Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative work in which the
visible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions,
and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned for her
delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern
tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its
broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism,
has no beauty whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is
absolutely detestable. We are beginning to weave possible carpets
in England, but only because we have returned to the method and
spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago, with
their solemn depressing truths, their inane worship of Nature,
their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have become, even to
the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured Mahomedan once
remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting
the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an
artistic application of the second." He was perfectly right, and
the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn
art in is not Life but Art.'

And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
question very completely.

'It was not always thus. We need not say anything about the poets,
for they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have
been really faithful to their high mission, and are universally
recognised as being absolutely unreliable. But in the works of
Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of
modem sciolists to verify his history, may justly be called the
"Father of Lies"; in the published speeches of Cicero and the