Arts die of a false emphasis, which is generally the effect of fatigue. The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint-or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint. I admit that sometimes, in Rubens or Rabelais, it might be called a broad hint; but it it is always a suggestion, even when it is an absurd suggestion. It always opens the vista of liberty that does not need to go all its own lengths. But there is a kind of dull exaggeration that is the very opposite of this light emphasis. And in this respect there is not much to choose between the large haloes of the old Crucifixion and the long hands of the modern Crucifixion. In both there is the weakness of stressing what strength would be content to suggest. In both a man who might have spoken to us, when he was alert and lively, is shouting at us because he is tired. And some of us may say, in the popular phrase, that it makes us tired to be shouted at. I can see what Michael Angelo means when he seems to make a limb unusually long; or what Giotto means when he seems to make a figure unusually stiff. And when an artist implies that I shall not see what he means unless he lengthens limbs in the manner of the modern Crucifixion, or stiffens them in the manner of the portrait of an Englishwoman, I feel as if a man two feet away were talking at the top of his voice on the assumption that I am stone deaf.

-March 10, 1923, Illustrated London News