nd translated
only by sympathy, so no mere painter can ever succeed in expressing in
its fulness the character of any great man. The lines in which holiest
passion, subtilest thought, divinest activity have recorded in the face
their existence and presence, are hieroglyphs unintelligible to one who
has not kindled with that passion, been rapt in that thought, or swept
away in sympathy with that activity; he may follow the lines, but must
certainly miss their meaning. A successful portrait implies an equality,
in some sense, between the artist and his original. The greatest of
artists fail most completely in painting people with whom they have no
sympathy, and only the mechanical painter succeeds alike with all,--the
fair average of his works being a general levelling of his subjects; the
great successes of the genuine artist being as surely offset (if one
success _can_ find offset in a thousand failures) by as absolute and
extreme failure.

As regards portraiture in general, the public may, without injury to Art
or history, employ the painters who make the prettiest pictures of them;
it doesn't matter to the future, if Mr. Jenkins, or even the Hon. Mr.
Twaddle, has employed the promising Mr. Mahlstock to perpetuate him
with a hundred transitory and borrowed graces,--if the talented young
_litterateur_, Mr. Simeah, has been found by his limner to resemble
Lord Byron amazingly, and has in consequence consented to sit for a
half-length, to be done _a la Corsair_, etc., etc.; but for our men of
thought, for those whose works will stand to all time as the signals
pointing out the road a nation followed, whose presence and acts shall
be our intellectual history,--it is of some little moment that these
should be given to us in such visible form, that men shall not
conjecture, a thousand years hence, if Emerson were really a man, or
a name under which some metaphysical club chose to publish their
philosophies. In psychological history, portraits are as necessary
as dates; and one of the most valuable gifts to an age is a great
portrait-painter,--a Titian, a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, or a
Page,--which last has more of the Titianesque character than any one who
has painted since the great Venetians lived, and few, indeed, are the
generations so endowed.

Beside this full insight and representation of character, which makes
the ideal portraiture, we have the less complete, but only in degree
less valuable, apprehension which res