Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/70

 probably suppose that medieval barons did nothing but order vassals into the dungeons beneath the castle moat. Now all through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries art, that is, the art of painting, suffered terribly from this conventional and uncultured quality in the working artist. People talk about something pedantic in the knowledge of the expert; but what ruins mankind is the ignorance of the expert. In the period of which we speak the experts in painting were bursting with this ignorance. The early essays of Thackeray are full of the complaint, that the whole trouble with painters was that they only knew how to paint. If they had painted unimportant or contemptible subjects, all would have been well; if they had painted the nearest donkey or lamp-post no one would have complained. But exactly because they were experts they fell into the mere snobbish sentimentalism of their times; they insisted on painting all the things they had read about in the cheapest history books and the most maudlin novels. As Thackeray has immortally described in the case of Mr Gandish, they painted Boadishia and declared that they had discovered "in