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 exquisite exception. 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.