To understand Dürer you require time; each print of the "Passions," "The Life of Mary," the "Apokalypse," should be read like a page printed in smallest type, with thought and some eye-strain. That of course goes very much against the grain of our own age; we demand large type and short stories. The study of his work entails considerable self-sacrifice. Your own likes and dislikes you have to suppress, and try to see with eyes that belong to an age long since gone. Do not despise the less self-sacrificing, who refuse the study of old Art; and distrust profoundly those others who laud it beyond measure. The green tree is the tree to water; the dead tree--be its black branches and sere leaves never so picturesque--is beyond the need of your attentions. The Scylla and Charybdis of æsthetic reformers is praise of the old, and poor appraising of the new. [Illustration: PLATE IV.--PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER'S FATHER (From the Oil-painting in the National Gallery. Painted in 1497) An interesting picture, which has unfortunately suffered by retouching. It is the only portrait by Dürer the nation possesses. Other works of his may be seen at South Kensington and at Hampton Court.] Now the old Italians thought Dürer a most admirable artist, blamed what they called the defects of his Art on the ungainliness of his models, and felt convinced that he might have easily been the first among the Italians had he lived there, instead of the first among the "Flemings." They were of course wrong, for it is the individual reflex-action of Dürer's brain which caused his Art to be what it is; in Italy it would still have been an individual reflex-action, and Dürer had been in Venice without the desired effect. Dürer might, however, himself seem to confirm the Italians' opinion: he strayed into the barren fields of theoretical speculations--barren because some of his best work was done before he had elaborated his system, barren because speculation saps the strength of natural perception. Dürer sought a "Canon of Beauty," and the history of Art has proved over and over again that beauty canonised is damned. One more remark: his contemporaries and critics praised the extraordinary technical skill with which he could draw straight lines without the aid of a ruler, or the astounding legerdemain with which he reproduced every single hair in a curl--the "Paganini" worship which runs through all the ages; which in itself is fruitless; touches the fiddle-strings at best or cerebral cords, not heart-strings. Out of all the foregoing, out of all the mortal and mouldering coverings we have now to shell the real, the immortal Dürer--the Dürer whose mind was longing for truth, whose soul was longing for harmony, and who out of his longings fashioned his Art, as all great men have done and will do until the last. On the title-page of the "Small Passion" is a woodcut--the "Man of Sorrows."