nt than in nature, yet nature has provided the elements
of significance. It is in his ability to see things whole and to
co-ordinate the selected details that Boecklin is most an artist. This
largeness of generalization gives him power over the imagination, and
is, perhaps the only, certainly the chief source of his power. His color
by its very intensity overdoes the intended effect. The imagination
instead of being stimulated is sated, and his obvious symbolism fails to
pique the curiosity. Moreover, his handling of paint lacks
sensitiveness. He has something of the disregard shown by the English
painter Watts for the beauty inherent in his material which might as
well be clay or textile as pigment in his hands. But his appreciation of
the effect upon the mind of noble arrangements of space and mass
raises him to a much higher place as an artist than he can be said to
occupy as a painter.

[Illustration: FIDDLING DEATH

_From a portrait by Arnold Boecklin_]

Franz von Stuck is Boecklin's most distinguished follower. When we turn
from the examples of Boecklin's work, by no means the most impressive
examples, exhibited in America, to Stuck's "Inferno" we perceive both
the influence of Boecklin and the powerful individuality that mingles
with it.

There is Boecklin's insistence upon the symbol, and upon the bodying
forth of things unseen, there is the solid violence of color, there is
the pompous statement of the half-discerned truths which more sensitive
artists are content to whisper. But there is also a splendid arabesque
of line and a deeper reading of the spiritual content of the subject.

If we compare Stuck with William Blake whose fancy also was haunted by
Dantesque conceptions, we see how much more impressive Blake's visions
of the unreal world are and we find the reason in their swift energy of
conception and in the artist's tenacity in holding his conception. With
both Boecklin and Stuck we feel that the manner of rendering the
conception becomes more important than the initial conception, and this
seldom, if ever, is true of Blake. In spite of Boecklin's superb
restraint in the disposition of his masses, when it comes to color he is
at the mercy of the material pigment and permits it to obliterate where
it should enhance and reveal. His forms, also, and even more than
Stuck's, lose vitality under the weight of significance forced upon
them, while Blake's emerge from the blank panel clean and strong and
u