. Every man was great in its eyes, not
by his perishable members, but by his immortal soul. With this religion
begins the reign of painting, which is a more subtle art, more
immaterial, than the others--more expressive, and also more individual.
We will give some proofs of it. Instead of acting, like architecture and
sculpture, upon the three dimensions of heavy matter, painting acts only
upon one surface, and produces its effects with an imponderable thing,
which is color--that is to say, light. Hegel has said with admirable
wisdom: 'In sculpture and architecture forms are rendered visible by
exterior light. In painting, on the contrary, matter, obscure in itself,
has within itself its internal element, its ideal--light: it draws from
itself both clearness and obscurity. Now, unity, the combination of
light and dark, is color.' The painter, then, proposes to himself to
represent, not bodies with their real thickness, but simply their
appearance, their image; but by this means it is the mind which he
addresses. Visible but impalpable, and in some sense immaterial, his
work does not meet the touch, which is the sight of the body: it only
meets the eye, which is the touch of the soul. Painting is then, from
this point of view, the essential art of Christianity.... If the
painter, like Phidias or Lysippus, had only to portray the types of
humanity, the majesty of Jupiter, the strength of Hercules, he might do
without the riches of color, and paint in one tone, modified only by
light and shade; but the most heroic man among Christians is not a
demigod: he is a being profoundly individual, tormented, combating,
suffering, and who throughout his real life shares with environing
Nature, and receives from every side the reflection of her colors.
Sculpture, generalizing, raises itself to the dignity of
allegory--painting, individualizing, descends to the familiarity of
portraiture."

Let us now return to consider William Hunt's pictures from this second
point of view. The gift of Verity having been already assumed, can we
also discern that higher power of Imagination whose crown and seal is
the Beautiful. To decide this question we have, unhappily, to consider
his work as lyrical, rather than dramatic, and for this reason we must
study his power under disadvantage. That he possesses dramatic power
will hardly be denied by those who know his "Hamlet," "The Drummer-Boy,"
and "The Boy and the Butterfly;" but the exigencies of life