Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/213

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Art and Citizenship
193

from what apparently touches art—in the mind, and the public and private life of the community. And so, as I started by saying, true Art is bound up with true education and social conditions. Good citizenship is one of the conditions for setting national Art upon a proper basis. A lively sense of your duty to your neighbour cannot fail to have an effect upon your taste in art.

Now I want to bring this view of things home to you. So I will ask everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation, and rest. And to begin with, how do you show your sense of duty to the architect, who has (if you are fortunate) designed for you rooms of pleasant and restful proportions? How many of the objects in those rooms help at all to give a unifying and a harmonious effect, or are in themselves in any way beautiful—things, that is to say, which (if not of actual use) we love to set our eyes on, and feel what fineness of skill in handling, what clean human thought in design went to their production? Have those things been put there quite irrespective of their price and the display they make of their owner's "comfortable circumstances"? Are they subordinated to a really intelligent sense of what a living-room should be? Or are they