a
bridge--the common people cannot account for it, and they say it was
erected _by the devil_. Now I feel this same thing in regard to the
works of Titian;--they seem to me as if painted by a devil, or at any
rate from inspiration; I cannot account for them.

_Northcote._

NORTHERN MASTERS

CCIX

Raphael, to be plain with you--for I like to be candid and
outspoken--does not please me at all. In Venice are found the good and
the beautiful; to their brush I give the first place; it is Titian that
bears the banner.

_Velasquez._

CCX

Perhaps some day the world will discover that Rembrandt is a much
greater painter than Raphael. I write this blasphemy--one to make the
hair of the Classicists stand on end--without definitely taking a side;
only I seem to find as I grow older that the most beautiful and most
rare thing in the world is truth.

Let us say, if you will, that Rembrandt has not Raphael's nobility. Yet
perhaps this nobility which Raphael manifests in his line is shown by
Rembrandt in the mysterious conception of his subjects, in the profound
naivete of his expressions and gestures. However much one may prefer the
majestic emphasis of Raphael, which answers perhaps to the grandeur
inherent in certain subjects, one might assert, without being stoned by
men of taste--I mean men whose taste is real and sincere--that the great
Dutchman was more a born painter than the studious pupil of Perugino.

_Delacroix._

CCXI

Rembrandt's principle was to extract from things one element among the
rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the
seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to
analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even
more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects.
One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their
"envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise
than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate them; but then,
if he ignored grace and beauty, purity of line and the delicacy of the
skin, he expressed the nude body by suggestions of suppleness,
roundness, elasticity, with a love of material substance, a sense of the
live being, which enchant the practical painter. He resolved everything
into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by
eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a
given scene, he