ter as ever lived, but no one
told him what to paint, and he studied the antique, and the grand
schools, and painted dances of nymphs in red and yellow shawls to the
end of his days. Much good may they do you! He is gone to the grave, a
lost mind. There was Flaxman, another naturally great man, with as true
an eye for nature as Raphael,--he stumbles over the blocks of the
antique statues--wanders in the dark valley of their ruins to the end of
his days. He has left you a few outlines of muscular men straddling and
frowning behind round shields. Much good may they do you! Another lost
mind. And of those who are lost namelessly, who have not strength enough
even to make themselves known, the poor pale students who lie buried
forever in the abysses of the great schools, no account can be rendered;
they are numberless.

130. And the wonderful thing is, that of all these men whom you now have
come to call the great masters, there was _not one_ who confessedly did
not paint his own present world, plainly and truly. Homer sang of what
he saw; Phidias carved what he saw; Raphael painted the men of his own
time in their own caps and mantles; and every man who has arisen to
eminence in modern times has done so altogether by his working in their
way, and doing the things he saw. How did Reynolds rise? Not by painting
Greek women, but by painting the glorious little living Ladies this, and
Ladies that, of his own time. How did Hogarth rise? Not by painting
Athenian follies, but London follies. Who are the men who have made an
impression upon you yourselves--upon your own age? I suppose the most
popular painter of the day is Landseer. Do you suppose he studied dogs
and eagles out of the Elgin Marbles? And yet in the very face of these
plain, incontrovertible, all-visible facts, we go on from year to year
with the base system of Academy teaching, in spite of which every one of
these men has risen: I say _in spite_ of the entire method and aim of
our art-teaching. It destroys the greater number of its pupils
altogether; it hinders and paralyzes the greatest. There is not a living
painter whose eminence is not in spite of everything he has been taught
from his youth upwards, and who, whatever his eminence may be, has not
suffered much injury in the course of his victory. For observe: this
love of what is called ideality or beauty in preference to truth,
operates not only in making us choose the past rather than the present
for our subj