ow to avoid decadence in art, we and our children
will teach them how to avoid it. We shall then have given a security to
art such as it has never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by
applying science to it, by using the conscious intelligence upon it.

We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not have been in
vain. And some future age in happier circumstances may profit by it, and
achieve that progress, that application of science to art, which we are
now attempting.

Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt is a mere
absurdity. But ignorance even about art need not be eternal. Ignorance
is eternal only when it is despairing or contented. Twenty years ago
many people said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are
flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are more and more
resolved to have great art. Every year we feel the lack of it more and
more. Every year more people exercise their wills more and more
consciously in the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never
happened before in the history of the world. And the consequence is that
our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that there has been in the
world before. It is so strange and so rebellious that we ourselves are
shocked and amazed by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and
rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely strange and
rebellious and so provoked the resentment and persecution of
self-respecting pagans. Every great effort of the human mind attracts
those who merely desire their own salvation, and so it is with the
artistic effort now. There are cubists and futurists and
post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because
they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They
are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable
than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the
early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort
which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the
past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their
religion. So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth in
their art. They are determined to have an art which shall express all
that they have themselves experienced of the beauty of the universe,
which shall not merely utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.

So far perhaps there is little but the e