individuality is crushed by the machinery of education in order that all
men may think alike, favours the growth of science alone; and scientific
men have the least individuality of all men who become great, because
science is not creative like art and literature, nor destructive like
soldiering, but inquisitive, inventive and speculative in the first
place, and secondly, in our age, financial. In old times, when a
discovery was made, men asked, 'What does it mean? To what will it
lead?' Now, the first question is, 'What will it be worth?' That does
not detract from the merit of science, but it shows the general tendency
of men's thoughts. And it explains two things, namely, why there are no
artists like Michelangelo nor literary men like Shakespeare in our
times--and why the majority of such artists and literary men as we have
are what is commonly called reactionaries, men who would prefer to go
back a century or two, and who like to live in out-of-the-way places in
old countries, as Landor lived in Florence, Browning in Venice,
Stevenson in Samoa, Liszt in Rome,--besides a host of painters and
sculptors, who have exiled themselves voluntarily for life in Italy and
France. The whole tendency of the modern world is scientific and
financial, and the world is ruled by financiers and led by a financial
society which honours neither art nor literature, but looks upon both as
amusements which it can afford to buy, and which it is fashionable to
cultivate, but which must never for a moment be considered as equal in
importance to the pursuit of money for its own sake.

It was the great scope for individuality, the great prizes to be won by
individuality, the honour paid to individuality, that helped the early
painters to their high success. It was the abundance of material,
hitherto never used in art, the variety of that material, in an age when
variety was the rule and not the exception, it was the richness of that
material, not in quantity and variety only, but in individual quality,
that made early paintings what we see. It was their genuine and true
love of beauty, and of nature and of the eternal relations between
nature and beauty, that made those men great artists. It was the
hampering of individuality, the exhaustion and disappearance of material
and the degeneration of a love of beauty to a love of effect, that put
an end to the great artistic cycle in Italy, and soon afterwards in the
rest of the world, with Rembran