f deception and of sin; whereas,
as none of us expect to see the heavens open above us, there is no
possibility of deception, and consequently no sin in Correggio's glory
of angels in the Parma Cathedral; thus absolving on the score of
morality a rather confused and sprawling composition, and condemning as
immoral one of the most graceful and childlike works of the Renaissance.
The result of this system of explaining all artistic phenomena by
ethical causes is, as we have remarked, that the real cause of any
phenomenon, the explanation afforded us by history, is entirely
overlooked or even ignominiously rejected. Thus Ruskin attributes the
decay of Gothic architecture to "one endeavour to assume, in excessive
flimsiness of tracery, the semblance of what it was not"--to its having
"sacrificed a single truth." Now the violation of the nature and
possibilities of the material, what Ruskin in ethical language calls
the endeavour to trick, was not the cause but the effect of a gradual
decline in the art. The lace work of 15th century Gothic is not a
_lie_, it is an effete form. The perfect forms had been obtained, and as
the growth of the art could not be checked, imperfect ones naturally
succeeded them; the workman had hewn enough, had diminished the stone
surfaces sufficiently, had carved the leafage as much as was compatible
with beauty; the succeeding generations of workmen continued to work,
and what happened? They hewed away too much, they diminished the stone
surface too much, they carved the leafage too deep, each generation
cutting away more and more, until the whole fabric had reached such a
degree of flimsiness that, had not the Renaissance swept its cobwebs
away, they would have been torn to shreds by the Gothic artists
themselves. An art corrupts and dies of its own vital principles, as
does every other living and changing thing, as a flower withers of its
own life: you begin by chipping, you end, as in Gothic architecture,
by chipping into nothingness. You begin with grouping: you end with
grouping, like Michelangiolo and Parmegianno, into knots and lumps;
you begin by raising your figures out of the background: you end, like
Ghiberti, by tying them on with the narrowest slip of bronze; you begin
with modulating: you end, like Raff, Brahms, and other Wagnerists, by
modulating into chaos. Art, if it lives, must grow, and if it grows it
must grow old and die. And this fact gradually, though instinctively,
beginnin