448 APPENDIX, 15

Intelligent part of the intellect and Resolute part of the soul. But the reader must feel more and more, at every step, the impossibility of classing the arts themselves, independently of the men by whom they are practised; and how an art, low in itself, may be made noble by the quantity of human strength and being which a great man will pour into it; and an art, great in itself, be made mean by the meanness of the mind occupied in it. I do not intend, when I call painting an art of the first, and war an art of the second, order, to class Dutch landscape painters with good soldiers; but I mean, that if from such a man as Napoleon we were to take away the honour of all that he had done in law and civil government, and to give him the reputation of his soldiership only, his name would be less, if justly weighed, than that of Buonarroti, himself a good soldier, also, when need was.¹ But I will not endeavour to pursue the inquiry, for I believe that of all the arts of the first order it would be found that all that a man has, or is, or can be, he can fully express in them, and give to any of them, and find it not enough.

15. P. 71.-INSTINCTIVE JUDGMENTS

The same rapid judgment which I wish to enable the reader to form of architecture, may in some sort also be formed of painting, owing to the close connection between execution and expression in the latter; as between structure and expression in the former. We ought to be able to tell good painting by a side glance as we pass along a gallery; and, until we can do so, we are not fit to pronounce judgment at all: not that I class this easily visible excellence of painting with the great expressional qualities which time and watchfulness only unfold. I have again and again insisted on the supremacy of these last, and shall always continue to do so. But I perceive a tendency among some of the more thoughtful critics of the day to forget that the business of a painter is to paint, and so altogether to despise those men, Veronese and Rubens for instance, who were painters, par excellence, and in whom the expressional qualities are subordinate.² Now it is well, when we have strong moral or poetical feeling manifested in painting, to mark this as the best part of the work; but it is not well to consider as a thing of small account, the painter’s language in which that feeling is conveyed; for if that language be not good and lovely, the man may indeed be a just moralist or a great poet, but he is not a painter, and it was wrong of him to paint. He had much better have put his morality into sermons, and his poetry into verse, than into a language of which he was not master. And this mastery of the language is that of which we should be cognisant by a glance of the eye; and if that be not found, it is wasted time to look farther; the man has mistaken his vocation, and his expression of himself will be cramped by his awkward efforts to do what he was not fit to do. On the other hand, if the man be a painter indeed, and have the gift of colours and lines, what is in him will

¹ [It will be remembered that Michael Angelo was in 1529 appointed Inspector of Fortifications at Florence. So, too, at a later date, he was entrusted with the preparation of schemes for the defence of Rome. There is an interesting account by the master himself of his services in war in the recently discovered dialogues by Francisco d’Ollanda: see Sir Charles Holroyd’s Michael Angelo, 1903, p. 308.]

² [There may be remarked among critics of a later day a tendency to ignore this side of Ruskin’s teaching (though it is enforced throughout his works), and to represent him as attaching importance only to expressional qualities in painting].

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