I wonder whether they are. The quality of our current civilization does not appear especially high. There is a cheapness about it that was lacking not only in more leisurely epochs, such as the first half of the eighteenth century, but also in others as fervent as this. The same splendid intensity of effort pervaded the civilization of the Renaissance as pervades our own; yet the quality of the former civilization was incomparably finer than that of ours. Since the energy is equally admirable in either period, it can only be the nature of the results striven for that renders one period fine and the other cheap. Neither do I think that this was because the Renaissance was All for Art and Art for All (a thesis of which I am profoundly sceptical), whereas our own is--what it is. No, one cannot dismiss current civilization loftily by calling it ‘money-getting.’ When did people not desire money--all the money they could possibly get? Read the letters of great painters of the Renaissance. Their social status was equivocal, and their demands were difficult to enforce, but they drove the hardest bargains they could, and cared every bit as much for money as do modern realtors. The problem goes deeper than that. What is this success, for which all are striving with magnificent energy, to achieve which brings wide acclaim, and to fail of achieving which relegates one to contemptuous indifference? As I have suggested, it is not merely money-making. We, too, have our artists, and (a more important fact) in business itself, to which most men turn perforce, there are other aims than just that one. To build up a flourishing business from a decrepit one results of course in money-making, must be tested by money-making; but it is the building-up, rather than the financial profit, that is recognized as success. ‘Recognized as success.’ Here we are getting warm. The recognition is essential. You cannot in our modern American-led civilization be a success without being recognized as one. And recognized by whom? By majority opinion. In other words, it is not sufficient that a small heterogeneous minority, who more or less understand the kind of thing you are trying to do, should consider you to have succeeded. The recognition must come from the large homogeneous majority. A man may do something sensitive and significant in one of a dozen fields, but unless he obtains this recognition he is set down as a failure.