Imagine Koyetzu, Signorelli, or the sculptor who carved the head of Akhenaton or of the wife of the Sheik-el-Beled, alive painting and carving, to-day. They would have been in the profoundest sense the same artists. But just as a painter may use one medium one day and another the next; so far more than simply traces of the fact that they had seen the machines that play such a part in our existence would be found in their inventions. Just as the sculptors of Nineveh put the lions that were such immediate objects in their life, to good use in their reliefs; or the painters of the Sung period the birds and landscapes found by them in their wilfully secluded lives; so it was inevitable to-day that artists should get into their inventions (figures, landscapes, or abstractions) something of the lineaments and character of machinery. An artist could excel, no doubt, who never suggested in his pictures acquaintance with anything more ferreous than a mushroom. But you would not be liable, I suppose, to pick a quarrel with the artists of Asshur because they used the lions at their door? This ground has to be gone over, and thus much reasserted, for the purposes of the new adjustments I propose. _The Artist’s Luck_ The best artists of the Sung period lived a secluded life, very luckily for them. It was considered the thing to inhabit the fairly distant country and live in intercourse with the objects of Nature. When this fashion passed, and a painter had to live within hailing distance of the court, the pictures produced showed an immediate decline in quality. That is _one_ lesson. The scenes in the Assyrian bas-reliefs from Nineveh were produced by an artist who led an unlucky kind of life. He was hurried about by the king in his razzias and hunts: no sooner had the party (a marauding or a hunting one) returned to the city than the harassed sculptors had to rush to their workrooms and produce by the next morning a complete series of bas-reliefs describing in what was apparently considered a flattering way the exploits of their diabolical idiot of a master. For no sooner had he slept off the fatigue caused by the last of an incessant series of displacements than he insisted on seeing what he had looked like to his band of performing sculptors during the last week or two. Their heads probably fell like apples in an autumn wind; though there is seemingly no record of his ever having had sculptors enough to build up their skulls into a pyramid. How they succeeded in doing such good lions it is difficult to say. Perhaps the ones who did the good lions were left in peace sometimes. But on the whole, a sculptor fated to work for Asshur’s deputy would no doubt have regarded the Sung hermit as the luckiest old yellow crab that ever painted. It has occurred to me that we might be worse off than we are. But I can see no reason why we should not be better off: hence, partly, this pamphlet. PART II _The Artist Older than the Fish_