culture has its responsibility in service. "Many a man has a
blind notion of stewardship about his property, but very few have it
about their knowledge," said Bishop Phillips Brooks, and he added: "One
grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by
selfishness." To the true idealist--as distinct from the mere
emotionalist with aesthetic tastes--selfishness is an impossible prison.
The only spiritual freedom lies in the perpetual sharing of the fuller
life. The gift shared is the gift doubled. Art is the spiritual glory of
life; the supreme manifestation, the very influence of spiritual
achievement. Mr. Stillman, discussing the revival of art, has
questioned: "Does the world want art any longer? Has it, in the present
state of human progress, any place which will justify devotion to it?"

He questions as to whether man is still

"Apparelled in celestial light,"

or whether he has lost "the glory and the freshness" of his dreams.

"No one can admit," continues Mr. Stillman, "that the human
intellect is weaker than it was five or twenty centuries ago; but
it is certain that if we take the pains to study what was done five
centuries ago in painting, or twenty centuries ago in sculpture,
and compare it with the best work of to-day, we shall find the
latter trivial and 'prentice work compared with the ordinary work
of men whose names are lost in the lustre of a school.

"Then, little men inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted greatly; now,
our great men fail to reach the technical achievement of the little
men of them. There is only one living painter who can treat a
portrait as a Venetian artist of 1550 A.D. would have done it, and
how differently in the mastery of his material! If we go to the
work of wider range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the
Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest
fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C. shows us that the best
sculpture of this century, even the French, is only a happy
child-work, not even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael
Angelo. The reason is simple, and already indicated. The early men
grew up in a system in which the power of expression was taught
from childhood; they acquired method as the musician does now, and
the tendency of the opinion of their time was to keep them in the
good method."

Is this not too