And this industrial characteristic of Italian painting is sufficiently explained by the entire character of the country. The Italian painter is not properly in a position to seek effects of his own and to make experiments. Hardly anything is bought for the galleries, and there are few collectors of superior taste. He labours chiefly for the traveller, and this gives his performances the stamp of attractive mercantile wares. The Italian is too much a man of business to undertake great trials of strength _pour le roi de Prusse_. He paints no great pictures, which would be still-born children in his home, nor does he paint severe studies of _plein-air_, preferring a specious, exuberant, flickering, and glaring revel in colour. In general he produces nothing which will not easily sell, and has a fine instinct for the taste of the rich travelling public, who wish to see nothing which does not excite cheerful and superficial emotions. But it is possible that this decline of the Latin races is connected with the nature of modern art itself. Of late the words "Germanic" and "Latin" have been much abused. It has been proclaimed that the new art meant the victory of the German depth of feeling over the Latin sense of form, the onset of German cordiality against the empty exaggeration in which the imitation of the Cinquecento resulted. Such assertions are always hard to maintain, because every century shows similar reactions of truth to nature against mannerism. Nevertheless is it true that modern art, with its heartfelt devotion to everyday life and the mysteries of light, has an essentially Germanic character, finding its ancestors not in Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Titian, but in the English of the eighteenth, the Dutch of the seventeenth, and the Germans of the sixteenth century. The Italians and Spaniards, whose entire intellectual culture rests upon a Latin foundation, may therefore find it difficult to follow this change of taste. They either adhere to the old bombastic and theatrical painting of history, or they recast the new painting in an external drawing-room art draped with gaudy tinsel. Even in France the rise of the new art meant, as it were, the victory of the Frankish element over the Gallic. Millet the Norman, Courbet the Frank, Bastien-Lepage of Lorraine, drove back the Latins--Ingres and Couture, Cabanel and Bouguereau--just as in the eighteenth century the Netherlander Watteau broke the yoke of the rigid Latin Classicism.