And if the lesson is learned by all tongues and all peoples, as we must believe will be, then the horror of human loss, the bitterness of Ypres and Louvain and Reims will receive its compensation, for out of death will come life and no man will have died in vain, no work of art will have perished without a return in kind. To lose Reims and regain after long years the impulse and the power to build after the same fashion would be more than ample compensation. We have tried for many centuries and have failed; no man has built anything approaching it for seven hundred years, nor has any one matched the statue of Our Lady at Paris, or the “Worship of the Lamb” at Ghent, or the glass of Chartres, or the tapestries of Arras, or the metal work of Dinant and Tournai. There was something lacking, some once indwelling spirit had been taken away, and though we tried to reassure ourselves by our boasting in far-away lines of accomplishment--parliamentary government, manhood suffrage, clever mechanical devices, deductive science, mastery of earth forces hitherto unknown, industrialism, high finance, favourable balance of trade, evolutionary philosophy, public-school systems, vocational training, or what-not; though we even made the effort to exalt the Pantheon and Fifth Avenue to rivalry with Amiens, the Sieges Allee into an emulation of the statues of Reims, the Salon and Luxembourg and Royal Academy above the primitives of Flanders--it was all unconvincing to ourselves and in the end we came to say that, after all, it did not matter anyway, art was, “in the ultimate analysis,” only a dispensable amenity of life, which could go on very well without it. Then came the revelation of 1914 and we saw our foolishness, realising at last that, “amenity” or no, art did indicate the existence in a society of something without which it was bound to decay to the point of extinction; and as the monuments we had despised because they exceeded our own powers of achievement were one by one taken from us, we saw architecture and painting and sculpture and all the other arts in a new light and offered our reverence, too late, to what we had lost for ever. Whatever the issue of the war, the world can never be the same, but a very different place; and amongst the differences will be a new realisation of the nature and function of art. All the follies of the last fifty years--didacticism, Bavarian illustration, realism, “new art,” impressionism, “cubism,” boulevardesque and neo-Gothic and revived Roman architecture--all the petty and insincere and premeditated fashions must go, and in their place come a new sincerity, a new sense of self-consecration.