implied a deeper and more vital change in the conception of art
itself. Till then men had believed the things they told in their art.
Byzantine saints, Cynewulf's Scriptural legends, German
_Heldenerzaehlungen_, Icelandic _Sagas_, down to the saints
and angels of the pre-Raphaelites, all represented realities to the
poet; he would have felt no interest in telling of things which he did
not believe to be true. But henceforward we have art for its own sake;
the truthfulness of the subject-matter is of no account; the sole
canon of art is beauty of form; its purpose not instruction but
pleasure.

I know no episode in the history of art that is more instructive than
the birth of the Italian opera. It was typically a product of the
Renaissance, but it came at the very end of that movement, when the
freshness of its early vigour was past, when learning had declined
into pedantry, and its graceful art was lost in _barocco_.

The period of Italian history known as the Renaissance is important
because it brought forth a greater number of geniuses of the highest
rank than ever existed together in any country before or since, except
perhaps in the great time of Athens. But in itself it was a falsehood.
It was an attempt to revive former _Italian_ greatness,
forgetting that the greatness of Italy had been exclusively military
and political, whereas the modern movement was literary and artistic.
It committed the blunder of confusing together under the term
"classic" two very different forms of culture, the Greek and the
Roman, very much as we now group Hindus, Moslems, and Chinamen
together as "Orientals." All that was really great in art was Greek,
but they were content to receive it through the tradition of the most
inartistic nation that ever lived. Far indeed were the Renaissance