begging the question as asking an impossibility: he cannot have the same
insight into the end without having studied the means; nor the same love
of art without the same habitual and exclusive attachment to it.
Painters are, no doubt, often actuated by jealousy to that only which
they find useful to themselves in painting. Wilson has been seen poring
over the texture of a Dutch cabinet-picture, so that he could not see
the picture itself. But this is the perversion and pedantry of the
profession, not its true or genuine spirit. If Wilson had never looked
at anything but megilps and handling, he never would have put the soul
of life and manners into his pictures, as he has done. Another
objection is, that the instrumental parts of the art, the means, the
first rudiments, paints, oils, and brushes, are painful and disgusting;
and that the consciousness of the difficulty and anxiety with which
perfection has been attained must take away from the pleasure of the
finest performance. This, however, is only an additional proof of the
greater pleasure derived by the artist from his profession; for these
things which are said to interfere with and destroy the common interest
in works of art do not disturb him; he never once thinks of them, he is
absorbed in the pursuit of a higher object; he is intent, not on the
means, but the end; he is taken up, not with the difficulties, but with
the triumph over them. As in the case of the anatomist, who overlooks
many things in the eagerness of his search after abstract truth; or the
alchemist who, while he is raking into his soot and furnaces, lives in a
golden dream; a lesser gives way to a greater object. But it is
pretended that the painter may be supposed to submit to the unpleasant
part of the process only for the sake of the fame or profit in view. So
far is this from being a true state of the case, that I will venture to
say, in the instance of a friend of mine who has lately succeeded in an
important undertaking in his art, that not all the fame he has acquired,
not all the money he has received from thousands of admiring spectators,