forms and surfaces are pleasant to eye and touch, is a work of art. There is no article whatever, from a hammer to a Senate-house, that may not and should not be a work of art. There have been places and times in the world's history when art has been thus universally applied to the objects of manufacture. Take as an instance Pompeii when it was overwhelmed by the eruption of Vesuvius. Modern excavations have brought to light not only the houses, but a countless multitude of objects of domestic utility. The remarkable fact is that almost every one of these objects, every pot and pan, every bucket and dish, all the commonest household utensils, are as beautiful in their simple fashion as the more elaborate and costly works professedly made for the sake of their beauty. In Pompeii art had penetrated the household and infused beauty into its remotest

recesses.

But art can have a wider domain even than this, if its sphere includes not only the manner in which a thing is made, but also the manner in which an act is done. The most elementary art of action is the dance-the art of graceful movement. Every one recognises dancing as an art, but it is too often forgotten that all the actions of life may be gracefully performed. I have heard it said that no one knows the charm that can be shed over the most commonplace action, who has not seen a certain famous actress enter a room and extend greeting to a guest. Poetry again is not the only, though it is the highest, art of speech. Whenever and for whatever purpose words have to be used, there is art in so selecting them that the speaker's or writer's meaning may be most clearly and gracefully expressed. If the word 'art' were properly understood, it would suffice to say that every action of life should be artistically performed.

The highest and most comprehensive of all arts is, therefore, the Art of Living-the art of so disposing of every moment as to fill the whole of a lifetime with as many beautiful actions as possible; and by beautiful actions I do not mean great and heroic deeds that attract the attention of multitudes, but merely the commonplace deeds and business that fill the hours of an ordinary individual's day, each of which may have infused into the doing of it the grace, efficiency, and charm, which are the essential elements in making a thing to be a work of art. Manners belong as much to art as does architecture or painting; the difference between them is that the art is exercised on a different material. Michelangelo said: 'I know of but one art,' meaning that the qualities that make good sculpture are the same as those that make good painting, good architecture, good decoration; but his statement is true in a far wider application. There is but one art in all human activity; every person in every action of life is an artist, good, bad, or indifferent. When two men greet one another in the street they as certainly manifest what

ever presence or lack of art there may be in them by the manner of their greeting and the charm of their intercourse, manly, gracious, honest, kindly, sincere-or the reverse: they manifest the essential element of art in them as plainly in such a simple action as does a painter on canvas by the handling of his brushes. For it must be remembered that the glory of painting is not in the subject portrayed, but in the way in which it is portrayed. A picture may represent an heroic action most vilely-that will be a bad picture; or it may show a heap of potatoes beautifully and be a good picture. The art is in the manner of the work. It does not answer to the question What? but to the question How?-not what is done, but how it is done. Thus the simplest action and the commonest object may be as artistic as the finest creations of the human intellect.

Observe that nothing effeminate enters into this conception of art or of artistic people. It is one of the disgraces of modern civilisation among Anglo-Saxon races that effeminacy and art should ever have come to be connected together in people's minds. No one will accuse sixteenth-century Italians of effeminacy, yet they were in many respects highly artistic. Take Benvenuto Cellini as type of his contemporaries. He was a first-rate blackguard, but he had a great sense both of the arts of form and the arts of manner. It would be safe to assert that when he went a-murdering he would have deemed it shocking to use any but the most elegant rapier. Art and immorality may go far together, but not art and effeminacy; whilst the highest and noblest art cannot be thought of as growing to perfection save in a dignified, a masculine, and, in the true sense, a moral community.

It is the sign of a partially developed civilisation when there is a difference in the matter of art between the sexes, just as it is a sign of high civilisation when the women have refined the men, and the men have developed strength and self-reliance in the women. The fact that both these processes seem to be going forward in our midst at the present day is a hopeful sign for the future. Civilisation, like society, arises from the interaction of the sexes on one another. The typical man is always anxious to accomplish something, and cares little how, so long as the end is attained. The typical woman thinks more of the How? and less of the What? A community of women would refine themselves away to mere futility; whilst a community of men would become an acting machine, like an army. In neither would any true civilisation arise. The combination of the masculine and feminine elements is essential for the production of that high result.

The whole body of a nation's art is the standard measure of its civilisation. An ideally artistic people would be one of perfect manners, living in dwellings as simple as you please, but all wellproportioned and well built, harmonious in colour, and arrayed with

no decoration that was not good. Such a people would be dressed in tasteful clothes, however plain. They would eat well-cooked food, however simple. They would use no implements that were not of good forms and perfectly adapted to their purpose. They might be without pictures or sculptures, but if they had any they would only have good ones, which, by-the-by, are just as cheap to make as bad. They would speak their own language clearly, simply, and beautifully; they would daily increase its expressiveness and develop its resources, softening down its asperities and vulgarities. They would make their landscape as fair as the nature of the climate would permit. They would surround themselves with cities clean and fine to look upon. Assuredly the England of the nineteenth century has not been inhabited by an artistic people; will the England of the twentieth century be better off?

If I have succeeded in explaining my position thus far, it will now be evident that a time of great intellectual and social development and change cannot be an artistic epoch, for the arts of life must be of slow growth. Birth and breeding, it has been well said, are the products of wealth and virtue respectively in the preceding generation. What is true of the individual is in this respect likewise true of the race. You cannot take an adult and turn him into a man well born and well bred. If you desire to produce a community of such persons, you must set to work training and breeding the generation that is to grow up and become their parents. All children are born savages. It takes the whole of childhood to turn them into merely decent members of society; how much more, then, to teach them the Art of Living. To begin with, the fine-art of life cannot be completely cultivated by any solitary individual; it is not a simple art concerned only with the handling and shaping of matter; the material with which it deals is living men and women in their mutual relations as well as in their relations to the world in which they live. The Art of Living therefore must be cultivated, and to some extent actually is cultivated, by a society or community of persons. If the organisation of society changes, the Art of Living must change in that society. Again, if the relations of society to the material world change, there must be a corresponding change in the Art of Living. Now, in the nineteenth century both the organisation of society and the relations of man to the material world have not merely changed; they have been, and are still in the process of being, utterly revolutionised. It follows that the Art of Living, at its best up till now an incompletely developed art, must be in process of fundamental transformation.

The briefest possible retrospective glance will explain my meaning better than pages of discussion of principles. We need not go very far back. Consider what was the effect upon our national life produced by the introduction of root-crops into agriculture in the last

century. All through the middle ages and down to the beginning of the eighteenth century there was in England little winter food for sheep and cattle except the product of grass land. The result was that no considerable head of cattle could be maintained and that a large proportion of the land of the country had to be kept in an uncultivated condition. The modern system of agriculture by which roots are grown as winter food for stock, was introduced by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The astonishing wealth of Holland at that time, relatively far surpassing the wealth of any other part of Europe, was mainly due to that system of agriculture. The system was introduced into England early in the eighteenth century, and soon wrought a social and economic revolution in this country. Then for the first time it became possible to improve the breeds of cattle and sheep, seeing that it was no longer necessary at the beginning of every winter to kill off the larger part of the flocks and herds and to half starve the survivors. Cattle therefore greatly increased, and the fields could be more satisfactorily manured. The amount of grass and waste lands could be correspondingly diminished, and enormous areas, previously uncultivated, were enclosed and brought under profitable cultivation. The result of all this was the rapid growth of the profits of agriculture. Farmers and landowners became rich. There was a great demand for farms on the part of intelligent men. Capital was attracted to the improved industry. Wages rose. Villages throve. Country towns in the centre of agricultural districts awoke. Agricultural banks sprang up all over the country. The country gentry, becoming thus enriched, began to spend their money upon building or improving their residences. A country gentleman's place in the sixteenth century had been a very poor affair. The house was sometimes a fine enough building architecturally, but there was no such thing as comfort found within its walls. It arose gauntly in the middle of grass land. It seldom had anything worth calling a garden attached to it, except perhaps a few formal parterres and a place where herbs were grown for household use. Landscape gardening on a large scale was only introduced into England in the eighteenth century. It came in the wake, and as the consequence, of the newly introduced system of Dutch agriculture. The finest parks that form the glory of our counties are in almost every case products of the eighteenth century. Before that time parks existed merely as waste lands; it was in the eighteenth century that they received the intentional impress of beauty. From one to two hundred years are needed to bring a piece of fine landscape gardening to perfection. Our good fortune at the present day is to live at the very time when the works of our forefathers in this kind have just arrived at maturity.

It is universally admitted that English social life reaches its most delightful and unique development in our country houses. For this

also we have to thank our forefathers of the eighteenth century. They not only built or improved the country houses and laid out their parks and gardens, but they invented the art of living gracefully in them, and they patronised all the arts that conduced to such life. For example, the walls of English houses were practically bare of pictures before the revival of agriculture. The eighteenth century not merely set flowing towards England that stream of fine paintings and other works of art from Italy and Holland which has turned this country into an unexampled store-house of beautiful things, but it produced a domestic school of painting of the first rank. Reynolds and Gainsborough would never have been called into activity but for the demand for pictures and portraits made by the class of men whom agriculture had enriched. A list of the people Reynolds portrayed practically indicates the class who presided over the great economic revolution I have been describing. As in Holland in the seventeenth century so in England in the eighteenth, the bounty wherewith the earth responded to the wisely directed labours of man awakened in him a new love for the beauty of nature; landscape art arose in response to that quickened feeling. At first people wanted pictures of their places, just as they demanded portraits of themselves; but presently the new art took a wider range and ultimately attained, at the hands of Turner and Constable, altogether unforeseen developments.

It may be said that the new Art of Living, which sprang up in consequence of the introduction of the turnip into England, had reached a high degree of perfection by the end of last century or the beginning of this. If no further fundamental social changes had occurred, that would be the Art of Living at the present day-an art further elaborated indeed, but in its essentials substantially the same. The present century, however, has been a time of the most fundamental social changes, which must now be briefly considered. When it opened, the English were a country-dwelling agricultural people; now they are a people town-dwelling and industrial. No greater contrast can be imagined, for it goes to the very root of all the arts of life. Of course there were English towns before the present industrial epoch began; but the wealth of England was not made in them. The towns existed to provide the requirements of the country; now the country exists to provide, and by no means succeeds in providing, the requirements of the towns. The townsman of the year 1800 had the country near to him. A part at any rate of the industrial classes living in towns looked to harvestings, hoppickings, and the like country industries for a contribution towards their means of subsistence. The towns of that date were in the country, not divorced from it, as are the giant groups of population nowadays. Fields and country lanes were within reach of an afternoon's walk from the very centre of the City of London. Snipe