[Footnote 238:  It is only because I am an Englishman, writing a popular book for English folk, that I thus spend time in noticing the opinions of Joshua Reynolds.  Addressing a European audience in this year grace, I should not have thought of eddying about his obsolete doctrine.]

The criticism and the art-practice of this century have combined to shake our faith in the grand style.  The spirit of the Romantic movement, penetrating poetry first, then manifesting itself in the reflective writings of Rio and Lord Lindsay, Ruskin and Gautier, producing the English landscape-painters and pre-Raphaelites, the French Realists and Impressionists, has shifted the center of gravity in taste.  Science, too, contributes its quota.  Histories of painting, like Kugler’s, and Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s, composed in an impartial and searching spirit of investigation, place students at a point of view removed from prejudice and academical canons of perfection.  Only here and there, under special reactionary influences, as in the Dusseldorf and Munich schools of religious purists, has anything approaching to the eighteenth-century ‘grand style’ delusion reappeared.

Why, therefore, the Eclectics are at present pining in the shade of neglect is now sufficiently apparent.  We dislike their religious sentiments.  We repudiate their false and unimaginative ideality.  We recognize their touch on antique mythology to be cold and lifeless.  Superficial imitations of Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon.  Dull reproductions of Raphael’s manner at his worst cannot delight men satiated with Raphael’s manner at his best.  Whether the whirligig of time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be seen.  Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems impossible, may happen in the future.  But a modest prediction can be hazarded that nothing short of the substitution of Catholicism for science and of Jesuitry for truth in the European mind will work a general revolution in their favor.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

     The main Events of European History—­Italy in the
     Renaissance—­Germany and Reformation—­Catholic Reaction—­Its
     Antagonism to Renaissance and Reformation—­Profound Identity of
     Renaissance and Reformation—­Place of Italy in European
     Civilization—­Want of Sympathy between Latin and Teutonic
     Races—­Relation of Rome to Italy—­Macaulay on the Roman Church—­On
     Protestantism—­Early Decline of Renaissance Enthusiasms—­Italy’s
     Present and Future.

I.

The four main events of European history since the death of Christ are the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization, the triumph of Christianity as a new humanizing agency, the intrusion of Teutonic and Slavonic tribes into the comity of nations, and the construction of the modern world of thought by Renaissance and Reformation.