Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/11

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UPERFICIAL examination fails to reveal with us the influence of the war on the artists. And not only with us. Neither have the victors gained any jubilating fresco by their triumph. Painting goes on, and sculpture, it seems, as though nothing had happened. This phenomenon is taken for granted, and is explained in accordance with the individual temperament and manner of thinking. Sceptics fall back on a precarious Platonism: according to them, art spends its shadowy life so far from all reality that even the decay of the world could not disturb it. The socialist finds a confirmation for his legend of the time-wasting of a privileged class, and he compares the Muse to an all-night restaurant in Berlin which is never empty even in the worst periods of destitution. Idealists harp on the nonsense of the catastrophe. For them the war is simply the hypertrophy of a dirty fait divers which pure art has nothing to do with.

In reality, nothing stands out so prominently in the art of the present as the world war; and unfortunately the impossibility of determining the duration of the catastrophe makes it more difficult to uncover the correlated facts. No one knows yet when the war is over, even if he does imagine himself capable of fixing its start. For art, it did not begin on the day when some potentate or other gave the order to mobilize and the first grenade shook the air, but long before. It was not the military incidents which affected the creative faculties, nor the verdict of victory or defeat; but it was the