Compare with it the attempts of
our painters a century ago to achieve the effects of the old masters by
imitation when they should have been illustrating a faith of their own.
Contemplate, if you can bear it, the dull daubs of Hilton and Haydon,
who knew so much more about drawing and scumbling and glazing and
perspective and anatomy and 'marvellous foreshortening' than Giotto,
the latchet of whose shoe they were nevertheless not worthy to unloose.
Compare Mozart's Magic Flute, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Wagner's Ring,
all of them reachings-forward to the new Vitalist art, with the dreary
pseudo-sacred oratorios and cantatas which were produced for no better
reason than that Handel had formerly made splendid thunder in that way,
and with the stale confectionery, mostly too would-be pious to be even
cheerfully toothsome, of Spohr and Mendelssohn, Stainer and Parry, which
spread indigestion at our musical festivals until I publicly told Parry
the bludgeoning truth about his Job and woke him to conviction of sin.
Compare Flaxman and Thorwaldsen and Gibson with Phidias and Praxiteles,
Stevens with Michael Angelo, Bouguereau's Virgin with Cimabue's, or the
best operatic Christs of Scheffer and Mueller with the worst Christs that
the worst painters could paint before the end of the fifteenth century,
and you must feel that until we have a great religious movement we
cannot hope for a great artistic one.
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