After Michelangelo, perhaps after Beethoven, is the decadence. Then
suddenly there is talk of inspiration, or the lack of it. Mere
imitators appear, and the historian who reviles them does not see that
they have only practised, and refuted, his theory of art. They also have
had the luck to be born later; but it has been bad luck, not good, for
them, because to them their art has been all a matter of mechanical
invention, of professionalism.
The worst of it is that the greatest artists are apt themselves to fall
in love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanical
inventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo in
his "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professional
through all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he was
bored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he was
lazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could be
very earnestly professional; and as for Milton--consider this end of the
last speech of Manoah, in _Samson Agonistes_, where we expect a simple
cadence:--
The virgins also shall on feastful days
Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing
His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,
From whence captivity and loss of eyes
Milton was tempted into the jargon of these last two lines, which are
like a bad translation of a Greek play, by professionalism.
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