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QUESTION anyone, quite literally anyone, who takes an active pleasure in works of art, and you will find that he has a Dark Past. He formerly liked pictures—in magazines, exhibitions, and museums—that he now sees to be insipid or false. Go through any museum containing the art of the modern period, and you find that it has a Dark Past. On the walls are pictures that nobody believes to have the least value, and the cellars are crammed with the ones already discarded. I am not speaking of conditions in America alone, for the art-lovers and the modern museums of Europe bear out my statements quite as well. If the question were simply that of a Dark Past, if the simulacrum of art that fooled us thirty years ago had no successor today, this book would be superfluous, even objectionably superfluous, for there would be no reason to stir up unpleasant memories. But for every bad work of the old school which time has brought to contempt there are ten works of the present schools as bad or worse.

And so there is every reason to bestir ourselves about the Dark Present. Perhaps there has been progress in the last generation or two; perhaps not. If there has been any, it is so slight, as compared with what remains to be done, that it scarcely counts. Optimists may point to certain good modern pictures that have been going into museums or private houses in recent years; they forget that for each one of them there are ten, twenty, a hundred or several hundred bad modern pictures to combat its influence. The good picture always gains with time, while the others reveal themselves each year more clearly as the worthless things they are. But while the individual bad picture dies, its race continues to flourish—if increase in number means flourishing, for in point of quality the bad pictures of today are enormously below those of thirty years ago. We should be in a poor way indeed if we judged the state of the world by the false artists. Fortunately, there is another breed of men at work, and we know that the world is healthy because of their presence among us.

They only come to acceptance after a long time, it is true. And for a century or more we have been growing so accustomed to the phenomenon that we are prone to think it a normal one. It is quite abnormal. In the past the masters were pretty generally recognized in their lifetime; the less important artists were given the less important work; the men unfitted for art remained in other pursuits. But with the loss of authority in the modern period, with the substitution of democratic control in art for guidance by men of culture, the whole scheme of things has gone topsy-turvy; it is the men unfitted for art who have power over public commissions, exhibitions, and too many museums, while the men who continue the great tradition have been recognized so tardily that the world has not had the full benefit of their genius. For the time when their effort counts most is their own time. Later on they are of the past; and, if they have, indeed, the authority that only time confers, they have also the aspect of unfamiliarity caused by the changes in men’s ideas. What is most absurd about the whole thing is that the accusation of being revolutionaries should have been leveled at all the masters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that the incompetents should be listened to when they offer the classics as the support of their position. Surely the question of the true line of descent in art is the one which we most need to answer today. Other books have dealt with the matter by bringing to notice the positive forces in art, the work of those men whose importance increases with the years. But there is another method of getting at the truth. It consists in understanding the failure of those men who have falsified the line of descent. And so a very special need today is for comprehending the phenomena presented by the False Artist, whose name I have called Ananias.

The story so marvelously told in the few lines of the Bible is immeasurably more than the parable of the liar. One needs to think of the circumstances—of the solemn trust that was in the hands of that little body of men and women who had seen the coming of the Messiah, who had heard His words, and witnessed His death. In their hands was the heritage of newly uttered truth which was to replace the outworn narrowness of old rituals and to triumph over the Roman’s worship of material power. (Let your preferences when you go to the Museum be what you will, the words that I have used to describe the religion of the first Christians will apply equally well to the rôle that art fulfills among man’s activities.) Ananias is the man who, when the others are putting the whole of their substance into the common store, keeps back a part of his possessions. The False Artist is a man who knows the unique significance of the work on which he has entered and yet cannot give himself to it wholeheartedly. With Sapphira, his wife, he professes the faith that is to change the world, but he clings to the tokens of an opposed order of existence.

At this point I hear the cool ironical voice of a friend of mine saying that I am getting on quite nicely with my ecclesiastical style. For the “objective” school of critics, any reference to such words as truth and beauty is mere question-begging. Undismayed by the fact that they cannot prove such a simple, material point as the claim that a given passage in a painting was done with tempera instead of oil, or that a passage in a print was done with dry-point instead of pure etching, they treat as sentimental vaporings the ideas of people who seek to understand the incomparably more difficult questions of the motive behind the work of art. They cite various fluctuations in the estimate of value of different schools or individuals, and would thereby rule out belief in the existence of a permanent good or bad in art. Since we cannot be sure of anything, they say, everybody is to be allowed his preferences, momentary or enduring; an atmosphere of decorous tolerance is to impose silence on fanatics who would question anyone’s right to his opinion. Is it not enough that he has one, whether he ever studied the question at issue or not? Or even if he has no opinion, but has accepted some tradition in his family or his class, that must be respected, too. A member of a certain London art club tells me that the unwritten law there is that no one shall ever mention art.

But art is about the most interesting subject there is, and there is probably no way of keeping it distinct from matters which are sometimes thought to be purely within the domain of religion—“mother of all insipidities,” as it has been called. The witty man who spoke that phrase needed a reminder that all art is religious. Whether the subject of a given work be “sacred” or “profane,” as the old distinctions would have it, art is our means (and probably our chief means) of telling the meaning that life and the world in general possess for us. And as to such matters, words like truth and beauty are not only in place, but they designate the objectives of our most important study.