The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

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.