have made a great beginning in this. For we are all
aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not merely happen,
as Whistler said. We know that it is a symptom of something right or
wrong with the whole mind of man and with the circumstances that affect
that mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between the art of
man and his intellect and his conscience. It was because William Morris
saw that connexion that he, from being a pure artist, became a socialist
and spoke at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and perversion
as it seemed to many, would have been impossible in any former age. It
was possible and inevitable, it was a natural process for Morris in the
nineteenth century, because he was determined to exercise his will upon
art, just as men in the past had exercised their will upon religion or
politics; because he no longer believed that art happened as the weather
happens and that the artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed
merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness. Was he right
or wrong? I myself firmly believe that he was right. That if man has a
will at all, if he is not a mere piece of matter moulded by
circumstances, he has a will in art as in all other things. And,
further, if he has a common will which can express itself in his other
activities, in religion or politics, that common will must also be able
to express itself in art. It has not hitherto done so consciously,
because man in all periods of artistic success has been content to
succeed without asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic
failure he has been content to fail without asking why he has failed. We
have been for long living in a period of artistic failure, but we have
asked, we are asking always more insistently, why we fail. And that is
where our time differs from any former period of artistic decadence,
why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but one of experiment,
and of experiment which will not be wasted, however much it may seem at
the moment to fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and
experiment we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from
failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress in art
such as has never been accomplished before even in the greatest ages.
For whereas men have never been able to learn from the experience of
those ages, whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century
have not taught men h