civilization as a whole is great and wherever there is a people
with high artistic ideals. The mind leaps back to the Greeks
(a people entirely composed of artists), then to the age that
built the cathedrals (an age entirely peopled with mystics)
-- and stops there. The argument runs in a circle: a civilization
is great because of its art, and conversely.

The commonplaces about the Greeks and the cathedrals
furnish only one useful clue to the relation between art and
society. They suggest that art has to be paid for, if only to
keep the artists alive. Now people will pay for something only
if they think it worth having; if they can, as the phrase goes,
appreciate it. Art can flourish only in a civilization that enjoys
a little superfluity of goods and whose population has some
little respect for art. So far the account is familiar enough.
When it is applied to our own society it seems to break down.
We certainly possess as large a material surplus as any pre-
vious civilization, and we have high ideals, enshrined in famil-
iar platitudes. But ask any social-minded critic what the pres-
ent relation of the artist to society is and he answers: Divorce.
The artist is divorced from society. Society does not support
him adequately; his social status is uncertain, and his produc-
tions are either soliloquies or else syntheses of the world spirit
that the world spirit refuses to recognize. We blame democ-
racy or capitalism or the shortage of genius, but we do not
deem ourselves as culturally well off as the Greeks of Pericles''s
time or the medieval inhabitants of Chartres.

Generalities about a "whole people" are likely to be wrong,
and if we take a look at the Greeks of Pericles''s time we are
sure of it. The Greeks, to begin with, were only the Athenians
with a sprinkling of resident foreigners; they were a cityful
not of aesthetes but of politicians, businessmen, idlers, and
slaves. The passion for the arts was limited to a few contem-
plative souls, the same who cultivated philosophy, science,
and the making of utopias. We always quote Pericles''s boast
about cultivating art without effeminacy, but we conveniently
forget that he also said the deeds of the Greek soldiers were
the best proof of Athens' greatness, and that "far from needing
a Homer for our panegyrist, or other of his craft whose verses
might charm for the moment . . . we have forced every sea
and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere,
whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monu-
ments behind us."

The Greeks who did not need Homer are of course the same
Greeks who built the Acropolis, carved the frieze of the
Parthenon, and wrote immortal books; but they are the "same"
only in the usual sense in which artists and their society are
identified. Artists and philosophers then as now met with dis-
approval or encouragement, were rewarded, exiled, or put to

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