As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight,
and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of
colour.

The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote
music--simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.

On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies--as harmonies--as
combinations, evolved from the chords of F or G and their minor
correlatives.

This is pure music as distinguished from airs--commonplace and vulgar
in themselves, but interesting from their associations, as, for
instance, "Yankee Doodle," or "Partant pour la Syrie."

Art should be independent of all clap-trap--should stand alone, and
appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this
with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love,
patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with
it; and that is why I insist on calling my works "arrangements" and
"harmonies."

Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an
"Arrangement in Grey and Black." Now that is what it is. To me it is
interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the
public to care about the identity of the portrait?

The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only
the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an
artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the
artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on
canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day;
to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of
colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model.

This is now understood indifferently well--at least by dressmakers. In
every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour
which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists
through the _Prophete_, or the Huguenots' hymn in the opera of that
name.

[Illustration]

_A Rebuke_

[Sidenote: _The World_, Dec. 9, 1885.]

No Birmingham election, no Chamberlain speech, no _Reynolds_ or
_Dispatch_ article, could bring the aristocracy more strongly into
ridicule and contempt than does the coarsely coloured cartoon of
"Newmarket" accompanying the winter number of _Vanity Fair_. From it
one learns that the Dukes, Duchesses, and turf persons generally,
frequenting the Heath, are a set of blob-headed stumpy dwarfs....