is a mistake, and to attack it is sheer
silliness. Tango and rag-time are kites sped by the breeze that fills
the great sails of visual art. Not every man can keep a cutter, but
every boy can buy a kite. In an age that is seeking new forms in which
to express that emotion which can be expressed satisfactorily in form
alone, the wise will look hopefully at any kind of dancing or singing
that is at once unconventional and popular.

So, let the people try to create form for themselves. Probably they will
make a mess of it; that will not matter. The important thing is to have
live art and live sensibility; the copious production of bad art is a
waste of time, but, so long as it is not encouraged to the detriment of
good, nothing worse. Let everyone make himself an amateur, and lose the
notion that art is something that lives in the museums understood by the
learned alone. By practising an art it is possible that people will
acquire sensibility; if they acquire the sensibility to appreciate, even
to some extent, the greatest art they will have found the new religion
for which they have been looking. I do not dream of anything that would
burden or lighten the catalogues of ecclesiastical historians. But if it
be true that modern men can find little comfort in dogmatic religion,
and if it be true that this age, in reaction from the materialism of the
nineteenth century, is becoming conscious of its spiritual need and
longs for satisfaction, then it seems reasonable to advise them to seek
in art what they want and art can give. Art will not fail them; but it
may be that the majority must always lack the sensibility that can take
from art what art offers.

That will be very sad for the majority; it will not matter much to art.
For those who can feel the significance of form, art can never be less
than a religion. In art these find what other religious natures found
and still find, I doubt not, in impassioned prayer and worship. They
find that emotional confidence, that assurance of absolute good, which
makes of life a momentous and harmonious whole. Because the aesthetic
emotions are outside and above life, it is possible to take refuge in
them from life. He who has once lost himself in an "O Altitudo" will not
be tempted to over-estimate the fussy excitements of action. He who can
withdraw into the world of ecstasy will know what to think of
circumstance. He who goes daily into the world of aesthetic emotion
returns to the wo