better” (my longish hair, I surmise, discovered a fellow connoisseur):  “if you want art you must go for it to the museums.”  How this pernicious nonsense is to be knocked out of people’s heads I cannot guess.  It has been knocked in so solemnly and for so long by the schoolmasters and the newspapers, by cheap text-books and profound historians, by district visitors and cabinet ministers, by clergymen and secularists, by labour leaders, teetotallers, anti-gamblers, and public benefactors of every sort, that I am sure it will need a brighter and braver word than mine to knock it out again.  But out it has to be knocked before we can have any general sensibility to art; for, while it remains, to ninety-nine out of every hundred a work of art will be dead the moment it enters a public gallery.

The museums and galleries terrify us.  We are crushed by the tacit admonition frowned from every corner that these treasures are displayed for study and improvement, by no means to provoke emotion.  Think of Italy—­every town with its public collection; think of the religious sightseers!  How are we to persuade these middle-class masses, so patient and so pathetic in their quest, that really they could get some pleasure from the pictures if only they did not know, and did not care to know, who painted them.  They cannot all be insensitive to form and colour; and if only they were not in a flutter to know, or not to forget, who painted the pictures, when they were painted, and what they represent, they might find in them the key that unlocks a world in the existence of which they are, at present, unable to believe.  And the millions who stay at home, how are they to be persuaded that the thrill provoked by a locomotive or a gasometer is the real thing?—­when will they understand that the iron buildings put up by Mr. Humphrey are far more likely to be works of art than anything they will see at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy?[27] Can we persuade the travelling classes that an ordinarily sensitive human being has a better chance of appreciating an Italian primitive than an expert hagiographer?  Will they understand that, as a rule, the last to feel aesthetic emotion is the historian of art?  Can we induce the multitude to seek in art, not edification, but exaltation?  Can we make them unashamed of the emotion they feel for the fine lines of a warehouse or a railway bridge?  If we can do this we shall have freed works of art from the museum atmosphere; and this is just what we have got to do.  We must make people understand that forms can be significant without resembling Gothic cathedrals or Greek temples, and that art is the creation, not the imitation, of form.  Then, but not till then, can they go with impunity to seek aesthetic emotion in museums and galleries.