Studio: international art (48.1910)

A If red Gilbert

STUDY FOR A "VICTORY" BY ALFRED GILBERT

for he is not as other men—appears logical—and
great. His want of grasp of the material side of
things, his impatience of any restraint that would
place him in a groove or control his actions, his
inability to measure time by figures on a dial,
his lofty scorn for prejudice, his ferocious pride
that keeps him silent where others would hasten to
explain, all the unusual personal characteristics
that have helped to make him one of the most
discussed and least understood of men, how
unimportant they seem when they are merged in
a devotion to art that takes no count of the
wealth and brilliant social position that might
be his could he first accommodate himself to
the age in which he lives, and then crib, cabin,
and confine his work by encompassing it with
numerals and calendars ! If the faculty of com-

parison asserts itself, we shall probably find our-
selves thinking of Leonardo, with whom Gilbert
has so many qualities in common, both as man
and artist, or of those other old masters whose
work lives because it was their religion, and whose
souls animate the priceless materials by which they
attained immortality.

And you leave the quiet retreat wishing, as so
many others have done, that the conditions still
obtained under which those old masters worked—■
that a country still saw it honoured itself in foster-
ing genius by arranging material circumstances so
that, with no sordid cares to vex the mind and
dissipate nervous energy, with no limit set to the
nature of the work or its period of completion,
the great artist might be free to follow the way-
ward moods of inspiration and thus enrich the
world with the best that is in him.

A. E. M.

Postscript.—As many readers of The Studio

" THE CALL OF THE SEA*' BY ALFRED GILBERT

(From photo by M. Maurice Renard)