affaelle and Michael Angelo, had nothing,
or but little _to unlearn_; the previous aim had fortunately not been
very multifarious; the sentiment of art was right, and the direction
true. It remained only to enlarge the sphere; the principles were in
being; they required but confirmation. Grace and power naturally
arose; for there was no counteracting education, nothing positively
bad altogether to lay aside, though there was something to correct.
Now with us, on the contrary, art has run into very strange vagaries;
the enlargement of the boundaries has been unlimited, but it has been
in regions far below the Parnassian Mount. We have talked of the High
Ideal, and practised and encouraged _ad infinitum_ the Low Natural,
and too often have descended to the worse, the Low Unnatural; so that,
upon the whole, we have to unlearn very much before we can be said to
be in the rudiments of Real Art. Let us suppose one born with every
natural endowment, with imagination, and a power of imitation. The
mind, after all, is fed with _realities_; there is in it also process
of digestion, which converts the real into the imaginative. Now, in
early years, how rare it is that the naturally endowed artist is not
ill fed--unhealthy diet of the mind entices him every where. If in the
country, he is sparingly fed--sees little or nothing of Art, little
perhaps beyond the Sign of an Inn--and is scarcely, from other sources
of education, taught to look with the mind's eye, through the
undignified appearance, to the actual dignity even of the nature he
sees:--if he has lived in the city, the Print shops are inevitable
lures to cheat him by little and little out of his natural taste, if
there be one; for at first it can be but a mere germ. The works of
greatness, of goodness, will be the last things that he will see; for
seldom indeed will they be presented to his sight. For the pure, the
sweet, the graceful, the dignified, he will have thrust before his
eyes gaudy, tawdry caricature and grimace; and, worse still, perhaps
wholly vulgar obscenities. Were he in his boyhood given a present in
the pictorial line, it would be of an Opera-dancer or a race-course,
or an abomination of London low life. What "slang" is to the ear, so
would it be to the eye; and such is in nine cases out of ten the first
education of those aspirants in art, who, ere they have unlearned any
thing, set up for themselves--and abuse the old masters. Generally
speaking, they are