best fruit of
a thousand years of human travail; it gapes and shrugs over them, and
pushes its way past them to the door.

281. But there is one feeling that is always distinct; however jaded and
languid we may be in all other pleasures, we are never languid in
vanity, and we would still paint and carve for fame. What other motive
have the nations of Europe to-day? If they wanted art for art's sake
they would take care of what they have already got. But at this instant
the two noblest pictures in Venice are lying rolled up in outhouses, and
the noblest portrait of Titian in existence is hung forty feet from the
ground. We have absolutely no motive but vanity and the love of
money--no others, as nations, than these, whatever we may have as
individuals. And as the thirst of vanity thus increases, so the
temptation to it. There was no fame of artists in these archaic days.
Every year, every hour, saw someone rise to surpass what had been done
before. And there was always better work to be done, but never any
credit to be got by it. The artist lived in an atmosphere of perpetual,
wholesome, inevitable eclipse. Do as well as you choose to-day,--make
the whole Borgo dance with delight, they would dance to a better man's
pipe to-morrow. _Credette Cimabue nella pittura, tener lo campo, et ora
ha Giotto il grido._ This was the fate, the necessary fate, even of the
strongest. They could only hope to be remembered as links in an endless
chain. For the weaker men it was no use even to put their name on their
works. They did not. If they could not work for joy and for love, and
take their part simply in the choir of human toil, they might throw up
their tools. But now it is far otherwise--now, the best having been
done--and for a couple of hundred years, the best of us being confessed
to have come short of it, everybody thinks that he may be the great man
once again, and this is certain, that whatever in art is done for
display, is invariably wrong.

282. But, secondly, consider the attractive power of false art,
completed, as compared with imperfect art advancing to completion.
Archaic work, so far as faultful, is repulsive, but advanced work is, in
all its faults, attractive. The moment that art has reached the point at
which it becomes sensitively and delicately imitative, it appeals to a
new audience. From that instant it addresses the sensualist and the
idler. Its deceptions, its successes, its subtleties, become interesting