measures; nor, in painting, on invention of new colours, or new modes
of using them. The chords of music, the harmonies of colour, the
general principles of the arrangement of sculptural masses, have been
determined long ago, and, in all probability, cannot be added to any
more than they can be altered. Granting that they may be, such
additions or alterations are much more the work of time and of
multitudes than of individual inventors. We may have one Van Eyck,[170]
who will be known as the introducer of a new style once in ten
centuries, but he himself will trace his invention to some accidental
by-play or pursuit; and the use of that invention will depend
altogether on the popular necessities or instincts of the period.
Originality depends on nothing of the kind. A man who has the gift,
will take up any style that is going, the style of his day, and will
work in that, and be great in that, and make everything that he does in
it look as fresh as if every thought of it had just come down from
heaven. I do not say that he will not take liberties with his
materials, or with his rules: I do not say that strange changes will
not sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his fancies, in both. But
those changes will be instructive, natural, facile, though sometimes
marvellous; they will never be sought after as things necessary to his
dignity or to his independence; and those liberties will be like the
liberties that a great speaker takes with the language, not a defiance
of its rules for the sake of singularity; but inevitable, uncalculated,
and brilliant consequences of an effort to express what the language,
without such infraction, could not. There may be times when, as I have
above described, the life of an art is manifested in its changes, and
in its refusal of ancient limitations: so there are in the life of an
insect; and there is great interest in the state of both the art and
the insect at those periods when, by their natural progress and
constitutional power, such changes are about to be wrought. But as that
would be both an Uncomfortable and foolish caterpillar which, instead
of being contented with a caterpillar's life and feeding on
caterpillar's food, was always striving to turn itself into a
chrysalis; and as that would be an unhappy chrysalis which should lie
awake at night and roll restlessly in its cocoon, in efforts to turn
itself prematurely into a moth; so will that art be unhappy and
unprosperous which, i