It may be that music provides for a century too stagnant and listless to act out its own emotions, too reflective to be frankly sensuous, a shadowy pageant of sense and emotion, that serves as a katharsis or purgation.

Anyhow, “an art that came out of the old world two centuries ago, with a few chants, love-songs, and dances; that a century ago was still tied to the words of a mass or an opera; or threading little dance-movements together in a ‘suite,’ became in the last century this extraordinary debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or worshipped a god, may not only ideally, but through the response of his nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of struggle, rapture, and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility, unheard of.  An amplified pattern of action and emotion is given:  each man may fit to it what images he will."[58]

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If our contention throughout this book be correct the Expressionists are in one matter abundantly right.  Art, we have seen, again and again rises by way of ritual out of emotion, out of life keenly and vividly livid.  The younger generation are always talking of life; they have a sort of cult of life.  Some of the more valorous spirits among them even tend to disparage art that life may be the more exalted.  “Stop painting and sculping,” they cry, “and go and see a football match.”  There you have life!  Life is, undoubtedly, essential to art because life is the stuff of emotion, but some thinkers and artists have an oddly limited notion of what life is.  It must, it seems, in the first place, be essentially physical.  To sit and dream in your study is not to live.  The reason of this odd limitation is easy to see.  We all think life is especially the sort of life we are not living ourselves.  The hard-worked University professor thinks that “Life” is to be found in a French cafe; the polished London journalist looks for “Life” among the naked Polynesians.  The cult of savagery, and even of simplicity, in every form, simply spells complex civilization and diminished physical vitality.

The Expressionist is, then, triumphantly right in the stress he lays on emotion; but he is not right if he limits life to certain of its more elementary manifestations; and still less is he right, to our minds, in making life and art in any sense coextensive.  Art, as we have seen, sustains and invigorates life, but only does it by withdrawal from these very same elementary forms of life, by inhibiting certain sensuous reactions.

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