There are two types of human temperament and attitude which manifest themselves in the world’s art product: the Art of Beauty and the Art of Power. The Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained, and to have their homes and surroundings set apart from the common mass. I do not mean that simple and primitive people do not produce beauty of a naïve sort; but for such art to develop and mature, it must be taken up by the privileged classes, patronizing and encouraging the artist, and making his work a form of class distinction. The fact that the men who produce this art have come from the people is a fact of no significance; for the ruling classes take what they want where they find it, and shape it to their own class ends. The characteristics of the Art of Beauty, whether in painting, or sculpture, or music, or words, or actions, are those of rest and serenity, pleasure in things as they actually exist; also clarity of form--because the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do. In every human society there is one group which controls, and another which struggles for control; the “ins” versus the “outs,” the “haves” versus the “have-nots.” In every well-developed civilization this latter class will be strong enough to have its art, which is apt to be crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion. Such art lays stress upon substance, rather than form; it aims, or at any rate tends, to arouse to action; and so we call it the Art of Power. This is the art which is generally described as “propaganda” by established criticism; the distinction being, as we have previously explained, itself a piece of propaganda. The Art of Beauty is equally propaganda; it is the gas-barrage of the “haves,” and the essence of its deadliness lies in the fact that it looks so little like a weapon. But to me it seems clear enough that when a leisure-class artist portrays the graces and refinements of the civilization which maintains him, when he paints the noble features, and quotes the imaginary golden words of ruling-class ladies and gentlemen, he is doing the best he knows how to protect those who give him a living. Nor is he, as a rule, without some awareness of the harsh and rough and dangerous forces which surround him, besieging the ivory tower, or the temple, or the sacred grove, or wherever it is that he keeps his working tools. But even where the artist is instinctive and naïve, the class which employs him knows what he is doing; it knows what is “safe and sane,” and “of sound tendency”; it approves of such art, and pays its money to maintain such art.