knows, as nothing but
the brush of an artist can; and when it comes to painting them, aerial
perspective and anatomical detail _must_ come right. This is the first
and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in--Shall I use
the fashionable artistic slang and say _preciousness_? It is the gift of
a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive
as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston
of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the other, but it can, far
more than the other, be improved and developed by practice and patience.
Both gifts in equal perfection constitute a technical master. It is
hardly necessary to say that no man--certainly no nation--can to-day
claim the highest measure of both. The French are most highly gifted
with the first, the Germans with the second. In the latter, patience and
science, working upon a natural aptitude, have developed great strength
and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and
design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the
whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by
crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence--splendor without
softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is
attempted in color--as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of
contemporary paintings, Knille's _Tannhaeuser and Venus_ in the Berlin
Gallery--the success is by no means on a par with the great excellence
of drawing and composition. In France the eye for color is present--I
will not say as in Venice, but to a greater degree than in the two other
nations.

If we leave now professional painters and professional critics and turn
to the untrained public, we shall find, of course, all our modern faults
more evident. The English public is pre-eminently untechnical in its
judgments, pre-eminently literary or moral. But the French and the
German public approximate more to the English--as is natural--than do
their respective artists. I use the word _literary_ as it has often been
used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the
time--and in England much of the professional criticism also--to denote
a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story--_l'anecdote_, as
a French critic calls it--over the purely painter's work of a picture.
It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense,
but to catch the fancy or the intellect or t