“But at least they have escaped, and have their holiday in heaven, and do not care one straw for our praise or blame.  They did their work, they and the great masters.  We call them old Masters, but they were new in their time; their old Masters were the Greeks.  They broke away from the Greeks and revolutionised art into a new life.  In our turn we must break away from them.”

And now glides in the theory.  “When Greek art reached its perfection, the limbs which infer the soul, and enough of the soul to inform the limbs, were faultlessly represented.  Men said the best had been done, and aspiration and growth in art ceased.  Content with what had been done, men imitated, but did not create.  But man cannot remain without change in a past perfection; for then he remains in a kind of death.  Even with failure, with faulty work, he desires to make new things, and in making, to be alive and feel his life.  Therefore Giotto and the rest began to create a fresh aspect of humanity, which, however imperfect in form, would suggest an infinite perfection.  The Greek perfection ties us down to earth, to a few forms, and the sooner, if it forbid us to go on, we reject its ideal as the only one, the better for art and for mankind.

    ’Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven—­
      The better!  What’s come to perfection perishes. 
    Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven: 
      Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.

“The great Campanile is still unfinished;” so he shapes his thoughts into his scenery.  Shall man be satisfied in art with the crystallised joy of Apollo, or the petrified grief of Niobe, when there are a million more expressions of joy and grief to render?  In that way felt Giotto and his crew.  “We will paint the whole of man,” they cried, “paint his new hopes and joys and pains, and never pause, because we shall never quite succeed.  We will paint the soul in all its infinite variety—­bring the invisible full into play.  Of course we shall miss perfection—­who can get side by side with infinitude?—­but we shall grow out of the dead perfection of the past, and live and move, and have our being.

    Let the visible go to the dogs—­what matters?”

Thus art began again.  Its spring-tide came, dim and dewy; and the world rejoiced.

And that is what has happened again and again in the history of art.  Browning has painted a universal truth.  It was that which took place when Wordsworth, throwing away the traditions of a century and all the finished perfection, as men thought, of the Augustan age, determined to write of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with the infinite variety of human nature, and in its natural simplicities.  What we shall see, he thought, may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect.  What we shall write will not have the conventional perfection of Pope and Gray, which all the cultivated world admires, and in which it rests