hat those powerful and
important people who are always assuring us that they would do anything
for art can do.

They might begin the work of encouragement by disestablishing and
disendowing art; by withdrawing doles from art schools, and confiscating
the moneys misused by the Royal Academy. The case of the schools is
urgent. Art schools do nothing but harm, because they must do something.
Art is not to be learned; at any rate it is not to be taught. All that
the drawing-master can teach is the craft of imitation. In schools there
must be a criterion of excellence and that criterion cannot be an
artistic one; the drawing-master sets up the only criterion he is
capable of using--fidelity to the model. No master can make a student
into an artist; but all can, and most do, turn into impostors, maniacs,
criminals, or just cretins, the unfortunate boys and girls who had been
made artists by nature. It is not the master's fault and he ought not to
be blamed. He is there to bring all his pupils to a certain standard of
efficiency appreciable by inspectors and by the general public, and the
only quality of which such can judge is verisimilitude. The only
respects in which one work can be seen to differ from another by an
ordinarily insensitive person (_e.g._ a Board of Education inspector)
are choice of subject and fidelity to common vision. So, even if a
drawing-master could recognise artistic talent, he would not be
permitted to encourage it. It is not that drawing-masters are wicked,
but that the system is vicious. Art schools must go.

The money that the State at present devotes to the discouragement of Art
had better, I dare say, be given to the rich. It would be tempting to
save it for the purchase of works of art, but perhaps that can lead to
nothing but mischief. It is unthinkable that any Government should ever
buy what is best in the work of its own age; it is a question how far
purchase by the State even of fine old pictures is a benefit to art. It
is not a question that need be discussed; for though a State may have
amongst its employes men who can recognise a fine work of art, provided
it be sufficiently old, a modern State will be careful to thwart and
stultify their dangerously good taste. State-acquisition of fine ancient
art might or might not be a means to good--I daresay it would be; but
the purchase of third-rate old masters and _objets d'art_ can benefit no
one except the dealers. As I shall hope to show, s