by the same methods as a
new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes.
Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no
doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric
and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts.

And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge
against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a
pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the
head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has
the hornier hand.

Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers.
Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and
commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal
aims--in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions,
arts, appointments, professorships, churches.

Art has for the third time changed its master--after the princes,
Maecenas, the middle-class market; after Maecenas, the plebs, and export
trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by
compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it
must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on
itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can
only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual
life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research,
learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several
generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this
drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has
given way to actuality.[14]

Certain reactions based on practical experience are not excluded;
the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will
show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no
fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken,
though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win
back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such
attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can
result.

The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent
on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate
than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success,
watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the
sordidness of private l