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MAN of the business world, knowing nothing of the peculiar manifestations of the artistic temperament, would be very apt to wonder over the mental make-up of a George Inness. An artist's way of looking at things is never quite sensible to the man in the street. It is too temperamental, too impulsive; and Inness was super-temperamental even for an artist. When he expressed himself in paint, he was very sane; but when he argued and talked, his auditors thought him erratic. And not without some show of reason. He was easily stirred by controversy, and in the heat of discussion he often discoursed like a mad rhapsodist. His thin hands and cheeks, his black hair and piercing eyes, his dramatic action as he walked and talked, seemed to complete the picture of the perfervid

visionary. He was always somewhat hectic. As a boy he was delicate and suffered from epilepsy. His physician had nothing to recommend but fresh air. As a man one of his hearers at table one day, after listening to his exposition of socialism or some allied theme, said: "Mr. Inness, what you need is fresh air." Inness himself used to tell this story with a little smile as though conscious of having appeared extravagant. As for "fresh air," he knew more about it than all his business acquaintances put together; but in the sense of its clearing the vision so that he could see things in a matter-of-fact light it was wholly unavailing. He was born with the nervous organization of the enthusiast. It is not the best temperament imaginable for a practical business man.

And yet Inness certainly thought that

his views about life, faith, government, and ethics were sound and applicable to all humanity. Art was only a part of the universal plan. In his theory of the unities everything in the scheme entire dropped into its appointed place. He could show this, to his own satisfaction at least, by the symbolism of numbers, just as he could prove immortality by the argument for continuity. All his life he was devoted to mystical speculations. He had his faith in divination, astrology, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism; and he was greatly stirred by all social questions. During the Rebellion he volunteered to fight for the freedom of the slave, but was rejected on physical examination; and later he became interested in labor problems, believed in Henry George and the single tax, and had views about a socialistic republic. He never changed. When nearly seventy When nearly seventy years of age, he was still discoursing on Swedenborg, on love, on truth, on the unities, with unabated enthusiasm. expect such a man to be "practical " would be little less than an absurdity; and to expect a practical man to understand him would be almost as absurd.

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But the fever of intensity that burned in Inness and his visionary way of looking at things were the very qualities that made him great as an artist. There is something in the abnormal view-one hardly knows what-that makes for art. Certainly the "practical" work of the camera gives only a statement of fact, where the less accurate drawing of a Millet or a Corot gives us something that we call artistic. The lens of the camera records mechanically and coldly, which may account for the prosaic quality of photography; but the retina of the artist's eye records an impression enhanced by the imagination, which may account for the poetry of art. Whichever way it may be put, it is the human element that makes the art. The painter does not record the facts like a machine; he gives his impression of the facts. Inness, with his exalted way of seeing, was full of impressions and was always insisting upon their vital importance. "The true purpose of the painter," he says, "is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion. Its real greatness consists in

the quality and the force of this emotion." And he practiced this preaching. Such nervous manifestations as enthusiasm, emotion, and imagination, working together and producing an impression, were the means wherewith he constructed pictures in his mind. They made up his mental equipment, and without them we should have heard little of George Inness the painter.

It was no mean or stinted equipment. In fact, Inness had too many impressions, had too much imagination. His diversity of view often opposed singleness of aim. While he was trying to record one impression upon the canvas, half a dozen others would rush in. That is one reason why he was never satisfied with his work, why he was always altering and amending, why he painted pictures one on top of another until (it is recorded) one canvas contained twenty different landscapes. The late William H. Fuller used to tell a story of his buying a landscape in Inness's studio one afternoon, and the next day, when he went to fetch it, he found an entirely different picture on the canvas. To his protests Inness replied: "It is a good deal better picture than the other."

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Yes; but it is not a question of losing money; I have lost my picture; it is buried under that new one."

Even when he was not bothered by many impressions, Inness had difficulty in contenting himself with his work. It was never quite right. There was a certain fine sentiment or feeling that he had about nature and that he wished to express in his picture; but he found that when the sentiment was strong the picture looked weak in the drawing, had no solidity or substance; and when the solidity was put in with exact textures and precise lines, then the sentiment fared badly. Inness knew where the trouble lay. "Details in the picture must be elaborated only enough fully to reproduce the impression. When more is done, the impression is weakened and lost, and we see simply an array of external things which may be very cleverly painted and may look very real, but which do not make an artistic painting. The effort and the difficulty of an artist is to combine the two, namely,

the canvas looked too weak, he tried to strengthen it here and there by bringing out lines and tones a little sharper, and with the result of making it look hard and cold. After several passings back and forth from strength to weakness, from sentiment to fact, the canvas began to show a kneaded and thumbed appearance. Its freshness was gone and its surface tortured. Inness was hardly ever free from this balancing of motives. It is a plague that bothers all painters, and no doubt many of them would agree with Inness in saying: "If a painter could unite Meissonier's careful reproduction of details with Corot's inspirational power, he would be the very god of art."

But Inness was more allied to Corot than to Meissonier. He never was the "perfect master of the brush" that we have heard him called, though he was an acceptable and often a very satisfactory technician. In his early days there were no art instructors in this country, and he was virtually self-taught. He had some instruction in engraving, and a few lessons from Gignoux in New York, but they amounted to little. In 1851 he went to Italy and spent several years, and there he first saw real pictures. He improved greatly by foreign study; and later on, when he came to know the work of the Fontainebleau-Barbizon men, he found himself in complete sympathy with it. Rousseau improved his technique, and Corot taught him the law of sacrifice; but he never became what one might call a perfect technician. He was frequently a little lame in drawing, and his pictures were often perplexing in their planes and lights. Nor was he always satisfactory in his textures and surfaces.

Color was

undoubtedly his strongest feature. He saw his landscapes as related masses of color rather than in linear extensions; and as he received the impression so he tried to place it upon canvas, holding the color patches together with air and illuminating the whole mass by light and shadow.

It was with color, light, and air that Inness scored his greatest successes. Almost all of his pictures will be found to hinge upon these primary features. He was very fond of moisture-laden air, rain effects, clouds clearing after rain, rainbows, mists, vapors, fogs, smokes, hazesall phases of the atmosphere. In the same

way he fancied dawns, dusks, twilights, moonlights, sunbursts, flying shadows, clouded lights-all phases of illumination. And again he loved sunset colors, cloud colors, sky colors, autumn tints, winter blues, spring grays, summer greens-all phases of color. And these not for themselves alone, but for the impression or effect that they produced. Did he paint a moonlight, it was with a great spread of silvery radiance, with a hushed effect, a still air, and the mystery of things half seen; did he paint an early spring morning, it was with vapor rising from the ground, dampness in the air, voyaging clouds and a warming blue in the sky; was it an Indian summer afternoon, there was a drowsy hum of Nature lost in dreamland, and with the indefinable regret of things passing away. His "Rainy Day, Montclair" has the bend and droop of foliage heavy with rain, the sense of saturation in earth and air, the suggestion of the very smell of rain; his "Delaware WaterGap" shows the drive of a storm down the valley, with the sweep of the wind felt in the clouds, the trees, and the water; his "Niagara" is not topographical in any sense, but rather an impression of the clouds of mist and vapor boiling up from the great caldron, and struck into colorsplendor by the sunlight.

Every feature of landscape had its peculiar sentiment for Inness. He said so often enough and with no uncertain voice. Here is one of his utterances about it:

"Rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky, clouds-all things that we see can convey that sentiment if we are in the love of God and the desire of truth. Some persons' suppose that landscape has no power of conveying human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that. which is savage and untamed. It is more significant."

That last passage about the "civilized landscape" is well worth noting, because this was exactly the landscape that Inness painted. His subjects are related to human life, and possibly our interest in his pictures is due to the fact that he shows thoughts, emotions, and sensations comprehensible of humanity. He tells things that every one may have thought but no