It is one of the facts which the experience of thirty years
enables me to assert without qualification, that a really good picture
is ultimately always approved and bought, unless it is wilfully
rendered offensive to the public by faults which the artist has been
either too proud to abandon or too weak to correct.
The development of whatever is healthful and serviceable in the two
modes of impulse which we have been considering, depends however,
ultimately, on the direction taken by the true interest in art which
has lately been aroused by the great and active genius of many of our
living, or but lately lost, painters, sculptors, and architects. It
may perhaps surprise, but I think it will please you to hear me, or
(if you will forgive me, in my own Oxford, the presumption of fancying
that some may recognize me by an old name) to hear the author of
_Modern Painters_ say, that his chief error in earlier days was not in
over-estimating, but in too slightly acknowledging the merit of living
men. The great painter whose power, while he was yet among us, I was
able to perceive,[172] was the first to reprove me for my disregard of
the skill of his fellow-artists; and, with this inauguration of the
study of the art of all time,--a study which can only by true modesty
end in wise admiration,--it is surely well that I connect the record
of these words of his, spoken then too truly to myself, and true
always more or less for all who are untrained in that toil,--"You
don't know how difficult it is.
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