of an old
instrument, Wagner revealed the limitations of literary music. As the
twentieth century dawns, a question, which up to the time of the French
Revolution had been judiciously kept academic, shoulders its way into
politics: "Why is this good?" About the same time, thanks chiefly to the
Aesthetes and the French Impressionists, an aesthetic conscience,
dormant since before the days of the Renaissance, wakes and begins to
cry, "Is this art?"

It is amusing to remember that the first concerted clamour against the
Renaissance and its florid sequelae arose in England; for the Romantic
movement, which was as much French and German as English, was merely a
reaction from the classicism of the eighteenth century, and hardly
attacked, much less threw off, the dominant tyranny. We have a right to
rejoice in the Pre-Raffaelite movement as an instance of England's
unquestioned supremacy in independence and unconventionality of thought.
Depression begins when we have to admit that the revolt led to nothing
but a great many bad pictures and a little thin sentiment. The
Pre-Raffaelites were men of taste who felt the commonness of the High
Renaissance and the distinction of what they called Primitive Art, by
which they meant the art of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. They
saw that, since the Renaissance, painters had been trying to do
something different from what the primitives had done; but for the life
of them they could not see what it was that the primitives did. They had
the taste to prefer Giotto to Raffael, but the only genuine reason they
could give for their preference was that they felt Raffael to be vulgar.
The reason was good, but not fundamental; so they set about inventing
others. They discovered in the primitives scrupulous fidelity to nature,
superior piety, chaste lives. How far they were from guessing the
secret of primitive art appeared when they began to paint pictures
themselves. The secret of primitive art is the secret of all art, at all
times, in all places--sensibility to the profound significance of form
and the power of creation. The band of happy brothers lacked both; so
perhaps it is not surprising that they should have found in acts of
piety, in legends and symbols, the material, and in sound churchmanship
the very essence, of mediaeval art. For their own inspiration they
looked to the past instead of looking about them. Instead of diving for
truth they sought it on the surface. The fact is