bbey church of St. Remi
have been injured it would be less easy to pardon the responsible party.
St. Remi is a masterpiece of the eleventh century, and was still, when
last I saw it, a work of splendour and significance in spite of having
suffered at the hands of French architects worse things than it is
likely to have suffered from German gunners.

It is a mistake for the English upper classes to assure the world that
they prize a work of art above a victory; the world knows better. Are
not these the people who were telling us just now that this was no time
for art? Is it seemly in them, is it prudent even, to revile their own
class in Germany for caring as little about art as themselves? When the
Germans sacked Louvain and shelled Reims our politicians and press
discovered suddenly that art is a sacred thing and that people who
disrespect it are brutes. Agreed: and how have the moneyed classes in
England respected art? What sacrifices, material, moral or military,
have they made? Here, in the richest country in the world, with what
difficulty do we raise a few thousand pounds to buy a masterpiece. What
institution do we starve so abjectly as we starve the National Gallery?
Has any one met a rich man who denied himself a motorcar to keep a
genius? How dare the people who fill our streets and public places with
monuments that make us the laughing-stock of Europe, the people who
cannot spare a few guineas to save a picture, who cheerfully improve
away respectable architecture, who allow artists to perish and put up
the Admiralty Arch--how dare such people pose as the champions of
culture and expose their wounded feelings in the penny and halfpenny
papers. In times of peace they used art as a hobby and a means of
self-advertisement, in wartime they would brandish it as a stick against
their foes. The old abuse was vulgar, the new one is worse.

We can measure the sensibility of these politic amateurs when we
overhear their chatter about patriotic art and catch them, as we caught
them lately, attempting to ban German music. "Give us patriotic art,"
they cry. As if art could be patriotic or unpatriotic! One might as well
cry for patriotic mathematics. The essence of art is that it provokes a
peculiar emotion, called aesthetic, which, like religious emotion or the
passion for truth, transcends nationality. Art's supreme importance lies
precisely in this: its glory is to share with truth and religion the
power of appealing t