erceive in a John Dory;
and this piece of paper contains, therefore, much more, and more subtle,
art, than the Japan ivory; but are we sure that it is therefore
_greater_ art? or that the painter was better employed in producing this
drawing, which only one person can possess, and only one in a hundred
enjoy, than he would have been in producing two or three pieces on a
larger scale, which should have been at once accessible to, and
enjoyable by, a number of simpler persons? Suppose, for instance, that
Turner, instead of faintly touching this outline, on white paper, with
his camel's-hair pencil, had struck the main forms of his fish into
marble, thus, (Fig. 7); and instead of coloring the white paper so
delicately that, perhaps, only a few of the most keenly observant
artists in England can see it at all, had, with his strong hand, tinted
the marble with a few colors, deceptive to the people, and harmonious to
the initiated; suppose that he had even conceded so much to the spirit
of popular applause as to allow of a bright glass bead being inlaid for
the eye, in the Japanese manner; and that the enlarged, deceptive, and
popularly pleasing work had been carved on the outside of a great
building,--say Fishmongers' Hall,--where everybody commercially
connected with Billingsgate could have seen it, and ratified it with a
wisdom of the market;--might not the art have been greater, worthier,
and kinder in such use?

[Illustration: FIG. 7.]

132. Perhaps the idea does not at once approve itself to you of having
your public buildings covered with ornaments; but, pray remember that
the choice of _subject_ is an ethical question, not now before us. All I
ask you to decide is whether the method is right, and would be pleasant,
in giving the distinctiveness to pretty things, which it has here given
to what, I suppose it may be assumed, you feel to be an ugly thing. Of
course, I must note parenthetically, such realistic work is impossible
in a country where the buildings are to be discolored by coal-smoke; but
so is all fine sculpture whatsoever; and the whiter, the worse its
chance. For that which is prepared for private persons, to be kept under
cover, will, of necessity, degenerate into the copyism of past work, or
merely sensational and sensual forms of present life, unless there be a
governing school addressing the populace, for their instruction, on the
outside of buildings. So that, as I partly warned you in my Third
Lectu