do for the advancement of art.

II

ART AND SOCIETY

What might Art do for Society? Leaven it; perhaps even redeem it: for
Society needs redemption. Towards the end of the nineteenth century life
seemed to be losing its savour. The world had grown grey and anaemic,
lacking passion, it seemed. Sedateness became fashionable; only dull
people cared to be thought spiritual. At its best the late nineteenth
century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless
joke. But, as we have seen, before the turn, first in France, then
throughout Europe, a new emotional movement began to manifest itself.
This movement if it was not to be lost required a channel along which it
might flow to some purpose. In the Middle Ages such a channel would have
been ready to hand; spiritual ferment used to express itself through the
Christian Church, generally in the teeth of official opposition. A
modern movement of any depth cannot so express itself. Whatever the
reasons may be, the fact is certain. The principal reason, I believe, is
that the minds of modern men and women can find no satisfaction in
dogmatic religion; and Christianity, by a deplorable mischance, has been
unwilling to relinquish dogmas that are utterly irrelevant to its
essence. It is the entanglement of religion in dogma that still keeps
the world superficially irreligious. Now, though no religion can escape
the binding weeds of dogma, there is one that throws them off more
easily and light-heartedly than any other. That religion is art; for art
is a religion. It is an expression of and a means to states of mind as
holy as any that men are capable of experiencing; and it is towards art
that modern minds turn, not only for the most perfect expression of
transcendent emotion, but for an inspiration by which to live.

From the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all
other religions. Obviously there can be no essential antagonism between
it and them. Genuine art and genuine religion are different
manifestations of one spirit, so are sham art and sham religion. For
thousands of years men have expressed in art their ultra-human emotions,
and have found in it that food by which the spirit lives. Art is the
most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious
expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be
appreciated as well by one race and one age as by another, and because
that significance is as independe