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212 Whose fault is this ? Evidently the fault of our artists. We are ignorant and indiscriminatina'. We take ingenuously what is offered to us. It is all very bad ; but it is not our blame, it is the artists A few centuries ago in England things were other- wise. We had artists then who kept us right on these matters, not so many then per thousand of population as we have now, — and now they don't keep us right. In brief, they have within the past century helped to provide us with an environment of ugliness. You object to it ; very well. Give us an environment of beauty. AVe shall take to it quite as well as to the other.' Thus might one of the ingenuous, ' ignorant, indiscriminating public' reply to Sir Frederick Leighton.

People live among ugly things, not because they demand ugly things, but because they know no other, to give the converse of Mr. Wjiistler's phrase. Give them beautiful things, and they will live with them, again not because they demand them, but because they will then know no other.

On all grounds, the blame as between the public and the artist for the decadence of art — if such there be — and for want of public encouragement of art, lies at the door of the artist, and not at the door of the public. There are causes to which such a de- cadence may be due that operate independently botli of the artist and of the jniblic, and for which neither the one nor the other is to blame.

These causes form indeed a highly complex series — so complex a series that it is vastly easier to work out the rationale of their operation than to suggest how in the future disastrous effects are to be avoided. Somewhere at the root of the series is the tendency very obvious in most civilised communities to promote the idea of the desirability of quantity, both in population and production, to the exclusion of quality in both. And somewhere, also, in the series will be found causes of a specially industrial character, arising from the contemporaneous growth of machinery and population, leading to what Sir Frederick Leighton called ' the divorce of art from industrial production.' Somewhere also in the series will be found those causes associated with the province of state and municipal action, and with the distribution of product ; and there will be foLuid also the causes associated with the influence upon individual life and character of social and material environment. Any serious study of these causes would show how futile it is for the artist to rail at the public for ignorance and want of discrimination, and how his own order is to blame for our uncomely environment as much or as little as the public.

It is little wonder that in the atmosphere of the Congress there was a good deal of Socialism. There was, of course, the kind of crude Socialism which blames the state for everything, and calls upon it to disburse prompt grants for this, that, and the other; and there was the enlightened Socialism which regards the individual as the debtor of society, and as bound to render for the use of society the best products of his brain and hands, not for the largest return which he can possibly exact, but for so inuch as may enable him to live a refined and not too exhausting life. This wds admirably put by Mr. Cobden Sanderson in his paper on ' Craft Ideals,' where he showed that it is'possible for a man to settle down in modern London, and, amid all the surroundings of competitive commerce, exercise a craft and work as an artist without bowing the knee to Baal. The same thing is done by many others. Indeed, the idea must be grasped that the whole conditions of modern life will have to undergo drastic change by means of human effort, individual and collective — that the whole life of the people, crowded in cities, and contesting every mouthful of air and food, has got to be rationalised, in order to make it possible that the people should be physically and mentally capable of even beginning the training that issues in an appreciation of art. While the papers and addresses at the Art Congress, with certain notable exceptions, lacked comprehensive grasp of the conditions, and while the atmosphere was not oppressively intellectual, it was a delightful social function ; and it is to be hoped that the next may be an improvement upon it in the one respect, and equal to it in the other. A Membeu.