IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM 151

not, or will only by force, consent to this discipline. He finds other means of expressing himself with his pencil somehow or another; and presently you find his paper covered with sketches of his grandfather and grandmother, and uncles, and cousins,-sketches of the room, and the house, and the cat, and the dog, and the country outside, and everything in the world he can set his eyes on; and he gets on, and even his child’s work has a value in it-a truth which makes it worth keeping; no one knows how precious, perhaps, that portrait of his grandfather may be, if any one has but the sense to keep it till the time when the old man can be seen no more up the lawn, nor by the wood. That child is working in the Middle-Age spirit-the other in the modern spirit.

129. But there is something still more striking in the evils which have resulted from the modern regardlessness of truth. Consider, for instance, its effect on what is called historical painting. What do you at present mean by historical painting? Now-a-days it means the endeavouring, by the power of imagination, to portray some historical event of past days. But in the Middle Ages, it meant representing the acts of their own days; and that is the only historical painting worth a straw.¹ Of all the wastes of time and sense which Modernism has invented-and they are many-none are so ridiculous as this endeavour to represent past history. What do you suppose our descendants will care for our imaginations of the events of former days? Suppose the Greeks, instead of representing their own warriors as they fought at Marathon,² had left us nothing but their imaginations of Egyptian battles; and suppose the Italians, in like manner, instead of portraits of Can Grande and Dante, or of Leo the Tenth and Raphael, had left us nothing but imaginary portraits of Pericles and

¹ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 21; ch. vii. § 21.]

² [The reference here is generally to Greek reliefs, but more particularly perhaps to the Stele of Aristion by Aristocles, known as “The Soldier of Marathon.” Casts of the original Gravestone of Aristion (in the National Museum at Athens) are in most collections.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]