Though the spirit of the emancipation breathed also on the graphic and the plastic arts, as yet its breath has produced only intoxication. For ten years one experiment has succeeded another, one school has hustled another out of the way; and the artists whom the public is enjoined to admire of a morning are devoured by their own children in the afternoon. Beyond a contempt for the academic and a revolt from the traditional--not always supported by technical proficiency in the method rejected--the impressionists and post-impressionists, the cubists, vorticists and dadaists have not made plain the goal of their exploration and as yet, though they have formulated new theories of art, they have not achieved a new beauty. As, in the reaction from Victorian stiffness, social emancipation led to a gilded hooliganism, so, in graphic art, the reaction from the strictness of the pre-Raphaelites led to chaotic lawlessness. If all England went mad for five years before the war, her madness is registered, though--it may be hoped--not immortalised, in the painting of the period. IV It was in these years of change and upheaval that the men of the vanished generation served their apprenticeship and came to first grips with life. Their fathers and grandfathers, seeing England riven by a new political dispensation, had acquiesced grudgingly in the transference of power without seeking to understand the aspirations of the newly emancipated millions and without striving to create a new and united community. The fact of social, economic and racial antagonism, impressed upon them as the legacy of the French revolution by a hundred years of riots, strikes and wars, came to be buttressed in the middle of the century by a biological doctrine which taught that antagonism of beast to beast and of man to man, of class to class and of creed to creed, of nation to nation and of hunger, cold and pestilence to all was an eternal and ineluctable decree of nature. It was easier to repeat half-comprehended phrases about a struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest than to attack the disorder which is the ineluctable and eternal result of antagonism.