The casual visitor finds little emotional excitement, and no literary interest in these honest interpretations of English scenery. Constable was never dramatic ("The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" may be counted an exception) or idealistic like Turner. From a scenic point of view, "The Hay Wain" is dull compared with "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus," and knowledge of art history is not so widely diffused as to give to "The Hay Wain" the interest it should command as a pioneer picture in modern landscape. Constable does not thrill. Roast beef does not thrill, but it is wholesome and life-communicating. Constable was a prosaic man of genius. Once he said that "painting is another word for feeling," but he also made that most characteristic retort to Blake, who, when looking through one of Constable's sketch-books, exclaimed on seeing a drawing of fir-trees on Hampstead Heath--"Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration." To which Constable quietly replied--"I meant it for drawing." Constable never desired to thrill; his ambition was merely to be a natural painter, and he would probably not have been in the least distressed at the episode related by Mr Sturge Henderson in his biography. An elegant and attractive American woman after examining "The Glebe Farm" in the National Gallery, remarked to her son, a typical undergraduate: "Does this thrill you?" "Not the least in the world," replied the son, and they passed on. No doubt these cultured moderns desired in a painting the "beauty touched with strangeness," that Botticelli and Piero della Francesca offer: there is no place in such æsthetic lives for the familiarity touched with honesty of John Constable. To-day his innovations--his attempts to represent the vibration of light, his spots and splashes of colour to counterfeit the sun glitter, his touches and scrapings laid on with the palette knife to obtain force and brightness--have become a commonplace. Constable, being a pioneer, was accustomed to misunderstanding and also to badinage. His breezy and showery effects, blowing wind, rustling grasses, waving trees, and wet rain, were occasionally the subjects of banter from his fellow Academicians and others. Fuseli, Professor of Painting, a bad artist, but a good joker, was once seen to open his umbrella as he entered the Exhibition. "What are you doing with your umbrella up?" asked a friend. "Oh," replied Fuseli, "I am going to look at Mr Constable's pictures!" That was really a great compliment, and I may cap the story by quoting the brief, bald, criticism of Sir William Beechy on Constable's "Salisbury from the Meadows." "Why, d--n it, Constable, what a d----d fine picture you are making; but you look d----d ill, and you have got a d----d bad cold."