communicable of all mysterious essences, a
human personality.

"Often enough I think I have got the turn of her head and neck; but
not the face--never the face that speaks," complains the poor bereaved
husband in Mary Robinson's beautiful little poem. The case may not be
tragic like that one, and yet thoroughly tantalizing; we feel the
absent ones opposite to us in the room, we are in that distant room
ourselves; there is a sense of their position, of the space they
occupy, and thus we see, as through a ghost, the familiar outline,
perhaps, of a chair. Or, again, there is the well-known movement,
accompanied, perhaps, by the tone of voice, concentrated almost to the
longed-for look, and, as the figure advances ... nothing! Like
Virgil's Orpheus, our fancy embraces a shadow. "The face--never the
face that speaks!" But we _will_ have it, people exclaimed, all those
ages ago, and exclaim ever since. And thus they came by the notion of
portraits.

And when they got them they grumbled. The cavilling at every
newly-painted likeness is notorious. The sitter, indeed, is sometimes
easy enough to please, poor human creatures enjoying, as a rule, any
notice (however professional) of their existence, let alone an answer to
the attractive riddle of _what they look like_. And there are, of
course, certain superfine persons who, in the case of a famous artist,
think very like the sitter, and are satisfied so long as they get an
ornamental picture, or one well up to date. But the truly human grumble,
and are more than justified in doing so. Their cravings have been
disappointed; they had expected the impossible, and have not got it.

Since, in the very nature of things, a picture, and particularly a fine
picture, is always an imperfect likeness. For the image of the sitter on
the artist's retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind
chock full of other images; and is transferred--heaven knows how changed
already--by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and
juxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artist
himself, but to the artist's whole school. Regarding merely the latter
question, we all know that the old Venetians painted people ample,
romantic, magnificent; and the old Tuscans painted them narrow, lucid,
and commonplace; men of velvet and silk and armour on the one hand, and
men of broadcloth and leather, on the other. The difference due to the
individual artist is even greater; and,