IV. CONCLUSION 205

not at this moment a junior student in our schools of painting, who does not know fifty times as much about the art as Giotto did; but he is not for that reason greater than Giotto; no, nor his work better, nor fitter for our beholding.¹ Let him go on to know all that the human intellect can discover and contain in the term of a long life, and he will not be one inch, one line, nearer to Giotto’s feet. But let him leave his academy benches, and, innocently, as one knowing nothing, go out into the highways and hedges, and there rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep;² and in the next world, among the companies of the great and good, Giotto will give his hand to him, and lead him into their white circle, and say, “This is our brother.”

§ 9. And the second important consequence of our feeling the soul’s pre-eminence will be our understanding the soul’s language, however broken, or low, or feeble, or obscure in its words; and chiefly that great symbolic language of past ages, which has now so long been unspoken. It is strange that the same cold and formal spirit which the Renaissance teaching has raised amongst us, should be equally dead to the languages of imitation and of symbolism; and should at once disdain the faithful rendering of real nature by the modern school of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the symbolic rendering of imagined nature in the work of the thirteenth century. But so it is; and we find the same body of modern artists rejecting Pre-Raphaelitism because it is not ideal ! and thirteenth century work, because it is not real!-their own practice being at once false and unideal, and therefore equally opposed to both.

§ 10. It is therefore, at this juncture, of much importance to mark for the reader the exact relation of healthy symbolism and of healthy imitation; and, in order to do so, let us return to one of our Venetian examples of symbolic

¹ [On the comparative rank of Giotto, and Ruskin’s later views on the subject, see Fors Clavigera, Letter 76.]

² [Luke xiv. 23; Romans xii. 15.]

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