the other." I must sacrifice (not that he says so, it is what he does) this object if I do justice to that: that is, he paints the sacrifice of one thing for another. You see why he must be true to nature if he represents the act of one thing becoming subservient to another. That is what Science says, each thing merges itself into another. But more than Science says it. In painting nature so, the artist paints her truly to our own life. While the But we may put it in more than one way. painter is endeavouring to accurately represent certain things which come before him, he is serving those things. When he is sacrificing those things to fulfil the claims of other things, he is not serving them, but using them. It does not seem too much to say that the painter in painting truly makes the objects which he seems to be delineating part of the instrument with which he paints; it is the means of his action, not the end of it. It is a thing which he uses instead of serves. But though I say this, I feel, and you must feel, that it is not the truth. When we get into the domain of art, it is not true; though it may have a superficial truth, it is absolutely untrue to say man uses nature at all. The true statement is that nature uses him, that is what makes him what he is it is nature operating through the artist that divides art from what is not art. Therefore, when we say that the painter sacrifices one object in order to fulfil the claims of another, we are giving exactly an instance of that kind of truth to which the painter has to be untrue. The true truth, which is got at underneath all that, is this-while the painter truly uses that one object to fulfil the claims of another, although he does truly do so, he is painting this object inaccurately, and by this very inaccuracy he makes it serve the demands of some other object which thus becomes represented. : I have said that the painter uses one object to fulfil the claims of another, making it, as it were, its instrument; but in truth the object makes him its instrument, uses him as the means of its sacrifice for another thing. That is what we mean, or ought to mean, when we say the painter is true to nature. The fact of nature is perpetual sacrifice of all things—that is, of all that being which we perceive under the form of things; perpetual sacrifice of all being for every other being. The painter paints truly to nature by being the instrument of the sacrifice of one thing in nature for its fellows. He is true to nature, not in reproducing any appearance, but in representing that absolute fact of nature the act of sacrifice. He If we see this in art, we see clearly that there is good reason for the world looking with such admiration, with such transported eyes, upon the works of the painter. For observe, he is not painting pictures alone; he is painting life, he is painting humanity, showing us not only the art of using the brush, but the art of living. has been painting for us the very fact and law of sacrifice. We may well wish to know the limits and the laws of this wrongness which the painter puts into his rightness. I have looked at pictures a good deal, in order to make them tell me what were the rules and what the limits by which and up to which the painter might deviate from accuracy in his drawing, and I came to this conclusion-that there were no rules and no limits; that he might deviate in any way and to any extent; that there need be no shadow of resemblance between the patch of colour and the object it is supposed to stand for. The painter seems to act with absolute license, yet we know, of course, that he obeys an absolute law. What is the law? It evidently has no relation to the thing. The only law laid upon a painter is that his sacrifice of the object shall be one that nature gives him a right to make; that he shall make it for her sake and not for his own; the sacrifice shall not be wanton, but for the sake of something else. The departure from accuracy must be a sacrifice of one claim to another. That is the only law and limit. The painter need not paint accurately at all, (nay, he paints badly if he does); but in deviating he must paint two things at once. If he does, he is painting rightly, however wrongly that is to say, he is right in his action so far as it serves he is wrong when it does not serve. His duty of truth may be sacrificed to any extent for service. Or, to take it in another way, we perceive a duty lies upon him. We cannot see the moral relations of the subject unless we bear in mind that to the painter accuracy is a duty absolutely laid upon him, and yet not laid upon him. What takes its place then? If he has not to fulfil that duty, what is it that he has to do? In sacrificing one object to the claims of another, he fulfils two duties at once. I do not say one duty is greater or higher than another, but it is to be noticed that there are duties which are laid upon us by ignorance because we do not know. The duty that doubt imposes is always different from that given by complete knowledge. What I think is that any duty may be sacrificed to any other duty, but it must be duty to which it is sacrificed, for in sacrificing one duty to another he is fulfilling two duties together. The duty sacrificed is fulfilled in the heart. For if it were not so it would not be for another duty, but for self, it would be sacrificed. Thus, then, what the painter shows us is the art of fulfilling two duties at once, for which observe we must in a certain sense do wrong. Re All true art has an outside appearance of wrongness. Look back at the earliest art. The painter (speaking of the race) began with endeavouring to be exact to the object that he drew. What was the power that forced him from that, and compelled him to be inexact? member what sort of man the artist is. No man ever gained the homage of the world to whom the rightness of his art did not take the place of all rightness else; who could not have refused to falsify his picture for the sake of heaven. He must have found all righteousness, all holiness, all virtue, all sacredness, in the truth of his picture. If he was not that, he was not of importance; he might be a very good man, but he was not a person who could have advanced the art of painting. His whole soul, his whole moral nature, centred round painting, and painting stood to him in the place of everything that we call virtue to us; and the success in making his picture what it should be was what heaven is to us. So we see what a terrible thing this man did, from his point of view. We might say, "He would like his picture better if it were so and so." But that man would never speak so. To him it would have been the simple obliteration of his whole moral nature. He did not care whether he liked his picture or not. He would no more have made it false than you would steal a man's property because you do not like to be poor. I suppose that not having money in your purse would not have much effect towards making you put your hand in another man's pocket. But the painter would steal not from another man, but from nature. What he saw was that his picture was not true, and of course he tried to make it more true—that is, more and more exact and yet it became more and more unlike nature. On this point I have a theory-whatever else may be in nature, certainly our hands are in nature, and, of all hands, a painter's hands are pre-eminently so. Now my guess is this, a painter comes to paint rightly in painting wrongly, but he does not give up trying to paint rightly; in mere weariness, I fancy, he shuts his eyes a little while, and, meaning nothing, lets his strokes express the nature of his hand. Now this hand has got in it, having been trained in exactness to the object which he sees, a habit which it would be torture to put away; so when he does not try to restrain it any more, but gives it liberty, as it were, to express two natures at once, I believe he finds out that way the true right of art. He gets so tired that he indulges in a little bit of freedom, and finds that he has for the first time truly fulfilled law. I do not believe that he plans it all, but that he yields to the "natural passion" of his hand; he finds out that his hand cannot draw anything that is not true to nature-that it can have no pleasure in it. The hand is a wonderful exhibition of the true form of nature; man's hand goes very deep indeed into nature's heart. What is true to the nature of the hand must be true to the make of nature down to the very bottom. Anything that is true to the make of an instructed hand must be true to her. You cannot go into a true artist's studio and take up a single scrap of paper that he has touched without seeing how true to nature it is; his hand will not do anything else. But observe, he has broken the law, though he did not mean any breaking of the law. I believe that this is very important, that the hand is truly an art organ, and that its structure is a power by which nature leads the painter to his truth. The natural desires, the emotions, we might almost say, of the hand express themselves against the restraint which the mere outside appearances impose. It is the |