or any lovers of art, it will always be to the old
inalienable traditions that they will turn; to the old local customs,
local pieties, local habits, local altars, and local gods.

To talk vaguely of cosmopolitan art uniting the nations, is to talk
foolishly, and it is to talk irreverently. The people who deal in such
theories are endeavouring to betray the dead of their own race and
the noble pieties and desperate courage of those who made them
what they are. It is a sacrilege, this speculation, and a sacrifice of
beauty upon the altar of a logical morality.

What one comes more and more to feel is that everything which
belongs to poetry and art belongs to the individual, to the individual
nation and the individual person. The great modern democracies,
with their cult of the average man and their suspicion of the
exceptional man, are naturally only too ready to hail as ideal and
wonderful any doctrine about literature which flatters their pride.

One of the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about
the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which
has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts and
all individual egoism.

There has never been such art in the history of the world as this
average man's art, free from tradition and free from personal colour.

There will never be such art, unless it be the great, idealistic,
humanitarian, cosmopolitan art of the Moving Picture Show.

But the idea sounds well in popular oratory, and it has a most
soothing ointment for the souls of such artists as have neither
reverence nor imagination.

It is quite possible that for the general comfort of the race at large
--even if not for its happiness--it would be a good thing if
philosophers and moralists between them could get rid of the
imagination of races as well as the imagination of individuals.

The common crowd are naturally suspicious of imagination of any
kind, as they are suspicious of genius of any kind; and this new
doctrine of a literature largely and purely "human," wherein the
general soul of humanity may find its expression, free from the
colour of race-feeling and free from the waywardness of individual
men of genius, is just the sort of thing to flatter the unthinking mob.

Why not have art and literature harnessed once and for all to the
great rolling chariot of popular public opinion? Why not abolish all
individualism at one stroke as a thing dangerous