In a Philistine world, where money was a god indecently obtruded and death a presence solicitously hidden, it was well enough to seek among the Arts for spells to dissipate reality. With life secure in our lands and without imperative desires in our hearts, it was reasonable to find in contemplation of the creations of man’s love of beauty a satisfaction of the many dissatisfactions of the spirit. But when a man has seen death, very clear and huge, straddling the way, and learned to think patiently of the final extinction; lost many friends; met fear in twenty shapes, and in the light of an unhoped-for morning felt the fresh, unshattered joy of living, the Arts, if they do not lose influence, do at least change in the significance that they have for his soul. They become not a means for satisfying the inexpressible and vacillating impulses of the spirit, but a means of satisfying the desires of a whole man. To have lived and survived as a soldier teaches a man the worth of his life; and life is desire. To live fully is to desire much and to have found means for the satisfaction of one’s desires. Art as you speak of it, as you advertise for it, is not a thing to minister to the desires of a man. It is a coloring matter to conceal an anaemia of the spirit, a way of spinning dainty webs across the void of a purposeless existence. At the best it is an echo for awakening the senses to the mysteries and subtleties of life, but without power to interpret them into action. I suspect, it is merely a device to avoid boredom. But for us, with lives still in hazard, the world holds too many desirable things for our souls to feel need of an art of this kind.