ABSTRACT
A society’s traditions in the arts and the connection of those traditions with life and art today are not only to be kept up; their audiences should be broadened as much as possible, and certainly much more than is evident in twentieth-century Britain. The arts are to be kept up because they are the most profound expression of our nature and experience. Without the constant and free practice of the arts, without people aware of the arts and free to come to them, however awkward they often are, a society is the poorer. If the arts are of value then the opportunities for revealing that value are cramped and biassed. The Arts Council has spent a great deal of money on ensuring that hardly anyone in Britain is more than forty miles from a theatre, each with a professional company far better than the sparse and irregular pre-war Reps.
