that art means nothing or little to them; I say they miss its full significance.  I do not suggest for one moment that their appreciation of art is a thing to be ashamed of; the majority of the charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted appreciate visual art impurely; and, by the way, the appreciation of almost all great writers has been impure.  But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic emotion, even a mixed and minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the most valuable things in the world—­so valuable, indeed, that in my giddier moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove the world’s salvation.

Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains, her spirit dwells on the mountains.  To him who woos, but woos impurely, she returns enriched what is brought.  Like the sun, she warms the good seed in good soil and causes it to bring forth good fruit.  But only to the perfect lover does she give a new strange gift—­a gift beyond all price.  Imperfect lovers bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation.  In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T’ang picture.  To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions.  But the perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and place.  To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent.  If the forms of a work are significant its provenance is irrelevant.  Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried.  It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.[3] Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it.  The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable and unobscure.  Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world.  To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago?  The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

II

AESTHETICS AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM