If you search in the London collections for ivory carvings or embroidered tobacco pouches, you will find them; if you search for the perfection of human work, you will find it in the Indian museum and the Babylonian gallery, in the Daumiers, Turners, and Watteaus, or in the Elgin marbles. But then you leave this accumulation of all the world’s treasures and you can ride for hours and miles on the top of a bus from Ealing to East Ham, and from Clapham to Bethnal Green; and you will scarcely find a place where your eye could derive pleasure from the beauty and lavishness of human work. Art is what is deposited behind glass in galleries, museums and in the rooms of rich people; but it does not move about here in the streets, it does not twinkle from the handsome cornices of windows, it does not take up its stand at the street-corner like a statue, it does not greet you in a winsome and monumental speech. I do not know: perhaps after all it is only Protestantism which has drained this country dry in an artistic respect.
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