There is always apt to be some discord between the artist and the large practical world in which he lives, but those ages are happiest in which the discord is least.  The nineteenth century, amid its splendid achievements in science and industry, in government and learning, and above all in humanity, illustrates this conflict in an interesting way.  To literature, an art which can explain itself, the great public world lent on the whole a reverent and intelligent ear.  Its great prose writers were at peace with their audience and were inspired by great public interests.  Some of the greatest, for example Tolstoy, produced their finest work on widely human subjects, and numbered their readers and admirers probably by the million.  Writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Mill, and Carlyle, even poets like Tennyson and Browning, were full of great public interests and causes, and, in different degrees and at different stages of their lives, were thoroughly and immensely popular.  On the other hand, one can find, at the beginning of the period, figures like Blake and Shelley, and all through it a number of painters—­the pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists—­walking like aliens in a Philistine world.  Even great figures like Burne-Jones and Whistler were for the greater part of their lives unrecognized or mocked at.  Millais reached the attention of the world, but was thought by the stricter fraternity to have in some sense or other sold his soul and committed the great sin of considering the bourgeois.  The bourgeois should be despised not partially but completely.  His life, his interests, his code of ethics and conduct must all be matters of entire indifference or amused contempt, to the true artist who intends to do his own true work and call his soul his own.

At a certain moment, during the eighties and nineties, it looked as if these doctrines were generally accepted, and the divorce between art and the community had become permanent.  But it seems as if this attitude, which coincided with a period of reaction in political matters and a recrudescence of a belief in force and on unreasoned authority, is already passing away.  There are not wanting signs that art, both in painting and sculpture, and in poetry and novel-writing, is beginning again to realize its social function, beginning to be impatient of mere individual emotion, beginning to aim at something bigger, more bound up with a feeling towards and for the common weal.

Take work like that of Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Masefield or Mr. Arnold Bennett.  Without appraising its merits or demerits we cannot but note that the social sense is always there, whether it be of a class or of a whole community.  In a play like Justice the writer does not “express” himself, he does not even merely show the pathos of a single human being’s destiny, he sets before us a much bigger thing—­man tragically caught and torn in the iron hands of a man-made machine, Society itself.  Incarnate Law is the protagonist, and, as it happens, the villain of the piece.  It is a fragment of Les Miserables over again, in a severer and more restrained technique.  An art like this starts, no doubt, from emotion towards personal happenings—­there is nothing else from which it can start; but, even as it sets sail for wider seas, it is loosed from personal moorings.