The trouble did not end there, however. Greater familiarity tends to form taste, especially in these matters. Art serves most men chiefly as a luxury, a relaxation, a recreation; and in our quest for these we are apt to take that which is most easily obtained. The mechanical factor, by making the fourth-rate accessible, _generated a desire for the fourth-rate_: this desire stimulated further reproduction, and this, in turn, brought more into the artistic fold, at each step lowering the quality of the most accessible and the most desired. The result is that to-day the average quality of the whole artistic consumption of the populace is considerably lower than it had ever been before in civilized times. Though every day more and more people are reading some kind of printed matter, witnessing plays--silent and audible--of a sort, looking at pictures, penny plain or twopence coloured, though the time is not far distant when every man will be interested to some extent in art in one or other of its forms, our art-life is developing not so much in quality as in quantity. III There is, of course, a bright side to the picture, and lest we be accused of pessimism it will be well to discuss this now. In the first place all forms of art, good, bad, and indifferent, have benefited by mechanical means of reproduction. The actual numbers of those who can experience the finest things in art have increased manifold, and to that extent, the art-life of the world is better off than before. My only contention is that _proportionately_ fewer appreciate the best, though _actually_ more do so. My only intention here is to point out the essentially _quantitative_ tendencies of to-day, lest we should mistake them for something better. Quantity alone is not everything, and, if we fail to realize these tendencies and endeavour to counteract their undesirable features, the time will come when the disproportion between those who seek the worthy and those who do not will be very dangerous. Why this will be so I hope to show in the next chapter. To return to the bright side--Though quantity is not everything, it _is_ something. It is better that people should appreciate the lowest arts than that they should ignore them altogether. Provided, of course, that any art is not definitely decadent and degenerate, it is better than none. But even this aspect has its disadvantages. It might be argued, not without reason, that it is more difficult to wean a person from the poor thing he knows and has come to like than to introduce an absolutely artistically-uneducated person to the moderately good. Of that, however we shall speak later. Thirdly, improved reproductive methods have enriched art by enabling minorities to flourish. IV