in our eyes to-day. I do not think this will be so. And in proof of
this opinion I will refer again to the differences of opinion
regarding the first principles of painting and drawing which divided
Ingres and Gericault. Differences regarding first principles never
existed between the leaders of any other artistic movement. Not
between Michael Angelo and Raphael, not between Veronese, Tintoretto,
Titian, and Rubens; not between Hals or any other Dutchman, except
Rembrandt, born between 1600 and 1640; or between Van Dyck and
Reynolds and Gainsborough. Nor must the difference between the methods
of Giotto and Titian cause any one to misunderstand my meaning. The
change that two centuries brought into art was a gradual change,
corresponding exactly to the ideas which the painter wished to
express; each method was sufficient to explain the ideas current at
the time it was invented for that purpose; it served that purpose and
no more.

Facilities for foreign travel, international exhibitions, and
cosmopolitanism have helped to keep artists of all countries in a
ferment of uncertainty regarding even the first principles of their
art. But this is not all; education has proved a vigorous and rapid
solvent, and has completed the disintegration of art. A young man goes
to the Beaux Arts; he is taught how to measure the model with his
pencil, and how to determine the movement of the model with his
plumb-line. He is taught how to draw by the masses rather than by the
character, and the advantages of this teaching permit him, if he is an
intelligent fellow, to produce at the end of two years' hard labour a
measured, angular, constipated drawing, a sort of inferior photograph.
He is then set to painting, and the instruction he receives amounts to
this--that he must not rub the paint about with his brush as he rubbed
the chalk with his paper stump. After a long methodical study of the