changes in woman's
social outlook. So much stronger is the promise of a vital force,
when they are free to enter and to work in the various departments of
the arts. It is the commonest error to think of art as if it stood
outside the other activities of life. Under the cloak of art much
self-amusement and vulgar self-display tries to justify itself, and
many mercenary interests are concerned in stinting its vitality. All
living and valuable art is really communal. It must fit into its right
place with all phases of human activities, and to do this it must have
somewhere in it the social citizen spirit.

You see how women stand in this matter. The social ideal is becoming a
very near ideal to women. And this quickening in her of the citizen
spirit may well come to revive our art to a more true and social
service. This is no idle fancy. Throughout the ages of patriarchal
faith women have been confined in the home, so that an understanding
of the needs of the home is in their blood. May not the old ideals
remain for service and find expression in the new work? Much that has
passed with us as art has to be swept away. Let women bring this sense
of home into our civic life, and surely it will be reflected in the
arts. It is the sense of fitness to the common use and needs of the
larger family of the State that has been almost wholly eliminated from
our architecture, our statues, our paintings, our music, and much of
our literature. The arts have withered and lost their vitality in our
narrow and blighting commercial society.

I do not want to weary the reader with what can only be suggestions. I
am certain, however, that this vital factor of the home cannot safely
be excluded from the State. Consider any one of the old mediaeval
towns, with its buildings, its cathedral, its churches, its halls, its
homes--all that it contains a splendid witness to the civic life of
its people. Contrast this with what we have been willing to accept as
art in our industrial towns. In the old days the city was in a very
literal sense the home of its citizens, now it is merely a centre of
trade. Is it unfair to connect this with the subjection of women and
the rush of male activities, that has destroyed the need of beauty and
fitness which once was the possession of all? For art you must have
human qualities, and you must have emotion. The time has come when we
are yielding to the new forces, that yet are old. This age will leave
its own track