energy. But as, in the grand progress of Art, these different stages
appeared successively, until, at the highest, all joined in one; so
also, in particulars, sound culture can spring up only where it has
unfolded itself regularly from the germ and root to the blossom.

The requirement that Art, like everything living, should commence from
the first rudiments, and, to renew its youth, constantly return
to them, may seem a hard doctrine to an age that has so often
been assured that it has only to take from works of Art already in
existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach
the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How
then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed?

Had the great founders of modern Art thought thus, we should never
have seen their miracles. Before them also stood the creations of the
ancients, round statues and works in relief, which they might have
transferred immediately to their canvas. But such an appropriation of
a Beauty not self-won, and therefore unintelligible, would not satisfy
an artistic instinct that aimed throughout at the fundamental, and
from which the Beautiful was again to create itself with free original
energy. They were not afraid, therefore, to appear simple, artless,
dry, beside those exalted ancients; nor to cherish Art for a long time
in the undistinguished bud, until the period of Grace had arrived.

Whence comes it that we still look upon these works of the older
masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of
reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the
faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their
serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect and admiration.

The same relation that they held to the ancients, the present
generation holds to them. Their time and ours are joined by no living
transmission, no link of continuous, organic growth; we must reproduce
Art in the way they did, but with energy of our own, in order to be
like them.

Even that Indian-summer of Art, at the end of the sixteenth and the
beginning of the seventeenth centuries, could call forth only a few
new blossoms on the old stem, but no productive germs, still less
plant a new tree of Art. But to set aside the works of perfected
Art, and to seek out its scanty and simple beginnings, as some have
desired, would be a new and perhaps greater mistake; it would be no
real return to the fundamenta