and Manet and Puvis de Chavannes,
rejecting their best, and has honored yesterday what it spurns to-day. The
feverish delirium of the upper culture demands "some new thing," and
Athens, Paris, London and New York concede it.

But what has lived? What successive generations have believed in may be
believed by us; a thought expressed by the author of "Modern Painters" in
one magnificent sentence, containing 153 words and too long for quotation.
The argument is based on the common sense of mankind. It has however this
objection. Judgment by such agreement is bound to be cumulative. What is
good in the beginning is better to-day, still better to morrow, then
great, then wonderful, then divine.

This is the Raphaelesque progression, and if fifty persons were asked who
was the greatest painter, forty-nine would say Raphael, without
discrimination. The fiftieth might have observed what all painters know,
that Raphael was not a great painter, either as colorist or technician.
The opinion in this contention of Velasquez that of all painters he
studied at Rome, Raphael pleased him least, is a judgment of a colorist
and a technician, the more valuable because rendered before the
ministrations of oil and granular secretion had enveloped his work in the
mystery from which it speaks to us. As a painter and draughtsman Raphael
is perhaps outclassed by Bouguereau, Cabanel or Lefevre of our own time,
and as a composer of either decorative or pictorial design he has had
superiors. But the work of Raphael possesses the loving unction of real
conviction and nothing to which he put his well trained hand failed of the
baptism of genius. Through this mark, therefore, it will live forever.
Nor should any work require more than this for continuous life. Each age
should be distinctive.

The bias of judgment through the cumulative regard of successive centuries
is what has created the popular disparity between the old and modern
masters, and it must not be forgotten that the harmony of color and its
glowing quality is largely the gift of these centuries, a fact made
cruelly plain to those who have restored pictures and tampered with their
secrets.

It will be a surprise to the average man in that realm of perfect truth
which lies beyond, to mark, in the association of artists of all ages,
when the divisions of schools, periods and petty formulas are forgotten,
that Raphael will grasp the hand of Abbott Thayer, saying to him in the
ne