they understand
that, as a rule, the last to feel aesthetic emotion is the historian of
art? Can we induce the multitude to seek in art, not edification, but
exaltation? Can we make them unashamed of the emotion they feel for the
fine lines of a warehouse or a railway bridge? If we can do this we
shall have freed works of art from the museum atmosphere; and this is
just what we have got to do. We must make people understand that forms
can be significant without resembling Gothic cathedrals or Greek
temples, and that art is the creation, not the imitation, of form. Then,
but not till then, can they go with impunity to seek aesthetic emotion
in museums and galleries.

It is argued with plausibility that a sensitive people would have no use
for museums. It is said that to go in search of aesthetic emotion is
wrong, that art should be a part of life--something like the evening
papers or the shop windows that people enjoy as they go about their
business. But, if the state of mind of one who enters a gallery in
search of aesthetic emotion is necessarily unsatisfactory, so is the
state of one who sits down to read poetry. The lover of poetry shuts the
door of his chamber and takes down a volume of Milton with the
deliberate intention of getting himself out of one world and into
another. The poetry of Milton is not a part of daily life, though for
some it makes daily life supportable. The value of the greatest art
consists not in its power of becoming a part of common existence but in
its power of taking us out of it. I think it was William Morris who said
that poetry should be something that a man could invent and sing to his
fellows as he worked at the loom. Too much of what Morris wrote may well
have been so invented. But to create and to appreciate the greatest art
the most absolute abstraction from the affairs of life is essential. And
as, throughout the ages, men and women have gone to temples and churches
in search of an ecstasy incompatible with and remote from the
preoccupations and activities of laborious humanity, so they may go to
the temples of art to experience, a little out of this world, emotions
that are of another. It is not as sanctuaries from life--sanctuaries
devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion--but as class-rooms,
laboratories, homes of research and warehouses of tradition, that
museums and galleries become noxious.

Human sensibility must be freed from the dust of erudition and the
weight of tradit