servances, often reach the
conclusion that these observances are the practice of that catholic
church which includes the pious-minded of all creeds and rituals; a
group of radical reformers, by passionate advocacy of a single reform,
come to believe that there have been no reformers before them, and
that none will be needed after them; a band of fresh and audacious
young practitioners of any of the arts, by dint of insistence upon a
certain manner, rapidly generate the conviction that art has no other
manner.

Society is full of provincialism in art, politics, religion, and
economics; and the essence of this provincialism is always the
same,--the substitution of a part for the whole. Larger knowledge of
the world and of history would make it perfectly clear that there has
always been not only a wide latitude, but great variation, in ritual
and worship; that the political story of all the progressive nations
has been one long agitation for reforms, and that no reform can ever
be final; that reform must succeed reform until the end of
time,--reforms being in their nature neither more nor less than those
readjustments to new conditions which are involved in all social
development. A wider survey of experience would make it clear that art
has many manners, and that no manner is supreme and none final.

A long experience gives a man poise, balance, and steadiness; he has
seen many things come and go, and he is neither paralysed by
depression when society goes wrong, nor irrationally elated when it
goes right. He is perfectly aware that his party is only a means to an
end, and not a piece of indestructible and infallible machinery; that
the creed he accepts has passed through many changes of
interpretation, and will pass through more; that the social order for
which he contends, if secured, will be only another stage in the
unbroken development of the organised life of men in the world. And
culture is, at bottom, only an enlarged and clarified experience,--an
experience so comprehensive that it puts its possessor in touch with
all times and men, and gives him the opportunity of comparing his own
knowledge of things, his faith and his practice, with the knowledge,
faith, and practice of all the generations. This opportunity brings,
to one who knows how to use it, deliverance from the ignorance or
half-knowledge of provincialism, from the crudity of its half-trained
tastes, and from the blind passion of its rash and groundles