160 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

walls of the Royal Academy; and such works as Mr. Hunt’s “Claudio and Isabella” have never been rivalled, in some respects never approached, at any other period of art.

This I believe to be a most candid statement of all their faults and all their deficiencies; not such, you perceive, as are likely to arrest their progress. The “magna est veritas”¹ was never more sure of accomplishment than by these men. Their adversaries have no chance with them. They will gradually unite their influence with whatever is true or powerful in the reactionary art of other countries; and on their works such a school will be founded as shall justify the third age of the world’s civilisation, and render it as great in creation as it has been in discovery.

137. And now let me remind you but of one thing more. As you examine into the career of historical painting, you will be more and more struck with the fact I have this evening stated to you,²-that none was ever truly great but that which represented the living forms and daily deeds of the people among whom it arose-that all precious historical work records, not the past, but the present. Remember, therefore, that it is not so much in buying pictures, as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, not for beauty of form in a marble image; but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.

¹ [Ruskin concluded his Addenda to Lectures I. and II. (§ 76) with this same thought from the Vulgate (1 Esdras iv. 14), there adding “and shall prevail”-“et prævalebit” being the substitution in ordinary citation for the “et prævalet” of the original.]

² [See above, § 129, p. 151.]

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