Walter Lippman Public Opinion

A distinguished art critic has said [Footnote: Bernard Berenson,
_The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_, pp. 60, _et
seq_.] that "what with the almost numberless shapes assumed by an
object. ... What with our insensitiveness and inattention, things
scarcely would have for us features and outlines so determined and
clear that we could recall them at will, but for the stereotyped
shapes art has lent them." The truth is even broader than that, for
the stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, in
the sense of painting and sculpture and literature, but from our moral
codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations as
well. Substitute in the following passage of Mr. Berenson's the words
'politics,' 'business,' and 'society,' for the word 'art' and the
sentences will be no less true: "... unless years devoted to the study
of all schools of art have taught us also to see with our own eyes, we
soon fall into the habit of moulding whatever we look at into the
forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted. There is
our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors
which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms
and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to reproduce things
as we know they certainly are, or we accuse him of insincerity."