and Italian style, unconscious that the physical type of the Niobids, the voluptuous charm of Correggio, the luminous color of Titian, the terribleness of Michelangelo, and the serenity of Raphael, being the ultimate expressions of distinct artistic qualities, were incompatible.  A still deeper truth escaped their notice—­namely, that art is valueless unless the artist has something intensely felt to say, and that where this intensity of feeling exists, it finds for itself its own specific and inevitable form.

’Poems distilled from other poems pass away, The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes; Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature.’

These profound sentences are the epitaph, not only of imitative poetry, but also of such eclectic art as the Caracci instituted.  Very little of it bears examination now.  We regard it with listlessness or loathing.  We turn from it without regret.  We cannot, or do not, wish to keep it in our memory.

Yet no student of Italian painting will refuse the Caracci that tribute of respect which is due to virile effort.  They were in vital sympathy with the critical and analytical spirit of their age—­an age mournfully conscious that its scepter had departed—­that

    ’Nothing can bring back the hour
    Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;’

an age incapable as yet of acquiescing in this gloom, strenuously eager by study and by labor to regain the kingdom which belongs alone to inspiration.  Science and industry enabled them to galvanize the corpse of art; into this they breathed the breath of the religion a la mode, of fashionable sensuousness and prevalent sentimentality.

Michelangelo died in 1564, Paolo Veronese in 1588, Tintoretto in 1594.  These were the three latest survivors of the great generation, and each of them had enjoyed a life of activity prolonged into extreme old age.  Their intellectual peers had long ago departed; Lionardo in 1520, Raphael in 1522, Correggio in 1534.

    ‘Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.’

These dates have to be kept in mind; for the painters of the Bolognese School were all born after 1550, born for the most part at that decisive epoch of the Tridentine Council which might be compared to a watershed of time between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation—­Lodovico Caracci in 1555, Agostino in 1558, Annibale in 1560, Guido Reni in 1574, Lionello Spada in 1576, Francesco Albani in 1578, Domenichino in 1581, Guercino in 1590.[213] With the last of these men the eclectic impulse was exhausted; and a second generation, derived in part from them, linked the painters of the Renaissance to those of modern times.  It is sufficient to mention Nicholas and Gaspar Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, and Canaletto as chief representatives of this secondary group.[214]