historical painting? Now-a-days it means the
endeavoring, by the power of imagination, to portray some historical
event of past days. But in the Middle Ages, it meant representing the
acts of _their own_ days; and that is the only historical painting worth
a straw. Of all the wastes of time and sense which Modernism has
invented--and they are many--none are so ridiculous as this endeavor to
represent past history. What do you suppose our descendants will care
for our imaginations of the events of former days? Suppose the Greeks,
instead of representing their own warriors as they fought at Marathon,
had left us nothing but their imaginations of Egyptian battles; and
suppose the Italians, in like manner, instead of portraits of Can Grande
and Dante, or of Leo the Tenth and Raphael, had left us nothing but
imaginary portraits of Pericles and Miltiades? What fools we should have
thought them! how bitterly we should have been provoked with their
folly! And that is precisely what our descendants will feel towards us,
so far as our grand historical and classical schools are concerned. What
do we care, they will say, what those nineteenth century people fancied
about Greek and Roman history! If they had left us a few plain and
rational sculptures and pictures of their own battles, and their own
men, in their every-day dress, we should have thanked them. "Well, but,"
you will say, "we _have_ left them portraits of our great men, and
paintings of our great battles." Yes, you have indeed, and that is the
only historical painting that you either have, or can have; but you
don't _call_ that historical painting. You don't thank the men who do
it; you look down upon them and dissuade them from it, and tell them
they don't belong to the grand schools. And yet they are the only true
historical painters, and the only men who will produce any effect on
their own generation, or on any other. Wilkie was a historical painter,
Chantrey a historical sculptor, because they painted, or carved, the
veritable things and men they saw, not men and things as they believed
they might have been, or should have been. But no one tells such men
they are historical painters, and they are discontented with what they
do; and poor Wilkie must needs travel to see the grand school, and
imitate the grand school, and ruin himself. And you have had multitudes
of other painters ruined, from the beginning, by that grand school.
There was Etty, naturally as good a pain