32 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 



laws of beauty, more anxious about the exponent form than 

 his predecessors were, he makes some sacrifice of the idea in 

 order to meet the requirements of style. But he does not 

 forget that beauty by itself is insufficient to a great and 

 perfect work, nor has he lost his interest in the cardinal con- 

 ceptions which vitalise a nation's most significant expression 

 of its soul through art. During the first and second stages 

 which I have indicated, the people turns out, through its 

 interpreters, poets and artists, a number of masterpieces 

 the earlier of them rough-hewn, archaic, cyclopean, pregnant 

 with symbolism, rich in anticipation the later, exquisite in 

 their combination of full thought and spiritual intensity with 

 technical perfection, with grace, with the qualities of free and 

 elevated beauty appropriate to the elaborated type. But now 

 the initial impulse is declining ; the cycle of animating ideas 

 has been exhausted; the taste of the people has been 

 educated, and its spirit has been manifested in definite forms, 

 which serve as ideal mirrors to the race of its own qualities, 

 and bring it to a knowledge of itself. Conceptions which had 

 all the magic of novelty for the grandparents, become the 

 intellectual patrimony of the grandchildren. It is impossible 

 to return upon the past ; the vigour of those former makers 

 may survive in their successors, but their inspiration has 

 taken shape for ever in their works. And that shape abides, 

 fixed in the habits of the nation. The type cannot be 

 changed, because the type grew itself out of the very nature 

 of the people, who are still existent. What then remains 

 for the third generation of artists? They have either to 

 reproduce their models, and this is what true genius will not 

 submit to, and what the public refuses to accept from it ; or 

 else they have to extract new motives from the perfected 

 type, at the risk of impairing its strength and beauty, with 

 the certainty of disintegrating its spiritual unity. The latter 

 course is always chosen, inevitably, as we now believe, and 

 by no merely wilful whim of individual craftsmen. Nay, the 

 very artists who begin to decompose the type and to degrade 

 it, and the public who applaud their ingenuity, and dote with 

 love upon their variations from the primal theme, are alike 



