But, after all, useful work must remain, for the most part, mechanical; and if the useful workers want to express themselves as completely as possible, they must do so in their leisure.  There are two kinds of formal expression open to all—­dancing and singing.  Certainly it is in dance and song that ordinary people come nearest to the joy of creation.  In no age can there be more than a few first-rate artists, but in any there might be millions of genuine ones; and once it is understood that art which is unfit for public exhibition may yet be created for private pleasure no one will feel shame at being called an amateur.  We shall not have to pretend that all our friends are great artists, because they will make no such pretence themselves.  In the great State they will not be of the company of divine beggars.  They will be amateurs who consciously use art as a means to emotional beatitude; they will not be artists who, consciously or unconsciously, use everything as a means to art.  Let us dance and sing, then, for dancing and singing are true arts, useless materially, valuable only for their aesthetic significance.  Above all, let us dance and devise dances—­dancing is a very pure art, a creation of abstract form; and if we are to find in art emotional satisfaction, it is essential that we shall become creators of form.  We must not be content to contemplate merely; we must create; we must be active in our dealings with art.

It is here that I shall fall foul of certain excellent men and women who are attempting to “bring art into the lives of the people” by dragging parties of school children and factory girls through the National Gallery and the British Museum.  Who is not familiar with those little flocks of victims clattering and shuffling through the galleries, inspissating the gloom of the museum atmosphere?  What is being done to their native sensibilities by the earnest bear-leader with his (or her) catalogue of dates and names and appropriate comments?  What have all these tags of mythology and history, these pedagogic raptures and peripatetic ecstasies, to do with genuine emotion?  In the guise of what grisly and incomprehensible charlatan is art being presented to the people?  The only possible effect of personally conducted visits must be to confirm the victims in their suspicion that art is something infinitely remote, infinitely venerable, and infinitely dreary.  They come away with a respectful but permanent horror of that old sphinx who sits in Trafalgar Square propounding riddles that are not worth answering, tended by the cultured and nourished by the rich.