XXVII
I have often thought that in Art, judging by the analogy of previous
development, we ought to be able to prophesy more or less the direction
in which development is likely to take place. I mean that in music, for
instance, the writers of the stricter ancient music might have seen
that the art was likely to develop a greater intricacy of form, an
increased richness of harmony, a larger use of discords, suspensions,
and chromatic intervals, a tendency to conceal superficial form rather
than to emphasise it, and so forth. Yet it is a curious question
whether if Handel, say, could have heard an overture of Wagner's he
would have thought it an advance in beauty or not--whether it would
have seemed to him like the realisation of some incredible dream, a
heavenly music, or whether he would have thought it licentious, and
even shapeless. Of course, one knows that there is going to be
development in art, but the imagination is unable to forecast it,
except in so far as it can forecast a possibility of an increased
perfection of technique. It is the same with painting. It is a
bewildering speculation what Raffaelle or Michelangelo would have
thought of the work of Turner or Millais: whether they would have been
delighted by the subtle evolution of their own aims, or confused by the
increase of impressional suggestiveness--whether, indeed, if Raffaelle
or Michelangelo had seen a large photograph, say, of a winter scene, or
a chromo-lithograph such as appears as a supplement to an illustrated
paper, they might not have flung down their brush in a mixture of
rapture and despair.
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