[Footnote 26:  June 1913. Ariadne in Naxos. Is Strauss, our one musician of genius, himself the pivot on which the wheel is beginning to swing?  Having drained the cup of Wagnerism and turned it upside down, is he now going to school with Mozart?]

V

THE FUTURE

I. SOCIETY AND ART

II.  ART AND SOCIETY

[Illustration:  PICASSO]

I

SOCIETY AND ART

To bother much about anything but the present is, we all agree, beneath the dignity of a healthy human animal.  Yet how many of us can resist the malsane pleasure of puzzling over the past and speculating about the future?  Once admit that the Contemporary Movement is something a little out of the common, that it has the air of a beginning, and you will catch yourself saying “Beginning of what?” instead of settling down quietly to enjoy the rare spectacle of a renaissance.  Art, we hope, serious, alive, and independent is knocking at the door, and we are impelled to ask “What will come of it?” This is the general question, which, you will find, divides itself into two sufficiently precise queries—­“What will Society do with Art?” and “What will Art do with Society?”

It is a mistake to suppose that because Society cannot affect Art directly, it cannot affect it at all.  Society can affect Art indirectly because it can affect artists directly.  Clearly, if the creation of works of art were made a capital offence, the quantity, if not the quality, of artistic output would be affected.  Proposals less barbarous, but far more terrible, are from time to time put forward by cultivated state-projectors who would make of artists, not criminals, but highly-paid officials.  Though statesmanship can do no positive good to art, it can avoid doing a great deal of harm:  its power for ill is considerable.  The one good thing Society can do for the artist is to leave him alone.  Give him liberty.  The more completely the artist is freed from the pressure of public taste and opinion, from the hope of rewards and the menace of morals, from the fear of absolute starvation or punishment, and from the prospect of wealth or popular consideration, the better for him and the better for art, and therefore the better for everyone.  Liberate the artist:  here is something that those powerful and important people who are always assuring us that they would do anything for art can do.

They might begin the work of encouragement by disestablishing and disendowing art; by withdrawing doles from art schools, and confiscating the moneys misused by the Royal Academy.  The case of the schools is urgent.  Art schools do nothing but harm, because they must do something.  Art is not to be learned; at any rate it is not to be taught.  All that the drawing-master can teach is the craft of imitation.  In schools there must be a criterion of excellence and that criterion