e before his eyes on the
hillside, instantly longed to reproduce a thousand things that pleased
him. So, when he was already old enough to understand life and its
beauty, he was suddenly transported to the midst of it, just where it
was most beautiful; and because he instantly saw that his master's art
was unreal and far removed from truth, dead, as it were, and bound hand
and foot in the graveclothes of Byzantine tradition, his first impulse
was to wake the dead in a blaze of life. And this he did.

And after him, from time to time, when art seemed to be stiffening again
in the clumsy fingers of the little scholars of the great, there came a
true artist, like Giotto, who realized the sort of deathlike trance into
which art had fallen, and roused it suddenly to things undreamed
of--from Giotto to Titian. And each did all that he meant to do. But
afterwards came Tintoretto, who said that he would draw like
Michelangelo and paint like Titian; but he could not, though he made
beautiful things: and he was the first great artist who failed to go
farther than others had gone before him; and because art must either
advance or go backward, and no one could advance any more, it began to
go backward, and the degeneration set in.

About three hundred years elapsed between Giotto's birth and Titian's
death, during which the world changed from the rough state of the Middle
Age to a very high degree of civilization; and men's eyes grew tired of
what they saw all the time, while many of the strong types which had
made the change faded away. Men grew more alike, dress grew more alike,
thoughts grew more alike. It was the beginning of that overspreading
uniformity which we have in our time, which makes it so very easy for
any one man to be eccentric, but which makes it so very hard for any one
man to be really great. One might say that in those times humanity
flowed in very small channels, which a strong man of genius could thwart
and direct. But humanity now is a stream so broad that it is almost like
an ocean, in which all have similar being, and the big fish come to the
surface, and spout and blow and puff without having any influence at all
on the tide.

There was hardly any such thing possible as eccentricity in Giotto's
time. When the dress and manners and language of every little town
differed distinctly from those of the nearest village, every man dressed
as he pleased, behaved as he had been taught, and spoke the dialect of