and so on, in the merely pictorial sense, has, upon the whole, improved, and certainly a great amount of colour has returned to it compared with what I may call the utilitarian and realistic epoch of a hundred years ago. But what, as I say, appears to me to be the essential evil in it is this: All those beauties, all that wealth of colour and of culture, are in a sense thrown open to men, they can do what they like with them, they are not unfamiliar with them; but they are handled in a fashion that indicates an insensibility to them.
For instance, nobody has an instinct for making colours and forms symbolical, as they had in what I should call more creative ages. Nobody wears any colours until they are all, as it were, drugged with colour. We have lost all sense that colour might possibly be used, as it was used in heraldry or in religious vestments, to express something.
Lastly—and, to my mind, this is the most important differentiation in this connection—the evil is not anarchy. It may proceed from a spiritual and philosophical anarchy in the very core of the mind, and I think it does; but that is quite a different question. If I attempted to talk about it, I should be thrown out of this College for being theological. But it is not in the ordinary external sense an evil as it was at the beginning of the industrial era, an evil of mere wild competition and undisciplined individualism. Exactly the opposite has come about, and that is exactly the danger to Culture that I see in this case. You could not, of course, have complete logical anarchy, though it was, I think, practically proposed by a great many of those great utilitarian philosophers in the early
