lssohn, Stainer and Parry, which
spread indigestion at our musical festivals until I publicly told Parry
the bludgeoning truth about his Job and woke him to conviction of sin.
Compare Flaxman and Thorwaldsen and Gibson with Phidias and Praxiteles,
Stevens with Michael Angelo, Bouguereau's Virgin with Cimabue's, or the
best operatic Christs of Scheffer and Mueller with the worst Christs that
the worst painters could paint before the end of the fifteenth century,
and you must feel that until we have a great religious movement we
cannot hope for a great artistic one. The disillusioned Raphael could
paint a mother and child, but not a queen of Heaven as much less skilful
men had done in the days of his great-grandfather; yet he could reach
forward to the twentieth century and paint a Transfiguration of the Son
of Man as they could not. Also, please note, he could decorate a house
of pleasure for a cardinal very beautifully with voluptuous pictures of
Cupid and Psyche; for this simple sort of Vitalism is always with
us, and, like portrait painting, keeps the artist supplied with
subject-matter in the intervals between the ages of faith; so that your
sceptical Rembrandts and Velasquezs are at least not compelled to paint
shop fronts for want of anything else to paint in which they can really
believe.

THE ARTIST-PROPHETS

And there are always certain rare but intensely interesting
anticipations. Michael Angelo could not very well believe in Julius
II or Leo X, or in much that they believed in; but he could paint
the Superman three hundred years before Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach
Zarathustra and Strauss set it to music. Michael Angelo won the primacy
among all modern painters and sculptors solely by his power of shewing
us superhuman persons. On the strength of his decoration and color alone
he would hardly have survived his own death twenty years; and even his
design would have had only an academic interest; but as a painter of
prophets and sibyls he is greatest among the very greatest in his craft,
because we aspire to a world of prophets and sibyls. Beethoven never
heard of radioactivity nor of electrons dancing in vortices of
inconceivable energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement of
his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than as a musical picture
of these whirling electrons? His contemporaries said he was mad, partly
perhaps because the movement was so hard to play; but we, who can make a
pianola pl