ART AND CITIZENSHIP
(1910)
THE most hardened advocate of "Art for Art's sake," will hardly deny that Art, for all its "sacred egoism," is a social force. The main question is where does your Art-training begin?
The conditions of the home, the workshop, and of social industries do more than the schools and the universities to educate a nation; and more especially, perhaps, to educate it toward a right or a wrong feeling about Art.
And if, in these departments, your national education takes a wrong line, then (however much you build schools over the heads of your pupils and intercept their feet with scholarships, and block their natural outlook on life with beautiful objects produced in past ages and in other countries) your Art-training will partake of the same condemnation.
True education, as opposed to merely commercial education, is a training of mind and body to an appreciation of right values; values, not prices. The man who has an all-round appreciation of right values is a well-educated man; and he could not have a better basis either for the love or the practice of Art than this appreciation of what things are really worth.
But, in the present age, which prides itself
