He was a shade too sentimental for my own
sympathies, and I fancied he was rather too fond of superfine
discriminations and of discovering subtle intentions in shallow places.
At moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics, and floundered a
while in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding
knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive
hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful
saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. "There are two
moods," I remember his saying, "in which we may walk through
galleries--the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure,
and we can never tell which is to take its turn. The critical mood,
oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending. It relishes
the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar cleverness, its conscious
graces. It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as if,
according to his light, the painter had enjoyed doing it--for the little
Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of
late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled, pastoral, sceptical
Italian landscapes.
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