ried to put his mighty self into
his work, just so far he failed of artistic perfection; and not every
one is Michael Angelo to make even failure beautifully colossal. In
architecture, which in his day was already a dead art to be galvanized,
not alive and manly like the art of the painter, his self-consciousness
shows most strongly and his failure is most conspicuous. Here he did not
create, but avowedly composed--set himself deliberately to study the
past and to decide what was best for the future. And upon none but him
rests the blame of having driven out of the semi-unconscious,
semi-original Renaissance style what elements of power it had, and sent
it reeling down through two centuries crazed with conceit and distorted
with self-inspection.

On the unconscious development of mediaeval architecture, due to no one
man, but to a universal interest in and appreciation of the art, it is
unnecessary to dwell. Nor need we for present purposes seek further
illustration farther afield. Let us take time now to look more narrowly
at the art of to-day, and try to mark the different shapes it has taken
with different nations.

The most decided school is in France: her artists, many in number,
confine, whether involuntarily or not, their individual differences
within sharply-marked and easily-noted limits. In Germany the schools
are two--one of so-called historical painting at Munich, one of what we
may name domestic painting at Duesseldorf. This last may be put on one
side as having no specially obtrusive characteristics, and by German
pictures will be meant those of the Munich and Vienna type, whether
actually from the studios of Munich and Vienna or not. In English
contemporary art can one pretend to find a school at all in any true
sense of the word? What we do find is a very widespread art-literature
and talk of art, a large number of working artists varying in
temperament, and a vast horde of amateurs, who are not content to be
patrons, but yearn also to be practisers of art.

In England theories of art are more carefully discussed and more widely
diffused than they are in any other country. But they are theories of an
essentially untechnical, amateurish, literary kind. The English critic
calls all law and philosophy, all rules of morals and manners, of
religion and political economy and science and scientific aesthetics, to
aid his critical faculty when he needs must speak of pictures. In
Germany there is also much the