Which first, the good news or the bad news? In honor of optimists who test their commitments by rising above the worst, I submit a three-part package of disheartening wisdom. W. J. T. Mitchell on pictures and words: “The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a 'nature' to which only it has access.” John Barrell on recent efforts to shelter the two arts of picturemaking and wordmaking under one critical label: “'Romanticism' has never become a well-established term in the discussion of English painting, and art historians do not seem, on the whole, to have found the term of great explanatory power even when applied to such obvious subjects as Turner, Palmer, or Blake himself.” And finally, the most quotable line ever written about all relations among all arts, Susanne Langer's heartstopping proclamation that “there are no happy marriages in art - only successful rape.” These warnings open suitably dark themes that we would be mistaken to bypass, because they are fundamentally true to life.