model by del Mazo, the great ones who guide us and teach the people to love art will see to it, I trust, that the picture is moved to a position befitting its mediocrity.  It is this unholy alliance between Expertise and Officialdom[18] that squanders twenty thousand on an unimpeachable Frans Hals, and forty thousand on a Mabuse for which no minor artist will wish to take credit.[19] For the money a judicious purchaser could have made one of the finest collections in England.  The unholy alliance has no use for contemporary art.  The supply is considerable and the names are not historic.  Snobbery makes acceptable the portrait of a great lady, though it be by Boldini; and even Mr. Lavery may be welcome if he come with the picture of a king.  But how are our ediles to know whether a picture of a commoner, or of some inanimate and undistinguished object, by Degas or Cezanne is good or bad?  They need not know whether a picture by Hals is good; they need only know that it is by Hals.

I will not describe in any detail the end of the slope, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.  The seventeenth century is rich in individual geniuses; but they are individual.  The level of art is very low.  The big names of El Greco, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Vermeer, Rubens, Jordaens, Poussin, and Claude, Wren and Bernini (as architects) stand out; had they lived in the eleventh century they might all have been lost in a crowd of anonymous equals.  Rembrandt, indeed, perhaps the greatest genius of them all, is a typical ruin of his age.  For, except in a few of his later works, his sense of form and design is utterly lost in a mess of rhetoric, romance, and chiaroscuro.  It is difficult to forgive the seventeenth century for what it made of Rembrandt’s genius.  One great advantage over its predecessor it did enjoy:  the seventeenth century had ceased to believe sincerely in the ideas of the Classical Renaissance.  Painters could not devote themselves to suggesting the irrelevant emotions of life because they did not feel them.[20] For lack of human emotion they were driven back on art.  They talked a great deal about Magnanimity and Nobility, but they thought more of Composition.  For instance, in the best works of Nicolas Poussin, the greatest artist of the age, you will notice that the human figure is treated as a shape cut out of coloured paper to be pinned on as the composition directs.  That is the right way to treat the human figure; the mistake lay in making these shapes retain the characteristic gestures of Classical rhetoric.  In much the same way Claude treats temples and palaces, trees, mountains, harbours and lakes, as you may see in his superb pictures at the National Gallery.  There they hang, beside the Turners, that all the world may see the difference between a great artist and an after-dinner poet.  Turner was so much excited by his observations and his sentiments that he set them all down without even trying to co-ordinate them in a work of art:  clearly he could not have done so in any case.  That was a cheap and spiteful thought that prompted the clause wherein it is decreed that his pictures shall hang for ever beside those of Claude.  He wished to call attention to a difference and he has succeeded beyond his expectations:  curses, like hens, come home to roost.