to be free!” Your individuality was given you by God, and in your race, and if you have any to speak of, you will want no liberty. You will want a den to work in, and peace, and light–no more,–in absolute need; if more, in anywise, it will still not be liberty, but direction, instruction, reproof, and sympathy. But if you have no individuality, if there is no true character nor true desire in you, then you will indeed want to be free. You will begin early, and, as a boy, desire to be a man; and, as a man, think yourself as good as every other. You will choose freely to eat, freely to drink, freely to stagger and fall, freely, at last, to curse yourself and die. Death is the only real freedom possible to us; and that is consummate freedom, permission for every particle in the rotting body to leave its neighbor particle, and shift for itself. You call it “corruption” in the flesh; but before it comes to that, all liberty is an equal corruption in mind. You ask for freedom of thought; but if you have not sufficient grounds for thought, you have no business to think; and if you have sufficient grounds, you have no business to think wrong. Only one thought is possible to you if you are wise–your liberty is geometrically proportionate to your folly.
154. “But all this glory and activity of our age; what are they owing to, but to freedom of thought?” In a measure, they are owing–what good is in them–to the discovery of many lies, and the escape from the power of evil. Not to liberty, but to the deliverance from evil or cruel masters. Brave men have dared to examine lies which had long been taught, not because they were free-thinkers, but because they were such stern and close thinkers that the lie could no longer escape them. Of course the restriction of thought, or of its expression, by persecution, is merely a form of violence, justifiable or not, as other violence is, according to the character of the persons against whom it is exercised, and the divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates. We must not burn a man alive for saying that the Athanasian creed is ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop’s salary because we are getting the worst of an argument with him; neither must we let drunken men howl in the public streets at night. There is much that is true in the part of Mr. Mill’s essay on Liberty which treats of freedom of thought; some important truths are there beautifully expressed, but many, quite vital, are omitted; and the balance, therefore, is wrongly struck. The liberty of expression, with a great nation, would become like that in a well-educated company, in which there is indeed freedom of speech, but not of clamor; or like that in an orderly senate, in which men who deserve to be heard, are heard in due time, and under determined restrictions. The degree of liberty you can rightly grant to a number of men is in the inverse ratio of their desire for it; and a general hush, or call to order, would be often very desirable in this England of ours. For the rest, of any good or evil extent, it is impossible to say what measure is owing to restraint, and what to license where the right is balanced between them. I was not a little provoked one day, a summer or two since, in Scotland, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from examining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in quietness; and to the very restriction that annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of their being in existence, instead of being blasted away by a mob-company; while the “free” paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and the Lake of Geneva are forever trampled down and destroyed, not by one duke, but by tens of thousands of ignorant tyrants.
155. So, a Dean and Chapter may, perhaps, unjustifiably charge me twopence for seeing a cathedral; but your free mob pulls spire and all down about my ears, and I can see it no more forever. And even if I cannot get up to the granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene crockery, and ashes.
156. In fine, the arguments for liberty may in general be summed in a few very simple forms, as follows:
Misguiding is mischievous: therefore guiding is.
If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch: therefore, nobody should lead anybody.
Lambs and fawns should be left free in the fields; much more bears and wolves.
If a man’s gun and shot are his own, he may fire in any direction he pleases.
A fence across a road is inconvenient; much more one at the side of it.
Babes should not be swaddled with their hands bound down to their sides: therefore they should be thrown out to roll in the kennels naked.
None of these arguments are good, and the practical issues of them are worse. For there are certain eternal laws for human conduct which are quite clearly discernible by human reason. So far as these are discovered and obeyed, by whatever machinery or authority the obedience is procured, there follow life and strength. So far as they are disobeyed, by whatever good intention the disobedience is brought about, there follow ruin and sorrow. And the first duty of every man in the world is to find his true master, and, for his own good, submit to him; and to find his true inferior, and, for that inferior’s good, conquer him. The punishment is sure, if we either refuse the reverence, or are too cowardly and indolent to enforce the compulsion. A base nation crucifies or poisons its wise men, and lets its fools rave and rot in the streets. A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the other, and cherishes all.
157. The best examples of the results of wise normal evidence in Art will be found in whatever evidence remains respecting the lives of great Italian painters, though, unhappily, in eras of progress, but just in proportion to the admirableness and efficiency of the life, will be usually the scantiness of its history. The individualities and liberties which are causes of destruction may be recorded; but the loyal conditions of daily breath are never told. Because Leonardo made models of machines, dug canals, built fortifications, and dissipated half his art-power in capricious ingenuities, we have many anecdotes of him;–but no picture of importance on canvas, and only a few withered stains of one upon a wall. But because his pupil, or reputed pupil, Luini, labored in constant and successful simplicity, we have no anecdotes of him;–only hundreds of noble works. Luini is, perhaps, the best central type of the highly-trained Italian painter. He is the only man who entirely united the religious temper which was the spirit-life of art, with the physical power which was its bodily life. He joins the purity and passion of Angelico to the strength of Veronese: the two elements, poised in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of both. The artist does not see the strength, by reason of the chastened spirit in which it is used: and the religious visionary does not recognize the passion, by reason of the frank human truth with which it is rendered. He is a man ten times greater than Leonardo;–a mighty colorist, while Leonardo was only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaroscuro drawing, like a colored print: he perceived and rendered the delicatest types of human beauty that have been painted since the days of the Greeks, while Leonardo depraved his finer instincts by caricature, and remained to the end of his days the slave of an archaic smile: and he is a designer as frank, instinctive, and exhaustless as Tintoret, while Leonardo’s design is only an agony of science, admired chiefly because it is painful, and capable of analysis in its best accomplishment. Luini has left nothing behind him that is not lovely; but of his life I believe hardly anything is known beyond remnants of tradition which murmur about Lugano and Saronno, and which remain ungleaned. This only is certain, that he was born in the loveliest district of North Italy, where hills, and streams, and air meet in softest harmonies. Child of the Alps, and of their divinest lake, he is taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty religious creed, and a sufficient law of life, and of its mechanical arts. Whether lessoned by Leonardo himself, or merely one of many disciplined in the system of the Milanese school, he learns unerringly to draw, unerringly and enduringly to paint. His tasks are set him without question day by day, by men who are justly satisfied with his work, and who accept it without any harmful praise, or senseless blame. Place, scale, and subject are determined for him on the cloister wall or the church dome; as he is required, and for sufficient daily bread, and little more, he paints what he has been taught to design wisely, and has passion to realize gloriously: every touch he lays is eternal, every thought he conceives is beautiful and pure: his hand moves always in radiance of blessing; from day to day his life enlarges in power and peace; it passes away cloudlessly, the starry twilight remaining arched far against the night.
158. Oppose to such a life as this that of a great painter amidst the elements of modern English liberty. Take the life of Turner, in whom the artistic energy and inherent love of beauty were at least as strong as in Luini: but, amidst the disorder and ghastliness of the lower streets of London, his instincts in early infancy were warped into toleration of evil, or even into delight in it. He gathers what he can of instruction by questioning and prying among half-informed masters; spells out some knowledge of classical fable; educates himself, by an admirable force, to the production of wildly majestic or pathetically tender and pure pictures, by which he cannot live. There is no one to judge them, or to command him: only some of the English upper classes hire him to paint their houses and parks, and destroy the drawings afterwards by the most wanton neglect. Tired of laboring carefully, without either reward or praise, he dashes out into various experimental and popular works–makes himself the servant of the lower public, and is dragged hither and thither at their will; while yet, helpless and guideless, he indulges his idiosyncrasies till they change into insanities; the strength of his soul increasing its sufferings, and giving force to its errors; all the purpose of life degenerating into instinct; and the web of his work wrought, at last, of beauties too subtle to be understood, his liberty, with vices too singular to be forgiven–all useless, because magnificent idiosyncrasy had become solitude, or contention, in the midst of a reckless populace, instead of submitting itself in loyal harmony to the Art-laws of an understanding nation. And the life passed away in darkness; and its final work, in all the best beauty of it, has already perished, only enough remaining to teach us what we have lost.
159. These are the opposite effects of Law and of Liberty on men of the highest powers. In the case of inferiors the contrast is still more fatal: under strict law, they become the subordinate workers in great schools, healthily aiding, echoing, or supplying, with multitudinous force of hand, the mind of the leading masters: they are the nameless carvers of great architecture–stainers of glass–hammerers of iron– helpful scholars, whose work ranks round, if not with, their master’s, and never disgraces it. But the inferiors under a system of license for the most part perish in miserable effort;* a few struggle into pernicious eminence–harmful alike to themselves and to all who admire them; many die of starvation; many insane, either in weakness of insolent egotism, like Haydon, or in a conscientious agony of beautiful purpose and warped power, like Blake. There is no probability of the persistence of a licentious school in any good accidentally discovered by them; there is an approximate certainty of their gathering, with acclaim, round any shadow of evil, and following it to whatever quarter of destruction it may lead.
* As I correct this sheet for press, my “Pall Mall Gazette” of last Saturday, April 17, is lying on the table by me. I print a few lines out of it:
“AN ARTIST’S DEATH.–A sad story was told at an inquest held in St. Pancras last night by Dr. Lankester on the body of . . ., aged fifty-nine, a French artist who was found dead in his bed at his rooms in . . . Street. M. . . ., also an artist, said he had known the deceased for fifteen years. He once held a high position, and being anxious to make a name in the world, he five years ago commenced a large picture, which he hoped, when completed, to have in the gallery at Versailles; and with that view he sent a photograph of it to the French Emperor. He also had an idea of sending it to the English Royal Academy. He labored on this picture, neglecting other work which would have paid him well, and gradually sank lower and lower into poverty. His friends assisted him, but being absorbed in his great work, he did not heed their advice, and they left him. He was, however, assisted by the French Ambassador, and last Saturday, he (the witness) saw deceased, who was much depressed in spirits, as he expected the brokers to be put in possession for rent. He said his troubles were so great that he feared his brain would give way. The witness gave him a shilling for which he appeared very thankful. On Monday the witness called upon him, but received no answer to his knock. He went again on Tuesday, and entered the deceased’s bedroom and found him dead. Dr. George Ross said that when called into the deceased he had been dead at least two days. The room was in a filthy, dirty condition, and the picture referred to–certainly a very fine one–was in that room. The post-mortem examination showed that the cause of death was fatty degeneration of the heart, the latter probably having ceased its action through the mental excitement of the deceased.”
160. Thus far the notes of Freedom. Now, lastly, here is some talk which I tried at the time to make intelligible; and with which I close this volume, because it will serve sufficiently to express the practical relation in which I think the art and imagination of the Greeks stand to our own; and will show the reader that my view of that relation is unchanged, from the first day on which I began to write, until now.
***
THE HERCULES OF CAMARINA.
ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ART SCHOOL OF SOUTH LAMBERT, MARCH 15, 1869.
161. Among the photographers of Greek coins which present so many admirable subjects for your study, I must speak for the present of one only: the Hercules of Camarina. You have, represented by a Greek workman, in that coin, the face of a man and the skin of a lion’s head. And the man’s face is like a man’s face, but the lion’s skin is not like a lion’s skin.
162. Now there are some people who will tell you that Greek art is fine, because it is true; and because it carves men’s faces as like men’s as it can.
And there are other people who will tell you that Greek art is fine, because it is not true; and carves a lion’s skin so as to look not at all like a lion’s skin.
And you fancy that one or the other of these sets of people must be wrong, and are perhaps much puzzled to find out which you should believe.
But neither of them are wrong, and you will have eventually to believe, or rather to understand and know, in reconciliation, the truths taught by each; but for the present, the teachers of the first group are those you must follow.
It is they who tell you the deepest and usefullest truth, which involves all others in time. Greek art, and all other art, is fine when it makes a man’s face as like a man’s face as it can. Hold to that. All kinds of nonsense are talked to you, nowadays, ingeniously and irrelevantly about art. Therefore, for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and keep your eyes open: and understand primarily, what you may, I fancy, easily understand, that the greatest masters of all greatest schools–Phidias, Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds–all tried to make human creatures as like human creatures as they could; and that anything less like humanity than their work, is not so good as theirs.
Get that well driven into your heads; and don’t let it out again, at your peril.
163. Having got it well in, you may then further understand, safely, that three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite other qualities than imitative ones. But all such art is inferior and secondary–much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a civilized human creature can only learn those principles rightly, by knowing those of great civilized art first–which is always the representation, to the utmost of its power, of whatever it has got to show–made to look as like the thing as possible. Go into the National Gallery, and look at the foot of Correggio’s Venus there. Correggio made it as like a foot as he could, and you won’t easily find anything liker. Now, you will find on any Greek vase something meant for a foot, or a hand, which is not at all like one. The Greek vase is a good thing in its way, but Correggio’s picture is the best work.
164. So, again, go into the Turner room of the National Gallery, and look at Turner’s drawing of “Ivy Bridge.” You will find the water in it is like real water, and the ducks in it are like real ducks. Then go into the British Museum, and look for an Egyptian landscape, and you will find the water in that constituted of blue zigzags, not at all like water; and ducks in the middle of it made of blue lines, looking not in the least as if they could stand stuffing with sage and onions. They are very good in their way, but Turner’s are better.
165. I will not pause to fence my general principle against what you perfectly well know of the due contradiction,–that a thing may be painted very like, yet painted ill. Rest content with knowing that it must be like, if it is painted well; and take this further general law: Imitation is like charity. When it is done for love it is lovely; when it is done for show, hateful.
166. Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first because the face is like a face. Perhaps you think there is something particularly handsome in the face, which you can’t see in the photograph, or can’t at present appreciate. But there is nothing of the kind. It is a very regular, quiet, commonplace sort of face; and any average English gentleman’s, of good descent, would be far handsomer.
167. Fix that in your heads also, therefore, that Greek faces are not particularly beautiful. Of that much nonsense against which you are to keep your ears shut, that which is talked to you of the Greek ideal of beauty is the absolutest. There is not a single instance of a very beautiful head left by the highest school of Greek art. On coins, there is even no approximately beautiful one. The Juno of Argos is a virago; the Athena of Athens grotesque, the Athena of Corinth is insipid; and of Thurium, sensual. The Siren Ligeia, and fountain of Arethusa, on the coins of Terina and Syracuse, are prettier, but totally without expression, and chiefly set off by their well-curled hair. You might have expected something subtle in Mercuries; but the Mercury of AEnus is a very stupid-looking fellow, in a cap like a bowl, with a knob on the top of it. The Bacchus of Thasos is a drayman with his hair pomatum’d. The Jupiter of Syracurse is, however, calm and refined; and the Apollo of Clazomenae would have been impressive, if he had not come down to us, much flattened by friction. But on the whole, the merit of Greek coins does not primarily depend on beauty of features, nor even, in the period of highest art, that of the statues. You make take the Venus of Melos as a standard of beauty of the central Greek type. She has tranquil, regular, and lofty features; but could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.
168. And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, bores you (and you know it does), is that you are always forced to look in it for something that is not there; but which may be seen every day, in real life, all round you; and which you are naturally disposed to delight in, and ought to delight in. For the Greek race was not at all one of exalted beauty, but only of general and healthy completeness of form. They were only, and could be only, beautiful in body to the degree that they were beautiful in soul (for you will find, when you read deeply into the matter, that the body is only the soul made visible). And the Greeks were indeed very good people, much better people than most of us think, or than many of us are; but there are better people alive now than the best of them, and lovelier people to be seen now than the loveliest of them.
169. Then what are the merits of this Greek art, which make it so exemplary for you? Well, not that it is beautiful, but that it is Right.* All that it desires to do, it does, and all that it does, does well. You will find, as you advance in the knowledge of art, that its laws of self-restraint are very marvelous; that its peace of heart, and contentment in doing a simple thing, with only one or two qualities, restrictedly desired, and sufficiently attained, are a most wholesome element of education for you, as opposed to the wild writhing, and wrestling, and longing for the moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony of eyes, and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out of one’s soul into fiddle-strings, which constitute the ideal life of a modern artist.
* Compare above, sec. 101.
Also observe, there is an entire masterhood of its business up to the required point. A Greek does not reach after other people’s strength, nor outreach his own. He never tries to paint before he can draw; he never tries to lay on flesh where there are no bones; and he never expects to find the bones of anything in his inner consciousness. Those are his first merits–sincere and innocent purpose, strong common-sense and principle, and all the strength that follows on that strength.
170. But, secondly, Greek art is always exemplary in disposition of masses, which is a thing that in modern days students rarely look for, artists not enough, and the public never. But, whatever else Greek work may fail of, you may always be sure its masses are well placed, and their placing has been the object of the most subtle care. Look, for instance, at the inscription in front of this Hercules of the name of the town– Camarina. You can’t read it, even though you may know Greek, without some pains; for the sculptor knew well enough that it mattered very little whether you read it or not, for the Camarina Hercules could tell his own story; but what did above all things matter was, that no K or A or M should come in a wrong place with respect to the outline of the head, and divert the eye from it, or spoil any of its lines. So the whole inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually diminishing size, continuing from the lion’s paws, round the neck, up to the forehead, and answering a decorative purpose as completely as the curls of the mane opposite. Of these, again, you cannot change or displace one without mischief; they are almost as even in reticulation as a piece of basket-work; but each has a different form and a due relation to the rest, and if you set to work to draw that mane rightly, you will find that, whatever time you give to it, you can’t get the tresses quite into their places, and that every tress out of its place does an injury. If you want to test your powers of accurate drawing, you may make that lion’s mane your pons asinorum, I have never yet met with a student who didn’t make an ass in a lion’s skin of himself when he tried it.
171. Granted, however, that these tresses may be finely placed, still they are not like a lion’s mane. So we come back to the question,–if the face is to be like a man’s face, why is not the lion’s mane to be like a lion’s mane? Well, because it can’t be like a lion’s mane without too much trouble,–and inconvenience after that, and poor success, after all. Too much trouble, in cutting the die into fine fringes and jags; inconvenience after that,–because, though you can easily stamp cheeks and foreheads smooth at a blow, you can’t stamp projecting tresses fine at a blow, whatever pains you take with your die.
So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes no time, uses no skill, and says to you, “Here is beautifully set tresses, which I have carefully designed and easily stamped. Enjoy them, and if you cannot understand that they mean lion’s mane, heaven mend your wits.”
172. See, then, you have in this work well-founded knowledge, simple and right aims, thorough mastery of handicraft, splendid invention in arrangement, unerring common sense in treatment,–merits, these, I think, exemplary enough to justify our tormenting you a little with Greek art. But it has one merit more than these, the greatest of all. It always means something worth saying. Not merely worth saying for that time only, but for all time. What do you think this helmet of lion’s hide is always given to Hercules for? You can’t suppose it means only that he once killed a lion, and always carried its skin afterwards to show that he had, as Indian sportsmen sent home stuffed rugs, with claws at the corners, and a lump in the middle which one tumbles over every time one stirs the fire. What was this Nemean Lion, whose spoils were evermore to cover Hercules from the cold? Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo, ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that. This Nemean cub was one of a bad litter. Born of Typhon and Echidna,–of the whirlwind and the snake,–Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna his sister,–it must have been difficult to get his hide off him. He had to be found in darkness, too, and dealt upon without weapons, by grip at the throat– arrows and club of no avail against him. What does all that mean?
173. It means that the Nemean Lion is the first great adversary of life, whatever that may be–to Hercules, or to any of us, then or now. The first monster we have to strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the dark, and with none to help us, only Athena standing by to encourage with her smile. Every man’s Nemean Lion lies in wait for him somewhere. The slothful man says, There is a lion in the path. He says well. The quiet unslothful man says the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their further reading of the text. The slothful man says, I shall be slain, and the unslothful, IT shall be. It is the first ugly and strong enemy that rises against us, all future victory depending on victory over that. Kill it; and through all the rest of your life, what was once dreadful is your armor, and you are clothed with that conquest for every other, and helmed with its crest of fortitude for evermore.
Alas, we have most of us to walk bare-headed; but that is the meaning of the story of Nemea,–worth laying to heart and thinking of sometimes, when you see a dish garnished with parsley, which was the crown at the Nemean games.
174. How far, then, have we got in our list of the merits of Greek art now?
Sound knowledge.
Simple aims.
Mastered craft.
Vivid invention.
Strong common sense.
And eternally true and wise meaning.
Are these not enough? Here is one more, then, which will find favor, I should think, with the British Lion. Greek art is never frightened at anything; it is always cool.
175. It differs essentially from all other art, past or present, in this incapability of being frightened. Half the power and imagination of every other school depend on a certain feverish terror mingling with their sense of beauty,–the feeling that a child has in a dark room, or a sick person in seeing ugly dreams. But the Greeks never have ugly dreams. They cannot draw anything ugly when they try. Sometimes they put themselves to their wits’-end to draw an ugly thing,–the Medusa’s head, for instance,–but they can’t do it, not they, because nothing frightens them. They widen the mouth, and grind the teeth, and puff the cheeks, and set the eyes a goggling; and the thing is only ridiculous after all, not the least dreadful, for there is no dread in their hearts. Pensiveness; amazement; often deepest grief and desolateness. All these; but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all fate; and joy such as they could win, not indeed in a perfect beauty, but in beauty at perfect rest! A kind of art this, surely, to be looked at, and thought upon sometimes with profit, even in these latter days.
176. To be looked at sometimes. Not continually, and never as a model for imitation. For you are not Greeks; but, for better or worse, English creatures; and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth doing, anything well, except what your English hearts shall prompt, and your English skies teach you. For all good art is the natural utterance of its own people in its own day.
But also, your own art is a better and brighter one than ever this Greek art was. Many motives, powers, and insights have been added to those elder ones. The very corruptions into which we have fallen are signs of a subtle life, higher than theirs was, and therefore more fearful in its faults and death. Christianity has neither superceded, nor, by itself, excelled heathenism; but it has added its own good, won also by many a Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all that was good and noble in heathenism; and our present thoughts and work, when they are right, are nobler than the heathen’s. And we are not reverent enough to them, because we possess too much of them. That sketch of four cherub heads from and English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did. Ineffably tender in the touch, yet Herculean in power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure in color as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion crest, –if it alone existed of such,–if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only one left in the world, and you build a shrine for it, and were allowed to see it only seven days in a year, it alone would teach you all of art that you ever needed to know. But you do not learn from this or any other such work, because you have not reverence enough for them, and are trying to learn from all at once, and from a hundred other masters besides.
177. Here, then, is the practical advice which I would venture to deduce from what I have tried to show you. Use Greek art as a first, not a final, teacher. Learn to draw carefully from Greek work; above all, to place forms correctly, and to use light and shade tenderly. Never allow yourselves black shadows. It is easy to make things look round and projecting; but the things to exercise yourselves in are the placing of the masses, and the modelling of the lights. It is an admirable exercise to take a pale wash of color for all the shadows, never reinforcing it everywhere, but drawing the statue as if it were in far distance, making all the darks one flat pale tint. Then model from those into the lights, rounding as well as you can, on those subtle conditions. In your chalk drawings, separate the lights from the darks at once all over; then reinforce the darks slightly where absolutely necessary, and put your whole strength on the lights and their limits. Then, when you have learned to draw thoroughly, take one master for your painting, as you would have done necessarily in old times by being put into his school (were I to choose for you, it should be among six men only–Titian, Correggio, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Reynolds, or Holbein). If you are a landscapist, Turner must be your only guide (for no other great landscape painter has yet lived); and having chosen, do your best to understand your own chosen master, and obey him, and no one else, till you have strength to deal with the nature itself round you, and then, be your own master, and see with your own eyes. If you have got masterhood or sight in you, that is the way to make the most of them; and if you have neither, you will at least be sound in your work, prevented from immodest and useless effort, and protected from vulgar and fantastic error.
And so I wish you all, good speed, and the favor of Hercules and of the Muses; and to those who shall best deserve them, the crown of Parsley first and then of the Laurel.