nces and conditions of education differ
very widely in this. But as preparation for intelligent appreciation
they should acquire some elementary principles of criticism, and some
knowledge of the history and of the different schools of painting,
indications of what to look for here and there in Europe and likewise of
how to look at it; this is what they can take with them as a foundation,
and in some degree all can acquire enough to continue their own
education according to their opportunities. Matter-of-fact minds can
learn enough not to be intolerable, the average enough to guide and
safeguard their taste. They are important, for they will be in general
the multitude, the public, whose judgment is of consequence by its
weight of numbers; they will by their demand make art go upwards or
downwards according to their pleasure. For the few, the precious few who
are chosen and gifted to have a more definite influence, all the love
they can acquire in their early years for the best in art will attach
them for life to what is sane and true and lovely and of good fame.

The foundations of all this lie very deep in human nature, and taste
will be consistent with itself throughout the whole of life. It
manifests itself in early sensitiveness and responsiveness to artistic
beauty. It determines the choice in what to love as well as what to
like. It will assert itself in friendship, and estrangement in matters
of taste is often the first indication of a divergence in ideals which
continues and grows more marked until at some crossroads one takes the
higher path and the other the lower and their ways never meet again.
That higher path, the disinterested love of beauty, calls for much
sacrifice; it must seek its pleasure on ly in the highest, and not look
for a first taste of delight, but a second, when the power of criticism
has been schooled by a kind of asceticism to detect the choice from the
vulgar and the true from the insincere. This spirit of sacrifice must
enter into every form of training for life, but above all into the
training of the Catholic mind. It has a wide range and asks much of its
disciples, a certain renunciation and self-restraint in all things which
never completely lets itself go. Catholic art bears witness to this:
"Where a man seeks himself there he falls from love," says a Kempis, and
this is proved not only in the love of God, but in what makes the glory
of Christian art, the love of beauty and truth in