ipling are quite as patriotic and even more
reactionary. Amongst painters David is the conspicuous example of an
artist--a small one, to be sure--intoxicated by politics. David set
out as a humble, eighteenth-century follower of Fragonard. But the
Revolution filled his poor head with notions about the Greeks and the
Romans, Harmodius and Aristogiton, Cornelia and the Gracchi, _sic semper
tyrannis_, and Phrygian caps. And his revolutionary enthusiasm changed
the whole manner of his attack on that central, artistic problem which
never, in any style, did he succeed in solving. But the influence of
this new style was immense, and paramount in French painting for the
next forty or fifty years. It is to be noted, however, that David's
great and immediate follower, the mighty Ingres, who frankly adopted
this style, redolent of all republican virtues, was himself one of the
most virulent reactionaries that ever lived.

And that, perhaps, would be all that needed saying about Art and
Politics were it not that at this moment the subject has an unusual
importance. Movements in art have, more often than not, been the result
of an extraordinarily violent preoccupation, on the part of artists,
with the unessential and insignificant. David rescued painting from
the charming and slightly sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth
century by concentrating on Roman virtues and generals' uniforms. The
Romantics freed themselves from Davidism by getting frantically excited
about a little hazy nonsense rather unfairly attributed to Lord Byron
and Sir Walter Scott. From this the Impressionists escaped by persuading
themselves that they were men of science. And against this my
contemporaries set up a conscious aestheticism, slightly tinged with
certain metaphysico-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and
the thing in itself. With Cubism conscious aestheticism holds the field,
for the Cubist theory is, in the main, aesthetic. That is one reason why
I cannot think that there is any great future for Cubism. An artistic
movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art; for
artists, it seems, must believe that they are concerned with something
altogether different. Wherefore, I think it not improbable--indeed,
there are indications already [X]--that, political progress having in the
last few years somewhat outrun civilization, and the new democracy being
apparently hostile to art and culture, artists will take to believ