Many British (or, to make myself safe, I will say English-speaking) painters have had enough sensibility of inspiration to make them distinguished and romantic figures.  Who but feels that Wilson, Blake, Reynolds, Turner, and Rossetti were remarkable men?  Others have had that facility and exquisiteness of handling which gives us the enviable and almost inexhaustible producer of charming objects—­Hogarth, Cotman, Keene, Whistler, Conder, Steer, Davies.  Indeed, with the exceptions of Blake and Rossetti—­two heavy-handed men of genius—­and Reynolds, whose reactions were something too perfunctory, I question whether there be a man in either list who wanted much for sensibility of either sort.  But what English painter could conceive and effectively carry out a work of art?  Crome, I think, has done it; Gainsborough and Constable at any rate came near; and it is because Duncan Grant may be the fourth name in our list that some of us are now looking forward with considerable excitement to his exhibition.

An Englishman who is an artist can hardly help being a poet; I neither applaud nor altogether deplore the fact, though certainly it has been the ruin of many promising painters.  The doom of Englishmen is not reversed for Duncan Grant:  he is a poet; but he is a poet in the right way—­in the right way, I mean, for a painter to be a poet.  Certainly his vision is not purely pictorial; and because he feels the literary significance of what he sees his conceptions are apt to be literary.  But he does not impose his conceptions on his pictures; he works his pictures out of his conceptions.  Anyone who will compare them with those of Rossetti or Watts will see in a moment what I mean.  In Duncan Grant there is, I agree, something that reminds one unmistakably of the Elizabethan poets, something fantastic and whimsical and at the same time intensely lyrical.  I should find it hard to make my meaning clearer, yet I am conscious enough that my epithets applied to painting are anything but precise.  But though they may be lyrical or fantastic or witty, these pictures never tell a story or point a moral.

My notion is that Duncan Grant often starts from some mixed motif which, as he labours to reduce it to form and colour, he cuts, chips, and knocks about till you would suppose that he must have quite whittled the alloy away.  But the fact is, the very material out of which he builds is coloured in poetry.  The thing he has to build is a monument of pure visual art; that is what he plans, designs, elaborates, and finally executes.  Only, when he has achieved it we cannot help noticing the colour of the bricks.  All notice, and some enjoy, this adscititious literary overtone.  Make no mistake, however, the literary element in the art of Duncan Grant is what has been left over, not what has been added.  A Blake or a Watts conceives a picture and makes of it a story; a Giorgione or a Piero di Cosimo steals the germ of a poem and by curious cultivation grows out of it