Yesterday, at Bordighera, I strolled up the hills behind the town to Sasso. It is a queer little cluster of gleaming white-washed houses that top the crest of a steep ridge; and, like many other Italian villages, it makes a brave show from a distance, though within it is full of evil smells and all uncleanness. But I found it had a church—a picturesquely ugly and dilapidated church; and without and within, this church was decorated by inglorious hands with very na?ve and rudimentary frescoes. The Four Evangelists were there, in flowing blue robes; and the Four Greater Prophets, with long white beards; and the Madonna, appearing in most wooden clouds; and the Patron Saint tricked out for his Festa in gorgeous holiday episcopal vestments. That was all—just the common everyday Italian country church that everybody has seen turned out to pattern with manufacturing regularity a hundred times over! Yet, as I sat among the olive-terraces looking down the steep slope into the Borghetto valley, and across the gorge to the green pines on the Cima, it set me thinking. \'Tis a bad habit one falls into when one has nothing better to turn one\'s mind to.

We English, coming to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everything on heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive, what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childish level!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea who rose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italy was capable of producing her great painters in her own great day, just because in thousands of such Italian villages there were work-a-day artisans in form and colour capable of turning out such ridiculous daubs as those that decorate this tawdry church on the Ligurian hilltop.

We English, in short, think of it all the wrong way uppermost. We think of it topsy-turvy, beginning at the end, while evolution invariably begins at the beginning. The Raphaels and Andreas, to put it in brief, were the final flower and fullest outcome of whole races of church decorators in infantile fresco.

Everywhere you go in Italy, this truth is forced upon your attention even to the present day. Art here is no exotic. It smacks of the soil; it springs spontaneous, like a weed; it burgeons of itself out of the heart of the people. Not high art, understand well; not the art of Burne-Jones and Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes and Sar Peladan. Commonplace everyday art, that is a trade and a handicraft, like the joiner\'s or the shoemaker\'s. Look up at your ceiling; it\'s overrun with festoons of crude red and blue flowers, or it\'s covered with cupids and graces, or it bristles with arabesques and unmeaning phantasies. Every wall is painted; every grotto decorated. Sham landscapes, sham loggias, sham parapets are everywhere. The sham windows themselves are provided, not only with sham blinds and sham curtains, but even with sham coquettes making sham eyes or waving sham handkerchiefs at passers-by below them. Open-air fresco painting is still a living art, an art practised by hundreds and thousands of craftsmen, an art as alive as cookery or weaving. The Italian decorates everything; his pottery, his house, his church, his walls, his palaces. And the only difference he feels between the various cases is, that in some of them a higher type of art is demanded by wealth and skill than in the others. No wonder, therefore, he blossomed out at last into Michael Angelo\'s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel!

To us English, on the contrary, high art is something exotic, separate, alone, sui generis. We never think of the plaster star in the middle of our ceiling as belonging even to the same range of ideas as, say, the frescoes in the Houses of Parliament.

A nation in such a condition as that is never truly artistic. The artist with us, even now, is an exceptional product. Art for a long time in England had nothing at all to do with the life of the people. It was a luxury for the rich, a curious thing for ladies\' and gentlemen\'s consumption, as purely artificial as the stuccoed Italian villa in which they insisted on shivering in our chilly climate. And the pictures it produced were wholly alien to the popular wants and the popular feelings; they were part of............