n
of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall
into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of
such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached
perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the
life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more
mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of
expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had
better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art
really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind,
and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is
the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in
the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all
into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and
scientific purposes.

But I have only to say that to prove that we will not be contented with
such a counsel of despair. The Romans went on producing art, even if it
was bad art, and we shall certainly go on producing art whether it is
good or bad. We have produced an immense mass of bad art, worse perhaps
than any that the Roman world produced. But there is this difference
between us and the Romans, that we are not content with it. We have the
conviction of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not think
that their example need make us despair. They were not exercising their
will on their art. It was to them what a purely conventional morality is
to a morally decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as
conventional morals do, when no man arises and says: 'This is wrong,
although you think it right. I know what is right from my own sense of
values, and I will do it in spite of you.' So far as we know, there were
no rebels of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But our
world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever since the artistic
debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact the chief
and the unique characteristic of the art of the last hundred years has
been the constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest
artists have been men who were determined to exercise their own wills in
their art, whatever the mass of men might think of it. And what has
always happened is that they have been first bitterly abused and then
passionately praised. This, so far as I