500 APPENDIX TO PART II

thing but by instinct. Did the brave and gallant soldiers in the Crimea act upon any other than instinct as they stood by their death-dealing guns? Did they entertain for a moment the question of the expediency of their running away? Far from it. Running away was not in them: they were animated solely by the instinct of courage. Ask a man of honour why he told the truth, or why he was not in the habit of telling lies. His reply would be, that it was not in him to act other than truthfully. Ask the man of compassion why he picked up the ragged boy from the gutter, who had been run over in the street, and his answer would be that he could not help doing it-it was his instinct to do so. He could, in fact, be no other than a compassionate man.

30. And this was especially the case in the arts. Everything to be well done must be done by instinct. If we went to any noble colourist, to any real man of talent, and asked him why he did such or such a thing, his answer would be, “I don’t know: I do it because it appears to me to look well.” The other day he was seated by the side of one of the greatest living colourists, Mr. Hunt;¹ and, in reply to a question put to him as to why he put on a certain colour [which appeared to be against all rules], he said “he did not know; he was just aiming at it.” He had had frequent opportunities of conversing with Turner, but had never heard him utter a single rule of colour, though he had frequently heard him, like all great men, talk of “trying” to do a thing. This was ever the language of great genius. A man of no talent, a bad colourist, would be ready to give you mathematical reasons for every colour he put on the canvas. Mulready was another great colourist, and he had once asked him whether he had any principles or rules of colour. The reply of the colourist was, “Know what you have to do, and do it;” but he could not tell by what rules he was to know what to do to a certain thing. The same thing prevailed in poetry. The master poets, who wrote the best verses, could not tell their way of doing it. Tennyson was, in his opinion, the leading master of versification at the present day, and he knew of no rules to guide him. An intimate friend of the poet set himself one day to find out all the rules of Tennyson’s versification, and collected together, from his verses, an immense number of laws and examples. “Look here,” said he, “what wonderful laws you observe.” “It’s all true,” replied the poet, “I do observe them, but I never knew it.” Take, again, the case of music. Haydn was one of the greatest of geniuses, as well as an ardent lover of true harmony. An admirable French work, containing the lives of Haydn and other composers, gave a striking instance of the perfect independence of mind and freedom from fetters of rule which characterised this fine composer. Checked in his youth by masters, this rare person had yet “taken science out of his own heart; he had found it there, and remarked the feelings which passed within his own breast, and he acted upon its suggestions and native promptings.” When in London, a young lord called upon Haydn, and sought his instruction. In the course of the

¹ [William Hunt, of the Old Water-Colour Society; see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. vii. §§ 12, 13, where these anecdotes of Hunt, Turner, and Haydn are repeated. The remark of Mulready had been enforced in the Seven Lamps, Introd., § 1 (Vol. VIII. p. 19). The “admirable French work” is De Stendhal’s Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase; compare the passages quoted from it in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. vii. §§ 11, 12.]

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