So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have lacked. The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the 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.