ffort at expression, an effort
strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and
laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from
the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the
conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all
human activities that prepare the way for successes.

Let us remember then, always, that art is a human activity, not a fairy
chance that happens to the mind of man now and again. And let us
remember, too, that it does not consist merely of pictures or statues or
of music performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality of
all things made by man, a quality that may be good or bad but which is
always in them. That is one of the facts about art that was discovered
in the nineteenth century, when men began to miss the excellence of art
in all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence might
return to them. And this discovery which was then made about art was of
the greatest practical importance. For then men became aware that they
could not have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless the
quality of art became good again in all their works. So much they learnt
about the science of art. They began, or some of them did, to think
about their furniture and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and
forks, and even about their tombstones, as well as about what had been
called their works of art. And in all these humbler things an advance, a
conscious resolute wilful advance, has been made. We begin to see when
and also why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad. We are
less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in such things than our
fathers were. We know our vulgarity and the naughtiness of our own
hearts. The advance, the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it
grows more general every year and the conviction of sin spreads. No
doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces unpleasant results.
The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than
his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple
pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out
for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and
there was none in paganism.

The title of this book is _Progress and History_, and it may justly be
complained that the progress of which I have been talking is not
historic, but a progress that has n