Giorgione was nearly twenty when we first hear of him.  He was a handsome fellow—­tall, slender, with an olive complexion and dreamy brown eyes.  There was a becoming flavor of melancholy in his manner, and more than one gracious dame sought to lure him back to earth, away from his sadness, out of the dream-world in which he lived.

Giorgione was a musician and a poet.  He sang his own pieces, playing the accompaniment on a harp.  Vasari says he sang his songs, playing his own accompaniment on a flute, but I think this is a mistake.

Into all his work Giorgione infused his own soul—­and do you know what the power to do that is?  It is genius.  To be able to make a statue is little, but to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life—­ah! that is something else!  The last elusive, undefinable stroke of the brush, that something uniting the spirit of the beholder with the spirit of the artist, so that you feel as he felt when he wrought—­that is art.  Burne-Jones is the avatar of Giorgione.  He subdues you into silence, and you wait, expecting that one of his tall, soulful dream-women will speak, if you are but worthy—­holding your soul in tune.

Giorgione never wrought so well as Burne-Jones, because he lived in a different age—­all art is an evolution.  Painting is a form of expression, just as language is a form of expression.  Every man who writes English is debtor to Shakespeare.  Every man who paints and expresses something of that which his soul feels is debtor to Giorgione and Botticelli.  But to judge of the greatness of an artist—­mind this—­you must compare him with his contemporaries, not with those who were before or those who came after.  The old masters are valuable, not necessarily for beauty, but because they reveal the evolution of art.

Between Burne-Jones and Giorgione came Botticelli.  Now, Botticelli builded on Giorgione, while Burne-Jones builded on Botticelli.  Aubrey Beardsley, dead at the age at which Keats died, builded on both, but he perverted their art and put a leer where Burne-Jones placed faith and abiding trust.  Aubrey Beardsley got the cue for his hothouse art from one figure in Botticelli’s “Spring,” I need not state which figure:  a glance at the picture and you behold sulphur fumes about the face of one of the women.

Did Aubrey Beardsley infuse his own spirit into his work?  Yes, I think he did.  Mrs. Jameson says, “There are no successful imitations of Giorgione, neither can there be, for the spirit of the man is in every face he drew, and the people who try to draw like him always leave that out.”

There are various pictures in the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Pinacothek at Munich, signed with Giorgione’s name, but Mrs. Jameson declares they are not his, “because they do not speak to your soul with that mild, beseeching look of pity,” Possibly we should make allowance for Mrs. Jameson’s warm praise—­other women talked like that when Giorgione was alive.