Not only so, but it very
seldom does so much as this, and the best pictures that exist of the
great schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very
simple and nowise noble persons. You may have much more brilliant and
impressive qualities in imaginative pictures; you may have figures
scattered like clouds, or garlanded like flowers; you may have light
and shade as of a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow; but all that
is child's play to the great men, though it is astonishment to us.
Their real strength is tried to the utmost, and as far as I know, it
is never elsewhere brought out so thoroughly, as in painting one man
or woman, and the soul that was in them; nor that always the highest
soul, but often only a thwarted one that was capable of height; or
perhaps not even that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the
poor best of it, by the masterful sight. So that in order to put
before you in your Standard series the best art possible, I am
obliged, even from the very strongest men, to take the portraits,
before I take the idealism. Nay, whatever is best in the great
compositions themselves has depended on portraiture; and the study
necessary to enable you to understand invention will also convince you
that the mind of man never invented a greater thing than the form of
man, animated by faithful life.
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