unknown, their pupils are aware that Giotto, the father of Renaissance
painting, broke with the _maniera greca_ at least as sharply as Cézanne
did with the nineteenth-century convention; that in the art of the
fifteenth century we have a revolt against Giottesque which must
grievously have wounded many pious souls; and that Raphael himself
stood, in his day, for a new movement. But distance gives a sense of
proportion. We see the art of the Italian Renaissance whole, growing out
of Byzantine and into French. The continuity is patent; and, what is
much to my purpose, it is Giotto and his successors rather than the
artists of the Palaeologie who seem to us to carry on the Byzantine
tradition, while the heirs of the Renaissance are not Salvator Rosa and
Carlo Dolci, but Claude and Poussin. The great artists stand out and
join hands: the contests that clashed around them, the little men that
aped them, the littler that abused, have fallen into one ruin. The odd
thing is that, as often as not, the big men themselves have believed
that it was the tradition, and not the stupid insensibility of their
fellows, that thwarted them. They have made the mistake their enemies
made infallibly: they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition.
For movements die; that is one of the respects in which they differ most
significantly from the tradition. The movement is a vein which is worked
out; the tradition a live thing that changes, grows, and persists. The
artist with a new vision comes on the tradition at its near end, and
finds its implements lying in a heap mixed with the fashions of the
moribund movement. He chooses; he changes; what happens next will depend
a good deal on the state of public opinion. Should the artist have
the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an intelligent country his
innovations may be accepted without undue hubbub. In that case he will
realize that artists can no more dispense with the tradition than
tradition can exist without artists, and will probably come to feel an
almost exaggerated reverence for the monuments of the past. But should