As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things; and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this--that man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts; that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We, for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present. You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between the years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation; their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with