are two things to be considered
in every picture: first, the quality of the idea expressed, and second,
the quality of the language in which it is expressed. Now, with regard
to the first, I hold that every person of cultivated taste is as good a
judge of painting as of poetry. The second, which relates to the mode of
expressing the conception, including drawing and coloring, with all
their secrets, requires more study, and here our untaught perceptions
must sometimes yield to the judgment of artists. My first question,
then, when I look at the work of an artist, is, What sort of a mind has
this man? What has he to say? And then I consider, How does he say it?

Now, with regard to Murillo, it appeared to me that he was a man of
rather a mediocre mind, with nothing very high or deep to say, but that
he was gifted with an exquisite faculty of expressing what he did say;
and his paintings seem to me to bear an analogy to Pope's poetry,
wherein the power of expression is wrought to the highest point, but
without freshness or ideality in the conception. As Pope could reproduce
in most exquisite wording the fervent ideas of Eloisa, without the power
to originate such, so Murillo reproduced the current and floating
religious ideas of his times, with most exquisite perfection of art and
color, but without ideality or vitality. The pictures of his which
please me most are his beggar boys and flower girls, where he abandons
the region of ideality, and simply reproduces nature. His art and
coloring give an exquisite grace to such sketches.

As to Vandyke, though evidently a fine painter, he is one whose mind
does not move me. He adds nothing to my stock of thoughts--awakens no
emotion. I know it is a fine picture, just as I have sometimes been
conscious in church that I was hearing a fine sermon, which somehow had
not the slightest effect upon me.

Rubens, on the contrary, whose pictures I detested with all the energy
of my soul, I knew and felt all the time, by the very pain he gave me,
to be a real living artist. There was a Venus and Cupid there, as fat
and as coarse as they could be, but so freely drawn, and so masterly in
their expression and handling, that one must feel that they were by an
artist, who could just as easily have painted them any other way if it
had suited his sovereign pleasure, and therefore we are the more vexed
with him. When your taste is crossed by a clever person, it always vexes
you more than when i