ses generally with a lowering of the
religious sense. I shall expect to find that whenever artists have
allowed themselves to be seduced from their proper business, the
creation of form, by other and irrelevant interests, society has been
spiritually decadent. Ages in which the sense of formal significance has
been swamped utterly by preoccupation with the obvious, will turn out, I
suspect, to have been ages of spiritual famine. Therefore, while
following the fortunes of art across a period of fourteen hundred years,
I shall try to keep an eye on that of which art may be a
manifestation--man's sense of ultimate reality.

To criticise a work of art historically is to play the science-besotted
fool. No more disastrous theory ever issued from the brain of a
charlatan than that of evolution in art. Giotto did not creep, a grub,
that Titian might flaunt, a butterfly. To think of a man's art as
leading on to the art of someone else is to misunderstand it. To praise
or abuse or be interested in a work of art because it leads or does not
lead to another work of art is to treat it as though it were not a work
of art. The connection of one work of art with another may have
everything to do with history: it has nothing to do with appreciation.
So soon as we begin to consider a work as anything else than an end in
itself we leave the world of art. Though the development of painting
from Giotto to Titian may be interesting historically, it cannot affect
the value of any particular picture: aesthetically, it is of no
consequence whatever. Every work of art must be judged on its own
merits.

Therefore, be sure that, in my next chapter, I am not going to make
aesthetic judgments in the light of history; I am going to read history
in the light of aesthetic judgments. Having made my judgments,
independently of any theory, aesthetic or non-aesthetic, I shall be
amused to see how far the view of history that may be based on them
agrees with accepted historical hypotheses. If my judgments and the
dates furnished by historians be correct, it will follow that some ages
have produced more good art than others: but, indeed, it is not disputed
that the variety in the artistic significance of different ages is
immense. I shall be curious to see what relation can be established
between the art and the age that produced it. If my second
hypothesis--that art is the expression of an emotion for ultimate
reality--be correct, the relation between art