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orizing, but of a different kind. It is not so much the whole physical and psychical cosmos that the German critic studies as the past history of art in its most recondite phases and most subtle divergences. Upon this he draws for information as to the value of the work before him. On the other hand, we shall find French art-criticism to be almost purely technical. As the critics differ, so do the criticised by the natural law of national coherence. An English painter is apt to be primarily an embodied theory of one sort or another; which theory is more or less directly connected with his actual work as a painter. A German painting is apt to be scientifically composed on theory also, but a theory drawn from the study of art _per se_, not of the whole world external to art. The work of a Frenchman, like the criticism of his commentator, is primarily technical. Because both German work and English work are theoretical compared with French, I do not wish to imply that technically they are on a par. Aside from the difference of imaginative power in the two nations, which renders German conceptions more valuable in every way than contemporary English ideas, there is a great difference in the technical training of the two groups of artists. German work often shows technical qualities as notable as those we find in France, though of another kind. The noble physical endowment of an artist--that by reason of which, and by reason of which alone, he _is_ an artist--is twofold: power of eye and power of hand. By power of the eye I mean simple vision exalted into a special gift, a special appreciation of line, an ultra delicate and profound perception of color, and an exact, unconscious memory. This last is not imagination nor imaginative memory, but an automatic power, if I may so say, of the retina--as unconscious as is the pianist's memory of his notes, and as unerring. It is not the power to fix in the mind by conscious effort the objects before one, and to recall them deliberately, inch by inch, at any time, but the power, when the brush pauses trembling for the signal, to put down unerringly facts learned God knows where, or imagined God knows how. Automatic, I repeat, this power must be. The tongue might not be able to tell, nor the mind deliberately to recall in cold blood, what was the depth of blue on a distant hill or the vagueness of its outlines, or what the anatomical structure of a mistress's fingers. But the brush
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