f the scenes. The very charter of painting depends upon its
not giving us charts. And if with us a long poem be a contradiction in
terms, a full picture is with them as self-condemnatory a production.
From the contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one is
apt, after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with an
unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the feast.

Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-be
slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller of
meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, which
is very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's own
imagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it not forever flitting
will-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond exact definition? For
the soul of art lies in what art can suggest, and nothing is half so
suggestive as the half expressed, not even a double entente. To hint
a great deal by displaying a little is more vital to effect than the
cleverest representation of the whole. The art of partially revealing
is more telling, even, than the ars celare artem. Who has not suspected
through a veil a fairer face than veil ever hid? Who has not been
delightedly duped by the semi-disclosures of a dress? The principle
is just as true in any one branch of art as it is of the attempted
developments by one of the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thus
felt its force? Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration on
chancing upon an illustrated edition of some book whose story he had
lain to heart? Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does not
know, and yet which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that to
more than one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor is
gone when Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to an
admiring house. It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using her
name for operatic title were a special intervention of the Muse, that we
might the less connect song with story,--two sensations that, like two
lights, destroy one another by mutual interference.

Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as in
the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when expressed is but
half that necessary to express it. Some understanding must exist in
the observer for any work to be intellig