On the whole, it seems to me that there is but one presiding principle which regulates and gives stability to every art.  The works, whether of poets, painters, moralists, or historians, which are built upon general nature, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on particular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuation of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them from obscurity.  Present time and future maybe considered as rivals, and he who solicits the one must expect to be discountenanced by the other.

A discourse
Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy on the Distribution of the
Prizes, December 10, 1772, by the President.

Gentlemen,—­I purpose to carry on in this discourse the subject which I began in my last.  It was my wish upon that occasion to incite you to pursue the higher excellences of the art.  But I fear that in this particular I have been misunderstood.  Some are ready to imagine, when any of their favourite acquirements in the art are properly classed, that they are utterly disgraced.  This is a very great mistake:  nothing has its proper lustre but in its proper place.  That which is most worthy of esteem in its allotted sphere becomes an object, not of respect, but of derision, when it is forced into a higher, to which it is not suited; and there it becomes doubly a source of disorder, by occupying a situation which is not natural to it, and by putting down from the first place what is in reality of too much magnitude to become with grace and proportion that subordinate station, to which something of less value would be much better suited.

My advice in a word is this:  keep your principal attention fixed upon the higher excellences.  If you compass them and compass nothing more, you are still in the first class.  We may regret the innumerable beauties which you may want:  you may be very imperfect:  but still, you are an imperfect person of the highest order.

If, when you have got thus far, you can add any, or all, of the subordinate qualifications, it is my wish and advice that you should not neglect them.

But this is as much a matter of circumspection and caution at least as of eagerness and pursuit.

The mind is apt to be distracted by a multiplicity of pursuits; and that scale of perfection, which I wish always to be preserved, is in the greatest danger of being totally disordered, and even inverted.

Some excellences bear to be united, and are improved by union, others are of a discordant nature; and the attempt to join them only produces a harsher jarring of incongruent principles.

The attempt to unite contrary excellences (of form, for instance) in a single figure, can never escape degenerating into the monstrous, but by sinking into the insipid, taking away its marked character, and weakening its expression.

This remark is true to a certain degree with regard to the passions.  If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot express the passions, which produce (all of them) distortion and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces.