ABSTRACT
One of the hardest tasks in the study of human activities is to explain convincingly developments in art, music, and literature. Up to a point the influence of material conditions on cultural achievement is obvious enough. However brave and unselfish the creator of such work may be, the survival of his products depends on the demand for them, and therefore on the whole condition of the society in which he lives. Every class and country supports, to a greater or lesser degree, its own forms of art; and they can all be used for propaganda or just for prestige. Since writings must be printed and published, plays and music performed, painting displayed (to however restricted a number of people), someone is likely to intervene between the creator of any of these and the recipient. But when all interpretations of how patrons and audiences behaved have been exhausted, they seldom amount to a satisfying explanation of why, for instance, England did not produce a school of painting comparable to that of the Netherlands, or France a poet like Milton. The links between styles in the arts and the periods in which they flourished are no less elusive. Efforts to show the seventeenth century as the ‘age of the baroque’ in which the characteristics of politics, religion, and commerce were all related to the ornate and swirling shapes, the sense of movement and striving, that were fashionable in painting sometimes owe more to imagination than to evidence. Analysis and explanation of cultural history are a necessary part of the understanding of any period; but even more than most forms of history they need to be scrutinized with a wary eye for the pretentious unsupported assertion.
