ifficult for us to produce
living art than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But still
we are not content to produce dead art. Half unconsciously we are making
the effort to exercise our wills upon our art, as upon our science, our
morals, our politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it in
other human activities; and this effort is the great experiment, the
peculiar feature, of the art of the last century.

It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual. There is a
great interest in aesthetics and a constant and growing effort to
charge them with actual experience and to put them to some practical
end. In the past they have been the most backward, the most futile and
barren, kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who had never
really experienced works of art and who saw no connexion between their
philosophy and the production of works of art. They talked about the
nature of the beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God.
And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own
experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of God. But now
men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the
present works of men and because they so passionately desire it; and
their speculation has the aim of recovering it. So aesthetics, whatever
some artists in their peculiar and pontifical narrowness may say, is of
great importance now; they are part of the effort which the modern world
is making to exercise its will in the production of works of art, and
they are bound, if that effort is successful, to have more and more
effect upon that production.

But is that effort going to be successful? That is a question which no
one can answer yet. But my object is to insist that in our age, because
of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and
resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the
same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from
what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art,
we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human
will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate.

What we have to do now is to understand what it is that causes decadence
in art, we have to apply a conscious science to the production of it. We
have to see what are the social causes that produce excellence and
decay in it. And we