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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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