ontemporary spiritual aspirations and
troubles. That such may be the case with literature, particularly the
more ephemeral kinds thereof, is very likely, since literature, save in
the great complex structures of epos, tragedy, choral lyric, is but the
development of daily speech, and possibly as upstart, as purely passing,
as daily speech itself; moreover, in its less artistic forms, requiring
little science or apprenticeship.

But art is a thing of older ancestry; you cannot, however bursting
with emotion, embody your feelings in forms like those of Phidias, of
Michelangelo, of Bach, or Mozart, unless such forms have come ready to
hand through the long, steady working of generations of men: Phidias
and Bach in person, cut off from their precursors, would not, for all
their genius, get as far as a schoolboy's caricature, or a savage's
performance on a marrow-bone. And these slowly elaborated forms,
representing the steady impact of so many powerful minds, representing,
moreover, the organic necessity by which, a given movement once started,
that movement is bound to proceed in a given direction, these forms
cannot be altered, save infinitesimally, to represent the particular
state of the human soul at a given moment. You might as well suppose
that the human shape itself, evolved through these millions of years,
could suddenly be accommodated to perfect representation of the momentary
condition of certain human beings; even the Tricoteuses of the guillotine
had the heads and arms of ordinary women, not the beaks and claws of
harpies. Hence such expressiveness must be limited to microscopic
alterations; and, indeed, one marvels at the modest demands of the art
critics, who are satisfied with the pucker of a frontal muscle of a
Praxitelean head as testimony to the terrible deep disorder in the
post-Periclean Greek spirit, and who can still find in the later
paintings of Titian, when all that makes Titian visible and admirable
is deducted, a something, just a little _je ne sais quoi_, which proves
these later Titians to have originated in the Catholic reaction. If
the theory of art as the outcome of momentary conditions be limited
to such particularities, I am quite willing to accept it; only, such
particularities do not constitute the large, important and really
valuable characteristics of art, and it matters very little by what
they are produced.

How then do matters stand between art and civilisation? Here follows
my h