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