Tintoret alone is master. I well remember the exaltations to
which he lifted me when first I learned to know him; but the glow
of that comparatively youthful amazement is dead, and with it, I
fear, that confident vivacity of phrase of which, in trying to
utter my impressions, I felt less the magniloquence than the
impotence. In his power there are many weak spots, mysterious
lapses and fitful intermissions; but when the list of his faults
is complete he still remains to me the most interesting of
painters. His reputation rests chiefly on a more superficial
sort of merit--his energy, his unsurpassed productivity, his
being, as Theophile Gautier says, le roi des fougueux.
These qualities are immense, but the great source of his
impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line
that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had
such breadth and such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce
figures as more than a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose
eloquence in dealing with the great Venetians sometimes outruns
his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter
of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing
matters too far, and the author of "The Rape of Europa" is,
pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other genius of
supreme good taste. Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but
Tintoret--well, Tintoret was almost a prophet. Before his
greatest works you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old
doubts and dilemmas, and the eternal problem of the conflict
between idealism and realism dies the most natural of deaths. In
his genius the problem is practically solved; the alternatives
are so harmoniously interfused that I defy the keenest critic to
say where one begins and the other ends. The homeliest prose
melts into the most ethereal poetry--the literal and the