rsons, and contentedly contemplated by them as such. All
love for it, with all knowledge of its history and all desire for its
development, was for a generation or two confined to a few professed
followers and a few devoted patrons, the mass of mankind thinking of it
not at all. But slowly a revival came in the main centres of
civilization--not much sooner in one than in another, though somewhat
differently in each. In Germany we see it beginning with the famous
Teutonic colony at Rome, reverent in spirit, cautious in method, severe
in theory, restrained in style--culminating, on the one hand, in the
academic pietism of Overbeck, on the other in the deliberate majesty of
Cornelius. In France the new life begins with the successors of David,
strenuous, impetuous, jealous and innovating, Ingres and outline waging
deadly battle with color and Delacroix. In England architectural
enthusiasm gave the first impulse, the "Gothic Revival" becoming the
basis of all subsequent work.

If, before noting the points of difference between one branch and
another of this modern art, we try to find the characteristics in which
these branches resemble one another, and by which they collectively are
distinguished from earlier developments, we find the most prominent one
to be self-consciousness--not necessarily self-conceit, but the inward
consciousness that they _are_, and the endeavor to realize just what
they are. With these comes, when the art is conscientious, a desire to
discover the noblest goal and to formulate the best methods of reaching
it. Some, casting the horoscope for this struggling art of ours, find
in these facts a great discouragement, believing that the vital germ of
art is spontaneity--believing that there cannot again be a genuine form
of art until there arise a fresh race of artists, unfed by the
mummy-wheat of tradition, unfettered by the cere-cloths of criticism.
Others, more sanguine, believe that spontaneity has done all it can, and
that its place is in the future to be worthily filled by a wide
eclecticism. Let us inquire what testimony as to the value of
spontaneity and the influence of self-consciousness in art may be
gathered from the methods and results of the past, and what from a
contrast between the different contemporary schools in their methods and
their results. Painting, as most prominently before our eyes and minds
just now, will principally concern us.

To the making of every work of art go three th