n us--ever
since the Conquest, if not earlier:--a delight in the forms of burlesque
which are connected in some degree with the foulness in evil. I think
the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible
temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for
the most part full of thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of
an April morning, there are, even in the midst of this, sometimes
momentarily jesting passages which stoop to play with evil--while the
power of listening to and enjoying the jesting of entirely gross
persons, whatever the feeling may be which permits it, afterwards
degenerates into forms of humour which render some of quite the
greatest, wisest, and most moral of English writers now almost useless
for our youth. And yet you will find that whenever Englishmen are
wholly without this instinct, their genius is comparatively weak and
restricted.

Now, the first necessity for the doing of any great work in ideal art,
is the looking upon all foulness with horror, as a contemptible though
dreadful enemy. You may easily understand what I mean, by comparing
the feelings with which Dante regards any form of obscenity or of base
jest, with the temper in which the same things are regarded by
Shakspere. And this strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it
is, in our good men, with great simplicity and common sense, renders
them shrewd and perfect observers and delineators of actual nature,
low or high; but precludes them from that speciality of art which is
properly called sublime. If ever we try anything in the manner of
Michael Angelo or of Dante, we catch a fall, even in literature, as
Milton in the battle of the angels, spoiled from Hesiod:[174] while in
art, every attempt in this style has hitherto been the sign either of
the presumptuous egotism of persons who had never really learned to be
workmen, or it has been connected with very tragic forms of the
contemplation of death,--it has always been partly insane, and never
once wholly successful.

But we need not feel any discomfort in these limitations of our
capacity. We can do much that others cannot, and more than we have
ever yet ourselves completely done. Our first great gift is in the
portraiture of living people--a power already so accomplished in both
Reynolds and Gainsborough, that nothing is left for future masters but
to add the calm of perfect workmanship to their vigour and felicity of
perception. And of wh