itics with the defects instead of
the qualities of what is classic. Yet the protestantism of the
successive schools of painting against the errors of their predecessors
has something even more crass about it. Contemporary painters and
critics thoroughly alive, and fully in the contemporary aesthetic
current, so far from appreciating modern classic art sympathetically,
are apt to admire the old masters themselves mainly on technical
grounds, and not at all to enter into their general aesthetic attitude.
The feeling of contemporary painters and critics (except, of course,
historical critics) for Raphael's genius is the opposite of cordial. We
are out of touch with the "Disputa," with angels and prophets seated on
clouds, with halos and wings, with such inconsistencies as the "Doge
praying" in a picture of the marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic
marriage itself. Raphael's grace of line and suave space-filling shapes
are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become
literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if
not of the prosaic.

Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's "Le Reve," which won him so
much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist,
and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with
impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-button lacking,
bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would prick;
above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly
armies--wraiths born of the sleepers' dreams. That we are in touch with.
No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as
pitiably literal. Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional--that is
to say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally assumed for the
moment--as Lebrun's "Triumph of Alexander." The latter is as much a true
expression of an ideal as Detaille's picture. It is an ideal now become
more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is as clearly an ideal and as
clearly genuine. The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun's
painting--Louis Quatorze painting--is not the perfunctory thing we are
apt to assume it to be. That is not the same thing, I hope, as
maintaining that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid.
Lebrun was assuredly not a strikingly original painter. His crowds of
warriors bear a much closer resemblance to Raphael's "Battle of
Constantine and Maxentius" than the "Transfiguration" of t