“We have entered into one of those periods of artistic revolution in which the public, audience, or spectators become partisans and express their opinions as if they were at a political meeting. The Russian Ballet, for instance, produced a conflict of opinion last Friday, which recalls the conflicts provoked by the plays of Victor Hugo in the thirties. Post-Impressionism now is what the Romantic movement was then. To one party it means the end of all beauty; to the other a new birth of it. People no longer clap or hiss because they think a particular performance is well or ill done. Even in England, where the arts are not commonly taken very seriously, they are beginning to clap or hiss on principle, and to feel that they are making history when they do so. Partisans on both sides are probably not very clear in their minds why they like Post-Impressionism or dislike it; but the word, vague and clumsy as it is, does imply to them a set of tendencies by which all the arts may be ruined or regenerated. It is not merely a fashion in painting, but, like Romanticism, a movement of the mind which is trying to express itself through all means of artistic expression. “Of this the new turn taken by the Russian Ballet is a striking proof; for no one can suppose that the artists concerned in that enterprise are haters of beauty because of their own incompetence to achieve it. They have every material inducement to continue delighting the world with Ballets like Carnival or Scheherazade; and, if they attempt a new kind of art, it must be because they are driven to it by some force in themselves too powerful to be withstood. Masters like M. Nijinsky do not try dangerous experiments on the public for the mere pleasure of trying them; and it is a little presumptuous to assume that they are suddenly afflicted by sheer perversity of taste. It is more probable that they are possessed by that ardour of discovery which is common both to great artists and to great men of science, indeed to all men whose interest in life is stronger than their desire for their own comfort. “Most people make the mistake of thinking that the development of an art consists altogether of what is called invention and not of discovery; and for that reason they often resent innovations as mere perversities. If a thing has been well done already they cannot see why it should not continue to be done. But the artist knows that he cannot invent again what has been once invented. He knows, too, that these seeming inventions are also discoveries of the possibilities of his art; and that when discovery has been carried very far in one direction it cannot be carried any further. The history of all arts proves this. After Michel Angelo no one could invent anything fresh in his manner, because he had discovered all that could be discovered about his method of art. Renaissance architecture prevailed in Europe because no new discoveries were possible in Gothic.