[I have never thoroughly understood the painful anxiety of people to be shielded against the dishonouring suspicion of not rightly appreciating pictures, even when the very phrases they use betray their ignorance and insensibility.  Many will avow their indifference to music, and almost boast of their ignorance of science; will sneer at abstract theories, and profess the most tepid interest in history, who would feel it an unpardonable insult if you doubted their enthusiasm for painting and the “old masters” (by them secretly identified with the brown masters).  It is an insincerity fostered by general pretence.  Each man is afraid to declare his real sentiments in the presence of others equally timid.  Massive authority overawes genuine feeling].

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.  There is something noble in the submission to a great renown, which makes all reverence a healthy attitude if it be genuine.  When I think of the immense fame of Raphael, and of how many high and delicate minds have found exquisite delight even in the “Transfiguration,” and especially when I recall how others of his works have affected me, it is natural to feel some diffidence in opposing the judgment of men whose studies have given them the best means of forming that judgment—­a diffidence which may keep me silent on the matter.  To start with the assumption that you are right, and all who oppose you are fools, cannot be a safe method.  Nor in spite of a conviction that much of the admiration expressed for the “Transfiguration” is lip-homage and tradition, ought the non-admiring to assume that all of it is insincere.  It is quite compatible with modesty to be perfectly independent, and with sincerity to be respectful to the opinions and tastes of others.  If you express any opinion, you are bound to express your real opinion; let critics and admirers utter what dithyrambs they please.  Were this terror of not being thought correct in taste once got rid of, how many stereotyped judgments on books and pictures would be broken up! and the result of this sincerity would be some really valuable criticism.  In the presence of Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna,” Titian’s “Peter the Martyr,” or Masaccio’s great frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, one feels as if there had been nothing written about these mighty works, so little does any eulogy discriminate the elements of their profound effects, so little have critics expressed their own thoughts and feelings.  Yet every day some wandering connoisseur stands before these pictures, and at once, without waiting to let them sink deep into his mind, discovers all the merits which are stereotyped in the criticisms, and discovers nothing else.  He does not wait to feel, he is impatient to range himself with men of taste; he discards all genuine impressions, replacing them with vague conceptions of what he is expected to see.