:--

"How thoroughly exquisite! See those lovely angels tumbling over each
other in their haste to tell the news to Mary! How brilliant! Surely
Tintoretto did not paint this!"

"No. This is by Titian; and it is one of his most happy religious
pictures too. I thought of it as we were coming, and am glad to have you
see it. The whole expression is admirable; and the fulness of life and
joy--the jubilation--is perfect. You can in no way more vividly feel the
difference between fourteenth-century painting in Florence, and the
sixteenth-century or High Renaissance work in Venice, than by recalling
Fra Angelico's sweet, calm, staid Annunciations, and contrasting them
with this one."

"But why do I feel that, after all, I love Fra Angelico's better, and
should care to look at them oftener?" rather timidly asked Barbara.

"I think," replied Mr. Sumner, after a little pause, "that it is
because, in them, the spiritual expression dominates the physical. We
recognize the fact that the artist has not the power to picture all that
he desires to express. His art language is weak; therefore there is
something left unsaid, and this compels our attention. We wish to
understand his full meaning, so come to his pictures again and again.

"It is this quality of the fourteenth-century painting that impelled the
Pre-Raphaelites, German and English, to discard the chief _motif_ of the
High Renaissance, which was to picture everything in its outward
perfection. They thought that this very perfection of artistic
expression led to the elimination of spiritual feeling."

"But how can artists go back now and paint as those did five centuries
ago?" queried Malcom. "Of course, if they study methods of the present
day, they must know all the principles underlying a true and artistic
representation--and it would be wrong not to practise them."

"You have at once found the weak point in the Pre-Raphaelites' principle
of work, Malcom. It is forced and artificial to do that in the
nineteenth century which was natural and charming in the fourteenth.
That which our artists of to-day must do if they desire any reform is to
so fill themselves with the comprehension of spiritual things--so strive
to understand the hidden beauty and harmony and truth of nature--that
their works may be revelations to those who do not see so clearly as do
they. To do this perfectly they must ever, in my opinion, give more
thought to the thing to be expressed than to the m