ay fit to it what
images he will."[58]

* * * * *

If our contention throughout this book be correct the Expressionists are
in one matter abundantly right. Art, we have seen, again and again
rises by way of ritual out of emotion, out of life keenly and vividly
livid. The younger generation are always talking of life; they have a
sort of cult of life. Some of the more valorous spirits among them even
tend to disparage art that life may be the more exalted. "Stop painting
and sculping," they cry, "and go and see a football match." There you
have life! Life is, undoubtedly, essential to art because life is the
stuff of emotion, but some thinkers and artists have an oddly limited
notion of what life is. It must, it seems, in the first place, be
essentially physical. To sit and dream in your study is not to live. The
reason of this odd limitation is easy to see. We all think life is
especially the sort of life we are _not_ living ourselves. The
hard-worked University professor thinks that "Life" is to be found in a
French _cafe_; the polished London journalist looks for "Life" among the
naked Polynesians. The cult of savagery, and even of simplicity, in
every form, simply spells complex civilization and diminished physical
vitality.

The Expressionist is, then, triumphantly right in the stress he lays on
emotion; but he is not right if he limits life to certain of its more
elementary manifestations; and still less is he right, to our minds, in
making life and art in any sense coextensive. Art, as we have seen,
sustains and invigorates life, but only does it by withdrawal from these
very same elementary forms of life, by inhibiting certain sensuous
reactions.

* * * * *

In another matter one section of Expressionists, the Futurists, are in
the main right. The emotion to be expressed is the emotion of to-day, or
still better to-morrow. The mimetic dance arose not only nor chiefly out
of reflection on the past; but out of either immediate joy or imminent
fear or insistent hope for the future. We are not prepared perhaps to go
all lengths, to "burn all museums" because of their contagious
corruption, though we might be prepared to "banish the nude for the
space of ten years." If there is to be any true living art, it must
arise, not from the contemplation of Greek statues, not from the revival
of folk-songs, not even from the re-enacting of Greek plays, but fro