Beauty vanishes,

youth passes,

however rare, rare it be.

When we look at ancient works of art, we habitually treat them not merely as objects of aesthetic enjoyment,

but also as succcessive deposits of the human imagination.

It is indeed this view of works of art as crystallised history,

that accounts for much of the interest felt in ancient art by those who have but little aesthetic feeling

and who find nothing to interest them in the work of their contemporaries,

where the historical motive is lacking,

and they are left face to face with bare aethetic values.

To many people then it seems an easy thing to pass thus directly from the work of art to the life of the time

which produced it.

I fancy, stop to consider very closely how true the imaged life is:

we are satisfied with the prospect of another life sort of life

which we might have lived, which we often think we might have preferred to our actual life.

We don't stop to consider what proportion of the whole reality of the past life gets itself embalmed in this way in works of art.

Thus we picture our Middle Ages as almost entirely occupied with religion and war,

our Renaissance as occupied in learning, and our eighteenth century as occupied in Gallantry and wit.

Whereas, as a matter of fact, all of these things were going on all the time

while the art of each period has for some reason been mainly taken up with the expression of one or another activity.

 

It would seem then that correspondence between art and life

which we so habitually assume is not  at all constant  and requires much correction before it can be trusted.

And here let me try to say what i mean by life as contrasted with art.

I mean the genaral intellectual and instinctive reaction to their surroundings of those men of any period

whose lives rise to complete self -consciousness.

Of course their conceptionof the nature and function of art will itself be one of the nature and function of art

will itself be one of the most varying aspects of life and many in any particular period

profoundly modify the correspondence of art to life.

For once then art and the other functions of the human spirit found themselves

in perfect harmony and direct alliance, and to that harmony we may attribute much of the intensity and self-assurance

of the work of the great Renaissance artists.

It is one of the rarest of good fortunes for an artist to find himself actually understood and appreciated by the mass of

his educated contemporaries, and not only that, but moving alongside of and in step with them towards a similar goal.

In the modern movement in art, then, as in so many cases in past history,

the revolution in art seems to be out of all proportion to any corresponding change in life as a whole.

It seems to find its sources, it at all, in what at present seem like minor movements.

We are of the change in art than we are of the general change in thought and feeling.