Principles of western civilisation

vi THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 187

forms of the drama, and in most of the controversies which are continually being waged round the standards of taste in the plastic and pictoric arts. In the modern world art is, in short, in the presence of an influence absolutely unknown in the Greek period; an influence restraining, and at the same time upheaving, which is related to a deep-lying principle of social evolution, and which, as Tolstoy has correctly perceived, is in the last analysis ethical in character.! ‘‘ Nowhere in the modern world,” says Professor Gardner, ‘‘is it harder to realise the conditions of Greek art than in current England and the United States.” A recent art critic makes practically the same statement, extending it, however, to the Germanic peoples generally, amongst whom it is stated that the lucid Greek and Latin spirit has now come into permanent conflict with a quality which the writer endeavours to describe as “a haunting sense of the infinite.’ ?

We see, in short, that this conflict is not imaginary or transient, or simply racial or local, as it is sometimes stated to be. It is actual, permanent, and growing; and it arises directly from

1 Cf. What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, trs. from the Russian by Aylmer Maude. Compare also Nietzsche’s Zhe Case of Wagner. As regards the drama the influence of the conflict may be traced in recent English thought in Bernard Shaw’s Zssays on Ibsen and Wagner, William Archer’s dramatic criticisms, and the writings and addresses of W. L. Courtney, H. W. Massingham, and many other writers. See also in this connection Professor Dowden’s “* Puritanism and English Literature,” Contemporary Review, No. 403.

2 This is but another method of expressing the conclusion arrived at in the foregoing pages. Where amongst the Latin peoples of to-day other standards prevail in art, the clue is to be sought, the same writer remarks, in the fact that the Latin methods proceed from the deeply rooted belief that the social life of man, z.é. in the State, is, as in the ancient civilisations, the end of the greatest consequence to men (‘The Superfluous Critic,” by Aline Gorren, the Century Magazine, vol. lv.)