the masterful sight. So that in order to put before you in your
Standard series, the best art possible, I am obliged, even from the very
strongest men, to take portraits, before I take the idealism. Nay,
whatever is best in the great compositions themselves has depended on
portraiture; and the study necessary to enable you to understand
invention will also convince you that the mind of man never invented a
greater thing than the form of man, animated by faithful life. Every
attempt to refine or exalt such healthy humanity has weakened or
caricatured it; or else consists only in giving it, to please our fancy,
the wings of birds, or the eyes of antelopes. Whatever is truly great in
either Greek or Christian art, is also restrictedly human; and even the
raptures of the redeemed souls who enter, "celestemente ballando," the
gate of Angelico's Paradise, were seen first in the terrestrial, yet
most pure, mirth of Florentine maidens.

104. I am aware that this cannot but at present appear gravely
questionable to those of my audience who are strictly cognisant of the
phases of Greek art; for they know that the moment of its decline is
accurately marked, by its turning from abstract form to portraiture. But
the reason of this is simple. The progressive course of Greek art was in
subduing monstrous conceptions to natural ones; it did this by general
laws; it reached absolute truth of generic human form, and if this
ethical force had remained, would have advanced into healthy
portraiture. But at the moment of change the national life ended in
Greece; and portraiture, there, meant insult to her religion, and
flattery to her tyrants. And her skill perished, not because she became
true in sight, but because she became vile at heart.

105. And now let us think of our own work, and ask how that may become,
in its own poor measure, active in some verity of representation. We
certainly cannot begin by drawing kings or queens; but we must try, even
in our earliest work, if it is to prosper, to draw something that will
convey true knowledge both to ourselves and others. And I think you will
find greatest advantage in the endeavour to give more life and
educational power to the simpler branches of natural science: for the
great scientific men are all so eager in advance that they have no time
to popularise their discoveries, and if we can glean after them a
little, and make pictures of the things which science describes, we
shall find