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He had a great struggle for a living. And here an amusing analogy occurs to me. Painting does not pay, he complains at one time, and therefore he devotes himself to "black and white."

Was it ever thus? Would that some of our own struggling artists remembered D?rer, and even when they find themselves compelled to do something to keep the pot aboiling, at any rate do their best.

We have it on D?rer's own authority that he took up etching and wood-engraving because it paid better. And strange--into this bread-and-butter work he put his best.

It is not his painting that made his fame and name, though in that branch of Art he was admired by a Raphael and a Bellini.

Agnes Frey bore him no children; this fact, I think, is worthy of note. Even a cursory glance at D?rer's etchings and woodcuts will reveal the fact that he was fond of children--"kinderlieb," as the Germans say. I do not doubt that he would have given us even more joy and sunshine in his Art had he but called a child his own.

Instead, we have too often the gloomy reflection of death throughout his work. The gambols and frolics of angelic cupids are too often obscured by the symbols of suffering, sin, and death.

Again, we must not allow a logical conclusion to be accepted as an absolute truth.

D?rer was certainly more familiar with death and suffering than we are.

Unless the grey lady and the dark angel visit our own homes, most of us--of my readers, at any rate--have to seek deliberately the faces of sorrow in the slums and the grimaces of death in the Coroner's Court. But in D?rer's days death lurked beyond the city walls; the sight of the slain or swinging victims of knightly valour, and peasant's revenge, blanched the cheeks of many maidens, and queer plagues and pestilences mowed the most upright to the ground. The Dance of Death was a favourite subject with the old painters, not because their disposition was morbid, but because the times were more out of joint than they are now.

All these points have to be realised before one can hope to understand D?rer even faintly. Again, when we examine more closely the apparently quaint and fantastic form his mode of visualising takes, we must make allowances for the habits and customs and costumes of the times--as indeed one has to, in the case of all old masters, and for which reason I humbly submit that the study of old masters properly belongs to the few, not the many. A great deal of erroneous opinions are held simply because it is difficult to disentangle the individual from the typical.

D?rer, whose wanderjahre had taken him to Strasburg and B?le and Venice, returned home again apparently uninfluenced.

Critics from Raphael's age down to the last few years have lamented this fact; have thought that "knowledge of classic antiquity" might have made a better artist of him.

Now, D?rer was not an artist in its wider sense; he was a craftsman certainly, but above all a thinker. D?rer uses his eyes for the purposes of thought; he could close them without disturbing the pageants of his vision. But whereas we have no hint that his dreams were of beauty, we have every indication that they were literal transcriptions of literary thoughts. When he came to put these materialisations into the form of pictures or prints, the craftsman side, the practical side of his nature, resolved them into scientific problems, with the remarkable result that these visions are hung on purely materialistic facts. From our modern point of view D?rer was decidedly lacking in artistic imagination, which even such men as Goya and Blake, or "si parva licet comparere magnis" John Martin and Gustave Dor?, and the delightful Arthur Rackham of our own times possess.

His importance was his craftsmanship, whilst the subject-matter of his pictures--the portraits excepted--and particularly of his prints, are merely of historic interest--"von kulturhistorischer Bedeutung," the German would say.

In 1506 and 1507 he visited Venice, as already stated, gracefully received by the nobles and Giovanni Bellini, but disliked by the other painters.

He returned home apparently uninfluenced by the great Venetians, Titian, remember, amongst them. Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio were then the only painters at Venice who saw the realistic side of Nature; but they were prosaic, whilst our D?rer imbued a wooden bench or a tree trunk with a personal and human interest. Those of my readers who can afford the time to linger on this aspect of D?rer's activity should compare Carpaccio's rendering of St. Jerome in his study with D?rer's engraving of the same subject.

D?rer the craftsman referred in everything he painted or engraved to Nature. But of course it was Nature as he and his times saw it; neither Hals, Rembrandt, neither Ribera, Velazquez, neither Chardin nor Constable, neither Monet nor Whistler had as yet begun to ascend the rungs of progress towards truthful--that is, "optical sight."

D?rer's reference to Nature means an intricate study of theoretical considerations, coupled with the desire to record everything he knew about the things he wished to reproduce.

Again an obvious truth may here mislead us. The analytical juxtaposition of facts was a characteristic of the age. D?rer's Art was a step forward; he--like Raphael, like Titian--dovetailed, where earlier men scarcely joined. D?rer has as yet not the power that even the next generation began to acquire--he never suggests anything; he works everything out, down to the minutest details. There are no slight sketches of his but such as suggest great travail of sight, encumbranced by an over-thoughtful mind.

To understand D?rer you require time; each print of the "Passions," "The Life of Mary," the "Apokalypse," should be read like a page printed in smallest type, with thought and some eye-strain. That of course goes very much against the grain of our own age; we demand large type and short stories.

The study of his work entails considerable self-sacrifice. Your own likes and dislikes you have to suppress, and try to see with eyes that belong to an age long since gone. Do not despise the less self-sacrificing, who refuse the study of old Art; and distrust profoundly those others who laud it beyond measure. The green tree is the tree to water; the dead tree--be its black branches and sere leaves never so picturesque--is beyond the need of your attentions.

The Scylla and Charybdis of aesthetic reformers is praise of the old, and poor appraising of the new.

Now the old Italians thought D?rer a most admirable artist, blamed what they called the defects of his Art on the ungainliness of his models, and felt convinced that he might have easily been the first among the Italians had he lived there, instead of the first among the "Flemings." They were of course wrong, for it is the individual reflex-action of D?rer's brain which caused his Art to be what it is; in Italy it would still have been an individual reflex-action, and D?rer had been in Venice without the desired effect. D?rer might, however, himself seem to confirm the Italians' opinion: he strayed into the barren fields of theoretical speculations--barren because some of his best work was done before he had elaborated his system, barren because speculation saps the strength of natural perception. D?rer sought a "Canon of Beauty," and the history of Art has proved over and over again that beauty canonised is damned.

One more remark: his contemporaries and critics praised the extraordinary technical skill with which he could draw straight lines without the aid of a ruler, or the astounding legerdemain with which he reproduced every single hair in a curl--the "Paganini" worship which runs through all the ages; which in itself is fruitless; touches the fiddle-strings at best or cerebral cords, not heart-strings.

Out of all the foregoing, out of all the mortal and mouldering coverings we have now to shell the real, the immortal D?rer--the D?rer whose mind was longing for truth, whose soul was longing for harmony, and who out of his longings fashioned his Art, as all great men have done and will do until the last.

On the title-page of the "Small Passion" is a woodcut--the "Man of Sorrows."

There, reader, you have, in my opinion, the greatness of D?rer; he never surpassed it. It is the consciousness of man's impotence; it is the saddest sight mortal eyes can behold--that of a man who has lost faith in himself.

If D?rer were here now I am sure he would lay his hand upon my shoulder, and, his deep true eyes searching mine, his soft and human lips would say:--

You are right, my friend; this is my best, for it is the spirit of my age that spoke in me then.

In front of the Pantheon at Paris is a statue called The Thinker. A seated man, unconscious of his bodily strength, for all his consciousness is in the iron grip of thought. He looks not up, not down--he looks before him; and methinks, reader, I can hear an unborn voice proclaim:

This too was once the Spirit of an Age. Two milestones on the path of human progress; an idle fancy if you will--no more.

Of the Man of Sorrows then we spoke: It is a small thing, but done exceeding well, for in the simplicity of form it embraces a world of meaning; and whilst you cannot spare one iota from the words of the Passion, on account of this picture, yet all the words of Christ's suffering seem alive in this plain print. Could there be a better frontispiece?

In judging, not enjoying, a work of art, one should first make sure that one understands the methods of the artist; one should next endeavour to discover his evident purpose or aim, or "motif," and forming one's judgment, ask: Has the artist succeeded in welding aim and result into one organic whole?

If we compare another woodcut, viz. the one from "Die heimliche Offenbarung Johannis," illustrating Revelations i. 12-17, we will have to draw a different conclusion. Let us listen to the passage D?rer set himself to illustrate:

In spite of appearances to the contrary, D?rer was, as I have said, unimaginative. He needed the written word or another's idea as a guide; he never dreamt of an Art that could be beautiful without a "mission"--he never "created." Try to realise for a moment that throughout his work--in accordance with the conception of his age--he mixes purely modern dress with biblical and classical representation, as if our Leightons, Tademas, Poynters, were to introduce crinolines, bustles, or "empire" gowns amongst Venuses and Apollos. In the pathetic "Deposition from the Cross" the Magdalen is just a "modern" Nuremberg damsel, and the Virgin's headwrap is slung as the northern housewife wore it, and not like an Oriental woman's; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are clad as Nuremberg burghers, and only in the figure of John does he make concession to the traditional "classic" garment. Such an anachronistic medley could only appear logical so long as the religious spirit and the convictions of the majority were at one. I dare scarcely hint at, much less describe, the feelings that would be stirred in you if a modern painter represented the Crucifixion with Nicodemus and the man from Arimathea in frock-coats, Mary and the Magdalen in "walking costume," and a company of Horse-guards in attendance. The abyss of over four centuries divides us from D?rer; my suggestion sounds blasphemous almost, yet it is a thought based on fact and worthy of most careful note.

I cannot think of any better way of explaining the effect of D?rer's Art as an illustrator upon his time, than to beg you to imagine the delight a short-sighted man experiences when he is given his first pair of spectacles. Everything remains where it is; he has not lost his sense of orientation, but on a sudden he sees everything more clearly, more defined, more in detail: and where he previously had only recognised vague effects he begins to see their causes. Such was the effect of D?rer's Art: features, arms, hands, bodies, legs, feet, draperies, accessories, tree-trunks and foliage, vistas, radiance and light, not suggested but present, truly realised. When I say D?rer was not imaginative I mean to convey that imagination was characteristic of the age, not of him alone, but the materialisation, the realisation of fancy, that is his strength.

All these considerations can find, unfortunately, no room for discussion in these pages, for it were tedious to refer the reader to examples which are not illustrated.

We must perforce accept the limitations of our programme, and devote our attention to his paintings--far the least significant part of his activity.

D?rer was the great master of line--he thinks in line. This line is firstly the outline or contour in its everyday meaning; secondly, it is the massed army of lines that go to make shadow; thirdly, it is line in its psychical aspect, as denoting direction, aim, tendency, such as we have it in the print of the "Melancholia." No one before him had ever performed such wonderful feats with "line," not even Mantegna with his vigorous but repellent parallels.

This line was the greatest obstacle to his becoming a successful painter. For his line was not the great sweep, not the graceful flow, not the spontaneous dash, not the slight touch, but the heavy, determined, reasoned move, as of a master-hand in a game of chess.

To him, consequently, the world and his Art were problems, not joys.

Consider one of his early works--the portrait of his father, the honest, God-fearing, struggling goldsmith. The colour of this work is monotonous, a sort of gold-russet. It might almost be a monochrome, for the interest is centred in the wrinkles and lines of care and old age with which Father Time had furrowed the skin of the old man, and which D?rer has imitated with the determination of a ploughshare cleaving the glebe.

When we come to his subject pictures, we will have to notice at once that they have been constructed, not felt. It has been remarked that D?rer did for northern Art, or at least attempted, what Leonardo did for Italian Art, viz., converted empirical Art into a theoretical science. Whether such conversion was not in reality a perversion, is a question that cannot be discussed here. We have, at any rate, in D?rer a curious example of an artist referring to Nature in order to discard it; the idealist become realist in order to further his idealism. Most of his pictures contain statements of pictorial facts which are in themselves most true, but taken in conjunction with the whole picture quite untrue. D?rer lacked the courage to trust his sense of sight, his optic organ: beauty with him is a thing which must be thought out, not seen. D?rer had come into direct contact with Italian Art, had felt himself a gentleman in Venice, and only a "parasite" in Nuremberg. From Italy he imported a conception of beauty which really was quite foreign to him. Italy sowed dissension in his mind, for he was ever after bent on finding a formula of beauty, which he could have dispensed with had he remained the simple painter as we know him in his early self-portrait of 1493. There can be no doubt that D?rer was principally looking towards Italy for approval, as indeed he had little reason to cherish the opinions of the painters in his own country, who were so greatly his inferiors both in mind as in their Art.

Much has been made of the fact that painting was a "free" Art, not a "Guild" in Nuremberg. Now carpentering was also a "free" Art at Nuremberg, and painting was not "free" in Italy, so the glory of freedom is somewhat discounted; but whatever Art was, D?rer, at any rate, was not an artist in Raphael's, Bellini's, or Titian's sense. He was pre-eminently a thinker, a moralist, a scientist, a searcher after absolute truth, seeking expression in Art. Once this is realised his pictures make wonderfully good reading.

The "Deposition," for example, is full of interest. The dead Christ, whose still open lips have not long since uttered "Into Thy hands, O Lord," is being gently laid on the ground, His poor pierced feet rigid, the muscles of His legs stiff as in a cramp. The Magdalen holds the right hand of the beloved body, and the stricken mother of Christ is represented in a manner almost worthy of the classic Niobe. Wonderfully expressive, too, are all the hands in this picture. D?rer found never-ending interest in the expressiveness of the hand. But if we were to seek in his colour any beauty other than intensity, we should be disappointed, as we should for the matter of that in any picture painted before the advent of Titian.

Again that monster Ignorance stirs. For as I speak of colour, as I dogmatise on Titian, I am aware that colour may mean so many different things, and any one who wished to contradict me would be justified in doing so, not because I am wrong and he is right, but because of my difficulty in explaining colour, and his natural wish to aim at my vulnerable spot. Because I am well-nigh daily breaking bread with painters who unconsciously reveal the workings of their mind to me, I know that all the glibly used technical terms of their Art are as fixed as the colour of a chameleon. Different temperaments take on different hues. There is colour in Van Eyck and Crivelli, in Bellini and Botticelli, but deliberate colour harmonies, though arbitrary in choice, belong to Titian.

D?rer is no colourist, because, as we have already said, painting was the problem, not the joy of expression--in that he is Mantegna's equal, and Beato Angelico's inferior.

Thus looking on the "Madonna mit dem Zeisig" at Berlin, we may realise its beauty with difficulty. For whatever it may have been to his contemporaries, to us it means little, by the side of the splendid Madonnas from Italy, or even compared with his own engraved work.

This "Madonna with the Siskin" is a typical D?rer. In midst of the attempted Italian repose and "beauty" of the principal figures, we have the vacillating, oscillating profusion of Gothic detail. The fair hair of the Madonna drawn tightly round the head reappears in a gothic mass of crimped curls spread over her right shoulder. On her left hangs a piece of ribbon knotted and twisted. The cushion on which the infant Saviour sits is slashed, laced, and tassled. The Infant holds a prosaic "schnuller" or baby-soother in His right hand, whilst the siskin is perched on the top of His raised forearm. Of the wreath-bearing angels, one displays an almost bald head, and the background is full of unrest. Even the little label bearing the artist's name, by which old masters were wont to mark their pictures, and which in Bellini's case, for instance, appears plain and flatly fixed, bends up, like the little films of gelatine, which by their movements are thought to betray the holder's temperament.

One of the tests of great Art is its appearance of inevitableness: in that the artist vies with the creator:

"The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line."

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