As for the creators, so called, there may be a young votary of art here and there who is trying honestly to put these abstractions into practice; and for him, I should suppose, the goal of dehumanisation and derealisation will have been attained when his pictures are simplified to a cunning design of line and colour with no suggestion of a definite subject, or still further to a spread of pure colour with no design at all; his music to a pure tone without melody or even variation; his poems to a succession of beautiful words unsullied by sense. That would seem to be the nearest practical equivalent to seeing a pure pane of glass. One wonders why the pilgrim of vacuity should be so slow and hesitant in his progress towards so easy a mark. Perhaps he foresees that absolute art, so reached, will cease to be art at all. Perhaps he has a foreboding that the prize if obtained would not be very valuable. It is hard to imagine the pleasure or profit to be derived from concentrating one’s attention upon a pane of transparent glass until one sees nothing through it; most of us would prefer to retain our impure perception of the flowers in the garden beyond. Despite the majestic logic of youth we persist in thinking that such a picture as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is a truer work of art than the deftest whirl of colours ever painted; that the _Æneid_ is richer in poetical joy than _Kubla Khan_ (not to mention the latest lyric from the American colony in Paris); that Bach’s Mass in B Minor is still a miracle and a rapture of sound. Yet all these--the painting and the epic and the mass--are brimming with human emotion and with a brooding sense of the eternal values of life. They are great for various reasons, no doubt; but certainly among those reasons is the fact that they are not art at all as the modernists would have us believe. The simple truth is that the effort to create pure art is nothing more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract reason--unless you prefer to ticket it as empty conceit--and could never engage the practical interest of any but a few witless cranks. There is a profound confusion in Señor Ortega’s interpretation of what is happening among the mass of the younger artists, as indeed there is often in their own statement of what they are endeavouring to do. They may be seeking an absolute, but it is not an absolute of purity in any sense of the word.