They almost extinguished the tradition of culture, they began to destroy
the bogey of imperialism, they cleaned the slate. They were able to
provide new bottles for the new wine. Artists can scarcely repress their
envy when they hear that academic painters and masters were sold into
slavery by the score. The Barbarians handed on the torch and wrought
marvels in its light. But in those days men were too busy fighting and
ploughing and praying to have much time for anything else. Material
needs absorbed their energies without fattening them; their spiritual
appetite was ferocious, but they had a live religion as well as a live
art to satisfy it. It is supposed that in the dark ages insecurity and
want reduced humanity to something little better than bestiality. To
this their art alone gives the lie, and there is other evidence. If
turbulence and insecurity could reduce people to bestiality, surely the
Italians of the ninth century were the men to roar and bleat. Constantly
harassed by Saracens, Hungarians, Greeks, French, and every sort of
German, they had none of those encouragements to labour and create which
in the vast security of the _pax Romana_ and the _pax Britannica_ have
borne such glorious fruits of private virtue and public magnificence.
Yet in 898 Hungarian scouts report that northern Italy is thickly
populated and full of fortified towns.[14] At the sack of Parma (924)
forty-four churches were burnt, and these churches were certainly more
like Santa Maria di Pomposa or San Pietro at Toscanella than the
Colosseum or the Royal Courts of Justice. That the artistic output of
the dark ages was to some extent limited by its poverty is not to be
doubted; nevertheless, more first-rate art was produced in Europe
between the years 500 and 900 than was produced in the same countries
between 1450 and 1850.

For in estimating the artistic value of a period one tends first to
consider the splendour of its capital achievements. After that one
reckons the quantity of first-rate work produced. Lastly, one computes
the proportion of undeniable works of art to the total output. In the
dark ages the proportion seems to have been high. This is a
characteristic of primitive periods. The market is too small to tempt a
crowd of capable manufacturers, and the conditions of life are too
severe to support the ordinary academy or salon exhibitor who lives on
his private means and takes to art because he is unfit for anything
else. Th