Homer is an excellent illustration of what a man cannot do entirely by himself. With his initial force and his keen vision he could make a very powerful report. Had he been educated, taught restraint and method, given a sense of style, schooled in decorative value, he might have risen to the great gods of art. But perhaps not. Even pedagogues, in their late years, begin to doubt the worth of training. It might have ruined Winslow Homer. Yet, nevertheless, it is the thing that his admirers always feel the lack of in his pictures. He has no comeliness of style, no charm of statement, no grace of presentation. To the last he is a barbarian for all that we may feel beneath his brush “the surge and thunder of the ‘Odyssey.’” Unfortunately, much of Homer’s barbarism of the brush lives after him while his splendid vision and stubborn character are in danger of being interred with his bones. He himself has become a tradition, a master to be imitated, for though he founded no school and had no pupils, a great many young painters in America have been influenced by his pictures. The majority of these young men have concluded that Homer’s strength lay in the rawness and savagery of his method; they have not gripped the fact that his compelling force was a matter of mind rather than of hand. An imitator can always be counted upon to clutch at a mannerism and neglect a mentality. So it is that many a young art student of to-day, with just enough imagination to conjure up an apple-blossom landscape is painting with the crude color and gritty brush of Homer, thinking thereby to get something “strong.” What a dreadful mistake! A surly surface of heaped-up paint _minus_ the drawing that is Homer! And the juvenile error of supposing that the knowledge of a lifetime can be picked up and handed out by a glib imitator in the few hours of a summer afternoon! The attempt presupposes art to be merely a conjurer’s trick--a supposition that history does not sustain. Homer cannot be counted fortunate in his followers. Accepting a surface appearance of strength as the all-in-all of art, they have abandoned grace of form with charm of color--flung the decorative to the winds. We are now asked to admire this or that because it is “real” or “just as I saw it,” or “absolutely true”--as though such apologies in themselves were sufficient reasons for fine art. But Homer long before he died withdrew to Prout’s Neck and abandoned his fellows of the brush. He no doubt thought them quite hopeless. Perhaps there was reason behind his thinking.