oft clothed an unwashed body.

Cruel plagues, smallpox, and all manner of disease and malformations inflicted a far greater number than nowadays, and the sad ignorance of doctors brewed horrid draughts amongst the skulls, skeletons, stuffed birds, and crocodiles of their fearsome-looking "surgeries."

In short, it was a "poetic" age; when all the world was full of mysteries and possibilities, and the sanest and most level-headed were outrageously fantastic.

There are people who will tell you that the world is very much the same to-day as it was yesterday, and that, after all, human nature is human nature in all ages all the world over. But, beyond the fact that we all are born and we all must die, there is little in common between you and me—between us of to-day and those of yesterday—and we resemble each other most nearly in things that do not matter.

Frankly, therefore, Albrecht Dürer, who was born on May 21, 1471, is a human being from another world, and unless you realise that too, I doubt you can understand him, much less admire him.

For his Art is not beautiful.

Germans have never been able to create anything beautiful in Art: their sense of beauty soars into Song.

But even whilst I am writing these words it occurs to me that they are no longer true, for the German of to-day is no longer the German of yesterday, "standing peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and to the raging, struggling multitude here and elsewhere solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast of cow-horn emit his 'Höret ihr Herren und lasst's euch sagen' ..." as Carlyle pictures him; he is most certainly not like the Lutheran German with a child's heart and a boy's rash courage.

Frankly I say you cannot admire Dürer if you be honestly ignorant or ignorantly honest.

We of to-day are too level-headed; our brains cannot encompass the world that crowded Dürer's dreams.

For the German's brain was always crowded; he had not that nice sense of space and emptiness that makes Italian Art so pleasant to look upon, and which the Japanese employ with astonishing subtlety. You remember Wagner's words in Goethe's "Faust"—

"Zwar weiss ich viel; doch möcht ich Alles wissen."

(I know a lot, yet wish that I knew All.)

It is not only his eagerness to show you all he knows, but also his ravenous desire to know all that is to be known. Hence we speak of German thoroughness, at once his boast and his modesty.

Here again I have to pull up. Generalisations are so easy, appear so justified, and are more often than not misleading.

Dürer was not a pure-blooded Teuton; his father came from Eytas in Hungary.¹

That German music owes a debt of gratitude to Hungary is acknowledged. Does Dürer owe his greatness to the strain of foreign blood?

Possibly; but it does not matter. He was a man, and a profound man, therefore akin to all the world, as Dante and Michelangelo, as Shakespeare and Millet. Born into German circumstances he appears in German habit—that is all.

His father Albrecht was a goldsmith, and Albrecht the son having shown himself worthy of a better education than his numerous brothers, was, after finishing school, apprenticed to and would have remained a goldsmith, had his artistic nature not drawn him to Art; at least so his biographer, i.e. the painter himself, tells us. It was not the artist alone who longed for freer play, for freer expression of his faculties. It was to a great extent, I feel sure, the thinker.

Dürer took himself tremendously seriously; were it not for some letters that he has left us, and some episodes in his graphic art, one might be led to imagine that Dürer knew not laughter, scarcely even a smile. He consequently thought it of importance to acquaint the world with all the details of his life and work, recording even the moods which prompted him to do this or that. In Dürer the desire to live was entirely absorbed in the desire to think. He was not a man of action, and the records of his life are filled by accounts of what he saw, what he thought, and what others thought of him; coupled with frequent complaints of jealousies and lack of appreciation. Dürer was deep but narrow, and in that again he reflects the religious spirit of Protestantism, not the wider culture of Humanism. His ego looms large in his consciousness, and it is the salvation of the soul rather than the expansion of the mind which concerns him; but withal he is like Luther—a Man.

His idea then of Art was, that it "should be employed," as he himself explained, "in the service of the Church to set forth the sufferings of Christ and such like subjects, and it should also be employed to preserve the features of men after their death." A narrow interpretation of a world-embracing realm.

The scope of this little volume will not admit of a detailed account of Dürer's life.

We may not linger on the years of his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, where he suffered much from his fellow-'prentices. We must not accompany him on his wanderjahre, these being the three years of peregrination which always followed the years of apprenticeship.

Neither may we record details, as of his marriage with Agnes Frey—"mein Agnes," upon his return home in 1494. "His Agnes" was apparently a good housewife and a shrewd business woman, to whom he afterwards largely entrusted the sale of his prints.

He had a great struggle for a living. And here an amusing analogy occurs to me. Painting does not pay, he complains at one time, and therefore he devotes himself to "black and white."

Was it ever thus? Would that some of our own struggling artists remembered Dürer, and even when they find themselves compelled to do something to keep the pot aboiling, at any rate do their best.

We have it on Dürer's own authority that he took up etching and wood-engraving because it paid better. And strange—into this bread-and-butter work he put his best.

It is not his painting that made his fame and name, though in that branch of Art he was admired by a Raphael and a Bellini.

Agnes Frey bore him no children; this fact, I think, is worthy of note. Even a cursory glance at Dürer's etchings and woodcuts will reveal the fact that he was fond of children—"kinderlieb," as the Germans say. I do not doubt that he would have given us even more joy and sunshine in his Art had he but called a child his own.

Instead, we have too