This book consists of two lectures, the first on The Normal View of Art, the second on Liberty and Discipline. We wish it were possible to have them delivered and redelivered in every public place (not specially Art Schools) in the English-speaking world; for the principles they enunciate are precisely those which our civilization most completely flouts and most needs to know. Such a wish is, however, not only “crying for the moon,” it would also be no more than “locking the stable after the horse has gone.” It is much too late now to hope for any widespread and deliberate reform of our world; what we must expect is such a complete breakdown of our palpably inhuman and therefore doomed institutions as will place us again in a state of primitive simplicity and barbarism and thus make possible a new growth, and eventually a new flowering, of the human and humane spirit. Meanwhile the existence of such lectures is all to the good. It is, under divine providence, possible that some memory of them will survive to fructify the new dark age which is obviously upon us. “My words shall not pass away,” and the words printed in this book are so clearly conformable to the Word which was in the beginning that we may hope for a like permanence.

To write a “review” of Dr. Coomaraswamy’s lecture is in fact an impudence; the only proper review would be a complete reprint. It has a clarity of vision which amounts to holiness.