that, in spite of its poetic associations, there was no reason why it should be converted into a rubbish heap.

Of course, beauty and the intimacy of the emotions aroused by it are subjects which could never be dealt with from the platform without very considerable tact; yet it would be a mistake to suppose that it is only at our public meetings that such subjects are tabooed. A keen appreciation of beauty and the delicate sensibility that goes with it are among the most dangerous gifts an Englishman can have, dangerous because so rare. There is every chance that a nature richly endowed in this respect will develop fantastically and end by bringing its highest faculty into disrepute. It has even been questioned whether sensitiveness of this kind should not be allowed to be a law to itself, whether it is not presumption, pharisaism, sacrilege, on the part of the humdrum average we call society to dictate to so rare a spirit its common code of decency and order. Such questions can only be asked seriously in passing moments of sympathetic extravagance. But we touch a problem of serious and enduring significance when we ask how far society must accept responsibility for the ruin and abuse which, once it has come about, cannot be treated except as criminal, but which, in a society where artistic genius was understood and valued at its proper worth, could never have come about at all. The fact seems to be that the perception of beauty, being a highly elaborate and complex function, is peculiarly liable to detach itself from the main stream of our consciousness, and to behave anarchically; at its worst it seems definitely to aim at subverting the judgments and activities to which we are determined by other functions, such as the moral and religious; functions no less complex than itself, but better, because more continuously, related to the common conduct of life. All our faculties undoubtedly possess this power of detachment, or rather are subject to this calamity. They may set up within the individual a separate centre of individuality, and make two men of him instead of one; indeed, a completely unified personality is so rare as to be remarked on whenever it is observed. Now nothing tends so much to provoke this kind of mental insubordination as the possession of a bent or faculty foreign to the normal equipment of surrounding society, the recognition of a class of truths to which others appear blind. Eccentricity springs usually from self-conceit, and the fact that such self-conceit may be well founded, may merit the better name of self-assertion, may approach or even overpass the border line that separates self-assertion from the gift of prophecy, does not save its victim from a violent one-sidedness hardly distinguishable from mania. We recognise this in the life of one of our greatest artists, William Blake. Blake's conception of art, and of the relation of art to society, was comprehensive and profound; but it was in an alien, unresponsive world that the fire of his conviction had been

kindled, where it had no choice but to prey upon itself; therefore, instead of expanding into a warm and generous glow, it shrank to a solitary gleam of piercing and almost perilous light. The normal English attitude to beauty seems to be determined by an unconscious recognition of this anarchic tendency of the aesthetic consciousness. The staid and steady Britisher is never surprised to find that an artist is a mountebank. He may shrug his shoulders when he hears of Whistler's worst extravagances, and think he pushed whimsicality somewhat too far; but he expects extravagance from an artist, and though he heartily dislikes it in all its manifestations, is content to tolerate them and the worship of beauty, by which he supposes them dictated, so long as they keep their distance, and do not obviously intrude themselves upon the proprieties of his more sober life. But, that the sobriety and propriety of his life is in any sense answerable for this extravagance and whimsicality has never crossed his mind. He hates anarchy in all its forms, and forgets that it is not a natural but a reactionary growth. To treat it with ignominy, or to attempt to stamp it out, is to provide it precisely with those conditions in which, and in which only, it can thrive.

It is because of this natural antipathy or distrust, with which we eye the devotees of art and beauty, that the work of Giotto has, or might have, a peculiar significance for us in England at the present time. If we were living in a country where religion had so far fallen into neglect that the religious instinct could no longer express itself among us naturally, but either remained quiescent or else vaunted itself in a wanton luxuriance of asceticism, we should do well to turn, for an antidote, to the life of a man whose religious genius had developed, not at the expense of his other faculties, but by permeating them and drawing strength and substance from them; a man whose ideal was lofty and intense, not because he had restricted and refined it, but because he had laid for it so large and generous a foundation that it rose as if by natural right and lifted itself without effort into the heaven of heavens. We have need of such an example less in the religious than in the artistic world, and for such an example there is none to whom we can better turn than to Giotto; he is acknowledged on all hands to have been among the greatest, perhaps himself the very greatest artist the world has seen, but his specific faculty, his aesthetic consciousness, never lost touch with the sum of those other faculties, both of heart and mind, which in their due subordination, combination, interaction, produce an article of higher value than any artistic excellence—a sane, strong, noble manhood. It is because Giotto was first of all a man, and rose to the height of fame without the smallest sacrifice of the principles and practice that govern happy human life, because he pursued beauty not as an abstraction to be secured by discarding alien matter, but as an organic principle to which nothing could be alien, everywhere discoverable by those

who have eyes to see it; it is for these reasons that the work he has left behind him, primitive as it is, unlovely as is the condition to which time and vandalism have reduced it, remains and will remain an inexhaustible treasure house, a unique pattern for all who look to art not as to a toy prepared for the amusement of artificial sensibilities, but for revelation, as from a loftier level, of the true meaning and reality that underlie the experience of every day—for a view of life more comprehensive than the normal and therefore more profound.

We do not, on the whole, conceive thus seriously of art in England at the present day; a suitable appreciation of the acknowledged masterpieces is part of the equipment of a gentleman; society' is interested in the beautiful, and it is necessary to be able to say something intelligible about it; and so we read art books and hang reproductions of our favourite Madonnas upon our walls. But how many of us recognise that a just development of the aesthetic consciousness is a necessary element as well in the national as in the individual character, and that as long as we fail to apprehend the facts of beauty in their bearing upon practical life, so long our practical life itself is insecurely founded: that we are attempting to set up the mansion of our prosperity, while neglecting one of the materials essential to all sound construction? Such appreciation of art as we possess must indeed remain worse than useless to us until we are able instinctively to relate it to the conduct of practical life. Our national genius is for practice, and for the tactful common sense by which high abstract ideals can be accommodated to practice and to the concrete limitations thereby imposed. We could extend this accommodating genius to the realm of the beautiful if once we came to appreciate the value, the necessity of doing so. But, at present, we prefer to leave art and beauty without the pale, and to view them as fascinating but dangerous ideals, not seeing that the danger we shrink from, and even the fascination, is of our own making, and results from our refusal to bring the faculties, by which we apprehend them, into healthy relation with the faculties which govern conduct-faculties of which we have less reason to be afraid, because by constant exercise we keep them sane. We need to study Giotto.

One of the characteristics that strikes us first about Giotto is his consoling straightforwardness. Most artists, we suspect, are oversubtle; they take a subject, they set out ostensibly to paint one thing, while all the while intending to paint another. We, in our innocence, are deceived by them; we note the name of a picture, Virgin and Child, and we assume that the artist who composed it wished to present us with his idea of the Mother of Christ. It is only by slow degrees that we discover our mistake. And the discovery leaves us uncomfortable. In the work of Giotto there is no such discovery to be made. In his attitude to his subject he is as ingenuous as a

child, and what he wished to paint any child who knows the Bible story has but to look at his picture to find out. This is a stumblingblock to modern criticism; for when once the weapons of subtlety have been devised, the temptation to use them is irresistible. But it is artists themselves who are primarily to blame for the confusion. They choose their subjects for the most part with as little regard for the essential character of the event or situation they profess to be depicting, as children playing nursery games. The scene in which Elisha curses the children who mocked him was a favourite among us for dramatic presentation when I was a boy. We failed fully to appreciate the dignity of the prophet, but we realised the magnificent opportunity of violence afforded by impersonation of the two shebears. Not that the presence of Elisha was wholly purposeless; without it the play must have degenerated into a common every-day performance, instead of sanctifying the drama for Sunday use; nor could there have been the same occasion for that peculiar venom which was allowed to be pardonable in bears summoned to execute a prophet's command. The history of art-of sacred art in particular-illustrates the same position over and over again; and the result has been a serious mystification of people, who, like ourselves, are naturally more susceptible of religious than of artistic truth. We have perceived dimly before a picture, such as Titian's great Assumption, that there were qualities in it that seemed not perfectly in keeping with a religious imagination of the event, and, conscious only of the immense reputation of the artist, have been content to acquiesce in his performance, and believe that the work before us was a true example of religious vision, a vision tempered or transformed -so we have conjectured-by the unknown necessities of artistic presentation. If, then, while our appreciation of the picture has been conventional, the distrust underlying that appreciation has been genuine, need we be surprised that the latter has proved the determining feature in our practical attitude to the art?

Our natural susceptibility to religious truth acts not to our confusion, but to our enlightenment, when we approach the study of Giotto. The subjects with which he deals are religious, and our simple-hearted belief that the essential qualities of sacred art are to be sought in the associations that make it sacred, suffers no harsh treatment at Giotto's hands. Great art consists in the perfect adaptation of finite means to infinite ends; and the true appreciation of it depends not so much upon the power to analyse and admire the ingenuity which secured that adaptation as upon communion in understanding of the end and in the desire for it. Thus it is that a purely secular appreciation of Giotto is an impossibility, whereas a mind in which the life or the ideal of Christ is in possession of the future as well as of the past, is already half-way advanced towards the essentially artistic apprehension of the meaning of Giotto's work.

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It is on this account that the study of Giotto must have a peculiar value for the English mind, directing it automatically to a recognition of the function of beauty in a serious and sober manhood. Giotto, like Milton, had learnt to measure life betimes'; he was no mere artist in that restricted sense in which we commonly use the word; he knew toward solid good what leads the nearest way'; he was a philosopher and a man of action. Born in England at the present time, he would soon have set aside the notion of devoting himself exclusively to art; he would have refused to waste his talent in work which his countrymen would only half appreciate and half disdain. Rather we should imagine him, like Milton, an artist with one hand, a politician with the other, a great portrait painter and a great reformer, leaving to posterity a priceless record of the thought and feature of his distinguished colleagues in the Cabinet or in the House of Commons. In any case he would have been, as indeed he was, a man whom the mightiest must meet on equal terms, or not at all. For the fact that Giotto was born under a happier star, in a country and at a time when there was everything to encourage, nothing to check, the development of his artistic power, had not the effect of cramping or stultifying the development of his nature upon other lines. He rose to greatness upon the irresistible wave of religious enthusiasm which followed in the wake of that world-shaker St. Francis; and, riding himself upon the billow's very crest, while the gathered strength of it nerved his hand and fired his heart, he anticipated the perils of its career and saw the sunken reef on which its weight and volume must go to wreck and lose themselves at last in foam. In an age when religious enthusiasm had over-reached itself, he maintained a perfect balance of mind, identifying himself so intimately with all that was vital in the Franciscan teaching that his version of the sacred story has all the grandeur and simplicity of a fifth gospel; and yet preserving so natural an interest, so generous a sympathy in contemporary life in all its forms, as to be the chosen companion of poet, priest, and king.

In Giotto, as in Dante, the fibre, the gathered strength of the sturdy Florentine stem breaks gloriously into flower; and the flower is of the rarest and most perfect that ever blossomed on the tree of humanity. It is at Florence, in the shadow of the great Campanile, that our thoughts turn naturally to Giotto. And there, indeed, we may find many a trace surviving of his power and influence in the exquisite sculptured reliefs on the bell-tower itself, in the sublime and tragic history of St. John the Baptist on the old bronze doors of the Baptistery. But Giotto, the painter, appears at Florence under a cloud. There are not more than two frescoes remaining in which the qualities really characteristic of his work make themselves immediately felt; in the rest they can only be inferred after a tedious process of study, for which the normal traveller has neither patience