But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it certainly has had some unfortunate results, must be good in itself. It is sympathy, and that is always better than indifference or antipathy. It is knowledge, and that is always better than ignorance. And we have to remember that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore, not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping at all the artistic treasures of the past that have been revealed to us like a new world; and still they are being revealed to our new perceptions. Only in the last ten years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of Chinese pottery was centuries before the time of that Chinese porcelain which we have hitherto admired so much. The knowledge, the delight, is still being gathered in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its effects upon the mind of Europe. But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurship or scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before. It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now. Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.