I once had occasion to call on Mr. Sargent, and was shown into a room with a black carpet. Only a colourist loves black, and sees it as a colour. And this room, so free from all that was novel and without associations, helped to explain to me why, though his method is so modern and of the moment, his pictures of aristocrats accommodate themselves to ancestral surroundings. For it is true that not only the face and the clothes of his sitters are given, but somehow, in the material of paint, their social position and their distinction. Now this is not by any means the least of Sargent's qualities; it is not a common one. Well-bred people drive up to the door of a modern studio almost visibly cloaked in the traditions of their race, but we are led to believe that they must have left all this behind them in the carriage when we see the portrait in an exhibition; the artist has shown nothing of it, has used his distinguished sitter simply as a model. For lack of inspiration novelties are proffered in its place, L'art nouveau on canvas. Sargent does not paint modern people as if they all came into the world yesterday landed from an airship. No, he is like Van Dyck, who not only painted the beautiful clothes, the long white hands, and the bearing of his sitters sympathetically, but also the very atmosphere of the Court around them, painting, as all great painters do, invisible as well as visible things. If there is not in Sargent's painting courtesy of touch, if his method has not suavity in painting elegant people, this is rather as it should be in an age which trusts implicitly to the dressmaker and tailor for its elegance. And without a word here as to the worth of some of our modern aims, at least the age is too much in earnest for a pose. The poses and fripperies of the pictures of Van Dyck and Kneller are done with; and besides, the modern baronet is not anxious to show his hands, but is painted gloved, and Work goes unimmortalised. Meunier the sculptor and other modern artists having gloried in the war of labour, its victories go unsung; its victors surviving only as fashionable men.

The portraits of some painters suggest nothing but the foreign atmosphere of a studio, but Sargent seems to meet his sitters in the atmosphere of their own daily, fashionable life, and that is why his pictures are romantic, for isn't there romance wherever there is wealth? The people whose wealth is such that they can take as their own background all the beautiful accessories of aristocratic tradition, are entitled to them if they like them well enough to spend their money in this way. And it is the peculiar gift of our age to recognise in ourselves the heirs of the centuries of beautiful handicrafts, which we close with our machines. They certainly are the heirs to any kind of beauty who have the imagination to enjoy it. And the imagination for past associations, who have this more than the Americans? We believe in England that all Americans are rich, that they can buy whatever they appreciate. So by the divine right of things going to those who appreciate them, the rich American is now, even as Sargent paints him, environed by old French and English things and their associations. And in connection with the accessories in Sargent's pictures, might we not ask the question whether it could not be considered a test of the worth or worthlessness, from a point of beauty, of any ornament or furniture whether it would survive representation in a picture? How much modern stuff we should have to sweep aside! And now that one thinks of it, modern pictures have left modern furniture rather severely alone—the painters have not been faithful to their brethren the makers of modern tables and chairs. Who is more modern than Sargent—and I am trying to think has he ever painted a modern room—that is, a room with modern things in it? The rooms that the most modern people live in are oddly enough the ones that are most old-fashioned, filled with eighteenth-century things. This, to reflect upon, has arisen through thinking about Sargent's interior paintings, which so very vividly and accurately reflect the attitude of the modern world to its own time. In that word modern, if we are not using it too often, we must seek the nature of Sargent's painting, its spirit; it is the most interesting thing in connection with painting to come as close as possible to its spirit. And what a test before any work of art, to ask whether it is worth a search for the incorporeal element; although in vain, in spite of Walter Pater, does painting aspire "towards the condition of music," since music is as ghostly as the ghosts that it contains.