o hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than
characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and
hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an
unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality.
But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something
very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by
a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in
blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in
the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures
painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those
done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of
Turner--Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the
Dutchmen and defiance of Claude.

I have but a line to give to the one or two other men of abnormally
splendid gifts whom this century has seen. Henri Regnault's
extraordinary talent was extinguished almost at the first spark, and it
is beyond prophecy to tell what it might have produced. His
eccentricities seem to have been quite genuine, due to an overflow of
power rather than to posing or grimace. His love of his art, his passion
for color, were almost frantic in their intensity, but sincere. A
certain exaggerated phrase of his is but the protest of reaction against
the literary painting, the erudite and philosophical art, of his time.
"La vie," he cries, "etant courte, il faut peindre tant qu'on a des
yeux. Donc on ne doit pas les fatiguer a lire des stupides journaux." A
crude way of putting the idea that to be an artist one needs but art.

Another wonderful talent is Hans Makart. Such an eye for color, it is
quite safe to say, has not been born since Veronese. Had he been born at
Venice among his peers, forced to work instead of experiment, outvied
instead of foolishly extolled, surrounded by artists to surpass him if
he tripped for a single instant, instead of critics to laud his most
glaring faults and amateurs to pay thousands for his spoiled paper, we
should have had another name to use as explanatory of genius. As it is,
he is, according to present indications, utterly spoiled. Only those who
know how he can draw if he will, how he has painted--portraits best,
perhaps--when he would, are vexed beyond endurance by the folly and the
carelessness and the sins he chooses to give us. It has been said that