It does not follow, of course, that we can relate the quality of a work of art to the “quantity” of its appeal; it would, in fact, be absurd to suppose that it is necessarily better that 100,000 should know and appreciate the second-rate than that 100 should love the finest--neither, with certain reservations, need this necessarily be untrue. The point I would urge at present is simply that the value of art to humanity does depend very largely upon the desire and opportunity of men to take advantage of it. The poet whose works are ignored saving by the very few may be as impotent as a mute inglorious Milton. Therefore there are two factors--production and reproduction, or, shall we say, creation and distribution. A musician composes a symphony, a dramatist writes a play, a novelist a story--that is the first factor. If no one ever performed the symphony, produced the play, or published the novel, of what importance would this creation prove to the world?--Practically none. The art-product must be distributed before it can accomplish any part of its essential purpose. It necessarily follows, moreover, that the _wider_ the distribution, the more adequately will it function. This is all very obvious, though often forgotten, and will disclose the next step in the argument, which is that, were it not for certain tendencies, increased means of reproduction and distribution would lead to a better developed, more valuable, and more active artistic life. That being so, the present, which is a period when mankind is enjoying the benefit of recent and important reproductive inventions, should be imbued with hopeful tendencies--Is it? Yes and no. Let us take stock of our position. Reproduction is almost entirely a mechanical matter, depending upon non-artistic, purely material factors. Production is the business of the creative artists; reproduction that of the scientists. The latter have given us within recent years inventions which have revolutionized artistic conditions--the mechanical processes and innumerable secondary inventions such as stereotyping, and mechanical composition and binding, which have facilitated the reproduction of printed matter, the three-colour and other photo-mechanical methods of reproducing pictorial matter, the gramophone, the piano-player, and wireless to aid the distribution of music, and so on, throughout the range of pure and applied art.