the heroes of fiction for a day, and return to his work ennobled and sweetened by the contact with these forms of excellence which lie beyond the bounds of his own outward life.  In two ways the fine arts add to the preexisting beauty in a man’s life:  by representing to him beautiful scenes and objects which he cannot enjoy in themselves, because he cannot go where they are, and by creating from the artist’s imagination a new universe of emotions and satisfactions, congenial to the human spirit and full of a refined and pure joy.

What dangers are there in culture and art for life?

We must now glance at the other side of the picture.  Enormous as are the potentialities for good in culture and art, they also have their perils.

(1) Culture and art must not take time, energy, or money that is needed for work.  Achievement necessitates concentration and sacrifice; beauty must not beguile men away from service. [Footnote:  Cf. what Pater says of Winckelmann (The Renaissance, p. 195):  “The development of his force was the single interest of Winckelmann, unembarrassed by anything else in him.  Other interests, practical or intellectual, those slighter motives and talents not supreme, which in most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, he plucked out and cast from him.”] The boys and girls who squander health in their eagerness to explore the new worlds opening before them, the older folk who give a disproportionate share of their time and money to music or the theater, the voracious readers who pore over every new novel and magazine without really assimilating and using what they read, are turning what ought to be recreation or inspiration into dissipation, and thereby seriously impairing their efficiency.  It is so much easier to read something new than to meditate fruitfully upon what one has read, to pass from picture to picture in a gallery and win no genuine insight from any.  A single great book thoroughly mastered-the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare-were better for a man than the superficial skimming of many, one beautiful picture well loved than a hundred idly glanced at and labeled with some trite comment.  Too many of the upper class, for whom limitless cultural opportunities are open, dabble in everything, know names and schools, repeat glibly the current phrases of criticism, but miss the lesson, the clarification of insight, the vision of the author or artist.  Such superficial culture is a futile expenditure of time and money. [Footnote:  For an arraignment of the money thrown away on modern decadent art, see Tolstoy’s What is Art? chapter I.]