ng of the Academy separates, as
the whole idea of the country separates, the notion of art-education
from other education, and when you have made that one fundamental
mistake, all others follow. You teach a young man to manage his chalk
and his brush--not always that--but having done that, you suppose you
have made a painter of him; whereas to educate a painter is the same
thing as to educate a clergyman or a physician--you must give him a
liberal education primarily, and that must be connected with the kind of
learning peculiarly fit for his profession. That error is partly owing
to our excessively vulgar and excessively shallow English idea that the
artist's profession is not, and cannot be, a liberal one. We respect a
physician, and call him a gentleman, because he can give us a purge and
clean out our stomachs; but we do not call an artist a gentleman, whom
we expect to invent for us the face of Christ. When we have made that
primary mistake, all other mistakes in education are trivial in
comparison. The very notion of an art academy should be, a body of
teachers of the youth who are to be the guides of the nation through its
senses; and that is a very important means of guiding it. We have done a
good deal through dinners, but we may some day do a good deal more
through pictures.

You would have a more comprehensive system of teaching?--Much more
comprehensive.

173. Do I rightly understand you that you would wish it to embrace
branches of liberal education in general, and not be merely confined to
specific artistic studies?--Certainly. I would have the Academy
education corresponding wholly to the university education. The schools
of the country ought to teach the boy the first conditions of
manipulation. He should come up, I say not at what age, but probably at
about fourteen or fifteen, to the central university of art, wherever
that was established; and then, while he was taught to paint and to
carve and to work in metal--just as in old times he would have been
taught to manage the sword and lance, they being the principal business
of his life,--during the years from fifteen to twenty, the chief
attention of his governors should be to make a gentleman of him in the
highest sense; and to give him an exceedingly broad and liberal
education, which should enable him not only to work nobly, but to
conceive nobly.

174. As to the point, however, of artistic manipulation, is not it the
fact that many great painter