In all Europe there is no school of portraiture worth notice; the so-called portrait-painters are only likeness-makers, comparing with the true portraitist as a topographical draughtsman does with a landscape artist.  The intellectual elements of the artistic character, which successful portraiture insists on, are some of its very greatest,—­if we admit, as it seems to us that we must, that imagination is not strictly intellectual, but an inspiration, an exaltation of the whole nature.  To paint a great man, one must not merely comprehend that he is great, but must in some sense rise up by the side of, and sympathize with, his greatness,—­must enter into and identify himself with some essential quality of his character, which quality will be the theme of his portrait.  So it inevitably follows that the greatness of the artist is the limitation of his art,—­that he expresses in his work himself as much as his subject, but no more of the latter than he can comprehend and appreciate.

The distinction between the true and the false portraitist is that between expression of something felt and representation of something seen; and as the subtilest and noblest part of the human soul can only be felt, as the signs of it in the face can be recognized and translated only by sympathy, so no mere painter can ever succeed in expressing in its fulness the character of any great man.  The lines in which holiest passion, subtilest thought, divinest activity have recorded in the face their existence and presence, are hieroglyphs unintelligible to one who has not kindled with that passion, been rapt in that thought, or swept away in sympathy with that activity; he may follow the lines, but must certainly miss their meaning.  A successful portrait implies an equality, in some sense, between the artist and his original.  The greatest of artists fail most completely in painting people with whom they have no sympathy, and only the mechanical painter succeeds alike with all,—­the fair average of his works being a general levelling of his subjects; the great successes of the genuine artist being as surely offset (if one success can find offset in a thousand failures) by as absolute and extreme failure.

As regards portraiture in general, the public may, without injury to Art or history, employ the painters who make the prettiest pictures of them; it doesn’t matter to the future, if Mr. Jenkins, or even the Hon. Mr. Twaddle, has employed the promising Mr. Mahlstock to perpetuate him with a hundred transitory and borrowed graces,—­if the talented young litterateur, Mr. Simeah, has been found by his limner to resemble Lord Byron amazingly, and has in consequence consented to sit for a half-length, to be done a la Corsair, etc., etc.; but for our men of thought, for those whose works will stand to all time as the signals pointing out the road a nation followed, whose presence and acts shall be our intellectual history,—­it