iven to the one series of Lectures
which has survived their delivery, and been published. I refer to 'Art
and Life, and the Building and Decoration of Cities,' a title which of
itself carries the scope of the Society beyond all the possible
Exhibits of an Exhibition.

The object of these Lectures is thus explicitly stated by the Lecturer
on 'Art and Life,' which introduces the series, and his statement is
borne witness to throughout by all the other speakers. The statement to
which I refer is as follows: 'I now begin the first of a series of
Lectures having for their object generally the extension of the
conception of Art, and more especially the application of the idea of
Beauty to the organization and decoration of our greater cities.' And
of his own Lecture he says: 'I desire to extend the conception of Art,
and to apply it to life as a whole; or, inversely, to make the whole of
life, in all its grandeur, as well as in all its delightful detail, the
object of the action of Art and Craft.'

And in the course of it the Lecturer thus defined what seemed to him
the function of art in this extended conception of its meaning. 'Art
implies a certain lofty environment, and is itself an adjustment to
that environment of all that can be done by mankind within it. Art as a
great function of human imagination is not the creation of isolated
objects of beauty, though isolated objects of beauty may indeed be
created by art, and, in themselves, resume all that is beautiful,
orderly, restful, and stable in the artist's conception of that
environment. Still less is it, what some may seem to imagine, the
objects of beauty themselves. Art is, or should be, alive, alive and a
universal stimulus. It is that spirit of order and seemliness, of
dignity and sublimity, which, acting in unison with the great
procession of natural forces in their own orderly evolution, tends
to make out of a chaos of egotistic passions, a great power of
disinterested social action; which tends to make out of the seemingly
meaningless satisfaction of our daily and annual needs, a beautiful
exercise of our innumerable gifts of fancy and invention, an exercise
which may be its own exceeding great reward, and come to seem to be
indeed _the_ end for which the needs were made.'

It was thus and thus that, in the inception of the Society, we sought
to 'divine' the Ideal of the Age, and to give effect to it in the work
which lay immediately to hand. But it was not t