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The art of architecture is later in its beginning than that of poetry, for it can exist only when men have learned to build solidly and permanently. A nomad may be a poet, but he cannot be an architect; a herdsman might have written the Book of Job, but the great builders are dwellers in cities. But since men first learned to build they have never quite forgotten how to do so. At all times there have been somewhere peoples who knew enough of building to mould its utility into forms of beauty, and the history of architecture may be read more continuously than that of any other art. It is a history of constant change and of continuous development, each people and each age forming out of the old elements a new style which should express its mind, and each style reaching its point of greatest distinctiveness only to begin a further transformation into something else; but is it a history of progress? Building, indeed, has progressed at one time or another. The Romans, with their domes and arches, were more scientific builders than the Greeks, with their simple post and lintel, but were they better architects? We of to-day, with our steel construction, can scrape the sky with erections that would have amazed the boldest of mediaeval craftsmen; can we equal his art? If we ask where in the history of architecture do its masterpieces appear, the answer must be: "Almost anywhere." Wherever men have had the wealth and the energy to build greatly, they have builded beautifully, and the distinctions are less between style and style or epoch and epoch than between building and building: The masterpieces of one time are as the masterpieces of another, and no man may say that the nave of Amiens is finer than the Parthenon or that the Parthenon is nobler than the nave of Amiens. One may say only that each is perfect in its kind, a supreme expression of the human spirit.

Of the art of music I must speak with the diffidence becoming to the ignorant; but it seems to me to consist of two elements and to contain an inspirational art as direct and as simple as that of poetry, and a science so difficult that its fullest mastery is of very recent achievement. In melodic invention it is so far from progressive that its most brilliant masters are often content to elaborate and to decorate a theme old enough to have no history--a theme the inventor of which has been so entirely forgotten that we think of it as sprung not from the mind of one man, but from that of a whole people, and call it a folk-song. The song is almost as old as the race, but the symphony has had to wait for the invention of many instruments and for a mastery of the laws of harmony, and so symphonic music is a modern art. We are still adding new instruments to the orchestra and admitting to our compositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred years made any essential progress even in this part of the art? Have we produced anything, I will not say greater, but anything as great as the noblest works of Bach and Beethoven?

Already, and before considering the arts of painting and sculpture, we are coming within sight of our general law. This law seems to be that, so far as an art is dependent upon any form of exact knowledge, so far it partakes of the nature of science and is capable of progress. So far as it is expressive of a mind and soul, its greatness is dependent upon the greatness of that mind and soul, and it is incapable of progress. It may even be the reverse of progressive, because as an art becomes more complicated and makes ever greater demands upon technical mastery, it becomes more difficult as a medium of expression, while the mind to be expressed becomes more sophisticated and less easy of expression in any medium. It would take a greater mind than Homer's to express modern ideas in modern verse with Homer's serene perfection; it would take, perhaps, a greater mind than Bach's to employ all the resources of modern music with his glorious ease and directness. And greater minds than those of Bach and Homer the world has not often the felicity to possess.

The arts of painting and sculpture are imitative arts above all others, and therefore more dependent than any others upon exact knowledge, more tinged with the quality of science. Let us see how they illustrate our supposed law.

Sculpture depends, as does architecture, upon certain laws of proportion in space which are analogous to the laws of proportion in time and in pitch upon which music is founded. But as sculpture represents the human figure, whereas architecture and music represent nothing, sculpture requires for its perfection the mastery of an additional science, which is the knowledge of the structure and movement of the human body. This knowledge may be acquired with some rapidity, especially in times and countries where man is often seen unclothed. So, in the history of civilizations, sculpture developed early, after poetry, but with architecture, and before painting and polyphonic music. It reached the greatest perfection of which it is capable in the age of Pericles, and from that time progress was impossible to it, and for a thousand years its movement was one of decline. After the dark ages sculpture was one of the first arts to revive; and again it develops rapidly--though not so rapidly as before, conditions of custom and climate being less favorable to it--until it reaches, in the first half of the sixteenth century, something near its former perfection. Again it can go no further; and since then it has changed but has not progressed. In Phidias, by which name I would signify the sculptor of the pediments of the Parthenon, we have the coincidence of a superlatively great artist with the moment of technical and scientific perfection in the art, and a similar coincidence crowns the work of Michelangelo with a peculiar glory. But, apart from the work of these two men, a the essential value of a work of sculpture is by no means always equal to its technical and scientific completeness. There are archaic statues that are almost as nobly beautiful as any work by Phidias and more beautiful than almost any work that has been done since his time. There are bits of Gothic sculpture that are more valuable expressions of human feeling than anything produced by the contemporaries of Buonarroti. Even in times of decadence a great artist has created finer things than could be accomplished by a mediocre talent of the great epochs, and the world could ill spare the Victory of Samothrace or the portrait busts of Houdon.

As sculpture is one of the simplest of the arts, painting is one of the most complicated. The harmonies it constructs are composed of almost innumerable elements of lines and forms and colors and degrees of light and dark, and the science it professes is no less than that of the visible aspect of the whole of nature--a science so vast that it never has been and perhaps never can be mastered in its totality. Anything approaching a complete art of painting can exist only in an advanced stage of civilization. An entirely complete art of painting never has existed and probably never will exist. The history of painting, after its early stages, is a history of loss here balancing gain there, of a new means of expression acquired at the cost of an old one.

We know comparatively little of the painting of antiquity, but we have no reason to suppose that that art, however admirable, ever attained to ripeness, and we know that the painting of the Orient has stopped short at a comparatively early stage of development. For our purpose the art to be studied is the painting of modern times in Europe from its origin in the Middle Ages. Even in the beginning, or before the beginning, while painting is a decadent reminiscence of the past rather than a prophecy of the new birth, there are decorative splendors in the Byzantine mosaics hardly to be recaptured. Then comes primitive painting, an art of the line and of pure color with little modulation and no attempt at the rendering of solid form. It gradually attains to some sense of relief by the use of degrees of light and less light; but the instant it admits the true shadow the old brightness and purity of color have become impossible. The line remains dominant for a time and is carried to the pitch of refinement and beauty, but the love for solid form gradually overcomes it, and in the art of the high Renaissance it takes a second place. Then light-and-shade begins to be studied for its own sake; color, no longer pure and bright, but deep and resonant, comes in again; the line vanishes altogether, and even form becomes secondary. The last step is taken by Rembrandt, and even color is subordinated to light-and-shade, which exists alone in a world of brownness. At every step there has been progress, but there has also been regress. Perhaps the greatest balance of gain against loss and the nearest approach to a complete art of painting were with the great Venetians. The transformation is still going on, and in our own day we have conquered some corners of the science of visible aspects which were unexplored by our ancestors. But the balance has turned against us; our loss has been greater than our gain; and our art, even in its scientific aspect, is inferior to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

And just because there never has been a complete art of painting, entirely rounded and perfected, it is the clearer to us that the final value of a work in that art never has depended on its approach to such completion. There is no one supreme master of painting but a long succession of masters of different yet equal glory. If the masterpieces of architecture are everywhere because there has often been a complete art of architecture, the masterpieces of painting are everywhere for the opposite reason. And if we do not always value a master the more as his art is more nearly complete, neither do we always value him especially who has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. Palma Vecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master; Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one of the immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made a distinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purely historic; Fra Angelico made no advance whatever, but he practised consummately the current art as he found it, and his work is eternally delightful. At every stage of its development the art of painting has been a sufficient medium for the expression of a great man's mind; and wherever and whenever a great man has practised it, the result has been a great and permanently valuable work of art.

For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts--the one essential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is a great man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you have the man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him; his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be at another; but at bottom the art is the man and at all times and in all countries is just as great as the man.

Let us clear our minds, then, of the illusion that there is in any important sense such a thing as progress in the fine arts. We may with a clear conscience judge every new work for what it appears in itself to be, asking of it that it be noble and beautiful and reasonable, not that it be novel or progressive. If it be great art it will always be novel enough, for there will be a great mind behind it, and no two great minds are alike. And if it be novel without being great, how shall we be the better off? There are enough forms of mediocre or evil art in the world already. Being no longer intimidated by the fetich of progress, when a thing calling itself a work of art seems to us hideous and degraded, indecent and insane, we shall have the courage to say so and shall not care to investigate it further. Detestable things have been produced in the past, and they are none the less detestable because we are able to see how they came to be produced. Detestable things are produced now, and they will be no more admirable if we learn to understand the minds that create them. Even should such things prove to be not the mere freaks of a diseased intellect that they seem but a necessary outgrowth of the conditions of the age and a true prophecy of "the art of the future," they are not necessarily the better for that. It is only that the future will be very unlucky in its art.

RAPHAEL

There used to be on the cover of the "Portfolio Monographs" little medallions of Raphael and Rembrandt, placed there, as the editor, Mr. Hamerton, has somewhere explained, as portraits of the two most widely influential artists that ever lived. In the eighteenth century, one imagines, Rembrandt's presence by the side of Raphael would have been thought little less than a scandal. To-day it is Raphael's place that would be contested, and he would be superseded, likely enough, by Velazquez.

There is no more striking instance of the vicissitudes of critical opinion than the sudden fall of Raphael from his conceded rank as "the prince of painters." Up to the middle of the nineteenth century his right to that title was so uncontested that it alone was a sufficient identification of him--only one man could possibly be meant. That he should ever need defending or re-explaining to a generation grown cold to him would have seemed incredible. Then came the rediscovery of an earlier art that seemed more frank and simple than his; still later the discovery of Rembrandt and Velazquez--the romanticist and the naturalist--and Raphael, as a living influence, almost ceased to exist. It was but a few years ago that the author of a volume of essays on art was gravely praised by a reviewer for the purely accidental circumstance that that volume contained no essay on Raphael; and a little later the writer of a book on the pictures in Rome "had to confess unutterable boredom" in the presence of the Stanze of the Vatican.

It is not probable that any critic who greatly valued his reputation, or who had any serious reputation to value, would take quite this tone; but, leaving out of consideration the impressionistic and ultra-modern criticism which ignores Raphael altogether, it is instructive to note the way in which a critic so steeped in Italian art as Mr. Berenson approaches the fallen prince. The artist who used to be considered the greatest of draughtsmen he will hardly admit to be a draughtsman at all, ranking him far below Pollaiuolo and positively speaking of him as "a poor creature, most docile and patient." As a colorist and a manipulator of paint, he places him with Sebastiano del Piombo--that is, among the mediocrities. Almost the only serious merit, from his point of view, which he will allow him is a mastery in the rendering of space, shared in nearly equal measure by Perugino, as, to some extent, by nearly all the painters of the Umbrian school. For, while he admits that Raphael was the greatest master of composition that Europe has produced, he evidently thinks of composition, as do so many other moderns, as a matter of relatively little importance.

It is not Raphael's popularity that is in question; that is, perhaps, as great as ever it was. His works, in one form or another of reproduction, from the finest carbon print to the cheapest lithograph, are still to be found, in the humblest homes as in the most splendid, in nearly every quarter of the globe. That popularity was always based on what Berenson calls the "illustrative" qualities of Raphael's work, on the beauty of his women, the majesty of his men; on his ability to tell a story as we like it told and to picture a world that we wish might be real. One may not be prepared to consider these illustrative qualities so negligible as do many modern critics, or to echo Mr. Berenson's phrase about "that which in art ... is so unimportant as what ... we call beauty." One might point out that the greatest artists, from Phidias to Rembrandt, have occupied themselves with illustration, and that to formulate the ideals of a race and an epoch is no mean task. But, for the moment, we may neglect all that, our present inquiry being why an artist, once counted the greatest of all, is no longer considered very significant by those who measure by purely artistic standards rather than by that of illustrative success and consequent popularity.

We may also leave out of our present consideration Raphael's achievement in the suggestion of space. It is a very real quality and a high one. It has doubtless always been an important element in the enjoyability of Raphael's art, as it is almost the only enjoyable element, for many of us, in the art of Perugino. But it is an element that has only very recently been clearly perceived to exist. If it was enjoyed by the artists and critics, from Raphael's day almost to our own, they were unconscious of the fact, and the probability is that we enjoy it more than they did. It will not account for the estimation in which they held Raphael, and still less will it account for the relative lack of interest in him to-day.

In truth the reason why many modern critics and painters almost dislike Raphael is the very reason for which he was so greatly revered. Coming in the nick of time, at the close of an epoch of investigation, himself a man of wide culture and quick intellect but of no special originality or emotional power, he learned from all his predecessors what they had to teach and, choosing from the elements of their art those which were suited to his purpose, formed a perfectly balanced and noble style which was immediately accepted as the only style suitable to the expression of lofty ideas in monumental form. He became the lawgiver, the founder of classicism, the formulator of the academic ideal. Not to admire him was to confess oneself a barbarian, and even those who did not really care for his art hardly dared to say so. As long as the academic ideal retained any validity his supremacy endured, and it was only with the definitive turning of modern art into the paths of romanticism and naturalism that revolt became possible.

But when the world became tired of Raphaelism it inevitably became unjust to Raphael. It forgot that it was not he who had made his art the test of that of others--who had erected what, with him, was a spontaneous and original creation into a rigid system of laws. It confounded him with his followers and imitators, and, being bored by them, began to find the master himself a bore.

For, eclectic as he was by nature, and founder as he was of the academic r?gime, the "grand style" of Raphael was yet a new and personal contribution to art. He drew from many sources, but the principle of combination was his own. His originality was in that mastery of composition which no one has ever denied him, but which is very differently rated as a quality of art by different temperaments. Almost everything specifically Raphaelesque in his work is the offspring of that power of design in which he is still the unapproached master. Modern criticism is right in denying that he was a draughtsman, if by draughtsman is meant one deeply preoccupied with form and structure for its own sake. His distinction was to invest the human figure with such forms as should best fit it to play its part in a scheme of monumental composition. The "style" of his draperies, so much and so justly admired, is composition of draperies. He was not a colorist as Titian was a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter--he was just so much of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being the greatest of decorative designers. Everything in his finest works is entirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition, and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for its predestined part in the final result. Probably he could not have drawn like Michelangelo or painted like Hals--certainly, when he once understood himself, he would not have desired to do so.

Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardini?re." Nearly at the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of the Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this time and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw like Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna. He made a host of studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity and all grasp of the ensemble. What he finally produced is a thing of fragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he was attempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the quality proper to himself. But, apparently, it answered its purpose. It freed him from preoccupation with the work of others. When his great opportunity came to him, in the commission to decorate the Camera della Segnatura, his painfully acquired knowledge was sufficiently at his command to give him no further trouble. He could concentrate himself on the essential part of his problem, the creation of an entirely appropriate, dignified, and beautiful decorative design. It was the work for which he was born, and he succeeded so immediately and so admirably in it that neither he nor any one else has ever been able to fill such spaces so perfectly again.

There are fourteen important compositions in the room. The decoration of the ceiling had already been begun by Sodoma, and Sodoma's decorative framework Raphael allowed to remain; partly, perhaps, from courtesy, more probably because its general disposition was admirable and not to be improved on. If Sodoma had begun any of the larger paintings which were to fill his frames they were removed to make way for the new work. There has always been a great deal of discussion as to whether Raphael himself invented the admirable scheme of subjects by which the room was made to illustrate the Renaissance ideal of culture with its division into the four great fields of learning: divinity, philosophy , poetry, and law. In reality, the question is of little importance. There seems to be at least one bit of internal evidence, to be mentioned presently, that even here the artist did not have a perfectly free hand, as we know he did not later. Whoever thought of the subjects, it was Raphael who discovered how to treat them in such a way as to make of this room the most perfectly planned piece of decoration in the world. Sodoma had left, on the vaulting, four circular medallions and four rectangular spaces which were to be filled with figure compositions. In the circles, each directly above one of the great wall spaces, Raphael placed figures personifying Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice; in the rectangles he illustrated these subjects with the stories of "The Fall of Man," "Apollo and Marsyas," and "The Judgment of Solomon," and with that figure, leaning over a celestial globe, which must be meant for Science. All of these panels are on curved surfaces, and Raphael's decorative instinct led him, on this account and to preserve the supremacy of the great wall spaces below, to suppress all distance, placing his figures against a background of simulated gold mosaic and arranging them, virtually, upon one plane. There is, therefore, no possible question of "space composition" here. These panels depend for their effect entirely upon composition in two dimensions--upon the perfect balancing of filled and empty spaces, the invention of interesting shapes, and the arrangement of beautiful lines. It is the pattern that counts, and the pattern is perfect.

If the composition of the rectangles is less inevitable it is only because the variety of ways in which such simple rectangles may be filled is almost infinite. Composition more masterly than that of the "Judgment of Solomon" , for instance, you will find nowhere; so much is told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space is so admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines that enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of the dignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that his head fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the hand of the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft, and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead. The dead child and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners. In the middle, herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother, and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue of her child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines of the picture. Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, full of oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placid formality of the "Adam and Eve," and you will have some notion of the meaning of this gift of design.

But it is the frescoes on the four walls of this room which are Raphael's greatest triumphs--the most perfect pieces of monumental decoration in the world. On the two longer walls, nearly unbroken lunettes of something over a semicircle, he painted the two great compositions of Theology and Philosophy known as the "Disputa" and the "School of Athens." The "Disputa" , the earlier of the two, has the more connection with the art of the past. The use of gilded relief in the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint of the whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes which existed in many churches. But what an original idea it was to transform the flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what a solemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on! The upper part is formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such a theme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in the attitudes and the spacing. In the lower part the variety becomes almost infinite, yet there is never a jar--not a line or a fold of drapery that mars the supreme order of the whole. Besides the uncounted cherubs which float among the rays of glory or support the cloudy thrones of the saints and prophets, there are between seventy and eighty figures in the picture; yet the hosts of heaven and the church on earth seem gathered about the altar with its sacred wafer--the tiny circle which is the focus of the great composition and the inevitable goal of all regards, as it is the central mystery of Catholic dogma.

Each of these walls has a doorway at one end, and the way in which these openings are dissimulated and utilized is most ingenious, particularly in the "Disputa," where the bits of parapet which play an important part at either side of the composition, one pierced, the other solid, were suggested solely by the presence of this door. In the end walls the openings, large windows much higher than the doors, become of such importance that the whole nature of the problem is changed. It is the pierced lunette that is to be dealt with, and Raphael has dealt with it in two entirely different ways. One wall is symmetrical, the window in the middle, and on that wall he painted the "Parnassus" , Apollo and the Muses in the centre with groups of poets a little lower on either side and other groups filling the spaces to right and left of the window head. At first sight the design seems less symmetrical and formal than the others, with a lyrical freedom befitting the subject, but in reality it is no less perfect in its ponderation. The group of trees above Apollo and the reclining figures either side of him accent the centrality of his position. From this point the line of heads rises in either direction to the figures of Homer and of the Muse whose back is turned to the spectator, and the perpendicularity of these two figures carries upward into the arch the vertical lines of the window. From this point the lateral masses of foliage take up the drooping curve and unite it to the arch, and this curve is strongly reinforced by the building up toward either side of the foreground groups and by the disposition of the arms of Sappho and of the poets immediately behind her, while, to disguise its formality, it is contradicted by the long line of Sappho's body, which echoes that of the bearded poet immediately to the right of the window and gives a sweep to the left to the whole lower part of the composition. It is the immediate and absolute solution of the problem, and so small a thing as the scarf of the back-turned Muse plays its necessary part in it, balancing, as it does, the arm of the Muse who stands highest on the left and establishing one of a number of subsidiary garlands that play through and bind together the wonderful design.

The window in the opposite wall is to one side of the middle, and here Raphael meets the new problem with a new solution. He places a separate picture in each of the unequal rectangles, carries a simulated cornice across at the level of the window head, and paints, in the segmental lunette thus left, the so-called "Jurisprudence" , which seems to many decorators the most perfect piece of decorative design that even Raphael ever created--the most perfect piece of design, therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness of line, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody of falling curves from end to end, are beyond description--the reader must study them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss were not his attention called to it--the ingenious way in which the whole composition is adjusted to a diagonal axis that the asymmetry of the wall may be minimized. Draw an imaginary straight line from the boss in the soffit of the arch through the middle of the Janus-head of Prudence. It will accurately bisect the central group, composed of this figure and her two attendant genii, will pass through her elevated left knee, the centre of a system of curves, and the other end of it will strike the top of the post or mullion that divides the window opening into two parts.

This single room, the Camera della Segnatura, marks the brief blossoming time of Raphael's art, an art consummate in science yet full of a freshness and spontaneity--the dew still upon it--as wonderful as its learning. The master himself could not duplicate it. He tried for Venetian warmth of color in the "Mass of Bolsena" and experimented with tricks of illumination in the "Deliverance of Peter" , and in these two compositions, struck out new and admirable ways of filling pierced lunettes. The balancing, in the one, of the solitary figure of the pope against the compact group of seven figures--a group that has to be carried up above the curved screen in order to counteract the importance given to Julius by his isolation and by the greater mass of his supporting group below--is a triumph of arrangement; and here, again, it is notable that the bleeding wafer, the necessary centre of interest, is situated on a straight line drawn diagonally from the keystone of the arch to the centre of the window head, and almost exactly half-way between these two points, while the great curve of the screen leads to it from either side. In the symmetrically pierced lunette opposite, the distribution of the space into three distinct but united pictures, the central one seen through the grating of the prison, is a highly ingenious and, on the whole, an acceptable variant on previous inventions. But these two are the last of the Vatican frescoes that show Raphael's infallible instinct as a composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something in the way of sketches.

Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. In 1514 he painted the "Sibyls" of Santa Maria della Pace, in a frieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape given him to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and as indisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did. Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the story of Cupid and Psyche--works painted and even drawn by his pupils, coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom and variety of design. The earlier painters covered their vaulting with ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independent pictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura. It was a bold innovation when Michelangelo discarded this system and placed in the pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets and the Sibyls, each on its architectural throne. It was reserved for Raphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of and to fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against a clear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series. One may easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, but the skill with which these groups are composed, their perfect naturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which they fill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, is nothing short of amazing. It is decoration of a festal and informal order--the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure, rather than of a stately chamber--but it is decoration the most consummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorative design that the world has seen.

It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for the element of design always present in the least of his works, the charming illustrator, the mere "painter of Madonnas," might be allowed to sink comfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest. But there is another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael the portrait-painter. The great decorators have nearly always been great portrait-painters as well, although--perhaps because--there is little resemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary for success in the two arts. The decorator, constantly occupied with relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation, finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too arid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of that other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraits behind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing for the necessary variation of type and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphael has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them and with nothing else--an individuality to be presented with all it contains, neither more nor less--to be rendered entirely, and without flattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters who were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can give no greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to say that they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina of Milan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami," in the collection of Mrs. Gardner --the original of which the picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica--has a beauty of surface and of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.

Raphael's portraits alone, had he done nothing else, would justify a great reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his work that they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rank that used to be assigned him among the world's greatest artists. It is, after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title to fame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation in which that quality is held. It was because composition was to him a comparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought little of Raphael. It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct element of art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters and critics decry Raphael altogether. The decorators have always known that design is the essence of their art, and therefore they have always appreciated the greatest of designers. That is why Paul Baudry, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based his own art upon that of the great Umbrian. To-day, in our own country, mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for the appropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works of painting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at any time since the Italian Renaissance. So surely as the interest in decorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become more widely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine again with something of its ancient splendor.

But design is something more than the essential quality of mural decoration--it is the common basis of all the arts, the essential thing in art itself. Each of the arts has its qualities proper to it alone, and it may be right to estimate the painter, the sculptor, the architect, or the musician according to his eminence in those qualities which are distinctive of his particular art and which separate it most sharply from the other arts. In that sense we are right to call Frans Hals a greater painter than Raphael. But if we estimate a man's artistry by the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expresses itself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes or forms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must we place Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but a choice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. If we no longer call him "the prince of painters" we must call him one of the greatest artists among those who have practised the art of painting.

TWO WAYS OF PAINTING

Among the modern paintings in the Metropolitan Museum is a brilliant and altogether remarkable little picture by John Sargent, entitled "The Hermit" . Mr. Sargent is a portrait-painter by vocation, and the public knows him best as a penetrating and sometimes cruel reader of human character. He is a mural painter by avocation and capable, on occasion, of a monumental formality. In this picture, as in the wonderful collection of watercolors in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, one fancies one sees the essential John Sargent, working for himself alone without regard to external demands, and doing what he really cares most to do. In such work he is a modern of the moderns and, in the broadest sense of the word, a thorough Impressionist. Not that he shows himself a disciple of Monet or occupies himself with the broken touch or the division of tones--his method is as direct as that of Sorolla and his impressionism is of the same kind--a bending of all his energies to the vivid realization of the effect of the scene rendered as one might perceive it in the first flash of vision if one came upon it unexpectedly. This picture is better than Sorolla--it is better than almost any one. It is perhaps the most astonishing realization of the modern ideal, the most accomplished transcript of the actual appearance of nature, that has yet been produced. It is because of its great merit, because of its extraordinary success in what it attempts, that it leads one to the serious consideration of the nature of the attempt and of the gain and loss involved in the choice that modern art has made.

The picture is exactly square--the choice of this form is, of itself, typically modern in its unexpectedness--and represents a bit of rough wood interior under intense sunlight. The light is studied for its brilliancy rather than for its warmth, and if the picture has a fault, granted the point of view of the painter, it is in a certain coldness of color; but such conditions of glaring and almost colorless light do exist in nature. One sees a few straight trunks of some kind of pine or larch, a network of branches and needles, a tumble of moss-spotted and lichened rocks, a confusion of floating lights and shadows, and that is all. The conviction of truth is instantaneous--it is an actual bit of nature, just as the painter found it. One is there on that ragged hillside, half dazzled by the moving spots of light, as if set down there suddenly, with no time to adjust one's vision. Gradually one's eyes clear and one is aware, first of a haggard human head with tangled beard and unkempt hair, then of an emaciated body. There is a man in the wood! And then--did they betray themselves by some slight movement?--there are a couple of slender antelopes who were but now invisible and who melt into their surroundings again at the slightest inattention. It is like a pictorial demonstration of protective coloring in men and animals.

Obviously, there are two courses open to the painter. If he is a modern by feeling and by training, full of curiosity and of the scientific temper, caring more for the investigation of the aspects of nature and the rendering of natural light and atmosphere than for the telling of a story or the construction of a decoration, he will, if he is able enough, treat his matter much as Sargent has treated it. The figure will become, for him, only an incident in the landscape. It will be important only as a thing of another texture and another color, valuable for the different way in which it receives the light and reflects the sky, just as rocks and foliage and water and bare earth are valuable. For to the true Impressionist light and atmosphere are the only realities, and objects exist only to provide surfaces for the play of light and atmosphere. He will abandon all attempt at rendering the material and physical significance of the human form and will still less concern himself with its spiritual significance. He will gain a great vividness of illusion, and he may console himself for what he loses with the reflection that he has expressed the true relation of man to the universe--that he has expressed either man's insignificance or man's oneness with nature, according as his temper is pessimistic or optimistic.

If, on the other hand, the painter is one to whom the figure as a figure means much; one to whom line and bulk and modelling are the principal means of expression, and who cares for the structure and stress of bone and muscle; if the glow and softness of flesh appeal strongly to him; above all, if he has the human point of view and thinks of his figures as people engaged in certain actions, having certain characters, experiencing certain states of mind and body; then he will give up the struggle with the truths of aspect that seem so vital to the painter of the other type and, by a frank use of conventions, will seek to increase the importance of his figure at the expense of its surroundings. He will give it firmer lines and clearer edges, will strengthen its light and shade, will dwell upon its structure or its movement and expression. He will so compose his landscape as to subordinate it to his figure and will make its lines echo and accentuate that figure's action or repose. When he has accomplished his task he will have painted not man insignificant before nature but man dominating nature.

For an example of this way of representing man's relation to the world about him, let us take Titian's "Saint Jerome" --a picture somewhat similar to Sargent's in subject and in the relative size of the figure and its surroundings. Titian has here given more importance to the landscape than was common in his day. He also has meant, as Sargent has, to make a great deal of the wilderness to which his saint has retired, and to make his saint a lonely human being in a savage place. But the saint and his emotion is, after all, what interests Titian most, and the wildness of nature is valuable to him mainly for its sympathy with this emotion. He wants to give a single powerful feeling and to give it with the utmost dramatic force--to give it theatrically even, one might admit of this particular picture; for it is by no means so favorable an example of Titian's method, or of the older methods of art in general, as is Sargent's "Hermit" of the modern way of seeing and painting. To attain this end he simplifies and arranges everything. He lowers the pitch of his coloring to a sombre glow and concentrates the little light upon his kneeling figure. He spends all his knowledge on so drawing and modelling that figure as to make you feel to the utmost its bulk and reality and the strain upon its muscles and tendons, and he so places everything else on his canvas as to intensify its action and expression. The gaze of the saint is fixed upon a crucifix high on the right of the picture, and the book behind him, the lines of the rocks, the masses of the foliage, even the general formation of the ground, are so disposed as to echo and reinforce the great diagonal. There is a splendid energy of invention in the drawing of the tree stems, but the effect is clear and simple with nothing of Sargent's dazzle and confusion. As for the lion, he is a mere necessary mark of identification, and Titian has taken no interest in him.

Now, it is evident that there is not nearly so much literal truth to the appearance of nature in this picture as in Sargent's. It is not only that it would never have occurred to Titian to try to paint the glittering spottiness of sunlight splashing through leafage, or to attempt to raise his key of light to something like that of nature, at the cost of fulness of color. It is not merely that he translates and simplifies and neglects certain truths that the world had not yet learned to see. He deliberately and intentionally falsifies. He knew as well as we do that a natural landscape would not arrange itself in such lines and masses for the purpose of throwing out the figure and of enhancing its emotion. But to him natural facts were but so much material, to be treated as he pleased for the carrying out of his purpose. He was a colorist and a chiaroscurist; and he had a great deal more interest in light and in landscape than most of the painters of his time. If he had been pre-eminently a draughtsman, like Michelangelo, he would have reduced his light and shade to the amount strictly necessary to give that powerful modelling of the figure which is the draughtsman's means of expression, would have greatly increased the relative size and importance of the figure, and would have reduced the landscape to a barely intelligible symbol. Had he been a linealist, like Botticelli, he would have eliminated modelling almost altogether, would have concentrated his attention upon the edges of things, and would have reduced his picture to a flat pattern in which the beauty and expressiveness of the lines should be almost the only attraction.

For all art is an exchange of gain against loss--you cannot have Sargent's truth of impression and Titian's truth of emotion in the same picture, nor Michelangelo's beauty of structure with Botticelli's beauty of line. To be a successful artist is to know what you want and to get it at any necessary sacrifice, though the greatest artists maintain a noble balance and sacrifice no more than is necessary. And if a painter of to-day is like-minded with these older masters he will have to express himself much in their manner. He will have to make, with his eyes open, the sacrifices which they made, more or less unconsciously, and to deny a whole range of truths with which his fellows are occupied that he may express clearly and forcibly the few truths which he has chosen.

All truths are good, and all ways of painting are legitimate that are necessary to the expression of any truth. I am not here concerned to show that one way is better than another or one set of truths more important than another set of truths. For the present I am desirous only of showing why there is more than one way--of explaining the necessity of different methods for the expression of different individualities and different ways of envisaging nature and art. But a little while ago it was the modern or impressionistic manner that needed explanation. It was new, it was revolutionary, and it was misunderstood and disliked. A generation of critics has been busy in explaining it, a generation of artists has been busy in practising it, and now the balance has turned the other way. The pressure of conformity is upon the other side, and it is the older methods that need justification and explanation. The prejudices of the workers and the writers have gradually and naturally become the prejudices of at least a part of the public, and it has become necessary to show that the small minority of artists who still follow the old roads do so not from ignorance or stupidity or a stolid conservatism, still less from mere wilful caprice, but from necessity, because those roads are the only ones that can lead them where they wish to go. No more magnificent demonstration of the qualities possible to the purely modern methods of painting has been made than this brilliant little picture of Sargent's. All the more is it a demonstration of the qualities impossible to these methods. If such qualities have any permanent value and interest for the modern world it is a gain for art that some painters should try to keep alive the methods that render possible their attainment.

THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

In the catalogues of our museums you may find entries like this: "John Smith, American school; The Empty Jug" or what-not. In such entries little more than a bare statement of nationality is intended. John Smith is an American, by birth or adoption; that is all that the statement is meant to convey. But the question occurs: Have we an American school in a more specific sense than this? Have we a body of painters with certain traits in common and certain differences from the painters of other countries? Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity and sufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name of American school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a French school and an English school?

Under the conditions of to-day there are no longer anywhere such distinctive local schools as existed in the Renaissance. In Italy, in those days, there were not only such great schools as the Venetian, the Florentine, and the Umbrian, differing widely in their point of view, their manner of seeing, and their technical traditions--each little town had a school with something characteristic that separated its painters from those of other schools in the surrounding towns. To-day every one knows and is influenced by the work of every one else, and it is only broad national characteristics that still subsist. Modern pictures are singularly alike, but, on the whole, it is still possible to tell an English picture from a French one, and a German or Italian picture from either. We may still speak of a Dutch school or a Spanish school with some reasonableness. Is it similarly and equally reasonable to speak of an American school? Does a room full of American pictures have a different look from a room full of pictures by artists of any other nationality? Does one feel that the pictures in such a room have a something in common that makes them kin and a something different that distinguishes them from the pictures of all other countries? I think the answer must be in the affirmative.

We have already passed the stage of mere apprenticeship, and it can no longer be said that our American painters are mere reflections of their European masters. Twenty or even ten years ago there may have been some truth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had no foreign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of a particular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it would be difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to a catalogue. They have, through long work in America and under American conditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverable resemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specific examples, who would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or the decorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either had been a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes or delicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name of G?r?me? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters we have who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work which still marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishable to-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified by John Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolus simply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painters who have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified its technic to suit their own purposes and are at least as different from the Impressionists of France as are the Impressionists of Scandinavia. We have painters who are undeniably influenced by Whistler, but so have other countries--the school of Whistler is international--and, after all, Whistler was an American. In short, the resemblances between American painting and the painting of other countries are to-day no greater than the resemblances between the painting of any two of those countries. And I think the differences between American painting and that of other countries are quite as great as, if not greater than, the differences between the paintings of any two of those countries.

Another accusation that used to be heard against our painters has been out-lived. We used to be told, with some truth, that we had learned to paint but had nothing to say with our painting, that we produced admirable studies but no pictures. The accusation never was true of our landscape-painting. Whatever may be the final estimation of the works of Inness and Wyant, there can be no doubt that they produced pictures--things conceived and worked out to give one definite and complete impression; things in which what was presented and what was eliminated were equally determined by a definite purpose; things in which accident and the immediate dominance of nature had little or no part. As for Winslow Homer, whether in landscape or figure painting, his work was unfailingly pictorial, whatever else it might be. He was a great and original designer, and every canvas of his was completely and definitely composed--a quality which at once removes from the category of mere sketches and studies even his slighter and more rapid productions. And our landscape-painters of to-day are equally painters of pictures. Some of them might be thought, by a modern taste, too conventionally painters of pictures--too much occupied with composition and tone and other pictorial qualities at the expense of freshness of observation--while our briskest and most original observers have, many of them, a power of design and a manner of casting even their freshest observations into pictorial form that is as admirable as it is remarkable.

No one could enter one of our exhibitions without feeling the definitely pictorial quality of American landscape-painting, but these exhibitions do less justice to the achievement of our figure-painters. The principal reason for this is that many of our most serious figure-painters have been so much occupied with mural decoration that their work seldom appears in the exhibitions at all, while the work that they have done is so scattered over our vast country that we rather forget its existence and, assuredly, have little realization of its amount. It is one of the defects of our exhibition system that work of this kind, while it is, of course, on permanent exhibition in the place for which it is painted, is hardly ever "exhibited," in the ordinary sense, in the centres where it is produced. The regular visitor to the Paris salons might know almost all that has been done in France in the way of mural painting. The public of our American exhibitions knows only vaguely and by hearsay what our mural painters have done and are doing. It is true that such work is infinitely better seen in place, but it is a pity it cannot be seen, even imperfectly, by the people who attend our exhibitions--people who can rarely have the necessary knowledge to read such collections of sketches, studies, and photographs as are shown at the exhibitions of the Architectural League, where, alone, our mural painters can show anything. If it were seen it would surely alter the estimation in which American figure-painting is held. Such work as was done by the late John La Farge, such work as is being done by Blashfield and Mowbray and Simmons and a dozen others, if not, in the most limited sense of the word, pictorial, is even further removed from the mere sketch or study--the mere bit of good painting--than is the finest easel picture.

But it is not only in mural decoration that serious figure-painting is being done in this country. I do not see how any one can deny the name of pictures to the genre paintings of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Paxton unless he is prepared to deny pictorial quality to the whole Dutch school of the seventeenth century; and the example of these men is influencing a number of others toward the production of thoroughly thought-out and executed genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure-painters as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure-painting in either the naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and harmoniously colored as well as admirably painted.

The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters or students learning technic and indifferent to anything else. They are a school producing work differing in character from that of other schools and at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day.

If so much may be taken as proved, the question remains for consideration: What are the characteristics of the American school of painting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considered a fault or a virtue according to the point of view and the prepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic that has certainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American work at recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among the schools of to-day, singularly old-fashioned. This characteristic has, undoubtedly, puzzled and repelled the foreigner. It is a time when the madness for novelty seems to be carrying everything before it, when anything may be accepted so long as it is or seems new, when the effort of all artists is to get rid of conventions and to shake off the "shackles of tradition." Here is a new people in the blessed state of having no traditions to shake off and from whom, therefore, some peppery wildness might be expected for the tickling of jaded palates. Behold, they are sturdily setting themselves to recover for art the things the others have thrown away! They are trying to revive the old fashion of thoughtful composition, the old fashion of good drawing, the old fashion of lovely color, and the old fashion of sound and beautiful workmanship.

This conservatism of American painting, however, is not of the kind that still marks so much of the painting of England. Excepting exceptions, English painting is somewhat stolidly staying where it was. America's conservatism is ardent, determined, living. It is not standing still; it is going somewhere as rapidly as possible--it might, perhaps, be more truly called not conservatism but reaction. We have, of course, our ultramodernists, but their audacities are mild compared to those of the French or German models they imitate. We have, even more of course, the followers of the easiest way--the practitioners of current and accepted methods who are alike everywhere. But our most original and most distinguished painters, those who give the tone to our exhibitions and the national accent to our school, are almost all engaged in trying to get back one or another of the qualities that marked the great art of the past. They have gone back of the art of the day and are retying the knots that should bind together the art of all ages.

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