NOTES ON THE LOUVRE 457

imaginative power, his physical gifts, his keenness of eye, his sense of colour, his enjoyment of all that was glorious in nature, his chief enjoyment of that which was especially fitted to his sympathies, his patience, his memory, his thoughtfulness-all that he was, that he had, that he could, was there. And as I glanced away to the extravagances, or meannesses, or mightinesses, that shone or shrank beneath my glance along the infinite closing of that sunset-coloured corridor, I felt that painting had never yet been understood as it is-an Interpretation of Humanity.

§22. It is vain to talk of a man’s being a great or a little Painter. There is no Greatness of Manhood and of mind too vast to be expressed by it. No meanness nor vileness too little or too foul to be arrested by it. And what the man is, such is his picture: not the achievement of an ill or well practised art, but the magnificent or miserable record of divine or decrepit mind. There is first the choice of subject and the thought of it, in which the whole soul of the man may be traced-his love, his moral principle, his modes of life, the kind of men among which he moved, and whose society he preferred, the degree of understanding he had of these men; and all this to a degree and with an exactitude which no words could ever reach. For the best Poet-use what expressions he may, [is] yet in a sort dependent upon his reader’s acceptance and rendering of such expressions. He may talk of nobility of brow or of mien: but the painter alone can show us the exact contour of brow and bearing of limb which he himself felt to be noble; the painter only can show us the very hues and lines he loved, the very cast of thought he most honoured. Let all this be read aright, and then add to it the expression of the less profound gifts, and feelings of the man-of his caprices, his fancies, his prejudices, his wildnesses of imagination, his favourite and familiar branches of knowledge-all stealing in in their due place-and more or less harmonized with his subject according to the degree in which that, or his Art, was predominant. Finally, the colossal power of the Art itself-of mere pictorial invention and execution-how many strange qualities of mind are there not involved in this alone, which in the poet must lie dormant. How feeble are his means of expressing colour, at the best, and if the music of words be thought equivalent to it, yet how little and miserable is the Art of arranging syllables and rhyme (often at some sacrifice of meaning), compared with that awful self-command, that lordly foresight and advance, by which the great painter gathers together his glory of deep-dyed light.

§ 23. Nor as an expression of Vice or Folly is it less distinct, for in exact proportion to the powers which it can express, are the powers it demands. With less than it can receive, it is incomplete. A man who is not a great man from the heart outwards, has no chance-I say not of being a great painter-but of being a painter at all. Cast into a field of contest of giants, he displays nothing but his own minuteness. And utterly and basely is the nakedness of most men discovered therein. For as in no poem is so much mystery of intellect concentrated as in this work of Veronese, and in many of Titian, Tintoret, M. Angelo, and Raffaelle, so in no book is it possible to display the amount of absolute idiocy which is exhibited in modern French or Italian work. Men may be taught to write grammar, not to draw steadily. For decency’s or for learning’s sake,

[Version 0.04: March 2008]