Do you think it a degradation of art that it should be enlisted by the makers of wall-papers?  Are there not too many ugly and discordant posters?  Do you consider trade and manufacture so sordid that they are beneath the ministrations of beauty?  It doesn’t matter a new penny whether you answer such questions with a nod or a no:  the invasion has begun.  It is irresistible.  Beauty is stooping—­stooping to conquer.

Your ardent social reformer is too often obsessed with one idea.  Across his mental firmament he sees only one blazing word:  INJUSTICE.  And, fine fellow though he often is, he is inclined to be impatient with any talk of art or beauty.  “How can beauty grow in these vile cities?” he cries.  “What is the use of your music, your statuary, your fine pictures, your poetry, to the starving and the oppressed?” And he does not see that his passionate desire for justice is at root the quest for beauty, for fullness and harmony of life.  His stormy sky shows no rainbow:  yet it is there.  And so is the stately music, the transmutation of colour into sound.  And if his eyes could be opened to one and his ears to the other, there would be more power to his elbow.  For beauty is inspiration and courage—­

    “My heart leaps up when I behold
     A rainbow in the sky....”

And there is more than that in it.  The cultivation of a sense of beauty, of harmony, makes reformers less harsh in their judgments, broadens their sympathies and helps to save them from becoming mere doctrinaires.  If you have any love for the beautiful you simply cannot be happy about most Utopias, though they be Justice itself in civic form; and, when our “scientific” Fabian has demonstrated to you how to organise the national life in all its parts into one vast smoothly working State mechanism you will shudder, and then laugh.  And then, without any rudeness, you will say:  “Hang mechanism and a minimum wage!  Live men and women want living crafts, liberty and a maximum beauty!”

And really, I am coming to see that there are a great many health-culture enthusiasts (not to mention food reformers) who see no rainbow in the sky and hear no music in the wind; and even if they did, ten to one they would see no connection between the two.  I verily believe there are some poor souls who have studied food questions so closely that they cannot see the sun for proteid nor the sea for salts.  In all meekness, and knowing the frailty of the human mind (I have written dozens of articles on diet!), I would prescribe for them a course of artistic wall-paper advertisements, combined with the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson.  He, poor fellow, had to battle against disease all his short life; but he managed to end one of his letters something like this (I quote from memory):  “Sursum Corda!  Heave ahead!  Art and blue heaven!  April and God’s larks!  A stately music....  Enter God.”