rst visit to Antwerp I looked for a few
minutes--which was as long, as I could bear it--at the great Descent
from the Cross in the cathedral, and turned away with the conviction
that I could never have anything but distressing and disagreeable
impressions from that picture. Six months afterward I was in Antwerp
again: I could not see the Descent often enough, and spent my last
hour in the place before it. Yet he is a brutal painter withal, and
such subjects, however magnificently treated by him, could never give
me the same unmixed enjoyment as in the hands of the gentle and
pensive Vandyke.

Some people maintain that all great works of art speak for themselves,
and will make their appeal at once to a person capable of appreciating
them, without any previous experience or education. This is
impossible, for were it so the fine arts would be an exception to the
rules which govern everything else in life--music, literature, moral
beauty and the beauties of Nature. It must be with them as with other
things: knowledge, cultivation, practice enhance the power of
enjoyment. Of course, in this, as in all matters, individual
organization will tell powerfully; but take an intelligent, educated
person of average perceptions, who has never seen a single good
picture, and set him before one of the greatest in the world, and I
doubt if he would receive any genuine pleasure from it. _A fortiori_,
an uneducated person, one who could appreciate the first masterpiece
he ever saw the first time he ever saw it, would be a prodigy only
second to him who could produce one without preliminary study. The
picture which I think calculated to appeal most powerfully and
universally is Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, where the grouping of
the figures and the expression of each head, as well as the
disposition of the whole, can hardly fail to produce a deep impression
on any one of thought and feeling; yet even here there would be a
first shock, to any untrained eye, from the faded colors, the defaced
and spotted surface; and this must be got over before the fresco can
be even seen. Moreover, in my experience, there is no pleasure
connected with the whole business of seeing galleries like that of
revisiting them: not only should we return to them daily on first
acquaintance, but we should make a practice of seeing them again after
an interval of months whenever it can be done: it is surprising what a
comprehension and enjoyment of their chief trea