Everybody keeps calling for Excellence — excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Exc… - Jacques Barzun

Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.

Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.

With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so many ardent workers and eager patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was inevitable that technique and style should gradually turn from successful trial and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy. The result was frigidity — or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that going back to the past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not the technique is the point of interest. As knowledge grows more exact, originality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the sug- gestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even though his high competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for himself. His art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corollary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art.