sisted on shivering in our chilly climate. And the pictures it
produced were wholly alien to the popular wants and the popular
feelings; they were part of an imported French, Italian, and Flemish
tradition. English art has only slowly outgrown this stage, just in
proportion as truly artistic handicrafts have sprung up here and there,
and developed themselves among us. Go into the Cantagalli or the Ginori
potteries at Florence, and you will see mere boys and girls, untrained
children of the people, positively disporting themselves, with childish
glee, in painting plates and vases. You will see them, not slavishly
copying a given design of the master's, but letting their fancy run riot
in lithe curves and lines, in griffons and dragons and floral
twists-and-twirls of playful extravagance. They revel in ornament. Now,
it is out of the loins of people like these that great artists spring by
nature--not State-taught, artificial, made-up artists, but the real
spontaneous product, the Lippi and Botticelli, the hereditary craftsmen,
the born painters. And in England nowadays it is a significant fact that
a large proportion of the truest artists--the innovators, the men who
are working out a new style of English art for themselves, in accordance
with the underlying genius of the British temperament, have sprung from
the great industrial towns--Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester--where
artistic handicrafts are now once more renascent. I won't expose myself
to further ridicule by repeating here (what I nevertheless would firmly
believe, were it not for the scoffers) that a large proportion of them
are of Celtic descent--belong, in other words, to that section of the
complex British nationality in which the noble traditions of decorative
art never wholly died out--that section which was never altogether
enslaved and degraded by the levelling and cramping and soul-destroying
influences of manufacturing industrialism.

In Italy, art is endemic. In England, in spite of all we have done to
stimulate it of late years with guano and other artificial manures, it
is still sporadic.

The case of music affords us an apt parallel. Till very lately, I
believe, our musical talent in Britain came almost entirely from the
cathedral towns. And why? Because there, and there alone, till quite a
recent date, there existed a hereditary school of music, a training of
musicians from generation to generation among the mass of the people.
Not only were th