save those nice, cultivated people who go about saying that
this is no time for art from doing some harm and making themselves
ridiculous. To them, not to the artists, is my mission. They are in
danger of becoming coarse and absurd and of saying things that their
enemies will never allow them to forget. They are not formidable:
besides, art is fearless. For art cannot die; neither can the desire for
art. If history teaches nothing else worth remembering, it teaches that.
Artists will create though they must starve for it, and art we will have
though our days be numbered. Artists and those who care for art may be a
mere handful in the human mass, but theirs is the passionate faith that
conquers somehow in spite of battles and holds the world in fee.

Art survives: the state of this chilly, quarrelsome little planet has
never grown so desperate that artists have lost faith. After all, why
should they? Art is not less important because some men are bad and most
are wretched; and it is no part of an artist's business to straighten
out the contortions of humanity. "The loss of hue to river-banks,"
observed Ch'eng Hao, the Sung poet, "is the river-banks' affair." Art
has seen worse days than these. Between 937 and 1059, if we may believe
Glaber, there were forty-eight years of pestilence and famine. From
Constantinople to Exeter the world was one miserable sore. Cannibalism
became chronic. In the market-place of Tournus human joints were
exposed for sale. Man had sunk to such depths of impotence that the
wolves came out and disputed with him the mastery of Europe. War seems
to have been the only activity for which the leaders of the people were
not too feeble: let us hope that they kept honour bright and preserved
nicely the balance of Neustria, Austria, and the kingdom of Italy. And
over all hung, as well it might, the terror of judgment and the end of
the world. Yet art survived. The years that lie round about the
millennium are precisely those in which artists seem to have been unable
almost to do wrong. Then it was that the aesthetic sense, rising calm
above confusion, detached and remote from human woes, expressed itself
gravely in that early Romanesque architecture and sculpture which
remains the imperishable glory of the Middle Age.

There have been wars as great as this; there may be greater. Empires and
continents have gone down and may again go down into misery. Art
survives. What remains of Egypt but her monuments