ose activity distributes wealth in their
own favour rather than creates it), so also he requires to be, more
and more, in sympathy with their mode of living and thinking: the
friend, the client, most often the son, of what we call (with terrible
unperceived irony in the words) _leisured_ folk. As to the folk who
have no leisure (and therefore, according to our modern aesthetics, no
_art_ because no _play_) they can receive from us privileged persons
(when privilege happens to be worth its keep) no benefits save very
practical ones. The only kind of work founded on "leisure"--which does
in our day not merely increase the advantages of already well-off
persons, but actually filter down to help the unleisured producers of
our wealth--is not the work of the artist, but of the doctor, the
nurse, the inventor, the man of science; who knows? Perhaps almost of
the philosopher, the historian, the sociologist: the clearer away of
convenient error, the unmaker and remaker of consciences.

As I began by saying, it is not very comfortable, nowadays, to be an
artist, and yet possess a mind and heart. And two of the greatest
artists of our times, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have done their utmost to
make it more uncomfortable still. So that it is natural for our
artists to decide that art exists only for art's own sake, since it
cannot nowadays be said to exist for the sake of anything else. And as
to us, privileged persons, with leisure and culture fitting us for
artistic enjoyment, it is even more natural to consider art as a kind
of play: play in which we get refreshed after somebody else's work.

VIII.

And are we really much refreshed? Watching the face and manner,
listless, perfunctory or busily attentive, of our fellow-creatures in
galleries and exhibitions, and in great measure in concert rooms and
theatres, one would imagine that, on the contrary, they were
fulfilling a social duty or undergoing a pedagogical routine. The
object of the proceeding would rather seem to be negative; one might
judge that they had come lest their neighbours should suspect that
they were somewhere else, or perhaps lest their neighbours should come
instead, according to our fertile methods of society intercourse and
of competitive examinations. At any rate, they do not look as if they
came to be refreshed, or as if they had taken the right steps towards
such spiritual refreshment: the faces and manner of children in a
playground, of cricketers on a vil