‘Ancient? it is not four hundred years since Perugino died. But I should suppose you do not intend to ignore classic art?’
‘You have divined rightly. I wish, in the study of the antique, to arrive at the primeval laws of unfallen human beauty.’
‘Were Phidias and Praxiteles, then, so primeval? the world had lasted many a thousand years before their turn came. If you intend to begin at the beginning, why not go back at once to the garden of Eden, and there study the true antique?’
‘If there were but any relics of it,’ said Lancelot, puzzled, and laughing.
‘You would find it very near you, young man, if you had but eyes to see it.’
Claude Mellot laughed significantly, and Sabina clapped her little hands.
‘Yet till you take him with you, master, and show it to him, he must needs be content with the Royal Academy and the Elgin marbles.’
‘But to what branch of painting, pray,’ said the master to Lancelot, ‘will you apply your knowledge of the antique? Will you, like this foolish fellow here’ (with a kindly glance at Claude), ‘fritter yourself away on Nymphs and Venuses, in which neither he nor any one else believes?’
‘Historic art, as the highest,’ answered Lancelot, ‘is my ambition.’
‘It is well to aim at the highest, but only when it is possible for us. And how can such a school exist in England now? You English must learn to understand your own history before you paint it. Rather follow in the steps of your Turners, and Landseers, and Standfields, and Creswicks, and add your contribution to the present noble school of naturalist painters. That is the niche in the temple which God has set you English to fill up just now. These men’s patient, reverent faith in Nature as they see her, their knowledge that the ideal is neither to be invented nor abstracted, but found and left where God has put it, and where alone it can be represented, in actual and individual phenomena;—in these lies an honest development of the true idea of Protestantism, which is paving the way to the mesothetic art of the future.’