been a notion that religion should be an amateur affair.  The pungis of India are beggars.  Let artists all over the world be beggars too.  Art and Religion are not professions:  they are not occupations for which men can be paid.  The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity.  They do not produce to live—­they live to produce.  There is no place for them in a social system based on the theory that what men desire is prolonged and pleasant existence.  You cannot fit them into the machine, you must make them extraneous to it.  You must make pariahs of them, since they are not a part of society but the salt of the earth.

In saying that the mass of mankind will never be capable of making delicate aesthetic judgments, I have said no more than the obvious truth.  A sure sensibility in visual art is at least as rare as a good ear for music.  No one imagines that all are equally capable of judging music, or that a perfect ear can be acquired by study:  only fools imagine that the power of nice discrimination in other arts is not a peculiar gift.  Nevertheless there is no reason why the vast majority should not become very much more sensitive to art than it is; the ear can be trained to a point.  But for the better appreciation, as for the freer creation, of art more liberty is needed.  Ninety-nine out of every hundred people who visit picture galleries need to be delivered from that “museum atmosphere” which envelops works of art and asphyxiates beholders.  They, the ninety-nine, should be encouraged to approach works of art courageously and to judge them on their merits.  Often they are more sensitive to form and colour than they suppose.  I have seen people show a nice taste in cottons and calicoes, and things not recognised as “Art” by the custodians of museums, who would not hesitate to assert of any picture by Andrea del Sarto that it must be more beautiful than any picture by a child or a savage.  In dealing with objects that are not expected to imitate natural forms or to resemble standard masterpieces they give free rein to their native sensibility.  It is only in the presence of a catalogue that complete inhibition sets in.  Traditional reverence is what lies heaviest on spectators and creators, and museums are too apt to become conventicles of tradition.

Society can do something for itself and for art by blowing out of the museums and galleries the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship.  Let us try to remember that art is not something to be come at by dint of study; let us try to think of it as something to be enjoyed as one enjoys being in love.  The first thing to be done is to free the aesthetic emotions from the tyranny of erudition.  I was sitting once behind the driver of an old horse-omnibus when a string of sandwich-men crossed us carrying “The Empire” poster.  The name of Genee was on the bill.  “Some call that art,” said the driver, turning to me, “but we know