Get that well driven into your heads; and don’t let it out again, at your peril.

163.  Having got it well in, you may then further understand, safely, that three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite other qualities than imitative ones.  But all such art is inferior and secondary—­much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a civilized human creature can only learn those principles rightly, by knowing those of great civilized art first—­which is always the representation, to the utmost of its power, of whatever it has got to show—­made to look as like the thing as possible.  Go into the National Gallery, and look at the foot of Correggio’s Venus there.  Correggio made it as like a foot as he could, and you won’t easily find anything liker.  Now, you will find on any Greek vase something meant for a foot, or a hand, which is not at all like one.  The Greek vase is a good thing in its way, but Correggio’s picture is the best work.

164.  So, again, go into the Turner room of the National Gallery, and look at Turner’s drawing of “Ivy Bridge.”  You will find the water in it is like real water, and the ducks in it are like real ducks.  Then go into the British Museum, and look for an Egyptian landscape, and you will find the water in that constituted of blue zigzags, not at all like water; and ducks in the middle of it made of blue lines, looking not in the least as if they could stand stuffing with sage and onions.  They are very good in their way, but Turner’s are better.

165.  I will not pause to fence my general principle against what you perfectly well know of the due contradiction,—­that a thing may be painted very like, yet painted ill.  Rest content with knowing that it must be like, if it is painted well; and take this further general law:  Imitation is like charity.  When it is done for love it is lovely; when it is done for show, hateful.

166.  Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first because the face is like a face.  Perhaps you think there is something particularly handsome in the face, which you can’t see in the photograph, or can’t at present appreciate.  But there is nothing of the kind.  It is a very regular, quiet, commonplace sort of face; and any average English gentleman’s, of good descent, would be far handsomer.

167.  Fix that in your heads also, therefore, that Greek faces are not particularly beautiful.  Of that much nonsense against which you are to keep your ears shut, that which is talked to you of the Greek ideal of beauty is the absolutest.  There is not a single instance of a very beautiful head left by the highest school of Greek art.  On coins, there is even no approximately beautiful one.  The Juno of Argos is a virago; the Athena of Athens grotesque, the Athena of Corinth is insipid; and of