entirely neglectful of the accepted forms of the theater of his own
time--accepted forms of which Shakspere and Molière would have availed
themselves instinctively. It was not Browning, but Whitman--and Whitman
in 1855, when the bard of Manhattan had not yet shown the stuff that
was in him--that Lowell had in mind in the letter where he says "when a
man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously
unoriginal.... The great fellows have always let the stream of their
activity flow quietly."

What is true of the poets is true also of the painters; and Lowell, who
did not lose his Yankee shrewdness in the galleries of Italy, saw this
also and phrased it happily in another of his letters. "The great merit,
it seems to me, of the old painters was that they did not try to be
original." The old painters were following in the footsteps of painters
still older, from whom they received the accepted formulas for
representing the subjects most likely to be ordered by customers. These
accepted formulas representing the Annunciation, for instance, the
Disputing in the Temple, the Crucifixion even, were passed down from one
generation of artists to another; and in each successive generation the
greatest painter was generally he who had no strong desire to be
different from his fellows, and who was quite willing to express himself
in the patterns which were then accepted traditions of his craft. To a
student of the work of the generation that went before, there is often
little or no invention in some of the mightiest masterpieces of
painting, however much imagination there may be. The painters who
wrought these masterpieces were only doing what their immediate
predecessors had been doing, the same thing more or less in the same
way--but with infinitely more insight, power, and inspiration. As
Professor Butcher has put it tersely, "the creative art of genius does
not consist in bringing something out of nothing, but in taking