It is possible to speak of civilized or uncivilized art and mean something by our words; but what we mean has nothing to do with the ultimate value of the work.  And, in the same way, there may be an unessential connection between art and politics, though more remote and unimportant still.  As I have explained too often already, an artist, before he can create effectively, has got to work himself into a passion; by some means he has got to raise his feelings to the creative temperature and his energies to a corresponding pitch of intensity.  He must make himself drunk somehow, and political passion is as good a tipple as another.  Religion, Science, Morals, Love, Hate, Fear, Lust—­all serve the artist’s turn, and Politics and Patriotism have done their bit.  It is clear that Wordsworth was thrown into the state of mind in which he wrote his famous sonnets by love of England and detestation of France, by fear of revolution and longing for order; but how much patriotism or constitutionalism has to do with the suave beauty of those harmonious masterpieces may be inferred from the fact that “hoarse Fitzgerald” and Mr. Kipling are quite as patriotic and even more reactionary.  Amongst painters David is the conspicuous example of an artist—­a small one, to be sure—­intoxicated by politics.  David set out as a humble, eighteenth-century follower of Fragonard.  But the Revolution filled his poor head with notions about the Greeks and the Romans, Harmodius and Aristogiton, Cornelia and the Gracchi, sic semper tyrannis, and Phrygian caps.  And his revolutionary enthusiasm changed the whole manner of his attack on that central, artistic problem which never, in any style, did he succeed in solving.  But the influence of this new style was immense, and paramount in French painting for the next forty or fifty years.  It is to be noted, however, that David’s great and immediate follower, the mighty Ingres, who frankly adopted this style, redolent of all republican virtues, was himself one of the most virulent reactionaries that ever lived.

And that, perhaps, would be all that needed saying about Art and Politics were it not that at this moment the subject has an unusual importance.  Movements in art have, more often than not, been the result of an extraordinarily violent preoccupation, on the part of artists, with the unessential and insignificant.  David rescued painting from the charming and slightly sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth century by concentrating on Roman virtues and generals’ uniforms.  The Romantics freed themselves from Davidism by getting frantically excited about a little hazy nonsense rather unfairly attributed to Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.  From this the Impressionists escaped by persuading themselves that they were men of science.  And against this my contemporaries set up a conscious aestheticism, slightly tinged with certain metaphysico-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and the thing in itself.  With