g to
conceal beneath striking wrappers the essential mediocrity of his wares?
If not heroically sincere he is surely not inhumanly base. Besides, he
has to imitate someone, and he likes to be in the fashion. And, after
all, a bad cubist picture is no worse than any other bad picture. If
anyone is to be blamed, it should be the spectator who cannot
distinguish between good cubist pictures and bad. Blame alike the fools
who think that because a picture is cubist it must be worthless, and
their idiotic enemies who think it must be marvellous. People of
sensibility can see that there is as much difference between Picasso and
a Montmartre sensationalist as there is between Ingres and the President
of the Royal Academy.]

II

ART AND LIFE

I. ART AND RELIGION

II. ART AND HISTORY

III. ART AND ETHICS

[Illustration: EARLY PERUVIAN POT FROM THE NASCA VALLEY
_In the British Museum_]

I

ART AND RELIGION

If in my first chapter I had been at pains to show that art owed nothing
to life the title of my second would invite a charge of inconsistency.
The danger would be slight, however; for though art owed nothing to
life, life might well owe something to art. The weather is admirably
independent of human hopes and fears, yet few of us are so sublimely
detached as to be indifferent to the weather. Art does affect the lives
of men; it moves to ecstasy, thus giving colour and moment to what might
be otherwise a rather grey and trivial affair. Art for some makes life
worth living. Also, art is affected by life; for to create art there
must be men with hands and a sense of form and colour and
three-dimensional space and the power to feel and the passion to create.
Therefore art has a great deal to do with life--with emotional life.
That it is a means to a state of exaltation is unanimously agreed, and
that it comes from the spiritual depths of man's nature is hardly
contested. The appreciation of art is certainly a means to ecstasy, and
the creation probably the expression of an ecstatic state of mind. Art
is, in fact, a necessity to and a product of the spiritual life.

Those who do not part company with me till the last stage of my
metaphysical excursion agree that the emotion expressed in a work of art
springs from the depths of man's spiritual nature; and those even who
will hear nothing of expression agree that the spiritual part is
profoundly affected by