adly, and forcibly, the vital difference
between ancient and modern art.

The worst characters of modern work result from its constant appeal to
our desire of change, and pathetic excitement; while the best features
of the elder art appealed to love of contemplation. It would appear to
be the object of the truest artists to give permanence to images such
as we should always desire to behold, and might behold without
agitation; while the inferior branches of design are concerned with
the acuter passions which depend on the turn of a narrative, or the
course of an emotion. Where it is possible to unite these two sources
of pleasure, and, as in the Assumption of Titian, an action of
absorbing interest is united with perfect and perpetual elements of
beauty, the highest point of conception would appear to have been
touched: but in the degree in which the interest of action
_supersedes_ beauty of form and colour, the art is lowered; and where
real deformity enters, in any other degree than as a momentary shadow
or opposing force, the art is illegitimate. Such art can exist only by
accident, when a nation has forgotten or betrayed the eternal purposes
of its genius, and gives birth to painters whom it cannot teach, and
to teachers whom it will not hear. The best talents of all our English
painters have been spent either in endeavours to find room for the
expression of feelings which no master guided to a worthy end, or to
obtain the attention of a public whose mind was dead to natural
beauty, by sharpness of satire, or variety of dramatic circumstance.

The work to which England is now devoting herself withdraws her eyes
from beauty, as her heart from rest; nor do I conceive any revival of
great art to be possible among us while the nation continues in its
present temper. As long as it can bear to see misery and squalor in
its streets, it can neither invent nor accept human beauty in its
pictures; and so long as in passion of rivalry, or thirst of gain, it
crushes the roots of happiness, and forsakes the ways of peace, the
great souls whom it may chance to produce will all pass away from it
helpless, in error, in wrath, or in silence. Amiable visionaries may
retire into the delight of devotional abstraction, strong men of the
world may yet hope to do service by their rebuke or their satire; but
for the clear sight of Love there will be no horizon, for its quiet
words no answer; nor any place for the art which alone is faithf