Sir Joshua Reynolds was taken by a friend to see a picture. He was anxious to admire it, and he looked it over with a keen and careful but favorable eye. "Capital composition; correct drawing; the color, tone, chiaroscuro excellent; but--but--it wants, hang it, it wants--_That!_" snapping his fingers; and, wanting "that," though it had everything else, it was worth nothing.
Again, Etty was appointed teacher of the students of the Royal Academy, having been preceded by a clever, talkative, scientific expounder of æsthetics, who delighted to tell the young men _how_ everything was done, how to copy this, and how to express that. A student came up to the new master, "How should I do this, sir?" "Suppose you try." Another, "What does this mean, Mr. Etty?" "Suppose you look." "But I have looked." "Suppose you look again." And they did try, and they did look, and looked again; and they saw and achieved what they never could have done, had the how or the what (supposing this possible, which it is not in its full and highest meaning) been told them, or done for them; in the one case, sight and action were immediate, exact, intense, and secure; in the other mediate, feeble, and lost as soon as gained. But what are "_Brains_"? what did Opie mean? and what is Sir Joshua's "_That_"? What is included in it? and what is the use, or the need of trying and trying, of missing often before you hit, when you can be told at once and be done with it; or of looking when you may be shown? Everything in medicine and in painting--practical arts--as means to ends, let their scientific enlargement be ever so rapid and immense, depends upon the right answers to these questions.
First of all, "brains," in the painter, are not diligence, knowledge, skill, sensibility, a strong will, or a high aim,--he may have all these, and never paint anything so truly good and effective as the rugged woodcut we must all remember, of Apollyon bestriding the whole breadth of the way, and Christian girding at him like a man, in the old sixpenny _Pilgrim's Progress_; and a young medical student may have zeal, knowledge, ingenuity, attention, a good eye and a steady hand--he may be an accomplished anatomist, stethoscopist, histologist, and analyst; and yet, with all this, and all the lectures, and all the books, and all the sayings, and all the preparations, drawings, tables, and other helps of his teachers, crowded into his memory or his note-books, he may be beaten in treating a whitlow or a colic, by the nurse in the wards where he was clerk, or by the old country doctor who brought him into the world, and who listens with such humble wonder to his young friend's account, on his coming home after each session, of all he had seen and done,--of all the last astonishing discoveries and operations of the day. What the painter wants, in addition to, and as the complement of, the other elements, is _genius and sense_; what the doctor needs to crown and give worth and safety to his accomplishments, is _sense and genius_: in the first case, more of this, than of that; in the second, more of that, than of this. These are the "_Brains_" and the "_That_."