etting to know,
getting to _feel_, any school of painting, is the gallery, and the
best, perhaps, the fields: the fields (or in the case of the
Venetians, largely the waters), to which, with their qualities of air,
of light, their whole train of sensations and moods, the artistic
temperament, and the special artistic temperament of a local school,
can very probably be traced.

For to appreciate any kind of art means, after all, not to understand
its relations with other kinds of art, but to feel its relations with
ourselves. It is a matter of living, thanks to that art, according to
the spiritual and organic modes of which it is an expression. Now, to
go from room to room of a gallery, allowing oneself to be played upon
by very various kinds of art, is to prevent the formation of any
definite mood, and to set up what is most hostile to all mood, to all
unity of being: comparison, analysis, classification. You may know
quite exactly the difference between Giotto and Simon Martini, between
a Ferrarese and a Venetian, between Praxiteles and Scopas; and yet be
ignorant of the meaning which any of these might have in your life,
and unconscious of the changes they might work in your being. And
this, I fear, is often the case with connoisseurs and archaeologists,
accounting for the latent suspicion of the ignoramus and the good
philistine, that such persons are somehow none the better for their
intercourse with art.

All art which is organic, short of which it cannot be efficient,
depends upon tradition. To say so sounds a truism, because we rarely
realise all that tradition implies: on the side of the artist, _what
to do_, and on the side of his public, _how to feel_: a habit, an
expectation which accumulates the results of individual creative
genius and individual appreciative sensibility, giving to each its
greatest efficacy. When one remembers, in individual instances--Kant,
Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart--how very little which is absolutely
new, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks,
after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seems
quite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on or
listener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similar
sequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding and
enjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to us; and,
while we expatiate on the creative originality of artists and poets,
we dully take for grant