Raphael infects with sleep of infidelity
the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first cause of all that
pre-eminent _dullness_ which characterizes what Protestants call sacred
art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the
young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion
in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the
graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the
painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could
exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed
impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, until
we find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring,
but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael.

241. Without claiming,--nay, so far as my knowledge can reach, utterly
disclaiming--any personal influence over, or any originality of
suggestion to, the men who founded our presently realistic schools, I
may yet be permitted to point out the sympathy which I had as an
outstanding spectator with their effort; and the more or less active
fellowship with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning.
The passage I have just quoted (with many others enforcing similar
truths) is in the third volume of _Modern Painters_; but if the reader
can refer to the close of the preface to the second edition[46] of the
first, he will find this very principle of realism asserted for the
groundwork of all I had to teach in that volume. The lesson so far
pleased the public of that day, that ever since, they have refused to
listen to any corollaries or conclusions from it, assuring me, year by
year, continually, that the older I grew, the less I knew, and the worse
I wrote. Nevertheless, that first volume of _Modern Painters_ did by no
means contain all that even then I knew; and in the third, nominally
treating of "Many Things," will be found the full expression of what I
knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to
paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we
ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether
his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it
meant seriously to represent anything at all!

242. And such definition has in these days become more needful than ever
before, in this solid, or spectral--which-ever the reader