m a
keen emotion felt towards things and people living to-day, in modern
conditions, including, among other and deeper forms of life, the haste
and hurry of the modern street, the whirr of motor cars and aeroplanes.

There are artists alive to-day, strayed revellers, who wish themselves
back in the Middle Ages, who long for the time when each man would have
his house carved with a bit of lovely ornament, when every village
church had its Madonna and Child, when, in a word, art and life and
religion went hand in hand, not sharply sundered by castes and
professions. But we may not put back the clock, and, if by
differentiation we lose something, we gain much. The old choral dance on
the orchestral floor was an undifferentiated thing, it had a beauty of
its own; but by its differentiation, by the severance of artist and
actors and spectators, we have gained--the drama. We may not cast
reluctant eyes backwards; the world goes forward to new forms of life,
and the Churches of to-day must and should become the Museums of
to-morrow.

* * * * *

It is curious and instructive to note that Tolstoy's theory of Art,
though not his practice, is essentially Expressive and even approaches
the dogmas of the Futurist. Art is to him just the transmission of
personal emotion to others. It may be bad emotion or it may be good
emotion, emotion it must be. To take his simple and instructive
instance: a boy goes out into a wood and meets a wolf, he is frightened,
he comes back and tells the other villagers what he felt, how he went to
the wood feeling happy and light-hearted and the wolf came, and what the
wolf looked like, and how he began to be frightened. This is, according
to Tolstoy, art. Even if the boy never saw a wolf at all, if he had
really at another time been frightened, and if he was able to conjure up
fear in himself and communicate it to others--that also would be art.
The essential is, according to Tolstoy, that he should feel himself and
so represent his feeling that he communicates it to others.[59]
Art-schools, art-professionalism, art-criticism are all useless or worse
than useless, because they cannot teach a man to feel. Only life can do
that.

All art is, according to Tolstoy, good _qua_ art that succeeds in
transmitting emotion. But there is good emotion and bad emotion, and the
only right material for art is good emotion, and the only good emotion,
the only emotion worth expressing,