sum which thus you cast
away, you might have relieved the hearts and preserved the health of
twenty young painters; and if, among those twenty, you but chanced on
one in whom a true latent power had been hindered by his poverty, just
consider what a far-branching, far-embracing good you have wrought with
that lucky expenditure of yours. I say, "Consider it," in vain; you
cannot consider it, for you cannot conceive the sickness of heart with
which a young painter of deep feeling toils through his first
obscurity;--his sense of the strong voice within him, which you will not
hear;--his vain, fond, wondering witness to the things you will not
see;--his far-away perception of things that he could accomplish if he
had but peace, and time, all unapproachable and vanishing from him,
because no one will leave him peace or grant him time: all his friends
falling back from him; those whom he would most reverently obey rebuking
and paralysing him; and, last and worst of all, those who believe in him
the most faithfully suffering by him the most bitterly;--the wife's
eyes, in their sweet ambition, shining brighter as the cheek wastes
away; and the little lips at his side parched and pale, which one day,
he knows, though he may never see it, will quiver so proudly when they
call his name, calling him "our father." You deprive yourselves, by your
large expenditure for pictures of mark, of the power of relieving and
redeeming _this_ distress; you injure the painter whom you pay so
largely;--and what, after all, have you done for yourselves or got for
yourselves? It does not in the least follow that the hurried work of a
fashionable painter will contain more for your money than the quiet work
of some unknown man. In all probability, you will find, if you rashly
purchase what is popular at a high price, that you have got one picture
you don't care for, for a sum which would have bought twenty you would
have delighted in.

101. For remember always, that the price of a picture by a living artist
never represents, never _can_ represent, the quantity of labour or value
in it. Its price represents, for the most part, the degree of desire
which the rich people of the country have to possess it. Once get the
wealthy classes to imagine that the possession of pictures by a given
artist adds to their "gentility," and there is no price which his work
may not immediately reach, and for years maintain; and in buying at that
price, you are not gett