on the bench, nor at
the bar, nor in the library. They are for other men and other work. He
may think, in a by-way; reason, now and then, when he has nothing better
to do; know, such fragments of knowledge as he can gather without
stooping, or reach without pains; but none of these things are to be his
care. The work of his life is to be twofold only: to see, to feel.

Sec. XI. Nay, but, the reader perhaps pleads with me, one of the great
uses of knowledge is to open the eyes; to make things perceivable which,
never would have been seen, unless first they had been known.

Not so. This could only be said or believed by those who do not know
what the perceptive faculty of a great artist is, in comparison with
that of other men. There is no great painter, no great workman in any
art, but he sees more with the glance of a moment than he could learn by
the labor of a thousand hours. God has made every man fit for his work;
He has given to the man whom he means for a student, the reflective,
logical, sequential faculties; and to the man whom He means for an
artist, the perceptive, sensitive, retentive faculties. And neither of
these men, so far from being able to do the other's work, can even
comprehend the way in which it is done. The student has no understanding
of the vision, nor the painter of the process; but chiefly the student
has no idea of the colossal grasp of the true painter's vision and
sensibility.

The labor of the whole Geological Society, for the last fifty years, has
but now arrived at the ascertainment of those truths respecting mountain
form which Turner saw and expressed with a few strokes of a camel's hair
pencil fifty years ago, when he was a boy. The knowledge of all the laws
of the planetary system, and of all the curves of the motion of
projectiles, would never enable the man of science to draw a waterfall
or a wave; and all the members of Surgeons' Hall helping each other
could not at this moment see, or represent, the natural movement of a
human body in vigorous action, as a poor dyer's son did two hundred
years ago.[9]

Sec. XII. But surely, it is still insisted, granting this peculiar faculty
to the painter, he will still see more as he knows more, and the more
knowledge he obtains, therefore, the better. No; not even so. It is
indeed true, that, here and there, a piece of knowledge will enable the
eye to detect a truth which might otherwise have escaped it; as, for
instance, in watching a su