Apart from my conviction on this subject, a useful way of illuminating it will be to consider how I, or an artist like me, stands towards it on the practical ground. It reduces itself to this: I have nothing materially to gain by your adopting these theories. You are perplexed: painters are everywhere perplexed. I make you and them a present of this analysis of these perplexities. I see the shapes that you would see did the world for the moment contain more stimulation and effort in the related arts. I do not need to have a house built with significant forms, lines, masses, and details of ornament, and planted squarely before my eyes, to know that such significance exists, or to have my belief in its reality stimulated. But _you_ require that. I am, or any painter you can see is, obviously here to do that. I am at your disposal in this respect. But that is primarily a work for you and not for me. I can get on quite well, the artist always can, without this material realisation. Theoretically, even, a creative painter or designer should be able to exist quite satisfactorily without paper, stone or paints, or without lifting a finger to translate into forms and colours his specialised creative impulse. It should be the same with the painter, the architect, or the sculptor as it is with the composer of music. The Interpreter is really only in the same category as the bricklayer, or at best a foreman of works. Still, I suffer somewhat all the same, from this lack of readiness, or really of aptitude, on your part, to employ me usefully. And every true artist I know, painter or sculptor, is in the same box. The trouble is this: It does not matter what objective Nature supplies. The inventive artist is his own purveyor. But the society of which he forms a part, can, by its backwardness, indolence, or obtuseness, cause him a series of inconveniences; and above all, can, at certain times and under certain conditions, affect his pocket adversely and cause him to waste an absurd amount of time. When no longer able to produce his best work, it would not be a waste of time for a painter or for a writer to lecture, for example, on the subject of his craft. The propaganda, explanatory pamphlets, and the rest, in which we, in this country, have to indulge, is so much time out of active life which would normally be spent as every artist wishes to spend his time, in work, in a state of complete oblivion as regards any possible public that his work may ever have. Yet were one’s ideas on painting not formulated, and given out in the shape of a lecture, a pamphlet, or a critical essay, an impossible condition would result for an artist desirous of experimenting.