mprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay
by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
absolute necessaries.

The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow
on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for
ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our
poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is
no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old
stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in
Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European
artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of
Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some
sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.

The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a
luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of
Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth
the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of
temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and
palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and
tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which
characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop
of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only
so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the
opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the
thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the
poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If
to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a
senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or
Paris for