The prospect is more pleasing when we turn to architecture, really the only art that is perennial. Here there is at least a great progress, a far higher level of taste than that of a generation ago, a competent and audacious coping with unprecedented problems. Yet here as elsewhere the cult of haste works harm. No architect of a skyscraper is given time to think his building out. Perfection in the arts rests largely on trifles lovingly meditated, and what successful architect has time for meditation? We have in abundance such arts as we deserve, and we shall have better arts only as we deserve them through better ideals of life generally. Painting and sculpture are kept alive by a sort of artificial respiration. It is to be hoped that the increasing public use of both in decoration may restore to these traditionally leading arts a fuller measure of vitality. As it is, these arts have joined fine craftsmanship as an elegant survival, like fencing or court tennis. Since painting and sculpture are the arts I most love, it would be pleasant indeed to come forward with a programme for their rehabilitation. But I have no such programme. I feel rather that we should at once accept the situation and emphasise it. The only remedy, and a partial one at that, is, I think, this: since painting and sculpture have become exotic, relatively unwanted, and subsidised arts, let us rebuild on their rarity value. If instead of making it ridiculously easy to learn painting and sculpture, we made it difficult, we should probably have better painting and sculpture. This could be done by withdrawing charitable support from the art schools, keeping open such as reasonably pay their way, and by suspending the artificially encouraged salesmanship of painting and sculpture. There would remain the human problem of what to do with the thousands of young men and women who legitimately wish to work delicately with their hands; but in a civilisation that is supplied from the factory, that problem seems insoluble. And withal there may be a satisfactory outlet in amateurism--this has happened notably in the art of the theatre at the very moment when the moving picture seemed to announce the end of the spoken play. In general I am not discouraging the support of survivals. Indeed I see in such support a singularly sympathetic act of patronage. But one should know what he is about. I have, for example, a predilection for the quill pen, but I should be very unwise to endow an institution for writing with the quill. And we are very unwise in America when, not really wanting their works, we artificially multiply painters and sculptors.