What modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to
rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may
satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of modern
life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which
supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger
than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art
would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and
uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind
concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even
in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of
mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare: it is a
magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of
which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than
our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.
Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give
the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in
Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, there
are high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding
that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon
blitheness and repose.
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