work of art from its human context and studies its forms as if these were ends in themselves. And this sort of teaching is popular. Along such lines one may make a generation of resolute pedants. For the humanist such teaching is not merely defective but positively harmful. On the other side, there is much sound and modest teaching, and the next generation of art patrons will be far better trained than that which is passing. Yet all such useful activities are simply marginal. Without a predisposition in its visitors, the museum might just as well be unvisited, since it then has no more dignity or value than the peep show. It is a proper uneasiness before flattering statistics of attendance that has rightly induced our museums to inaugurate direct instruction in appreciation. It is a weakness and limitation of such teaching that it too often merely foments a diffused interest in art taken as an entity and not as related to human values generally. For appreciation really requires a right and balanced attitude towards life. It was really more important for Florence that her great citizens, while bowing to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, wanted a full and honourable life in Florence--it was really more important, I say, that they cared discriminatingly for the dignity of their ordinary activities and for the authority of their faith, than that they cared _specifically_ for painting, sculpture, and architecture. In short some aristocratic vision of the good life has always been the foundation on which great national art has been reared in the past. It behooves us then to ask what is in America our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of “knockers”)? I fear it would come to these few articles of faith:--to make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the “art-artist,” to quote a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And it naturally gets the art it feeds--the immaculate bank clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in the classy car--the art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also finds its authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence.