am prone to find in
all his work, and I should insist on it still more if I might refer
to his important paintings. So composite are the parts of which any
distinguished talent is made up that we have to feel our way as we
enumerate them; and yet that very ambiguity is a challenge to analysis
and to characterization. This "nobleness" on Mr. Parsons' part is the
element of style--something large and manly, expressive of the total
character of his facts. His landscape is the landscape of the male
vision, and yet his touch is full of sentiment, of curiosity and
endearment. These things, and others besides, make him the most
interesting, the most living, of the new workers in his line. And what
shall I say of the other things besides? How can I take precautions
enough to say that among the new workers, deeply English as he is, there
is comparatively something French in his manner? Many people will like
him because they see in him--or they think they do--a certain happy
mean. Will they not fancy they catch him taking the middle way between
the unsociable French _etude_ and the old-fashioned English "picture"?
If one of these extremes is a desert, the other, no doubt, is an oasis
still more vain. I have a recollection of productions of Mr. Alfred
Parsons' which might have come from a Frenchman who was in love with
English river-sides. I call to mind no studies--if he has made any--of
French scenery; but if I did they would doubtless appear English enough.
It is the fashion among sundry to maintain that the English landscape
is of no use for _la peinture serieuse_, that it is wanting in technical
accent and is in general too storytelling, too self-conscious
and dramatic also too lumpish and stodgy, of a green--_d'un vert
bete_--which, when reproduced, looks like that of the chromo. Certain
it is that there are many hands which are not to be trusted with it,
and taste and integrity have been known to go down before it. But Alfred
Parsons may be pointed to as one who has made the luxuriant and
lovable things of his own country almost as "serious" as those familiar
objects--the pasture and the poplar--which, even when infinitely
repeated by the great school across the Channel, strike us as but meagre
morsels of France.

V

[Illustration: Mr. George H. Boughton]

In speaking of Mr. George H. Boughton, A.R.A., I encounter the same
difficulty as with Mr. Millet: I find the window closed through which
alone almost it is ju