always social, to crystallize conviction into dogma.  We can scarcely, unless we are as high-hearted as Tolstoy, hope now-a-days for an art that shall be world-wide.  The tribe is extinct, the family in its old rigid form moribund, the social groups we now look to as centres of emotion are the groups of industry, of professionalism and of sheer mutual attraction.  Small and strange though such groups may appear, they are real social factors.

Now this social, collective element in art is too apt to be forgotten.  When an artist claims that expression is the aim of art he is too apt to mean self-expression only—­utterance of individual emotion.  Utterance of individual emotion is very closely neighboured by, is almost identical with, self-enhancement.  What should be a generous, and in part altruistic, exaltation becomes mere megalomania.  This egotism is, of course, a danger inherent in all art.  The suspension of motor-reactions to the practical world isolates the artist, cuts him off from his fellow-men, makes him in a sense an egotist.  Art, said Zola, is “the world seen through a temperament.”  But this suspension is, not that he should turn inward to feed on his own vitals, but rather to free him for contemplation.  All great art releases from self.

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The young are often temporary artists:  art, being based on life, calls for a strong vitality.  The young are also self-centred and seek self-enhancement.  This need of self-expression is a sort of artistic impulse.  The young are, partly from sheer immaturity, still more through a foolish convention, shut out from real life; they are secluded, forced to become in a sense artists, or, if they have not the power for that, at least self-aggrandizers.  They write lyric poems, they love masquerading, they focus life on to themselves in a way which, later on, life itself makes impossible.  This pseudo-art, this self-aggrandizement usually dies a natural death before the age of thirty.  If it live on, one remedy is, of course, the scientific attitude; that attitude which is bent on considering and discovering the relations of things among themselves, not their personal relation to us.  The study of science is a priceless discipline in self-abnegation, but only in negation; it looses us from self, it does not link us to others.  The real and natural remedy for the egotism of youth is Life, not necessarily the haunting of cafes, or even the watching of football matches, but strenuous activity in the simplest human relations of daily happenings.  “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

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