d colour capable of turning out such ridiculous daubs
as those that decorate this tawdry church on the Ligurian hilltop.

We English, in short, think of it all the wrong way uppermost. We think
of it topsy-turvy, beginning at the end, while evolution invariably
begins at the beginning. The Raphaels and Andreas, to put it in brief,
were the final flower and fullest outcome of whole races of church
decorators in infantile fresco.

Everywhere you go in Italy, this truth is forced upon your attention
even to the present day. Art here is no exotic. It smacks of the soil;
it springs spontaneous, like a weed; it burgeons of itself out of the
heart of the people. Not high art, understand well; not the art of
Burne-Jones and Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes and Sar Peladan.
Commonplace everyday art, that is a trade and a handicraft, like the
joiner's or the shoemaker's. Look up at your ceiling; it's overrun with
festoons of crude red and blue flowers, or it's covered with cupids and
graces, or it bristles with arabesques and unmeaning phantasies. Every
wall is painted; every grotto decorated. Sham landscapes, sham loggias,
sham parapets are everywhere. The sham windows themselves are provided,
not only with sham blinds and sham curtains, but even with sham
coquettes making sham eyes or waving sham handkerchiefs at passers-by
below them. Open-air fresco painting is still a living art, an art
practised by hundreds and thousands of craftsmen, an art as alive as
cookery or weaving. The Italian decorates everything; his pottery, his
house, his church, his walls, his palaces. And the only difference he
feels between the various cases is, that in some of them a higher type
of art is demanded by wealth and skill than in the others. No wonder,
therefore, he blossomed out at last into Michael Angelo's frescoes in
the Sistine Chapel!

To us English, on the contrary, high art is something exotic, separate,
alone, _sui generis_. We never think of the plaster star in the middle
of our ceiling as belonging even to the same range of ideas as, say, the
frescoes in the Houses of Parliament.

A nation in such a condition as that is never truly artistic. The artist
with us, even now, is an exceptional product. Art for a long time in
England had nothing at all to do with the life of the people. It was a
luxury for the rich, a curious thing for ladies' and gentlemen's
consumption, as purely artificial as the stuccoed Italian villa in which
they in