IV. ST. MARK’S 127

it makes to supply the void will be induced rather by association and accident than by the real merit of the work submitted to it. The likeness to a beloved friend, the correspondence with a habitual conception, the freedom from any strange or offensive particularity, and, above all, an interesting choice of incident, will win admiration for a picture when the noblest efforts of religious imagination would otherwise fail of power. How much more, when to the quick capacity of emotion is joined a childish trust that the picture does indeed represent a fact! It matters little whether the fact be well or ill told: the moment we believe the picture to be true, we complain little of its being ill-painted. Let it be considered for a moment, whether the child, with its coloured print, inquiring eagerly and gravely which is Joseph, and which is Benjamin, is not more capable of receiving a strong, even a sublime, impression from the rude symbol which it invests with reality by its own effort, than the connoisseur who admires the grouping of the three figures in Raphael’s “Telling of the Dreams;”¹ and whether also, when the human mind is in right religious tone, it has not always this childish power-I speak advisedly, this power-a noble one, and possessed more in youth than at any period of after life, but always, I think, restored in a measure by religion-of raising into sublimity and reality the rudest symbol which is given to it of accredited truth.

§ 61. Ever since the period of the Renaissance, however, the truth has not been accredited; the painter of religious subject is no longer regarded as the narrator of a fact, but as the inventor of an idea.* We do not severely criticise the manner in which a true history is told, but we become harsh investigators of the faults of an invention; so that in

* I do not mean that modern Christians believe less in the facts than ancient Christians,** but they do not believe in the representation of the facts as true. We look upon the picture as this or that painter’s conception; the

** I ought to have meant it though, and very sternly. [1879.]

¹ [“Joseph relating his dreams to his brethren,” one of the subjects in “Raphael’s Bible” in the Loggie of the Vatican; in the foreground, beside Joseph, is a group of three figures with their arms and hands linked together.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]