omething might be said
for supporting and enriching galleries and museums, if only the public
attitude towards, and the official conception of, these places could be
changed. As for contemporary art, official patronage is the surest
method of encouraging in it all that is most stupid and pernicious. Our
public monuments, the statues and buildings that disgrace our streets,
our postage-stamps, coins, and official portraits are mere bait to the
worst instincts of the worst art-students and to the better a formidable
temptation.

Some of those generous prophets who sit at home dreaming of pure
communistic societies have been good enough to find a place in them for
the artist. Demos is to keep for his diversion a kennel of mountebanks.
Artists will be chosen by the State and supported by the State. The
people will pay the piper and call the tune. In the choice of
politicians the method works well enough, but to art it would be fatal.
The creation of soft artistic jobs is the most unlikely method of
encouraging art. Already hundreds take to it, not because they have in
them that which must be expressed, but because art seems to offer a
pleasant and genteel career. When the income is assured the number of
those who fancy art as a profession will not diminish. On the contrary,
in the great State of the future the competition will be appalling. I
can imagine the squeezing and intriguing between the friends of
applicants and their parliamentary deputies, between the deputies and
the Minister of Fine Arts; and I can imagine the art produced to fulfil
a popular mandate in the days when private jobbery will be the only
check on public taste. Can we not all imagine the sort of man that would
be chosen? Have we no experience of what the people love? Comrades, dear
democratic ladies and gentlemen, pursue, by all means, your schemes for
righting the world, dream your dreams, conceive Utopias, but leave the
artists out. For, tell me honestly, does any one of you believe that
during the last three hundred years a single good artist would have been
supported by your system? And remember, unless it had supported him it
would not have allowed him to exist. Remember, too, that you will have
to select or reject your artists while yet they are students--you will
not be able to wait until a name has been imposed on you by years of
reputation with a few good judges. If Degas is now reverenced as a
master that is because his pictures fetch long p