Inquiries and Opinions | Page 9

"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 preëminent, 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.
The selection made by a single race or by a single century is not likely
to be widely or permanently acceptable. Long years ago the Italians
were wont to speak of the Four Poets, quattro poete, meaning thereby
Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. But this was a choice far too local
and far too narrow. Of these four Italian poets perhaps only the severe
Florentine has won his way outside of the boundaries of the language
he did so much to ennoble,--altho it may be admitted that the gentle
Petrarch had also for a century a wide influence on the lyrists of other
tongues.
Lowell had a more cosmopolitan outlook on literature, when he discust
'The Five Indispensable Authors'--Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere,
and Goethe. "Their universal and perennial application to our
consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence and
insures their immortality." We may admit that all five of the authors
designated by Lowell are truly indispensable, just as we must accept
also the incomparable position of the four leaders in the several arts
whom Taine set apart in lonely elevation. But both Taine's list and
Lowell's we feel to be too brief. The French critic had ranged thru
every realm of art to discover finally that the incontestable masters
were four and four only. The American critic, altho he limited himself
to the single art of literature, dealt with it at large, not distinguishing
between the poets and the masters of prose.
If we strike out of Lowell's list the single name of Cervantes, who was
a poet only in a special and arbitrary sense, we shall have left the names
of the four poets whose fame is world-wide--Homer,