1827.) On Mean* and Ends. 227 



the light breaks in upon Us, through all the disguises of sophistry and self- 

 love, it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it. The more evident our, 

 failure, the more desperate the struggles we make to conceal it from our- 

 selves, to stick to our original determination, and end where we began. 



What makes me think that this is the real stumbling-block in our way, 

 and not mere rusticity or want of discrimination, is that you will see an 

 English artist admiring and thrown into downright raptures by the tucker 

 of Titian's Mistress, made up of an infinite number of little delicate folds ; 

 and, if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds deliberately to omit all these 

 details, and dash it off by a single smear of his brush. This is not igno- 

 rance, or even laziness, I conceive, so much as what is called jumping at 

 a conclusion. It is, in a word, an overweening presumption. " A wilful 

 man must have his way." He sees the details, the varieties, and their 

 effect: he sees and is charmed with all this; but he would reproduce it 

 with the same rapidity and unembarrassed freedom that he sees it or not 

 at all. He scorns the slow but sure method, to which others conform, as 

 tedious and inanimate. The mixing his colours, the laying in the ground, 

 the giving all his attention to a minute break or nice gradation in the 

 several lights and shades, is a mechanical and endless operation, very dif- 

 ferent from the delight he feels in studying the effect of all these, when 

 properly and ably executed. Quam nihil ad tuum, Papiniane, ingeniuml 

 Such fooleries are foreign to his refined taste and lofty enthusiasm ; and 

 a doubt crosses his mind, in the midst of his warmest raptures, how Titian 

 could resolve upon the drudgery of going through them, or whether it was 

 not rather owing to extreme facility of hand, and a sort of trick in laying 

 on the colours, abridging the mechanical labour ! No one wrote or talked 

 more eloquently about Titian's harmony and clearness of colouring than, 

 the late Mr. Barry discoursing of his greens, his blues, his yellows, 

 " the little red and white of which he composed his flesh-colour," con 

 amore ; yet his own colouring was dead and dingy, and, if he had copied 

 a Titian, he would have made it a mere daub, leaving out all that caused 

 his wonder or admiration, or that induced him to copy it after the English 

 or Irish fashion. We not only grudge the labour of beginning, but we 

 stop short, for the same reason, when we are near touching the goal of 

 success, and, to save a few last touches, leave a work unfinished and an 

 object unattained. The immediate steps, the daily gradual improvement, 

 the successive completion of parts, give us no pleasure ; we strain at the 

 final result ; we wish to have the whole done, and, in our anxiety to get it 

 off our hands, say it will do, and lose the benefit of all our pains by stint- 

 ing a little more, and being unable to command a little patience. In a day 

 or two, we will suppose, a copy of a fine Titian would be as like as we 

 could make it : the prospect of this so enchants us, that we skip the inter,- 

 vening space, see no great use in going on with it, fancy that we may spoil 

 it, and, in order to put an end to the question, take it home with us, where 

 we immediately see our error, and spend the rest of our lives in regretting 

 that we did not finish it properly when we were about it. We can execute 

 only a part ; we see the whole of nature or of a picture at once. Hinc ilia: 

 lackrymcd. The English grasp at this whole nothing less interests or 

 contents them ; and, in aiming at too much, they miss their object alto- 

 gether. 



A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious feel- 

 ingof this desire to master the whole of his subject, and anticipate his 

 good fortune at a blow of this massing and concentrating principle. He 



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