So, let the people try to create form for themselves.  Probably they will make a mess of it; that will not matter.  The important thing is to have live art and live sensibility; the copious production of bad art is a waste of time, but, so long as it is not encouraged to the detriment of good, nothing worse.  Let everyone make himself an amateur, and lose the notion that art is something that lives in the museums understood by the learned alone.  By practising an art it is possible that people will acquire sensibility; if they acquire the sensibility to appreciate, even to some extent, the greatest art they will have found the new religion for which they have been looking.  I do not dream of anything that would burden or lighten the catalogues of ecclesiastical historians.  But if it be true that modern men can find little comfort in dogmatic religion, and if it be true that this age, in reaction from the materialism of the nineteenth century, is becoming conscious of its spiritual need and longs for satisfaction, then it seems reasonable to advise them to seek in art what they want and art can give.  Art will not fail them; but it may be that the majority must always lack the sensibility that can take from art what art offers.

That will be very sad for the majority; it will not matter much to art.  For those who can feel the significance of form, art can never be less than a religion.  In art these find what other religious natures found and still find, I doubt not, in impassioned prayer and worship.  They find that emotional confidence, that assurance of absolute good, which makes of life a momentous and harmonious whole.  Because the aesthetic emotions are outside and above life, it is possible to take refuge in them from life.  He who has once lost himself in an “O Altitudo” will not be tempted to over-estimate the fussy excitements of action.  He who can withdraw into the world of ecstasy will know what to think of circumstance.  He who goes daily into the world of aesthetic emotion returns to the world of human affairs equipped to face it courageously and even a little contemptuously.  And if by comparison with aesthetic rapture he finds most human passion trivial, he need not on that account become unsympathetic or inhuman.  For practical purposes, even, it is possible that the religion of art will serve a man better than the religion of humanity.  He may learn in another world to doubt the extreme importance of this, but if that doubt dims his enthusiasm for some things that are truly excellent it will dispel his illusions about many that are not.  What he loses in philanthropy he may gain in magnanimity; and because his religion does not begin with an injunction to love all men, it will not end, perhaps, in persuading him to hate most of them.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 27:  An example of this was the temporary police-court set up recently in Francis Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road.  I do not know whether it yet stands; if so, it is one of the few tolerable pieces of modern architecture in London.]