rather--or let it be. Tradition, in fact, has to do with art alone;
while with movements can be mixed up history, archæology, philosophy,
politics, geography, fashions, religion, and crime. So, by insisting on
the fact that Matisse, Cézanne, Poussin, Piero, and Giotto are all in
the tradition we insist on the fact that they are all artists. We rob
them of their amusing but adscititious qualities; we make them utterly
uninteresting to precisely 99.99 per cent. of our fellow-creatures; and
ourselves we make unpopular.

The tradition of art begins with the first artist that ever lived, and
will end with the last. Always it is being enriched or modified--never
is it exhausted. The earliest artists are driven to creation by an
irresistible desire to express themselves. Their over-bubbling minds
supply abundance of matter; difficulties begin when they try to express
it. Then it is they find themselves confronted by those terrible
limitations of the human mind, and by other limitations, only less
terrible, imposed by the medium in which they work. Every genuine
artist--every artist, that is, with something of his own to say--is
faced afresh by the problem, and must solve it for himself.
Nevertheless, each one who succeeds in creating an appropriate form for
his peculiar experience leaves in that form a record, and from the sum
of these records is deduced something, less definite far than a code,
by no means a pattern or recipe, which is yet a sign and a source of
half-conscious suggestion to those that follow. No artist can escape the
tradition of art except by refusing to grapple with the problem; which
is how most do escape it. The academic humbug uses the old language to
say nothing, the bombastic charlatan devises a new one for the same
purpose; but once a man has something to express, and the passion to
express it, he will find himself attacking the eternal problem and
leaning on the inevitable tradition. Let anyone who doubts this mention