thing this side of Cezanne?
How many writer people are there who really do understand what has
taken place since then?

I have heard these characteristic remarks among the so-called art
writers who write the regular notices for the daily journals--"You see
I really don't know anything about the subject, but I have to write!"
or--"I don't know anything about art, but I am reading up on it as
much as possible so that I won't appear too stupid; for they send me
out and I have to write something." Their attitude is the same as if
their subject were a fire or a murder: but either of the latter would
be much more in their line, calling for nothing but a registration of
the simplest of facts. Just why these people have to write upon art
will never be clear. But because of this altogether trivial
relationship to the theme of painting we find it difficult to take
seriously at all what we read in our dailies, in every case the barest
notation with heavily worded comment, having little or no reference to
what is important in the particular pictures themselves. How can
anyone take these individuals seriously when they actually have no
opinion to offer, and must rely either upon humor or indignation to
inspire them?

If we turn to the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of
Ruskin on Giotto:--"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto
is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like
Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's _Fighting Temeraire_, he
says: "Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain,
this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted--no ruin
was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave."
Journalism of the first class certainly, but at the farthest stretch
of the imagination how can one possibly think of Gainsborough or
Turner in connection with any special quality of Giotto? As for the
pathos of an aged ship, that belongs to poetry, as Coleridge has
shown; sentiment of this kind has never had any proper place in
painting. A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be
found, of course, in Pater's passages on _La Gioconda_ and
Botticelli's _Birth of Venus_. But these belong to a different realm,
in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures
themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of
suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless
description. We shall always dispu