the brain,
the child becomes a painter. His fond mother gives him a box of coloured
chalks and every loose bit of paper is rapidly covered with strange
pothooks and scrawls which represent houses and horses and terrible
naval battles.

Soon however this happiness of just "making things" comes to an end.
School begins and the greater part of the day is filled up with work.
The business of living, or rather the business of "making a living,"
becomes the most important event in the life of every boy and girl.
There is little time left for "art" between learning the tables of
multiplication and the past participles of the irregular French verbs.
And unless the desire for making certain things for the mere pleasure of
creating them without any hope of a practical return be very strong, the
child grows into manhood and forgets that the first five years of his
life were mainly devoted to art.

Nations are not different from children. As soon as the cave-man had
escaped the threatening dangers of the long and shivering ice-period,
and had put his house in order, he began to make certain things which
he thought beautiful, although they were of no earthly use to him in his
fight with the wild animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his
grotto with pictures of the elephants and the deer which he hunted, and
out of a piece of stone, he hacked the rough figures of those women he
thought most attractive.

As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Persians and all
the other people of the east had founded their little countries along
the Nile and the Euphrates, they began to build magnificent palaces for
their kings, invented bright pieces of jewellery for their women and
planted gardens which sang happy songs of colour with their many bright
flowers.

Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic
prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters,
composed songs which celebrated the mighty deeds of their great leaders
and invented a form of poetry which has survived until our own day. A
thousand years later, when they had established themselves on the Greek
mainland, and had built their "city-states," they expressed their joy
(and their sorrows) in magnificent temples, in statues, in comedies and
in tragedies, and in every conceivable form of art.

The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy administering
other people and making money to have much love for "use