IMAGINATION. If we were to be asked, abruptly, and required to answer briefly, what qualities chiefly distinguish great artists from feeble artists, we should answer, I suppose, first, their sensibility and tenderness; secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry. Some of us might, perhaps, doubt the justice of attaching so much importance to this last character, because we have all known clever men who were indolent, and dull men who were industrious. But though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and, during such investigation as I have been able to give to the lives of the artists whose works are in all points noblest, no fact ever looms so large upon me-no law remains so steadfast in the universality of its application,--as the fact and law that they are all great workers: nothing concerning them is matter of more astonishment than the quantity they have accomplished in the given length of their life; and when I hear a young man spoken of, as giving promise of high genius, the first question I ask about him is always - Does he work? But though this quality of industry is essential to an artist, it does not in any wise make an artist; many people are busy, whose doings are little worth. Neither does sensibility make an artist; since, as I hope, many can feel both strongly and nobly who yet care nothing about art. But the gifts which distinctively mark the artist - without which he must be feeble in life, forgotten in death-with which he may become one of the shakers of the earth, and one of the signal-lights in heaven are those of sympathy and imagination. I will not occupy your time, nor incur the risk of your dissent, by endeavouring to give any close definition of this last word. We all have a general and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and in our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imaging or picturing of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary respect for this power, whenever we can recognise it, acknowledging it to be a greater power than manipulation, or calculation, or observation, or any other human faculty. If we see an old woman spinning at the fire side, and distributing her thread dexterously from the distaff, we respect her for her manipulation, — if we ask her how much she expects to make in a year, and she answers quickly, we respect her for her calculation, if she is watching at the same time that none of her grandchildren fall into the fire, we respect her for her observation, — yet for all this she may still be a commonplace old woman enough. But if she is all the time telling her grandchildren a fairy tale out of her head, we praise her for her imagination, and say, she must be a rather remarkable old woman. Precisely in like manner, if an architect does his workingdrawing well, we praise him for his manipulation, if he keeps closely within his contract, we praise him for his honest arithmetic, if he looks well to the laying of his beams, so that nobody shall drop through the floor, we praise him for his observation. But he must, somehow, tell us a fairy tale out of his head beside all this, else we cannot praise him for his imagination, nor speak of him as we did of the old woman, as being in any wise out of the common way, a rather remarkable architect. Ruskin. STYLE. of GENERALLY speaking an author's style is a faithful copy his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character. Goethe. SYMPATHY WITH MERIT. LASTLY, and chiefly, you must love the creatures to whom you minister, your fellow-men; for, if you do not love them, not only will you be little interested in the passing events of life, but in all your gazing at humanity, you will be apt to be struck only by outside form, and not by expression. It is only kindness and tenderness which will ever enable you to see what beauty there is in the dark eyes that are sunk with weeping, and in the paleness of those fixed faces which the earth's adversity has compassed about, till they shine in their patience like dying watchfires through twilight. But it is not this only which makes it needful for you, if you would be great, to be also kind; there is a most important and all-essential reason in the very nature of your own art. So soon as you desire to build largely, and with addition of noble sculpture, you will find that your work must be associative. You cannot carve a whole cathedral yourself — you can carve but few and simple parts of it. Either your own work must be disgraced in the mass of the collateral inferiority, or you must raise your fellow-designers to correspondence of power. If you have genius, you yourself take the lead in the building you design; you will carve its porch and direct its disposition. But for all subsequent advancement of its detail, you must trust to the agency and the invention of others; and it rests with you either to repress what faculties your workmen have, into cunning subordination to your own, or to rejoice in discovering even the powers that may rival you, and leading forth mind after mind into fellowship with your fancy and association with your fame. I need not tell you that if you do the first -if you endeavour to depress or disguise the talents of your subordinates you are lost; for nothing could imply more darkly and decisively than this, that your art and your work were not beloved by you; that it was your own prosperity that you were seeking, and your own skill only that you cared to contemplate. I do not say that you must not be jealous at all; it is rarely in human nature to be wholly without jealousy; and you may be forgiven for going some day sadly home, when you find some youth, unpractised and unapproved, giving the life-stroke to his work, which you, after years of training, perhaps, cannot reach: but your jealousy must not conquer-your love of your building must conquer, helped by your kindness of heart. See! I set no high or difficult standard before you. I do not say that you are to surrender your pre-eminence in mere unselfish generosity. But I do say that you must surrender your pre-eminence in your love of your building helped by your kindness; and that whomsoever you find better able to do what will adorn it than you,- that person you are to give place to; and to console yourself for the humiliation, first, by your joy in seeing the edifice grow more beautiful under his chisel, and secondly, by your sense of having done kindly and justly. But if you are morally strong enough to make the kindness and justice the first motive, it will be better;-best of all, if you do not consider it as kindness at all, but bare and stern justice; for, truly, such help as we can give each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury. Ruskin. SCORN NOT THE LEAST. WHERE words are weak, and foes encount'ring strong, Where mightier do assault than do defend, The feebler part puts up enforced wrong And silent sees, that speech could not amend: While pike doth range, the silly tench doth fly, The merlin cannot ever soar on high, |