about art is to know a good picture when you see it, and a bad
picture when you see it. As regards the date of the artist, all

good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a
portrait of Velasquez - they are always modern, always of our

time. And as regards the nationality of the artist, art is not
national but universal. As regards archaeology, then, avoid it

altogether: archaeology is merely the science of making excuses
for bad art; it is the rock on which many a young artist founders

and shipwrecks; it is the abyss from which no artist, old or young,
ever returns. Or, if he does return, he is so covered with the

dust of ages and the mildew of time, that he is quite
unrecognisable as an artist, and has to conceal himself for the

rest of his days under the cap of a professor, or as a mere
illustrator of ancient history. How worthlessarchaeology is in

art you can estimate by the fact of its being so popular.
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art.

Whatever is popular is wrong.
As I am not going to talk to you, then, about the philosophy of the

beautiful, or the history of art, you will ask me what I am going
to talk about. The subject of my lecture to-night is what makes an

artist and what does the artist make; what are the relations of the
artist to his surroundings, what is the education the artist should

get, and what is the quality of a good work of art.
Now, as regards the relations of the artist to his surroundings, by

which I mean the age and country in which he is born. All good
art, as I said before, has nothing to do with any particular

century; but this universality is the quality of the work of art;
the conditions that produce that quality are different. And what,

I think, you should do is to realise completely your age in order
completely to abstract yourself from it; remembering that if you

are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century,
but the master of eternity, that all art rests on a principle, and

that mere temporal considerations are no principle at all; and that
those who advise you to make your art representative of the

nineteenth century are advising you to produce an art which your
children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned. But you

will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic
people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of

ours.
Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But

remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic
people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always

been, and will always be, an exquisiteexception. There is no
golden age of art; only artists who have produced what is more

golden than gold.
WHAT, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic

people?
Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the

Athenians, the citizens of one out of a thousand cities.
Do you think that they were an artistic people? Take them even at

the time of their highest artistic development, the latter part of
the fifth century before Christ, when they had the greatest poets

and the greatest artists of the antique world, when the Parthenon
rose in loveliness at the bidding of a Phidias, and the philosopher

spake of wisdom in the shadow of the painted portico, and tragedy
swept in the perfection of pageant and pathos across the marble of

the stage. Were they an artistic people then? Not a bit of it.
What is an artistic people but a people who love their artists and

understand their art? The Athenians could do neither.
How did they treat Phidias? To Phidias we owe the great era, not

merely in Greek, but in all art - I mean of the introduction of the
use of the living model.

And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the
English people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one

day and took off Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate
on the charge of having allowed you to make use of the living model

in your designs for sacred pictures?
Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of

such an idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to
honour God is to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the

work of His hands; and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must
take the most Christlike person one can find, and if one wants to

paint the Madonna, the purest girl one knows?
Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say

that such a thing was without parallel in history?
Without parallel? Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.

In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you
will see a marbleshield on the wall. On it there are two figures;

one of a man whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the
godlike lineaments of Pericles. For having done this, for having

introduced into a bas relief, taken from Greek sacred history, the
image of the great statesman who was ruling Athens at the time,

Phidias was flung into prison and there, in the common gaol of
Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old world.

And do you think that this was an exceptional case? The sign of a
Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry

was raised by the Athenian people against every great poet and
thinker of their day - AEschylus, Euripides, Socrates. It was the

same with Florence in the thirteenth century. Good handicrafts are
due to guilds, not to the people. The moment the guilds lost their

power and the people rushed in, beauty and honesty of work died.
And so, never talk of an artistic people; there never has been such

a thing.
But, perhaps, you will tell me that the external beauty of the

world has almost entirely passed away from us, that the artist
dwells no longer in the midst of the lovely surroundings which, in

ages past, were the natural inheritance of every one, and that art
is very difficult in this unlovely town of ours, where, as you go

to your work in the morning, or return from it at eventide, you
have to pass through street after street of the most foolish and

stupid architecture that the world has ever seen; architecture,
where every lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled, and every

lovely Gothic form defiled and desecrated, reducing three-fourths
of the London houses to being, merely, like square boxes of the

vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they
are pretentious - the hall door always of the wrong colour, and the

windows of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the
houses you turn to contemplate the street itself, you have nothing

to look at but chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards,
vermilion letter-boxes, and do that even at the risk of being run

over by an emerald-green omnibus.
Is not art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as

these? Of course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you
yourselves would not wish it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is

worth doing except what the world says is impossible.
Still, you do not care to be answered merely by a paradox. What

are the relations of the artist to the external world, and what is
the result of the loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of

the most important questions of modern art; and there is no point
on which Mr. Ruskin so insists as that the decadence of art has

come from the decadence of beautiful things; and that when the
artist cannot feed his eye on beauty, beauty goes from his work.

I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid
aspect of a great English city, he draws for us a picture of what

were the artistic surroundings long ago.
Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose

beauty I can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which
presented itself, in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the