kely to come of them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as
to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build
their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering
millions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this,
could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness
of the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and
bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on
it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we
desired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the whole
intellect into general strength, and all the affections into warmth and
honesty, and look to heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have
sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words: but, it being
required to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to
work? We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or
sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her;
but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the
better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do
himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, he
is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet
this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules,
is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a
principle shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's
heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the
personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order,
which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen
is to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of
teaching which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!

But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense
of the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of
our younger painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones,
our older men having become familiarised with the false system,
or else having passed t