"Now, as I have put it--and as we all now see it--the argument is
simplicity itself. But it took a long time to be recognized; and
it was not until after the appalling events of the first twenty
years of the century, and the discrediting of the absurd
Socialistic attempt to preach the Law of Love by methods of Force,
that civilization as a whole saw the point. Yet for all that it
was beginning to mould popular opinion even as early as 1910.

"Turn now to a completely different plane. Turn to Art. This,
too, drove men back to the Church."

(Mr. Manners' air was becoming now less professional and more vivid.
He glanced quickly from face to face with a kind of sharp triumph;
his long, thin hands waved a slight gesture now and again.)

"Art, you remember, in the end of the Victorian era had attempted
to become realistic--had attempted, that is, the absurdly
impossible; and photography exposed the absurdity, For no man can
be truly a realist, since it is literally impossible to paint or
to describe all that the eye sees. When photography became
general, this began to be understood; since it was soon seen that
the only photographer who could lay any claim to artistic work
was the man who selected and altered and posed--arranged his
subject, that is to say, in more or less symbolic form. Then
people began to see again that Symbolism was the underlying
spirit of Art--as they had known perfectly well, of course, in
medieval days: that Art consisted in going beneath the material
surfaces that reflected light, or the material events that
happened, in painting and literature respectively, and, by a