ly high level. In
reality, if such things were possible, we should turn into oysters, or
into something about as intelligent. It is the experience of all ages
that human beings will not work unless they are obliged to, and
degenerate rapidly in idleness, and there have not been many exceptions
to the rule. Art grew out of hand-work, but it grew in it, too, as a
plant in the soil; when there is no more hand-work, there will be no
more art. The two belong to each other, and neither can do without the
other.

[Illustration: THE FORUM

Looking West]

Of course, I do not mean to say that there was a succession of
centuries, or even one century, during which no pictures were painted in
Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like
the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works
were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life
in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades,
Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than
those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more
pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and
expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean
is that the revival of real art came from a new beginning deep down and
out of sight, among humble craftsmen and hard-working artisans, who
found out by degrees that their hands could do more than they had been
taught to do, and that objects of daily use need not be ugly or merely
plain in order to be strong and well made and serviceable. And as this
knowledge grew among them with practice and by experiment, they rose to
the power of using for new purposes of beauty the old methods of
painting and sculpture, which had survived, indeed, but which were of no
value to the old-fashioned artists who had learned them from generation
to generation, without understanding and without enthusiasm.

The highest of the crafts in the Middle Age was goldsmithing. When
almost every other artistic taste had disappeared from daily life in
that rough time, the love of personal adornment had survived, and when
painters and sculptors were a small band of men, trained to represent
certain things in certain ways--trained like a church choir, in fact, to
the endless repetition of ancient themes--the goldsmiths had latitude
and freedom to their hearts' desire and so many buyers for their work
that their own numbe