catholicity of critical appreciation. Literary criticism is certainly
full of similar intolerance; though when Gautier talks about Racine, or
Zola about "Mes Haines," or Mr. Howells about Scott, the polemic temper,
the temper most opposed to the critical, is very generally recognized.
And in spite of their admirable accomplishment in various branches of
literature, these writers will never quite recover from the misfortune
of having preoccupied themselves as critics with the defects instead of
the qualities of what is classic. Yet the protestantism of the
successive schools of painting against the errors of their predecessors
has something even more crass about it. Contemporary painters and
critics thoroughly alive, and fully in the contemporary æsthetic
current, so far from appreciating modern classic art sympathetically,
are apt to admire the old masters themselves mainly on technical
grounds, and not at all to enter into their general æsthetic attitude.
The feeling of contemporary painters and critics (except, of course,
historical critics) for Raphael's genius is the opposite of cordial. We
are out of touch with the "Disputa," with angels and prophets seated on
clouds, with halos and wings, with such inconsistencies as the "Doge
praying" in a picture of the marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic
marriage itself. Raphael's grace of line and suave space-filling shapes
are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become
literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if
not of the prosaic.

Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's "Le Rêve," which won him so
much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist,
and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with
impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-button lacking,
bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would prick;
above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly