In effect the mediæval artist was reproducing a story that had often been told before. But the modern artist has to undergo a whole preliminary labor of inventing, creating, formulating, for which there was almost no counterpart in the life of a mediæval artist. The modern artist has to be original. That is to say, he has to seize experience, pick it over, and drag from it his theme. It is a very exhausting task, as anyone can testify who has tried it. That surely is why we hear so much of the storm and stress in the soul of a modern artist. The craftsman does not go through agonies over the choice of words, images, and rhythms. The agony of the modern artist lies in the effort to give birth to the idea, to bring some intuition of order out of the chaos of experience, to create the idea with which his art can deal. We assume, [p109] quite falsely I think, that this act of ‘creation’ is an inherent part of the artist’s task. But if we refrain from using words loosely, and reserve the word creation to mean the finding of the original intuition and idea, then creation is plainly not a necessary part of the artist’s equipment. Creation is an obligation which the artist has had thrust upon him as a result of the dissolution of the great accepted themes. He is compelled to be creative because his world is chaotic. This labor of creation has no connection with his gifts as a painter. There is no more reason why a painter should be able to extemporize a satisfactory interpretation of life than that he should be able to govern a city or write a treatise on chemistry. Giotto surely was as profoundly original a painter as the world is likely to see; it has been said of him by Mr. Berenson, who has full title to speak, that he had “a thoroughgoing sense for the significant in the visible world.” But with all his genius, what would have been Giotto’s plight if, in addition to exercising his sense of the significant, he had had to create for himself all his standards of significance? For Giotto those standards existed in the Catholic Christianity of the Thirteenth Century, and it was by the measure of these standards, within the framework of a great accepted tradition, that he followed his own personal sense of the significant. But the modern artist, though he had Giotto’s gifts, would not have Giotto’s freedom to use them. A very large part of his energies, consciously or unconsciously, would have to be spent in devising some sort of substitute for the traditional view of life which Giotto took for granted. For there is no longer an accepted view of [p110] life organized in stories which all men know and understand.