A water-colour by Turner, on which all his power had been expended,
an abstract of years and years of toil and observation, was unable
to detain me for more than five minutes, and in those five minutes I
very likely did not detect one of its really distinguishing
qualities. As to the early religious pictures of the Italian
school, I cared nothing either for subject or treatment, and would
have given a cartload of them for a drawing by Hunt of a bird's
nest. Wanting an ear for music and an eye for pictorial merit, I
believed, or affected to believe, that the raptures of people who
possessed the ear and eye were a sham. It irritated me to hear my
aunt play, although she had been well taught in her youth and was a
skilful performer. I know she would have liked to feel that she
gave me some pleasure, and that her playing was admired, but I was
so openly indifferent to it that at last she always shut the piano
if I happened to come into the room while she was practising. I
remember saying to her when she was talking to me about one of
Mozart's quartets she had just heard, that music was immoral,
inasmuch as it provoked such enormous insincerity.
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