an he could express, and so bungled in the
expression. Nor was the plea advanced that such bungling after the
infinite was better than simple perfection in the attainable. An artist
was called upon to be an artist, not a poet nor a philosopher nor a
moralist. When Plato confounded them all in a splendid confusion of
criticism the fruit-time had gone by. There was left but to expatiate on
the hoard which summer had bequeathed, or to speculate, if he chose, on
the possible yield of a future and most problematical year.

In the rich Italian summer one sees the same thing. Men paint because
they must--because put at anything else they come back to art as iron to
the magnet. Not because art is lovely, nor because to be an artist is a
desirable or a noble or a righteous thing, but because they are artists
born, stamped, double-dyed, and, kick as they might, they could be
nothing else--if not artists creative, yet artists critical and
appreciative. Truly, they think and strive over their art, write
treatises and dogmas and speculations, vie with and rival and outdo each
other. But it is their _art_ they discuss, not themselves, not one
another--technical methods, practical instruction, questions of pigment
and model and touch, of perspective and chiaroscuro and varnish, not
psychological aesthetics, biographical and psychical explanations as to
facts of canvas and color. What is done is what is to be criticised.
What can be done technically is what should be done theoretically, and
what cannot be done with absolute and perfect technical success is out
of the domain of art once and for ever. As the Greek did not try to
carve marble eyelashes, so no Venetian tried to put his conscience on a
panel. All Lionardo could see of Mona Lisa's soul he might paint, not
all he could feel of Lionardo's. Mr. Ruskin himself quotes Duerer's note
that Raphael sent him his drawings, not to show his soul nor his
theories, but simply _seine Hand zu weisen_--to prove his touch. In
Raphael's touch was implied Raphael's eye, and those two made the artist
Raphael.

Nothing strikes one more in these men than the oblivion of self in their
work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the
most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even
Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a
clique of commentators and a brotherhood of artists equally infected to
develop that. But just so far as he t