[Footnote 4:  Anyone who has visited the very latest French exhibitions will have seen scores of what are called “Cubist” pictures.  These afford an excellent illustration of my thesis.  Of a hundred cubist pictures three or four will have artistic value.  Thirty years ago the same might have been said of “Impressionist” pictures; forty years before that of romantic pictures in the manner of Delacroix.  The explanation is simple,—­the vast majority of those who paint pictures have neither originality nor any considerable talent.  Left to themselves they would probably produce the kind of painful absurdity which in England is known as an “Academy picture.”  But a student who has no original gift may yet be anything but a fool, and many students understand that the ordinary cultivated picture-goer knows an “Academy picture” at a glance and knows that it is bad.  Is it fair to condemn severely a young painter for trying to give his picture a factitious interest, or even for trying to conceal beneath striking wrappers the essential mediocrity of his wares?  If not heroically sincere he is surely not inhumanly base.  Besides, he has to imitate someone, and he likes to be in the fashion.  And, after all, a bad cubist picture is no worse than any other bad picture.  If anyone is to be blamed, it should be the spectator who cannot distinguish between good cubist pictures and bad.  Blame alike the fools who think that because a picture is cubist it must be worthless, and their idiotic enemies who think it must be marvellous.  People of sensibility can see that there is as much difference between Picasso and a Montmartre sensationalist as there is between Ingres and the President of the Royal Academy.]

II

ART AND LIFE

I. ART AND RELIGION

II.  ART AND HISTORY

III.  ART AND ETHICS

[Illustration:  EARLY PERUVIAN POT FROM THE NASCA VALLEY
In the British Museum]

I

ART AND RELIGION

If in my first chapter I had been at pains to show that art owed nothing to life the title of my second would invite a charge of inconsistency.  The danger would be slight, however; for though art owed nothing to life, life might well owe something to art.  The weather is admirably independent of human hopes and fears, yet few of us are so sublimely detached as to be indifferent to the weather.  Art does affect the lives of men; it moves to ecstasy, thus giving colour and moment to what might be otherwise a rather grey and trivial affair.  Art for some makes life worth living.  Also, art is affected by life; for to create art there must be men with hands and a sense of form and colour and three-dimensional space and the power to feel and the passion to create.  Therefore art has a great deal to do with life—­with emotional life.  That it is a means to a state of exaltation is unanimously agreed, and that it comes from the spiritual depths of man’s nature is hardly contested.  The appreciation of art is certainly a means to ecstasy, and the creation probably the expression of an ecstatic state of mind.  Art is, in fact, a necessity to and a product of the spiritual life.