ter only to saunter and to smile: better, infinitely better,
that you should never handle a pencil at all, than handle it only for
the sake of complacency in your small dexterity: better, infinitely
better, that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures, and
uninformed respecting them, than that you should just know enough to
detect blemishes in great works,--to give a color of reasonableness to
presumption, and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding. Above
all, I would plead for this so far as the teaching of these schools may
be addressed to the junior Members of the University. Men employed in
any kind of manual labor, by which they must live, are not likely to
take up the notion that they can learn any other art for amusement only;
but amateurs are: and it is of the highest importance, nay, it is just
the one thing of all importance, to show them what drawing really means;
and not so much to teach them to produce a good work themselves, as to
know it when they see it done by others. Good work, in the stern sense
of the word, as I before said, no mere amateur can do; and good work, in
any sense, that is to say, profitable work for himself or for anyone
else, he can only do by being made in the beginning to see what is
possible for him, and what not;--what is accessible, and what not; and
by having the majesty and sternness of the everlasting laws of fact set
before him in their infinitude. It is no matter for appalling him: the
man is great already who is made well capable of being appalled; nor do
we even wisely hope, nor truly understand, till we are humiliated by our
hope, and awe-struck by our understanding. Nay, I will go farther than
this, and say boldly, that what you have mainly to teach the young men
here is, not so much what they can do, as what they cannot;--to make
them see how much there is in nature which cannot be imitated, and how
much in man which cannot be emulated. He only can be truly said to be
educated in Art to whom all his work is only a feeble sign of glories
which he cannot convey, and a feeble means of measuring, with
ever-enlarging admiration, the great and untraversable gulf which God
has set between the great and the common intelligences of mankind: and
all the triumphs of Art which man can commonly achieve are only truly
crowned by pure delight in natural scenes themselves, and by the sacred
and self-forgetful veneration which can be nobly abashed, and
tremblingly exalted, in