they had lived in the days of those, had been their peers.

Painting, as the Venetians understood it, is a lost art, because the
mental conditions which made it possible exist no longer. The race is
getting to that mannish stature in which every childlike quality is a
shame to it; and the Venetian feeling for and cultivation of color are
essentially childlike traits. No shadows of optics, no spectra of the
prism clouded their passionate enjoyment of color as it was or as it
might be, no uplifted finger of cold decorum frightened them into gray
or sable gloom; they garbed themselves in rainbows, and painted with the
sunset. Color was to them a rapture and one of the great pursuits of
their lives; it was music visible, and they cultivated it as such,--not
by rule and measure, by scales and opposites, through theories and
canons, with petrific chill of intellect or entangling subtilty of
analysis. Their lives developed their instincts, and their instincts
their art. They loved color more than everything else; and therefore
color made herself known to them in her rarest and noblest beauty. They
went to Nature as children, and Nature met them as a loving mother
meets her child, with her happiest smile and the richest of her gifts. I
do not believe that to any Venetian painter the thought of whether a
given tint was true ever came; if only his fine instinct told him it was
lovely, he asked no question further,--and if he took a tint from
Nature, it was because it was lovely, and not because he found it in
Nature. _Our_ painter must see,--_their_ painter could feel; and in this
antithesis is told the whole difference between the times, so far as
color is concerned.

But while Delacroix worked in the same spirit and must be ranked in the
same school, there were differences produced by the action of the so
different social and intellectual influences under which he grew up. His
nature was intensely imaginative, and so was preserved from the dwarfing
effect of French rationalism and materialism: their clay could not hide
his light or close his eyes, for imagination sees at all points and
through all disguises, and so his spiritual and intellectual nature was
kept alive when all Art around him was sinking into mere shapely clay.
Classic taste and rationalistic pride had left in his contemporaries
little else than cold propriety of form and color, studied negations of
spontaneity and imaginative abandon; yet such was the force of