For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts—the one essential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is a great man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you have the man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him; his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be at another; but at bottom the art is the man and at all times and in all countries is just as great as the man.
Let us clear our minds, then, of the illusion that there is in any important sense such a thing as progress in the fine arts. We may with a clear conscience judge every new work for what it appears in itself to be, asking of it that it be noble and beautiful and reasonable, not that it be novel or progressive. If it be great art it will always be novel enough, for there will be a great mind behind it, and no two great minds are alike. And if it be novel without being great, how shall we be the better off? There are enough forms of mediocre or evil art in the world already. Being no longer intimidated by the fetich of progress, when a thing calling itself a work of art seems to us hideous and degraded, indecent and insane, we shall have the courage to say so and shall not care to investigate it further. Detestable things have been produced in the past, and they are none the less detestable because we are able to see how they came to be produced. Detestable things are produced now, and they will be no more admirable if we learn to understand the minds that create them. Even should such things prove to be not the mere freaks of a diseased intellect that they seem but a necessary outgrowth of the conditions of the age and a true prophecy of "the art of the future," they are not necessarily the better for that. It is only that the future will be very unlucky in its art.
IV
RAPHAEL
There used to be on the cover of the "Portfolio Monographs" little medallions of Raphael and Rembrandt, placed there, as the editor, Mr. Hamerton, has somewhere explained, as portraits of the two most widely influential artists that ever lived. In the eighteenth century, one imagines, Rembrandt's presence by the side of Raphael would have been thought little less than a scandal. To-day it is Raphael's place that would be contested, and he would be superseded, likely enough, by Velazquez.
There is no more striking instance of the vicissitudes of critical opinion than the sudden fall of Raphael from his conceded rank as "the prince of painters." Up to the middle of the nineteenth century his right to that title was so uncontested that it alone was a sufficient identification of him—only one man could possibly be meant. That he should ever need defending or re-explaining to a generation grown cold to him would have seemed incredible. Then came the rediscovery of an earlier art that seemed more frank and simple than his; still later the discovery of Rembrandt and Velazquez—the romanticist and the naturalist—and Raphael, as a living influence, almost ceased to exist. It was but a few years ago that the author of a volume of essays on art was gravely praised by a reviewer for the purely accidental circumstance that that volume contained no essay on Raphael; and a little later the writer of a book on the pictures in Rome "had to confess unutterable boredom" in the presence of the Stanze of the Vatican.
It is not probable that any critic who greatly valued his reputation, or who had any serious reputation to value, would take quite this tone; but, leaving out of consideration the impressionistic and ultra-modern criticism which ignores Raphael altogether, it is instructive to note the way in which a critic so steeped in Italian art as Mr. Berenson approaches the fallen prince. The artist who used to be considered the greatest of draughtsmen he will hardly admit to be a draughtsman at all, ranking him far below Pollaiuolo and positively speaking of him as "a poor creature, most docile and patient." As a colorist and a manipulator of paint, he places him with Sebastiano del Piombo—that is, among the mediocrities. Almost the only serious merit, from his point of view, which he will allow him is a mastery in the rendering of space, shared in nearly equal measure by Perugino, as, to some extent, by nearly all the painters of the Umbrian school. For, while he admits that Raphael was the greatest master of composition that Europe has produced, he evidently thinks of composition, as do so many other moderns, as a matter of relatively little importance.
It is not Raphael's popularity that is in question; that is, perhaps, as great as ever it was. His works, in one form or another of reproduction, from the finest carbon print to the cheapest lithograph, are still to be found, in the humblest homes as in the most splendid, in nearly every quarter of the globe. That popularity was always based on what Berenson calls the "illustrative" qualities of Raphael's work, on the beauty of his women, the majesty of his men; on his ability to tell a story as we like it told and to picture a world that we wish might be real. One may not be prepared to consider these illustrative qualities so negligible as do many modern critics, or to echo Mr. Berenson's phrase about "that which in art ... is so unimportant as what ... we call beauty." One might point out that the greatest artists, from Phidias to Rembrandt, have occupied themselves with illustration, and that to formulate the ideals of a race and an epoch is no mean task. But, for the moment, we may neglect all that, our present inquiry being why an artist, once counted the greatest of all, is no longer considered very significant by those who measure by purely artistic standards rather than by that of illustrative success and consequent popularity.
We may also leave out of our present consideration Raphael's achievement in the suggestion of space. It is a very real quality and a high one. It has doubtless always been an important element in the enjoyability of Raphael's art, as it is almost the only enjoyable element, for many of us, in the art of Perugino. But it is an element that has only very recently been clearly perceived to exist. If it was enjoyed by the artists and critics, from Raphael's day almost to our own, they were unconscious of the fact, and the probability is that we enjoy it more than they did. It will not account for the estimation in which they held Raphael, and still less will it account for the relative lack of interest in him to-day.