to our eyes of the incidents of our Saviour’s life, especially His passion, gives them more reality than even the most frequent reading of the Bible.  This renders the crucifixion extremely painful, intolerable in powerful pictures.  I knew of an intelligent, sensitive little child who burst into convulsive sobbing before Tintoretto’s great Crucifixion in the Scuola San Rocco at Venice.  In the Belvedere at Vienna there is a picture by Rubens of the dead Christ in the arms of the usual small group:  His mother is removing with a light, tender touch a thorn which is still piercing the cold brow.  The whole picture is in the same spirit, and I never could look at it with dry eyes.  Yet in Rubens’s hands this and all kindred subjects are generally repulsive.  The very early masters are prone to fix the attention upon some revolting detail of torture or too material and agonizing exhibition of physical suffering, but their stiff, hard outlines, absence of perspective and childishness of composition, with the element of the grotesque which is seldom absent, take the edge off their effect.  Later, when art has advanced, and is capable of affecting us more deeply, refinement too has advanced:  there is less simplicity, but merely painful detail is subordinated to general expression and skill of drawing and color.  It is where the two meet, as in Rubens, that the result is most harrowing:  the picture I have just spoken of is the only one of his in which I ever saw any sign of delicacy or tenderness, any appeal to the deeper and more exquisite emotions.  Nevertheless, by degrees his genius helps one to surmount his realism.  On my first visit to Antwerp I looked for a few minutes—­which was as long, as I could bear it—­at the great Descent from the Cross in the cathedral, and turned away with the conviction that I could never have anything but distressing and disagreeable impressions from that picture.  Six months afterward I was in Antwerp again:  I could not see the Descent often enough, and spent my last hour in the place before it.  Yet he is a brutal painter withal, and such subjects, however magnificently treated by him, could never give me the same unmixed enjoyment as in the hands of the gentle and pensive Vandyke.

Some people maintain that all great works of art speak for themselves, and will make their appeal at once to a person capable of appreciating them, without any previous experience or education.  This is impossible, for were it so the fine arts would be an exception to the rules which govern everything else in life—­music, literature, moral beauty and the beauties of Nature.  It must be with them as with other things:  knowledge, cultivation, practice enhance the power of enjoyment.  Of course, in this, as in all matters, individual organization will tell powerfully; but take an intelligent, educated person of average perceptions, who has never seen a single good picture, and set him before one of the greatest in the world, and I doubt if he would receive