the grand manner.  Remember, we are not Dutchmen.  Therefore let all your figures suggest the appropriate emotion by means of the appropriate gesture—­the gesture consecrated by the great tradition.  Straining limbs, looks of love, hate, envy, fear and horror, up-turned or downcast eyes, hands outstretched or clasped in despair—­by means of our marvellous machinery, and still more marvellous skill, we can give them all they ask without forestalling the photographers.  But we are not recounters all, for some of our patrons are poets.  To them the visible Universe is suggestive of moods or, at any rate, sympathetic with them.  These value objects for their association with the fun and folly and romance of life.  For them, too, we paint pictures, and in their pictures we lend Nature enough humanity to make her interesting.  My lord is lascivious?  Correggio will give him a background to his mood.  My lord is majestic?  Michelangelo will tell him that man is, indeed, a noble animal whose muscles wriggle heroically as watch-springs.  The sixteenth century produced a race of artists peculiar in their feeling for material beauty, but normal, coming as they do at the foot of the hills, in their technical proficiency and aesthetic indigence.  Craft holds the candle that betrays the bareness of the cupboard.  The aesthetic significance of form is feebly and impurely felt, the power of creating it is lost almost; but finer descriptions have rarely been painted.  They knew how to paint in the sixteenth century:  as for the primitives—­God bless them—­they did their best:  what more could they do when they couldn’t even round a lady’s thighs?

The Renaissance was a re-birth of other things besides a taste for round limbs and the science of representing them; we begin to hear again of two diseases, endemic in imperial Rome, from which a lively and vigorous society keeps itself tolerably free—­Rarity-hunting and Expertise.  These parasites can get no hold on a healthy body; it is on dead and dying matter that they batten and grow fat.  The passion to possess what is scarce, and nothing else, is a disease that develops as civilisation grows old and dogs it to the grave:  it is saprophytic.  The rarity-hunter may be called a “collector” if by “collector” you do not mean one who buys what pleases or moves him.  Certainly, such an one is unworthy of the name; he lacks the true magpie instinct.  To the true collector the intrinsic value of a work of art is irrelevant; the reasons for which he prizes a picture are those for which a philatelist prizes a postage-stamp.  To him the question “Does this move me?” is ludicrous:  the question “Is it beautiful?”—­otiose.  Though by the very tasteful collector of stamps or works of art beauty is allowed to be a fair jewel in the crown of rarity, he would have us understand from the first that the value it gives is purely adventitious and depends for its existence on rarity.  No rarity, no beauty.  As for the profounder aesthetic significance,