Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any exception.  They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will permit themselves in ugliness;—­but they will never permit themselves in uselessness or in unveracity.

And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much more their desire for truth.  It is impossible to find the three motives in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds.  He rejoices in showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in learning what painters’ work really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter—­that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea.  He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he will never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful.  But all his power and all his invention are held by him subordinate,—­and the more obediently because of their nobleness,-to his true leading purpose of setting before you such likeness of the living presence of an English gentleman or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon for ever.

But farther, you remember, I hope—­for I said it in a way that I thought would shock you a little, that you might remember it—­my statement, that art had never done more than this, never more than given the likeness of a noble human being.  Not only so, but it very seldom does so much as this, and the best pictures that exist of the great schools are all portraits, or groups of portraits, often of very simple and nowise noble persons.  You may have much more brilliant and impressive qualities in imaginative pictures; you may have figures scattered like clouds, or garlanded like flowers; you may have light and shade as of a tempest, and colour, as of the rainbow; but all that is child’s play to the great men, though it is astonishment to us.  Their real strength is tried to the utmost, and as far as I know, it is never elsewhere brought out so thoroughly, as in painting one man or woman, and the soul that was in them; nor that always the highest soul, but often only a thwarted one that was capable of height; or perhaps not even that, but faultful and poor, yet seen through, to the poor best of it, by the masterful sight.  So that in order to put before you in your Standard series the best art possible, I am obliged, even from the very strongest men, to take the portraits, before I take the idealism.  Nay, whatever is best in the great compositions themselves has depended on portraiture; and the study necessary