Pope, and even now they make poetry seem an easy art to us, until we
try to write songs of innocence ourselves:--

When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.

"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,
Till the morning appears in the skies."

We call it artless, with still a hint of depreciation in the word, or at
least of wonder that we should be so moved by such simple means. It is a
kind of cottage-poetry, and has that beauty which in a cottage moves us
more than all the art of palaces. But we never learn the lesson of that
beauty because it seems to us so easily won; and so our arts are always
threatened by the decadence of professionalism. But poetry in England
has been a living art so long because it has had the power of freeing
itself from professionalism and choosing the better path with Mary and
with Ruth. The value of the Romantic movement lay, not in its escape to
the wonders of the past, but in its escape from professionalism and all
its self-imposed and easy difficulties. For it is much easier to write
professional verses in any style than to write songs of innocence; and
that is why professionalism in all the arts tempts all kinds of artists.
Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute for
expression, as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as a
forbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself seem unattractive, so
professionalism destroys men's natural delight in the arts. Like the
artist himself, his public becomes anxious, perverse, exacting; afraid
lest it shall admire the wrong thing, because it has lost the immediate
sense of the right thing. Just as it expects art to be difficult, so it
expects its own pleasure in art to be difficult; and thus we have
attained to our present notion about art which is like the Puritan
notion about virtue, that it is what no human being could possibly enjoy
by nature. And if we do enjoy it, "like a meadow gale in spring," it
cannot be good art.

But in painting as in poetry, all the new movements of value are escapes
from professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because they
seem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work of