Excerpt from Can Grande's Castle It has frequently been asserted that an artist lives apart, that he must Withdraw him self from events and be somehow above and beyond them. To a certain degree this is true, as Withdrawal is usually an inherent quality of his nature, but to seek'such a With drawal is both ridiculous and frustrating. For an artist to shut himself up in the proverbial ivory tower and never look out of the Win dow is merely a tacit admission that it is his ancestors, not he, Who possess the faculty of creation. This is the real decadence: to see through the eyes of dead men. Yet to-day can never be adequately expressed, largely because we are a part of it and only a part. For that reason one is flung backwards to a time Which is not thrown out of proportion by any personal experience, and Which on that very account lies extended in something like its proper perspective. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.