“It follows, also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly paint, in the noble sense of the word.  Vanity and selfishness are troublous, eager, anxious, petulant:  painting can only be done in calm of mind.  Resolution is not enough to secure this; it must be secured by disposition as well.  You may resolve to think of your picture only; but, if you have been fretted before beginning, no manly or clear grasp of it will be possible for you.  No forced calm is calm enough:  only honest calm, natural calm.  You might as well try by external pressure to smooth a lake till it could reflect the sky, as by violence of effort to secure the peace through which only you can reach imagination.  That peace must come in its own time, as the waters settle themselves into clearness as well as quietness:  you can no more filter your mind into purity than you can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure, if you would have it pure; and throw no stones into it, if you would have it quiet.  Great courage and self-command may to a certain extent give power of painting without the true calmness underneath, but never of doing first-rate work.  There is sufficient evidence of this in even what we know of great men, though of the greatest we nearly always know the least (and that necessarily; they being very silent, and not much given to setting themselves forth to questioners,—­apt to be contemptuously reserved no less than unselfishly).  But in such writings and sayings as we possess of theirs we may trace a quite curious gentleness and serene courtesy.  Rubens’s letters are almost ludicrous in their unhurried politeness.  Reynolds, swiftest of painters, was gentlest of companions; so also Velasquez, Titian, and Veronese.

“It is gratuitous to add that no shallow or petty person can paint.  Mere cleverness or special gift never made an artist.  It is only perfectness of mind, unity, depth, decision, the highest qualities, in fine, of the intellect, which will form the imagination.

“And, lastly, no false person can paint.  A person false at heart may, when it suits his purposes, seize a stray truth here or there; but the relations of truth, its perfectness, that which makes it wholesome truth, he can never perceive.  As wholeness and wholesomeness go together, so also sight with sincerity; it is only the constant desire of and submissiveness to truth, which can measure its strange angles and mark its infinite aspects, and fit them and knit them into sacred invention.

“Sacred I call it deliberately; for it is thus in the most accurate senses, humble as well as helpful,—­meek in its receiving as magnificent in its disposing; the name it bears being rightly given even to invention formal, not because it forms, but because it finds.  For you cannot find a lie; you must make it for yourself.  False things may be imagined, and false things composed; but only truth can be invented.”

One of those cardinal doctrines by which we may learn the bearings of a writer’s system of truth is that of Ruskin’s of the intimate connection between landscape art and humanity.