contemporary paintings, Knille's _Tannhaeuser and Venus_ in the Berlin Gallery--the success is by no means on a par with the great excellence of drawing and composition. In France the eye for color is present--I will not say as in Venice, but to a greater degree than in the two other nations. If we leave now professional painters and professional critics and turn to the untrained public, we shall find, of course, all our modern faults more evident. The English public is pre-eminently untechnical in its judgments, pre-eminently literary or moral. But the French and the German public approximate more to the English--as is natural--than do their respective artists. I use the word _literary_ as it has often been used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the time--and in England much of the professional criticism also--to denote a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story--_l'anecdote_, as a French critic calls it--over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. This feeling, which in France turns toward sensationalism, in England toward sentimentality, is something other than the interest which attaches to historical painting as the record of facts--in itself not the highest interest one can find in a work of art. If we think back for a moment, we shall see how different from either of these moods was the mood in which the great Italians painted. Some "subject" of course a painting must have that is not a portrait, but these men chose instinctively--hardly, it is to be supposed, theoretically--such subjects as were most familiar to their public, and therefore least likely to engage attention primarily, and to the exclusion of the absolute pictorial value of the painting as such. We never find Titian telling anecdotes. His portraits are quiescence itself--portraits of men and women standing in the fulness of beauty and strength to be painted by Titian. We do not find likenesses snatched in some occurrence of daily life or in some dramatic action of historical or biographical importance. Even Raphael's great frescoes are symbolical more truly than historical, expressing the significance of a whole series of events rather than literally rendering one single event. The first remark of many who, accustomed to the literary interest of modern pictures, are for the first time making acquaintance with the old masters, is, that the galleries are so unexcitingly monotonous: the subjects are not interesting. Portraits, scenes from sacred history or Greek mythology,--that is all among the Italians. Desiring nothing but beauty of line and color, and expressiveness provided it was beautiful, they sought a subject merely as the _raison d'etre_ of beauty. Raphael could paint the Madonna and Child a score of times, and Veronese his _Marriages of Cana_, and all of them Magdalenes and St.