It is tempting to suppose that art such as this implies an attitude towards society.  It seems to imply a belief that the future will not be a mere repetition of the past, but that by dint of willing and acting men will conquer for themselves a life in which the claims of spirit and emotion will make some headway against the necessities of physical existence.  It seems, I say:  but it would be exceedingly rash to assume anything of the sort, and, for myself, I doubt whether the good artist bothers much more about the future than about the past.  Why should artists bother about the fate of humanity?  If art does not justify itself, aesthetic rapture does.  Whether that rapture is to be felt by future generations of virtuous and contented artisans is a matter of purely speculative interest.  Rapture suffices.  The artist has no more call to look forward than the lover in the arms of his mistress.  There are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity would not be an extravagant means; of such are the moments of aesthetic ecstasy.  It is as vain to imagine that the artist works with one eye on The Great State of the future, as to go to his art for an expression of political or social opinions.  It is not their attitude towards the State or towards life, but the pure and serious attitude of these artists towards their art, that makes the movement significant of the age.  Here are men who refuse all compromise, who will hire no half-way house between what they believe and what the public likes; men who decline flatly, and over-stridently sometimes, to concern themselves at all with what seems to them unimportant.  To call the art of the movement democratic—­some people have done so—­is silly.  All artists are aristocrats in a sense, since no artist believes honestly in human equality; in any other sense to call an artist an aristocrat or a democrat is to call him something irrelevant or insulting.  The man who creates art especially to move the poor or especially to please the rich prostitutes whatever of worth may be in him.  A good many artists have maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic art and plebeian.  In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and principles by which societies exist.  It may be said with some justice that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so emphatically on fundamentals and challenges so violently the conventional tradition of art and, by implication, I suppose, the conventional view of life.  By setting art so high, it sets industrial civilisation very low.  Here, then, it may shake hands with the broader and vaguer spirit of the age; the effort to produce serious art may bear witness to a stir in the underworld, to a weariness of smug materialism and a more passionate and spiritual conception of life.  The art of the movement, in so far as it is art, expresses nothing temporal or local; but it may be a manifestation of something that is happening here and now, something of which the majority of mankind seems hardly yet to be aware.