might meet and be overwhelmed by between the pages of Bradshaw, but something to be sought and saluted at appropriate times in appointed places.  Culture feels no imperative craving for art such as one feels for tobacco; rather it thinks of art as something to be taken in polite and pleasant doses, as one likes to take the society of one’s less interesting acquaintances.  Patronage of the Arts is to the cultivated classes what religious practice is to the lower-middle, the homage that matter pays to spirit, or, amongst the better sort, that intellect pays to emotion.  Neither the cultivated nor the pious are genuinely sensitive to the tremendous emotions of art and religion; but both know what they are expected to feel, and when they ought to feel it.

Now if culture did nothing worse than create a class of well-educated ladies and gentlemen who read books, attend concerts, travel in Italy, and talk a good deal about art without ever guessing what manner of thing it is, culture would be nothing to make a fuss about.  Unfortunately, culture is an active disease which causes positive ill and baulks potential good.  In the first place, cultivated people always wish to cultivate others.  Cultivated parents cultivate their children; thousands of wretched little creatures are daily being taught to love the beautiful.  If they happen to have been born insensitive this is of no great consequence, but it is misery to think of those who have had real sensibilities ruined by conscientious parents:  it is so hard to feel a genuine personal emotion for what one has been brought up to admire.  Yet if children are to grow up into acceptable members of the cultivated class they must be taught to hold the right opinions—­they must recognise the standards.  Standards of taste are the essence of culture.  That is why the cultured have ever been defenders of the antique.  There grows up in the art of the past a traditional classification under standard masterpieces by means of which even those who have no native sensibility can discriminate between works of art.  That is just what culture wants; so it insists on the veneration of standards and frowns on anything that cannot be justified by reference to them.  That is the serious charge against culture.  A person familiar with the masterpieces of Europe, but insensitive to that which makes them masterpieces, will be utterly non-plussed by a novel manifestation of the mysterious “that.”  It is well that old masters should be respected; it were better that vital art should be welcome.  Vital art is a necessity, and vital art is stifled by culture, which insists that artists shall respect the standards, or, to put it bluntly, shall imitate old masters.