icity; nor, in the
case of children belonging to the lower classes, does it seem to me
often advisable to aim at anything more. At all events, their drawing
lessons should be made as recreative as possible. Undergoing due
discipline of hard labour in other directions, such children should be
painlessly initiated into employments calculated for the relief of toil.
It is of little consequence that they should know the principles of art,
but of much that their attention should be pleasurably excited. In our
higher public schools, on the contrary, drawing should be taught
rightly; that is to say, with due succession and security of preliminary
steps,--it being here of little consequence whether the student attains
great or little skill, but of much that he should perceive distinctly
what degree of skill he has attained, reverence that which surpasses it,
and know the principles of right in what he has been able to accomplish.
It is impossible to make every boy an artist or a connoisseur, but quite
possible to make him understand the meaning of art in its rudiments, and
to make him modest enough to forbear expressing, in after life,
judgments which he has not knowledge enough to render just.

157. There is, however, at present this great difficulty in the way of
such systematic teaching--that the public do not believe the principles
of art are determinable, and, in no wise, matters of opinion. They do
not believe that good drawing is good, and bad drawing bad, whatever any
number of persons may think or declare to the contrary--that there is a
right or best way of laying colours to produce a given effect, just as
there is a right or best way of dyeing cloth of a given colour, and
that Titian and Veronese are not merely accidentally admirable but
eternally right.

158. The public, of course, cannot be convinced of this unity and
stability of principle until clear assertion of it is made to them by
painters whom they respect; and the painters whom they respect are
generally too modest, and sometimes too proud, to make it. I believe the
chief reason for their not having yet declared at least the fundamental
laws of labour as connected with art-study is a kind of feeling on their
part that "_cela va sans dire_." Every great painter knows so well the
necessity of hard and systematized work, in order to attain even the
lower degrees of skill, that he naturally supposes if people use no
diligence in drawing, they do not care t