amatic verse to found their
style at first on Massinger rather than on Shakespeare, so Reynolds
thought that the Caracci were sound models for beginners in the science
of idealization. Shakespeare and Michelangelo are inimitable; Massinger
and the Caracci exhibit the one thing needful to be learned, upon a
scale not wholly unattainable by industry and talent. That was the line
of argument; and, granted that the pseudo-grand style is a _sine qua
non_ of painting, Reynolds's position was logical.[238]

[Footnote 238: It is only because I am an Englishman, writing a popular
book for English folk, that I thus spend time in noticing the opinions
of Joshua Reynolds. Addressing a European audience in this year grace, I
should not have thought of eddying about his obsolete doctrine.]

The criticism and the art-practice of this century have combined to
shake our faith in the grand style. The spirit of the Romantic movement,
penetrating poetry first, then manifesting itself in the reflective
writings of Rio and Lord Lindsay, Ruskin and Gautier, producing the
English landscape-painters and pre-Raphaelites, the French Realists and
Impressionists, has shifted the center of gravity in taste. Science,
too, contributes its quota. Histories of painting, like Kugler's, and
Crowe and Cavalcaselle's, composed in an impartial and searching spirit
of investigation, place students at a point of view removed from
prejudice and academical canons of perfection. Only here and there,
under special reactionary influences, as in the Dusseldorf and Munich
schools of religious purists, has anything approaching to the
eighteenth-century 'grand style' delusion reappeared.

Why, therefore, the Eclectics are at present pining in the shade of
neglect is now sufficiently apparent. We dislike their religious
sentiments. We repudiate their false and unimaginative ideality. We
recognize their touch on antique mythology to be cold and lifeless.
Superficial imitations of Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no
attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon.
Dull reproductions of Raphael's manner at his worst cannot delight men
satiated with Raphael's manner at his best. Whether the whirligig of
time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be
seen. Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create
taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems
impossible, may happen in the future. But a