first and foremost. Some artists have embraced reality only as it justified their imagination. If we look on Sargent's art for anything inward except that which looks through the eyes and determines the smile of his sitter, we shall find our sympathies break down. Unnecessary perhaps to say this, yet it were as well to make quite clear the light in which we should regard the work of an artist who has wholly succeeded in self-expression, the only known form of success in art.

In analysing some men's work, we wish above all to know them, to know the mind that thus environs itself. With others it is their art which tempts us to further and further knowledge of its truths while, as with Shakespeare, the artist behind it becomes impersonal. Thus it is with Sargent's art. It is true that if we wish to know an artist we can never under any circumstances become more intimate with him than in his art, whether we find him in it far away in remote valleys or at the centre of fashionable life. And this though the dreamer may be a man of fashion and the painter of society live a life retired.

Of Sargent's water-colours, much might be said. To some extent they explain his oils, yet he seems to allow himself in them a greater freedom, just as the medium itself is freer than that of oils—more accidental, and the masters of this art control its propensity for accidental effect as its very spirit, guiding it with skill to results which baffle and perplex by the ingenuity with which they give illusion. First, as last, a painter has to accept the fact that he conveys nothing except by illusion; that he can never bring his easel so close to the subject, or his materials to such minuteness of touch, that his art becomes pure imitation; nor can he secure the adjustment of proportion between a large subject and a small panel which would give in every case such imitation. The supreme artist accepts the standpoint first instead of last, and the greater his art becomes, the greater his power in its mysterious control of effect.

VIII

There are some painters whose work we may personally wholly dislike—dislike their outlook—even our favourite subjects becoming intolerable to us in their art. It is something in their nature antipathetic to our own. Of course, mediocre work does not assume such proportions in our mind. Then there are painters who, through some affinity of temperament with our own, make everything their art touches pleasant to us. And then there are the impersonal artists, Velazquez, Millais, and Sargent, taking apparently quite an impersonal view of life. Sargent's world is everybody's world, and if we are affected one way or another by it, it is as life affects us.

One has heard a painter say, "I can paint those things because I love them." Judged by his treatment of so many things, of nearly everything, how much must Sargent love life. One man can paint flowers and another marble—Sargent paints everything; and, to paraphrase, almost it might be said that what he doesn't paint isn't worth painting. But all this is nothing if he never penetrates, as Meissonier and others never penetrated, below the surface; if he gave no symbols in his art of things invisible.

We like some of the subjects he has painted, others we dislike so much that we wonder he has painted them; just as in life there are people and surroundings to which we are attracted, and others from whom we keep away.

To the realist by temperament the effect of the details of any scene accepted direct from nature provide exciting inspiration, and he least of all is likely to turn to decorative composition, which, with its resemblance to a form imposed in verse, only aids in the interpretation of the subject in proportion as it is imaginatively inspired. A painter pre-occupied with the opportunities which any incident may offer for the interpretation of subtleties, will often accept any scene from nature and almost any point of view as composition. For the old formulas of composition—of the time when composition was regarded as something to be taught—went with a decorative conception of things, was in itself a form of decoration. And whilst it has been said that all art is decorative, it will perhaps be found that the naturalistic painter is too much excited with incident to scheme much for a rhythmic presentation of it in the frame. Such a canvas as Sargent's "Salmon Fishing in Norway," lately exhibited in the McCulloch collection, a portrait painted in the open, of a youth resting on the bank of a river with caught salmon and tackle beside him, the centre of a skilfully painted piece of landscape, is a case in point. The difficulties which subjects have presented have often seemed Sargent's inspiration in landscape: rocks presenting surfaces to the light with a thousand variations; the wet basins of bronze fountains receiving coloured reflections and the diamond lights in the fountain splashes; grey architecture with its soft shadows, architecture white in the sun with its cool blue shadows, like fragments of night in the doorways. It is this mysterious sensation of light and shadow alternating everywhere, changing the colour of the day itself as the day advances, which Sargent meets. He is one of the few painters who have faced the noon. He has this great command of art's slender resources, and he is matter-of-fact enough to be happy at this uncompromising time of day, unbelieved in by the workers, so inconsiderate to the lazy with its heat. The noon has not many with its praises, and "all great art is praise." Painters have got up at dawn to communicate to us its everyday recurring freshness, as of an eternal spring, and has not evening always been the painter's hour? Sargent has faced the noon, which demands so much sensitiveness that the over-sensitive shrink. His brush has given it in water-colours the finest interpretation it has yet received.

IX

To go back to the matter of composition again. In his portrait groups, where the mere fact that the sitters have to be grouped implies that he is not dealing from the start with an impression direct, we find he is a master of the finest composition, as in his group of Mrs. Carl Meyer and children. And yet to one who will take not one touch with his brush from what is not before him, such a view of his subject must be incalculable in its difficulties.

The painter has never made a passage of painting the excuse for incongruity. The arrangements in his pictures are always probable. It is legitimate in many cases that they should only be imaginatively probable. Any arrangement is probable in a studio, and affording themselves too much licence in this respect some painters wonder why the public are inclined to discredit most of what they do. The logical quality, the sanity of Sargent's art is yet another