made; I care about their emotional significance to us. To the
historian everything is a means to some other means; to me everything
that matters is a direct means to emotion. I am writing about art, not
about history. With history I am concerned only in so far as history
serves to illustrate my hypothesis: and whether history be true or false
matters very little, since my hypothesis is not based on history but on
personal experience, not on facts but on feelings. Historical fact and
falsehood are of no consequence to people who try to deal with
realities. They need not ask, "Did this happen?"; they need ask only,
"Do I feel this?" Lucky for us that it is so: for if our judgments about
real things had to wait upon historical certitude they might have to
wait for ever. Nevertheless it is amusing to see how far that of which
we are sure agrees with that which we should expect. My aesthetic
hypothesis--that the essential quality in a work of art is significant
form--was based on my aesthetic experience. Of my aesthetic experiences
I am sure. About my second hypothesis, that significant form is the
expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality--I am far from
confident. However, I assume it to be true, and go on to suggest that
this sense of reality leads men to attach greater importance to the
spiritual than to the material significance of the universe, that it
disposes men to feel things as ends instead of merely recognising them
as means, that a sense of reality is, in fact, the essence of spiritual
health. If this be so, we shall expect to find that ages in which the
creation of significant form is checked are ages in which the sense of
reality is dim, and that these ages are ages of spiritual poverty. We
shall expect to find the curves of art and spiritual fervour ascending
and descending together. In my next chapter I shall glance at the
history of a cycle of art with the intention of following the movement
of art and discovering how far that movement keeps pace with changes in
the spiritual state of society. My view of the rise, decline and fall of
art in Christendom is based entirely on a series of independent
aesthetic judgments in the rightness of which I have the arrogance to
feel considerable confidence. I pretend to a power of distinguishing
between significant and insignificant form, and it will interest me to
see whether a decline in the significance of forms--a deterioration of
art, that is to say--synchroni