The real motive for this modern increase in art-culture is not the disinterested love of art, it is the desire for commercial success. France and England are not now really artistic nations. In the French provincial cities the modern buildings, which are so rapidly replacing what remains of the mediæval ones, display, as a rule, no artistic invention whatever, and if the English people were suddenly to awake one morning with an artist’s passion for the beautiful they would not be able to endure the prevalent ugliness of their towns. Still, though the nations are not artistic, both races produce exceptional persons who are so, and these are allowed to have their own way more than formerly in the warfare that they wage against the hideous or the commonplace. Their argument in favour of the beautiful is the very simple one that it makes life pleasanter and, so far, happier, and in some of them this argument takes the kindly form of desiring, especially, to make beautiful things accessible to the poor. They might even go further, and affirm that beautiful surroundings are favourable to health, which they certainly are, by ministering to gaiety and cheerfulness and so increasing the charm of life. The perception of this truth would produce a very close alliance between philanthropic and artistic spirits, as we see already in the generous and thoughtful founders of the Manchester Art Museum. [Sidenote: Art in Lancashire.] [Sidenote: A former artistic Condition.] [Sidenote: The unspoiled Beauty of Nature.] [Sidenote: The Industrial Epoch.] Art education is an attempt to return consciously to conditions of life which have long ago been attained unconsciously and afterwards departed from. There are now many schools of art in Lancashire by way of reaction against the ugliness of the industrial age. There was a time when Lancashire knew neither ugliness nor schools of art. The habitations of the Lancashire people in the sixteenth century, and for some time later, were always artistic, whether magnificent or simple, and so was the furniture inside them. The art was not of an exquisite or an elevated order, but it _was_ art, and it was interesting and picturesque. The beauty of nature, too, was quite unspoiled, and though Lancashire was no more Switzerland than Manchester was Verona, still there was beauty enough in the county for all ordinary human needs; the pastoral valleys were green, the trout-streams pure, and if the skies were often gray it was only with clouds from the sea. The industrial epoch came and destroyed all this; it destroyed the vernacular architecture, it filled the beautiful valleys with the ugliest towns in the world, it fouled both the streams and the sky, it rapidly diminished even the health and beauty of the race. It is the conscious reaction against these evils which has made Lancashire a centre of artistic effort. [Sidenote: Conditions of Urban Life in France.] [Sidenote: Artistic Torpor.]