352 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

16. But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty? Yes, the highest, the noblest place-that which these only can attain when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention high enough, and suppose that they can be taught. Throughout every sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank attributed to these powers-the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be attained, increased, or in anywise modified by teaching, only in various ways capable of being concealed or quenched.¹ Understand this thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bringing men up to be poets?-of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in a youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labour? Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification

of the very best English Gothic. Then the little cinquefoil window in the front, the boss of the arch over it, with a small angel on one side and foliage on the other, and the mouldings of the southern door in the choir are the richest and most delicate I ever saw in England, evidently by the same workman and travaillées with a care and profusion altogether unequalled.”

See also a note to Seven Lamps (Vol. VIII. p. 12) where similar opinions are expressed.]

¹ [As, for instance, in Modern Painters, vol. ii. Section II., “Of the Imaginative Faculty.” And compare Seven Lamps, ch. iii. § 23 (Vol. VIII. p. 134).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]