form; it presses on to the impalpable, the ideal.  The forest of trees and the forest of rocks, not hewn timber and carved stones, suit its aspirations for something not to be bounded or expressed.  With this tendency, the Celtic races have, as I remarked before, been necessarily almost impotent in the higher branches of the plastic arts.  Ireland, that has produced so many powerful spirits, has produced no great sculptors or painters.  Cross into England.  The inaptitude for the plastic art strikingly diminishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element, preponderates in the race.  And yet in England, too, in the English race, there is something which seems to prevent our reaching real mastership in the plastic arts, as the more unmixed German races have reached it.  Reynolds and Turner are painters of genius, who can doubt it? but take a European jury, the only competent jury in these cases, and see if you can get a verdict giving them the rank of masters, as this rank is given to Raphael and Correggio, or to Albert Durer and Rubens.  And observe in what points our English pair succeed, and in what they fall short.  They fall short in architectonice, in the highest power of composition, by which painting accomplishes the very uttermost which it is given to painting to accomplish; the highest sort of composition, the highest application of the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or they fail in it.  Their defect, therefore, is on the side of art, of plastic art.  And they succeed in magic, in beauty, in grace, in expressing almost the inexpressible:  here is the charm of Reynolds’s children and Turner’s seas; the impulse to express the inexpressible carries Turner so far, that at last it carries him away, and even long before he is quite carried away, even in works that are justly extolled, one can see the stamp-mark, as the French say, of insanity.  The excellence, therefore, the success, is on the side of spirit.  Does not this look as if a Celtic stream met the main German current in us, and gave it a somewhat different course from that which it takes naturally?  We have Germanism enough in us, enough patient love for fact and matter, to be led to attempt the plastic arts, and we make much more way in them than the pure Celtic races make; but at a certain point our Celtism comes in, with its love of emotion, sentiment, the inexpressible, and gives our best painters a bias.  And the point at which it comes in is just that critical point where the flowering of art into its perfection commences; we have plenty of painters who never reach this point at all, but remain always mere journeymen, in bondage to matter; but those who do reach it, instead of going on to the true consummation of the masters in painting, are a little overbalanced by soul and feeling, work too directly for these, and so do not get out of their art all that may be got out of it.