e fact that in that age an aristocracy of some
twenty-five thousand citizens was supported by the compulsory labours of
some four hundred thousand slaves. The truth is, of course, that art may
flourish under any form of government. It flourished in the Athenian
aristocracy and under the despotic bureaucracies of China, Persia, and
Byzantium. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished under
the feudal system, and in the fifteenth amongst the oligarchies and
tyrannies of Italy. On the other hand, neither the Roman Republic nor
the Roman Empire gave us anything much worth remembering: and no period
in French history has been less fruitful in art and letters than the
first republic and empire. There was Ingres, of course; but the period
on the whole was singularly barren, and it may be just worth remarking
that at no time, perhaps, has French art been so academic, professorial,
timid, and uninspired as in the first glorious years of the great
Revolution.

Here there is nothing to surprise us. But what does, at first sight,
seem odd is that art should apparently be indifferent, not only to
political systems, but to social conditions as well. Barbarism or
Civilization: it is all one to art. Old-fashioned historians, who had a
pleasant, tidy way of dealing with the past, used to plot out from that
wilderness four great periods of civilization: the Athenian (from 480
B.C. to the death of Aristotle, 322), the first and second centuries of
the Roman Empire, Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,
and from the end of the Fronde, 1653, to the Revolution. For my part, I
should be inclined to subtract from these the Roman period, and add, if
only I knew more about it, the age of Sung. But accepting, by way of
compromise, all five, we find that three--the Greek, Chinese, and
Italian--were rich in visual art, whereas Rome was utterly barren and
the eighteenth century not extraordinarily prolific. To make matters
worse, we see in the dark and early middle ages a steady flow of
first-rate art from societies more or less barbarous, while lately we
have learnt that black and naked savages can create exquisitely.

Are we, then, to assume that there is no connection between art and
civilization? I think not. A connection there is, but, as was to
be expected, an unessential one. The essential quality in art is
invariable, and what gives the Parthenon its significance is what gives
significance to a nigger's basket-work