Scatter five thousand people through
the scene, and I do not know how to make a better outline sketch. I was
unquiet, from a hopelessness of being able to enjoy it fully. Nothing is
more depressing to me than the sight of a great many pictures together;
it is like having innumerable books open before you at once, and being
able to read only a sentence or two in each. They bedazzle one another
with cross lights. There never should be more than one picture in a
room, nor more than one picture to be studied in one day. Galleries of
pictures are surely the greatest absurdities that ever were contrived,
there being no excuse for them, except that it is the only way in which
pictures can be made generally available and accessible.
We went first into the Gallery of British Painters, where there were
hundreds of pictures, every one of which would have interested me by
itself; but I could not fix nay mind on one more than another, so I
wandered about, to get a general idea of the Exhibition. Truly it is
very fine; truly, also, every great show is a kind of humbug. I doubt
whether there were half a dozen people there who got the kind of
enjoyment that it was intended to create,--very respectable people they
seemed to be, and very well behaved, but all skimming the surface, as I
did, and none of them so feeding on what was beautiful as to digest it,
and make it a part of themselves.
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