? In Babylonia there
were kings and princes before the coming of the Assyrians; there were
statesmen, generals, and priests: but the glory and story of that land
would be for us a vague, bad dream were it not that the sculpture of the
vanquished Sumerians remains splendid and unobscure. Kublai Khan, that
conquerer of China and scourge of all the East, lives, if he live at
all, in the verse of an English poet, while the art of the people he
came to destroy is the great glory of Asia and the inspiration of half
the world.

To be or not to be thinking about art is not a matter of choice. Art is
imperious. As well tell an artist not to breathe as not to create.
Artists will be artists; and so far as I can see the spirit has never
foundered in the wreck of material things. If those ancient ministers of
the devil, fire and sword, pestilence and famine, could not force men to
stop creating and feeling, I do not suppose that journalists and
politicians and inactive colonels and fire-eating curates will be more
successful. There never was a time that was no time for art. In the
darkness of the darkest ages the aesthetic sense shines clear. Were not
the masterpieces of Attic comedy written in a beleagured State in the
throes of a disastrous war? And was it not in 1667 that England suffered
what has been called her greatest humiliation? Certainly it was in 1667
she received her greatest epic.

Few, indeed, can look steadily at their own times. To the ephemera that
tossed on the waters of the past the ripples were mountainous; to us the
past is a sad, grey lake, scarcely ruffled, from which emerge the tall
lights of art and thought. It must be a defective sense of proportion, I
think, that makes people who cite Aristophanes, but never heard of
Conon, who are deep in _Paradise Lost_ but neither know nor care who won
the battle of Lowestoft, assert so confidently that this is no time for
art. Let them, for their own sakes, consider what sort of figure in
history one would cut who had adjured young Shakespeare--thirty years of
age and, if one may draw inferences from tradition, able at least to
shoot--to give over his precious fooling and join the expeditionary
force in Portugal. Yet the moment was grave: we had lost _The Revenge_
and failed ignominiously before Cadiz; we still expected invasion.
Shakespeare and the rest of them might surely have done something for
their country.

FOOTNOTE:

[24] This essay was written for a Hamp