rent motives and perceptions, and the result
is divine. On the whole, I conceive that the extremes of good and evil
lie with the finishers, and that whatever glorious power we may admit in
men like Tintoret, whatever attractiveness of method to Rubens,
Rembrandt, or, though in far less degree, our own Reynolds, still the
thoroughly great men are those who have done everything thoroughly, and
who, in a word, have never despised anything, however small, of God's
making. And this is the chief fault of our English landscapists, that
they have not the intense all-observing penetration of well-balanced
mind; they have not, except in one or two instances, anything of that
feeling which Wordsworth shows in the following lines:--

"So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive;--
Would that the little flowers were born to live
Conscious of half the pleasure which they give.
That to this mountain daisy's self were known
_The beauty of its star-shaped shadow, thrown
On the smooth surface of this naked stone._"

That is a little bit of good, downright, foreground painting--no mistake
about it; daisy, and shadow, and stone texture and all. Our painters
must come to this before they have done their duty; and yet, on the
other hand, let them beware of finishing, for the sake of finish, all
over their picture. The ground is not to be all over daisies, nor is
every daisy to have its star-shaped shadow; there is as much finish in
the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them; and
while I demand this amount of specific character where nature shows it,
I demand equal fidelity to her where she conceals it. To paint mist
rightly, space rightly, and light rightly, it may be often necessary to
paint nothing else rightly, but the rule is simple for all that; if the
artist is painting something that he knows and loves, as he knows it
because he loves it, whether it be the fair strawberry of Cima, or the
clear sky of Francia, or the blazing incomprehensible mist of Turner, he
is all right; but the moment he does anything as he thinks it ought to
be, because he does not care about it, he is all wrong. He has only to
ask himself whether he cares for anything except himself; so far as he
does he will make a good picture; so far as he thinks of himself a vile
one. This is the root of the viciousness of the whole French school.
Industry they have, learning they have,