expression of beauty becoming too great a force among the other
forces of life, would, if they had had the making of the external
world, have been afraid of making an ear of wheat beautiful, lest it
should not have been good to eat.

But indeed there seems no chance of art becoming universal, unless
on the terms that it shall have little self-consciousness, and for
the most part be done with little effort; so that the rough work of
the world would be as little hindered by it, as the work of external
nature is by the beauty of all her forms and moods: this was the
case in the times that I have been speaking of: of art which was
made by conscious effort, the result of the individual striving
towards perfect expression of their thoughts by men very specially
gifted, there was perhaps no more than there is now, except in very
wonderful and short periods; though I believe that even for such men
the struggle to produce beauty was not so bitter as it now is. But
if there were not more great thinkers than there are now, there was
a countless multitude of happy workers whose work did express, and
could not choose but express, some original thought, and was
consequently both interesting and beautiful: now there is certainly
no chance of the more individual art becoming common, and either
wearying us by its over-abundance, or by noisy self-assertion
preventing highly cultivated men taking their due part in the other
work of the world; it is too difficult to do: it will be always but
the blossom of all the half-conscious work below it, the fulfilment
of the shortcomings of less complete minds: but it will waste much
of its power, and have much less influence on men's minds, unless it
be surrounded by abundance of that commoner work, in which all men
once shared, and which, I say, will, when art has really awakened,
be done so easily and constantly, that it will stand in no man's way