Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/110

 morals, and religious history, will have to be ransacked. The result will then, if the writer has chosen his subject well, and with a due estimate of his own powers, be an artistic unity, a perfect image, true to its author's idea, and, if he has not let his own idea prejudice him in the manipulation of his materials, true to the reality, so far as the reality can be discovered. It is of course in the life-like portraiture of great men that success of this sort is most frequently achieved, for it is in the realising of grand character that the strength of historical genius chiefly displays itself. But the same method may be applied to an institution that has a well ascertained growth, and the result in that case will certainly be not less valuable. Still there are certain unities of time, place, and interest, which are more readily united in biography than in institutional history. As valuable History may be so written, so a good deal of History may be so read, in a way, that is, to produce in the mind a perfect image of the character worth studying; nay, the method is more applicable to the reading than to the writing of History, because it is easier for the mind to receive successive images or phases of the one character, than it is for the writer to reproduce them without becoming tedious; the realisation in the mind may easily be a regular and orderly development, whilst in the written record of even the best historian it is liable to become a series of postures and attitudes, attended by tricks and mannerisms of style that are unworthy of the serious student.

The second form of our art is analogous to painting, and its result to a picture; it aims at reproducing not a character or a life, but a situation; it requires a background and a foreground, scenery and perspective, as well as unity and symmetry; it studies the relations and positions, the features and habit of each of the persons or groups that the picture contains, and tries to make ^hem true to the eye, whatever they may be to the life. Thoroughness and complete realisation is not a requisite of this sort of work quite so much as accurate reproduction. The painter is not, like the statuary, obliged to look at his figures all round; he need not go to the