so that only certain forms in certain combinations will ever suggest
themselves to a given designer. Every writer's style, too, however
varied within limits, is single and monotonous compared with the ideal
possibilities of expression. Genius at every moment is confined to the
idiom it is creating.

[Sidenote: Inertia in appreciation.]

Social inertia is due to the same causes working in the community at
large. The fancy, for instance, of building churches in the shape of a
cross has largely determined Christian architecture. Builders were
prevented by a foregone suggestion in themselves and by their patrons'
demands from conceiving any alternative to that convention. Early
pottery, they say, imitates wicker-work, and painted landscape was for
ages not allowed to exist without figures, although even the old masters
show plainly enough in their backgrounds that they could love landscape
for its own sake. When one link with humanity has been rendered explicit
and familiar, people assume that by no other means can humanity be
touched at all; even if at the same time their own heart is expanding to
the highest raptures in a quite different region. The severer Greeks
reprobated music without words; Saint Augustine complained of chants
that rendered the sacred text unintelligible; the Puritans regarded
elaborate music as diabolical, little knowing how soon some of their
descendants would find religion in nothing else. A stupid convention
still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow
distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially
mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away;
whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among
natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so
safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is
not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the
action of an animal's limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it
to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal
prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh
perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational
decencies, make man's chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools'
heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and
start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an
infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet