Chapter XIII: Preface (6)

20. You see, then, from this spot, the plain of Piedmont, on the north and south, literally as far as the eye can reach; so that the plain terminates as the sea does, with a level blue line, only tufted with woods instead of waves, and crowded with towers of cities instead of ships. Then in the luminous air beyond and behind this blue horizon-line, stand, as it were, the shadows of mountains, they themselves dark, for the southern slopes of the Alps of the Lago Maggiore and Bellinzona are all without snow; but the light of the unseen snowfields, lying level behind the visible peaks, is sent up with strange reflection upon the clouds; an everlasting light of calm Aurora in the north. Then, higher and higher around the approaching darkness of the plain, rise the central chains, not as on the Switzer's side, a recognizable group and following of successive and separate hills, but a wilderness of jagged peaks, cast in passionate and fierce profusion along the circumference of heaven; precipice behind precipice, and gulf beyond gulf, filled with the flaming of the sunset, and forming mighty channels for the flowings of the clouds, which roll up against them out of the vast Italian plain, forced together by the narrowing crescent, and breaking up at last against the Alpine wall in towers of spectral spray; or sweeping up its ravines with long moans of complaining thunder. Out from between the cloudy pillars, as they pass, emerge forever the great battlements of the memorable and perpetual hills: Viso, with her shepherd-witnesses to ancient faith; Rocca-Melone, the highest place of Alpine pilgrimage;[61] Iseran, who shed her burial sheets of snow about the march of Hannibal; Cenis, who shone with her glacier light on the descent of Charlemagne; Paradiso, who watched with her opposite crest the stoop of the French eagle to Marengo; and underneath all these, lying in her soft languor, this tender Italy, lapped in dews of sleep, or more than sleep--one knows not if it is trance, from which morning shall yet roll the blinding mists away, or if the fair shadows of her quietude are indeed the shades of purple death. And, lifted a little above this solemn plain, and looking beyond it to its snowy ramparts, vainly guardian, stands this palace dedicate to pleasure, the whole legend of Italy's past history written before it by the finger of God, written as with an iron pen upon the rock forever, on all those fronting walls of reproachful Alp; blazoned in gold of lightning upon the clouds that still open and close their unsealed scrolls in heaven; painted in purple and scarlet upon the mighty missal pages of sunset after sunset, spread vainly before a nation's eyes for a nation's prayer. So stands this palace of pleasure; desolate as it deserves--desolate in smooth corridor and glittering chamber--desolate in pleached walk and planted bower--desolate in that worst and bitterest abandonment which leaves no light of memory. No ruins are here of walls rent by war, and falling above their defenders into mounds of graves: no remnants are here of chapel-altar, or temple porch, left shattered or silent by the power of some purer worship: no vestiges are here of sacred hearth and sweet homestead, left lonely through vicissitudes of fate, and heaven-sent sorrow. Nothing is here but the vain apparelings of pride sunk into dishonor, and vain appanages of delight now no more delightsome. The hill-waters, that once flowed and plashed in the garden fountains, now trickle sadly through the weeds that encumber their basins, with a sound as of tears: the creeping, insidious, neglected flowers weave their burning nets about the white marble of the balustrades, and rend them slowly, block from block, and stone from stone: the thin, sweet-scented leaves tremble along the old masonry joints as if with palsy at every breeze; and the dark lichens, golden and gray, make the footfall silent in the path's center.

And day by day as I walked there, the same sentence seemed whispered by every shaking leaf, and every dying echo, of garden and chamber. "Thus end all the arts of life, only in death; and thus issue all the gifts of man, only in his dishonor, when they are pursued or possessed in the service of pleasure only."

21. This then is the great enigma of Art History,--you must not follow Art without pleasure, nor must you follow it for the sake of pleasure. And the solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art has been followed _only_ for the sake of luxury or delight, it has contributed, and largely contributed, to bring about the destruction of the nation practicing it: but wherever Art has been used _also_ to teach any truth, or supposed truth--religious, moral, or natural--there it has elevated the nation practicing it, and itself with the nation.

22. Thus the Art of Greece rose, and did service to the people, so long as it was to them the earnest interpreter of a religion they believed in: the Arts of northern sculpture and architecture rose, as interpreters of Christian legend and doctrine: the Art of painting in Italy, not only as religious, but also mainly as expressive of truths of moral philosophy, and powerful in pure human portraiture. The only great painters in our schools of painting in England have either been of portrait--Reynolds and Gainsborough; of the philosophy of social life--Hogarth; or of the facts of nature in landscape--Wilson and Turner. In all these cases, if I had time, I could show you that the success of the painter depended on his desire to convey a truth, rather than to produce a merely beautiful picture; that is to say, to get a likeness of a man, or of a place; to get some moral principle rightly stated, or some historical character rightly described, rather than merely to give pleasure to the eyes. Compare the feeling with which a Moorish architect decorated an arch of the Alhambra, with that of Hogarth painting the "Marriage a la Mode," or of Wilkie painting the "Chelsea Pensioners," and you will at once feel the difference between Art pursued for pleasure only, and for the sake of some useful principle or impression.

23. But what you might not so easily discern is, that even when painting does appear to have been pursued for pleasure only, if ever you find it rise to any noble level, you will also find that a stern search after truth has been at the root of its nobleness. You may fancy, perhaps, that Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were painters for the sake of pleasure only: but in reality they were the only painters who ever sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of light and shade as associated with color, in the noblest of all physical created things, the human form. They were the only men who ever painted the human body; all other painters of the great schools are mere anatomical draughtsmen compared to them; rather makers of maps of the body, than painters of it. The Venetians alone, by a toil almost super-human, succeeded at last in obtaining a power almost super-human; and were able finally to paint the highest visible work of God with unexaggerated structure, undegraded color, and unaffected gesture. It seems little to say this; but I assure you it is much to have _done_ this--so much, that no other men but the Venetians ever did it: none of them ever painted the human body without in some degree caricaturing the anatomy, forcing the action, or degrading the hue.

24. Now, therefore, the sum of all is, that you who wish to encourage Art in England have to do two things with it: you must delight in it, in the first place; and you must get it to serve some serious work, in the second place. I don't mean by serious, necessarily moral: all that I mean by serious is in some way or other useful, not merely selfish, careless, or indolent. I had, indeed, intended before closing my address, to have traced out a few of the directions in which, as it seems to me, Art may be seriously and practically serviceable to us in the career of civilization. I had hoped to show you how many of the great phenomena of nature still remained unrecorded by it, for _us_ to record; how many of the historical monuments of Europe were perishing without memorial, for the want of but a little honest, simple, laborious, loving draughtsmanship; how many of the most impressive historical events of the day failed of teaching us half of what they were meant to teach, for want of painters to represent them faithfully, instead of fancifully, and with historical truth for their aim, instead of national self-glorification. I had hoped to show you how many of the best impulses of the heart were lost in frivolity or sensuality, for want of purer beauty to contemplate, and of noble thoughts to associate with the fervor of hallowed human passion; how, finally, a great part of the vital power of our religious faith was lost in us, for want of such art as would realize in some rational, probable, believable way, those events of sacred history which, as they visibly and intelligibly occurred, may also be visibly and intelligibly represented. But all this I dare not do yet. I felt, as I thought over these things, that the time was not yet come for their declaration: the time will come for it, and I believe soon; but as yet, the man would only lay himself open to the charge of vanity, of imagination, and of idle fondness of hope, who should venture to trace in words the course of the higher blessings which the Arts may have yet in store for mankind. As yet there is no need to do so: all that we have to plead for is an earnest and straightforward exertion in those courses of study which are opened to us day by day, believing only that they are to be followed gravely and for grave purposes, as by men, and not by children. I appeal, finally, to all those who are to become the pupils of these schools, to keep clear of the notion of following Art as dilettantism: it ought to delight you, as your reading delights you--but you never think of your reading as dilettantism. It ought to delight you as your studies of physical science delight you--but you don't call physical science dilettantism. If you are determined only to think of Art as a play or a pleasure, give it up at once: you will do no good to yourselves, and you will degrade the pursuit in the sight of others. Better, infinitely better, that you should never enter a picture gallery, than that you should enter only to saunter and to smile: better, infinitely better, that you should never handle a pencil at all, than handle it only for the sake of complacency in your small dexterity: better, infinitely better, that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures, and uninformed respecting them, than that you should just know enough to detect blemishes in great works,--to give a color of reasonableness to presumption, and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding. Above all, I would plead for this so far as the teaching of these schools may be addressed to the junior Members of the University. Men employed in any kind of manual labor, by which they must live, are not likely to take up the notion that they can learn any other art for amusement only; but amateurs are: and it is of the highest importance, nay, it is just the one thing of all importance, to show them what drawing really means; and not so much to teach them to produce a good work themselves, as to know it when they see it done by others. Good work, in the stern sense of the word, as I before said, no mere amateur can do; and good work, in any sense, that is to say, profitable work for himself or for anyone else, he can only do by being made in the beginning to see what is possible for him, and what not;--what is accessible, and what not; and by having the majesty and sternness of the everlasting laws of fact set before him in their infinitude. It is no matter for appalling him: the man is great already who is made well capable of being appalled; nor do we even wisely hope, nor truly understand, till we are humiliated by our hope, and awe-struck by our understanding. Nay, I will go farther than this, and say boldly, that what you have mainly to teach the young men here is, not so much what they can do, as what they cannot;--to make them see how much there is in nature which cannot be imitated, and how much in man which cannot be emulated. He only can be truly said to be educated in Art to whom all his work is only a feeble sign of glories which he cannot convey, and a feeble means of measuring, with ever-enlarging admiration, the great and untraversable gulf which God has set between the great and the common intelligences of mankind: and all the triumphs of Art which man can commonly achieve are only truly crowned by pure delight in natural scenes themselves, and by the sacred and self-forgetful veneration which can be nobly abashed, and tremblingly exalted, in the presence of a human spirit greater than his own.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] This Address has been already printed in three forms,--(_a_) in a pamphlet printed at Cambridge "for the committee of the School of Art," by Naylor & Co., _Chronicle_ office, 1858; (_b_) in a second pamphlet, Cambridge, Deighton & Bell; London, Bell & Daldy, 1858; and (_c_) a new edition, published for Mr. Ruskin by Mr. George Allen in 1879. The first of these pamphlets contains, in addition to the address, a full account of the "inaugural soiree" at which it was read, and a report of speeches then made by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., and Mr. George Cruikshank; and both the first and second pamphlet also contain a few introductory words spoken, by Mr. Ruskin, before proceeding to deliver his address.--ED.

[59] See "A Joy For Ever," Sec. 113, and "Time and Tide," Sec. 78.--ED.

[60] I ought perhaps to remind the reader that this statement refers to two different societies among the Alps; the Waldenses in the 13th, and the people of the Forest Cantons in the 14th and following centuries. Protestants are perhaps apt sometimes to forget that the virtues of these mountaineers were shown in connection with vital forms of opposing religions; and that the patriots of Schwytz and Uri were as zealous Roman Catholics as they were good soldiers. We have to lay to their charge the death of Zuinglius as well as of Gessler.

[61] The summit of Rocca-Melone is the sharp peak seen from Turin on the right hand of the gorge of the Cenis, dominant over the low projecting pyramid of the hill called by De Saussure Montagne de Musinet. Rocca-Melone rises to a height of 11,000 feet above the sea, and its peak is a place of pilgrimage to this day, though it seems temporarily to have ceased to be so in the time of De Saussure, who thus speaks of it:

"Il y a eu pendant longtemps sur cette cime, une petite chapelle avec une image de Notre Dame qui etoit en grande veneration dans le pays, et ou un grand nombre de gens alloient au mois d'aout en procession, de Suze et des environs; mais le sentier qui conduit a cette chapelle est si etroit et si scabreux qu'il n'y avoit presque pas d'annees qu'il n'y perit du monde; la fatigue et la rarete de l'air saisissoient ceux qui avoient plutot consulte leur devotion que leurs forces; ils tomberent en defalliance, et de la dans le precipice."

* * * * *

ART.

V.

THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.

(_Art Journal, January-July 1865; January, February, and April 1866._)

* * * * *

THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA.

"[Greek: Poikilon o eni panta teteuchatai oude se phemi
Aprekton ge neesthai, ho ti phresi sesi menoinas.]"

(HOM. _Il._ xiv. 220-21.)

PREFATORY.[62]

25. Not many months ago, a friend, whose familiarity with both living and past schools of Art rendered his opinion of great authority, said casually to me in the course of talk, "I believe we have now as able painters as ever lived; but they never paint as good pictures as were once painted." That was the substance of his saying; I forget the exact words, but their tenor surprised me, and I have thought much of them since. Without pressing the statement too far, or examining it with an unintended strictness, this I believe to be at all events true, that we have men among us, now in Europe, who might have been noble painters, and are not; men whose doings are altogether as wonderful in skill, as inexhaustible in fancy, as the work of the really great painters; and yet these doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand--"are not Great, for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among us all; only let me at once partly modify it, and partly define.

26. In one sense, modern Art has more goodness in it than ever Art had before. Its kindly spirit, its quick sympathy with pure domestic and social feeling, the occasional seriousness of its instructive purpose, and its honest effort to grasp the reality of conceived scenes, are all eminently "good," as compared with the insane picturesqueness and conventional piety of many among the old masters. Such domestic painting, for instance, as Richter's in Germany, Edward Frere's in France, and Hook's in England, together with such historical and ideal work as----perhaps the reader would be offended with me were I to set down the several names that occur to me here, so I will set down one only, and say--as that of Paul de la Roche; such work, I repeat, as these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere sympathy, by many inferior painters, so that our exhibitions and currently popular books are full of very lovely and pathetic ideas, expressed with a care, and appealing to an interest, quite unknown in past times. I will take two instances of merely average power, as more illustrative of what I mean than any more singular and distinguished work could be. Last year, in the British Institution, there were two pictures by the same painter, one of a domestic, the other of a sacred subject. I will say nothing of the way in which they were painted; it may have been bad, or good, or neither: it is not to my point. I wish to direct attention only to the conception of them. One, "Cradled in his Calling," was of a fisherman and his wife, and helpful grown-up son, and helpless new-born little one; the two men carrying the young child up from the shore, rocking it between them in the wet net for a hammock, the mother looking on joyously, and the baby laughing. The thought was pretty and good, and one might go on dreaming over it long--not unprofitably. But the second picture was more interesting. I describe it only in the circumstances of the invented scene--sunset after the crucifixion. The bodies have been taken away, and the crosses are left lying on the broken earth; a group of children have strayed up the hill, and stopped beside them in such shadowy awe as is possible to childhood, and they have picked up one or two of the drawn nails to feel how sharp they are. Meantime a girl with her little brother--goat-herds both--have been watering their flock at Kidron, and are driving it home. The girl, strong in grace and honor of youth, carrying her pitcher of water on her erect head, has gone on past the place steadily, minding her flock; but her little curly-headed brother, with cheeks of burning Eastern brown, has lingered behind to look, and is feeling the point of one of the nails, held in another child's hand. A lovely little kid of the goats has stayed behind to keep him company, and is amusing itself by jumping backwards and forwards over an arm of the cross. The sister looks back, and, wondering what he can have stopped in that dreadful place for, waves her hand for the little boy to come away.

I have no hesitation in saying that, as compared with the ancient and stereotyped conceptions of the "Taking down from the Cross," there is a living feeling in that picture which is of great price. It may perhaps be weak, nay, even superficial, or untenable--that will depend on the other conditions of character out of which it springs--but, so far as it reaches, it is pure and good; and we may gain more by looking thoughtfully at such a picture than at any even of the least formal types of the work of older schools. It would be unfair to compare it with first-rate, or even approximately first-rate designs; but even accepting such unjust terms, put it beside Rembrandt's ghastly white sheet, laid over the two poles at the Cross-foot, and see which has most good in it for you of any communicable kind.

27. I trust, then, that I fully admit whatever may, on due deliberation, be alleged in favor of modern Art. Nay, I have heretofore asserted more for some modern Art than others were disposed to admit, nor do I withdraw one word from such assertion. But when all has been said and granted that may be, there remains this painful fact to be dealt with,--the consciousness, namely, both in living artists themselves and in us their admirers, that something, and that not a little, is wrong with us; that they, relentlessly examined, could not say they thoroughly knew how to paint, and that we, relentlessly examined, could not say we thoroughly know how to judge. The best of our painters will look a little to us, the beholders, for confirmation of his having done well. We, appealed to, look to each other to see what we ought to say. If we venture to find fault, however submissively, the artist will probably feel a little uncomfortable: he will by no means venture to meet us with a serenely crushing "Sir, it cannot be better done," in the manner of Albert Duerer. And yet, if it could not be better done, he, of all men, should know that best, nor fear to say so; it is good for himself, and for us, that he should assert that, if he knows that. The last time my dear old friend William Hunt came to see me, I took down one of his early drawings for him to see (three blue plums and one amber one, and two nuts). So he looked at it, happily, for a minute or two and then said, "Well, it's very nice, isn't it? I did not think I could have done so well." The saying was entirely right, exquisitely modest and true; only I fear he would not have had the courage to maintain that his drawing was good, if anybody had been there to say otherwise. Still, having done well, he knew it; and what is more no man ever does do well without knowing it: he may not know _how_ well, nor be conscious of the best of his own qualities; nor measure, or care to measure, the relation of his power to that of other men, but he will know that what he has done is, in an intended, accomplished, and ascertainable degree, good. Every able and honest workman, as he wins a right to rest, so he wins a right to approval,--his own if no one's beside; nay, his only true rest _is_ in the calm consciousness that the thing has been honorably done--[Greek: suneidesis hoti kalon]. I do not use the Greek words in pedantry, I want them for future service and interpretation; no English words, nor any of any other language, would do as well. For I mean to try to show, and believe I _can_ show, that a simple and sure conviction of our having done rightly is not only an attainable, but a necessary seal and sign of our having so done; and that the doing well or rightly, and ill or wrongly, are both conditions of the whole being of each person, coming of a nature in him which affects all things that he may do, from the least to the greatest, according to the noble old phrase for the conquering rightness, of "integrity," "wholeness," or "wholesomeness." So that when we do external things (that are our business) ill, it is a sign that internal, and, in fact, that all things, are ill with us; and when we do external things well, it is a sign that internal and all things are well with us. And I believe there are two principal adversities to this wholesomeness of work, and to all else that issues out of wholeness of inner character, with which we have in these days specially to contend. The first is the variety of Art round us, tempting us to thoughtless imitation; the second our own want of belief in the existence of a rule of right.

28. I. I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations. The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than iron--living wood fiber--in him, he cannot be allowed any natural growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps of frozen clay;--grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set; while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent, it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar qualities; fancies that _this_ is what they are praised for; tries to catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches and adopts, triumphant in its ease:--has not sense to steal the peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better, never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path. Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless; fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt, your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholly ineffective on the national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in money;--valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their own minds; teach perhaps a trick or two of their stage business in early life--as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who might have been among the best of them,[63] the last we heard of, finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its own;--the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the trouble to understand,--the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a flea,--and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that the said blots of Titian and Rubens _are_ Art, perceiving for itself little good in them, and hanging _them_ also well out of its way, at tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example; Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the only "Right" cognizable by it.

29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all. "Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what does not amuse us we do not want. Taste is assuredly a frivolous, apparently a dangerous gift; vicious persons and vicious nations have it; we are a practical people, content to know what we like, wise in not liking it too much, and when tired of it, wise in getting something we like better. Painting is of course an agreeable ornamental Art, maintaining a number of persons respectably, deserving therefore encouragement, and getting it pecuniarily, to a hitherto unheard-of extent. What would you have more?" This is, I believe, very nearly our Art-creed. The fact being (very ascertainably by anyone who will take the trouble to examine the matter), that there is a cultivated Art among all great nations, inevitably necessary to them as the fulfillment of one part of their human nature. None but savage nations are without Art, and civilized nations who do their Art ill, do it because there is something deeply wrong at their hearts. They paint badly as a paralyzed man stammers, because his life is touched somewhere within; when the deeper life is full in a people, they speak clearly and rightly; paint clearly and rightly; think clearly and rightly. There is some reverse effect, but very little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation; it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and aimless sophism; and it and they will perish together.

30. It is my purpose, therefore, in some subsequent papers, with such help as I may anywise receive, to try if there may not be determined some of the simplest laws which are indeed binding on Art practice and judgment. Beginning with elementary principle, and proceeding upwards as far as guiding laws are discernible, I hope to show, that if we do not yet know them, there are at least such laws to be known, and that it is of a deep and intimate importance to any people, especially to the English at this time, that their children should be sincerely taught whatever arts they learn, and in riper age become capable of a just choice and wise pleasure in the accomplished works of the artist. But I earnestly ask for help in this task. It is one which can only come to good issue by the consent and aid of many thinkers; and I would, with the permission of the Editor of this Journal, invite debate on the subject of each paper, together with brief and clear statements of consent or objection, with name of consenter or objector; so that after courteous discussion had, and due correction of the original statement, we may get something at last set down, as harmoniously believed by such and such known artists. If nothing can thus be determined, at least the manner and variety of dissent will show whether it is owing to the nature of the subject, or to the impossibility, under present circumstances, that different persons should approach it from similar points of view; and the inquiry, whatever its immediate issue, cannot be ultimately fruitless.

FOOTNOTES:

[62] _Art Journal_, New Series, vol. iv., pp. 5-6. January 1865.--ED.

[63] See p. 353, Sec. 83, for a further mention of William Blake.--ED.

THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA