such conditions, and the fact is that, however it came to
pass, modern civilization has functioned through explicit ugliness, and
the environment it has made for its votaries and its rebels
indifferently, is unique in its palpable hideousness; from the clothes
it wears and the motives it extols, to the cities it builds, and the
structures therein, and the scheme of life that romps along in its
ruthless career within the sordid suburbs that take the place of the
once enclosing walls. And the defiant and segregated "artists," mortuary
art museums, the exposed statues and hidden pictures, the opera
subsidized by "high society," and the "arts and crafts" societies and
the "art magazines" and "art schools" and clubs and "city beautiful"
committees, only seem to make the contrast more apparent and the
desperate nature of the situation more profound.

It is a new situation altogether, and nowhere in history is there any
recorded precedent to which we can return for council and example, for
nothing quite of the same sort ever happened before. It is also a
problem of which formal education must take cognizance, for the lack is
one which must somehow be supplied, while it reveals an astonishing
_lacuna_ in life that means a new deficiency in the unconscious
education of man that renders him ineffective in life; defective even,
it may be, unless from some source he can acquire something of what in
the past life itself could afford.

Indeed it is not merely a negative influence we deal with, but a
positive, for, to paraphrase a little, "ugly associations corrupt good
morals." Youth is beaten upon at many points by things that not only
look ugly, but are, and as in compassion we are bound to offer some new
agency to fill a lack, so in self-defence we must take thought as to how
the evil influence of contemporaneousness is to be nullified and its
results corrected.

I confess the method seems to me to lean more closely to the indirect
influence rather than the direct. It is doubtful if "art" can really be
taught in any sense; the inherent sense of beauty can be fostered and an
inherent aptitude developed, but that is about all. As for the building
up of a non-professional passion for art I am quite sure it cannot be
done, and should hardly be attempted, and very likely the same is true
of the application of beauty.

Text books on "How to Understand" this art or that are interesting
ventures into abstract theory, but they are lit