lous skill, we can give them all they
ask without forestalling the photographers. But we are not recounters
all, for some of our patrons are poets. To them the visible Universe is
suggestive of moods or, at any rate, sympathetic with them. These value
objects for their association with the fun and folly and romance of
life. For them, too, we paint pictures, and in their pictures we lend
Nature enough humanity to make her interesting. My lord is lascivious?
Correggio will give him a background to his mood. My lord is majestic?
Michelangelo will tell him that man is, indeed, a noble animal whose
muscles wriggle heroically as watch-springs. The sixteenth century
produced a race of artists peculiar in their feeling for material
beauty, but normal, coming as they do at the foot of the hills, in their
technical proficiency and aesthetic indigence. Craft holds the candle
that betrays the bareness of the cupboard. The aesthetic significance of
form is feebly and impurely felt, the power of creating it is lost
almost; but finer descriptions have rarely been painted. They knew how
to paint in the sixteenth century: as for the primitives--God bless
them--they did their best: what more could they do when they couldn't
even round a lady's thighs?

The Renaissance was a re-birth of other things besides a taste for round
limbs and the science of representing them; we begin to hear again of
two diseases, endemic in imperial Rome, from which a lively and vigorous
society keeps itself tolerably free--Rarity-hunting and Expertise. These
parasites can get no hold on a healthy body; it is on dead and dying
matter that they batten and grow fat. The passion to possess what is
scarce, and nothing else, is a disease that develops as civilisation
grows old and dogs it to the grave: it is saprophytic. The rarity-hunter
may be called a "collector" if by "collector" you do not mean one who
buys what pleases or moves him. Certainly, such an one is unworthy of
the name; he lacks the true magpie instinct. To the true collector the
intrinsic value of a work of art is irrelevant; the reasons for which he
prizes a picture are those for which a philatelist prizes a
postage-stamp. To him the question "Does this move me?" is ludicrous:
the question "Is it beautiful?"--otiose. Though by the very tasteful
collector of stamps or works of art beauty is allowed to be a fair jewel
in the crown of rarity, he would have us understand from the first that
the value i