ndividuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then
it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate,
both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece,
Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few
decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of
expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an
environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give
any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were
its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The
things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the
painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and
poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular
and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages
in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art,
was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily
health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for
granted.

Now all is changed. For just an hundred years (the process definitely
began here in America between 1820 and 1823) we have been eliminating
beauty as an attribute of life and living until, during the last two
generations, it is true to say that the instinctive impulse of the race
as a whole is towards ugliness in those categories of creation and
appreciation where formerly it had been towards beauty. Of course the
corollary of this was the driving of the unhappy man in whom was born
some belated impulse towards the apprehending of beauty and its visible
expression in some art, back upon himself, until, conscious of his
isolation and confident of his own superiority, he not only made his art
a form of purely personal expression (or even of exposure), but held
himself to be, and so conducted himself, as a being apart, for whom the
laws of the herd were not, and to whom all men should bow.

The separation of art from life is only less disastrous in its results
than the separation of religion from life, particularly since with the
former went the separation of art (and therefore of beauty) from its
immemorial alliance with religion. It was bad for art, it was bad for
religion, and it was worst of all for life itself. Beyond a certain
point man cannot live in and with and through ugliness, nor can society
endure under