it simply the
incommensurable emotion evoked by the genius of the painter or
sculptor? One need not be hyperaesthetic to experience something akin
to muffled pain when listening to certain pages of Tristan and Isolde,
or while submitting to the mystic ecstasy of Jan Van Eyck at Ghent.
The exquisite grace of the Praxiteles Hermes or the sweetness of life
we recognise in Donatello may invade the soul with messages of
melancholy, and not come as ministers of joy.

One can't study the masters too much--I mean, from the amateur's
view-point; in the case of an artist it depends on the receptivity of
his temperament. Velasquez didn't like Raphael, and it was Boucher who
warned Fragonard, when he went to Rome, not to take the Italian
painters too seriously. Imitation may be the sincerest form of
flattery, but it sometimes stifles individuality. I think it is
probably the belief that never again will this planet have another
golden age of painting and sculpture that arouses in me the melancholy
I mention. Music has passed its prime and is now entering the twilight
of perfections past for ever. So is it with the Seven Arts.
Nevertheless, there is no need of pessimism. Even if we could, it
would not be well to repeat the formulas of art accomplished, born as
they were of certain conditions, social as well as technical. Other
days, other plays. And that is the blight on all academic art.
"Traditional art," says Frank Rutter, "is the art of respectable
plagiarism," a slight variation on Paul Gauguin's more revolutionary
axiom. No fear of any artist being too original. "There is no isolated
truth," exclaimed Millet; but Constable wrote: "A good thing is never
done twice." Best of all, it was R. A. M. Stevenson who said in effect
that after studying Velasquez at the Prado he had modified his
opinions as to the originality of modern art. Let us admit that there
is no hope of ever rivalling the dead; yet a new beauty may be born, a
new vision, and with it necessarily new technical procedures. When I
say "new," I mean a new variation on the past. To-day the Chinese and
Assyrian are revived. It is the denial of these very obvious truths
that makes academic critics slightly ridiculous. They obstinately
refuse to see the sunlight on the canvases of the Impressionists
just as they deny the sincerity and power of the so-called
post-Impressionists. The transvaluation of critical values must
follow in the trail of revolutions.

It is a pity