career of historical painting, you will be more and more struck
with the fact I have this evening stated to you,--that none was ever
truly great but that which represented the living forms and daily deeds
of the people among whom it arose;--that all precious historical work
records, not the past, but the present. Remember, therefore, that it is
not so much in _buying_ pictures, as in _being_ pictures, that you can
encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which
seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty
of form in a marble image; but that which educates your children into
living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the
heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.

ADDENDA

TO

THE FOURTH LECTURE.

138. I could not enter, in a popular lecture, upon one intricate and
difficult question, closely connected with the subject of
Pre-Raphaelitism--namely, the relation of invention to observation; and
composition to imitation. It is still less a question to be discussed in
the compass of a note; and I must defer all careful examination of it to
a future opportunity. Nevertheless, it is impossible to leave altogether
unanswered the first objection which is now most commonly made to the
Pre-Raphaelite work, namely, that the principle of it seems adverse to
all exertion of imaginative power. Indeed, such an objection sounds
strangely on the lips of a public who have been in the habit of
purchasing, for hundreds of pounds, small squares of Dutch canvas,
containing only servile imitations of the coarsest nature. It is strange
that an imitation of a cow's head by Paul Potter, or of an old woman's
by Ostade, or of a scene of tavern debauchery by Teniers, should be
purchased and proclaimed for high art, while the rendering of the most
noble expressions of human feeling in Hunt's "Isabella," or of the
loveliest English landscape, haunted by sorrow, in Millais' "Ophelia,"
should be declared "puerile." But, strange though the utterance of it
be, there is some weight in the objection. It is true that so long as
the Pre-Raphaelites only paint from nature, however carefully selected
and grouped, their pictures can never have the characters of the highest
class of compositions. But, on the other hand, the shallow and
conventional arrangements commonly called "compositions" by the artists
of the present day, are infinitely farther from great art than the mo