whirling impression, which superficially reminded one of the vibration of hot air on a sunny plain at midsummer noon. Only superficially. Pissarro soon discovered that stippling really did not bring more light into his pictures, and he gave it up. He resigned the Seurat method to rivals who rush after eccentricity because they hope to astonish by it, and to whom a style of painting was particularly suitable, which blurred the line with colour and saved them that tedious drawing that always gave them the greatest affliction. He himself, however, returned again to the honest style of wielding the brush, which he had learnt of his great masters. The stippling episode of his life, which he got over, throws light, however, on the painful, fundamental mistake of Pissarro and his companions. They wanted to paint light, and by that wanted something impossible, for light is not to be represented by colours which do not themselves emit light, and are neither phosphorescent nor fluorescent. All that is attainable by colour is awakening the reminiscence of light, and, by means of the memory-picture illuminating the brain, to cheat our consciousness with the idea of a directly received impression. The very great masters of optical landscape painting soon acknowledge, or feel, that the brush can indeed conjure forth the illusion of illumination, but is unable to paint light, and they turn from a hopeless Sisyphus-task to create pictures of mist and dusk, from which sunlight—a thing inimitable—is absolutely banished. The most instructive example of this is James Whistler; but he who does not possess the instinctive certainty of genius will not be conscious of the limitations of human capacity, and ever rolls the round stone unweariedly up the mountain. Pissarro would have saved himself many hours of tragic quest, struggle, and sense of powerlessness, had he known or recognised the primary fact which Friedrich Hebbel seized in his theological but lucid epigram: “He who the sun has created will ever remain quite another Than the industrious wight who for us prospects shall paint.” WHISTLER’S PSYCHOLOGY “Do you think, prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest genius among painters if he had been unlucky enough to be born without hands?” Lessing makes the painter Conti say to Prince Gonzaga. A century and a half ago that seemed paradoxical, and was, probably on that account, one of the most quoted maxims of Lessing’s. It has, meanwhile, experienced the fate of many paradoxes, viz., become a commonplace. Nowadays, every dabbler in psychology knows that not arm and hand—_i.e._, execution—make the painter, but his optical brain centres, _i.e._, his sensitiveness to impressions of sight, his specific reactions on colour and form. One is a born painter—a painter from organic necessity and natural bent preceding all education—only by special development or susceptibility of this centre.