If anything I can say here, on the subject of the painter\'s Art, will encourage intelligent people of any rank to turn a deaf ear to all that critics, connoisseurs, lecturers, and compilers of guide-books can tell them; to trust entirely to their own common sense when they are looking at pictures; and to express their opinions boldly, without the slightest reference to any precedents whatever—I shall have exactly achieved the object with which I now apply myself to the writing of this paper.

Let me first ask, in regard to pictures in general, what it is that prevents the public from judging for themselves, and why the influence of Art in England is still limited to select circles,—still unfelt, as the phrase is, by all but the cultivated classes? Why do people want to look at their guide-books, before they can make up their minds about an old picture? Why do they ask connoisseurs and professional friends for a marked catalogue, before they venture inside the walls of the exhibition-rooms 212 in Trafalgar Square? Why, when they are, for the most part, always ready to tell each other unreservedly what books they like, or what musical compositions are favourites with them, do they hesitate the moment pictures turn up as a topic of conversation, and intrench themselves doubtfully behind such cautious phrases, as, "I don\'t pretend to understand the subject,"—"I believe such and such a picture is much admired,"—"I am no judge," and so on?

No judge! Does a really good picture want you to be a judge? Does it want you to have anything but eyes in your head, and the undisturbed possession of your senses? Is there any other branch of intellectual art which has such a direct appeal, by the very nature of it, to every sane human being as the art of painting? There it is, able to represent through a medium which offers itself to you palpably, in the shape of so many visible feet of canvass, actual human facts, and distinct aspects of Nature, which poetry can only describe, and which music can but obscurely hint at. The Art which can do this—and which has done it over and over again both in past and present times—is surely of all arts that one which least requires a course of critical training, before it can be approached on familiar terms. Whenever I see an intelligent man, which I often do, standing before a really eloquent and true picture, and asking his marked catalogue, or his newspaper, 213 or his guide-book, whether he may safely admire it or not—I think of a man standing winking both eyes in the full glare of a cloudless August noon, and inquiring deferentially of an astronomical friend whether he is really justified in saying that the sun shines!

But, we have not yet fairly got at the main obstacle which hinders the public from judging of pictures for themselves, and which, by a natural consequence, limits the influence of Art on the nation generally. For my own part, I have long thought, and shall always continue to believe, that this same obstacle is nothing more or less than the Conceit of Criticism, which has got obstructively between Art and the people,—which has kept them asunder, and will keep them asunder, until it is fairly pulled out of the way, and set aside at once and for ever in its proper background place.

This is a bold thing to say; but I think I can advance some proofs that my assertion is not altogether so wild as it may appear at first sight. By the Conceit of Criticism, I desire to express, in one word, the conventional laws and formulas, the authoritative rules and regulations which individual men set up to guide the tastes and influence the opinions of their fellow-creatures. When Criticism does not speak in too arbitrary a language, and when the laws it makes are ratified by the consent and 214 approbation of intelligent people in general, I have as much respect for it as any one. But, when Criticism sits altogether apart, speaks opinions that find no answering echo in the general heart, and measures the greatness of intellectual work by anything rather than by its power of appealing to all capacities for admiration and enjoyment, from the very highest to the very humblest,—then, as it seems to me, Criticism becomes the expression of individual conceit, and forfeits all claim to consideration and respect. From that moment, it is Obstructive—for it has set itself up fatally between the Art of Painting and the honest and general appreciation of that Art by the People.

Let me try to make this still clearer by an example. A great deal of obstructive criticism undoubtedly continues to hang as closely as it can about Poetry and Music. But there are, nevertheless, stateable instances, in relation to these two Arts, of the voice of the critic and the voice of the people being on the same side. The tragedy of Hamlet, for example, is critically considered to be the masterpiece of dramatic poetry; and the tragedy of Hamlet is also, according to the testimony of every sort of manager, the play, of all others, which can be invariably depended on to fill a theatre with the greatest certainty, act it when and how you will. Again, in music, the Don Giovanni of Mozart, which 215 is the admiration even of the direst pedant producible from the ranks of musical connoisseurs, is also the irresistible popular attraction which is always sure to fill the pit and gallery at the opera. Here, at any rate, are two instances in which two great achievements of the past in poetry and music are alike viewed with admiration by the man who appreciates by instinct, and the man who appreciates by rule.

If we apply the same test to the achievements of the past in Painting, where shall we find a similar instance of genuine concurrence between the few who are appointed to teach, and the many who are expected to learn?

I put myself in the position of a man of fair capacity and average education, who labours under the fatal delusion that he will be helped to a sincere appreciation of the works of the Old Masters by asking critics and connoisseurs to form his opinions for him. I am sent to Italy as a matter of course. A general chorus of learned authorities tells me that Michael Angelo and Raphael are the two greatest painters that ever lived; and that the two recognised masterpieces of the highest High Art are the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, and the Transfiguration, in the Vatican picture gallery. It is not only Lanzi and Vasari, and hosts of later sages running smoothly along the same critical grooves, who give me this information. Even the greatest of English portrait-painters, 216 Sir Joshua Reynolds, sings steadily with the critical chorus, note for note. When experience has made me wiser, I am able to detect clearly enough in the main principles which Reynolds has adopted in his Lectures on Art, the reason of his notorious want of success whenever he tried to rise above portraits to the regions of historical painting. But at the period of my innocence, I am simply puzzled and amazed, when I come to such a passage as the following in Sir Joshua\'s famous Fifth Lecture, where he sums up the comparative merits of Michael Angelo and Raphael:—

"If we put these great artists in a line of comparison with each other (lectures Sir Joshua), Raphael had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo had more of the poetical inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime; his people are a superior order of beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions or their attitudes, or the style and cast of their limbs or features, that reminds us of their belonging to our own species."

Here I get plainly enough at what Sir Joshua considers to be the crowning excellence of high art. It is one great proof of the poetry and sublimity of 217 Michael Angelo\'s pictures that the people represented in them never remind us of our own species: which seems equivalent to saying that the representation of a man made in the image of Michael Angelo is a grander sight than the representation of a man made in the image of God. I am a little staggered by these principles of criticism; but as all the learned authorities that I can get at seem to have adopted them, I do my best to follow the example of my teachers, and set off reverently for Rome to see the two works of art which my critical masters tell me are the sublimest pictures that the world has yet beheld.

I go first to the Sistine Chapel; and, on a great blue-coloured wall at one end of it, I see painted a confusion of naked, knotty-bodied figures, sprawling up or tumbling down below a single figure, posted aloft in the middle, and apparently threatening the rest with his hand. If I ask Lanzi, or Vasari, or Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the gentleman who has compiled Murray\'s Handbook for Central Italy, or any other competent authorities, what this grotesquely startling piece of painter\'s work can possibly be, I am answered that it is actually intended to represent the unimaginably awful spectacle of the Last Judgment! And I am further informed that, estimated by the critical tests applied to it by these competent authorities, the picture is pronounced to 218 be a masterpiece of grandeur and sublimity. I resolve to look a little closer at this celebrated work, and to try if I can get at any fair estimate of it by employing such plain, uncritical tests, as will do for me and for everybody.

Here is a fresco, which aspires to represent the most impressive of all Christian subjects; it is painted on the wall of a Christian church, by a man belonging to a Christian community—what evidences of religious feeling has it to show me? I look at the lower part of the composition first, and see—a combination of the orthodox nursery notion of the devil, with the Heathen idea of the conveyance to the infernal regions, in the shape of a horned and tailed ferryman giving condemned souls a cast across a river! Pretty well, I think, to begin with.

Let me try and discover next what evidences of extraordinary intellectual ability the picture presents. I look up towards the top now, by way of a change, and I find Michael Angelo\'s conception of the entrance of a martyr into the kingdom of Heaven, displayed before me in the shape of a flayed man, presenting his own skin, as a sort of credential, to the hideous figure with the threatening hand—which I will not, even in writing, identify with the name of Our Saviour. Elsewhere, I see nothing but unnatural distortion and hopeless confusion; fighting figures, tearing figures, tumbling figures, kicking 219 figures; and, to crown all, a caricatured portrait, with a pair of ass\'s ears, of a certain Messer Biagio of Sienna, who had the sense and courage, when the Last Judgment was first shown on completion, to protest against every figure in it being painted stark-naked!

I see such things as these, and many more equally preposterous, which it is not worth while to mention. All other people with eyes in their heads see them, too. They are actual matters of fact, not debateable matters of taste. But I am not—on that account—justified, nor is any other uncritical person justified, in saying a word against the picture. It may palpably outrage all the religious proprieties of the subject; but, then, it is full of "fine foreshortening," and therefore we uncritical people must hold our tongues. It may violate just as plainly all the intellectual proprieties, counting from the flayed man with his skin in his hand, at the top, to Messer Biagio of Sienna with his ass\'s ears, at the bottom; but, then, it exhibits "masterly anatomical detail," and therefore we uncritical spectators must hold our tongues. It may strike us forcibly that, if people are to be painted at all, as in this picture, rising out of their graves in their own bodies as they lived, it is surely important (to say nothing of giving them the benefit of the shrouds in which they were buried) to represent them as having the usual general proportions 220 of human beings. But Sir Joshua Reynolds interposes critically, and tells us the figures on the wall and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are sublime, because they don\'t remind us of our own species. Why should they not remind us of our own species? Because they are prophets, sibyls, and such like, cries the chorus of critics indignantly. And what then? If I had been on intimate terms with Jeremiah, or if I had been the ancient king to whom the ............