Be that as it may, this theory, which once seemed paradoxical, quite loses its fantastic air when considered in the light of our discovery.  Had art anything to do with opinion it would be strange, indeed, if new art were ill-received by those who like their opinions new.  But as art has nothing whatever to do with such things there is no more reason why a Radical should like new forms of art than why he should like new brands of tea.

The essential qualities of a work of art are purely artistic; and since politicians, if not too coarse by nature, soon make themselves so by practice, to apprehend these they must, unless they can leave art alone, seek its significance in what is unessential.  Progressive politicians, who have a way of taking ethics under their wing and even conceive themselves the active promoters of good, are apt to seek it in morals.  One might have supposed that a message was to be found as easily in new forms of art as in old; but, unluckily, new forms are to most incomprehensible.  And though to a hardened sinner here and there what is incomprehensible may be nothing worse than disconcerting, to him who seeks good in all things, and is constantly on the look-out for uplifting influences, whatever disappoints this longing is positively and terribly evil.  Now, a new and genuine work of art is something unmistakably alive and, at the same time, unprovided, as yet, with moral credentials.  It is unintelligible without being negligible.  It comes from an unfamiliar world and shakes a good man’s belief in the obvious.  It must be very wicked.  And the proper reaction to what is wicked is a blind fury of moral indignation.  Well, blind fury is blind.  So no one could be much worse placed than the political moralist for seeing whatever there may be to be seen in what is, at once, strange and subtle.

We are in a position now to clear up another difficulty, which has distressed so deeply the best and wisest of men that to get rid of it some have felt justified in tampering with the truth.  If art had anything to do with politics, evidently art should have flourished most gloriously in those ages of political freedom which do us all so much credit.  The necessity of this inference has been felt strongly enough by Liberal historians to make them accept without demur the doctrine that the age of Pericles was the great age of visual art, and repeat it without mentioning the fact that in that age an aristocracy of some twenty-five thousand citizens was supported by the compulsory labours of some four hundred thousand slaves.  The truth is, of course, that art may flourish under any form of government.  It flourished in the Athenian aristocracy and under the despotic bureaucracies of China, Persia, and Byzantium.  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished under the feudal system, and in the fifteenth amongst the oligarchies and tyrannies of Italy.  On the other hand, neither the Roman Republic nor the Roman Empire gave us anything much worth remembering:  and no period in French history has been less fruitful in art and letters than the first republic and empire.  There was Ingres, of course; but the period on the whole was singularly barren, and it may be just worth remarking that at no time, perhaps, has French art been so academic, professorial, timid, and uninspired as in the first glorious years of the great Revolution.