quickly the name of some artist who owes nothing to his predecessors.

Often, however, owing either to some change in circumstances or to his
innate peculiarity, a man of uncommon force and imagination will find
himself with something to say for which the traditional instrument is,
or at first seems to be, inadequate. What shall he do? Why, what Giotto
did, what Masaccio did, what Ronsard and the poets of the Pléiade did,
what Wordsworth did, and what Cézanne has done. All these great artists
struck new veins, and to work them were obliged to overhaul the
tool-chest. Of the traditional instruments some they reshaped and
resharpened, some they twisted out of recognition, a few they discarded,
many they retained. Above all, they travelled back along the tradition,
tapping it and drawing inspiration from it, nearer to its source. Very
rarely does the pioneer himself work out his seam: he leaves it to
successors along with his technical discoveries. These they develop,
themselves making experiments as they go forward, till of the heritage
to which they succeeded they have left nothing--nothing but a fashion to
be flouted by the next great original genius who shall rise. Such is
the shape of a movement. A master, whose sole business it is to express
himself, founds it incidentally, just as incidentally he enriches
the tradition from which he borrows; successors exploit it; pious
great-grand-nephews mummify and adore it. Movements are nothing but the
stuff of which tradition is made. At any given moment tradition ends in
the contemporary movement; the capital works of any age are almost sure
to be capital examples of that movement; but a hundred years later, when
these are clear-set in the tradition, the movement will have become dust
and ashes--the daily bread of historians and archæologists.

Though lecturers still hold up the Renaissance as an example of the
happy and stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when rebels were