likes; men who decline
flatly, and over-stridently sometimes, to concern themselves at all with
what seems to them unimportant. To call the art of the movement
democratic--some people have done so--is silly. All artists are
aristocrats in a sense, since no artist believes honestly in human
equality; in any other sense to call an artist an aristocrat or a
democrat is to call him something irrelevant or insulting. The man who
creates art especially to move the poor or especially to please the rich
prostitutes whatever of worth may be in him. A good many artists have
maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction
between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic
art and plebeian. In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art
seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and
principles by which societies exist. It may be said with some justice
that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so
emphatically on fundamentals and challenges so violently the
conventional tradition of art and, by implication, I suppose, the
conventional view of life. By setting art so high, it sets industrial
civilisation very low. Here, then, it may shake hands with the broader
and vaguer spirit of the age; the effort to produce serious art may bear
witness to a stir in the underworld, to a weariness of smug materialism
and a more passionate and spiritual conception of life. The art of the
movement, in so far as it is art, expresses nothing temporal or local;
but it may be a manifestation of something that is happening here and
now, something of which the majority of mankind seems hardly yet to be
aware.

Men and women who have been thrilled by the pure aesthetic significance
of a work of art go away into the outer world in a state of excitement
and exaltation which makes them more sensitive to all that is going
forward about them. Thus, they realise with a heightened intensity the
significance and possibility of life. It is not surprising that they
should read this new sense of life into that which gave it. Not in the
least; and I shall not quarrel with them for doing so. It is far more
important to be moved by art than to know precisely what it is that
moves. I should just like to remind them, though, that if art were no
more than they sometimes fancy it to be, art would not move them as it
does. If art were a mere matter of suggesting the emotions of life a
work