a man’s art I need know nothing whatever about the artist; I can say whether this picture is better than that without the help of history; but if I am trying to account for the deterioration of his art, I shall be helped by knowing that he has been seriously ill or that he has married a wife who insists on his boiling her pot.  To mark the deterioration was to make a pure, aesthetic judgment:  to account for it was to become an historian.  To understand the history of art we must know something of other kinds of history.  Perhaps, to understand thoroughly any kind of history we must understand every kind of history.  Perhaps the history of an age or of a life is an indivisible whole.  Another intolerable idea!  What becomes of the specialist?  What of those formidable compendiums in which the multitudinous activities of man are kept so jealously apart?  The mind boggles at the monstrous vision of its own conclusions.

But, after all, does it matter to me?  I am not an historian of art or of anything else.  I care very little when things were made, or why they were made; I care about their emotional significance to us.  To the historian everything is a means to some other means; to me everything that matters is a direct means to emotion.  I am writing about art, not about history.  With history I am concerned only in so far as history serves to illustrate my hypothesis:  and whether history be true or false matters very little, since my hypothesis is not based on history but on personal experience, not on facts but on feelings.  Historical fact and falsehood are of no consequence to people who try to deal with realities.  They need not ask, “Did this happen?”; they need ask only, “Do I feel this?” Lucky for us that it is so:  for if our judgments about real things had to wait upon historical certitude they might have to wait for ever.  Nevertheless it is amusing to see how far that of which we are sure agrees with that which we should expect.  My aesthetic hypothesis—­that the essential quality in a work of art is significant form—­was based on my aesthetic experience.  Of my aesthetic experiences I am sure.  About my second hypothesis, that significant form is the expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality—­I am far from confident.  However, I assume it to be true, and go on to suggest that this sense of reality leads men to attach greater importance to the spiritual than to the material significance of the universe, that it disposes men to feel things as ends instead of merely recognising them as means, that a sense of reality is, in fact, the essence of spiritual health.  If this be so, we shall expect to find that ages in which the creation of significant form is checked are ages in which the sense of reality is dim, and that these ages are ages of spiritual poverty.  We shall expect to find the curves of art and spiritual fervour ascending and descending together.  In my next chapter I shall glance at the history of a cycle of art with the intention of following the movement