DEFINITION OF THE ART OF ENGRAVING. 263 



meaning of any word which Christ Himself speaks on this 

 matter ! So you see this popular art of light and shade, 

 catching you by your mere thirst of sensation, is not only un- 

 didactic, but the reverse of didactic deceptive and illusory. 



30. This popular art, you hear me say, scornfully ; and I 

 have told you, in some of my teaching in Aratra Pentelici, that 

 all great art must be popular. Yes, but great art is popular, 

 as bread and water are to children fed by a father. And vile 

 art is popular, as poisonous jelly is, to children cheated by a 

 confectioner. And it is quite possible to make any kind of 

 art popular on those last terms. The colour school may be- 

 come just as poisonous as the colourless, in the hands of fools, 

 or of rogues. Here is a book I bought only the other day,- 

 one of the things got up cheap to catch the eyes of mothers 

 at bookstalls, Puss in Boots, illustrated ; a most definite 

 work of the colour school ; red jackets and white paws and 

 yellow coaches as distinct as Giotto or Kaphael would have 

 kept them. But the thing is done by fools for money, and 

 becomes entirely monstrous and abominable. Here, again, is 

 colour art produced by fools for religion : here is Indian sacred 

 painting, a black god with a hundred arms, with a green god 

 on one side of him and a red god on the other ; still a most 

 definite work of the colour school. Giotto or Kaphael could 

 not have made the black more resolutely black, (though the 

 whole colour of the school of Athens is kept in distinct separa- 

 tion from one black square in it), nor the green more unques- 

 tionably green. Yet the whole is pestilent and loathsome. 



31. Now but one point more, and I have done with this sub- 

 ject for to-day. 



You must not think that this manifest brilliancy and Harle- 

 quin's-jacket character is essential in the colour school. The 

 essential matter is only that everything should be of its own 

 definite colour : it may be altogether sober and dark, yet the 

 distinctness of hue preserved with entire fidelity. Here, for 

 instance, is a picture of Hogarth's, one of quite the most 

 precious things we have in our galleries. It represents a 

 meeting of some learned society gentlemen of the last cen- 

 tury, very gravely dressed, but who, nevertheless, as gentlemen 



