Introduction 



and business affairs generally, from market-stall 

 to bank and finance ministry ? And what, there- 

 fore, of the statistics which should record the 

 accountancy which should criticise the whole of 

 these activities ? What of our coal supply, and 

 of our national energies generally, stored but 

 diminishing like coal, or passing yet ever renewed 

 like wind and stream and tide ? What, too, of 

 our human energies ? Even from our professedly 

 mechanical standpoint, much less any other, do 

 we make the most of these ? 



Nor are the fine arts exempted from this all- 

 penetrating influence. Even architecture is less 

 conservative than it appears : and the graphic 

 arts frankly admit their direct relation to scien- 

 tific advances, the subtlest impressionist no less 

 than the simplest photographer recognising his 

 indebtedness to the progress of optical science, so 

 that Chevreul with his complementary colours and 

 Monet with his lyrical variations upon light stand 

 side by side in history. In the apparently cloistered 

 art of sculpture the same parallelism holds good. 

 Rodin's mighty penseur might have been wrought 

 as the symbol of the doctrine now so fruitful 

 both in psychology and education, that thought is 

 no insulated brain-malady of the physically less 

 fit, as even Huxley seems to have viewed it, but 

 the highest expression of motor experience, and 

 thought being more full than we know, the very 

 nerve of action. Literature and criticism are 

 everywhere becoming sociological ; and in this 

 movement the drama leads. Even music, as ever, 



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