at
paradox which perhaps seemed to you so daring, is nevertheless deeply
and finally true, that while a woodcut may be laboriously finished, a
grand engraving on metal must be comparatively incomplete. For it must
be done, throughout, with the full fire of temper in it, visibly
governing its lines, as the wind does the fibers of cloud.

180. The value hitherto attached to Rembrandt's etchings, and others
imitating them, depends on a true instinct in the public mind for this
virtue of line. But etching is an indolent and blundering method at the
best; and I do not doubt that you will one day be grateful for the
severe disciplines of drawing required in these schools, in that they
will have enabled you to know what a line may be, driven by a master's
chisel on silver or marble, following, and fostering as it follows, the
instantaneous strength of his determined thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[AG] If you paint a bottle only to amuse the spectator by showing him
how like a painting may be to a bottle, you cannot be considered, in
art-philosophy, as a designer. But if you paint the cork flying out of
the bottle, and the contents arriving in an arch at the mouth of a
recipient glass, you are so far forth a designer or signer; probably
meaning to express certain ultimate facts respecting, say, the
hospitable disposition of the landlord of the house; but at all events
representing the bottle and glass in a designed, and not merely natural,
manner. Not merely natural--nay, in some sense non-natural, or
supernatural. And all great artists show both this fantastic condition
of mind in their work, and show that it has arisen out of a
communicative or didactic purpose. They are the Signpainters of God.

I have added this note to the lecture in copying my memoranda of it here
at Assisi, June 9th, being about to begin work in the Tavern, or
Tabernaculum, of the Lower Church, with its variously significant four
great 'signs.'

[AH] Plate X., Lecture VI.

[AI] I do not mean the greatest teacher of reformed faith; but the
greatest protestant against faith unreformed.

[AJ] It has become the permitted fashion among modern mathematicians,
chemists, and apothecaries, to call themselves 'scientific men,' as
opposed to theologians, poets, and artists. They know their sphere to be
a separate one; but their ridiculous notion of its being a peculiarly
scientific one ought not to be allowed in our Universities. There is a
science of Morals, a sci