388 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

yet we go on preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was everything, and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts,¹ wherein the courses are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.

57. It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork themselves, but in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of men to see things done in what they call a “masterly,” or “bold,” or “broad,” manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief may have followed from men’s looking for nothing else but this facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth remains the same:-that because it is not intended that men shall torment or weary themselves with any earthly labour, it is appointed that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to the workman’s hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all men, and justly felt. The freedom of

¹ [“Barmecide feasts” is the better-known expression, referring to the tale in The Arabian Nights of “The Barber’s Sixth Brother,” of how Shacabac was invited to a feast, when starving, by the wealthy Barmecide, and finding the dishes and goblets empty, had “to cloy the hungry edge of appetite with bare imagination of the feast.” He at once entered into the humour of the thing, which so pleased the Barmecide that he then provided Shacabac with a substantial banquet.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]