How can we have great art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of some sort is the life-blood of art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her Son lost that mystery and divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a Venus now, she is but a frivolous woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner. [Sidenote: _a woman, even in_] We want a great inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us is a passion for nature: for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this, we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it, so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius and as a great Juvenal; and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes: but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle or a Flaxman. [Sidenote: _Boston,_] Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight of the multitude—the perpetual adoration of that loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and greed of their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that, it is empty and useless as a child’s reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the child’s breath spent. [Sidenote: _who can_] It must have been such a good life—a painter’s in those days: those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then—modern painters can know nothing of it. [Sidenote: _produce literature_] When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural fashion—in those early days only fancy the delights of a painter! [Sidenote: _equal_] Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each touch of colour—the painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of Columbus. [Sidenote: _to this?_] And one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting because he loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.