aily being taught to love
the beautiful. If they happen to have been born insensitive this is of
no great consequence, but it is misery to think of those who have had
real sensibilities ruined by conscientious parents: it is so hard to
feel a genuine personal emotion for what one has been brought up to
admire. Yet if children are to grow up into acceptable members of the
cultivated class they must be taught to hold the right opinions--they
must recognise the standards. Standards of taste are the essence of
culture. That is why the cultured have ever been defenders of the
antique. There grows up in the art of the past a traditional
classification under standard masterpieces by means of which even those
who have no native sensibility can discriminate between works of art.
That is just what culture wants; so it insists on the veneration of
standards and frowns on anything that cannot be justified by reference
to them. That is the serious charge against culture. A person familiar
with the masterpieces of Europe, but insensitive to that which makes
them masterpieces, will be utterly non-plussed by a novel manifestation
of the mysterious "that." It is well that old masters should be
respected; it were better that vital art should be welcome. Vital art is
a necessity, and vital art is stifled by culture, which insists that
artists shall respect the standards, or, to put it bluntly, shall
imitate old masters.

The cultured, therefore, who expect in every picture at least some
reference to a familiar masterpiece, create, unconsciously enough, a
thoroughly unwholesome atmosphere. For they are rich and patronising and
liberal. They are the very innocent but natural enemies of originality,
for an original work is the touchstone that exposes educated taste
masquerading as sensibility. Besides, it is reasonable that those who
have been at such pains to sympathise with artists should expect artists
to think and feel as they do. Originality, however, thinks and feels for
itself; commonly the original artist does not live the refined,
intellectual life that would befit the fancy-man of the cultured
classes. He is not picturesque; perhaps he is positively inartistic; he
is neither a gentleman nor a blackguard; culture is angry and
incredulous. Here is one who spends his working hours creating something
that seems strange and disquieting and ugly, and devotes his leisure to
simple animalities; surely one so utterly unlike ourselves cannot