Note 2 — Chapter IX · RELIGION: THE FINE ARTS: LITERATURE

Of course it would be very easy to argue that the tendency of all this is rather to develop a somewhat higher standard of mediocrity than to produce brilliant examples of art in any manifestation. Beauty, up to a certain point, can be bought. The demand will evoke the supply. But the highest manifestations of the beautiful must be the spontaneous product of subtle brains and lissom fingers working for Art’s sake. Yet it is also not very difficult to show that circumstances affect production even of the highest. An example may be found in the extraordinary merit of modern French sculpture, as compared with the wretched work produced in England. In the Paris Salon, which may be said to correspond with our Royal Academy, sculpture is shown in a manner which renders the huddled cloak-room full of mediocre marble and third-rate work in clay at Burlington House almost too painful to be ludicrous. However meritorious the work of an English statuary, he would get no chance—does get no chance—in the Academy exhibition: and there is every justification for the opinion that it is not bad work which in this country produces official neglect, nor good work which in France has for many years led to the loving care with which sculpture is shown in Paris; but on the contrary, that the real opportunity which a French sculptor obtains has been just as instrumental in fostering the art there as our own utter neglect to appreciate sculpture of genius has been in stifling the art here. The French treatment of sculpture has not merely raised the standard of average production. It has fostered actual genius. Even so the opportunities which the social conditions of a hundred years hence will afford to art will assuredly promote the artistic conditions favourable to the development and fostering of genius, whenever genius, in its shy, fairy-like way, contrives to be born, no man knows how. A general power of appreciating masterpieces has never been alleged to be unfavourable to their production. What is unfavourable to it in a highly civilised age is the hurry and preoccupation which leave no time for the appreciative faculties to employ themselves. It has been very well said that the feature most inimical to art in American civilisation is the absence of a “leisure class.” If there be any validity in the conclusions for which I have been trying to win acceptance2 in the earlier chapters of this work, the new age will be an age of greatly increased leisure in all ranks, and this condition ought to favour art in every way as highly as the improvement in the nature as well as in the extent of education must also favour it. And in this there will be both action and reaction—increased leisure and improved appreciation tending to foster genius, genius in the glorious perfection of its work generously returning the benefit by cultivating and refining the æsthetic sense of the new age.