e decadent
classical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque
and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as
any art that has ever been.

But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine art was thought to
be only a barbarous corruption of the classical art. For then the
classical art even in its last feebleness still kept its immense and
unique prestige. Shelley said that the effect of Christianity seemed to
have been to destroy the last remains of pure taste, and he said this
when he had been looking at the great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic
at Ravenna. Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong. He
was himself a great artist, but to him there was only one rational and
beautiful and civilized art, and that was the decadent Graeco-Roman art.
To him works like the Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the
world, and all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in fact
most people of his time were still overawed by the immense complacency
of that art. They had not the historical sense at all. They had no
notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar
to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless
it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that
characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there
may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage
than in the Laocoon.

This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay
because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they
thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on
producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant
anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what
was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is
the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as
uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and
the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of
real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so
artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must
work for evermore.

Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic
decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very
easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organizatio