light and nothing else; never an expression of events of life. Here lies the limitation of his capacity. In my book, “Paradoxes,” I have tried to classify painters according to the rank of that segment of the central nerve-system, in which their talent is rooted. By this method I arrived at a distinction between painters who feel joy only in colours and their harmonies, and others who, besides delighting in colour, often even without this, have a developed sense of the proportion of things in space, therefore, of forms, reciprocal distances, movements so far as these latter can be indicated by means of the painter’s fixed process: those, in short, who know how to elicit from visible phenomena an invisible, emotional significance, and to represent them so that they express, in a natural way, psychical processes and feelings, without becoming falsified through the intentional introduction of arbitrary features foreign to them. Now, Sisley is an instructive instance of those painters who are painters only through their retina and lowest centres of perception, viz., their feeling for colour, and the vivid sensation of enjoyment it affords them. Sisley has the most delicate sense for the lightest gradations and depths of colour. If I may use an image from an adjacent intellectual domain, he does optically what an ear would do acoustically which was capable of feeling purely all the tones of a chromatic divided, perhaps, into sixty-fourths. This faculty gives him his rank as an artist, but it was also the torturing demon of his life; for he wanted to reproduce with equal clearness what he saw so distinctly. That is, however, impossible by the medium of oil-painting. Let it never be forgotten that the colours an artist uses are very different from the natural appearances which they wish to recall. All painting is a translation that falls short of the original text, and even the most refined palette only permits a vulgar groping after the subtle play of colour in the reality. It is sheer convention, to which our eyes are artificially trained, that we recognise in definite play of colours, human flesh, an evening sky, foliage, or mirroring water. In all cases we have, at most, approximations before us, and even a man’s countenance by Franz Hals reproduces the true coloration of the skin on a human face, as little as perhaps the well-known _scherzo_ in the second movement of the Pastoral reproduces the true note of the golden oriole. Sisley, overlooked, like the majority indeed of impressionists, and like many very juvenile stipplers and black and white artists, this technical main condition—if you like, this main defect—of all painting with media as at present known; and he obstinately insisted on overcoming a difficulty that is, as a matter of fact, insuperable. The whole labour of his life is a struggle with the resistance of matter, intensely pathetic, but, nevertheless, finally only irritating, because its utter hopelessness is admitted.