orrid delusions. For, taking the phenomenon
historically, we shall see that although art has arisen in periods of
stress and change, and therefore of moral anarchy, it has never arisen
among the immoral classes nor to serve any immoral use: the apparent
anomaly in the Renaissance, for instance, was not an anomaly, but a
coincidence of contrary movements: a materially prosperous, intellectually
innovating epoch, producing on the one hand moral anarchy, on the
other artistic perfection, connected not as cause and effect, but as
coincidence, the one being the drawback, the other the advantage, of
that particular phase of being. The Malatestas and Borgias, of whom we
have heard too much, did not employ Alberti and Pier della Francesca,
Pinturicchio and Bramante, to satisfy their convict wickedness, but to
satisfy their artistic taste, which, in so far, was perfectly sound, as
various others among their faculties, their eye and ear, and sense of
cause and effect, were apparently sound also. And the architecture of
Alberti, the decorations of Pinturicchio, remain as spotless of all
contact with their evil instincts as the hills they may have looked at,
the sea they may have listened to, the eternal verity that two and two
make four, which had doubtless passed through their otherwise badly
inhabited minds. And, moreover, the sea is still sonorous, the mountains
are still hyacinth blue, and the buildings and frescoes still noble,
while the rest of those disagreeable mortals' cravings and strivings are
gone, and on the whole were best forgotten.

But there is another side of this same question, and of it we are
admonished, as it seems to me, still louder by our growing intellectual
instincts--those instincts, let us remember, which do but represent
whatever has been congruous and uniform in repeated experience. Art is
a much greater and more cosmic thing than the mere expression of man's
thoughts or opinions on any one subject, of man's attitude towards his
neighbour or towards his country, much as all this concerns us. Art is
the expression of man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations
with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to
the universe's unspoken message. Hence it represents not the details of
his existence, which, more's the pity, are rarely what they should be,
whether in thought or action, but the bulk of his existence, _when that
bulk is unusually sound_. This clause contains the whole