Men and women who have been thrilled by the pure aesthetic significance of a work of art go away into the outer world in a state of excitement and exaltation which makes them more sensitive to all that is going forward about them.  Thus, they realise with a heightened intensity the significance and possibility of life.  It is not surprising that they should read this new sense of life into that which gave it.  Not in the least; and I shall not quarrel with them for doing so.  It is far more important to be moved by art than to know precisely what it is that moves.  I should just like to remind them, though, that if art were no more than they sometimes fancy it to be, art would not move them as it does.  If art were a mere matter of suggesting the emotions of life a work of art would give to each no more than what each brought with him.  It is because art adds something new to our emotional experience, something that comes not from human life but from pure form, that it stirs us so deeply and so mysteriously.  But that, for many, art not only adds something new, but seems to transmute and enrich the old, is certain and by no means deplorable.

The fact is, this passionate and austere art of the Contemporary Movement is not only an index to the general ferment, it is also the inspiration, and even the standard, of a young, violent, and fierce generation.  It is the most visible and the most successful manifestation of their will, or they think it is.  Political reform, social reform, literature even, move slowly, ankle-deep in the mud of materialism and deliquescent tradition.  Though not without reason Socialists claim that Liberals ride their horses, the jockeys still wear blue and buff.  Mr. Lloyd George stands unsteadily on the shoulders of Mr. Gladstone; the bulk of his colleagues cling on behind.  If literature is to be made the test, we shall soon be wishing ourselves back in the nineteenth century.  Unless it be Thomas Hardy, there is no first-rate novelist in Europe; there is no first-rate poet; without disrespect to D’Annunzio, Shaw, or Claudel, it may be said that Ibsen was their better.  Since Mozart, music has just kept her nose above the slough of realism, romance, and melodrama.  Music seems to be where painting was in the time of Courbet; she is drifting through complex intellectualism and a brilliant, exasperating realism, to arrive, I hope, at greater purity.[26] Contemporary painting is the one manifest triumph of the young age.  Not even the oldest and wisest dare try to smile it away.  Those who cannot love Cezanne and Matisse hate them; and they not only say it, they shriek it.  It is not surprising, then, that visual art, which seems to many the mirror in which they see realised their own ideals, should have become for some a new religion.  Not content with its aesthetic significance, these seek in art an inspiration for the whole of life.  For some of us, to be sure, the aesthetic significance is a sufficient inspiration;