rner belongs to it, that
all the strongest men in times of developed art belong to it; but
then, remember, so do all the basest. The learning of the Academy is
indeed a splendid accessory to original power, in Velasquez, in
Titian, or in Reynolds; but the whole world of art is full of a base
learning of the Academy, which, when fools possess, they become a
tenfold plague of fools.

And again, a stern and more or less hopeless melancholy necessarily is
under-current in the minds of the greatest men of all ages,--of Homer,
Aeschylus, Pindar, or Shakespeare. But an earthy, sensual, and weak
despondency is the attribute of the lowest mental and bodily disease;
and the imbecilities and lassitudes which follow crime, both in
nations and individuals, can only find a last stimulus to their own
dying sensation in the fascinated contemplation of completer death.

45. Between these--the highest, and these--the basest, you have every
variety and combination of strength and of mistake: the mass of
foolish persons dividing themselves always between the two oppositely
and equally erroneous faiths, that genius may dispense with law, or
that law can create genius. Of the two, there is more excuse for, and
less danger in the first than in the second mistake. Genius has
sometimes done lovely things without knowledge and without discipline.
But all the learning of the Academies has never yet drawn so much as
one fair face, or ever set two pleasant colors side by side.

46. Now there is one great Northern painter, of whom I have not spoken
till now, probably to your surprise, Rubens; whose power is composed
of so many elements, and whose character may be illustrated so
completely, and with it the various operation of the counter schools,
by one of his pictures now open to your study, that I would press you
to set aside one of your brightest Easter afternoons for the study of
that one picture in the Exhibition of Old Masters, the so-called "Juno
and Argus," No. 387.

So-called, I say; for it is not a picture either of Argus or of Juno,
but the portrait of a Flemish lady "as Juno" (just as Rubens painted
his family picture with his wife "as the Virgin" and himself "as St.
George"): and a good anatomical study of a human body as Argus. In the
days of Rubens, you must remember, mythology was thought of as a mere
empty form of compliment or fable, and the original meaning of it
wholly forgotten. Rubens never dreamed that Argus is the night,