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livery age has been face to face with the deadly possibility of 
being swamped by materialism—none more so than our own. 
This seems to be the fatality of humanity. The emotional 
expressions of mankind when formulated into a poem, a drama, 
a picture or statue, a beautiful ornament, or, in any other such 
manner, are the protest from the best and noblest minds against 
the materialism of their surroundings, John Stuart Mill points 
out with his usual clearness that it is impossible for any of us to 
get beyond nature ; everything is nature—our badness, cur good- 
ness, ugliness, beauty. Roughly speaking, therefore, we may 
say that the Fine Arts are devoted to the noble service of 
expressing our highest ideas, our ideals, our sentiments, and our 
most remarkable or noble actions, in such a manner that the 
expression delights us and remains with us as a source of 
pleasure and as a standard of excellence. It is small blame to 
us in a place like Manchester if we remain outside the higher 
enjoyment of Art—that is to say, out of the truly ordered joys of 
the best life. When we get to see the ugliness of our surround- 
ings, and it is as difficult to see ugliness as it is to see beauty, 
we are conscious how much of God’s best and man’s best we are 
content to live without. Almost all of us live apart from, and 
are necessarily ignorant, therefore, of the standards that should 
show us what is acknowledged to be good, and by consequence 
should make us instinctively know what is bad, and so enable us 
to admire the one and regret the other. 
Let us take the example from literature—surely an important 
branch of the Arts, from many points of view the most service- 
able because the readiest available. It is impossible to cultivate 
a high taste from the newspaper standard, which is the stock 
reading of most of us, nor, indeed, from any class of examples, 
except the highest, can be educed the best that isin one. You 
can foretell from what a person reads what his estimate of real 
worth in literature will be. You can apply this rule at every 
point. The readers of the so-called comic papers are nearly 
always the most dismal people, just as the music hall habitué 
gets weary of fine drama, fine acting, noble music, or really good 
dancing. In all the arts it is the same. Look at our houses. 
Can we say that the rage is passed for hideous painted mirrors, 
or painted tambourines, or ugly useless bric-a-brac, or perilously 
foliated bronzes? If there was any rational standard of taste, 
would our upper and middle class houses be the extraordinary 
museums of useless, valueless, but expensive oddments, which 
pain one on every hand as we are shown through their pet 
rooms? For example, the malachite tables at Chatsworth 
cannot be readily matched for ugliness and vulgarity in any of 
our smaller houses. The simple rule of having nothing in one’s 
house but what one knows to be useful, or believes to be 
