being in love. The first thing to be done is to
free the aesthetic emotions from the tyranny of erudition. I was sitting
once behind the driver of an old horse-omnibus when a string of
sandwich-men crossed us carrying "The Empire" poster. The name of Genee
was on the bill. "Some call that art," said the driver, turning to me,
"but we know better" (my longish hair, I surmise, discovered a fellow
connoisseur): "if you want art you must go for it to the museums." How
this pernicious nonsense is to be knocked out of people's heads I cannot
guess. It has been knocked in so solemnly and for so long by the
schoolmasters and the newspapers, by cheap text-books and profound
historians, by district visitors and cabinet ministers, by clergymen and
secularists, by labour leaders, teetotallers, anti-gamblers, and public
benefactors of every sort, that I am sure it will need a brighter and
braver word than mine to knock it out again. But out it has to be
knocked before we can have any general sensibility to art; for, while it
remains, to ninety-nine out of every hundred a work of art will be dead
the moment it enters a public gallery.

The museums and galleries terrify us. We are crushed by the tacit
admonition frowned from every corner that these treasures are displayed
for study and improvement, by no means to provoke emotion. Think of
Italy--every town with its public collection; think of the religious
sightseers! How are we to persuade these middle-class masses, so patient
and so pathetic in their quest, that really they could get some pleasure
from the pictures if only they did not know, and did not care to know,
who painted them. They cannot all be insensitive to form and colour; and
if only they were not in a flutter to know, or not to forget, who
painted the pictures, when they were painted, and what they represent,
they might find in them the key that unlocks a world in the existence of
which they are, at present, unable to believe. And the millions who stay
at home, how are they to be persuaded that the thrill provoked by a
locomotive or a gasometer is the real thing?--when will they understand
that the iron buildings put up by Mr. Humphrey are far more likely to be
works of art than anything they will see at the summer exhibition of
the Royal Academy?[27] Can we persuade the travelling classes that an
ordinarily sensitive human being has a better chance of appreciating an
Italian primitive than an expert hagiographer? Will