ness), we are, as Ruskin has
already told us, but the parasites of parasites.

For of the pleasure-giving things we make, what portion really gives
any pleasure, or comes within reach of giving pleasure, to those whose
hands _as a whole class_ (as distinguished from the brain of an
occasional individual of the other class) produce the wealth we all of
us have to live, or try to live, upon? Of course there is the seeming
consolation that, like the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs, the Watteaus
and the Fragonards of the past, the Millais and the Sargents (charming
sitters, or the reverse, and all), and the Monets and Brabazons, will
sooner or later become what we call public property in public
galleries. But, meanwhile, the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs and
Watteaus and Fragonards themselves, though the legal property of
everybody, are really reserved for those same classes who own their
modern equivalents, simply because those alone have the leisure and
culture necessary to enjoy them. The case is not really different for
the one or two seemingly more independent and noble artistic
individualities, the great decorators like Watts or Besnard; their own
work, like their own conscience, is indeed the purer and stronger for
their intention of painting not for smoking-rooms and private
collections, but for places where all men can see and understand; but
then all men cannot see--they are busy or too tired--and they cannot
understand, because the language of art has become foreign to them.
The same applies to composers and to writers: music and books are
cheap enough, but the familiarity with musical forms and literary
styles, without which music and books are mere noise and waste-paper,
is practically unattainable to the classes who till the ground,
extract its stone and minerals, and make, with their hands, every
material thing (save works of art) that we possess.

Indeed, one additional reason why, ever since the eighteenth century,
art has been set up as the opposite of useful work, and explained as a
form of play (though its technical difficulties grew more exorbitant
and exhausting year by year) is probably that, in our modern
civilisations, art has been obviously produced for the benefit of the
classes who virtually do not work, and by artists born or bred to
belong to those idle classes themselves. For it is a fact that, as the
artist nowadays finds his public only among the comparatively idle
(or, at all events, those wh