b, and would not have tried to do so for
connoisseurs. Pardon me; for real connoisseurs he would, and did; and
herein consists a truth which belongs to all the arts, and which I will
at once drive home in your minds, as firmly as I can.

122. All second-rate artists--(and remember, the second-rate ones are a
loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century;
and then, silently)--all second-rate artists will tell you that the
object of fine art is not resemblance, but some kind of abstraction more
refined than reality. Put that out of your heads at once. The object of
the great Resemblant Arts is, and always has been, to resemble; and to
resemble as closely as possible. It is the function of a good portrait
to set the man before you in habit as he lived, and I would we had a few
more that did so. It is the function of a good landscape to set the
scene before you in its reality; to make you, if it may be, think the
clouds are flying, and the streams foaming. It is the function of the
best sculptor--the true Daedalus--to make stillness look like breathing,
and marble look like flesh.

123. And in all great times of art, this purpose is as naively expressed
as it is steadily held. All the talk about abstraction belongs to
periods of decadence. In living times, people see something living that
pleases them; and they try to make it live forever, or to make something
as like it as possible, that will last forever. They paint their
statues, and inlay the eyes with jewels, and set real crowns on the
heads; they finish, in their pictures, every thread of embroidery, and
would fain, if they could, draw every leaf upon the trees. And their
only verbal expression of conscious success is that they have made their
work 'look real.'

124. You think all that very wrong. So did I, once; but it was I that
was wrong. A long time ago, before ever I had seen Oxford, I painted a
picture of the Lake of Como, for my father. It was not at all like the
Lake of Como; but I thought it rather the better for that. My father
differed with me; and objected particularly to a boat with a red and
yellow awning, which I had put into the most conspicuous corner of my
drawing. I declared this boat to be 'necessary to the composition.' My
father not the less objected, that he had never seen such a boat, either
at Como or elsewhere; and suggested that if I would make the lake look a
little more like water, I should be under no necessity