men were rigorously excluded.
As for the old masters, the better plan would be never even to look at
one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with Plato, Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus, Dante, Goethe, and two others, neither of them Englishmen, to
limbo, as the Seven Humbugs of Christendom.

While we are about it, let us leave off talking about "art for art's
sake." Who is art, that it should have a sake? A work of art should be
produced for the pleasure it gives the producer, and the pleasure he
thinks it will give to a few of whom he is fond; but neither money nor
people whom he does not know personally should be thought of. Of course
such a society as I have proposed would not remain incorrupt long.
"Everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment." The
members would try to imitate professional men in spite of their rules,
or, if they escaped this and after a while got to paint well, they would
become dogmatic, and a rebellion against their authority would be as
necessary ere long as it was against that of their predecessors: but the
balance on the whole would be to the good.

Professional men should be excluded, if for no other reason yet for this,
that they know too much for the beginner to be _en rapport_ with them. It
is the beginner who can help the beginner, as it is the child who is the
most instructive companion for another child. The beginner can
understand the beginner, but the cross between him and the proficient
performer is too wide for fertility. It savours of impatience, and is in
flat contradiction to the first principles of biology. It does a
beginner positive harm to look at the masterpieces of the great
executionists, such as Rembrandt or Turner.

If one is climbing a very high mountain which will tax all one's
strength, nothing fatigues so much as casting upward glances to the top;
nothing encourages so much as casting downward glances. The top seems
never to draw nearer; the parts that we have passed retreat rapidly. Let
a water-colour student go and see the drawing by Turner in the basement
of our National Gallery, dated 1787. This is the sort of thing for him,
not to copy, but to look at for a minute or two now and again. It will
show him nothing about painting, but it may serve to teach him not to
overtax his strength, and will prove to him that the greatest masters in
painting, as in everything else, begin by doing work which is no way
superior to that of their ne