But there are other proofs, still stronger, and first, every-day experience. When we behold what takes place in the life of an artist, we perceive that it is generally divided into two sections. During the first, in the youth and maturity of his talent, he sees things as they are, and studies them minutely and earnestly; he fixes his eyes on them; he labors and worries to express them, and he expresses them with more than scrupulous fidelity. Arriving at a certain moment of life, he thinks he understands them thoroughly and discovers no more novelty in them; he casts aside the living model, and with certain prescribed rules which he has picked up in the course of his experience he forms a drama or a romance, a picture or a statue. The first epoch is that of natural feeling; the second that of mannerism and decline. If we penetrate the lives of the greatest men, we rarely fail to discover both. In the life of Michael Angelo, the first period lasted a long time, a little less than sixty years; all the works belonging to it disclose the sentiment of force and heroic grandeur. The artist is imbued with it; he has no other thought. His numerous dissections, his countless drawings, the unremitted analysis of his own heart, his study of the tragic passions and of their physical expression, are for him but the means of manifesting outwardly the militant energy with which he is carried away. This idea descends upon you from every corner of the great vault of the Sistine chapel. Enter the Pauline chapel alongside of it, and contemplate the works of his old age--the Conversion of St. Paul, the Crucifixion of St. Peter; consider even the Last Judgment, which he painted in his seventy-seventh year. Connoisseurs, and those who are not, recognize at once that the two frescoes are executed according to prescribed rules; that the artist possessed a certain number of forms, which he used conventionally; that he multiplied extraordinary attitudes, and ingeniously contrived foreshortenings; that the lively invention, naturalness, the great transport of the heart, the perfect truth peculiar to his first works, have, at least in part, disappeared from the abuse of technique and the force of routine; and that if he is still superior to others, he is greatly inferior to himself.