account for our feelings. The subtlest and most potent half of the
spell is hidden; and we guess it only little by little. In this little
Grecian tabernacle, every line save the bare verticals and horizontals
is a line suggestive of trickling and flowing and bubbles; a line
suggested by water and water's movement; and every light and shadow is
a light or a shadow suggested by water's brightness or transparent
gloom; it is water which winds in tiny meanders of pattern along the
shallow shining pillars, and water which beads and dimples along the
shady cornice. The fountain has been thought out in longing for water,
and every detail of it has been touched by the memory thereof. Water!
they wanted water, and they should have it. By a coincidence almost,
Giovanni della Robbia has revealed the secret which himself most
probably never guessed, in the little landscape of lilac and bluish
tiles with which he filled up the arch behind the taps. Some Tuscan
scene, think you? Hills and a few cypresses, such as his
contemporaries used for background? Not a bit. A great lake, an
estuary, almost a sea, with sailing ships, a flooded country, such as
no Florentine had ever seen with mortal eyes; but such as, in his
longing for water, he must have dreamed about. Thus the landscape sums
up this dream, this realisation of every cool and trickling sight and
touch and sound which fills that sacristy as with a spray of watery
thoughts. In this manner, with perhaps but a small effort of invention
and a small output of fancy, and without departing in the least from
the general proportions and shapes and ornaments common in his day,
has an artist of the second order left us one of the most exquisitely
shapely and poetical of works, merely by following the suggestions of
the use, the place, the religious message and that humble human wish
for water where there was none.

VII.

It is discouraging and humiliating to think (and therefore we think it
very seldom) that nowadays we artists, painters of portraits and
landscapes, builders and decorators of houses, pianists, singers,
fiddlers, and, quite as really though less obviously, writers, are all
of us indirectly helping to keep up the greed which makes the
privileged and possessing classes cling to their monopolies and
accumulate their possessions. Bitter to realise that, disinterested as
we must mostly be (for good artistic work means talent, talent
preference, and preference disinterested