y ineffective on the
national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in
money;--valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick
wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels
at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the
shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite
inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their
own minds; teach perhaps a trick or two of their stage business in
early life--as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black
to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with
black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only
in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who
might have been among the best of them,[63] the last we heard of,
finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares
honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its
own;--the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and
ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from
its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a
bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the
trouble to understand,--the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a
flea,--and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens
and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not
boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that
the said blots of Titian and Rubens _are_ Art, perceiving for itself
little good in them, and hanging _them_ also well out of its way, at
tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example;
Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it
may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad
work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking
to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in
official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the
only "Right" cognizable by it.

29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former
one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we
have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all.
"Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what
does not amuse us we do not wa