The Grammar of Painting And Engraving

s denunciation of Ulysses, it is related of Alexander the Great, that every time he cast his eyes upon the picture, he trembled and turned pale, because it reminded him that he had caused the death of his friend Clitus. This story, which repeats itself every day in life in a thousand ways, makes comprehensible the force of the lessons that painting may contain. Without being either a missionary of f religion, a teacher of ethics, or a means of government, painting improves our morals, because it touches us and can awake in us noble aspirations or salutary remorse. Its figures, in their eternal silence, speak more loudly and emphatically to us than could the living philosopher or moralist ? men like ourselves. Their immobility sets our mind in motion. More persuasive than the painter who has created them, they lose the character of a human work because they seem to live a loftier life and to belong to another, to an ideal world. The morality that painting teaches us is so much the more captivating because instead of being imposed upon us by the artist it is accepted by ourselves. The spectator respects and admires it, regarding it as his own work. Believing he has discovered it, he willingly submits to it, thinking to obey only his own thought. Thus painting purifies people by its mute eloquence. Moreover, whatever may be the nature of its images, they always benefit the mind, at first because they address themselves to the mind and excite it, afterwards beca...