“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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 Reve,” 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 armies—­wraiths born of the sleepers’ dreams.  That we are in touch with.  No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as pitiably literal.  Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional—­that is to say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally assumed for the moment—­as Lebrun’s “Triumph of Alexander.”  The latter is as much a true expression of an ideal as Detaille’s picture.  It is an ideal now become more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is as clearly an ideal and as clearly genuine.  The only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun’s painting—­Louis Quatorze painting—­is not the perfunctory thing we are apt to assume it to be.  That is not the same thing, I hope, as maintaining that M. Bouguereau is significant rather than insipid.  Lebrun was assuredly not a strikingly original painter.  His crowds of warriors bear a much closer resemblance to Raphael’s “Battle of Constantine and Maxentius” than the “Transfiguration” of the Vatican does to Giotto’s, aside from the important circumstance that the difference in the latter instance shows development, while the former illustrates mainly an enfeebled variation.  But there is unquestionably something of Lebrun in Lebrun’s work—­something typical of the age whose artistic spirit he so completely expressed.