al, but the vital element; and this
desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always
leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any
exception. They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will
permit themselves in ugliness;--but they will never permit themselves
in uselessness or in unveracity.

And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much
more their desire for truth. It is impossible to find the three
motives in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. He
rejoices in showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in
learning what painters' work really is, will one day rejoice also,
even to laughter--that highest laughter which springs of pure delight,
in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth
its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea.
He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he
will never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is
unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But all his power and all
his invention are held by him subordinate,--and the more obediently
because of their nobleness,-to his true leading purpose of setting
before you such likeness of the living presence of an English
gentleman or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon
for ever.

But farther, you remember, I hope--for I said it in a way that I
thought would shock you a little, that you might remember it--my
statement, that art had never done more than this, never more than
given the likeness of a noble human being. Not only so, but it very
seldom does so much as this, and the best pictures that exist of the
great schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very
simple and nowise noble persons. You may have much more brilliant and
impressive qualities in imaginative pictures; you may have figures
scattered like clouds, or garlanded like flowers; you may have light
and shade as of a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow; but all that
is child's play to the great men, though it is astonishment to us.
Their real strength is tried to the utmost, and as far as I know, it
is never elsewhere brought out so thoroughly, as in painting one man
or woman, and the soul that was in them; nor that always the highest
soul, but often only a thwarted one that was capable of height; or
perhaps not even that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to