Let Raffael take a crayon in his hand and sweep a curve; let an
engineer take tracing paper and all other appliances necessary
to accurate reproduction, and let him copy that curve--his
line will not be the line of Raffael. Rules and principles are
profitable and necessary for the guidance of the growing artist
and for the artist full grown; but rules and principles, I take
it, just as little as geology and botany, can create the artist.
Guidance and rule imply something to be guided and ruled. And
that indefinable something which baffles all analysis, and which
when wisely guided and ruled emerges in supreme excellence, is
individual genius, which, to use familiar language, is “the gift
of God.”--JOHN TYNDALL.
(1208)