night in hasty march, or by the borderer in
heedless rapine.

The elements of progress and decline being thus strangely mingled in
the modern mind, we might beforehand anticipate that one of the
notable characters of our art would be its inconsistency; that efforts
would be made in every direction, and arrested by every conceivable
cause and manner of failure; that in all we did, it would become next
to impossible to distinguish accurately the grounds for praise or for
regret; that all previous canons of practice and methods of thought
would be gradually overthrown, and criticism continually defied by
successes which no one had expected, and sentiments which no one could
define.

Accordingly, while, in our inquiries into Greek and mediaeval art, I
was able to describe, in general terms, what all men did or felt, I
find now many characters in many men; some, it seems to me, founded on
the inferior and evanescent principles of modernism, on its
recklessness, impatience, or faithlessness; others founded on its
science, its new affection for nature, its love of openness and
liberty. And among all these characters, good or evil, I see that
some, remaining to us from old or transitional periods, do not
properly belong to us, and will soon fade away, and others, though not
yet distinctly developed, are yet properly our own, and likely to grow
forward into greater strength.

For instance: our reprobation of bright colour is, I think, for the
most part, mere affectation, and must soon be done away with.
Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety, will indeed always express themselves
through art in brown and grey, as in Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and
Salvator; but we are not wholly vulgar, dull, or impious; nor, as
moderns, are we necessarily obliged to continue so in any wise. Our
greatest men, whether sad or gay, still delight, like the great men of
all ages, in brilliant hues. The colouring of Scott and Byron is full
and pure; that of Keats and Tennyson rich even to excess. Our
practical failures in colouring are merely the necessary consequences
of our prolonged want of practice during the periods of Renaissance
affectation and ignorance; and the only durable difference between old
and modern colouring, is the acceptance of certain hues, by the
modern, which please him by expressing that melancholy peculiar to his
more reflective or sentimental character, and the greater variety of
them necessary to express his greater science.

Again