Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/418

314 granted thus much, let us not spoil one of the most original and charming of the many joys to be found "in stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find" along the meads of art, by hankering after what will not be found, or quarrelling with what we cannot mend. Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. One would think that the reason of this was obvious; yet it is lost sight of continually. Our experience has shown us that there are few who receive from works of a plastic kind a tithe of their power to please, because of their narrow, uncatholic, querulous condition of mind, arising from a false standard and unwarrantable expectations. They will not be at the pains to recollect the wide chasm of difference between a medium in which only that need be told which can be told with truth, and one in which all must be told, either truthfully or untruthfully: they will not reflect that the visible phenomena of nature are endless; that absolute perfection requires the presence of the whole series of those phenomena, and that nothing less can produce on the eye the full effect of nature; that the conditions on which representations are made are subject to such an infinity of accidents, that it would take a regiment rather than a single man to catch the mere blush and bloom of any one aspect of nature at any one time. They forget that life is short; health, variable; opportunity, mutable; means, precarious; memory, feeble; days, dark; "models," impracticable; pigments, dull; and media, disappointing.

Let us implore the visitor of gallery and studio to reflect for a while on these inexorable limitations and distinctions, and to endeavour rather to extract pleasure out of what is absolutely there, than to repine over the lack of sufficiencies which, probably, if demanded, would be found as