He made
up his mind in a flash, partly from instinct and partly from will.
"He had the courage for life and the enterprise to spend his
fortune on it. He was kind and impulsively generous, but too hasty
for disease to accost or death to delay. For him they were
interruptions, not abiding sorrows.
"He knew nothing of rancour, remorse, regret; they conveyed much
the same to him as if he had been told to walk backwards and
received neither sympathy nor courtesy from him.
"He was an artist with the gift of admiration. He had a good eye
and could not buy an ugly or even moderately beautiful thing; but
he was no discoverer in art. Here I will add to make myself clear
that I am thinking of men like Frances Horner's father, old Mr.
Graham, [Footnote: Lady Horner, of Mells, Frome.] who discovered
and promoted Burne-Jones and Frederick Walker; or Lord Battersea,
who was the first to patronise Cecil Lawson; or my sister, Lucy
Graham Smith, who was a fine judge of every picture and recognised
and appreciated all schools of painting. My father's judgment was
warped by constantly comparing his own things with other people's.
"The pride of possession and proprietorship is a common and a
human one, but the real artist makes everything he admires his
own: no one can rob him of this; he sees value in unsigned
pictures and promise in unfinished ones; he not only discovers and
interprets, but almost creates beauty by the fire of his
criticisms and the inwardness of his preception.
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