such sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness and reality,
so much she sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not
live thus isolated and exclusive. I will go further than this and
say that on such terms I do not wish her to live. I protest that it
would be a shame to an honest artist to enjoy what he had huddled up
to himself of such art, as it would be for a rich man to sit and eat
dainty food amongst starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort.

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or
freedom for a few.

No, rather than art should live this poor thin life among a few
exceptional men, despising those beneath them for an ignorance for
which they themselves are responsible, for a brutality that they
will not struggle with,--rather than this, I would that the world
should indeed sweep away all art for awhile, as I said before I
thought it possible she might do; rather than the wheat should rot
in the miser's granary, I would that the earth had it, that it might
yet have a chance to quicken in the dark.

I have a sort of faith, though, that this clearing way of all art
will not happen, that men will get wiser, as well as more learned;
that many of the intricacies of life, on which we now pride
ourselves more than enough, partly because they are new, partly
because they have come with the gain of better things, will be cast
aside as having played their part, and being useful no longer. I
hope that we shall have leisure from war,--war commercial, as well
as war of the bullet and the bayonet; leisure from the knowledge
that darkens counsel; leisure above all from the greed of money, and
the craving for that overwhelming distinction that money now brings: