literature and yet be interesting. Insincere as
is the denouement, the note of insincerity was absent in the acting of
the cast. The honours were easily borne away by a pretty Viennese
actress from the Volks Theatre there, Elsa Galafres by name, whose
methods are Gallic, whose personality is charming. Critical Berlin has
taken her to itself, and her theatrical fortune is made. It may be
confessed that her part, despite its artificiality, is one that any
actress in the world would jump at. Sudermann is a conjurer. His
puppets are all agreeable, and, in one instance, vital: the father of
the baroness, a financier, who could be easily turned into a "heavy"
conventional father, but, as played by Hermann Nissen, is a positively
original characterisation. Max the butterfly (Ernst Dumcke) was wholly
admirable. I shall be very much surprised if Der gute Ruf does not
soon appear on the stage of other lands. Its picture of manners, its
mundane environment, its epigrams and dramatic bravoura will make it
welcome everywhere. Sudermann is still Klingsor, the evoker of
artificial figures, not the poet who creates living men and women.

XII

KUBIN, MUNCH, AND GAUGUIN: MASTERS OF HALLUCINATION

I

Because it is a simpler matter to tell the truth than casuists admit I
shall preface this little sermon on three hallucinated painters by a
declaration of my artistic faith.

I believe in Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt; the greatest
harmonist, the greatest painter of daylight, and the profoundest
interpreter of the human soul--Rembrandt as pyschologist is as
profound as Beethoven.

The selection of this triune group of genius, one Spaniard and two
Dutchmen, doesn't mean that I'm insensible to the purity of Raphael,
the rich colouring of Titian, or the giant power of Michael Angelo.
Botticelli is probably, so Mr. Berenson thinks, the most marvellous
draughtsman thus far produced by European art (we can still go to old
China and Japan for his masters), and who shall say him nay? Ruskin,
on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the
greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter,
Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to
destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci--what of that incomparable genius?

After Haarlem and Frans Hals you may realise that Manet and Sargent
had predecessors; after a visi