Yet he did much thinking along certain paths and had something very important to say to his age and generation about sound technique, good workmanship. In a literary or illustrative sense he recorded no more romance, history, passion, power, or pathos than Whistler. He told no story in paint, indulged in no dramatic climaxes, was guiltless of emotion, and perhaps incapable of poetry. He was a workman, a consummate craftsman in a goldsmith sense, and he did his thinking about his work, put his storm and stress and soul into his palette and brush. As a workman he was distinguished by a manner of his own which is sometimes referred to as his style--his individual style. His method, rather than his style, he passed on to his pupils, and his influence upon them was perhaps greater than upon the community at large. He taught more young people how to handle a brush than any painter of any time, not excepting Rubens. Several thousand pupils came under his influence, were stimulated by his enthusiasm, and encouraged by his words. He was an excellent teacher, and American art is perhaps more beholden to him for what he taught than for the things he painted. For the pupils now carry on the teaching, and perhaps from them may come a greater and a loftier art than Chase himself was able to produce. The force of good teaching is cumulative and eventually it develops into that body of belief and practice which I have called tradition. Chase, like Whistler, was not an inheritor of any American tradition, but he established one of his own and passed it on to his followers. He based his pupils in good technical workmanship and taught the fundamental value of craftsmanship. It was a teaching badly needed in his America; he gave it importance and place in the schools and became, perhaps without his knowing it, a master leader in the craft. Chase’s painting is the concrete embodiment of his teaching--the illustration of it. It has the obvious limitations of his method and belief. To pass it by because it has not the romance of a Ryder or the poetry of a Martin or the significance of a La Farge is to miss its meaning entirely. He is just as frankly dealing with the surface as Whistler, with the mere difference that Whistler asks us to regard him decoratively and Chase desires to be looked at technically, as one might consider a Stevens, a Vollon, a Fortuny, or a Boldini. We surely are not so narrow in outlook as to deny admiration and high rank to such masters of the brush as these. They are artists in the narrow sense that they deal with art alone and consider painting only from the æsthetic point of view, but who shall say they are not precisely and exactly right? Each turn of the screw, each new generation in art, pins us down more narrowly and positively to the material. Perhaps Whistler and Chase were wrong only in being ahead of their time.