You may separate these two groups of artists more distinctly in your
mind as those who seek for the pleasure of art, in the relations of its
colours and lines, without caring to convey any truth with it; and
those who seek for the truth first, and then go down from the truth to
the pleasure of colour and line. Marking those two bodies distinctly as
separate, and thinking over them, you may come to some rather notable
conclusions respecting the mental dispositions which are involved in
each mode of study. You will find that large masses of the art of the
world fall definitely under one or the other of these heads. Observe,
pleasure first and truth afterwards, (or not at all,) as with the
Arabians and Indians; or, truth first and pleasure afterwards, as with
Angelico and all other great European painters. You will find that the
art whose end is pleasure only is pre-eminently the gift of cruel and
savage nations, cruel in temper, savage in habits and conception; but
that the art which is especially dedicated to natural fact always
indicates a peculiar gentleness and tenderness of mind, and that all
great and successful work of that kind will assuredly be the production
of thoughtful, sensitive, earnest, kind men, large in their views of
life, and full of various intellectual power. And farther, when you
examine the men in whom the gifts of art are variously mingled, or
universally mingled, you will discern that the ornamental, or
pleasurable power, though it may be possessed by good men, is not in
itself an indication of their goodness, but is rather, unless balanced
by other faculties, indicative of violence of temper, inclining to
cruelty and to irreligion. On the other hand, so sure as you find any
man endowed with a keen and separate faculty of representing natural
fact, so surely you will find that man gentle and upright, full of
nobleness and breadth of thought. I will give you two instances, the
first peculiarly English, and another peculiarly interesting because it
occurs among a nation not generally very kind or gentle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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