appropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works of
painting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at any
time since the Italian Renaissance. So surely as the interest in
decorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become more
widely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine again
with something of its ancient splendor.

But design is something more than the essential quality of mural
decoration--it is the common basis of all the arts, the essential thing
in art itself. Each of the arts has its qualities proper to it alone,
and it may be right to estimate the painter, the sculptor, the
architect, or the musician according to his eminence in those qualities
which are distinctive of his particular art and which separate it most
sharply from the other arts. In that sense we are right to call Frans
Hals a greater painter than Raphael. But if we estimate a man's artistry
by the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expresses
itself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes or
forms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must we
place Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but a
choice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. If we no
longer call him "the prince of painters" we must call him one of the
greatest artists among those who have practised the art of painting.

V

TWO WAYS OF PAINTING

Among the modern paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant and
altogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "The
Hermit" (Pl. 21). Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and the
public knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader of
human character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, on
occasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in the
wonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts
and Sciences, one fancies one sees the essential John Sargent, working
for himself alone without regard to external demands, and doing what he
really cares most to do. In such work he is a modern of the moderns
and, in the broadest sense of the word, a thorough Impressionist. Not
that he shows himself a disciple of Monet or occupies himself with the
broken touch or the division of tones--his method is as direct as that
of Sorolla and his impressionism is of the same kind--a bending of all
his energ