the future (for all your schools of art should be local
schools, the schools of particular cities). We talk of the Italian
school of painting, but there is no Italian school; there were the
schools of each city. Every town in Italy, from Venice itself, queen of
the sea, to the little hill fortress of Perugia, each had its own school
of art, each different and all beautiful.

So do not mind what art Philadelphia or New York is having, but make by
the hands of your own citizens beautiful art for the joy of your own
citizens, for you have here the primary elements of a great artistic
movement.

For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people
imagine. For the noblest art one requires a clear healthy atmosphere,
not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the smoke and grime
and horridness which comes from open furnace and from factory chimney.
You must have strong, sane, healthy physique among your men and women.
Sickly or idle or melancholy people do not do much in art. And lastly,
you require a sense of individualism about each man and woman, for this
is the essence of art--a desire on the part of man to express himself in
the noblest way possible. And this is the reason that the grandest art
of the world always came from a republic, Athens, Venice, and
Florence--there were no kings there and so their art was as noble and
simple as sincere. But if you want to know what kind of art the folly of
kings will impose on a country look at the decorative art of France under
the grand monarch, under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy gilt furniture
writhing under a sense of its own horror and ugliness, with a nymph
smirking at every angle and a dragon mouthing on every claw. Unreal and
monstrous art this, and fit only for such periwigged pomposities as the
nobility of France at that time, but not at all fit for you or me. We do
not want the rich to possess more beautiful things but the poor to create
more beautiful things; for every man is poor who cannot create. Nor
shall the art which you and I need be merely a purple robe woven by a
slave and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous king to adorn or
to conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be the noble and
beautiful expression of a people's noble and beautiful life. Art shall
be again the most glorious of all the chords through which the spirit of
a great nation finds its noblest utterance.

All around you, I said, lie the