campered over all
Europe, the shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to
one that he cannot tell you; and yet he will be voluble of criticism
on every painted landscape from Dresden to Madrid"--and why not? The
chances are ninety to one that the merits of not a single picture
shall depend upon this knowledge, and yet the pictures shall be good
and the connoisseur right. One man sees what another does not see in
portraits. Undoubtedly; but how any one is to find in a portrait the
following, we are at a loss to conceive. "The third has caught the
trace of all that was most hidden and most mighty, when all hypocrisy
and all habit, and all petty and passing emotion--the _ice, and the
bank, and the foam of the immortal river--were shivered and broken,
and swallowed up in the awakening of its inward strength_," _&c._ How
can a man with a pen in his hand let such stuff as this drop from his
fingers' ends?

In the chapter "on the relative importance of truths," there is a
little needless display of logic--needless, for we find, after all, he
does not dispute "the kind of truths proper to be represented by the
painter or sculptor," though he combats the maxim that general truths
are preferable to particular. His examples are quite out of art,
whether one be spoken of as a man or as Sir Isaac Newton. Even
logically speaking, Sir Isaac Newton may be the _whole_ of the
subject, and as such a whole might require a generality. There may be
many particulars that are best sunk. So, in a picture made up of many
parts, it should have a generality totally independent of the
particularities of the parts, which must be so represented as not to
interfere with that general idea, and which may be altogether in the
mind of the artist. This little discussion seems to arise from a sort
of quibble on the word important. Sir Joshua and others, who abet the
generality maxim, mean no more than that it is of importance to a
picture that it contain, fully expressed, one general idea, with which
no parts are to interfere, but that the parts will interfere if each
part be represented with its most particular truth--and that,
therefore, drapery should be drapery merely, not silk or satin, where
high truths of the subject are to be impressed.

"Colour is a secondary truth, therefore less important than form."
"He, therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth of
colour, has neglected a greater truth for a less one." It is true