and her Nurse.”  It was a moonlight, with the most wonderful rendering of a certain effect seen with the moon at the spectator’s back, and I noted in speaking to Ruskin, later on, that no other picture I had ever seen of moonlight had succeeded so fully in realizing it, to which he replied that he had never noticed that it was a moonlight picture; but when I called his attention to the display of fireworks on the Grand Canal, he admitted that it was not customary to let off fireworks by day, and that it must be a night scene.

My acquaintance with Ruskin lasted with varying degrees of intimacy, and some interruptions due to his sympathy with the South during the civil war and bitterness against our government, till 1870, when it was terminated by a trivial personal incident to which his morbid state of mind at that time gave a false color.  We separated more and more widely in our opinions on art in later years, and the differences came to me reluctantly, for my reverence for the man was never to be shaken, while my study of art showed me finally that, however correct his views of the ethics of art might be, from the point of view of pure art he was entirely mistaken, and all that his influence had done for me had to be undone before any true progress could be made.  What little I had learned from the artists I knew had been in the main correct, and had aided to show me the true road, but the teaching of “Modern Painters,” and of Ruskin himself later, was in the end fatal to the career to which I was then devoted, for I was unable to get back to the dividing of the ways.

But the first mistake was my own.  What I needed was practical study, the training of the hand, for my head had already gone so far beyond my technical attainment that I had entered into the fatal condition of having theories beyond my practice.  My execution was so far in arrear of my perceptions of what should be in the result, that instead of the delight with which I had, untaught, and in my stolen hours, given myself to painting, I felt the weight of my technical shortcomings so heavily as to make my work full of distress instead of that content with which the artist should always work.  Everything became conscious effort and the going was too much uphill.  I had always been groping my own way, scarcely as much assisted by the fragmentary good advice I received as laid under heavier disabilities by the better knowledge of what should be done.  In art education the training of the hand should, I am persuaded, always be kept in advance of the thinking powers, so that the young student should feel that his ideal is just before him if not at his finger’s end.  That this is so rarely the case with art students in our day is, I am convinced, the chief reason of the technical inferiority of our modern painters and the root of the inferiority of modern art.  The artist does not begin early enough.  I was already belated, and every advance I made in the study of the theory of art put me farther behind, practically.