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knows, as nothing but the brush of an artist can; and when it comes to painting them, aerial perspective and anatomical detail _must_ come right. This is the first and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in--Shall I use the fashionable artistic slang and say _preciousness_? It is the gift of a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the other, but it can, far more than the other, be improved and developed by practice and patience. Both gifts in equal perfection constitute a technical master. It is hardly necessary to say that no man--certainly no nation--can to-day claim the highest measure of both. The French are most highly gifted with the first, the Germans with the second. In the latter, patience and science, working upon a natural aptitude, have developed great strength and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence--splendor without softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is attempted in color--as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of contemporary paintings, Knille's _Tannhaeuser and Venus_ in the Berlin Gallery--the success is by no means on a par with the great excellence of drawing and composition. In France the eye for color is present--I will not say as in Venice, but to a greater degree than in the two other nations. If we leave now professional painters and professional critics and turn to the untrained public, we shall find, of course, all our modern faults more evident. The English public is pre-eminently untechnical in its judgments, pre-eminently literary or moral. But the French and the German public approximate more to the English--as is natural--than do their respective artists. I use the word _literary_ as it has often been used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the time--and in England much of the professional criticism also--to denote a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story--_l'anecdote_, as a French critic calls it--over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or t
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