The moment has now come for that inevitable question, with which
friendly readers unintentionally embarrass, and hostile ones purposely
interrupt, any exposition of mal-adjustment in the order of the
universe: But what remedy do you propose?
Mal-adjustments of a certain gravity are not set right by proposable
arrangements: they are remedied by the fulness and extent of the
feeling against them, which employs for its purposes and compels into
its service all the unexpected and incalculable coincidences and
accidents which would otherwise be wasted, counteracted or even used
by some different kind of feeling. And the use that a writer can
be--even a Ruskin or a Tolstoi--is limited not to devising programmes
of change (mere symptoms often that some unprogrammed change is
preparing), but to nursing the strength of that great motor which
creates its own ways and instruments: impatience with evil conditions,
desire for better.
A cessation of the special æsthetic mal-adjustment of our times, by
which art is divorced from life and life from art, is as difficult to
foretell in detail as the new-adjustment between labour and the other
elements of production which will, most probably, have to precede it.
A healthy artistic life has indeed existed in the past through
centuries of social wrongness as great as our own, and even greater;
indeed, such artistic life, more or less continuous until our day,
attests the existence of great mitigations in the world's former
wretchedness (such as individuality in labour, spirit of co-operative
solidarity, religious feeling: but perhaps the most important
alleviations lie far deeper and more hidden)--mitigations without
which there would not have been happiness and strength enough to
produce art; nor, for the matter of that, to produce what was then the
future, including ourselves and our advantages and disadvantages. The
existence of art has by no means implied, as Ruskin imagined, with his
teleological optimism and tendency to believe in Eden and banishment
from Eden, that people once lived in a kind of millennium; it merely
shows that, however far from millennial their condition, there was
stability enough to produce certain alleviations, and notably the
alleviations without which art cannot exist, and the alleviations
which art itself affords.
It is not therefore the badness of our present social arrangements (in
many ways far less bad than those of the past) which is responsible
for our lack of all really vital, deep-seated, widely spread and
happiness-giving art; but merely the feature in this latter-day
badness which, after all, is our chief reason for hope: the fact that
the social mal-adjustments of this century are, to an extent hitherto
unparalleled, the mal-adjustments incident to a state of over-rapid
and therefore insufficiently deep-reaching change, of superficial
legal and material improvements extending in reality only to a very
small number of persons and things, and unaccompanied by any real
renovation in the thought, feeling or mode of living of the majority;
the mal-adjustment of transition, of disorder, and perfunctoriness, by
the side of which the regularly recurring disorders of the past--civil
wars, barbarian invasions, plagues, etc., are incidents leaving the
foundation of life unchanged, transitional disorders, which we fail to
remark only because we are ourselves a part of the hurry, the scuffle,
and the general wastefulness. How soon and how this transition period
of ours will come to an end, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to
foretell; but that it _must_ soon end is certain, if only for one
reason: namely, that the changes accumulated during our times must
inevitably work their way below the surface; the new material and
intellectual methods must become absorbed and organised, and thereby
produce some kind of interdependent and less easily disturbed new
conditions; briefly, that the amount of alteration we have witnessed
will occasion a corresponding integration. And with this period of
integration and increasing organisation and comparative stability
there will come new alleviations and adjustments in life, and with
these, the reappearance in life of art.