the wrong end of a telescope.

Art of high quality and calibre is seldom obscure. The great popular
writers of the nineteenth century--Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson,
Tolstoy--wrote so that all could understand. A really big artist has
something important to say, something vast to show, something that moves
him and presses on him; and he will say it simply because he must get it
said. He will trick it out with no devices, most of all with no
obscurities. It has vexed and torn him enough while it was pushing its
way to be born. He has no peace till it is said, and said as clearly as
he may. He says it, not consciously for the sake of others, but for
himself, to ease him from the burden of big thought. Moreover, art,
whose business is to transmit emotion, should need no commentary. Art
comes out of _theoria_, contemplation, steady looking at, but never out
of _theory_. Theory can neither engender nor finally support it. An
exhibition of pictures with an explanatory catalogue, scientifically
interesting though it may be, stands, in a sense, self-condemned.

We must, however, remember that all art is not of the whole community.
There are small groups feeling their own small but still collective
emotion, fashioning their own language, obscure sometimes to all but
themselves. They are right so to fashion it, but, if they appeal to a
wider world, they must strive to speak in the vulgar tongue,
understanded of the people.

* * * * *

It is, indeed, a hopeful sign of the times, a mark of the revival of
social as contrasted with merely individualistic instincts that a
younger generation of poets, at least in France, tend to form themselves
into small groups, held together not merely by eccentricities of
language or garb, but by some deep inner conviction strongly held in
common. Such a unity of spirit is seen in the works of the latter group
of thinkers and writers known as _Unanimists_. They tried and failed to
found a community. Their doctrine, if doctrine convictions so fluid can
be called, is strangely like the old group-religion of the common dance,
only more articulate. Of the Unanimist it might truly be said, "_il
buvait l'indistinction_." To him the harsh old Roman mandate _Divide et
impera_, "Divide men that you may rule them," spells death. His dream is
not of empire and personal property but of the realization of life,
common to all. To this school the great reality is the social group,