This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must work for evermore. Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organization of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind, and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and scientific purposes.