ll imitators of
Michelangelo were greater than his great predecessors. As we say, their
taste became bad, their values were perverted; and with that perversion
all their natural genius for the arts was wasted. To this day Carlo
Dolci is the favourite painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man
of some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and revolting
because he himself and his public liked such pictures.

There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying that we despair
of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately this unaccountable thing
called taste, and not the absence or presence of genius, which
determines whether the arts shall thrive or decay in any particular age
or country. People often say that they know nothing about art, but that
they do know what they like; and what they imply is that there is
nothing to be known about art except your own likes and dislikes, and
further that no man can control those. The Florentines of the
seventeenth century happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines
of the fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation we
can give of the decline of Florentine painting.

It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation beyond it has
been given, we are told that there can be no such thing as progress in
the arts. That is the lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians
in science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed one might say
that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe,
except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly
declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable
decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything
else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has
been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really
wished for progress there he has got it, except in this one case.
Therefore it seems that upon the arts he cannot exercise his will, and
that they alone of all his activities are not capable of progress. What
do we mean by progress except the successful exercise of the human will
in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress from natural
growth; that alone can preserve it from natural processes of decay.
There are people who say that it does not exist, that everything which
happens to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether that is
so or not, w