It is argued with plausibility that a sensitive people would have no use for museums.  It is said that to go in search of aesthetic emotion is wrong, that art should be a part of life—­something like the evening papers or the shop windows that people enjoy as they go about their business.  But, if the state of mind of one who enters a gallery in search of aesthetic emotion is necessarily unsatisfactory, so is the state of one who sits down to read poetry.  The lover of poetry shuts the door of his chamber and takes down a volume of Milton with the deliberate intention of getting himself out of one world and into another.  The poetry of Milton is not a part of daily life, though for some it makes daily life supportable.  The value of the greatest art consists not in its power of becoming a part of common existence but in its power of taking us out of it.  I think it was William Morris who said that poetry should be something that a man could invent and sing to his fellows as he worked at the loom.  Too much of what Morris wrote may well have been so invented.  But to create and to appreciate the greatest art the most absolute abstraction from the affairs of life is essential.  And as, throughout the ages, men and women have gone to temples and churches in search of an ecstasy incompatible with and remote from the preoccupations and activities of laborious humanity, so they may go to the temples of art to experience, a little out of this world, emotions that are of another.  It is not as sanctuaries from life—­sanctuaries devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion—­but as class-rooms, laboratories, homes of research and warehouses of tradition, that museums and galleries become noxious.

Human sensibility must be freed from the dust of erudition and the weight of tradition; it must also be freed from the oppression of culture.  For, of all the enemies of art, culture is perhaps the most dangerous, because the least obvious.  By “culture” it is, of course, possible to mean something altogether blameless.  It may mean an education that aims at nothing but sharpening sensibility and strengthening the power of self-expression.  But culture of that sort is not for sale:  to some it comes from solitary contemplation, to others from contact with life; in either case it comes only to those who are capable of using it.  Common culture, on the other hand, is bought and sold in open market.  Cultivated society, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a congeries of persons who have been educated to appreciate le beau et le bien.  A cultivated person is one on whom art has not impressed itself, but on whom it has been impressed—­one who has not been overwhelmed by the significance of art, but who knows that the nicest people have a peculiar regard for it.  The characteristic of this Society is that, though it takes an interest in art, it does not take art seriously.  Art for it is not a necessity, but an amenity.  Art is not something that one