title, but it would have been more accurate.  And if you compare critically the history of any manifestation of the human intellect, religion, literature, painting, architecture, or science, you will find that the development of one expressive force has been momentarily arrested while some other manifestation is asserting itself synchronously with the supposed decay in a manifestation whose particular history you are studying.  Always regard the deductions of the historian with the same scepticism that you regard the deductions of fiscal politicians.

Every one knows the charming books by writers more learned than I can pretend to be, where the history of Italian art is traced from Giotto downwards; the story of Giotto and the little lamb, now, alas! entirely exploded; of Cimabue’s Madonna being carried about in processions, and now discovered to have been painted by some one else!  Then on to Massaccio through the delightful fifteenth century until you see in the text-book in large print, like the flashes of harbour lights after a bad Channel crossing, RAPHAEL, MICHAEL ANGELO, DA VINCI.  But when you come to the seventeenth century, Guido Reni, the Carracci, and other painters (for the present moment out of fashion), painters whose work fetches little at Christie’s, the art critic and historian begin to snivel about decay; not only of Italian art, but of the Italian peninsula; and their sobs will hardly ever allow them to get as far as Longhi, Piazetta, and Tiepolo, those great masters of the eighteenth century.

But we know, painters certainly must know if they look at old masters at all, that Tiepolo, if he was the last of the old masters, was also the first of the moderns; it was his painting in Spain which influenced Goya, and Goya is not only a deceased Spanish master, he is a European master of to-day.  You can trace his influence through all the great French figure-painters of the nineteenth century down to those of the New English Art Club, though they may not have actually known they were under his influence.  Painting commences with a childish naturalism, such as you see on the walls of pre-historic caves; that is why savages always prefer photographs to any work of art, and why photographers are always so savage about works of art.  Gradually this childish naturalism develops into decoration; it becomes stylistic.  The decoration becomes perfected and sterile; then there arises a more sophisticated generation, longing for naturalism, for pictorial vraisemblance, without the childishness of the cave pictures.  And their new art develops at the expense of decoration; it becomes perfect and sterile.  What is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development.  The exquisite art of Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debasement of Greco-Roman art.  It was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of exaggerated realism.  The same might have happened in Europe after the Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day;