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anti-artistic. We can see by some of the examples which I shall 
show how the very noblest and best art has triumphed over the 
passing fashions of the centuries since they were done, and how 
these vivid examples, some created thousands of years since, still 
remain as living examples, “the top of admiration,” as 
Ferdinand says of Miranda. Moreover, all the best art has been 
done from the religious impulse, or for sacred purposes. The 
temples, and statues, and dramas of Greece, the great cathedrals, 
the noblest pictures, all were created for religion and for the 
people. Nowadays we require a multitude of things producing 
to suit our poor individual taste, and then we fall back on the 
inane expression, ‘‘ Well, I know what I like.” This is 
unfortunately too true. The man who gets drunk and goes 
home and maltreats his wife knows what he likes, and very good 
fun he gets out of it, from his point of view. So when we use 
such-like phrases in excuse for our weaknesses, negligences, or 
ignorances, we are probably guilty of a breach of good law. The 
law of conduct or of taste surely is to know the best and to 
strive for its realization. I know of no other rule as a safe 
all-round guide for our actions, and fortunately we may apply it 
in matters of taste if those responsible will see that we have the 
standards of art supplied. With regard to our houses, let me 
interpolate one remark. Keep them quiet. You don’t want to 
see the wall paper, or the furniture, or the nick-nacks. You 
want, or should want, to see the people who use the room. It is 
much better to knit stockings than to do macramé work, as a 
hideous production, now out of fashion, was called. It is much 
more artistic to set a table simply amd well than to paint 
impossible flowers and faces on impossible tambourines—one 
may be art, the other never can be. Art has to do with real 
things. In the higher branches art is more real even than the 
nature it is selected from. There is no room for the ridiculous 
artificiality which has usurped the true thing. The artist in any 
branch of effort is he who selects the best material for his work, 
he is a seer as well as a producer, he is the one who has the 
highest sanity, or health, and taken with the differences of 
individuality he has most to give to the world that is beautiful 
and lasting. You cannot produce him in any school. King 
David and Robert Burns came from the soil, Shakspeare was the 
son of a butcher, and they have all given to the world poems, 
works of supreme art, one cannot explain why, nor tell how their 
like was created, or how they may be again produced. It is very 
wonderful. David shows us how to praise as none of us could 
hope to do, unaided. Burns expresses the universals of falling 
in love, and all the troubles and joys of it, in a keener way than 
we common mortals who have gone through it all can give even 
a hint of. Shakspeare’s multitude of various characters are, as a 
