know, has never happened before.
There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt, but only a few of them.
Most great artists before the nineteenth century have been admired in
their own time. But in the nineteenth century, and more and more towards
the end of it, the great artists have had to conquer the world with
their rebellion, they have had to exercise their own individual wills
against the common convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the
great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel and conquer
the world with his rebellion, even if he kills himself in the process.
Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above
all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of
Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but
only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of
all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists,
Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach,
Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer
the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world
knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman
world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo and Raphael, if
they were like them in nothing else. If they had been rebels we might
not yawn at their works now.

Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the harmony
between the artist and his public which has prevailed in all great ages
of art. But it is better than the harmony of dull and complacent
convention which prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means
that our artists are not content with such complacence, that they will
not accept decadence as an inevitable process. And the fact that we do
passionately admire them for their rebellion as soon as we understand
what it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and heroic
thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not content to sink into
the Graeco-Roman complacency. We may stone our prophets at first, but
like the Hebrews, we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say
academicians. And we treasure their works as the Hebrews treasured the
books of the prophets.

Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to exercise our wills.
We are aware that it is threatened with decadence by the mere process of
our civilization, that it is much more d