Every one recognizes to-day that “certain poets like Dante and Shakspere, certain composers like Beethoven and Mozart, hold the foremost place in their art.”  So Taine insisted, adding that this foremost place is also “accorded to Goethe, among the writers of our century; to Rembrandt among the Dutch painters; to Titian among the Venetians.”  And then Taine asserted also that “three artists of the Italian renascence, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, rise, by unanimous consent, far above all others.”

No doubt this list of supreme leaders in the arts is unduly scanted; but there is wisdom in Taine’s parsimony of praise.  The great names he has here selected for signal eulogy are those whose appeal is universal and whose fame far transcends the boundaries of any single race.

It may have been from Sainte-Beuve that Taine inherited his catholicity of taste and his elevation of judgment; and it was due to the influence of Sainte-Beuve also that Matthew Arnold attained to a breadth of vision denied to most other British critics.  Arnold invited us to “conceive of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past out of which they all proceed, and of one another.”  He went on to suggest that for any artist or poet “to be recognized by the verdict of such a confederation as a master is indeed glory, a glory which it would be difficult to rate too highly.  For what could be more beneficent, more salutary?  The world is forwarded by having its attention fixt on the best things; and here is a tribunal, free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality, putting a stamp on the best things and recommending them for general honor and acceptance.”  Then he added the shrewd suggestion that there would be direct advantage to each race in seeing which of its own great men had been promoted to the little group of supreme leaders, since “a nation is furthered by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is encouraged to develop them further.”

Who, then, are the supreme leaders in the several departments of human endeavor?  By common consent of mankind who are the supreme soldiers, the supreme painters, the supreme poets?  To attempt to name them is as difficult as it is dangerous; but the effort itself may be profitable, even if the ultimate result is not wholly satisfactory.  To undertake this is not to revive the puerile debate as to whether Washington or Napoleon was the greater man; rather it is a frank admission that both were preeminent, with the further inquiry as to those others who may have achieved a supremacy commensurate with theirs.  To seek out these indisputable masters is not to imitate the vain desire of the pedagog to give marks to the several geniuses, and to grade the greatest of men as if they were school-boys.  There is no pedantry in striving to ascertain the list of the lonely few whom the assembled nations are all willing now to greet as the assured masters of the several arts.