50 THE STONES OF VENICE I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE

of the great uses of knowledge is to open the eyes; to make things perceivable which never would have been seen, unless first they had been known.

Not so. This could only be said or believed by those who do not know what the perceptive faculty of a great artist is, in comparison with that of other men. There is no great painter, no great workman in any art, but he sees more with the glance of a moment than he can learn by the labour of a thousand hours.

God has made every man fit for his work; He has given to the man whom He means for a student, the reflective, logical, sequential faculties; and to the man whom He means for an artist, the perceptive, sensitive, retentive faculties. And neither of these men, so far from being able to do the other’s work, can even comprehend the way in which it is done. The student has no understanding of the vision, nor the painter of the process; but chiefly, the student has no idea of the colossal grasp of the true painter’s vision and sensibility.

The labour of the whole Geological Society, for the last fifty years, has but now arrived at the ascertainment of those truths respecting mountain form which Turner saw and expressed with a few strokes of a camel’s hair pencil fifty years ago, when he was a boy.¹ The knowledge of all the laws of the planetary system, and of all the curves of the motion of projectiles, would never enable the man of science to draw a waterfall or a wave; and all the members of Surgeons’ Hall helping each other could not at this moment see, or represent, the natural movement of a human body in vigorous action, as a poor dyer’s son did two hundred years ago.*²

§ 12. But surely, it is still insisted, granting this peculiar faculty to the painter, he will still see more as he knows more, and the more knowledge he obtains, therefore, the

* Tintoret.

¹ [Compare on this subject, Modern Painters, vol. i., Vol. III. p. 429.]

² [At this point the “Travellers’ Edition” breaks off, resuming at § 23.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]