uch histories there always comes a point at
which artists cease to profit by the inventions of their predecessors.
After Michelangelo, perhaps after Beethoven, is the decadence. Then
suddenly there is talk of inspiration, or the lack of it. Mere
imitators appear, and the historian who reviles them does not see that
they have only practised, and refuted, his theory of art. They also have
had the luck to be born later; but it has been bad luck, not good, for
them, because to them their art has been all a matter of mechanical
invention, of professionalism.

The worst of it is that the greatest artists are apt themselves to fall
in love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanical
inventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo in
his "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professional
through all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he was
bored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he was
lazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could be
very earnestly professional; and as for Milton--consider this end of the
last speech of Manoah, in _Samson Agonistes_, where we expect a simple
cadence:--

The virgins also shall on feastful days
Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing
His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,
From whence captivity and loss of eyes

Milton was tempted into the jargon of these last two lines, which are
like a bad translation of a Greek play, by professionalism. He was
trying to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary speech as he could; he
was for the moment a slave to a tradition, and none the less a slave
because it was the tradition of his own past.

Professionalism is a device for making expression easy; and it is one
used by the greatest artists sometimes because their business is to be
always expressing themselves, and even they have not always something to
express. But expression is so difficult, even for those who have
something to express, that they must be always practising it if they are
ever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemy
of professionalism in poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses.
It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and his professionalism was
merely less accomplished than that of Milton or Spenser:--

Fair Ellen Irwin, when she sate
Upon