pt
a part of it, or reject it altogether? Each must decide for himself. I
insist only on the rightness of my aesthetic hypothesis. And of one
other thing am I sure. Be they artists or lovers of art, mystics or
mathematicians, those who achieve ecstasy are those who have freed
themselves from the arrogance of humanity. He who would feel the
significance of art must make himself humble before it. Those who find
the chief importance of art or of philosophy in its relation to conduct
or its practical utility--those who cannot value things as ends in
themselves or, at any rate, as direct means to emotion--will never get
from anything the best that it can give. Whatever the world of aesthetic
contemplation may be, it is not the world of human business and
passion; in it the chatter and tumult of material existence is unheard,
or heard only as the echo of some more ultimate harmony.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The existence of the Ku K'ai-chih makes it clear that the
art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive
movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang
dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art
of the Han decadence--from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate
straggler--is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of
Praxiteles. Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream
of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual and emotional
revolution that followed the onset of Buddhism.]

[Footnote 2: This is not to say that exact representation is bad in
itself. It is indifferent. A perfectly represented form may be
significant, only it is fatal to sacrifice significance to
representation. The quarrel between significance and illusion seems to
be as old as art itself, and I have little doubt that what makes most
palaeolithic art so bad is a preoccupation with exact representation.
Evidently palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of
form. Their art resembles that of the more capable and sincere Royal
Academicians: it is a little higher than that of Sir Edward Poynter and
a little lower than that of the late Lord Leighton. That this is no
paradox let the cave-drawings of Altamira, or such works as the sketches
of horses found at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum, bear
witness. If the ivory head of a girl from the Grotte du Pape,
Brassempouy (_Musee St. Germain_) and the ivory torso found at the same