attitude towards all the passions.

In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have
penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous
constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and
mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little
sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and
sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each
naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half
lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,
and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism
had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and
despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a
display of archaeological lore or for exotic _motifs_; others gave all
their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of
execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been
abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they
have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be
some danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the
artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to
barbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic
climaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better
convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful
observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,
and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the
crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think
their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;