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Here, when art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,

Lived and laboured Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art.

These jingling lines would scarcely merit consideration but that they express a common notion which has its part of truth as well as of error. Let us examine the first assertion (that art has been religion.) Baudelaire, in his Curiosités Esthétiques says: La première affaire d'un artiste est de substituer l'homme à la nature et de protester contre elle. ("The first thing for an artist is to substitute man for nature and to protest against her.") The beginners and the smatterers are always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of art, a life worthy of universal remembrance is a masterpiece: only the materials employed differentiate it from any other work of art. The life of Jesus is considered as such a masterpiece. Thus we can say that if art has never been religion, religion has always been and ever will be an art.

Now let us examine the second assertion that Dürer was an evangelist. What kind of character do we mean to praise when we say a man is an evangelist? Two only of the four evangelists can be said to reveal any ascertainable personality, and only St. John is sufficiently outlined to stand as a type; but I do not think we mean to imply a resemblance to St. John. The bringer of good news, the evangelist par excellence, was Jesus. He it was who made it evident that the sons of men have power to forgive sins. Victory over evil possible--this was the good news. No doubt every sincere Christian is supposed to be a more or less successful imitator of Jesus; and as such, Dürer may rightly be called an evangelist. But more than this is I think, implied in the use of the word; an evangelist is, for us above all a bringer of good news in something of the same manner as Jesus brought it, by living among sinners for those sinners' sake, among paupers for those paupers' sake; to see a man sweet, radiant, and victorious under these circumstances, is to see an evangelist. Goethe's final claim is that, "after all, there are honest people up and down the world who have got light from my books; and whoever reads them, and gives himself the trouble to understand me, will acknowledge that he has acquired thence a certain inward freedom"; and for this reason I have been tempted to call him the evangelist of the modern world. But it is best to use the word as I believe it is most correctly employed, and not to yield to the temptation (for tempting it is) to call men like Dürer and Goethe evangelists. They are teachers who charm as well as inform us, as Jesus was; but they are not evangelists in the sense that he was, for they did not deal directly with human life where it is forced most against its distinctive desire for increase in nobility, or is most obviously degraded by having betrayed it.'^[11]