pupil, makes us alive to the special qualities which
can delight us. As long as we looked in a manner so slovenly that a
spurious Botticelli could pass for a genuine one, we could evidently
never benefit by the special quality, the additional excellence of
Botticelli's own work. And similarly in the case of archaeology. Indeed,
in the few cases where I have myself hazarded an hypothesis on some
point of artistic history, as, for instance, regarding the respective
origin of antique and mediaeval sculpture, I am inclined to think that
the chief use (if any at all) of my work, will be to make my readers
more sensitive to the specific pleasure they may get from Praxiteles or
from Mino da Fiesole, than they could have been when the works of both
were so little understood as to be judged by one another's standards.

But to return. It seems as if at present the development, the contagion,
so to speak, of scientific methods applied to art were making people
forget a little that art, besides being, like everything else, the
passive object of scientific treatment, is (what most other things
are not) an active, positive, special factor of pleasure; and that,
therefore, save to special students, the greater, more efficacious form
of art should occupy an immensely larger share of attention than the
lesser and more inefficient. We are made, nowadays, to look at too much
mediocre art on the score of its historical value; we are kept too long
in contemplation of pictures and statues which cannot give much pleasure,
on the score that they led to or proceeded from other pictures or statues
which can.

As regards Greek sculpture, the insistance on archaic forms is becoming,
if I may express my own feelings, a perfect bore. Why should we be kept
in the kitchen tasting half-cooked stuff out of ladles, when most of
us have barely time to eat our fully cooked dinner, which we like
and thrive on, in peace? Similarly with such painters as are mainly
precursors. They are taking up too much of our attention; and one might
sometimes be tempted to think that the only use of great artists, like
the only functions of those patriarchs who kept begetting one another,
was to produce other great artists: Giotto to produce eventually Masaccio,
Masaccio through various generations Michelangelo and Raphael, and
Michelangelo and Raphael, through even more, Manet and Degas, who in
their turn doubtless dutifully.... Meanwhile why should art have gone
on evol