OF
BEAUTY IN THE PAINTER'S OWN MIND; and that in every art, whether its
plastic expression be found in words or marble, colours or sounds, the
servile imitation of Nature is the work of journeymen and tyros,--so in
conduct the man of the world vitiates and lowers the bold enthusiasm of
loftier natures by the perpetual reduction of whatever is generous and
trustful to all that is trite and coarse. A great German poet has well
defined the distinction between discretion and the larger wisdom. In the
last there is a certain rashness which the first disdains,--

"The purblind see but the receding shore, Not that to which the bold
wave wafts them o'er."

Yet in this logic of the prudent and the worldly there is often a
reasoning unanswerable of its kind.

You must have a feeling,--a faith in whatever is self-sacrificing
and divine, whether in religion or in art, in glory or in love; or
Common-sense will reason you out of the sacrifice, and a syllogism will
debase the Divine to an article in the market.

Every true critic in art, from Aristotle and Pliny, from Winkelman and
Vasari to Reynolds and Fuseli, has sought to instruct the painter that
Nature is not to be copied, but EXALTED; that the loftiest order of art,
selecting only the loftiest combinations, is the perpetual struggle of
Humanity to approach the gods. The great painter, as the great author,
embodies what is POSSIBLE to MAN, it is true, but what is not COMMON
to MANKIND. There is truth in Hamlet; in Macbeth, and his witches; in
Desdemona; in Othello; in Prospero, and in Caliban; there is truth in
the cartoons of Raphael; there is truth in the Apollo, the Antinous,
and the Laocoon. But you do not meet the originals of the words, the
cartoons, or the marble, in Oxford Street or St. James's. All these, to
return to Raphael, are the creatures of the idea in the artist's mind.
This idea is not inborn, it has come from an intense study. But that
study has been of the ideal that can be raised from the positive and
the actual into grandeur and beauty. The commonest model becomes full of
exquisite suggestions to him who has formed this idea; a Venus of flesh
and blood would be vulgarised by the imitation of him who has not.

When asked where he got his models, Guido summoned a common porter from
his calling, and drew from a mean original a head of surpassing beauty.
It resembled the porter, but idealised the porter to the hero. It was
true, but it was not real. There