II

ART AND SOCIETY

What might Art do for Society?  Leaven it; perhaps even redeem it:  for Society needs redemption.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century life seemed to be losing its savour.  The world had grown grey and anaemic, lacking passion, it seemed.  Sedateness became fashionable; only dull people cared to be thought spiritual.  At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke.  But, as we have seen, before the turn, first in France, then throughout Europe, a new emotional movement began to manifest itself.  This movement if it was not to be lost required a channel along which it might flow to some purpose.  In the Middle Ages such a channel would have been ready to hand; spiritual ferment used to express itself through the Christian Church, generally in the teeth of official opposition.  A modern movement of any depth cannot so express itself.  Whatever the reasons may be, the fact is certain.  The principal reason, I believe, is that the minds of modern men and women can find no satisfaction in dogmatic religion; and Christianity, by a deplorable mischance, has been unwilling to relinquish dogmas that are utterly irrelevant to its essence.  It is the entanglement of religion in dogma that still keeps the world superficially irreligious.  Now, though no religion can escape the binding weeds of dogma, there is one that throws them off more easily and light-heartedly than any other.  That religion is art; for art is a religion.  It is an expression of and a means to states of mind as holy as any that men are capable of experiencing; and it is towards art that modern minds turn, not only for the most perfect expression of transcendent emotion, but for an inspiration by which to live.

From the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions.  Obviously there can be no essential antagonism between it and them.  Genuine art and genuine religion are different manifestations of one spirit, so are sham art and sham religion.  For thousands of years men have expressed in art their ultra-human emotions, and have found in it that food by which the spirit lives.  Art is the most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be appreciated as well by one race and one age as by another, and because that significance is as independent as mathematical truth of human vicissitudes.  On the whole, no other vehicle of emotion and no other means to ecstasy has served man so well.  In art any flood of spiritual exaltation finds a channel ready to nurse and lead it:  and when art fails it is for lack of emotion, not for lack of formal adaptability.  There never was a religion so adaptable and catholic as art.  And now that the young movement begins to cast about for a home in which to preserve itself and live, what more natural than that it should turn to the one religion of unlimited forms and frequent revolutions?