along with his technical discoveries. These they develop,
themselves making experiments as they go forward, till of the heritage
to which they succeeded they have left nothing--nothing but a fashion to
be flouted by the next great original genius who shall rise. Such is
the shape of a movement. A master, whose sole business it is to express
himself, founds it incidentally, just as incidentally he enriches
the tradition from which he borrows; successors exploit it; pious
great-grand-nephews mummify and adore it. Movements are nothing but the
stuff of which tradition is made. At any given moment tradition ends in
the contemporary movement; the capital works of any age are almost sure
to be capital examples of that movement; but a hundred years later, when
these are clear-set in the tradition, the movement will have become dust
and ashes--the daily bread of historians and archaeologists.

Though lecturers still hold up the Renaissance as an example of the
happy and stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when rebels were
unknown, their pupils are aware that Giotto, the father of Renaissance
painting, broke with the _maniera greca_ at least as sharply as Cezanne
did with the nineteenth-century convention; that in the art of the
fifteenth century we have a revolt against Giottesque which must
grievously have wounded many pious souls; and that Raphael himself
stood, in his day, for a new movement. But distance gives a sense of
proportion. We see the art of the Italian Renaissance whole, growing out
of Byzantine and into French. The continuity is patent; and, what is
much to my purpose, it is Giotto and his successors rather than the
artists of the Palaeologie who seem to us to carry on the Byzantine
tradition, while the heirs of the Renaissance are not Salvator Rosa and
Carlo Dolci, but Claude and Poussin. The great artists stand out and
join hands: the contests that clashed around them, the little men that
aped them, the littler that abused, have fallen into one ruin. The odd
thing is that, as often as not, the big men themselves have believed
that it was the tradition, and not the stupid insensibility of their
fellows, that thwarted them. They have made the mistake their enemies
made infallibly: they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition.
For movements die; that is one of the respects in which they differ most
significantly from the tradition. The movement is a vein which is worked
out; the tradition a live thin