Whether this is best, or whether it is the artist’s duty humbly to voice that which is in him—saying, “Well, this is the way you feel, is it? Better let it out then. Perhaps you’ll change quicker if you _see_ your badness,” this is a very large question. Perhaps the truly morbid and vicious tendencies, thus recognised by the artist, would cause him as much shame as if he had unfortunately inherited some scrofulous disease, and he would be unable to proceed. This, at least, should be held steadily in mind, that human work is not mere _expression_, of self or of society, but is _transmission_, and therefore to be watched. If speech were merely a relief to one’s own feelings, poured forth into empty air and earless waste places, then foulness and profanity would be merely indications of how the speaker felt, and hurt no one. But where speech goes to other ears, it must be measured, not merely by the speaker’s emotions, but by theirs. So the artist is not merely an unconscious spring bubbling over with fair water, or foul, according to its hidden sources, but is a conduit, taking the water _to_ something as well as from something. And as a conscious intelligence bound to act “up to his lights,” if he judges the water to be bad in its effects, he has no right to convey it to others. This would leave an easy alternative to the artist. Let him, if he _must_, write his decadent literature, paint his decadent pictures; and then, having so relieved himself of these foul secretions, let him decently destroy the product, lest it prove contagious. Some friend, having seen, would say compassionately—“Poor Jones! He has to write about so much of it in a year—he cannot help it, it is better to come out, I suppose. But don’t look as if you knew—he is very sensitive about it.” In a more advanced civilisation we may have Public Health ordinances as to these expressions, like the signs in our street cars. The assumption of the artist that his form of production is beyond all social responsibility or control, that “there is no ethics in art,” is a very interesting instance of the ego concept at its most insane height. If ever there was a “social function,” it is art. As a civilisation advances, there is more and more development of art; as we look back along the path of social progress, there is less and less of it. In its inception it was more or less common to all workers, a little of it; as it grew, it demanded more wholly the work of a whole life. No ultra-specialised social servant is more removed from self-support than the artist, whose work is of no faintest possible use to him as an individual. He must absolutely depend on the advanced society which made him, which feeds, clothes, shelters, and defends him, and whose highest needs it is his duty to serve.