m whence they see sights and hear revelations which they
communicate with all the fervour of plenary explanation to those who may
be disposed to attend to their raptures. They float with wings expanded
in lofty circles, they stalk over the canvas at large strides, never
condescending to pause at anything of less magnitude than a group or a
colossal figure. The face forms no part of their collective inquiries;
or so that it occupies only a sixth or an eighth proportion to the whole
body, all is according to the received rules of composition. Point to a
divine portrait of Titian, to an angelic head of Guido, close by--they
see and heed it not. What are the 'looks commercing with the skies,' the
soul speaking in the face, to them? It asks another and an inner sense
to comprehend them; but for the trigonometry of painting, nature
has constituted them indifferently well. They take a stand on
the distinction between portrait and history, and there they are
spell-bound. Tell them that there can be no fine history without
portraiture, that the painter must proceed from that ground to the one
above it, and that a hundred bad heads cannot make one good historical
picture, and they will not believe you, though the thing is obvious to
any gross capacity. Their ideas always fly to the circumference, and
never fix at the centre. Art must be on a grand scale; according to
them, the whole is greater than a part, and the greater necessarily
implies the less. The outline is, in this view of the matter, the same
thing as the filling-up, and 'the limbs and flourishes of a discourse'
the substance. Again, the same persons make an absolute distinction,
without knowing why, between high and low subjects. Say that you would
as soon have Murillo's Two Beggar Boys at the Dulwich Gallery as almost
any picture in the world, that is, that it would be one you would choose
out of ten (had you the choice), and they reiterate upon you that surely
a low subject cannot be of equal value with a high one. It is in vain
that you turn to the picture: they keep to the class. They have eyes,
but see not; and, upon their principles of refined taste, would be just
as good judges of the merit of the picture without seeing it as with
that supposed advantage. They know what the subject is _from the
catalogue!_--Yet it is not true, as Lord Byron asserts, that execution
is everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects,
equally well executed (which,