transparent honesty of purpose that do not often occur to this degree. The record is indeed so well made that it will always be legible, and what is to be read therein will have an ever increasing historical interest.
To ask to have besides all this works of art is to be too exacting. Indeed, it is asking almost an impossibility. No man who was mainly an artist could have, so to speak, "delivered the goods." No artist could have treated one after another of all these members of the family with almost equal success, with such certainty of keeping to standard. His sensibility would have led him, here into some more penetrating and curious inquiry, there it would have been rebuffed altogether. From an artist, questions of composition and design would demand more anxious research. He could not have been satisfied as Mr Sargent was with a mere general adequacy of presentment. Questions of quality would have held him up, made him repeat passages again and again and, perhaps in the search for some more intimate expression, made him lose all that freshness and élan which never deserts so competent a performer as Mr Sargent.
Mr Sargent has not the distinctively artistic vision—he has, one might say, no visual passion at all, scarcely any visual predilections—he has rather the undifferentiated eye of the ordinary man trained to its finest acuteness for observation, and supplied with the most perfectly obedient and skilful hand to do its bidding. But his values are never aesthetic values; they are the values of social and everyday life. Naturally, such a vision would never force a man to discover the means by which to record its experiences, and here comes in the connexion between applied and pure art. For, just as the man of applied science, having no particular passion for truth, applies the results, discovered by those who have, to some ulterior social end, so Mr Sargent has known how to use for his purposes the discoveries of pure art. And he was not only very skilful in seeing what could be of service, but very fortunate in what lay to his hand. For the dominant influence when he was a student in Paris was Manet. Now, Manet was very intensely an artist, an artist who had a passionate feeling about certain oppositions of tone and colour, and who felt these oppositions in such a way that he had to discover a very abrupt and frank way of stating them. He consequently invented a peculiarly straightforward and concise
