350 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

people¹-would not that be a more honourable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by “bright effects”? They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most difficult, and worthy of the greatest men’s greatest effort, to render, as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest; each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is, however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows, that when he draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener is cowardice than in disdain.

14. I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have not space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission, and to the whole people, in the results of his labour. Consider how the man himself would be elevated; how content he would become, how earnest, how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from envy-knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people: the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy, pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of inferior talents now left feding away in misery. Conceive all this, and then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the “cattle pieces,” and “sea pieces,” and “fruit pieces,” and “family pieces”; the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in

¹ [Ruskin often reverted to the wide field which painters might occupy as “historians” and “naturalists.” On the former sphere, see, especially, Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. ii. § 6; on the latter, Lectures on Art, §§ 105-114, and Love’s Meinie, § 87.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]