al
thinker to discover any merit in any painter before Raffael, except
perhaps, as Goldsmith wisely remarked, Perugino. The man who went then
to the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his High
Renaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judith
or the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wild
beasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted to
amuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like the
Correggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men of
that time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their sole
artistic standards. To people brought up upon pure David and
Thorvaldsen, the Primavera at the Belle Arti must naturally have seemed
like a wild freak of madness. The Zeitgeist then went all in the
direction of cold lifeless correctness; the idea that the painter's soul
counted for something in art was an undreamt of heresy.

On your way back from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and take
the Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that glorious
thirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw
monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and _baroque_ period. There they
sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to
the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the
noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any
workman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppy
creatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying to
oneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, and
let us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makers
designed them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakable
angels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim?
Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And
whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out
of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the
Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and
delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere
barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and
to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and
meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness.

The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it.

It is