They were not afraid, therefore, to appear simple, artless,
dry, beside those exalted ancients; nor to cherish Art for a long time
in the undistinguished bud, until the period of Grace had arrived.
Whence comes it that we still look upon these works of the older
masters, from Giotto to the teacher of Raphael, with a sort of
reverence, indeed with a certain predilection, if not that the
faithfulness of their endeavor, and the grand earnestness of their
serene voluntary limitation, compel our respect and admiration.
The same relation that they held to the ancients, the present
generation holds to them. Their time and ours are joined by no living
transmission, no link of continuous, organic growth; we must reproduce
Art in the way they did, but with energy of our own, in order to be
like them.
Even that Indian-summer of Art, at the end of the sixteenth and the
beginning of the seventeenth centuries, could call forth only a few
new blossoms on the old stem, but no productive germs, still less
plant a new tree of Art. But to set aside the works of perfected
Art, and to seek out its scanty and simple beginnings, as some have
desired, would be a new and perhaps greater mistake; it would be no
real return to the fundamental; simplicity would be affectation, and
grow into hypocritical show.
But what prospect does the present time offer for an Art springing
from a vigorous germ, and growing up from the root? For it is in a
great measure dependent on the character of its time; and who
would promise the approbation of the present time to such earnest
beginnings, when Art, on the one hand, scarcely obtains equal
consideration with other instruments of prodigal luxury, and, on the
other, artists and amateurs, with entire want of ability to grasp
Nature, praise and demand the Ideal?
Art springs only from that powerful striving of the inmost powers of
the heart and the spirit, which we call Inspiration.
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