of art would give to each no more than what each brought with him.
It is because art adds something new to our emotional experience,
something that comes not from human life but from pure form, that it
stirs us so deeply and so mysteriously. But that, for many, art not only
adds something new, but seems to transmute and enrich the old, is
certain and by no means deplorable.

The fact is, this passionate and austere art of the Contemporary
Movement is not only an index to the general ferment, it is also the
inspiration, and even the standard, of a young, violent, and fierce
generation. It is the most visible and the most successful manifestation
of their will, or they think it is. Political reform, social reform,
literature even, move slowly, ankle-deep in the mud of materialism and
deliquescent tradition. Though not without reason Socialists claim that
Liberals ride their horses, the jockeys still wear blue and buff. Mr.
Lloyd George stands unsteadily on the shoulders of Mr. Gladstone; the
bulk of his colleagues cling on behind. If literature is to be made the
test, we shall soon be wishing ourselves back in the nineteenth
century. Unless it be Thomas Hardy, there is no first-rate novelist in
Europe; there is no first-rate poet; without disrespect to D'Annunzio,
Shaw, or Claudel, it may be said that Ibsen was their better. Since
Mozart, music has just kept her nose above the slough of realism,
romance, and melodrama. Music seems to be where painting was in the time
of Courbet; she is drifting through complex intellectualism and a
brilliant, exasperating realism, to arrive, I hope, at greater
purity.[26] Contemporary painting is the one manifest triumph of the
young age. Not even the oldest and wisest dare try to smile it away.
Those who cannot love Cezanne and Matisse hate them; and they not only
say it, they shriek it. It is not surprising, then, that visual art,
which seems to many the mirror in which they see realised their own
ideals, should have become for some a new religion. Not content with its
aesthetic significance, these seek in art an inspiration for the whole
of life. For some of us, to be sure, the aesthetic significance is a
sufficient inspiration; for the others I have no hard words. To art
they take their most profound and subtle emotions, their most
magnanimous ideas, their dearest hopes; from art they bring away
enriched and purified emotion and exaltation, and fresh sources of both.
In art they imagi