xviii INTRODUCTION

as that the adversary may not be able to misrepresent them, nor the simple run any risk of misapprehending them. And this I have long felt to be also the case with every great principle of art which it has been my endeavour in this and my other writings to assert or defend. There is not any one but has, as it were, two natures in it-at least two different colours or sides-according to the things in connexion with which it is viewed; and therefore, exactly in proportion to the breadth and universality which I have endeavoured to give to all my statements, is their liability to appearances of contradiction, and the certainty of their being misunderstood by any person who does not take the pains to examine the connexion.

“This is peculiarly the case with respect to the principle now under consideration,¹ and some additional ambiguity may perhaps arise in the reader’s mind from the difference between the senses in which I am now using the word “modern,” and that which it bore in my first work upon painting. In Modern Painters our task was to compare the work of living artists with that of so-called “old” masters of landscape, who flourished for the most part in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but throughout the present volume I use the term “modern” of all work whatsoever subsequent to the period of the Renaissance-that is to say, the middle of the fifteenth century, Claude, Salvator, and Poussin being in the larger view now taken of the history of art as much moderns as Turner and Stanfield. The recent-would that I could still say, living-school of landscape, is healthy and noble just because in many respects it has broken through the Renaissance systems, and returned in its study of external nature to the earnestness with which the great and, in the large sense, early schools studied men. And yet not enough; for in his necessary opposition to the rules of art which were established by the Renaissance formalists, the modern landscape painter has fallen too often into the same kind of error as the modern religious reformer. For though right in receiving the authority of the present truth and living impression upon the soul, rather than that of tradition and ordinance, he has [not] taken care to render such impressions accurate or profound: he does not take pains to increase the Perceptive power of his mind; but is content with first thoughts and outside visions of things; whereas the truly noble perceptive power is only attained by patience and watchfulness, always going on to see more and more, and helped by the Imagination to see rather the heart of things than their surface.

“Now the principle which has just been stated in the preceding paragraph is not only the most important, but it is the head and sum

¹That is, the principle stated in § 6 of ch. iv., that art should express the soul of the artist.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]