In another matter one section of Expressionists, the Futurists, are in the main right.  The emotion to be expressed is the emotion of to-day, or still better to-morrow.  The mimetic dance arose not only nor chiefly out of reflection on the past; but out of either immediate joy or imminent fear or insistent hope for the future.  We are not prepared perhaps to go all lengths, to “burn all museums” because of their contagious corruption, though we might be prepared to “banish the nude for the space of ten years.”  If there is to be any true living art, it must arise, not from the contemplation of Greek statues, not from the revival of folk-songs, not even from the re-enacting of Greek plays, but from a keen emotion felt towards things and people living to-day, in modern conditions, including, among other and deeper forms of life, the haste and hurry of the modern street, the whirr of motor cars and aeroplanes.

There are artists alive to-day, strayed revellers, who wish themselves back in the Middle Ages, who long for the time when each man would have his house carved with a bit of lovely ornament, when every village church had its Madonna and Child, when, in a word, art and life and religion went hand in hand, not sharply sundered by castes and professions.  But we may not put back the clock, and, if by differentiation we lose something, we gain much.  The old choral dance on the orchestral floor was an undifferentiated thing, it had a beauty of its own; but by its differentiation, by the severance of artist and actors and spectators, we have gained—­the drama.  We may not cast reluctant eyes backwards; the world goes forward to new forms of life, and the Churches of to-day must and should become the Museums of to-morrow.

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It is curious and instructive to note that Tolstoy’s theory of Art, though not his practice, is essentially Expressive and even approaches the dogmas of the Futurist.  Art is to him just the transmission of personal emotion to others.  It may be bad emotion or it may be good emotion, emotion it must be.  To take his simple and instructive instance:  a boy goes out into a wood and meets a wolf, he is frightened, he comes back and tells the other villagers what he felt, how he went to the wood feeling happy and light-hearted and the wolf came, and what the wolf looked like, and how he began to be frightened.  This is, according to Tolstoy, art.  Even if the boy never saw a wolf at all, if he had really at another time been frightened, and if he was able to conjure up fear in himself and communicate it to others—­that also would be art.  The essential is, according to Tolstoy, that he should feel himself and so represent his feeling that he communicates it to others.[59] Art-schools, art-professionalism, art-criticism are all useless or worse than useless, because they cannot teach a man to feel.  Only life can do that.