ould
acknowledge; it is probably of the habits of the people more than their
hearts; continued efforts of this kind, especially if their subjects be
varied, assuredly end in failure; Lewis, who seemed so eminently
penetrative in Spain, sent nothing from Italy but complexions and
costumes, and I expect no good from his stay in Egypt. English artists
are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy, but for this there
are collateral causes which it is not here the place to examine. Be this
as it may, and whatever success may be attained in pictures of slight
and unpretending aim, of genre, as they are called, in the rendering of
foreign character, of this I am certain, that whatever is to be truly
great and affecting must have on it the strong stamp of the native land;
not a law this, but a necessity, from the intense hold on their country
of the affections of all truly great men; all classicality, all
middle-age patent reviving, is utterly vain and absurd; if we are now to
do anything great, good, awful, religious, it must be got out of our own
little island, and out of this year 1846, railroads and all: if a
British painter, I say this in earnest seriousness, cannot make
historical characters out of the British House of Peers, he cannot paint
history; and if he cannot make a Madonna of a British girl of the
nineteenth century, he cannot paint one at all.

Sec. 38. Influence of this feeling on the choice of Landscape subject.

The rule, of course, holds in landscape; yet so far less
authoritatively, that the material nature of all countries and times is
in many points actually, and in all, in principle, the same; so that
feelings educated in Cumberland, may find their food in Switzerland, and
impressions first received among the rocks of Cornwall, be recalled upon
the precipices of Genoa. Add to this actual sameness, the power of every
great mind to possess itself of the spirit of things once presented to
it, and it is evident, that little limitation can be set to the
landscape painter as to the choice of his field; and that the law of
nationality will hold with him only so far as a certain joyfulness and
completion will be by preference found in those parts of his subject
which remind him of his own land. But if he attempt to impress on his
landscapes any other spirit than that he has felt, and to make them
landscapes of other times, it is all over with him, at least, in the
degree in which such reflected moonshine