ith deeper humanity, the courtier is not more interesting to
him than anyone else. "You have learned to dance and fence; you can
speak with clearness, and think with precision; your hands are small,
your senses acute, and your features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this in
you, and will do it justice. You shall stand as none but a well-bred man
could stand; and your fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers
could but those that knew the grasp of it. But for the rest, this grisly
fisherman, with rusty cheek and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as
you, and might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible.
His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, Titian, as your
paleness, and his hoary spray of stormy hair takes the light as well as
your waving curls. Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as
he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first in him, as in you
I have not put the gentlemanliness first. In him I see a strong human
creature, contending with all hardship: in you also a human creature,
uncontending, and possibly not strong. Contention or strength, weakness
or picturesqueness, and all other such accidents in either, shall have
due place. But the immortality and miracle of you--this clay that burns,
this color that changes--are in truth the awful things in both: these
shall be first painted--and last."

155. With which question respecting treatment of character we have to
connect also this further one: How is it that the attempts of so great
painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond portraiture, limited
almost like children's? No domestic drama--no history--no noble natural
scenes, far less any religious subject:--only market carts; girls with
pigs; woodmen going home to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in
fields, and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice touched higher
themes,--"among the chords his fingers laid," and recoiled: wisely; for,
strange to say, his very sensibility deserts him when he leaves his
courtly quiet. The horror of the subjects he chose (Cardinal Beaufort
and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not
have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,--would
not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair--the despair
of the ignoble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care
than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has
neither dignity nor sacre