better and to-morrow, perchance, it will be Raphael or
Whistler or some Japanese, why not?

The one and only good sign which marks imitation is that it shows
appreciation, and this of the standards is a good thing. Let each have
its turn. Their synthesis may be _you._

But to a man of the professions or business whose time for study in these
vast fields of the classics is so disproportionate to their extent and
who, though supplied with search warrants and summons, still fails to make
a capture, how ineffectual and wearying this chase after
ideals--subjective. Why not shorten your course? Why not produce
Rembrandts and Corots because you apprehend the principles on which _they_
work and anticipate a surprise in discovering, as by chance, that you have
produced something which _recalls them._ In this way and by these means
there will be meaning in your claim of brotherhood.

One may scarcely call an estimate in art matters complete without an
opinion from Mr. Ruskin. "In art we look for a record of man's thought
and power, but photography gives that only in quite a secondary degree.
Every touch of a great painting is instinct with feeling, but howsoever
carefully the objects of a picture be chosen and grouped by the
photographer, there his interference ends. It is not a mere matter of
color or no color, but of Invention and Design, of Feeling and
Imagination. Photography is a matter of ingenuity: Art of genius."

On these lines however the philosopher of Coniston hardly proves his case.

Invention and design, feeling and imagination, are all a part of the
photographer's suite. He employs them all. And these too are qualities
the most artistic. Technique, which is manual and not spiritual, is the
one point at which art and photography cannot coalesce. To Art's sentient
finger-tips, Photography holds up only steel, wood and glass. Art
therefore holds the winning cards.

P. G. Hamerton, England's safest and surest critic of art, writing a
generation ago on the "Relation between Photography and Painting," says:
"But all good painting, however literal, however pre-Raphaelite or
topographic, is full of human feeling and emotion. If it has no other
feeling in it than love or admiration for the place depicted, that is much
already, quite enough to carry the picture out of the range of photography
into the regions of real art."

"And this is the reason why good painting cannot be based on photography.
I find