atural prescience of beauty which is the
inalienable inheritance of Greek and Italian is not our inheritance. For
such an informing and presiding spirit of art to shield us from all harsh
and alien influences, we of the Northern races must turn rather to that
strained self-consciousness of our age which, as it is the key-note of
all our romantic art, must be the source of all or nearly all our
culture. I mean that intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century
which is always looking for the secret of the life that still lingers
round old and bygone forms of culture. It takes from each what is
serviceable for the modern spirit--from Athens its wonder without its
worship, from Venice its splendour without its sin. The same spirit is
always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting what it
owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and to the palm-
trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of Proserpine.

And yet the truths of art cannot be taught: they are revealed only,
revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful
impressions by the study and worship of all beautiful things. And hence
the enormous importance given to the decorative arts in our English
Renaissance; hence all that marvel of design that comes from the hand of
Edward Burne-Jones, all that weaving of tapestry and staining of glass,
that beautiful working in clay and metal and wood which we owe to William
Morris, the greatest handicraftsman we have had in England since the
fourteenth century.

So, in years to come there will be nothing in any man's house which has
not given delight to its maker and does not give delight to its user. The
children, like the children of Plato's perfect city, will grow up 'in a
simple atmosphere of all fair things'--I quote from the passage in the
Republic--'a simple atmosphere of all fair things, where beauty, which is
the spirit of art, will come on eye and ear like a fresh breath of wind
that brings health from a clear upland, and insensibly and gradually draw
the child's soul into harmony with all knowledge and all wisdom, so that
he will love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly
(for they always go together) long before he knows the reason why; and
then when reason comes will kiss her on the cheek as a friend.'

That is what Plato thought decorative art could do for a nation, feeling
that the secret not of philosophy merely but o