Yet unless I am greatly mistaken the modern painter has ceased not only to depict any theory of destiny but has ceased to express any important human mood in the presence of destiny. One goes to a museum and comes out feeling that one has beheld an odd assortment of nude bodies, copper kettles, oranges, tomatoes, and zinnias, babies, street corners, apple trees, bathing beaches, bankers, and fashionable ladies. I do not say that this person or that may not find a picture immensely significant to him. But the general impression for anyone, I think, is of a chaos of anecdotes, perceptions, fantasies, and little [p104] commentaries, which may be all very well in their way, but are not sustaining and could readily be dispensed with. The conclusive answer to the romantic theory of the artist as prophet is a visit to a collection of modern paintings. _(e) Art for Art’s Sake_ This brings us to the other theory, which is that art has nothing to do with prophecy, wisdom, and the meaning of life, but has to do only with art. This theory must command an altogether different kind of respect than the sentimental theory of the artist as prophet. This indeed is the theory which most artists now hold. “I am convinced,” says Mr. R. H. Wilenski in his book _The Modern Movement in Art_, “that all the most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.” The instinct of artists in this matter is, I think, much sounder than the rationalizations which they have constructed. As working artists they do not think of themselves as seers, philosophers, or moralists. They do not wish to be judged as thinkers, but as painters, and they are justifiably impatient with the Philistines who are interested primarily in the subject matter and its human significance. The painter knows quite well that in the [p105] broadly human sense he has no special qualifications as story-teller or wise man. What he is driving at, therefore, in his expression of contempt for the subject matter of art is the wish that he might again be in the position of the mediæval artist who did not have to concern himself _as artist_ with the significance of his themes. The intuition behind the theory of art for art’s sake is the artist’s wish to be free of a responsibility which he has never before had put upon him. The peculiar circumstances of modernity have thrust upon him, much against his will and regardless of his aptitudes, the intolerably heavy burden of doing for himself what in other ages was done for him by tradition and authority.