public, for through these other artists it sweeps out again in further circles and ripples of expression. Art is the universal traveller, essentially international in influence. Revealing the spirit of things lying behind parochial surfaces and circumstance, delving down into the common stuff of nature and human nature, and recreating therefrom, it passes ten thousand miles of space, ten thousand years of time, and yet appeals to the men it finds on those far shores. It is the one possession of a country which that country’s enemies usually still respect and take delight in. War—destructive outcome of the side of man’s nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart—can for the moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? For thousands of generations war has been the normal state of man’s existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflecting man’s myriad aspirations and longings, and, by innumerable expressions of individual vision and sentiment, ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion passing from heart to heart by ways more invisible than the winds travel, carrying the seeds and pollen of herb life. If one could only see those countless tenuous bridges spun by art, a dewy web over the whole lawn of life! If for a moment we could see them, discouragement would cease its uneasy buzzing. What can this war do that a million wars have not? It is bigger, and more bloody—the reaction from it will but be the greater. If every work of art existing in the Western world were obliterated, and every artist killed, would human nature return to the animalism from which art has in a measure raised it? Not so. Art makes good in the human soul all the positions that it conquers. When the war is over, the world will find that the thing which has changed least is art. There will be less money to spend on it; some artists will have been killed; certain withered leaves, warts, and dead branches will have sloughed off from the tree; and that is all. The wind of war reeking with death will neither have warped nor poisoned it. The utility of art, which in these days of blood and agony is mocked at, will be rising again into the view even of the mockers, almost before the thunder of the last shell has died away. “Beauty is useful,” says Monsieur Rodin. Aye! it is useful!