so help
the family of their unfortunate favourite. One and all refused, severely
giving the lady to understand that this was no time to think about art.
Of charity they said nothing; but they were generous, I dare say, in
some more patriotic and conspicuous fashion.

Charity, however, is beside my point. What interests me in this little
story is the unanimity with which the cultivated people agree that this
is no time for art. It interests me because I have lately been taken to
task for saying that the cultured regard art as no more than an elegant
amenity. The war has put my opinion to the proof and I am shocked to
discover how much I was in the right. From every quarter comes the same
cry--"This is no time for art!" Those galleries and exhibitions which
are not closed are visited chiefly by homeless refugees; if literary
taste goes beyond the newspapers it is only to salute the verse of Mr.
Begbie and the prose of Mr. H. G. Wells; even at concerts our ears are
exasperated by national platitudes and the banalities of our Allies.
This is no time for art. Good taste is unpatriotic; the man who
continues to care for painting, poetry, or music is little better than a
Hun.

That people who in times of peace treat art as an amenity should feel
that this is no time for art is, I suppose, natural. That they should
expect those who feel that art is the most important thing in the world
to do the same seems to me unreasonable. To those who care seriously for
art, to those for whom it is a constant source of passionate emotion,
the notion that this is no time for art seems as ludicrous as to a
Christian mystic of the ninth century would have seemed the notion that
that tortured age was no time for religious ecstasy. People who are
capable of ecstasy, be it religious or aesthetic, are apt to distinguish
between ends and means. They know that empires and dominations,
political systems and material prosperity and life itself are valuable
only as means to those states of mind which alone are good as ends. Thus
it comes about that the things which to the majority are of primary
importance, because to the majority they seem to be ends, are to a
handful of mystics and artists of secondary importance because to them
they are no more than means. They cannot forget about art and think
exclusively about war, because if they forgot about art the world and
its ways would seem unworthy of thought. Public activities and
operations they feel