In an age it is not always what is most characteristic that survives: posterity will probably know us not by our true qualities, but by the exceptions to them. The present-day writers in English who will endure after their age has passed are probably Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson, and Hillaire Belloc for a few of his essays and lyrics--none of them representative, none of them modern. They might have been born in any era: they are in the oldest tradition. The most striking characteristic of our time, however, is its lack of a tradition. The sentiment of transiency is our most deeply rooted sentiment: it is the very spirit of the age. But by its essential nature it cannot hope to endure, to be known by future generations; for we shall not produce immortal works until we become interested in some idea long enough to be inspired by it, and to write monumentally and surely of it. We hold our ideas by the day; but for a masterpiece to be born, an idea must have taken root and defied time. Permanence of form, moreover, would seriously embarrass a modern writer, who wishes to change with the hour, and does not want his crotchets of yesterday to live to be refutations of his fads of today. Thus we are too fleeting to make even our transitoriness eternal. The very sentiment of immortality has perished amongst us, and we actually prefer that our work should die--witness the Futurists! The most self-conscious heirs of modernity, these propounded the theory that _it is better_ that works of art should not endure: well, in that case, their own creations have been true works of art! Nevertheless, all they did in this theory was to erect into a system the shallowness, provinciality and frivolousness of the present--and thereby to proclaim themselves the enemies of the future. IV ART AND LITERATURE 98 _Psychology of Style_ There are writers with a style--it may be either good or bad--and writers with no style at all, who just write badly. What quality or combination of qualities is it which makes a writer a stylist? Style probably arises out of a duality; the association in a writer of the scribe and the spectator. The first having set down his thought, the second goes aside, contemplates it, as things should be contemplated, _from a distance,_ and and asks, "How does this strike me? How does it look, sound, move?" And he suggests here a toning down of colour, there an acceleration of speed, somewhere else, it may be, an added lucidity, for clearness is an æsthetic as well as an intellectual virtue.