y
are, in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline. They tell us
what happened, not why it happened. And they all seem to point to two
conclusions about the course of the arts, both of which would make us
despair of any settled progress in them. The first is that the practice
of any art by any particular people always follows a certain natural
course of growth, culmination, and decay. At least it always follows
this course where an art is practised naturally and therefore with
success. Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life of
an individual human being and subject to inexorable natural laws. It is
born, as men are born, without the exercise of will; and in the same way
it passes through youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion
follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot take up an
art where another has left it. That is where art seems to differ from
science. The mass of knowledge acquired in one country can, if that
country loses energy to apply or increase it, be utilized by another.
But we cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the Italian
Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the Gothic revival we tried to
make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We
imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we
were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a
growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell
why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.

That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of
it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a
product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a
dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and
with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a
picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and
choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same.
We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be
commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can
make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps
into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration.
And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences;
and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the
training. In bot