For in estimating the artistic value of a period one tends first to consider the splendour of its capital achievements.  After that one reckons the quantity of first-rate work produced.  Lastly, one computes the proportion of undeniable works of art to the total output.  In the dark ages the proportion seems to have been high.  This is a characteristic of primitive periods.  The market is too small to tempt a crowd of capable manufacturers, and the conditions of life are too severe to support the ordinary academy or salon exhibitor who lives on his private means and takes to art because he is unfit for anything else.  This sort of producer, whose existence tells us less about the state of art than about the state of society, who would be the worst navvy in his gang or the worst trooper in his squadron, and is the staple product of official art schools, is unheard of in primitive ages.  In drawing inferences, therefore, we must not overlook the advantage enjoyed by barbarous periods in the fact that of those who come forward as artists the vast majority have some real gift.  I would hazard a guess that of the works that survive from the dark age as high a proportion as one in twelve has real artistic value.  Were a proportion of the work produced between 1450 and 1850 identical with that of the work produced between 500 and 900 to survive, it might very well happen that it would not contain a single work of art.  In fact, we tend to see only the more important things of this period and to leave unvisited the notorious trash.  Yet judging from the picked works brought to our notice in galleries, exhibitions, and private collections, I cannot believe that more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.

Between 900 and 1200 the capital achievements of Christian art are not superior in quality to those of the preceding age—­indeed, they fall short of the Byzantine masterpieces of the sixth century; but the first-rate art of this second period was more abundant, or, at any rate, has survived more successfully, than that of the first.  The age that has bequeathed us Romanesque, Lombardic, and Norman architecture gives no sign of dissolution.  We are still on the level heights of the Christian Renaissance.  Artists are still primitive.  Men still feel the significance of form sufficiently to create it copiously.  Increased wealth purchases increased leisure, and some of that leisure is devoted to the creation of art.  I do not marvel, therefore, at the common, though I think inexact, opinion that this was the period in which Christian Europe touched the summit of its spiritual history:  its monuments are everywhere majestic before our eyes.  Not only in France, Italy, and Spain, but in England, and as far afield as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, we can see the triumphs of Romanesque art.  This was the last level stage on the long journey from Santa Sophia to St. John’s Wood.