CHAPTER XXXVI

ITALY

Italy has played a very different part from that of Spain in the development of modern art. Even at the World Exhibition of 1855 Edmond About called Italy "the grave of painting" in his _Voyage à travers l'Exposition des Beaux-Arts_. He mentions a few Piedmontese professors, but about Florence, Naples, and Rome he found nothing to say. The Great Exhibition of 1862 in England was productive of no more favourable criticism, for W. Bürger's account is as little consolatory as About's. "Renowned Italy and proud Spain," writes Burger, "have no longer any painters who can rival those of other schools. There is nothing to be said about the rooms where the Italians, Spanish, and Swiss are exhibited." To-day there are in Italy a great number of vigorous painters. In Angelo de Gubernati's lexicon of artists there are over two thousand names, some of which are favourably known in other countries also. But the mass dwindles to a tiny heap if those only are included who have risen from the level of dexterous picture-makers to that of painters of real importance in the world of art.

Whether it be from direct influence or similarity of origin, Fortuny has found his ablest successors amongst the Neapolitan artists. As early as the seventeenth century the school of painting there was very different from those in the rest of Italy; the Greek blood of the population and the wild, romantic scenery of the Abruzzi gave it a peculiar stamp. Southern _brio_, the joy of life, colour, and warmth, in contrast with the noble Roman ideal of form, were the qualities of Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, and Ribera, bold and fiery spirits. And a breath of such power seems to live in their descendants still. Even now Neapolitan painting sings, dances, and laughs in a bacchanal of colour, pleasure, delight in life, and glowing sunshine.

A wild and restless spirit, _Domenico Morelli_, whose biography is like a chapter from _Rinaldo Rinaldini_, is the head of this Neapolitan school. He was born on 4th August, 1826, and in his youth he is said to have been, first a pupil in a seminary of priests, then an apprentice with a mechanician, and for some time even _facchino_. He never saw such a thing as an academy. Indeed, it was a Bohemian life that he led, making his meals of bread and cheese, wandering for weeks together with Byron's poems in his pocket upon the seashore between Posilippo and Baiæ. In 1848 he fought against King Ferdinand, and was left severely wounded on the battle-field. After these episodes of youth he first became a painter, beginning his career in 1855 with the large picture "The Iconoclasts," followed in 1857 by a "Tasso," and in 1858 by a "Saul and David." Biblical pictures remained his province even later, and he was the only artist in Italy who handled these subjects from an entirely novel point of view, pouring into them a peculiarly exalted and imaginative spirit. A Madonna rocking her sleeping Child, whilst her song is accompanied by a legion of cherubs playing upon instruments, "The Reviling of Christ," "The Ascension," "The Descent from the Cross," "Christ walking on the Sea," "The Raising of the Daughter of Jairus," "The Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple," "The Marys at the Grave," "Salve Regina," and "Mary Magdalene meeting Christ risen from the Grave," are the principal stages of his great Christian epic, and in their imaginative naturalism a new revolutionary language finds utterance through all these pictures. There is in them at times something of the mystical quietude of the East, and at times something of the passionate breath of Eugène Delacroix. In these pictures he revealed himself as a true child of the land of the sun, a lover of painting which scintillates and flickers. As yet hard, ponderous, dark, and plastic in "The Iconoclasts," he was a worshipper of light and resplendent in colour in the "Mary Magdalene." "The Temptation of St. Anthony" probably marks the summit of his creative power in the matter of colour. Morelli has conceived the whole temptation as a hallucination. The saint squats upon the ground, claws with his fingers, and with fixed gaze tries to stifle thoughts, full of craving sensuality, which are flaming in him. Yet they throng ever more thickly, take shape ever more distinctly, are transformed into red-haired women who detach themselves from corners upon all sides. They rise from beneath the matting, wind nearer from the depth of the cavern; even the breeze that caresses the fevered brow of the tormented man changes into the head of a girl pressing her kisses upon him. Only Naples could produce an artist at once so bizarre, so many-sided and incoherent, so opulent and strange. Younger men of talent trooped around him. A fiery spirit, haughty and independent, he became the teacher of all the younger generation. He led them to behold the sun and the sea, to marvel at nature in her radiant brightness. Through him the joy in light and colour came into Neapolitan painting, that rejoicing in colour which touches such laughing concords in the works of his pupil _Paolo Michetti_.

A man of bold and magnificent talent, the genuine product of the wild Abruzzi, Michetti was the son of a day-labourer, like Morelli. However, a man of position became the protector of the boy, who was early left an orphan. But neither at the Academy at Naples nor in Paris and London did this continue long. As early as 1876 he was back in Naples, and settled amid the Abruzzi, close to the Adriatic, in Francavilla à Mare, near Ostona, a little nest which the traveller passes just before he goes on board the Oriental steamer at Brindisi. Here he lives out of touch with old pictures, in the thick of the vigorous life of the Italian people. In 1877 he painted the work which laid the foundation of his celebrity, "The Corpus Domini Procession at Chieti," a picture which rose like a firework in its boisterous, exhilarating medley of bright colours. The procession is seen just coming out of church: men, women, naked children, monks, priests, a canopy, choristers with censers, old men and youths, people who kneel and people who laugh, the mist of incense, the beams of the sun, flowers scattered on the ground, a band of musicians, and a church façade with rich and many-coloured ornaments. There is the play of variously hued silk, and colours sparkle in all the tints of the prism. Everything laughs, the faces and the costumes, the flowers and the sunbeams. Following upon this came a picture which he called "Spring and the Loves." It represented a desolate promontory in the blue sea, and upon it a troop of Cupids, playing round a hawthorn bush in full flower, are scuffling, buffeting each other, and leaping as riotously as Neapolitan street-boys. Some were arrayed like little Japanese, some like Grecian terra-cotta figures, whilst a marble bridge in the neighbourhood shone in indigo blue. The whole picture gleamed with red, blue, green, and yellow patches of colour: a serpentine dance painted twelve years before the appearance of Loie Fuller. Then again he painted the sea. It is noon, and the sultry heat broods over the azure tide. Naked fishermen are standing in it, and on the shore gaily dressed women are searching for mussels; whilst, in the background, vessels with the sun playing on their sails are mirrored brightly in the water. Or the moon rises casting greenish reflections upon the body of Christ, which shines like phosphorus as it is being taken from the cross: or there is a flowery landscape upon a summer evening; birds are settling down for the night, and little angels are kissing each other and laughing. In all these pictures Michetti showed himself an improviser of astonishing dexterity, solving every difficulty as though it were child's play, and shedding a brilliant colour over everything--a man to whom "painting" was as much a matter of course as orthography is to ourselves. Even the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 made him celebrated as an artist, and from that time his name was to the Italian ear a symbol for something new, unexpected, wild, and extravagant. The word "Michetti" means splendid materials, dazzling flesh-tones, conflicting hues set with intention beside each other, the luxuriant bodies of women basking in heat and sun, fantastic landscapes created in the mad brain of the artist, strange and curious frames, and village idylls in the glowing blaze of the sun. There are no lifeless spots in his works; every whim of his takes shape, as if by sorcery, in splendid figures.

Another pupil of Morelli, _Edoardo Dalbono_, completed his duty to history by a scene of horror _à la_ Laurens, "The Excommunication of King Manfred," and then became the painter of the Bay of Naples. "The Isle of Sirens" was the first production of his able, appetising, and nervously vibrating brush. There is a steep cliff dropping sheer into the blue sea. Two antique craft are drawing near, the crews taking no heed of the reefs and sandbanks. With phantomlike gesture the naked women stretch out their arms beckoning, embodiments as they are of the deadly beautiful and voluptuously cruel ocean. By degrees the sea betrayed to him all its secrets--its strangest combinations of colour and atmospheric effects, its transparency, and its eternally shifting phases of ebb and flow. He has painted the Bay of Naples under bright, hot noon and the gloom of night, in the purple light of the sinking sun and in the strange and many-coloured mood of twilight. At one moment it shines and plays variegated and joyous in blue, grass-green, and violet tones; at another it seems to glitter with millions of phosphorescent sparks: the rosy clouds of the sky are glassed in it, and the lights of the houses irregularly dotted over abrupt mountain-chains or the dark-red glow of lava luridly shining from Vesuvius. Now and then he painted scenes from Neapolitan street-life--old, weather-beaten seamen, young sailors with features as sharply cut as if cast in bronze, beautiful, fiery, brown women, shooting the hot Southern flame from their eyes, houses painted white or orange-yellow, with the sun glittering on the windows. The "Voto alla Madonna del Carmine" was the most comprehensive of these Southern pictures. Everything shines in joyous blue, yellowish-green, and red colours. Warmth, life, light, brilliancy, and laughter are the elements on which his art is based.

_Alceste Campriani_, _Giacomo di Chirico_, _Rubens Santoro_, _Federigo Cortese_, _Francesco Netti_, _Edoardo Toffano_, _Giuseppe de Nigris_ have, all of them, this kaleidoscopic sparkle, this method of painting which gives pictures the appearance of being mosaics of precious stones. As in the days of the Renaissance, the Church is usually the scene of action, though not any longer as the house of God, but as the background of a many-coloured throng. As a rule these pictures contain a crowd of canopies, priests, and choristers, and country-folk, bowing or kneeling when the host is carried by, or weddings, horse-races, and country festivals; and everything is vivid and joyous in colour, saturated with the glowing sun of Naples. Alceste Campriani's chief work was entitled "The Return from Montevergine." Carriages and open rack-waggons are dashing along, the horses snorting and the drivers smacking their whips, while the peasants, who have had their fill of sweet wine, are shouting and singing, and the orange-sellers in the street are crying their goods. A coquettish glancing light plays over the gay costumes, and the white dust sparkles like fluid silver, as it rises beneath the hoofs of the horses wildly plunging forward. The leading work of _Giacomo di Chirico_, who became mad in 1883, was "A Wedding in the Basilicata." It represents a motley crowd. The entire village has set out to see the ceremony. The wedding guests are descending the church steps to the square, which is decked out with coloured carpets and strewn with flowers. Triumphal arches have been set up, and the pictures of the Madonna are hung with garlands. Meanwhile the _sindaco_ gives his arm to the bride, beneath whose gay costume a charmingly graceful little foot is peeping out. Then the bridegroom follows with the _sindaco's_ wife. All the village girls are looking on with curiosity, and the musicians are playing. Winter has covered the square with a white cloak of snow; yet the sunbeams sport over it, making it shine vividly with a thousand reflections.

Of course, the derivation of all these pictures is easily recognisable. Almost all the Neapolitan painters studied at Fortuny's in the seventies in Rome, and when they came home again they perceived that the life of the people offered themes which had a coquettish fitness in Fortuny's scale of tones. From the variously coloured magnificence of old churches, the red robes of ecclesiastics, the gaudy splendour of the country-people's clothes, and the gay glory of rags amongst the Neapolitan children, they composed a modern _rococo_, rejoicing in colour, whilst the Spaniard had fled to the past to attain his gleaming effects.

A great number of the Italians do the same even now. In numerous costume pictures, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, flashing with silk and velvet, the Southerner's bright pleasure in colour still loves to celebrate its orgies. Gay trains rustle, rosy Loves laugh down from the walls, Venetian chandeliers shed their radiance; no other epoch in history enables the painter with so much ease to produce such an efflorescence of full-toned chords of colour. With his shining glow of hue the delectable and spirited _Favretto_ (who, like Fortuny, entered the world of art as a victor, and, like him again, was snatched from it when barely thirty-seven, after a brief and brilliant career) stands at the head of this group. The child of poor parents, indeed the son of a joiner, he was born in Venice in 1849, and, like the Spaniard, passed a youth which was full of privations. But all the cares of existence, even the loss of an eye, did not hinder him from seeing objects under a laughing brightness of colour. Through his studies and the bent of his fancy he had come to be no less at home in the Venice of the eighteenth century than in that of his own time. This Venice of Francesco Guardi, this city of enchantment surrounded with the gleam of olden splendour, the scene of rich and brilliantly coloured banquets and a graceful and modish society, rose once more under Favretto's hands in fabulous beauty. What _brio_ of technique, what harmony of colours, were to be found in the picture "Un Incontro," the charming scene upon the Rialto Bridge, with the bowing cavalier and the lady coquettishly making her acknowledgments! This was the first picture which gave him a name in the world. What fanfares of colour were in the two next pictures, "Banco Lotto" and "Erbajuolo Veneziano"! At the Exhibition in Turin in 1883 he was represented by "The Bath" and "Susanna and the Elders"; at that in Venice in 1887 he celebrated his last and greatest triumph. The three pictures "The Friday Market upon the Rialto Bridge," "The Canal Ferry near Santa Margherita," and "On the Piazzetta" were the subject of enthusiastic admiration. All the Venetian society of the age of Goldoni, Gozzi, and Casanova had become vivid in this last picture, and moved over the smooth brick pavement of the Piazzetta at the hour of the promenade, from the Doge's palace to the library, and from the Square of St. Mark to the pillar of the lions and Theodore, to and fro in surging life. Men put up their glasses and chivalrously greeted the queens of beauty. The enchanting magic building of Sansovino, the _loggetta_ with their bright marble pillars, bronze statues of blackish-grey, and magnificent lattice doors, formed the background of the standing and sauntering groups, whose variegated costumes united with the tones of marble and bronze to make a most beautiful combination of colours. Favretto had a manner of his own, and, although a member of the school of Fortuny, he was stronger and healthier than the latter. He drew like a genuine painter, without having too much of the Fortuny fireworks. His soft, rich painting was that of a colourist of distinction, always tasteful, exquisite in tone, and light and pleasing in technique.

By the other Italian costume painters the scale run through by Fortuny was not enriched by new notes. Most of their pictures are nugatory, coquettishly sportive toys, masterly in technique no doubt, but so empty of substance that they vanish from memory like novels read upon a railway journey. Many have no greater import than dresses, cloaks, and hats worn by ladies during a few weeks of the season. Sometimes their significance is not even so great, since there are modistes and dressmakers who have more skill in making ruches and giving the right _nuance_ to colours. Some small part of Favretto's refined taste seems to have been communicated to the Venetian _Antonio Lonza_, who delights in mingling the gleaming splendour of Oriental carpets, fans, and screens amid the motley, picturesque costumes of the _rococo_ period--Japanese who perform as jugglers and knife-throwers in quaint _rococo_ gardens before the old Venetian nobility. But the centre of this costume painting is Florence, and the great mart for it the _Società artistica_, where there are yearly exhibitions.

Francesco Vinea, Tito Conti, Federigo Andreotti, and Edoardo Gelli are in Italy the special manufacturers who have devoted themselves, with the assistance of Meissonier, Gérôme, and Fortuny, to scenes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to plumed hats, Wallenstein boots, and horsemen's capes, to Renaissance lords and laughing Renaissance ladies, and they have thereby won great recognition in Germany. Pretty, languishing women in richly coloured costumes, tippling soldiers and gallant cavaliers, laughing peasant women and trim serving-girls drawing wine in the cellar vaults and setting it before a trooper, who in gratitude affectionately puts his arm round their waist, beautiful and still more languishing noble ladies, who laugh with a parrot or a dog, instead of a trooper, in apartments richly furnished with Gobelins--such for the most part are the subjects treated by _Francesco Vinea_ with great virtuosity bordering on the routine of a typewriter. His technique is neither refined nor fascinating; the colours are so crude that they affect the eye as a false note the ear. But the mechanical power of his painting is great. He has much ability, far more, indeed, than Sichel, and possesses the secret of painting, in an astonishing manner, the famous lace kerchiefs wound round the heads of his fair ones. _Andreotti_ and _Tito Conti_ work in the same fashion, except that the ballad-singers and rustic idylls of Andreotti are the smoother and more mawkish, whereas the pictures of Conti make a somewhat more refined and artistic effect. His colour is superior and more transparent, and his tapestry backgrounds are warmer.

And, so far as one can judge from their pictures, life runs as merrily for the Italians of the present as it did for those _rococo_ cavaliers. Hanging here and there beside the serious art of other nations, these little picture-people enjoy their careless tinsel pomp; art is a gay thing for them, as gay as a Sunday afternoon with a procession and fireworks, walks and sips of sherbet, to an Italian woman. By the side of the blue-plush and red-velvet costume-picture comic _genre_ still holds its sway: barbaric in colour and with materials which are merrier than is appropriate in tasteful pictures, _Gaetano Chierici_ represents children, both good and naughty, making their appearance upon a tiny theatre. _Antonio Rotta_ renders comic episodes from the life of Venetian cobblers and the menders of nets. _Scipione Vannuttelli_ paints young girls in white dresses arrayed as nuns or being confirmed in church. _Francesco Monteverde_ rejoices in comical _intermezzi_ in the style of Grützner--for instance, an ecclesiastical gentleman observing, to his horror, that his pretty young servant-girl is being kissed by a smart lad in the yard. This is more or less his style of subject. _Ettore Tito_ paints the pretty Venetian laundresses whom Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Charles Ulrich, Eugène Blaas, and others introduced into art. Only a very few struck deeper notes. _Luigi Nono_, in Venice, painted his beautiful picture "Refugium Peccatorum"; _Ferragutti_, the Milanese, his "Workers in the Turnip Field," a vivid study of sunlight of serious veracity; and after these _Giovanni Segantini_ came forward with his forcible creations, in which he has demonstrated that it is possible for a man to be an Italian and yet a serious artist.

Segantini's biography is like a novel. Born the child of poor parents, in Arco, in 1858, he was left, after the death of his parents, to the care of a relative in Milan with whom he passed a most unhappy time. He then wanted to make his fortune in France, and set out upon foot; but he did not get very far, in fact he managed to hire himself out as a swine-herd. After this he lived for a whole year alone in the wild mountains, worked in the field, the stable, the barn. Then came the well-known discovery, which one could not believe were it not to be read in Gubernati. One day he drew the finest of his pigs with a piece of charcoal upon a mass of rock. The peasants ran in a crowd and took the block of stone, together with the young Giotto, in triumph to the village. He was given assistance, visited the School of Art in Milan, and now paints the things he did in his youth. In a secluded village of the Alps, Val d'Albola in Switzerland, a thousand metres above the sea, amid the grand and lofty mountains, he settled down, surrounded only by the peasants who make a precarious living from the soil. Out of touch with the world of artists the whole year round, observing great nature at every season and every hour of the day, fresh and straightforward in character, he is one of those natures of the type of Millet, in whom heart and hand, man and artist, are one and the same thing. His shepherd and peasant scenes from the valleys of the high Alps are free from all flavour of _genre_. The life of these poor and humble beings passes without contrasts and passions, being spent altogether in work, which fills the long course of the day in monotonous regularity. The sky sparkles with a sharp brilliancy. The spiky yellow and tender green of the fields forces its way modestly from the rocky ground. In front is something like a hedge where a cow is grazing, or there is a shepherdess pasturing her sheep. Something majestic there is in this cold nature, where the sunshine is so sharp, the air so thin. And the primitive, it might almost be said antique, execution of these pictures is in accord with the primitive simplicity of the subjects. In fact, Segantini's pictures, with their cold silvery colours, and their contours so sharp in outline, standing out hard against the rarefied air, make an impression like encaustic paintings or mosaics. They have nothing alluring or pleasing, and there is, perhaps, even a touch of mannerism in this mosaic painting; but they are nevertheless exceedingly true, rugged, austere, and yet sunny. Segantini opened up to painting an entirely new world of beauty, the poetry of the highlands. His appearance dates from the Impressionistic period when preference was given to damp, misty atmospheres which toned down all colour and melted away all lines, and artists made a specialty of flat, monotonous plains. At that time the mountains were in bad repute, thanks to the old-fashioned painters of views, the masters of the "picture-postcard style." Segantini led the way again up to the heights; but he did not paint the mountain-tops that, like the Titans of old, strive to reach the sky; he painted the plateaus, not the plains of the lowlands, but of the highlands, lonely, weird, sublime, where man draws near to the heart of Nature, far from the noise and struggle of everyday life. The air of the heights is there, the colours and lines speak with no uncertain voice. Thus Segantini learnt from the locale of his pictures to become the first master of line among the Impressionists. How he mirrors in his pictures the stillness, the might and grandeur of these lofty heights! With what astounding truth his cold, clear colours make us feel the coldness and clearness of these regions. Like a dome of steel, the sky stretches over the steel-blue lakes, clear as crystal, over the pale-green meadows in the grip of the frost; the tender foliage rustles and freezes in the quivering ice-cold air: there glaciers gleam, there glitters the snow, there the sun pours down his beams upon the earth like plumes of fire. A thunder cloud draws near, calm and majestic as destiny in its relentless course. There is something Northern and virginal, something earnest and grandiose, which stands in strange contrast with the joyful, conventional smile which is otherwise spread over the countenance of Italian painting. Though he died so young, Giovanni Segantini will live for all time in the history of art.

With the exception of Segantini, not one of these painters will own that there are poverty-stricken and miserable people in his native land. An everlasting blue sky still laughs over Italy, sunshine and the joy of life still hold undisputed sway over Italian pictures. There is no work in sunny Italy, and in spite of that there is no hunger. Even where work is being done there are assembled only the fairest girls of Lombardy, who kneel laughing and jesting on the strand, while the wind dallies with their clothes. They have a special delight for showing themselves while engaged at their toilette, in a bodice, their little feet in neat little slippers, their naked arms raised to arrange their red-gold hair. As a rule, however, they do nothing whatever but smile at you with their most seductive smile, which shows their pearl-white teeth, and ensnares every poor devil who does not suspect that they have smiled for years in the same way, and most of all with him who pays highest: "_j'aime les hommes parse que j'aime les truffes_." These pictures are almost invariably works which are well able to give pleasure to their possessor, only they seldom suggest discussion on the course of art. _Trop de marchandise_ is the phrase generally used in the Paris Salon when the Italians come under consideration. Few there are amongst them who are real pioneers, spirits pressing seriously forward and having a quickening influence on others. The vital questions of the painting of free light, Impressionism, and Naturalism do not interest them in the least. A naïve, pleasant, lively, and self-complacent technique is in most cases the solitary charm of their works. One feels scarcely any inclination to search the catalogue for the painter's name, and whether the beauty--for she is not the first of her kind--who was called Ninetta last year has now become Lisa. Most of these modern Italians execute their pictures in the way in which gold pieces are minted, or in the way in which plastic works, which run through so many editions, are produced in Italy. Nowhere are more beautiful laces chiselled, and in the same manner painters render the shining splendour of satin and velvet, the glittering brilliancy of ornaments, and the starry radiance of the beautiful eyes of women. Only, as soon as one has once seen them one knows the pictures by heart, as one knows the works in marble, and this is so because the painters had them by heart first. Everywhere there are the evidences of talent, industry, ability, and spirit, but there is no soul in the spirit and no life in the colours. So many brilliant tones stand beside each other, and yet there is neither a refined tone nor the impression of truth to nature.

In all this art of theirs there is scarcely a question of any serious landscape. Apart from the works of some of the younger men--for instance, _Belloni_, _Serra_, _Gola_, _Filippini_, and others, who display an intimacy of observation which is worthy of honour--a really close connection with the efforts made across the Alps is not achieved in these days. As a rule the landscapes are mere products of handicraft, which are striking for the moment by their technical routine, but seldom waken any finer feelings, whether the Milanese paint the dazzling Alpine effects or the Venetian lagunes steeped in light, with gondolas and gondola-poles glowing in the sunshine, or the Neapolitans set glittering upon the canvas their beautiful bay like a brilliant firework. Most of them continue to pursue with complete self-satisfaction the flagged gondola of Ziem; the conquests of the Fontainebleau painters and of the Impressionists are unnoticed by them.

And this industrial characteristic of Italian painting is sufficiently explained by the entire character of the country. The Italian painter is not properly in a position to seek effects of his own and to make experiments. Hardly anything is bought for the galleries, and there are few collectors of superior taste. He labours chiefly for the traveller, and this gives his performances the stamp of attractive mercantile wares. The Italian is too much a man of business to undertake great trials of strength _pour le roi de Prusse_. He paints no great pictures, which would be still-born children in his home, nor does he paint severe studies of _plein-air_, preferring a specious, exuberant, flickering, and glaring revel in colour. In general he produces nothing which will not easily sell, and has a fine instinct for the taste of the rich travelling public, who wish to see nothing which does not excite cheerful and superficial emotions.

But it is possible that this decline of the Latin races is connected with the nature of modern art itself. Of late the words "Germanic" and "Latin" have been much abused. It has been proclaimed that the new art meant the victory of the German depth of feeling over the Latin sense of form, the onset of German cordiality against the empty exaggeration in which the imitation of the Cinquecento resulted. Such assertions are always hard to maintain, because every century shows similar reactions of truth to nature against mannerism. Nevertheless is it true that modern art, with its heartfelt devotion to everyday life and the mysteries of light, has an essentially Germanic character, finding its ancestors not in Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, but in the English of the eighteenth, the Dutch of the seventeenth, and the Germans of the sixteenth century. The Italians and Spaniards, whose entire intellectual culture rests upon a Latin foundation, may therefore find it difficult to follow this change of taste. They either adhere to the old bombastic and theatrical painting of history, or they recast the new painting in an external drawing-room art draped with gaudy tinsel. Even in France the rise of the new art meant, as it were, the victory of the Frankish element over the Gallic. Millet the Norman, Courbet the Frank, Bastien-Lepage of Lorraine, drove back the Latins--Ingres and Couture, Cabanel and Bouguereau--just as in the eighteenth century the Netherlander Watteau broke the yoke of the rigid Latin Classicism.

It is perhaps no mere chance that the threads of the Germanic aim in art were drawn out with such zeal by the Germanic nations. With the Latins a striking effect is made by brilliant technique, mastery of the manual art of painting, and careless sway over all the enchantments of the craft; with the Teutons one stands in the presence of an art which is so natural and simple that one scarcely thinks of the means by which it was called into being. In one case there is virtuosity, ductility, and grace; in the other, health, intrinsic feeling, and temperament.