ave a tooth for cheap sweet-meats.

Painting, outside Italy, was following more deliberately the road
indicated by architecture. In illuminated manuscripts it is easy to
watch the steady coarsening of line and colour. By the beginning of the
fourteenth century, Limoges enamels have fallen into that state of
damnation from which they have never attempted to rise. Of trans-Alpine
figuration after 1250 the less said the better. If in Italian painting
the slope is more gentle, that is partly because the spirit of the
Byzantine renaissance died harder there, partly because the descent was
broken by individual artists who rose superior to their circumstances.
But here, too, intellect is filling the void left by emotion; science
and culture are doing their work. By the year 1500 the stream of
inspiration had grown so alarmingly thin that there was only just
enough to turn the wheels of the men of genius. The minor artists seem
already prepared to resign themselves to the inevitable. Since we are no
longer artists who move, let us be craftsmen who astonish. 'Tis a fine
thing to tempt urchins with painted apples: that makes the people stare.
To be sure, such feats are rather beneath the descendants of Giotto; we
leave them to the Dutchmen, whom we envy a little all the same. We have
lost art; let us study the science of imitation. Here is a field for
learning and dexterity. And, as our patrons who have lost their
aesthetic perceptions have not lost all their senses, let us flatter
them with grateful objects: let our grapes and girls be as luscious as
lifelike. But the patrons are not all sensualists; some of them are
scholars. The trade in imitations of the antique is almost as good as
the trade in imitations of nature. Archaeology and connoisseurship,
those twin ticks on palsied art, are upon us. To react to form a man
needs sensibility; to know whether rules have been respected knowledge
of these rules alone is necessary. By the end of the fifteenth century
art is becoming a question of rules; appreciation a matter of
connoisseurship.

Literature is never pure art. Very little literature is a pure
expression of emotion; none, I think is an expression of pure inhuman
emotion. Most of it is concerned, to some extent, with facts and ideas:
it is intellectual. Therefore literature is a misleading guide to the
history of art. Its history is the history of literature; and it is a
good guide to the history of thought. Yet sometimes