cannot be an artistic one; the drawing-master sets up the only criterion he is capable of using—­fidelity to the model.  No master can make a student into an artist; but all can, and most do, turn into impostors, maniacs, criminals, or just cretins, the unfortunate boys and girls who had been made artists by nature.  It is not the master’s fault and he ought not to be blamed.  He is there to bring all his pupils to a certain standard of efficiency appreciable by inspectors and by the general public, and the only quality of which such can judge is verisimilitude.  The only respects in which one work can be seen to differ from another by an ordinarily insensitive person (e.g. a Board of Education inspector) are choice of subject and fidelity to common vision.  So, even if a drawing-master could recognise artistic talent, he would not be permitted to encourage it.  It is not that drawing-masters are wicked, but that the system is vicious.  Art schools must go.

The money that the State at present devotes to the discouragement of Art had better, I dare say, be given to the rich.  It would be tempting to save it for the purchase of works of art, but perhaps that can lead to nothing but mischief.  It is unthinkable that any Government should ever buy what is best in the work of its own age; it is a question how far purchase by the State even of fine old pictures is a benefit to art.  It is not a question that need be discussed; for though a State may have amongst its employes men who can recognise a fine work of art, provided it be sufficiently old, a modern State will be careful to thwart and stultify their dangerously good taste.  State-acquisition of fine ancient art might or might not be a means to good—­I daresay it would be; but the purchase of third-rate old masters and objets d’art can benefit no one except the dealers.  As I shall hope to show, something might be said for supporting and enriching galleries and museums, if only the public attitude towards, and the official conception of, these places could be changed.  As for contemporary art, official patronage is the surest method of encouraging in it all that is most stupid and pernicious.  Our public monuments, the statues and buildings that disgrace our streets, our postage-stamps, coins, and official portraits are mere bait to the worst instincts of the worst art-students and to the better a formidable temptation.

Some of those generous prophets who sit at home dreaming of pure communistic societies have been good enough to find a place in them for the artist.  Demos is to keep for his diversion a kennel of mountebanks.  Artists will be chosen by the State and supported by the State.  The people will pay the piper and call the tune.  In the choice of politicians the method works well enough, but to art it would be fatal.  The creation of soft artistic jobs is the most unlikely method of encouraging art.  Already hundreds take to it, not because they have in them that which must