although we have occasionally spasmodic
efforts and fits of enthusiasm, and green meadows and apple-blossom to
spare, it yet remains a fact that not in all this England, and still
less in France, have you a painter who has been able nobly to paint
so much as a hedge of wild roses or a forest glade full of anemones or
wood-sorrel.

80. One reason of this has been the idea that such work was easy, on
the part of the young men who attempted it, and the total vulgarity
and want of education in the great body of abler artists, rendering
them insensitive to qualities of fine delineation; the universal law
for them being that they can draw a pig, but not a Venus. For
instance, two landscape-painters of much reputation in England, and
one of them in France also--David Cox and John Constable, represent a
form of blunt and untrained faculty which in being very frank and
simple, apparently powerful, and needing no thought, intelligence or
trouble whatever to observe, and being wholly disorderly, slovenly and
licentious, and therein meeting with instant sympathy from the
disorderly public mind now resentful of every trammel and ignorant of
every law--these two men, I say, represent in their intensity the
qualities adverse to all accurate science or skill in landscape art;
their work being the mere blundering of clever peasants, and deserving
no name whatever in any school of true practice, but consummately
mischievous--first, in its easy satisfaction of the painter's own
self-complacencies, and then in the pretense of ability which blinds
the public to all the virtue of patience and to all the difficulty of
precision. There is more real relation to the great schools of art,
more fellowship with Bellini and Titian, in the humblest painter of
letters on village signboards than in men like these.

Do not, therefore, think that the Gothic school is an easy one. You
might more easily fill a house with pictures like Constable's from
garret to cellar, than imitate one cluster of leaves by Van Eyck or
Giotto; and among all the efforts that have been made to paint our
common wild-flowers, I have only once--and that in this very year,
just in time to show it to you--seen the thing done rightly.

81. But now observe: These flowers, beautiful as they are, are not of
the Gothic school. The law of that school is that everything shall be
seen clearly, or at least, only in such mist or faintness as shall be
delightful; and I have no doubt that