Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/210

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
190
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook

on its inhuman system of specialisation as a means to economy, such a man is rather a rare phenomenon; for it is about as difficult to get out of present conditions a true appreciation of life values—a true Art-training—as it is to get a true artist. Where your national conditions shut down the critical faculties, and make their exercise difficult, there too, your creative artistic faculties are being shut down and made difficult also. They are far more interdependent than your average Art-teacher or Art-student is generally willing to admit. The idea that he has to concern himself with conditions outside his own particular department threatens him with extra trouble, and the burden of a conscience that the doctrine of "Art for Art's sake," will not wholly satisfy; and so he is inclined to shut his eyes, and direct his energies to the securing of favourable departmental instead of right national conditions.

But the man, or woman, who embarks whole-heartedly on Art-training must in the end find himself involved in a struggle for the recovery of those true social values which have been lost (or the acquisition of those which are as yet unrealised) and for the substitution, among other things, of true for false economics. He cannot afford to live a life of aloof specialisation, when the conditions out of which he derives and into which he is throwing his work are of a complementarily disturbing kind. If, that is to say, the give-and-take conditions