Things of which the ultimate end is to affect human beings must take human beings into account.  If you aim at appealing only to other craftsmen, it becomes an erudite business:  you become like a carpenter who makes things which are of no use except to win the admiration of other carpenters.  Of course it may be worth doing if you are content with indicating a treatment which other people can apply and popularise.  But if you isolate art into a theory which has no application to life, you are a savant and not an artist.  You can’t be an artist without being a man, and therefore I hold that humanity comes first.  I don’t mean that one need be vulgar.  Of course I am a mere professional, and my primary aim is to earn an honest livelihood.  I frankly confess that I don’t pose, even to myself, as a public benefactor.  But Herries does not care either about an income, or about touching other people.  Of course I should like to raise the standard.  I should like to see ordinary people capable of perceiving what is good art, and not so wholly at the mercy of conventional and melodramatic art.  But Herries does not care twopence about that.  He is like the Calvinist who is sure of his own salvation, has his doubts about the minister, and thinks every one else irreparably damned.  As I say, it is a lofty sort of ideal, but it is not a good sign when that sort of thing begins.  The best art of the world—­let us say Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—­was contributed by people who probably did not think about it as art at all.  Fancy Homer going in for questions of form!  It is always, I believe, a sign of decadence when formalism begins.  It is just like religion, which starts with a teacher who has an overwhelming sense of the beauty of holiness; and then that degenerates into theology.  These young men are to art what the theologians are to religion.  They lose sight of the object of the whole thing in codification and definition.  My own idea of a great artist is a man who finds beauty so hopelessly attractive and desirable that he can’t restrain his speech.  It all has to come out; he cannot hold his peace.  And then a number of people begin to see that it was what they had been vaguely admiring and desiring all the time; and then a few highly intellectual people think that they can analyse it, and produce the same effects by applying their analysis.  It can’t be done so; art must have a life of its own.”

“Yes,” I said, “I think you are right.  Herries is ascetic and eremitical—­a beautiful thing in many ways; but there is no transmission of life in such art; it is a sterile thing after all, a seedless flower.”

“Let us express the vulgar hope,” said Musgrave, “that he may fall in love; that will bring him to his moorings!  And now,” he added, “we will go to the music-room and I will see if I cannot tempt the shy bird from his roost.”  And so we did—­Musgrave is an excellent musician.  We flung the windows open; he embarked upon a great Bach “Toccata”; and before many bars were over, our idealist crept softly into the room, with an air of apologetic forgiveness.