that language be not good and lovely, the man may indeed be a
just moralist or a great poet, but he is not a _painter_, and it was
wrong of him to paint. He had much better put his morality into sermons,
and his poetry into verse, than into a language of which he was not
master. And this mastery of the language is that of which we should be
cognizant by a glance of the eye; and if that be not found, it is wasted
time to look farther: the man has mistaken his vocation, and his
expression of himself will be cramped by his awkward efforts to do what
he was not fit to do. On the other hand, if the man be a painter indeed,
and have the gift of colors and lines, what is in him will come from his
hand freely and faithfully; and the language itself is so difficult and
so vast, that the mere possession of it argues the man is great, and
that his works are worth reading. So that I have never yet seen the case
in which this true artistical excellence, visible by the eye-glance, was
not the index of some true expressional worth in the work. Neither have
I ever seen a good expressional work without high artistical merit: and
that this is ever denied is only owing to the narrow view which men are
apt to take both of expression and of art; a narrowness consequent on
their own especial practice and habits of thought. A man long trained to
love the monk's visions of Fra Angelico, turns in proud and ineffable
disgust from the first work of Rubens which he encounters on his return
across the Alps. But is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten,
that while Angelico prayed and wept in his _olive shade_, there was
different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders;--wild seas to be
banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be
drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful
breeding of stout horses and fat cattle; close setting of brick walls
against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands and gross
stoutening of bodies in all this; gross jovialities of harvest homes and
Christmas feasts, which were to be the reward of it; rough affections,
and sluggish imagination; fleshy, substantial, ironshod humanities, but
humanities still; humanities which God had his eye upon, and which won,
perhaps, here and there, as much favor in his sight as the wasted
aspects of the whispering monks of Florence (Heaven forbid it should not
be so, since the most of us cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and
reaper