Though lecturers still hold up the Renaissance as an example of the happy and stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when rebels were unknown, their pupils are aware that Giotto, the father of Renaissance painting, broke with the maniera greca at least as sharply as Cezanne did with the nineteenth-century convention; that in the art of the fifteenth century we have a revolt against Giottesque which must grievously have wounded many pious souls; and that Raphael himself stood, in his day, for a new movement.  But distance gives a sense of proportion.  We see the art of the Italian Renaissance whole, growing out of Byzantine and into French.  The continuity is patent; and, what is much to my purpose, it is Giotto and his successors rather than the artists of the Palaeologie who seem to us to carry on the Byzantine tradition, while the heirs of the Renaissance are not Salvator Rosa and Carlo Dolci, but Claude and Poussin.  The great artists stand out and join hands:  the contests that clashed around them, the little men that aped them, the littler that abused, have fallen into one ruin.  The odd thing is that, as often as not, the big men themselves have believed that it was the tradition, and not the stupid insensibility of their fellows, that thwarted them.  They have made the mistake their enemies made infallibly:  they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition.  For movements die; that is one of the respects in which they differ most significantly from the tradition.  The movement is a vein which is worked out; the tradition a live thing that changes, grows, and persists.  The artist with a new vision comes on the tradition at its near end, and finds its implements lying in a heap mixed with the fashions of the moribund movement.  He chooses; he changes; what happens next will depend a good deal on the state of public opinion.  Should the artist have the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an intelligent country his innovations may be accepted without undue hubbub.  In that case he will realize that artists can no more dispense with the tradition than tradition can exist without artists, and will probably come to feel an almost exaggerated reverence for the monuments of the past.  But should the public be dull and brutish, and hardening the dust of dead movements into what it is pleased to call “tradition,” pelt with that word the thing which above all others is to dull brutes disquieting—­I mean passionate conviction—­the artist, finding himself assailed in the name of tradition, will probably reply, “Damn the tradition.”  He will protest.  And, for an artist, to become a protestant is even worse than using bad language.