Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty:  he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction:  whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality.  You must find it in life and re-create it in art.

While, then, on the one hand I do not desire to give you any philosophy of beauty—­for, what I want to-night is to investigate how we can create art, not how we can talk of it—­on the other hand, I do not wish to deal with anything like a history of English art.

To begin with, such an expression as English art is a meaningless expression.  One might just as well talk of English mathematics.  Art is the science of beauty, and Mathematics the science of truth:  there is no national school of either.  Indeed, a national school is a provincial school, merely.  Nor is there any such thing as a school of art even.  There are merely artists, that is all.

And as regards histories of art, they are quite valueless to you unless you are seeking the ostentatious oblivion of an art professorship.  It is of no use to you to know the date of Perugino or the birthplace of Salvator Rosa:  all that you should learn about art is to know a good picture when you see it, and a bad picture when you see it.  As regards the date of the artist, all good work looks perfectly modern:  a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—­they are always modern, always of our time.  And as regards the nationality of the artist, art is not national but universal.  As regards archaeology, then, avoid it altogether:  archaeology is merely the science of making excuses for bad art; it is the rock on which many a young artist founders and shipwrecks; it is the abyss from which no artist, old or young, ever returns.  Or, if he does return, he is so covered with the dust of ages and the mildew of time, that he is quite unrecognisable as an artist, and has to conceal himself for the rest of his days under the cap of a professor, or as a mere illustrator of ancient history.  How worthless archaeology is in art you can estimate by the fact of its being so popular.  Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art.  Whatever is popular is wrong.

As I am not going to talk to you, then, about the philosophy of the beautiful, or the history of art, you will ask me what I am going to talk about.  The subject of my lecture to-night is what makes an artist and what does the artist make; what are the relations of the artist to his surroundings, what is the education the artist should get, and what is the quality of a good work of art.