may be with some amusement, that we learn from Kirke White, who visited the artist and had a long talk with him, that he entertained "no great reverence for Sir Isaac Newton."

When we try to estimate Russell's power and rank as an artist, the comparison with Sir Joshua and Gainsborough forces itself upon us. Nevertheless, the divergence is far more real and striking than the resemblance. In looking at Reynolds, we can never forget that he has lived with the greatest. His own resources may be inferior to theirs, but he has learnt his dignity and ease of manner in their company and in their school. He knows exactly how a great master would be expected to behave in a difficulty. He feels instinctively where Titian would have been bold, or Correggio subtle. Gainsborough, on the other hand, has none of this elaborate finish of breeding and training. He is a self-made man. In the consciousness of his superb facility, he disdains the roundabout contrivances of learned art, nourished upon maxims and memories. With him the shortest is also the easiest way, and his masterpieces, unlike those of his more deliberate and self-conscious rival, have all the appearance of being the natural result of some occasional harmony of mood and model. In Russell we have less of art, but more of truth than in either of his great predecessors. We use the word truth, of course, in a restricted sense. He never reached that higher level, on which, as in the case of the Johnson and the Heathfield, the real and the imperishable have, as it seems, already begun to shine out in the light of immortality; but, on the whole, his transcripts are more faithful than the average of either Reynolds or Gainsborough. He was ignorant of the conventions of the grand style which led the aspiring president to generalize his subjects, while the careless audacity of Gainsborough was equally remote from his character of earnestness and sobriety. Men are saved by their limitations more often than they are apt to think certainly than Russell himself would ever have allowed.

GAINSBOROUGH1

[1895: AET. 32]

MAINSBOROUGH, like Velasquez, may be described as a painters' painter. The historian can do little with the events of his life, for what there is to tell is known already, and if it needs to be repeated is soon told. But in the historian's necessity the critic finds his opportunity. He is free from the temptations to wander out of his depth, or to clothe the nakedness of impressions in the uniform of opinions. Alone with the object to be described as it appears, and judged upon its merits, he can express what he thinks and feels, without fear of science or favour of sentiment, for the benefit of his clique or generation as the case may be.

In the present case we shall not invite the reader to traverse the familiar ground covered by Gainsborough's career. The journey might be monotonous, and the company, from certain points of view, none of the best-very different, at any rate, from what we should meet if we were travelling with Reynolds. Our object will rather be to learn what we can from the observation and judgment of this Gainsborough's latest, though not his least qualified, critic.

Ruskin in one of his early intervals of lucidity and directness, before he had definitely abandoned teaching for preaching, pronounced Gainsborough to be the finest colourist since Rubens. This may have startled the first readers of "Modern Painters," those of them, at least, who remembered that the colourists since Rubens include Vandyke and Reynolds. People had grown so accustomed to the words, "The old is better," that they began to believe that heaven and earth would pass away sooner; but now the tendency

1 "Thomas Gainsborough." By Sir Walter Armstrong. London, 1895; "Guardian," May 25th, 1895.

is to the other extreme, and we praise the past, when we do praise it, not at the respectful distance of inferiors, but with the easy assurance of patrons, willing to overlook imperfect knowledge in consideration of honest endeavour. It is easy to see how this change has worked to the advantage of Gainsborough's reputation, as compared, for instance, with that of Reynolds. We have our doubts about a man who, like the President, was always pondering old secrets and new problems. If he had known all that has since been discovered—or, at any rate, asserted-about the difference between "literature" and "paint," he would have thought less about pictures, or, perhaps, not thought at all, and in consequence have painted better. Gainsborough, on the other hand, who chose Van Dyck in all his "gentlemanly flimsiness" for his model in default of a better, was driven both by circumstance and by temperament to be what we are now taught it is best to be-namely, an "impressionist"; factus est similis nostri.

The comparison between Reynolds and Gainsborough seems to be as unavoidable as that between Handel and Bach, and in both cases we are apt to make the past, which we only half understand because of its remoteness, responsible for the present, which we only half understand because of its closeness:

"We may say," writes Mr. Armstrong, "that Gainsborough was a finer colourist than Reynolds, but then Sir Joshua excelled him in directions which, to some, may appear more important than colour."

The truth seems to be that, starting from different points and working for different ends, each had to make his own sacrifices for his own successes. If Reynolds, aiming at Venetian harmony and splendour, suffused his canvas with an unreal golden glow, the greenish pallor of Gainsborough's sitters is no less unreal, though perhaps equally unavoidable in the cold keys in which it was his constant delight to compose.

Nothing is more misleading in criticism, or more characteristic of the criticism of the present day, than to choose the faculties of a particular artist, and then to make them into the type or measure of the artistic faculty in general. "As a painter," says Mr. Armstrong, "Gainsborough was the artistic temperament made visible." To us it seems that the evidence is too slight to bear this weighty conclusion, and that what Gainsborough made visible was neither

more nor less than the temperament of a portrait-painter in whom the perceptive and executive faculties dominated, if they did not exclude, all the rest. Granted that "he felt no temptation to be literary" (like Titian when he painted Bacchus and Ariadne), “to be anecdotic" (like Velasquez when he painted The Surrender of Breda), "to be didactic" (like Dürer when he designed The Knight and Death), what does this prove as regards either the quality or the limits of the artistic temperament in men of whom it is certain that they were powerfully and to the end of their days beset by these very temptations? "With Reynolds deliberation counted for much; Gainsborough's good things are impromptus." And many of Schubert's good things are impromptus; but the artistic temperament made visible in Schubert is that of a man who, judged by the great standard of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, was a feeble musician. Not that we mean to imply that Gainsborough was a feeble painter. Like Reynolds, he chose a style "suited to his abilities and to the taste of the times in which he lived"; but there have been other times, in which other styles without ceasing to be pictorial suited or tempted abilities of a wider range and of a higher order.

A

THE ART OF TITIAN1

[1898: AET. 34]

I

ELASQUEZ on one occasion when in Italy astonished an artist, with whom he was discussing the relative merits of the great Italian masters, by confessing that, in his judgment, not Raphael, but Titian "carried the banner." And ever since

the time of Velasquez Titian's reputation has held its ground against the changes of fashion that have shaken, if they have not uprooted, almost every other demigod upon his throne. That Reynolds continued throughout his whole career to offer the sincerest form of flattery to Titian is obvious enough; but besides, devoted as he was to the lip-service of Michael Angelo, he could say that of the two names that stood highest in art, Titian's was one, and, in another place, that, if ever any of the masterpieces of Greek painting were to be recovered, we should probably find them "as correctly drawn as the Laocoon and coloured like Titian." Mengs, as became a Greek of the German breed, was less enthusiastic about a naturalist and colourist than about the eclectic and ideal Raphael; but even he observes that no one knew better than Titian when to put a red cloth in a picture and when a blue one

-a problem far less easy of solution than it might appear. Lastly Ruskin, who composed his gospel out of a whole mass of ill-considered and inconsistent preachments, in the case of Titian at any rate never challenged the verdict of history. "We cannot study Raphael too little." Michael Angelo was "incapable of laying a touch of oil-colour," and as for fresco, in which he did value his skill, Perugino, be it noted, has shown us what that is. And yet the storm of verbiage, that left little else standing where it was, passed

1 "The Earlier Work of Titian," by Claude Phillips, 1897; "Literature," March 26th, 1898.