The tradition of art begins with the first artist that ever lived, and will end with the last.  Always it is being enriched or modified—­never is it exhausted.  The earliest artists are driven to creation by an irresistible desire to express themselves.  Their over-bubbling minds supply abundance of matter; difficulties begin when they try to express it.  Then it is they find themselves confronted by those terrible limitations of the human mind, and by other limitations, only less terrible, imposed by the medium in which they work.  Every genuine artist—­every artist, that is, with something of his own to say—­is faced afresh by the problem, and must solve it for himself.  Nevertheless, each one who succeeds in creating an appropriate form for his peculiar experience leaves in that form a record, and from the sum of these records is deduced something, less definite far than a code, by no means a pattern or recipe, which is yet a sign and a source of half-conscious suggestion to those that follow.  No artist can escape the tradition of art except by refusing to grapple with the problem; which is how most do escape it.  The academic humbug uses the old language to say nothing, the bombastic charlatan devises a new one for the same purpose; but once a man has something to express, and the passion to express it, he will find himself attacking the eternal problem and leaning on the inevitable tradition.  Let anyone who doubts this mention quickly the name of some artist who owes nothing to his predecessors.

Often, however, owing either to some change in circumstances or to his innate peculiarity, a man of uncommon force and imagination will find himself with something to say for which the traditional instrument is, or at first seems to be, inadequate.  What shall he do?  Why, what Giotto did, what Masaccio did, what Ronsard and the poets of the Pleiade did, what Wordsworth did, and what Cezanne has done.  All these great artists struck new veins, and to work them were obliged to overhaul the tool-chest.  Of the traditional instruments some they reshaped and resharpened, some they twisted out of recognition, a few they discarded, many they retained.  Above all, they travelled back along the tradition, tapping it and drawing inspiration from it, nearer to its source.  Very rarely does the pioneer himself work out his seam:  he leaves it to successors along with his technical discoveries.  These they develop, themselves making experiments as they go forward, till of the heritage to which they succeeded they have left nothing—­nothing but a fashion to be flouted by the next great original genius who shall rise.  Such is the shape of a movement.  A master, whose sole business it is to express himself, founds it incidentally, just as incidentally he enriches the tradition from which he borrows; successors exploit it; pious great-grand-nephews mummify and adore it.  Movements are nothing but the stuff of which tradition is made.  At any given moment tradition ends in the contemporary movement; the capital works of any age are almost sure to be capital examples of that movement; but a hundred years later, when these are clear-set in the tradition, the movement will have become dust and ashes—­the daily bread of historians and archaeologists.