Catherine, with the mystic
marriage itself. Raphael's grace of line and suave space-filling shapes
are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become
literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if
not of the prosaic.
Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's "Le Reve," which won him so
much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist,
and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with
impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-button lacking,
bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would prick;
above them in the heavens the clash of contending ghostly
armies--wraiths born of the sleepers' dreams. That we are in touch with.
No one would object to it except under penalty of being scouted as
pitiably literal. Yet the scheme is as thoroughly conventional--that is
to say, it is as closely based on hypothesis universally assumed for the
moment--as Lebrun's "Triumph of Alexander." The latter is as much a true
expression of an ideal as Detaille's picture.
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