192 THE IDEALS OF A SCIENCE SCHOOL 



catholic. The cult of beauty there is confined 

 almost to the beauty of words. Poetry and litera- 

 ture, however beautiful in form, if divorced from 

 the spirit and knowledge of the age and finding 

 therein only what is ugly, sordid and low, degenerate 

 into one of the most artificial and insidious forms 

 of the aesthetic function. There surely would be a 

 renaissance of classical studies, more in keeping with 

 their original models, to the interpretation and 

 portrayal of the world in its present greatness. The 

 beauty of form sculpture in marble and bronze 

 the beauty of colour painting and the arts of 

 decoration the beauty of harmony music finds 

 no official recognition in most of our modern faculties 

 of arts, and the same may be said of the chief values 

 for which the ancient world stood. The drama, 

 the building of cities and the general ordering of 

 the civic and national life received attention in the 

 early world, but now are neglected, not because of 

 the growth of science or of what is termed in 

 contempt " materialism," but because of the decay 

 of the creative spirit of the past and its usurpal by 

 a craven imitative habit of mind, which deems the 

 present inferior and tries to make it so. 



You may wonder that I should really look for 

 a revival of the lost glories of the ancient world to 

 Labour. First, I would answer, because Labour is 

 young, virile and strong, and, secondly, because 

 upon it has pressed without mitigation the sordid- 

 ness and squalor of our modern industrial and com- 

 mercial life. The love of beauty, like the love of 

 truth, is innate and inextinguishable, and from the 

 horrors of the nineteenth century and the mismanage- 

 ment of the blessings of science under systems that 

 had atrophied even before its advent, men are now 

 earnestly looking everywhere for a way of escape. 



The following extract from the Report on Recon- 



