be inevitable and intimate.  In that case, an aesthetic judgment will imply some sort of judgment about the general state of mind of the artist and his admirers.  In fact, anyone who accepts absolutely my second hypothesis with all its possible implications—­which is more than I am willing to do—­will not only see in the history of art the spiritual history of the race, but will be quite unable to think of one without thinking of the other.

If I do not go quite so far as that, I stop short only by a little.  Certainly it is less absurd to see in art the key to history than to imagine that history can help us to an appreciation of art.  In ages of spiritual fervour I look for great art.  By ages of spiritual fervour I do not mean pleasant or romantic or humane or enlightened ages; I mean ages in which, for one reason or another, men have been unusually excited about their souls and unusually indifferent about their bodies.  Such ages, as often as not, have been superstitious and cruel.  Preoccupation with the soul may lead to superstition, indifference about the body to cruelty.  I never said that ages of great art were sympathetic to the middle-classes.  Art and a quiet life are incompatible I think; some stress and turmoil there must be.  Need I add that in the snuggest age of materialism great artists may arise and flourish?  Of course:  but when the production of good art is at all widespread and continuous, near at hand I shall expect to find a restless generation.  Also, having marked a period of spiritual stir, I shall look, not far off, for its manifestation in significant form.  But the stir must be spiritual and genuine; a swirl of emotionalism or political frenzy will provoke nothing fine.[8] How far in any particular age the production of art is stimulated by general exaltation, or general exaltation by works of art, is a question hardly to be decided.  Wisest, perhaps, is he who says that the two seem to have been interdependent.  Just how dependent I believe them to have been, will appear when, in my next chapter, I attempt to sketch the rise, decline, and fall of the Christian slope.

III

ART AND ETHICS

Between me and the pleasant places of history remains, however, one ugly barrier.  I cannot dabble and paddle in the pools and shallows of the past until I have answered a question so absurd that the nicest people never tire of asking it:  “What is the moral justification of art?” Of course they are right who insist that the creation of art must be justified on ethical grounds:  all human activities must be so justified.  It is the philosopher’s privilege to call upon the artist to show that what he is about is either good in itself or a means to good.  It is the artist’s duty to reply:  “Art is good because it exalts to a state of ecstasy better far than anything a benumbed moralist can even guess at; so shut up.”  Philosophically he is quite right; only, philosophy is not so simple as that.  Let us try to answer philosophically.