Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved
sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris
of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out
of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters
play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks
he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto's beliefs, and correct
his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can
get Bunyan's or Shakespear's style without Bunyan's conviction or
Shakespear's apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split
his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their
collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or
anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn
the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art
is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who
sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century,
though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least
does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your
academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring
of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils
and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances
dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities.
And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who
have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to learn agree
with him emphatically.

I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study
the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public
capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will
find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible
copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light