ification
which criticism has supposed itself to discover in the works of previous
writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of
them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break through
all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foundation
in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering millions against
units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could anything come
of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man?
But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first
flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would
on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired to feed into
greatness? Should we not educate the whole intellect into general
strength, and all the affections into warmth and honesty, and look to
heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have sense enough to do, in
order to produce a poet in words: but, it being required to produce a
poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to work? We begin, in all
probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is
full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is
perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after
much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a
Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to
do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever
something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have
a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal
shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's heads in
the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages
represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which
ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;
but mostly in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is
to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of teaching
which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press
criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we
give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!

182. But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense of
the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of our younger
painte