to authority
instead of originality, in the early stages of education, because when
he went to Italy he met the greatest experience of his life. He found
that much of his originality was wrong.

If Sir Joshua Reynolds had gone to Italy earlier he would never have
been heard of except as a copyist, lecturer, or colour-commentator. The
real value of Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Discourses on Art" is the man in
spite of the lecturer. What the man stands for is,--Be original. Get
headway of personal experience, some power of self-teaching. Then when
you have something to work on, organs that act and react on what is
presented to them, confront your Italy--whatever it may be--and the
Past, and give yourself over to it. The result is paradox and power, a
receptive, creative man, an obeying and commanding, but self-centred and
self-poised man, world-open, subject to the whole world and yet who has
a whole world subject to him, either by turns or at will.

What Sir Joshua conveys to his pupils is not his art, but his mere
humility about his art--_i. e._, his most belated experience, his
finishing touch, as an artist.

The result is that having accidentally received an ideal education,
having begun his education properly, with self-command, he completed his
career with a kind of Reynoldsocracy--a complacent, teachery,
levelling-down command of others. While Sir Joshua Reynolds was an
artist, he became one because he did not follow his own advice. The fact
that he would have followed it if he had had a chance shows what his art
shows, namely, that he did not intend to be any more original than he
could help. It is interesting, however, that having acquired the blemish
of originality in early youth, he never could get rid of enough of it
before he died, not to be tolerated among the immortals.

His career is in many ways the most striking possible illustration of
what can be brought to pass when a human being without genius is by
accident brought up with the same principles and order of education and
training that men of genius have--education by one's self; education by
others, under the direction of one's self. Sir Joshua Reynolds would
have been incapable of education by others under direction of himself,
if he had not been kept ignorant and creative and English, long enough
to get a good start with himself before he went down to Italy to run a
race with Five Hundred Years. In his naive, almost desperate shame over
the plight of