Because both German work and English work are theoretical compared with French, I do not wish to imply that technically they are on a par. Aside from the difference of imaginative power in the two nations, which renders German conceptions more valuable in every way than contemporary English ideas, there is a great difference in the technical training of the two groups of artists. German work often shows technical qualities as notable as those we find in France, though of another kind. The noble physical endowment of an artist--that by reason of which, and by reason of which alone, he _is_ an artist--is twofold: power of eye and power of hand. By power of the eye I mean simple vision exalted into a special gift, a special appreciation of line, an ultra delicate and profound perception of color, and an exact, unconscious memory. This last is not imagination nor imaginative memory, but an automatic power, if I may so say, of the retina--as unconscious as is the pianist's memory of his notes, and as unerring. It is not the power to fix in the mind by conscious effort the objects before one, and to recall them deliberately, inch by inch, at any time, but the power, when the brush pauses trembling for the signal, to put down unerringly facts learned God knows where, or imagined God knows how. Automatic, I repeat, this power must be. The tongue might not be able to tell, nor the mind deliberately to recall in cold blood, what was the depth of blue on a distant hill or the vagueness of its outlines, or what the anatomical structure of a mistress's fingers. But the brush knows, as nothing but the brush of an artist can; and when it comes to painting them, aerial perspective and anatomical detail _must_ come right. This is the first and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in--Shall I use the fashionable artistic slang and say _preciousness_? It is the gift of a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the other, but it can, far more than the other, be improved and developed by practice and patience. Both gifts in equal perfection constitute a technical master. It is hardly necessary to say that no man--certainly no nation--can to-day claim the highest measure of both. The French are most highly gifted with the first, the Germans with the second. In the latter, patience and science, working upon a natural aptitude, have developed great strength and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence--splendor without softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is attempted in color--as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of