et, even at our first step. We would teach a boy to draw. Well, what
shall he draw?--Gods, or men, or beasts, or clouds, or leaves, or iron
cylinders? Are there any gods to be drawn? any men or women worth
drawing, or only worth caricaturing? What are the aesthetic laws
respecting iron cylinders; and would Titian have liked them rusty, or
fresh cleaned with oil and rag, to fill the place once lightened by St.
George's armor? How can we begin the smallest practical business, unless
we get first some whisper of answer to such questions? We may tell a boy
to draw a straight line straight, and a crooked one crooked; but what
else?

And it renders the dilemma, or multilemma, more embarrassing, that
whatever teaching is to be had from the founders and masters of art is
quite unpractical. The first source from which we should naturally seek
for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a
sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have
nothing to say. They are silent, absolutely in proportion to their
creative power. The contributions to our practical knowledge
of the principles of Art, furnished by the true captains of its
hosts, may, I think, be arithmetically summed by the +O+ of
Giotto: the inferior teachers become didactic in the degree of their
inferiority; and those who can do nothing have always much to advise.

36. This however, observe, is only true of advice direct. You never, I
grieve to say, get from the great men a plain answer to a plain
question; still less can you entangle them in any agreeable gossip, out
of which something might unawares be picked up. But of enigmatical
teaching, broken signs and sullen mutterings, of which you can
understand nothing, and may make anything;--of confused discourse in the
work itself, about the work, as in Duerer's Melancolia;--and of discourse
not merely confused, but apparently unreasonable and ridiculous, about
all manner of things _except_ the work,--the great Egyptian and Greek
artists give us much: from which, however, all that by utmost industry
may be gathered, comes briefly to this,--that they have no conception of
what modern men of science call the "Conservation of forces," but deduce
all the force they feel in themselves, and hope for in others, from
certain fountains or centers of perpetually supplied strength, to which
they give various names: as, for instance, these seven following, more
specially:--

1. The Sp