f all gracious existence
might be externally hidden from any one whose youth had been passed in
uncomely and vulgar surroundings, and that the beauty of form and colour
even, as he says, in the meanest vessels of the house, will find its way
into the inmost places of the soul and lead the boy naturally to look for
that divine harmony of spiritual life of which art was to him the
material symbol and warrant.

Prelude indeed to all knowledge and all wisdom will this love of
beautiful things be for us; yet there are times when wisdom becomes a
burden and knowledge is one with sorrow: for as every body has its shadow
so every soul has its scepticism. In such dread moments of discord and
despair where should we, of this torn and troubled age, turn our steps if
not to that secure house of beauty where there is always a little
forgetfulness, always a great joy; to that citta divina, as the old
Italian heresy called it, the divine city where one can stand, though
only for a brief moment, apart from the division and terror of the world
and the choice of the world too?

This is that consolation des arts which is the keynote of Gautier's
poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed--as indeed what in our
century is not?--by Goethe. You remember what he said to the German
people: 'Only have the courage,' he said, 'to give yourselves up to your
impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay
instructed, inspired for something great.' The courage to give
yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the
artistic life--for while art has been defined as an escape from the
tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the
soul. But only to those who worship her above all things does she ever
reveal her true treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as the
mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical
nature of Heine.

And indeed I think it would be impossible to overrate the gain that might
follow if we had about us only what gave pleasure to the maker of it and
gives pleasure to its user, that being the simplest of all rules about
decoration. One thing, at least, I think it would do for us: there is no
surer test of a great country than how near it stands to its own poets;
but between the singers of our day and the workers to whom they would
sing there seems to be an ever-widening and dividing chasm, a chasm which
slander and mockery cannot