r lack some material to keep him busy;
but if what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a great
revolution would first have to be worked in society. We should have to
abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms
and schools of art, and to discover instead our genuine needs, the forms
of our possible happiness. To call for such self-examination seems
revolutionary only because we start from a sophisticated system, a
system resting on traditional fashions and superstitions, by which the
will of the living generation is misinterpreted and betrayed. To shake
off that system would not subvert order but rather institute order for
the first time; it would be an _Instauratio Magna_, a setting things
again on their feet.

We in Christendom are so accustomed to artificial ideals and to
artificial institutions, kept up to express them, that we hardly
conceive how anomalous our situation is, sorely as we may suffer from
it. We found academies and museums, as we found missions, to fan a flame
that constantly threatens to die out for lack of natural fuel. Our overt
ideals are parasites in the body politic, while the ideals native to the
body politic, those involved in our natural structure and situation,
are either stifled by that alien incubus, leaving civic life barbarous,
or else force their way up, unremarked or not justly honoured as ideals.
Industry and science and social amenities, with all the congruous
comforts and appurtenances of contemporary life, march on their way, as
if they had nothing to say to the spirit, which remains entangled in a
cobweb of dead traditions. An idle pottering of the fancy over obsolete
forms--theological, dramatic, or plastic--makes that by-play to the
sober business of life which men call their art or their religion; and
the more functionless and gratuitous this by-play is the more those who
indulge in it think they are idealists. They feel they are champions of
what is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancy
herself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book instead of
planting their seeds in the garden.

[Sidenote: Why art is now empty and unstable.]

It is clear that gratuitous and functionless habits cannot bring
happiness; they do not constitute an activity at once spontaneous and
beneficent, such as noble art is an instance of. Those habits may indeed
give pleasure; they may bring extreme excitement, as madness notably