e do mean by progress something different from these natural
processes. When we speak of it we do imply the exercise of the human
will, man's command over circumstances; and those who deny progress
altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circumstances.
For them things happen to man and that is all, it is not man's will that
makes things happen. But if we use the word progress at all, we imply
that it is man's will that makes things happen. And since man is
evidently liable to decline as well as progress, it follows that if we
believe man to be capable of exercising his will in a right direction we
must also believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction.
I assume that man has this power both for good and for evil. If I did
not, I should not be addressing you upon the question whether man is
capable of progress in the arts, but upon the question whether he is
capable of progress at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is
not.

As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of
exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things;
and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the
arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this--that
man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts;
that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We,
for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the
ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that
power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We
cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make
furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into
an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present.
You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first
generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a
rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering
upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or
so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural
talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have
to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his
talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal
decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between
th