full into play. Of course we shall miss perfection--who can
get side by side with infinitude?--but we shall grow out of the dead
perfection of the past, and live and move, and have our being.

Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?"

Thus art began again. Its spring-tide came, dim and dewy; and the world
rejoiced.

And that is what has happened again and again in the history of art.
Browning has painted a universal truth. It was that which took place
when Wordsworth, throwing away the traditions of a century and all the
finished perfection, as men thought, of the Augustan age, determined to
write of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with the infinite
variety of human nature, and in its natural simplicities. What we shall
see, he thought, may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect. What we
shall write will not have the conventional perfection of Pope and Gray,
which all the cultivated world admires, and in which it rests
content--growth and movement dead--but it will be true, natural, alive,
running onwards to a far-off goal. And we who write--our loins are
accinct, our lights burning, as men waiting for the revelation of the
Bridegroom. Wordsworth brought back the soul to Poetry. She made her
failures, but she was alive. Spring was blossoming around her with dews
and living airs, and the infinite opened before her.

So, too, it was when Turner recreated landscape art. There was the
perfect Claudesque landscape, with all its parts arranged, its colours
chosen, the composition balanced, the tree here, the river there, the
figures in the foreground, the accurate distribution and gradation of
the masses of light and shade. "There," the critics said, "we have had
perfection. Let us rest in that." And all growth in landscape-art
ceased. Then came Turner, who, when he had followed the old for a time
and got its good, broke away from it, as if in laughter. "What," he
felt, "the infinite of nature is before me; inconceivable change and
variety in earth, and sky, and sea--and shall I be tied down to one form
of painting landscape, one arrangement of artistic properties? Let the
old perfection go." And we had our revolution in landscape art: nothing,
perhaps, so faultless as Claude's composition, but life, love of nature,
and an illimitable range; incessant change, movement, and aspiration
which have never since allowed the landscape artist to think that he has
attained.

On another side of the art of painting