p or
scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human
spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in
the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before.
It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we
must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and
enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the
prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in
Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the
art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He
had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the
artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own
language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was
wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now.
Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past
without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless
experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to
apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the
conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.

So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last
century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in
which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in
which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried
to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that
effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We
may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must
allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and
blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence
known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere
pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always
following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin
in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have
lacked.

The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that
of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at
least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of
the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, th