its
beginning with the nineteenth century, epochs as diverse in character as
the Venice of 1400 and the Paris of 1800. In him died the last great
painter whose art was moulded by the instincts and traditions that made
Titian and Veronese, and the greatest artist whose eyes have opened on
the, to him, uncongenial and freezing life of the nineteenth century. In
our time we have a new ideal, a new and maybe a higher development of
intellectual art, and as great a soul as Titian's might to-day reach
farther towards the reconciled perfections of graphic art: but what he
did no one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away,--its
unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct, revelling in Art like children
in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and
glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to
science,--all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions
which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory,
as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic souls
kindling into like glow, with faint perception of what had passed from
the whole world beside. Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix, kept the line of color, now at last
utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out
of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the
greater substance; we kindle with the utilities, and worship with the
aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our
souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our
right minds in what we believe to be the noonday light of reason and
science. We are humanitarian, enlightened. We begin to comprehend the
great problems of human existence and development; our science touches
the infinitely removed, and apprehends the mysteries of macrocosmic
organism: but we have lost the art of painting; for, when Eugene
Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood
Art as Titian understood it, and painted with such eyes as Veronese's,
passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion
of a kingly race dies in some alien land. Greater artists than he we may
have in scores; but he was of the Venetians, and, with his _nearly_
rival, Turner, lived to testify that it was not from a degeneracy of the
kind that we have no more Tintorets and Veroneses; for both these, if