little; but concerning
painting a great deal. And you desire to know, too, I see. The spirit is
willing, but the spirit probably does not know yet what lies in front
of it. You are groping--blind, childlike--without a hand to guard and
an authority to guide. That is merely to waste time. When you go back
to Italy, you must begin at the beginning, if you are in earnest--not at
the middle. Only ignorance measures art in terms of skill, for there are
no degrees in art. None has transcended Giotto, because technique and
draughtsmanship are accidents of time; they lie outside the soul of the
matter. Art is in fact a static thing. It changes as the face of the sea
changes, from hour to hour; but it does not progress. There are great
and small artists and great and small movements, as there are great and
small waves, brisk breezes and terrific tempests; but all are moulded
of like substance. In the one case art, in the other, the ocean, remains
unchanged. I shall plan your instruction for you, if you please,
and send you to the primitives first--the mighty ones who laid the
foundations. I lived five years at Siena--for love of the beginnings;
and you must also learn to love and reverence the beginnings, if you
would understand that light in the darkness men call the Renaissance."

He broke from Mary presently, strove to interest Sir Walter, and
succeeded.

"A benevolent autocracy is the ideal government, my friend--the ideal
of all supreme thinkers--a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a
Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they
cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the strong instantly look to
it that equality shall perish. And rightly so. Equality is a war cry
for fools--a negation of nature, an abortion. The very ants know better.
Doubtless you view with considerable distrust the growing spirit of
democracy, or what is called by that name?"

"I do," admitted Sir Walter.

"Your monarch and mine are a little bitten by this tarantula. I am
concerned for them. We must not pander to the mob's leaders, for they
are not, and never have been, the many-headed thing itself. They, not
the mob, are 'out to kill,' as you say. But that State will soon
perish that thinks to prosper under the rule of the proletariat. Such a
constitution would be opposed to natural law and, therefore, contain
the seeds of its own dissolution. And its death would be inconceivably
horrible; for the death of huge, coarse