The Functions of Art. 357 



drapery stock, unless the picture in which they glisten sug- 

 gests a thought worth having, or an emotion that makes life 

 truer and more beautiful than it was before. Interiors of 

 cottages, village schools, and scenes of amphibious existence 

 on the sea- shore, ought to be something more than works of 

 imitation, tinged with the personal egotism of their manu- 

 facturers, before they are entitled to demand our praise. Is 

 there nothing in the peasant life of England but gnarled or 

 chubby faces, fat bacon and hunks of bread ? Is there nothing 

 in the interior of our cottage homes — miserable dens though too 

 many of them be — but carrots and crockery, a deal table and 

 a mug of beer ? Those who paint peasant life as made up of 

 these beggarly elements, had better leave it alone. You may 

 see the grain of the wood floor, count the knots in the table, 

 feel disposed to pick up the potato peelings, and be a profound 

 believer in the patches on the clothes ; but if the painter has 

 seen nothing to idealize, if he excites no sensation of human 

 worth, if his men, women, and children have nothing in them but 

 simple animal characteristics, tinged with want, or degradation, 

 no merit in his brown pitchers or clouted shoes should induce 

 any one to fancy that he has produced a work of art. 



Cottage scenes are common enough in our exhibitions ; but 

 how few painters perceive the pathetic or the nobler sides of 

 humble life. And yet we know that where the common-place 

 mind can see only its own miserable reflection, there may be 

 enough heroic devotion for a Thermopylge — enough strength 

 and tenderness for a whole calendar of saints. 



We want in art the mind of a poet-thinker, turning every- 

 thing it touches to living gold ; and after an exhibition has 

 been gone through, and the physical fatigue of the process is 

 over, he alone should be dignified by the name of an artist who 

 has taught us how to see, or how to feel, or how to think, more 

 truthfully and more beautifully than before. Take aspiration 

 away from art, and it becomes so much dead lumber. If it 

 leaves its votaries with just so much indifference to bad things, 

 and no more love of good things than they previously possessed, 

 it has failed of its purpose ; it is like an instrument from which 

 no music can be evoked, — a bell that will not ring, a book that 

 proves to be nothing but leather and wood. 



Very often indeed the painter comes forward as the ex- 

 pounder of our great writers, and many works receive high 

 praise upon the merely technical ground that the art-spelling is 

 done properly, when no art-words are put together by which 

 the verse of the poet becomes a stronger and more exquisite 

 reality in our minds. If reading the poem gives us a better 

 picture, the painter has been of no use. Wo are entitled to ask 

 him to do more for us than our own imagination could easily 



