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
of art and discovering how far that movement keeps pace with changes in
the spiritual state of society. My view of the rise, decline and fall of
art in Christendom is based entirely on a series of independent
aesthetic judgments in the rightness of which I have the arrogance to
feel considerable confidence. I pretend to a power of distinguishing
between significant and insignificant form, and it will interest me to
see whether a decline in the significance of forms--a deterioration of
art, that is to say--synchronises generally with a lowering of the
religious sense. I shall expect to find that whenever artists have
allowed themselves to be seduced from their proper business, the
creation of form, by other and irrelevant interests, society has been
spiritually decadent. Ages in which the sense of formal significance has
been swamped utterly by preoccupation with the obvious, will turn out, I
suspect, to have been ages of spiritual famine. Therefore, while
following the fortunes of art across a period of fourteen hundred years,
I shall try to keep an eye on that of which art may be a
manifestation--man's sense of ultimate reality.

To criticise a work of art historically is to play the science-besotted
fool. No more disastrous theory ever issued from the brain of a
charlatan than that of evolution in art. Giotto did not creep, a grub,
that Titian might flaunt, a butterfly. To think of a man's art as
leading on to the art of someone else is to misunderstand it. To praise