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
they had lived in the days of those, had been their peers.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198