cannot remain satisfied with such an adolescent attitude.
Mature interest leads one at least as much to the mind
of the artist as to his hand. An artistic personality
includes not only all that the artist did in his best
moments, but all that his mind conceived in the terms of
his art, in whatever shape it has been recorded, no
matter how inadequate nor how unsatisfactory.

It might indeed seem that long experience has brought
me back to the old days when everything that looked like
Leonardo or Raphael produced the appropriate sentiment
in the soul of the beholder. 'What then,' it may be
asked, 'has been the use of all this business about renam-
ing pictures, dividing originals from copies, and masters
from pupils, if now we are to be invited to get once more
our Raphael or Leonardo thrill from inferior works?
What has become of the touchstone of Quality, if we
admit that the hand of a great artist can falter, and if we
insist on tracing his genius through the works of his
assistants and followers, and value even the humble
achievements of copyists whose hands never vibrated
with the master's touch? We are once again in the old
uncharted regions where no compass pointing to quality
any longer guides us, and where the only clue is the
familiar one of the conception, the idea, the suggestion,
that led us into so many bogs. The naive sightseer and the
connoisseur join hands!'

True! But though they acclaim together 'the Master',
it is with a difference. The plain sightseer can undoubtedly
be deeply stirred by a work of art, but it is nearly always
the literary, the romantic, the associative ideas that move
him. The connoisseur who has learnt to distinguish
between the poetry suggested by the picture and its
specific qualities as painting, is affected in another way.

In my writings on Renaissance Painters I attempted to
distinguish between the Illustrative and the Decorative
elements in pictures, and it may be that I over-emphasized
the latter, for I have been amused and sometimes
distressed to find many subsequent writers dwelling
only on the decorative elements in art, which, vitalizing
as they are, do their noblest service only when they
convey great human ideals.

The instructed lover of art, who has learnt to dis-

-iv-