more than once points out that this temperament, this 'taste,' as
he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by
frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a form of
right judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as there
are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of
novelty. He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how
difficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary work.
But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. He admired Turner
and Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of as
they are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we require
more than 'mere industry and accurate transcription.' Of Crome's
'Heath Scene near Norwich' he remarks that it shows 'how much a
subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a
most uninteresting flat,' and of the popular type of landscape of
his day he says that it is 'simply an enumeration of hill and dale,
stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through
rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of
the real painter, are not.' He had a thorough dislike of what is
obvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to
entertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David's
pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe's poems. With the imitative and
realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells us
frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the
fact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that an
artist should paint only what he sees. The qualities that he
sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of
line, richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the other