nd to all
the ages, we have set ourselves to discover fantastic modes of doing
fantastic things,--new mixtures and manipulations of metal, and
porcelain, and leather, and paper, and every conceivable condition of
false substance and cheap work, to our own infinitely multiplied
confusion,--blinding ourselves daily more and more to the great,
changeless, and inevitable truth, that there is but one goodness in art;
and that is one which the chemist cannot prepare, nor the merchant
cheapen, for it comes only of a rare human hand, and rare human soul.

Sec. XVII. Within its due limits, however, here is one branch of science
which the artist may pursue; and, within limits still more strict,
another also, namely, the science of the appearances of things as they
have been ascertained and registered by his fellow-men. For no day
passes but some visible fact is pointed out to us by others, which,
without their help, we should not have noticed; and the accumulation and
generalization of visible facts have formed, in the succession of ages,
the sciences of light and shade, and perspective, linear and aerial: so
that the artist is now at once put in possession of certain truths
respecting the appearances of things, which, so pointed out to him, any
man may in a few days understand and acknowledge; but which, without
aid, he could not probably discover in his lifetime. I say, probably
could not, because the time which the history of art shows us to have
been actually occupied in the discovery and systematization of such
truth, is no measure of the time _necessary_ for such discovery. The
lengthened period which elapsed between the earliest and the perfect
developement of the science of light (if I may so call it) was not
occupied in the actual effort to ascertain its laws, but in _acquiring
the disposition to make that effort_. It did not take five centuries to
find out the appearance of natural objects; but it took five centuries
to make people care about representing them. An artist of the twelfth
century did not desire to represent nature. His work was symbolical and
ornamental. So long as it was intelligible and lovely, he had no care to
make it like nature. As, for instance, when an old painter represented
the glory round a saint's head by a burnished plate of pure gold, he had
no intention of imitating an effect of light. He meant to tell the
spectator that the figure so decorated was a saint, and to produce
splendor of effect