Consider that word, "picturesque." It, and the notion of art which it expresses, are the children of the Ancien Regime--of the era of decay.The healthy, vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed of admiring, much less of painting, for their own sake, rags and ruins; the fashion sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century; it lingered on during the first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction from 1815-25.It is all but dead now, before the return of vigorous and progressive thought.An admirer of the Middle Ages now does not build a sham ruin in his grounds; he restores a church, blazing with colour, like a medieval illumination.He has learnt to look on that which went by the name of picturesque in his great-grandfather's time, as an old Greek or a Middle Age monk would have done--as something squalid, ugly, a sign of neglect, disease, death; and therefore to be hated and abolished, if it cannot be restored.At Carcassone, now, M.Viollet-le-Duc, under the auspices of the Emperor of the French, is spending his vast learning, and much money, simply in abolishing the picturesque;in restoring stone for stone, each member of that wonderful museum of Middle Age architecture: Roman, Visigothic, Moslem, Romaine, Early English, later French, all is being reproduced exactly as it must have existed centuries since.No doubt that is not the highest function of art: but it is a preparation for the highest, a step toward some future creative school.As the early Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed into their minds the beauty and meaning of old Greek and Roman art; so must the artists of our days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance.They must learn to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must learn--indeed they have learnt--that decay is ugliness, and the imitation of decay, a making money out of the public shame.
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