ant youth immature
childhood; death may be only arrested development and life itself an
exhausted convention. Have you ever tried to count the number of reasons
Gibbon gives (each one is a principal reason) for the cause of Roman
decline? His philosophy reminds me of Flaubert's hero, who observed that
if Napoleon had been content to remain a simple soldier in the barracks
at Marseilles, he might still be on the throne of France. If we really
accept Gibbon's view of history, I am not surprised that any one should
be nervous about the British Empire. The great intellectual idea of the
Roman dominion, arrested indeed by barbarian invasion, philosophically
never decayed. Some of it was embalmed in Byzantium--particularly its
artistic and literary sides; its religious forces were absorbed by the
Roman Church, as Hobbes pointed out in a very wonderful passage; its
humanism and polity became the common property of the European nations of
to-day. Gibbon's work should have been called 'The Rise and Progress of
Greco-Roman Civilisation.' That is not such a good title, but it would
have been more accurate. And if you compare critically the history of
any manifestation of the human intellect, religion, literature, painting,
architecture, or science, you will find that the development of one
expressive force has been momentarily arrested while some other
manifestation is asserting itself synchronously with the supposed decay
in a manifestation whose particular history you are studying. Always
regard the deductions of the historian with the same scepticism that you
regard the deductions of fiscal politicians.

Every one knows the charming books by writers more learned than I can
pretend to be, where the history of Italian art is traced from Giotto
downwards; the story of Giotto and the little lamb, now, alas! entirely
exploded; of Cimabue's Madonna being carried about in processions, and
now discovered to have been painted by some one else! Then on to
Massaccio through the delightful fifteenth century until you see in the
text-book in large print, like the flashes of harbour lights after a bad
Channel crossing, RAPHAEL, MICHAEL ANGELO, DA VINCI. But when you come
to the seventeenth century, Guido Reni, the Carracci, and other painters
(for the present moment out of fashion), painters whose work fetches
little at Christie's, the art critic and historian begin to snivel about
decay; not only of Italian art, but of the Italian