luable only for their aesthetic significance.
Above all, let us dance and devise dances--dancing is a very pure art, a
creation of abstract form; and if we are to find in art emotional
satisfaction, it is essential that we shall become creators of form. We
must not be content to contemplate merely; we must create; we must be
active in our dealings with art.

It is here that I shall fall foul of certain excellent men and women who
are attempting to "bring art into the lives of the people" by dragging
parties of school children and factory girls through the National
Gallery and the British Museum. Who is not familiar with those little
flocks of victims clattering and shuffling through the galleries,
inspissating the gloom of the museum atmosphere? What is being done to
their native sensibilities by the earnest bear-leader with his (or her)
catalogue of dates and names and appropriate comments? What have all
these tags of mythology and history, these pedagogic raptures and
peripatetic ecstasies, to do with genuine emotion? In the guise of what
grisly and incomprehensible charlatan is art being presented to the
people? The only possible effect of personally conducted visits must be
to confirm the victims in their suspicion that art is something
infinitely remote, infinitely venerable, and infinitely dreary. They
come away with a respectful but permanent horror of that old sphinx who
sits in Trafalgar Square propounding riddles that are not worth
answering, tended by the cultured and nourished by the rich.

First learn to walk, then try running. An artisan of exceptional
sensibility may get something from the masterpieces of the National
Gallery, provided there is no cultivated person at hand to tell him what
to feel, or to prevent him feeling anything by telling him to think. An
artisan of ordinary sensibility had far better keep away until, by
trying to express himself in form, he has gained some glimmer of a
notion of what artists are driving at. Surely there can be no reason why
almost every man and woman should not be a bit of an artist since
almost every child is. In most children a sense of form is discernible.
What becomes of it? It is the old story: the child is father to the man;
and if you wish to preserve for the man the gift with which he was born,
you must catch him young, or rather prevent his being caught. Can we by
any means thwart the parents, the teachers, and the systems of education
that turn children i