greater poem than the "Divine Comedy" because Voltaire has learned the
falsity of the Ptolemaic astronomy. Finally, these writers, like other
people, desire to seem knowing and clever; and if you appear to admire
vastly what no one else understands you pass for a clever man.

I have looked through a good deal of the writings of these "up-to-date"
critics in the effort to find something like an intelligible argument
or a definite statement of belief. I have found nothing but the
continually repeated assumption that these new movements, in all their
varieties, are "living" and "vital." I can find no grounds stated for
this assumption and can suppose only that what is changing with great
rapidity is conceived to be alive; yet I know nothing more productive of
rapid changes than putrefaction.

Do not be deceived. This is not vital art, it is decadent and corrupt.
True art has always been the expression by the artist of the ideals of
his time and of the world in which he lived--ideals which were his own
because he was a part of that world. A living and healthy art never has
existed and never can exist except through the mutual understanding and
co-operation of the artist and his public. Art is made for man and has a
social function to perform. We have a right to demand that it shall be
both human and humane; that it shall show some sympathy in the artist
with our thoughts and our feelings; that it shall interpret our ideals
to us in that universal language which has grown up in the course of
ages. We have a right to reject with pity or with scorn the stammerings
of incompetence, the babble of lunacy, or the vaporing of imposture. But
mutual understanding implies a duty on the part of the public as well as
on the part of the artist, and we must give as well as take. We must be
at the pains to learn something of the language of art in which we bid
the artist speak. If we would have beauty from him we must sympathize