The fact that “the report about nature” which we have called “truth” varies with the reporter is of vital importance to us in comprehending the measure of exactness in the result. It is something that must be reckoned with in every thought, deed, and utterance, for its presence is potent in all human endeavor. Two astronomers, to use the accepted illustration, taking the time of the passage of a series of stars over the same meridian, will not precisely agree in their arithmetical results. However accurate, unbiassed, and mechanical in action they may seek to be, it happens that one takes the time earlier or later than the other. Consequently there is always a variation in the product, which has to be rectified by adding a constant. This is what is called the personal equation—a something we have heard about in literature and art as well as in science.

Perhaps you may remember that in the writing class of our youth when the motto, “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” was given us as an example to copy, we all wrote the motto, and we all tried to follow the exact form of the copper-plate pattern before us; but somehow our performances differed one from another. In some the letters were large, in others they were small; the angle was flatter, the line was firmer, or the shading heavier. We used to think it merely a matter of practice, and fancied if we kept at it long enough we could ultimately write exactly like the copper-plate pattern. But I wonder if we thought quite correctly about that. Certainly there are thousands of people who have been writing all their lives and have had practice enough, but these are the ones that show the most marked variations from the model. Each one writes in a manner peculiarly his own. And these handwritings that vary so radically interest us very much. We see all sorts of striking peculiarities in them suggestive of their authors, and we even have so-called scientists who read character out of them, or into them, I will not say which. The cause of the variation is not far to seek. It is the personal element appearing in the work and influencing it. If we would get the same result in all handwritings we must eliminate the personal element or, if you please, reckon with the personal equation.

This quality which creates the variance in handwriting is met with even more positively in painting. For painting is, after all, only an elaborated picture-writing, more flexible, perhaps, than letter-writing, and, therefore, more easily bent by a personality; but in the main influenced by the same principles as regards the variation of the characters. We all write the letter “A” and they are all “A’s,” but each is different from the other, just as all landscape painters paint hills and trees and they are all hills and trees, yet each is different again. If three painters, say Turner, Rousseau, and Claude Monet, could be brought together and induced, each for himself, to paint a given tree, there can be no doubt that all three of the paintings would represent the tree and be true enough representations into the bargain; but they would not be at all like one another. The Turner would undoubtedly give the height, the branching outline, the grace and grandeur of the tree; but in flattened form, perhaps in silhouette against a yellow evening sky. In any event and under any circumstances we may be sure that it would be a Turnerian tree. And the Rousseau would be correspondingly true to Rousseau’s peculiar point of view. It would probably have an emphasis of mass and volume; it would be as deep through as broad across, it would be firm in its rooting, massive in its trunk and branches, heavy in its foliage, rich in its coloring. But Claude Monet, painting the same tree, would not see the things that appealed to Turner and Rousseau, or if he did he would disregard them. He would overlook form and line and body, perhaps lose them entirely in studying the sunlight falling upon the foliage, in painting the colored reflections cast by sky and ground and water, in surrounding the tree with colored air and giving it a setting in an atmospheric envelope. Undoubtedly we should be able to recognize the original tree in any one of the three counterfeit presentments. Each would differ from the other and yet no one of them be false. There would be three different truths about the one tree—three different phases of the one fact. And undoubtedly we should be able to say just which painter painted each picture. How? Because we should recognize in each the point of view peculiar to its maker—we should recognize the individuality of the painter.

If we consider this same tree as part of a landscape—consider it in connection with foreground, background, and sky—we shall see that the chance for the display of individuality is even greater. The choice of the painter as to how the tree shall be seen determines at the very start the character of the representation. If it is placed in the foreground and spreads in a pattern of branches and leaves high up against the sky, we have one phase of tree-truth, one kind of picture which may perhaps resemble, in a way, the work of Harpignies, if it is placed in the middle distance, a shadowy form against a pale morning sky, with a feeling of heavy air and rising mists, we have another phase of truth, something which may represent Corot; if it is seen in the far background against a yellow twilight sky, tall, dark, motionless, we have still another phase of truth which may stand for Daubigny. Any change in the position of the tree, any change in foreground or sky-line, in light or reflection or atmosphere, would represent a new angle of vision and hence a new truth. And the preference of the painter for any particular phase of the manifestation, any particular truth, would exhibit what we have called his individuality.^[2]

This preference for a peculiar point of view crops out very early in the painter’s life. The students in an art class, drawing from the living model on the platform, and each one striving to follow that model literally, all show it. The sketches indicate by the placing of the figure upon the paper, the size of the figure, the height or depth of the shadows, the clearness or vagueness of the outline, that the personal element—individuality—is present, influencing and practically dominating the work of everyone in the class-room. And this, too, in charcoal work, where the color problem is eliminated. Moreover, there are features of these charcoal sketches, aside from mere technique, that are equally interesting as indicative of the peculiar temperament behind the pencil. You cannot fail to be struck with the mood or spirit that creeps into each one of the drawings. On one paper the model looks pleasant, almost jovial, on another he will appear sad-faced or morose, on another, romantic as you might conceive a Wagner hero, or classic and insipid like a Canova marble, and on still another, gross, brutal, or perhaps foolish-looking. It is not possible that the model could exhibit all these different moods. The variation is not in him. He presents the same stolid, tired front common to all models; the mood is added to him by the personality holding the charcoal.

We see the same variation among the works of older people—full-fledged artists, in the world of art. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the portrait, the one thing which might be thought to call for the elimination of the painter and a close fidelity to the facts of the original. But such is the power of preference that the painter almost invariably emphasizes certain features at the expense of others less interesting to him; or such is the warp of the vision that certain qualities appear abnormal, certain prominences appear unduly accentuated. There are portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire and of Mrs. Siddons (Plate 19) by both Reynolds and Gainsborough, but how very different they are! With Reynolds both of the characters are healthy, robust, good-natured, somewhat loud and stormy; with Gainsborough they are both delicate, subdued, refined, even melancholy. And think of the portraits in the Louvre of Francis I. by different hands, where only a slight thread of resemblance holds them together; or, better still, the portraits of Napoleon I., painted by the classic painters of his reign who believed in the utter effacement of the artist in favor of the facts before him. How very different in form, feature, mood, and character Napoleon appears in each picture. He is classic; he is romantic; he is thin, fat, amiable, moody, fiery, dreamy. David, Delaroche, Gros, no matter what their theories in art, could not keep themselves out of the representation. All that any one of them could do was to give his individual impression of the model before him. Necessarily each was tinctured by a predilection or a bias. It could not have been otherwise.

What is the cause of the variation in results to be seen in the portrait? Why, for instance, do the photographs of Queen Victoria show substantially the same thing, while the portraits of her by painters show different things? Because the cameras are all made of practically the same material, have the same sensitiveness, and receive light in the same way; whereas men are not made of the same material, have not the same sensitiveness, and receive varying degrees of light according to their lucidity or absorbent power, which is sometimes called genius. No two people are fashioned precisely after the same pattern. They vary in intellectual, emotional, and physical make-up. And let a painter strive as he may to record an exact fact before him, he cannot escape the action of his inherent faculties. These may be brighter, clearer, keener, than those of other painters, or they may be duller and feebler; but at least they are different, and he must use what nature has given him. He was equipped originally to see with his own eyes, think with his own brain, and work with his own hands. Is it not very apparent then that the eye may warp the vision and report peculiarly to the brain, which in turn may tell the hand to work thus and so? And the result in art is what? Why, the individual view of one man; or nature passed through the alembic of that man’s personality.^[3]

How shrewdly Coleridge discerned the truth in that definition of art which I am so very fond of quoting because of its exactness. He says that painting is of “a middle quality between a thought and a thing—the union of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human.” That is it, precisely. Art is an illusion of nature produced by a personality. Human individuality must be in it because it cannot very well be kept out of it. Whatever we do, we speak ourselves. For a time we may act a part—copy someone else—but sooner or later the mask falls and we stand revealed in the form and manner nature designed for us. We are all peculiar in our make-up physically, mentally, and æsthetically. To the European all Chinamen look alike, and possibly to Chinamen all Americans look alike; but we know there is a variation. We may seem as like as peas in a peck measure, but we differ in the conformation of a wrinkle. Out of a hundred acquaintances on the street how easy it is to recognize each one apart from his fellows. There is a peculiarity in look or walk or bearing that betrays the man. And of those hundred acquaintances each one, as we have already noted, writes in an individual way and you are able to distinguish the handwritings by the variations in the muscular action of the hands. Suppose you should have read to you extracts from a hundred famous authors, do you think you would have much difficulty in recognizing Shakespeare from Victor Hugo, Carlyle from Cardinal Newman, or Walter Scott from Swinburne? Could you possibly mistake an essay by Bacon for an essay by Macaulay, or could you by any chance confuse a sermon by Canon Liddon with a sermon by Spurgeon? I think not, for the individuality of mind and thought is even more positive and assertive than the individuality of the physical presence.

If you are acquainted with pictures you can enter a gallery in which you have never been before, and standing in the middle of the room you can pick out at a distance the Corots, the Diazes, the Monets, the Millets, the Delacroixs—yes, the Rubenses, the Van Dycks, the Holbeins, and the Titians. And this, too, with a large degree of accuracy. You are very likely to be right in your ascriptions. Why? Because you know the artistic individualities of each one of those painters—know just how they see, think, feel, and paint—as you know the personal appearance of an acquaintance upon the street, or recognize his handwriting upon the face of an envelope. When the question of a picture’s attribution comes up, when it is of moment whether a work is by a Raphael or a Perino del Vaga, by a Velasquez or a Mazo, there is an unconscious appeal made to the spirit of the picture. And this quite aside from a question of technique, aside from any Morellian theory of tools or methods or models. Does the work reflect the spirit of Raphael? Is the impress of his individuality to be felt in the canvas? If it is genuine, yes; if by a follower, no. The sugary little “Reading Magdalene” in the Dresden Gallery, so long attributed to Correggio, gives not the slightest hint of that great painter’s individuality; the alleged portrait of Raphael by himself in the Louvre shows all the blundering stupidity of Bacchiacca. Whether master or follower, the painter cannot disguise himself effectively. Back of the work we feel the presence of the worker. The great artists fashion their art after their own thoughts, and that which they love the best or feel the deepest speaks out from the canvas until at last we recognize the poet in his poem, the sculptor in his marble, the painter in his picture.

These qualities of individuality in art are much like the same qualities in real life, and we may perhaps fancy in the picture that which we find admirable in the personal acquaintance. For instance, the traits of frankness and straightforwardness which we all love in a friend, are they not just as apparent in Carpaccio the painter? And just as lovable? The way in which Carpaccio tells the history of St. Ursula or St. George—so frank in spirit and yet so cunning of hand—reminds one somehow of a chapter from Sir John Maundevile or Roger of Wendover. How naif he is with his gorgeously robed Venetians (Plate 6)! How earnest he is about the dignity of the types, the nobility of the faces, the sobriety of the action! His sincerity is as great as that of Giotto, and his absolute unconsciousness—his lack of egotism—as apparent as that of Fra Angelico. At the foot of the “Presentation” in the Venetian Academy is that little angel playing upon a lute which you have all seen in reproductions so many times. You must have noticed that the angel was not playing for public applause, but for the glory of the Madonna standing above. There is no thought of you or of me, or anyone outside of the Madonna and the group of saints. That quality of unconsciousness we need not attribute to angels. It is no characteristic of theirs so far as we know; but it was a quality of Victor Carpaccio, the Venetian painter.

Think for a moment of the “Madonna and Saints” in the sacristy of the Frari by Giovanni Bellini (Plate 7). How absolutely honest and unabashed she looks! This is not the Madonna of Sorrows, not the pathetic Madonna of Botticelli; but a purely human mother, proud of her boy—a mother and not ashamed. And the little cherubs playing on musical instruments at the foot of the throne, how child-like they are with their serious faces, their little fat cheeks and round childish legs! Everything in and about the picture tells you of the sane, healthy mind and art of Giovanni Bellini. The Madonna’s honesty is Bellini’s honesty; the view of the cherubs as merely beautiful and graceful children of this earth is Bellini’s view; yes, the gorgeous coloring of the patterned background, the superb architecture, even the rich ornamentation of the framing are Bellini’s taste. We cannot, if we would, escape the man. He is omnipresent in his work. Why should he not be? The story in literature becomes fascinating through the personality and skill of the story-teller; why should not the theme in art be beautiful through the individuality and skill of the painter?

Those of you who have been in Rome and have studied in the Sistine Chapel know with what a feeling of awe the great figures on the ceiling inspire one. You feel the presence of a mighty spirit within the walls, hovering about the vaulted space, in the very air of the chapel itself. What is it? Surely, nothing in the architecture or the lighting of the chapel; nothing in the subjects of the frescoes, for they are familiar subjects in art. It is the impress of a commanding individuality that you feel. Michael Angelo lives here in his pictures. Those great forms of the Prophets and Sibyls lost in thought, brooding over the evil of their days, isolated in their grandeur, living on in gloomy solitude, how very like they are to what we know of Michael Angelo himself! Notice the fore-shortened hand and arm of the “Delphic Sibyl” (Plate 21) and how symbolic of strength it is, how like to the power that lay in the arm, hand, and mind of the master himself! Follow the outline of the figure of the newly created Adam—perhaps the grandest piece of drawing in all pictorial art—and how that summarized, synthetized line speaks the comprehensive grasp, scope, knowledge, and plastic feeling of the great draughtsman.

So it is that individuality creeps into the work of art and tinges the whole character of it. Of the thousands of pictures we pass before in public galleries the great majority of them are merely records of individual tastes, beliefs, aspirations, emotions. In other words they are partial autobiographies of the painters, showing countless moods of human nature. Some of them are grave, some gay, some refined, some fierce, some grandiloquent, some resplendent. Almost every shade of sentiment and feeling, almost every quality personal to the man, can be recorded in art. And this, without premeditated thought, without extravagant effort, without conscious action. The note of a bird discloses its kind not more unconsciously than the hand of the artist tells the quality of the man.

If all the lives of Rembrandt were swept out of existence we should still be able to reconstruct his individuality from his pictures. His must have been an intensely emotional nature. For not in the “Supper at Emmaus” alone do we find the sorrow-stained face. The portraits of himself are only too often sad-eyed and passion-wrung; and there is in the National Gallery, London, one of his portraits of an old woman with a lace cap and a white ruff (No. 775 of the Catalogue) that shows a mouth and chin quivering with emotion, and eyes that seem red with weeping. The man was tragic in his passionate power. He could not suppress it. Even when he laughs you feel that he is doing so to avoid a moan. We have little record of the life of Giorgione, but from two or three of his pictures we know he must have been quite the reverse of Rembrandt. His “Madonna,” at Castelfranco (Plate 24) and his “Concert,” in the Louvre (in Giorgione’s style if not by his hand), tell us his Theocritean nature—loving life for its pastoral beauty, revelling in sunshine, shadow and color, careless of everything but the pure joy of living. We know still less about Correggio, but his pictures (Plate 8) say to us that he was of a similar faun-like nature—a man who grew eloquent over the grace and charm of women and children, and cared little or nothing for the religious themes of his time.

And so we might go on down the long line of paintings, recognizing in each picture the note that harmonized with the painter’s individuality. What, for instance, is more apparent than the charm of Corot as seen in his landscapes (Plate 9)? His pictures delight us by their alluring qualities of calmness, radiance, unity. They are fair dreams of splendor in which dawn and twilight glow through a silver veil of atmosphere, in which the winds are hushed and the waters are stilled and that peace that passeth understanding, that joy which is beyond price, have fallen upon the dwellers in Arcadia Charm in its various manifestations has been the possession of not a few painters. Many of the Italians—Leonardo, Filippino, Lorenzo Costa, Sodoma—possessed it; the eighteenth century Englishmen—Wilson, Gainsborough, Romney—were not without it; and the modern landscape painters—Daubigny (Plate 16), Cazin, Homer Martin, Tryon—have shown it in almost all their work. Serenity is a quality allied to charm in that it is restful and hence an attractive feature. All the great men possessed it. Raphael was primarily its exponent in Rome as Giorgione in Venice. The superb repose of Titian and Velasquez is akin to it; and the calm of the Parthenon marbles is part of the same spirit. Refinement is another characteristic that may be shown in painting as readily as in print. It has nothing to do with fine furniture, fine clothes, and a pretty face. A picture may possess all the elegance of the latest fashion and still be the epitome of vulgarity. Refinement in art means the delicacy, the distinction of feeling that a painter may possess and show in his work. Terburg made it apparent in so simple a thing as the drawing of a chair leg or a table-cloth, Chardin showed it in his pots, pans and dishes, and it is obvious to the most obtuse in Van Dyck’s portraits of men, women and children. (Plate 18.) A tenderness of feeling as well as of touch has been exhibited many times in painting. Dürer shows it in his “Christ on the Cross” (Plate 10), and Botticelli suggests it in almost every picture he ever painted, whether sacred or profane (Plate 29). Just so with sensitiveness, which we see so beautifully shown in the portraits by Lorenzo Lotto, or impetuosity as revealed in the great dramatic canvases by Tintoretto, or liveliness as seen in the garden scenes of Pater or the soubrette figures of Fragonard. The words describe the spirit of the pictures and they also suggest the nature of the painter.

And note too, if you please, that the disagreeable and unpleasant qualities of the individual crop out in painting as in social life. How many modern painters do we know whose works exhale the atmosphere of the Folies-Bergères and the Bal Bullier. Their subjects may be pure enough or refined enough; they may picture decent people, high life, and fashionable surroundings, and yet do it with an unwholesome mind and a tell-tale brush. There are painters (their names need not be mentioned) who cannot paint a lady without showing the cocotte, nor a gentleman without showing the blackguard, nor a child without showing a certain sophistication—a precocious knowledge of evil—altogether unhappy. The coarseness of Jan Steen or Brouwer may be passed over as incidental to his time. It is coarse, but neither vulgar nor immoral. But not so the brutality of the modern cosmopolite who boasts so openly in his pictures that he has no faith in the virtue of women nor the respectability of men.

And what vulgarity we see in every modern exhibition, whether held in Chicago, London, or Paris! Painters there are, born and bred no one knows where or how, who depict Oxford professors or statesmen with the air and attitude of flunkies, or duchesses with the smirk of shop-girls. And painters there are, too, who, assuming for their characters the elegance of luxury, paint pictures that seem to reek of perfumes, scented soaps, and manicured finger-nails. Such men seem to leave an unhappy impress upon the trees and mountains, and their point of view vulgarizes the blue sky. They may be very brilliant handlers of the brush—indeed they are often excellent craftsmen—but their vision is sadly warped and their minds are tainted. There are, for instance, few workmen more fascinating in craftsmanship than Goya. He could paint beautifully and convincingly, but when you go to Spain and see the mass of his painting you will be surprised at the blood and flame and brutality of it. The man’s mind, at times, was hideous, unearthly, poisoned with bitterness. On the contrary take the work of Carlo Dolci or Sassoferrato and you meet with super-saturated sentimentality and mawkishness. Neither was a bad painter for his age and people, but his mental attitude was lacking in force—perhaps had not enough brutality about it.

And human conceit exudes as readily from the painter’s brush as from the writer’s pen. You have no trouble in recognizing conceit in a book. It is only too apparent. And yet all that clever painting, that bravura of the brush, that elaborate flourish of the little men who try to make a great noise and attract attention to themselves, is mere pictorial conceit. And there is so much of it in modern painting. It seems sometimes as though the exhibitions were more than half made up of flippant displays of dexterity, which have no other aim than to show how very clever the painter can be and still avoid seriousness.

But I need not stop longer to discuss disagreeable characteristics in art. They are not our quest in any sense and they are referred to here merely to suggest anew that the man—be he weak or strong, good or bad, noble or ignoble, serious or flippant—eventually appears in his work. Individuality will speak out though the individual may not be aware of it.

And this is as it should be. The disagreeable personality misleads for only a short time. Eventually it is ignored in art as in social life. And that which is really good in painting is the better for the strong individuality behind it. The frank statement of personal feeling or faith, the candid autobiography, has added more to the real knowledge of life, and has done more to show people how to live, than all the long volumes of scientific history, of which we have enough and to spare in every library. When a person speaks of himself he knows his subject at least, and can speak of it truly; but when he speaks of dead-and-gone Alexanders and Cæsars, he is speculating in “perhapses” and “possiblys.” And so in painting, when a person paints what he individually sees and is impressed by, he is likely to produce something worthy of attention; but when he takes up some formula of truth laid down by a school or a camera he is merely repeating a something he has not seen, and simulating a feeling he has not known.

Even the positive assertion—the insistent assertion—of one’s own view is often welcome in art. I think we all like the self-reliance, the steadfastness of belief of the individual—assuming, of course, that he is right and not therefore merely obstinate. When Delacroix was opposed by the classic painters of his day because he saw nature in patches of color and light, instead of in outlines and linear extensions, he declared defiantly: “The whole world cannot prevent me from seeing things in my own way.” He insisted upon it that his “way” was a right way, even if different from that of Ingres. He was seeking to picture something peculiar to himself, in a manner entirely his own. Listen to him again: “I am at my window and I see the most beautiful landscape; the idea of a line never comes into my head. The lark sings, the river glitters, the foliage murmurs; but where are the lines that produce these charming sensations?” There you have the individual point of view, and in the 1840’s it was a very unusual view. It was the self-reliant quality of the man, which enabled him to discard the outworn conception of his contemporaries and create a something new; and it is largely by the creative faculty arising from the desire to say something new, that we distinguish genius from mediocrity or eccentricity.

For you know that people whom we call “queer” can be just as individual as others, and yet not accomplish anything of importance. There is an individuality of genius which consists in original impression and statement; and there is an eccentricity of foolishness which produces only the bizarre. It is not difficult, however, to distinguish between them. For, as we have already noted, true individuality is always creative. It builds up, has a definite aim, proceeds to a definite goal; whereas, eccentricity is disordered, disposed to be meaningless, inclined to produce brilliant fragments that have no connection with each other. We see the same qualities exhibited in the social characters of real life, and gossip says that such a man is a “genius” or that another is “eccentric.” It is by some outward manifestation or action, akin to expression in painting, that gossip arrives at its conclusion; and it is usually a correct conclusion.

Then, too, there are painters who lose their individuality—throw it aside to take up with the view of some other person who seems to have achieved more popularity. The majority of men break down in their ideals long before they are old. They may have possessed talent, and given voice to it in early years; but it has been unnoticed, perhaps unheard. They may have had impressions of their own; but perhaps they have not proved attractive to the masses, or have not received the immediate recognition to which their producers perhaps thought them entitled. Then they make the irretrievable mistake of trying to follow someone whose impressions seem to be in public demand. It may be that they follow Raphael or Titian or Velasquez; but no matter how good a painter they may choose for a model, they have already committed artistic suicide. No one in this world of ours ever became great by echoing the voice of another, repeating what that other has said. Are there not countless illustrations of this—illustrations by whole schools of painters and sculptors in the history of art? What was the art of Rome, following as it did the art of Greece? What was the art of those who followed Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio? What was the seventeenth-century art of France, following that of Italy? What was David and classicism, following ancient Rome? What is to-day the value of all these French peasants and Seine landscapes for which Millet and Corot set the patterns, and in the imitation of which America has contributed her modicum of strength? It is all a vapid and somewhat meaningless copying that may furnish canvases to hide a break in the wall-paper of a drawing-room, but as original art counting for naught. And why? Simply because it lacks in individuality—lacks in originality of aim and statement.

That last statement may be almost as fittingly applied to those who literally imitate nature as to those who imitate some other painter. It adds nothing to our store of knowledge, nothing to our appreciation of beauty, to have the painter reproducing line upon line and shade upon shade and color upon color the exact scene from nature. “A mere copier of nature,” says Sir Joshua, “can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions or warm the heart of the spectator.” The insistence upon fact crowds the man out of the picture. Individuality does not appear, except perhaps in a manner of handling which shows the artisan rather than the artist. The Denners and Meissoniers and Gerard Dous have no individualities that you can trace in their pictures. You know they were workmen and that is about all. Realism with them, as with all devoted followers of the “truth to nature” theory, is an attempt at eliminating the personal element, an attempt at approximating the working of a machine. Of course the attempt is never fully realized, but it may be carried far enough to destroy whatever might have been stimulating or exalted in the picture.

And just so with those painters who produce academic art or, as it has been known for many years, classic art. It is based upon an abstraction, an ideal taken from memories or remains of Greek art; and it is produced, in a scholastic way, according to an unwritten canon of academic proportions. Bouguereau and Lefebvre are the last notable exponents of it in France, and excellent craftsmen they are, too; but somehow their pictures always remind one of the book-keeper’s handwriting. They are very good as official handicraft—excellent drawings after a model—but they seem to lack character. They have no more force than the pretty girl on the outside of the handkerchief box, for whose existence, indeed, they are largely responsible. The want of stamina and vitality in their pictures may be accounted for readily enough, because again the man is absent. The work is mapped out by rule and done by academic precept. As for the feeling and the enthusiasm of the painter they are not apparent, and the product is accordingly colorless, mechanical, somewhat insipid.

This academic art is just as impersonal as the so-called realistic art, but, of course, neither of them is impersonal through the ignorance of their producers. It is a part of their creed that the painter should be absolutely “wiped out of the canvas,” and that the picture is complete only when the means of its production (including the painter) are no longer apparent in the work. The realist believes that nature is above all, the most beautiful of all beauties, and that the best the painter can do is to copy her in all humility of spirit. The academician believes that the academic rule—the consensus of tradition as to what constitutes beauty in art—is better than any one painter’s eyes and hand, and that the best the moderns can do is to follow the greatest of the ancients, namely, the Greeks. But we have seen the impossibility of absolute realism in art and we can imagine the futility of copying an art of the past to be applied to a people of the present. In practice neither kind of art has proved satisfying. The insistence upon academic and realistic formulas has always led to denials and revolts. The bitterest quarrels in art have hinged upon whether painting should be personal or impersonal, whether a man should follow a model, a rule, an inexorable law, or whether he should create and be a law unto himself. We have been told many times that the struggles and neglect of the Delacroixs, the Corots, and the Millets were due to the stupid public that refused to recognize them; but on the contrary, it was the stupid academicians of the École des Beaux Arts who would not understand them and denounced them. The protestants did not conform to the academic standard—they did not recite by rote.

Great art never has admitted a law; it will not be bound down to a model or a formula; it will not tolerate a rule if it can gain by breaking it. It is primarily the expression of man’s delight in what he sees or feels, and every man must express himself in his own way and in his own language. Indeed, the longer we ponder over the subject the surer we are to agree in substance with Véron that “of every work of art we may truly say that its chief value consists in the personal character of its author.”

These different kinds of art—realism, classicism, individualism—we frequently hear spoken of in metaphysical terms, which one hesitates to use for fear of producing confusion. When a person begins talking about “the real” and “the ideal,” “the objective” and “the subjective,” we are at once all at sea; because those words seem to have been used to define everything in the art world, and no two definitions mean quite the same thing. But as we may consider impersonal art hereafter, perhaps it is as well to say that it is often referred to as objective art. That is to say, it is as much as possible a realization of the object or thing painted. It is the outer view, seeing things beautiful in external nature. Personal art, on the contrary, is usually referred to as subjective art. It is the inner view, seeing things beautiful in the mind’s impression or the heart’s emotion. The interest in the one case centres in the representation of the model; in the other case it emanates from the expression of the painter himself.

Of course, the work of art does not necessarily hinge upon this question of personality or impersonality in the picture. There is the decorative quality that counts for much; there is something in subject that may be of importance; and there is, too, the style of the work, which may be strong enough to overcome other and perhaps detracting features. We have not yet finished with our consideration of the picture, and are not yet ready to draw a conclusion. It may be that conclusions in art are the better for not being “drawn” too rigidly. The arts which depend so largely upon varying personalities and temperaments cannot be summed up and proved with the exactness of a mathematical problem. Sometimes from a mass of illustrations one may extract a few general principles, and if we succeed in doing that we shall be taking at least one step forward in the appreciation of art.