24 THE STONES OF VENICE

the lowermost on the other; sometimes in smaller fragments, but, in the periods above named, always definitely and grandly, though in a thousand various ways. And I call it a magnificent principle, for it is an eternal and universal one, not in art only,* but in human life. It is the great principle of Brotherhood, not by equality, nor by likeness, but by giving and receiving;¹ the souls that are unlike, and the nations that are unlike, and the natures that are unlike, being bound into one noble whole by each receiving something from and of the others’ gifts and the others’ glory. I have not space to follow out this thought,-it is of infinite extent and application,-but I note it for the reader’s pursuit, because I have long believed, and the whole second volume of Modern Painters was written to prove, that in whatever has been made by the Deity externally delightful to the human sense of beauty, there is some type of God’s nature or of God’s laws; nor are any of His laws, in one sense, greater than the appointment that the most lovely and perfect unity shall be obtained by the taking of one nature into another. I trespass upon too high ground; and yet I cannot fully show the reader the extent of this law,

* In the various works which Mr. Prout has written on light and shade, no principle will be found insisted on more strongly than this carrying of the dark into the light, and vice versâ. It is curious to find the untaught instinct of a merely picturesque artist in the nineteenth century, fixing itself so intensely on a principle which regulated the entire sacred composition of the thirteenth. I say “untaught” instinct, for Mr. Prout was, throughout his life, the discoverer of his own principles; fortunately so, considering what principles were taught in his time, but unfortunately in the abstract, for there were gifts in him, which, had there been any wholesome influences to cherish them, might have made him one of the greatest men of his age. He was great, under all adverse circumstances, but the mere wreck of what he might have been, if, after the rough training noticed in my pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism [§ 26], as having fitted him for his great function in the world, he had met with a teacher who could have appreciated his powers, and directed them.²

¹ [So Tennyson in In Memoriam, 1xxix. (1850):-

“But he was rich where I was poor,

And he supplied my want the more

As his unlikeness fitted mine.”]

² [Prout’s principal work above referred to is Hints on Light and Shadow, Composition, etc., as applied to Landscape Painting, 1838.]

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