alien art like painting, of any art, indeed, whose sphere is only
surface. Let those, again, who sneer, so rightly, at the 'painted
anecdotes of the Academy,' censure equally the writers who trespass on
painters' ground. It is a proclaimed sin that a painter should concern
himself with a good little girl's affection for a Scotch greyhound,
or the keen enjoyment of their port by elderly gentlemen of the early
'forties. Yet, for a painter to prod the soul with his paint-brush is
no worse than for a novelist to refuse to dip under the surface, and the
fashion of avoiding a psychological study of grief by stating that the
owner's hair turned white in a single night, or of shame by mentioning
a sudden rush of scarlet to the cheeks, is as lamentable as may be. But!
But with the universal use of cosmetics and the consequent secernment of
soul and surface, upon which, at the risk of irritating a reader, I
must again insist, all those old properties that went to bolster up the
ordinary novel--the trembling lips, the flashing eyes, the determined
curve of the chin, the nervous trick of biting the moustache, aye, and
the hectic spot of red on either cheek--will be made spiflicate, as the
puppets were spiflicated by Don Quixote. Yes, even now Demos begins to
discern. The same spirit that has revived rouge, smote his mouth as it
grinned at the wondrous painter of mist and river, and now sends him
sprawling for the pearls that Meredith dived for in the deep waters of
romance.

Indeed the revival of cosmetics must needs be so splendid an influence,
conjuring boons innumerable, that one inclines almost to mutter against
that inexorable law by which Artifice must perish from time to
time. That such branches of painting as the staining of glass or
the illuminating of manuscripts should fall into disuse seems, in
comparison, so likely; these were esoteric arts; they died with the
monastic spirit. But personal appearance is art's very basis. The
painting of the face is the first kind of painting men can have known.
To make beautiful things--is it not an impulse laid upon few? But
to make oneself beautiful is an universal instinct. Strange that the
resultant art could ever perish! So fascinating an art too! So various
in its materials from stimmis, psimythium, and fuligo to bismuth and
arsenic, so simple in that its ground and its subject-matter are one, so
marvellous in that its very subject-matter becomes lovely when an artist
has select