It is a favourite dogma among modern writers on colour that "warm

colours" (reds and yellows) "approach" or express nearness, and "cold

colours" (blue and grey) "retire" or express distance. So far is this

from being the case, that no expression of distance in the world is so

great as that of the gold and orange in twilight sky. Colours, as such,

are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their _quality_

(as depth, delicacy, &c.) which expresses distance, not their tint. A

blue bandbox set on the same shelf with a yellow one will not look an

inch farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will

always appear to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as it is in

reality. It is quite true that in certain objects, blue is a _sign_ of

distance; but that is not because blue is a retiring colour, but because

the mist in the air is blue, and therefore any warm colour which has not

strength of light enough to pierce the mist is lost or subdued in its

blue: but blue is no more, on this account, a "retiring colour," than

brown is a retiring colour, because, when stones are seen through brown

water, the deeper they lie the browner they look; or than yellow is a

retiring colour, because when objects are seen through a London fog, the

farther off they are the yellower they look. Neither blue, nor yellow,

nor red, can have, as such, the _smallest_ power of expressing either

nearness or distance: they express them only under the peculiar

circumstances which render them at the moment, or in that place, _signs_

of nearness or distance. Thus, vivid orange in an orange is a sign of

nearness, for if you put the orange a great way off, its colour will not

look so bright; but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because

you cannot get the colour of orange in a cloud near you. So purple in a

violet or a hyacinth is a sign of nearness, because the closer you look

at them the more purple you see. But purple in a mountain is a sign of

distance, because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or

grey. It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale colour

will more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark colour

nearness; but even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually

give a pale and tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far

away; the rose colour of sunset on snow is pale on the snow at your

feet, deep and full on the snow in the distance; and the green of a

Swiss lake is pale in the clear waves on the beach, but intense as an

emerald in the sunstreak, six miles from shore. And in any case, when

the foreground is in strong light, with much water about it, or white

surface, casting intense reflections, all its colours may be perfectly

delicate, pale, and faint; while the distance, when it is in shadow, may

relieve the whole foreground with intense darks of purple, blue green,

or ultramarine blue. So that, on the whole, it is quite hopeless and

absurd to expect any help from laws of "aerial perspective." Look for

the natural effects, and set them down as fully as you can, and as

faithfully, and _never_ alter a colour because it won't look in its

right place. Put the colour strong, if it be strong, though far off;

faint, if it be faint, though close to you. Why should you suppose that

Nature always means you to know exactly how far one thing is from

another? She certainly intends you always to enjoy her colouring, but

she does not wish you always to measure her space. You would be hard put

to it, every time you painted the sun setting, if you had to express his

95,000,000 miles of distance in "aerial perspective."

There is, however, I think, one law about distance, which has some

claims to be considered a constant one: namely, that dullness and

heaviness of colour are more or less indicative of nearness. All distant

colour is _pure_ colour: it may not be bright, but it is clear and

lovely, not opaque nor soiled; for the air and light coming between us

and any earthy or imperfect colour, purify or harmonise it; hence a bad

colourist is peculiarly incapable of expressing distance. I do not of

course mean that you are to use bad colours in your foreground by way of

making it come forward; but only that a failure in colour, there, will

not put it out of its place; while a failure in colour in the distance

will at once do away with its remoteness: your dull-coloured foreground

will still be a foreground, though ill-painted; but your ill-painted

distance will not be merely a dull distance,--it will be no distance at

all.

I have only one thing more to advise you, namely, never to colour

petulantly or hurriedly. You will not, indeed, be able, if you attend

properly to your colouring, to get anything like the quantity of form

you could in a chiaroscuro sketch; nevertheless, if you do not dash or

rush at your work, nor do it lazily, you may always get enough form to

be satisfactory. An extra quarter of an hour, distributed in quietness

over the course of the whole study, may just make the difference

between a quite intelligible drawing, and a slovenly and obscure one. If

you determine well beforehand what outline each piece of colour is to

have; and, when it is on the paper, guide it without nervousness, as far

as you can, into the form required; and then, after it is dry, consider

thoroughly what touches are needed to complete it, before laying one of

them on; you will be surprised to find how masterly the work will soon

look, as compared with a hurried or ill-considered sketch. In no process

that I know of--least of all in sketching--can time be really gained by

precipitation. It is gained only by caution; and gained in all sorts of

ways: for not only truth of form, but force of light, is always added by

an intelligent and shapely laying of the shadow colours. You may often

make a simple flat tint, rightly gradated and edged, express a

complicated piece of subject without a single retouch. The two Swiss

cottages, for instance, with their balconies, and glittering windows,

and general character of shingly eaves, are expressed in Fig. 30., with

one tint of grey, and a few dispersed spots and lines of it; all of

which you ought to be able to lay on without more than thrice dipping

your brush, and without a single touch after the tint is dry.

[Illustration: FIG. 30.]

Here, then, for I cannot without coloured illustrations tell you more, I

must leave you to follow out the subject for yourself, with such help as

you may receive from the water-colour drawings accessible to you; or

from any of the little treatises on their art which have been published

lately by our water-colour painters.[244] But do not trust much to works

of this kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to mixture of

colours; and here and there you will find a useful artifice or process

explained; but nearly all such books are written only to help idle

amateurs to a meretricious skill, and they are full of precepts and

principles which may, for the most part, be interpreted by their

_precise_ negatives, and then acted upon, with advantage. Most of them

praise boldness, when the only safe attendant spirit of a beginner is

caution;--advise velocity, when the first condition of success is

deliberation;--and plead for generalisation, when all the foundations of

power must be laid in knowledge of specialty.

And now, in the last place, I have a few things to tell you respecting

that dangerous nobleness of consummate art,--COMPOSITION. For though it

is quite unnecessary for you yet awhile to attempt it, and it _may_ be

inexpedient for you to attempt it at all, you ought to know what it

means, and to look for and enjoy it in the art of others.

Composition means, literally and simply, putting several things

together, so as to make _one_ thing out of them; the nature and goodness

of which they all have a share in producing. Thus a musician composes an

air, by putting notes together in certain relations; a poet composes a

poem; by putting thoughts and words in pleasant order; and a painter a

picture, by putting thoughts, forms, and colours in pleasant order.

In all these cases, observe, an intended unity must be the result of

composition. A paviour cannot be said to compose the heap of stones

which he empties from his cart, nor the sower the handful of seed which

he scatters from his hand. It is the essence of composition that

everything should be in a determined place, perform an intended part,

and act, in that part, advantageously for everything that is connected

with it.

Composition, understood in this pure sense, is the type, in the arts of

mankind, of the Providential government of the world.[245] It is an

exhibition, in the order given to notes, or colours, or forms, of the

advantage of perfect fellowship, discipline, and contentment. In a

well-composed air, no note, however short or low, can be spared, but the

least is as necessary as the greatest: no note, however prolonged, is

tedious; but the others prepare for, and are benefited by, its duration;

no note, however high, is tyrannous; the others prepare for and are

benefited by, its exaltation: no note, however low, is overpowered, the

others prepare for, and sympathise with, its humility: and the result

is, that each and every note has a value in the position assigned to it,

which by itself, it never possessed, and of which by separation from the

others, it would instantly be deprived.

Similarly, in a good poem, each word and thought enhances the value of

those which precede and follow it; and every syllable has a loveliness

which depends not so much on its abstract sound as on its position. Look

at the same word in a dictionary, and you will hardly recognise it.

Much more in a great picture; every line and colour is so arranged as to

advantage the rest. None are inessential, however slight; and none are

independent, however forcible. It is not enough that they truly

represent natural objects; but they must fit into certain places, and

gather into certain harmonious groups: so that, for instance, the red

chimney of a cottage is not merely set in its place as a chimney, but

that it may affect, in a certain way pleasurable to the eye, the pieces

of green or blue in other parts of the picture; and we ought to see that

the work is masterly, merely by the positions and quantities of these

patches of green, red, and blue, even at a distance which renders it

perfectly impossible to determine what the colours represent: or to see

whether the red is a chimney, or an old woman's cloak; and whether the

blue is smoke, sky, or water.

It seems to be appointed, in order to remind us, in all we do, of the

great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition in

the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however unlearned

or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and metre, and in

simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that _power_ of

composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great

intellect All men can more or less copy what they see, and, more or

less, remember it: powers of reflection and investigation are also

common to us all, so that the decision of inferiority in these rests

only on questions of _degree_. A. has a better memory than B., and C.

reflects more profoundly than D. But the gift of composition is not

given _at all_ to more than one man in a thousand; in its highest range,

it does not occur above three or four times in a century.

It follows, from these general truths, that it is impossible to give

rules which will enable you to compose. You might much more easily

receive rules to enable you to be witty. If it were possible to be witty

by rule, wit would cease to be either admirable or amusing: if it were

possible to compose melody by rule, Mozart and Cimarosa need not have

been born: if it were possible to compose pictures by rule, Titian and

Veronese would be ordinary men. The essence of composition lies

precisely in the fact of its being unteachable, in its being the

operation of an individual mind of range and power exalted above others.

But though no one can _invent_ by rule, there are some simple laws of

arrangement which it is well for you to know, because, though they will

not enable you to produce a good picture, they will often assist you to

set forth what goodness may be in your work in a more telling way than

you could have done otherwise; and by tracing them in the work of good

composers, you may better understand the grasp of their imagination, and

the power it possesses over their materials I shall briefly state the

chief of these laws.

1. THE LAW OF PRINCIPALITY.

The great object of composition being always to secure unity; that is,

to make out of many things one whole; the first mode in which this can

be effected is, by determining that _one_ feature shall be more

important than all the rest, and that the others shall group with it in

subordinate positions.

This is the simplest law of ordinary ornamentation. Thus the group of

two leaves, _a_, Fig. 31., is unsatisfactory, because it has no leading

leaf; but that at _b_ _is_ prettier, because it has a head or master

leaf; and _c_ more satisfactory still, because the subordination of the

other members to this head leaf is made more manifest by their gradual

loss of size as they fall back from it. Hence part of the pleasure we

have in the Greek honeysuckle ornament, and such others.

[Illustration: FIG. 31.]

Thus, also, good pictures have always one light larger or brighter than

the other lights, or one figure more prominent than the other figures,

or one mass of colour dominant over all the other masses; and in general

you will find it much benefit your sketch if you manage that there shall

be one light on the cottage wall, or one blue cloud in the sky, which

may attract the eye as leading light, or leading gloom, above all

others. But the observance of the rule is often so cunningly concealed

by the great composers, that its force is hardly at first traceable; and

you will generally find that they are vulgar pictures in which the law

is _strikingly_ manifest. This may be simply illustrated by musical

melody; for instance, in such phrases as this:

[Illustration]

one note (here the upper G) rules the whole passage, and has the full

energy of it concentrated in itself. Such passages, corresponding to

completely subordinated compositions in painting, are apt to be

wearisome if often repeated. But in such a phrase as this:

[Illustration]

it is very difficult to say, which is the principal note. The A in the

last bar is lightly dominant, but there is a very equal current of

power running through the whole; and such passages rarely weary. And

this principle holds through vast scales of arrangement; so that in the

grandest compositions, such as Paul Veronese's Marriage in Cana, or

Raphael's Disputa, it is not easy to fix at once on the principal

figure; and very commonly the figure which is really chief does not

catch the eye at first, but is gradually felt to be more and more

conspicuous as we gaze. Thus in Titian's grand composition of the

Cornaro Family, the figure meant to be principal is a youth of fifteen

or sixteen, whose portrait it was evidently the painter's object to make

as interesting as possible. But a grand Madonna, and a St. George with a

drifting banner, and many figures more, occupy the centre of the

picture, and first catch the eye; little by little we are led away from

them to a gleam of pearly light in the lower corner, and find that, from

the head which it shines upon, we can turn our eyes no more.

As, in every good picture, nearly all laws of design are more or less

exemplified, it will, on the whole, be an easier way of explaining them

to analyse one composition thoroughly, than to give instances from

various works. I shall therefore take one of Turner's simplest; which

will allow us, so to speak, easily to decompose it, and illustrate each

law by it as we proceed.

Figure 32. is a rude sketch of the arrangement of the whole subject; the

old bridge over the Moselle at Coblentz, the town of Coblentz on the

right, Ehrenbreitstein on the left. The leading or master feature is, of

course the tower on the bridge. It is kept from being _too_ principal by

an important group on each side of it; the boats, on the right, and

Ehrenbreitstein beyond. The boats are large in mass, and more forcible

in colour, but they are broken into small divisions, while the tower is

simple, and therefore it still leads. Ehrenbreitstein is noble in its

mass, but so reduced by aerial perspective of colour that it cannot

contend with the tower, which therefore holds the eye, and becomes the

key of the picture. We shall see presently how the very objects which

seem at first to contend with it for the mastery are made, occultly to

increase its preeminence.

[Illustration: FIG. 32.]

2. THE LAW OF REPETITION.

Another important means of expressing unity is to mark some kind of

sympathy among the different objects, and perhaps the pleasantest,

because most surprising, kind of sympathy, is when one group imitates or

repeats another; not in the way of balance or symmetry, but

subordinately, like a far-away and broken echo of it. Prout has insisted

much on this law in all his writings on composition; and I think it is

even more authoritatively present in the minds of most great composers

than the law of principality. It is quite curious to see the pains that

Turner sometimes takes to echo an important passage of colour; in the

Pembroke Castle for instance, there are two fishing-boats, one with a

red, and another with a white sail. In a line with them, on the beach,

are two fish in precisely the same relative positions; one red and one

white. It is observable that he uses the artifice chiefly in pictures

where he wishes to obtain an expression of repose: in my notice of the

plate of Scarborough, in the series of the "Harbours of England," I have

already had occasion to dwell on this point, and I extract in the

note[246] one or two sentences which explain the principle. In the

composition I have chosen for our illustration, this reduplication is

employed to a singular extent. The tower, or leading feature, is first

repeated by the low echo of it to the left; put your finger over this

lower tower, and see how the picture is spoiled. Then the spires of

Coblentz are all arranged in couples (how they are arranged in reality

does not matter; when we are composing a great picture, we must play the

towers about till they come right, as fearlessly as if they were

chessmen instead of cathedrals). The dual arrangement of these towers

would have been too easily seen, were it not for a little one which

pretends to make a triad of the last group on the right, but is so faint

as hardly to be discernible: it just takes off the attention from the

artifice, helped in doing so by the mast at the head of the boat, which,

however, has instantly its own duplicate put at the stern.[247] Then

there is the large boat near, and its echo beyond it. That echo is

divided into two again, and each of those two smaller boats has two

figures in it; while two figures are also sitting together on the great

rudder that lies half in the water, and half aground. Then, finally, the

great mass of Ehrenbreitstein, which appears at first to have no

answering form, has almost its _facsimile_ in the bank on which the girl

is sitting; this bank is as absolutely essential to the completion of

the picture as any object in the whole series. All this is done to

deepen the effect of repose.

Symmetry or the balance of parts or masses in nearly equal opposition,

is one of the conditions of treatment under the law of Repetition. For

the opposition, in a symmetrical object, is of like things reflecting

each other; it is not the balance of contrary natures (like that of day

and night) but of like natures or like forms; one side of a leaf being

set like the reflection of the other in water.

Symmetry in Nature is, however, never formal nor accurate. She takes the

greatest care to secure some difference between the corresponding things

or parts of things; and an approximation to accurate symmetry is only

permitted in animals because their motions secure perpetual difference

between the balancing parts. Stand before a mirror; hold your arms in

precisely the same position at each side, your head upright your body

straight; divide your hair exactly in the middle, and get it as nearly

as you can into exactly the same shape over each ear, and you will see

the effect of accurate symmetry; you will see, no less, how all grace

and power in the human form result from the interference of motion and

life with symmetry, and from the reconciliation of its balance with its

changefulness. Your position, as seen in the mirror, is the highest type

of symmetry as understood by modern architects.

In many sacred compositions, living symmetry, the balance of harmonious

opposites, is one of the profoundest sources of their power: almost any

works of the early painters, Angelico, Perugino, Giotto, &c., will

furnish you with notable instances of it. The Madonna of Perugino in the

National Gallery, with the angel Michael on one side and Raphael on the

other, is as beautiful an example as you can have.

In landscape, the principle of balance is more or less carried out in

proportion to the wish of the painter to express disciplined calmness.

In bad compositions as in bad architecture, it is formal, a tree on one

side answering a tree on the other; but in good compositions, as in

graceful statues, it is always easy, and sometimes hardly traceable. In

the Coblentz, however, you cannot have much difficulty in seeing how the

boats on one side of the tower and the figures on the other are set in

nearly equal balance; the tower, as a central mass uniting both.

3. THE LAW OF CONTINUITY.

Another important and pleasurable way of expressing unity is by giving

some orderly succession to a number of objects more or less similar. And

this succession is most interesting when it is connected with some

gradual change in the aspect or character of the objects. Thus the

succession of the pillars of a cathedral aisle is most interesting when

they retire in perspective, becoming more and more obscure in distance;

so the succession of mountain promontories one behind another, on the

flanks of a valley; so the succession of clouds, fading farther and

farther towards the horizon; each promontory and each cloud being of

different shape, yet all evidently following in a calm and appointed

order. If there be no change at all in the shape or size of the objects,

there is no continuity; there is only repetition--monotony. It is the

change in shape which suggests the idea of their being individually

free, and able to escape, if they liked, from the law that rules them,

and yet submitting to it. I will leave our chosen illustrative

composition for a moment to take up another, still more expressive of

this law. It is one of Turner's most tender studies, a sketch on Calais

Sands at sunset; so delicate in the expression of wave and cloud, that

it is of no use for me to try to reach it with any kind of outline in a

woodcut; but the rough sketch, Fig. 33., is enough to give an idea of

its arrangement. The aim of the painter has been to give the intensest

expression of repose, together with the enchanted lulling, monotonous

motion of cloud and wave. All the clouds are moving in innumerable ranks

after the sun, meeting towards the point in the horizon where he has

set; and the tidal waves gain in winding currents upon the sand, with

that stealthy haste in which they cross each other so quietly, at their

edges: just folding one over another as they meet, like a little piece

of ruffled silk, and leaping up a little as two children kiss and clap

their hands, and then going on again, each in its silent hurry, drawing

pointed arches on the sand as their thin edges intersect in parting; but

all this would not have been enough expressed without the line of the

old pier-timbers, black with weeds, strained and bent by the storm

waves, and now seeming to stoop in following one another, like dark

ghosts escaping slowly from the cruelty of the pursuing sea.

I need not, I hope, point out to the reader the illustration of this law

of continuance in the subject chosen for our general illustration. It

was simply that gradual succession of the retiring arches of the bridge

which induced Turner to paint the subject at all; and it was this same

principle which led him always to seize on subjects including long

bridges where-ever he could find them; but especially, observe, unequal

bridges, having the highest arch at one side rather than at the centre.

There is a reason for this, irrespective of general laws of composition,

and connected with the nature of rivers, which I may as well stop a

minute to tell you about, and let you rest from the study of

composition.

[Illustration: FIG. 33.]

All rivers, small or large, agree in one character, they like to lean a

little on one side: they cannot bear to have their channels deepest in

the middle, but will always, if they can, have one bank to sun

themselves upon, and another to get cool under; one shingly shore to

play over, where they may be shallow, and foolish, and childlike, and

another steep shore, under which they can pause, and purify themselves,

and get their strength of waves fully together for due occasion. Rivers

in this way are just like wise men, who keep one side of their life for

play, and another for work; and can be brilliant, and chattering, and

transparent, when they are at ease, and yet take deep counsel on the

other side when they set themselves to their main purpose. And rivers

are just in this divided, also, like wicked and good men: the good

rivers have serviceable deep places all along their banks, that ships

can sail in; but the wicked rivers go scoopingly irregularly under their

banks until they get full of strangling eddies, which no boat can row

over without being twisted against the rocks; and pools like wells,

which no one can get out of but the water-kelpie that lives at the

bottom;--but, wicked or good, the rivers all agree in having two kinds

of sides. Now the natural way in which a village stonemason therefore

throws a bridge over a strong stream is, of course, to build a great

door to let the cat through, and little doors to let the kittens

through; a great arch for the great current, to give it room in flood

time, and little arches for the little currents along the shallow shore.

This, even without any prudential respect for the floods of the great

current, he would do in simple economy of work and stone; for the

smaller your arches are, the less material you want on their flanks. Two

arches over the same span of river, supposing the butments are at the

same depth, are cheaper than one, and that by a great deal; so that,

where the current is shallow, the village mason makes his arches many

and low; as the water gets deeper, and it becomes troublesome to build

his piers up from the bottom, he throws his arches wider; at last he

comes to the deep stream, and, as he cannot build at the bottom of that,

he throws his largest arch over it with a leap, and with another little

one or so gains the opposite shore. Of course as arches are wider they

must be higher, or they will not stand; so the roadway must rise as the

arches widen. And thus we have the general type of bridge, with its

highest and widest arch towards one side, and a train of minor arches

running over the flat shore on the other; usually a steep bank at the

river-side next the large arch; always, of course, a flat shore on the

side of the small ones; and the bend of the river assuredly concave

towards this flat, cutting round, with a sweep into the steep bank; or,

if there is no steep bank, still assuredly cutting into the shore at the

steep end of the bridge.

Now this kind of bridge, sympathising, as it does, with the spirit of

the river, and marking the nature of the thing it has to deal with and

conquer, is the ideal of a bridge; and all endeavours to do the thing in

a grand engineer's manner, with a level roadway and equal arches, are

barbarous; not only because all monotonous forms are ugly in themselves,

but because the mind perceives at once that there has been cost

uselessly thrown away for the sake of formality.[248]

Well, to return to our continuity. We see that the Turnerian bridge in

Fig. 32. is of the absolutely perfect type, and is still farther

interesting by having its main arch crowned by a watch-tower. But as I

want you to note especially what perhaps was not the case in the real

bridge, but is entirely Turner's doing, you will find that though the

arches diminish gradually, not one is _regularly_ diminished--they are

all of different shapes and sizes: you cannot see this clearly in 32.,

but in the larger diagram, Fig. 34., opposite, you will with ease. This

is indeed also part of the ideal of a bridge, because the lateral

currents near the shore are of course irregular in size, and a simple

builder would naturally vary his arches accordingly; and also, if the

bottom was rocky, build his piers where the rocks came. But it is not as

a part of bridge ideal, but as a necessity of all noble composition,

that this irregularity is introduced by Turner. It at once raises the

object thus treated from the lower or vulgar unity of rigid law to the

greater unity of clouds, and waves, and trees, and human souls, each

different, each obedient, and each in harmonious service.

4. THE LAW OF CURVATURE.

There is, however, another point to be noticed in this bridge of

Turner's. Not only does it slope away unequally at its sides, but it

slopes in a gradual though very subtle curve. And if you substitute a

straight line for this curve (drawing one with a rule from the base of

the tower on each side to the ends of the bridge, in Fig. 34., and

effacing the curve), you will instantly see that the design has suffered

grievously. You may ascertain, by experiment, that all beautiful objects

whatsoever are thus terminated by delicately curved lines, except where

the straight line is indispensable to their use or stability: and that

when a complete system of straight lines, throughout the form, is

necessary to that stability, as in crystals, the beauty, if any exists,

is in colour and transparency, not in form. Cut out the shape of any

crystal you like, in white wax or wood, and put it beside a white lily,

and you will feel the force of the curvature in its purity, irrespective

of added colour, or other interfering elements of beauty.

[Illustration: FIG. 34.]

Well, as curves are more beautiful than straight lines, it is necessary

to a good composition that its continuities of object, mass, or colour

should be, if possible, in curves, rather than straight lines or angular

ones. Perhaps one of the simplest and prettiest examples of a graceful

continuity of this kind is in the line traced at any moment by the corks

of a net as it is being drawn: nearly every person is more or less

attracted by the beauty of the dotted line. Now it is almost always

possible, not only to secure such a continuity in the arrangement or

boundaries of objects which, like these bridge arches or the corks of

the net, are actually connected with each other, but--and this is a

still more noble and interesting kind of continuity--among features

which appear at first entirely separate. Thus the towers of

Ehrenbreitstein, on the left, in Fig. 32., appear at first independent

of each other; but when I give their profile, on a larger scale, Fig.

35., the reader may easily perceive that there is a subtle cadence and

harmony among them. The reason of this is, that they are all bounded by

one grand curve, traced by the dotted line; out of the seven towers,

four precisely touch this curve, the others only falling back from it

here and there to keep the eye from discovering it too easily.

[Illustration: FIG. 35.]

And it is not only always _possible_ to obtain continuities of this

kind: it is, in drawing large forest or mountain forms essential to

truth. The towers of Ehrenbreitstein might or might not in reality fall

into such a curve, but assuredly the basalt rock on which they stand

did; for all mountain forms not cloven into absolute precipice, nor

covered by straight slopes of shales, are more or less governed by these

great curves, it being one of the aims of Nature in all her work to

produce them. The reader must already know this, if he has been able to

sketch at all among the mountains; if not, let him merely draw for

himself, carefully, the outlines of any low hills accessible to him,

where they are tolerably steep, or of the woods which grow on them. The

steeper shore of the Thames at Maidenhead, or any of the downs at

Brighton or Dover, or, even nearer, about Croydon (as Addington Hills),

are easily accessible to a Londoner; and he will soon find not only how

constant, but how graceful the curvature is. Graceful curvature is

distinguished from ungraceful by two characters: first, its moderation,

that is to say, its close approach to straightness in some parts of its

course;[249] and, secondly, by its variation, that is to say, its never

remaining equal in degree at different parts of its course.

This variation is itself twofold in all good curves.

[Illustration: FIG. 36.]

A. There is, first, a steady change through the whole line from less to

more curvature, or more to less, so that _no_ part of the line is a

segment of a circle, or can be drawn by compasses in any way whatever.

Thus, in Fig. 36., _a_ is a bad curve, because it is part of a circle,

and is therefore monotonous throughout; but _b_ is a good curve, because

it continually changes its direction as it proceeds.

[Illustration: FIG. 37.]

The _first_ difference between good and bad drawing of tree boughs

consists in observance of this fact. Thus, when I put leaves on the line

_b_, as in Fig. 37., you can immediately feel the springiness of

character dependent on the changefulness of the curve. You may put

leaves on the other line for yourself, but you will find you cannot make

a right tree spray of it. For _all_ tree boughs, large or small, as well

as all noble natural lines whatsoever, agree in this character; and it

is a point of primal necessity that your eye should always seize and

your hand trace it. Here are two more portions of good curves, with

leaves put on them at the extremities instead of the flanks, Fig. 38.;

and two showing the arrangement of masses of foliage seen a little

farther off, Fig. 39., which you may in like manner amuse yourself by

turning into segments of circles--you will see with what result. I hope,

however, you have beside you by this time, many good studies of tree

boughs carefully made, in which you may study variations of curvature in

their most complicated and lovely forms.[250]

[Illustration: FIG. 38.]

[Illustration: FIG. 39.]

B. Not only does every good curve vary in general tendency, but it is

modulated, as it proceeds, by myriads of subordinate curves. Thus the

outlines of a tree trunk are never as at _a_, Fig. 40, but as at _b_. So

also in waves, clouds, and all other nobly formed masses. Thus another

essential difference between good and bad drawing, or good and bad

sculpture, depends on the quantity and refinement of minor curvatures

carried, by good work, into the great lines. Strictly speaking, however,

this is not variation in large curves, but composition of large curves

out of small ones; it is an increase in the quantity of the beautiful

element, _but not a change in its nature_.

5. THE LAW OF RADIATION.

[Illustration: FIG. 40.]

We have hitherto been concerned only with the binding of our various

objects into beautiful lines or processions. The next point we have to

consider is, how we may unite these lines or processions themselves, so

as to make groups of _them_.

Now, there are two kinds of harmonies of lines. One in which, moving

more or less side by side, they variously, but evidently with consent,

retire from or approach each other, intersect or oppose each other:

currents of melody in music, for different voices, thus approach and

cross, fall and rise, in harmony; so the waves of the sea, as they

approach the shore, flow into one another or cross, but with a great

unity through all; and so various lines of composition often flow

harmoniously through and across each other in a picture. But the most

simple and perfect connexion of lines is by radiation; that is, by their

all springing from one point, or closing towards it: and this harmony is

often, in Nature almost always, united with the other; as the boughs of

trees, though they intersect and play amongst each other irregularly,

indicate by their general tendency their origin from one root. An

essential part of the beauty of all vegetable form is in this radiation:

it is seen most simply in a single flower or leaf, as in a convolvulus

bell, or chestnut leaf; but more beautifully in the complicated

arrangements of the large boughs and sprays. For a leaf is only a flat

piece of radiation; but the tree throws its branches on all sides, and

even in every profile view of it, which presents a radiation more or

less correspondent to that of its leaves, it is more beautiful, because

varied by the freedom of the separate branches. I believe it has been

ascertained that, in all trees, the angle at which, in their leaves, the

lateral ribs are set on their central rib is approximately the same at

which the branches leave the great stem; and thus each section of the

tree would present a kind of magnified view of its own leaf, were it not

for the interfering force of gravity on the masses of foliage. This

force in proportion to their age, and the lateral leverage upon them,

bears them downwards at the extremities, so that, as before noticed, the

lower the bough grows on the stem, the more it droops (Fig. 17, p.

295.); besides this, nearly all beautiful trees have a tendency to

divide into two or more principal masses, which give a prettier and more

complicated symmetry than if one stem ran all the way up the centre.

Fig. 41. may thus be considered the simplest type of tree radiation, as

opposed to leaf radiation. In this figure, however, all secondary

ramification is unrepresented, for the sake of simplicity; but if we

take one half of such a tree, and merely give two secondary branches to

each main branch (as represented in the general branch structure shown

at _b_, Fig. 18., p. 296), we shall have the form, Fig. 42. This I

consider the perfect general type of tree structure; and it is curiously

connected with certain forms of Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic

ornamentation, into the discussion of which, however, we must not enter

here. It will be observed, that both in Figs. 41. and 42. all the

branches so spring from the main stem as very nearly to suggest their

united radiation from the root R. This is by no means universally the

case; but if the branches do not bend towards a point in the root, they

at least converge to some point or other. In the examples in Fig. 43.,

the mathematical centre of curvature, _a_, is thus, in one case, on the

ground at some distance from the root, and in the other, near the top of

the tree. Half, only, of each tree is given, for the sake of clearness:

Fig. 44. gives both sides of another example, in which the origins of

curvature are below the root. As the positions of such points may be

varied without end, and as the arrangement of the lines is also farther

complicated by the fact of the boughs springing for the most part in a

spiral order round the tree, and at proportionate distances, the systems

of curvature which regulate the form of vegetation are quite infinite.

Infinite is a word easily said, and easily written, and people do not

always mean it when they say it; in this case I _do_ mean it; the number

of systems is incalculable, and even to furnish any thing like a

representative number of types, I should have to give several hundreds

of figures such as Fig. 44.[251]

[Illustration: FIG. 41.]

[Illustration: FIG. 42.]

[Illustration: FIG. 43.]

[Illustration: FIG. 44.]

Thus far, however, we have only been speaking of the great relations of

stem and branches. The forms of the branches themselves are regulated by

still more subtle laws, for they occupy an intermediate position between

the form of the tree and of the leaf. The leaf has a flat ramification;

the tree a completely rounded one; the bough is neither rounded nor

flat, but has a structure exactly balanced between the two, in a

half-flattened, half-rounded flake, closely resembling in shape one of

the thick leaves of an artichoke or the flake of a fir cone; by

combination forming the solid mass of the tree, as the leaves compose

the artichoke head. I have before pointed out to you the general

resemblance of these branch flakes to an extended hand; but they may be

more accurately represented by the ribs of a boat. If you can imagine a

very broad-headed and flattened boat applied by its keel to the end of a

main branch,[252] as in Fig. 45., the lines which its ribs will take,

and the general contour of it, as seen in different directions, from

above and below; and from one side and another, will give you the

closest approximation to the perspectives and foreshortenings of a

well-grown branch-flake. Fig. 25. above, page 316., is an unharmed and

unrestrained shoot of healthy young oak; and if you compare it with Fig.

45., you will understand at once the action of the lines of leafage; the

boat only failing as a type in that its ribs are too nearly parallel to

each other at the sides, while the bough sends all its ramification well

forwards, rounding to the head, that it may accomplish its part in the

outer form of the whole tree, yet always securing the compliance with

the great universal law that the branches nearest the root bend most

back; and, of course, throwing _some_ always back as well as forwards;

the appearance of reversed action being much increased, and rendered

more striking and beautiful, by perspective. Figure 25. shows the

perspective of such a bough as it is seen from below; Fig. 46. gives

rudely the look it would have from above.

[Illustration: FIG. 45.]

[Illustration: FIG. 46.]

You may suppose, if you have not already discovered, what subtleties of

perspective and light and shade are involved in the drawing of these

branch-flakes, as you see them in different directions and actions; now

raised, now depressed; touched on the edges by the wind, or lifted up

and bent back so as to show all the white under surfaces of the leaves

shivering in light, as the bottom of a boat rises white with spray at

the surge-crest; or drooping in quietness towards the dew of the grass

beneath them in windless mornings, or bowed down under oppressive grace

of deep-charged snow. Snow time, by the way, is one of the best for

practice in the placing of tree masses; but you will only be able to

understand them thoroughly by beginning with a single bough and a few

leaves placed tolerably even, as in Fig. 38. page 372. First one with

three leaves, a central and two lateral ones, as at _a_; then with five,

as at _b_, and so on; directing your whole attention to the expression,

both by contour and light and shade, of the boat-like arrangements,

which in your earlier studies, will have been a good deal confused,

partly owing to your inexperience, and partly to the depth of shade, or

absolute blackness of mass required in those studies.

One thing more remains to be noted, and I will let you out of the wood.

You see that in every generally representative figure I have surrounded

the radiating branches with a dotted line: such lines do indeed

terminate every vegetable form; and you see that they are themselves

beautiful curves, which, according to their flow, and the width or

narrowness of the spaces they enclose, characterize the species of tree

or leaf, and express its free or formal action, its grace of youth or

weight of age. So that, throughout all the freedom of her wildest

foliage, Nature is resolved on expressing an encompassing limit; and

marking a unity in the whole tree, caused not only by the rising of its

branches from a common root, but by their joining in one work, and being

bound by a common law. And having ascertained this, let us turn back for

a moment to a point in leaf structure which, I doubt not, you must

already have observed in your earlier studies, but which it is well to

state here, as connected with the unity of the branches in the great

trees. You must have noticed, I should think, that whenever a leaf is

compound,--that is to say, divided into other leaflets which in any way

repeat or imitate the form of the whole leaf,--those leaflets are not

symmetrical as the whole leaf is, but always smaller on the side towards

the point of the great leaf, so as to express their subordination to it,

and show, even when they are pulled off, that they are not small

independent leaves, but members of one large leaf.

[Illustration: FIG. 47.]

Fig. 47., which is a block-plan of a leaf of columbine, without its

minor divisions on the edges, will illustrate the principle clearly. It

is composed of a central large mass, A, and two lateral ones, of which

the one on the right only is lettered, B. Each of these masses is again

composed of three others, a central and two lateral ones; but observe,

the minor one, _a_ of A, is balanced equally by its opposite; but the

minor _b_1 of B is larger than its opposite _b_2. Again, each of these

minor masses is divided into three; but while the central mass, A of A,

is symmetrically divided, the B of B is unsymmetrical, its largest

side-lobe being lowest. Again _b_2, the lobe _c_1 (its lowest lobe in

relation to B) is larger than _c_2; and so also in _b_1. So that

universally one lobe of a lateral leaf is always larger than the other,

and the smaller lobe is that which is nearer the central mass; the lower

leaf, as it were by courtesy, subduing some of its own dignity or

power, in the immediate presence of the greater or captain leaf; and

always expressing, therefore, its own subordination and secondary

character. This law is carried out even in single leaves. As far as I

know, the upper half, towards the point of the spray, is always the

smaller; and a slightly different curve, more convex at the springing,

is used for the lower side, giving an exquisite variety to the form of

the whole leaf; so that one of the chief elements in the beauty of every

subordinate leaf throughout the tree, is made to depend on its

confession of its own lowliness and subjection.

And now, if we bring together in one view the principles we have

ascertained in trees, we shall find they may be summed under four great

laws; and that all perfect[253] vegetable form is appointed to express

these four laws in noble balance of authority.

1. Support from one living root.

2. Radiation, or tendency of force from some one given point, either in

the root, or in some stated connexion with it.

3. Liberty of each bough to seek its own livelihood and happiness

according to its needs, by irregularities of action both in its play and

its work, either stretching out to get its required nourishment from

light and rain, by finding some sufficient breathing-place among the

other branches, or knotting and gathering itself up to get strength for

any load which its fruitful blossoms may lay upon it, and for any stress

of its storm-tossed luxuriance of leaves; or playing hither and thither

as the fitful sunshine may tempt its young shoots, in their undecided

states of mind about their future life.

4. Imperative requirement of each bough to stop within certain limits,

expressive of its kindly fellowship and fraternity with the boughs in

its neighborhood; and to work with them according to its power,

magnitude, and state of health, to bring out the general perfectness of

the great curve, and circumferent stateliness of the whole tree.

I think I may leave you, unhelped, to work out the moral analogies of

these laws; you may, perhaps, however, be a little puzzled to see the

meeting of the second one. It typically expresses that healthy human

actions should spring radiantly (like rays) from some single heart

motive; the most beautiful systems of action taking place when this

motive lies at the root of the whole life, and the action is clearly

seen to proceed from it; while also many beautiful secondary systems of

action taking place from motives not so deep or central, but in some

beautiful subordinate connexion with the central or life motive.

The other laws, if you think over them, you will find equally

significative; and as you draw trees more and more in their various

states of health and hardship, you will be every day more struck by the

beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for

mankind to know;[254] and you will see what this vegetation of the

earth, which is necessary to our life, first, as purifying the air for

us and then as food, and just as necessary to our joy in all places of

the earth,--what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as

we contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or

spoken for us, not in frightful black letters, nor in dull sentences,

but in fair green and shadowy shapes of waving words, and blossomed

brightness of odoriferous wit, and sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom,

and playful morality.

Well, I am sorry myself to leave the wood, whatever my reader may be;

but leave it we must, or we shall compose no more pictures to-day.

This law of radiation, then, enforcing unison of action in arising from,

or proceeding to, some given point, is perhaps, of all principles of

composition, the most influential in producing the beauty of groups of

form. Other laws make them forcible or interesting, but this generally

is chief in rendering them beautiful. In the arrangement of masses in

pictures, it is constantly obeyed by the great composers; but, like the

law of principality, with careful concealment of its imperativeness, the

point to which the lines of main curvature are directed being very often

far away out of the picture. Sometimes, however, a system of curves will

be employed definitely to exalt, by their concurrence, the value of some

leading object, and then the law becomes traceable enough.

In the instance before us, the principal object being, as we have seen,

the tower on the bridge, Turner has determined that his system of

curvature should have its origin in the top of this tower. The diagram

Fig. 34. page 369, compared with Fig. 32. page 361, will show how this

is done. One curve joins the two towers, and is continued by the back of

the figure sitting on the bank into the piece of bent timber. This is a

limiting curve of great importance, and Turner has drawn a considerable

part of it with the edge of the timber very carefully, and then led the

eye up to the sitting girl by some white spots and indications of a

ledge in the bank; then the passage to the tops of the towers cannot be

missed.

The next curve is begun and drawn carefully for half an inch of its

course by the rudder; it is then taken up by the basket and the heads of

the figures, and leads accurately to the tower angle. The gunwales of

both the boats begin the next two curves, which meet in the same point;

and all are centralised by the long reflection which continues the

vertical lines.

Subordinated to this first system of curves there is another, begun by

the small crossing bar of wood inserted in the angle behind the rudder;

continued by the bottom of the bank on which the figure sits,

interrupted forcibly beyond it,[255] but taken up again by the

water-line leading to the bridge foot, and passing on in delicate

shadows under the arches, not easily shown in so rude a diagram, towards

the other extremity of the bridge. This is a most important curve,

indicating that the force and sweep of the river have indeed been in old

times under the large arches; while the antiquity of the bridge is told

us by the long tongue of land, either of carted rubbish, or washed down

by some minor stream, which has interrupted this curve, and is now used

as a landing-place for the boats, and for embarkation of merchandise, of

which some bales and bundles are laid in a heap, immediately beneath the

great tower. A common composer would have put these bales to one side or

the other, but Turner knows better; he uses them as a foundation for his

tower, adding to its importance precisely as the sculptured base adorns

a pillar; and he farther increases the aspect of its height by throwing

the reflection of it far down in the nearer water. All the great

composers have this same feeling about sustaining their vertical masses:

you will constantly find Prout using the artifice most dexterously (see,

for instance, the figure with the wheelbarrow under the great tower, in

the sketch of St. Nicolas, at Prague, and the white group of figures

under the tower in the sketch of Augsburg[256]); and Veronese, Titian,

and Tintoret continually put their principal figures at bases of

pillars. Turner found out their secret very early, the most prominent

instance of his composition on this principle being the drawing of Turin

from the Superga, in Hakewell's Italy.

I chose Fig. 20., already given to illustrate foliage drawing, chiefly

because, being another instance of precisely the same arrangement, it

will serve to convince you of its being intentional. There, the

vertical, formed by the larger tree, is continued by the figure of the

farmer, and that of one of the smaller trees by his stick. The lines of

the interior mass of the bushes radiate, under the law of radiation,

from a point behind the farmer's head; but their outline curves are

carried on and repeated, under the law of continuity, by the curves of

the dog and boy--by the way, note the remarkable instance in these of

the use of darkest lines towards the light;--all more or less guiding

the eye up to the right, in order to bring it finally to the Keep of

Windsor, which is the central object of the picture, as the bridge tower

is in the Coblentz. The wall on which the boy climbs answers the purpose

of contrasting, both in direction and character, with these greater

curves; thus corresponding as nearly as possible to the minor tongue of

land in the Coblentz. This, however, introduces us to another law, which

we must consider separately.

6. THE LAW OF CONTRAST.

Of course the character of everything is best manifested by Contrast.

Rest can only be enjoyed after labour; sound, to be heard clearly, must

rise out of silence; light is exhibited by darkness, darkness by light;

and so on in all things. Now in art every colour has an opponent colour,

which, if brought near it, will relieve it more completely than any

other; so, also, every form and line may be made more striking to the

eye by an opponent form or line near them; a curved line is set off by a

straight one, a massy form by a slight one, and so on; and in all good

work nearly double the value, which any given colour or form would have

uncombined, is given to each by contrast.[257]

In this case again, however, a too manifest use of the artifice

vulgarises a picture. Great painters do not commonly, or very visibly,

admit violent contrast. They introduce it by stealth and with

intermediate links of tender change; allowing, indeed, the opposition to

tell upon the mind as a surprise, but not as a shock.[258]

Thus in the rock of Ehrenbreitstein, Fig. 35., the main current of the

lines being downwards, in a convex swell, they are suddenly stopped at

the lowest tower by a counter series of beds, directed nearly straight

across them. This adverse force sets off and relieves the great

curvature, but it is reconciled to it by a series of radiating lines

below, which at first sympathize with the oblique bar, then gradually

get steeper, till they meet and join in the fall of the great curve. No

passage, however intentionally monotonous, is ever introduced by a good

artist without _some_ slight counter current of this kind; so much,

indeed, do the great composers feel the necessity of it, that they will

even do things purposely ill or unsatisfactorily, in order to give

greater value to their well-doing in other places. In a skilful poet's

versification the so-called bad or inferior lines are not inferior

because he could not do them better, but because he feels that if all

were equally weighty, there would be no real sense of weight anywhere;

if all were equally melodious, the melody itself would be fatiguing; and

he purposely introduces the labouring or discordant verse, that the full

ring may be felt in his main sentence, and the finished sweetness in his

chosen rhythm.[259] And continually in painting, inferior artists

destroy their work by giving too much of all that they think is good,

while the great painter gives just enough to be enjoyed, and passes to

an opposite kind of enjoyment, or to an inferior state of enjoyment: he

gives a passage of rich, involved, exquisitely wrought colour, then

passes away into slight, and pale and simple colour; he paints for a

minute or two with intense decision, then suddenly becomes, as the

spectator thinks, slovenly; but he is not slovenly: you could not have

_taken_ any more decision from him just then; you have had as much as is

good for you; he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the

most rounded and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a

freak, gives you a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn.

Perhaps the most exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of

painting is the arrow point, laid sharp against the white side and among

the flowing hair of Correggio's Antiope. It is quite singular how very

little contrast will sometimes serve to make an entire group of forms

interesting which would otherwise have been valueless. There is a good

deal of picturesque material, for instance, in this top of an old tower,

Fig. 48., tiles and stones and sloping roof not disagreeably mingled;

but all would have been unsatisfactory if there had not happened to be

that iron ring on the inner wall, which by its vigorous black

_circular_ line precisely opposes all the square and angular characters

of the battlements and roof. Draw the tower without the ring, and see

what a difference it will make.

[Illustration: FIG. 48.]

One of the most important applications of the law of contrast is in

association with the law of continuity, causing an unexpected but gentle

break in a continuous series. This artifice is perpetual in music, and

perpetual also in good illumination; the way in which little surprises

of change are prepared in any current borders, or chains of ornamental

design, being one of the most subtle characteristics of the work of the

good periods. We take, for instance, a bar of ornament between two

written columns of an early 14th Century MS., and at the first glance we

suppose it to be quite monotonous all the way up, composed of a winding

tendril, with alternately a blue leaf and a scarlet bud. Presently,

however, we see that, in order to observe the law of principality there

is one large scarlet leaf instead of a bud, nearly half-way up, which

forms a centre to the whole rod; and when we begin to examine the order

of the leaves, we find it varied carefully. Let A stand for scarlet bud,

_b_ for blue leaf, _c_ for two blue leaves on one stalk, _s_ for a stalk

without a leaf, and R for the large red leaf. Then counting from the

ground, the order begins as follows:

_b_, _b_, A; _b_, _s_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, A; and we think we

shall have two _b_'s and an A all the way, when suddenly it becomes _b_,

A; _b_, R; _b_, A; _b_, A; _b_, A; and we think we are going to have

_b_, A continued; but no: here it becomes _b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _b_, A;

_b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _c_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; and we think we are

surely going to have _b_, _s_ continued, but behold it runs away to the

end with a quick _b_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, _b_, _b_![260] Very often,

however, the designer is satisfied with _one_ surprise, but I never saw

a good illuminated border without one at least; and no series of any

kind is ever introduced by a great composer in a painting without a snap

somewhere. There is a pretty one in Turner's drawing of Rome, with the

large balustrade for a foreground in the Hakewell's Italy series: the

single baluster struck out of the line, and showing the street below

through the gap, simply makes the whole composition right, when

otherwise, it would have been stiff and absurd.

If you look back to Fig. 48. you will see, in the arrangement of the

battlements, a simple instance of the use of such variation. The whole

top of the tower, though actually three sides of a square, strikes the

eye as a continuous series of five masses. The first two, on the left,

somewhat square and blank; then the next two higher and richer, the

tiles being seen on their slopes. Both these groups being couples, there

is enough monotony in the series to make a change pleasant; and the last

battlement, therefore, is a little higher than the first two,--a little

lower than the second two,--and different in shape from either. Hide it

with your finger, and see how ugly and formal the other four battlements

look.

There are in this figure several other simple illustrations of the laws

we have been tracing. Thus the whole shape of the wall's mass being

square, it is well, still for the sake of contrast, to oppose it not

only by the element of curvature, in the ring, and lines of the roof

below, but by that of sharpness; hence the pleasure which the eye takes

in the projecting point of the roof. Also because the walls are thick

and sturdy, it is well to contrast their strength with weakness;

therefore we enjoy the evident decrepitude of this roof as it sinks

between them. The whole mass being nearly white, we want a contrasting

shadow somewhere; and get it, under our piece of decrepitude. This

shade, with the tiles of the wall below, forms another pointed mass,

necessary to the first by the law of repetition. Hide this inferior

angle with your finger, and see how ugly the other looks. A sense of the

law of symmetry, though you might hardly suppose it, has some share in

the feeling with which you look at the battlements; there is a certain

pleasure in the opposed slopes of their top, on one side down to the

left, on the other to the right. Still less would you think the law of

radiation had anything to do with the matter: but if you take the

extreme point of the black shadow on the left for a centre and follow

first the low curve of the eaves of the wall, it will lead you, if you

continue it, to the point of the tower cornice; follow the second curve,

the top of the tiles of the wall, and it will strike the top of the

right-hand battlement; then draw a curve from the highest point of the

angle battlement on the left, through the points of the roof and its

dark echo; and you will see how the whole top of the tower radiates from

this lowest dark point. There are other curvatures crossing these main

ones, to keep them from being too conspicuous. Follow the curve of the

upper roof, it will take you to the top of the highest battlement; and

the stones indicated at the right-hand side of the tower are more

extended at the bottom, in order to get some less direct expression of

sympathy, such as irregular stones may be capable of, with the general

flow of the curves from left to right.

You may not readily believe, at first, that all these laws are indeed

involved in so trifling a piece of composition. But as you study longer,

you will discover that these laws, and many more, are obeyed by the

powerful composers in every _touch_: that literally, there is never a

dash of their pencil which is not carrying out appointed purposes of

this kind in twenty various ways at once; and that there is as much

difference, in way of intention and authority, between one of the great

composers ruling his colours, and a common painter confused by them, as

there is between a general directing the march of an army, and an old

lady carried off her feet by a mob.

7. THE LAW OF INTERCHANGE.

Closely connected with the law of contrast is a law which enforces the

unity of opposite things, by giving to each a portion of the character

of the other. If, for instance, you divide a shield into two masses of

colour, all the way down--suppose blue and white, and put a bar, or

figure of an animal, partly on one division, partly on the other, you

will find it pleasant to the eye if you make the part of the animal blue

which comes upon the white half, and white which comes upon the blue

half. This is done in heraldry, partly for the sake of perfect

intelligibility, but yet more for the sake of delight in interchange of

colour, since, in all ornamentation whatever, the practice is

continual, in the ages of good design.

Sometimes this alternation is merely a reversal of contrasts; as that,

after red has been for some time on one side, and blue on the other, red

shall pass to blue's side and blue to red's. This kind of alternation

takes place simply in four-quartered shields; in more subtle pieces of

treatment, a little bit only of each colour is carried into the other,

and they are as it were dovetailed together. One of the most curious

facts which will impress itself upon you, when you have drawn some time

carefully from Nature in light and shade, is the appearance of

intentional artifice with which contrasts of this alternate kind are

produced by her; the artistry with which she will darken a tree trunk as

long as it comes against light sky, and throw sunlight on it precisely

at the spot where it comes against a dark hill, and similarly treat all

her masses of shade and colour, is so great, that if you only follow her

closely, every one who looks at your drawing with attention will think

that you have been inventing the most artifically and unnaturally

delightful interchanges of shadow that could possibly be devised by

human wit.

You will find this law of interchange insisted upon at length by Prout

in his "Lessons on Light and Shade:" it seems, of all his principles of

composition, to be the one he is most conscious of; many others he obeys

by instinct, but this he formally accepts and forcibly declares.

The typical purpose of the law of interchange is, of course, to teach us

how opposite natures may be helped and strengthened by receiving each,

as far as they can, some impress or imparted power, from the other.

8. THE LAW OF CONSISTENCY.

It is to be remembered, in the next place, that while contrast exhibits

the _characters_ of things, it very often neutralises or paralyses their

_power_. A number of white things may be shown to be clearly white by

opposition of a black thing, but if you want the full power of their

gathered light, the black thing may be seriously in our way. Thus, while

contrast displays things, it is unity and sympathy which employ them,

concentrating the power of several into a mass. And, not in art merely,

but in all the affairs of life, the wisdom of man is continually called

upon to reconcile these opposite methods of exhibiting, or using, the

materials in his power. By change he gives them pleasantness, and by

consistency value; by change he is refreshed, and by perseverence

strengthened.

Hence many compositions address themselves to the spectator by aggregate

force of colour or line, more than by contrasts of either; many noble

pictures are painted almost exclusively in various tones of red, or

grey, or gold, so as to be instantly striking by their breadth of flush,

or glow, or tender coldness, these qualities being exhibited only by

slight and subtle use of contrast. Similarly as to form; some

compositions associate massive and rugged forms, others slight and

graceful ones, each with few interruptions by lines of contrary

character. And, in general, such compositions possess higher sublimity

than those which are more mingled in their elements. They tell a special

tale, and summon a definite state of feeling, while the grand

compositions merely please the eye.

This unity or breadth of character generally attaches most to the works

of the greatest men; their separate pictures have all separate aims. We

have not, in each, grey colour set against sombre, and sharp forms

against soft, and loud passages against low; but we have the bright

picture, with its delicate sadness; the sombre picture, with its single

ray of relief; the stern picture, with only one tender group of lines;

the soft and calm picture, with only one rock angle at its flank; and so

on. Hence the variety of their work, as well as its impressiveness. The

principal bearing of this law, however, is on the separate masses or

divisions of a picture: the character of the whole composition may be

broken or various, if we please, but there must certainly be a tendency

to consistent assemblage in its divisions. As an army may act on several

points at once, but can only act effectually by having somewhere formed

and regular masses, and not wholly by skirmishers; so a picture may be

various in its tendencies, but must be somewhere united and coherent in

its masses. Good composers are always associating their colours in great

groups; binding their forms together by encompassing lines, and

securing, by various dexterities of expedient, what they themselves call

"breadth:" that is to say, a large gathering of each kind of thing into

one place; light being gathered to light, darkness to darkness, and

colour to colour. If, however, this be done by introducing false lights

or false colours, it is absurd and monstrous; the skill of a painter

consists in obtaining breadth by rational arrangement of his objects,

not by forced or wanton treatment of them. It is an easy matter to paint

one thing all white, and another all black or brown; but not an easy

matter to assemble all the circumstances which will naturally produce

white in one place, and brown in another. Generally speaking, however,

breadth will result in sufficient degree from fidelity of study: Nature

is always broad; and if you paint her colours in true relations, you

will paint them in majestic masses. If you find your work look broken

and scattered, it is, in all probability, not only ill composed, but

untrue.

The opposite quality to breadth, that of division or scattering of light

and colour, has a certain contrasting charm, and is occasionally

introduced with exquisite effect by good composers.[261] Still, it is

never the mere scattering, but the order discernible through this

scattering, which is the real source of pleasure; not the mere

multitude, but the constellation of multitude. The broken lights in the

work of a good painter wander like flocks upon the hills, not

unshepherded; speaking of life and peace: the broken lights of a bad

painter fall like hailstones, and are capable only of mischief, leaving

it to be wished they were also of dissolution.

9. THE LAW OF HARMONY.

This last law is not, strictly speaking, so much one of composition as

of truth, but it must guide composition, and is properly, therefore, to

be stated in this place.

Good drawing is, as we have seen, an _abstract_ of natural facts; you

cannot represent all that you would, but must continually be falling

short, whether you will or no, of the force, or quantity, of Nature.

Now, suppose that your means and time do not admit of your giving the

depth of colour in the scene, and that you are obliged to paint it

paler. If you paint all the colours proportionately paler, as if an

equal quantity of tint had been washed away from each of them, you still

obtain a harmonious, though not an equally forcible statement of natural

fact. But if you take away the colours unequally, and leave some tints

nearly as deep as they are in Nature, while others are much subdued, you

have no longer a true statement. You cannot say to the observer, "Fancy

all those colours a little deeper, and you will have the actual fact."

However he adds in imagination, or takes away, something is sure to be

still wrong. The picture is out of harmony.

It will happen, however, much more frequently, that you have to darken

the whole system of colours, than to make them paler. You remember, in

your first studies of colour from Nature, you were to leave the passages

of light which were too bright to be imitated, as white paper. But, in

completing the picture, it becomes necessary to put colour into them;

and then the other colours must be made darker, in some fixed relation

to them. If you deepen all proportionately, though the whole scene is

darker than reality, it is only as if you were looking at the reality in

a lower light: but if, while you darken some of the tints, you leave

others undarkened, the picture is out of harmony, and will not give the

impression of truth.

It is not, indeed, possible to deepen _all_ the colours so much as to

relieve the lights in their natural degree; you would merely sink most

of your colours, if you tried to do so, into a broad mass of blackness:

but it is quite possible to lower them harmoniously, and yet more in

some parts of the picture than in others, so as to allow you to show the

light you want in a visible relief. In well-harmonised pictures this is

done by gradually deepening the tone of the picture towards the lighter

parts of it, without materially lowering it in the very dark parts; the

tendency in such pictures being, of course, to include large masses of

middle tints. But the principal point to be observed in doing this, is

to deepen the individual tints without dirtying or obscuring them. It is

easy to lower the tone of the picture by washing it over with grey or

brown; and easy to see the effect of the landscape, when its colours are

thus universally polluted with black, by using the black convex mirror,

one of the most pestilent inventions for falsifying nature and degrading

art which ever was put into an artist's hand.[262] For the thing

required is not to darken pale yellow by mixing grey with it, but to

deepen the pure yellow; not to darken crimson by mixing black with it,

but by making it deeper and richer crimson: and thus the required effect

could only be seen in Nature, if you had pieces of glass of the colour

of every object in your landscape, and of every minor hue that made up

those colours, and then could see the real landscape through this deep

gorgeousness of the varied glass. You cannot do this with glass, but you

can do it for yourself as you work; that is to say, you can put deep

blue for pale blue, deep gold for pale gold, and so on, in the

proportion you need; and then you may paint as forcibly as you choose,

but your work will still be in the manner of Titian, not of Caravaggio

or Spagnoletto, or any other of the black slaves of painting.[263]

Supposing those scales of colour, which I told you to prepare in order

to show you the relations of colour to grey, were quite accurately made,

and numerous enough, you would have nothing more to do, in order to

obtain a deeper tone in any given mass of colour, than to substitute for

each of its hues the hue as many degrees deeper in the scale as you

wanted, that is to say, if you want to deepen the whole two degrees,

substituting for the yellow No. 5. the yellow No. 7., and for the red

No. 9. the red No. 11., and so on; but the hues of any object in Nature

are far too numerous, and their degrees too subtle, to admit of so

mechanical a process. Still, you may see the principle of the whole

matter clearly by taking a group of colours out of your scale, arranging

them prettily, and then washing them all over with grey: that represents

the treatment of Nature by the black mirror. Then arrange the same group

of colours, with the tints five or six degrees deeper in the scale; and

that will represent the treatment of Nature by Titian.

You can only, however, feel your way fully to the right of the thing by

working from Nature.

The best subject on which to begin a piece of study of this kind is a

good thick tree trunk, seen against blue sky with some white clouds in

it. Paint the clouds in true and tenderly gradated white; then give the

sky a bold full blue, bringing them well out; then paint the trunk and

leaves grandly dark against all, but in such glowing dark green and

brown as you see they will bear. Afterwards proceed to more complicated

studies, matching the colours carefully first by your old method; then

deepening each colour with its own tint, and being careful, above all

things, to keep truth of equal change when the colours are connected

with each other, as in dark and light sides of the same object. Much

more aspect and sense of harmony are gained by the precision with which

you observe the relation of colours in dark sides and light sides, and

the influence of modifying reflections, than by mere accuracy of added

depth in independent colours.

This harmony of tone, as it is generally called, is the most important

of those which the artist has to regard. But there are all kinds of

harmonies in a picture, according to its mode of production. There is

even a harmony of _touch_. If you paint one part of it very rapidly and

forcibly, and another part slowly and delicately, each division of the

picture may be right separately, but they will not agree together: the

whole will be effectless and valueless, out of harmony. Similarly, if

you paint one part of it by a yellow light in a warm day, and another by

a grey light in a cold day, though both may have been sunlight, and both

may be well toned, and have their relative shadows truly cast, neither

will look like light: they will destroy each other's power, by being out

of harmony. These are only broad and definable instances of discordance;

but there is an extent of harmony in all good work much too subtle for

definition; depending on the draughtsman's carrying everything he draws

up to just the balancing and harmonious point, in finish, and colour,

and depth of tone, and intensity of moral feeling, and style of touch,

all considered at once; and never allowing himself to lean too

emphatically on detached parts, or exalt one thing at the expense of

another, or feel acutely in one place and coldly in another. If you have

got some of Cruikshank's etchings, you will be able, I think, to feel

the nature of harmonious treatment in a simple kind, by comparing them

with any of Richter's illustrations to the numerous German story-books

lately published at Christmas, with all the German stories spoiled.

Cruikshank's work is often incomplete in character and poor in incident,

but, as drawing, it is _perfect_ in harmony. The pure and simple effects

of daylight which he gets by his thorough mastery of treatment in this

respect, are quite unrivalled, as far as I know, by any other work

executed with so few touches. His vignettes to Grimm's German stories,

already recommended, are the most remarkable in this quality. Richter's

illustrations, on the contrary, are of a very high stamp as respects

understanding of human character, with infinite playfulness and

tenderness of fancy; but, as drawings, they are almost unendurably out

of harmony, violent blacks in one place being continually opposed to

trenchant white in another; and, as is almost sure to be the case with

bad harmonists, the local colour hardly felt anywhere. All German work

is apt to be out of harmony, in consequence of its too frequent

conditions of affectation, and its wilful refusals of fact; as well as

by reason of a feverish kind of excitement, which dwells violently on

particular points, and makes all the lines of thought in the picture to

stand on end, as it were, like a cat's fur electrified; while good work

is always as quiet as a couchant leopard, and as strong.

I have now stated to you all the laws of composition which occur to me

as capable of being illustrated or defined; but there are multitudes of

others which, in the present state of my knowledge, I cannot define, and

others which I never hope to define; and these the most important, and

connected with the deepest powers of the art. Among those which I hope

to be able to explain when I have thought of them more, are the laws

which relate to nobleness and ignobleness; that ignobleness especially

which we commonly call "vulgarity," and which, in its essence, is one of

the most curious subjects of inquiry connected with human feeling. Among

those which I never hope to explain, are chiefly laws of expression, and

others bearing simply on simple matters; but, for that very reason, more

influential than any others. These are, from the first, as inexplicable

as our bodily sensations are; it being just as impossible, I think, to

explain why one succession of musical notes[264] shall be noble and

pathetic, and such as might have been sung by Casella to Dante, and why

another succession is base and ridiculous, and would be fit only for the

reasonably good ear of Bottom, as to explain why we like sweetness, and

dislike bitterness. The best part of every great work is always

inexplicable: it is good because it is good; and innocently gracious,

opening as the green of the earth, or falling as the dew of heaven.

But though you cannot explain them, you may always render yourself more

and more sensitive to these higher qualities by the discipline which you

generally give to your character, and this especially with regard to the

choice of incidents; a kind of composition in some sort easier than the

artistical arrangements of lines and colours, but in every sort nobler,

because addressed to deeper feelings.

For instance, in the "Datur Hora Quieti," the last vignette to Roger's

Poems, the plough in the foreground has three purposes. The first

purpose is to meet the stream of sunlight on the river, and make it

brighter by opposition; but any dark object whatever would have done

this. Its second purpose is by its two arms, to repeat the cadence of

the group of the two ships, and thus give a greater expression of

repose; but two sitting figures would have done this. Its third and

chief, or pathetic, purpose is, as it lies abandoned in the furrow (the

vessels also being moored, and having their sails down), to be a type of

human labour closed with the close of day. The parts of it on which the

hand leans are brought most clearly into sight; and they are the chief

dark of the picture, because the tillage of the ground is required of

man as a punishment; but they make the soft light of the setting sun

brighter, because rest is sweetest after toil. These thoughts may never

occur to us as we glance carelessly at the design; and yet their under

current assuredly affects the feelings, and increases, as the painter

meant it should, the impression of melancholy, and of peace.

Again, in the "Lancaster Sands," which is one of the plates I have

marked as most desirable for your possession; the stream of light which

falls from the setting sun on the advancing tide stands similarly in

need of some force of near object to relieve its brightness. But the

incident which Turner has here adopted is the swoop of an angry seagull

at a dog, who yelps at it, drawing back as the wave rises over his feet,

and the bird shrieks within a foot of his face. Its unexpected boldness

is a type of the anger of its ocean element, and warns us of the sea's

advance just as surely as the abandoned plough told us of the ceased

labour of the day.

It is not, however, so much in the selection of single incidents of

this kind as in the feeling which regulates the arrangement of the whole

subject that the mind of a great composer is known. A single incident

may be suggested by a felicitous chance, as a pretty motto might be for

the heading of a chapter. But the great composers so arrange _all_ their

designs that one incident illustrates another, just as one colour

relieves another. Perhaps the "Heysham," of the Yorkshire series which,

as to its locality, may be considered a companion to the last drawing we

have spoken of, the "Lancaster Sands," presents as interesting an

example as we could find of Turner's feeling in this respect. The

subject is a simple north-country village, on the shore of Morecambe

Bay; not in the common sense, a picturesque village: there are no pretty

bow-windows, or red roofs, or rocky steps of entrance to the rustic

doors, or quaint gables; nothing but a single street of thatched and

chiefly clay-built cottages, ranged in a somewhat monotonous line, the

roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses from

the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a

wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through

it, and giving it something the look of a large farmstead, in which a

right of way lies through the yard. The road which leads to this gate is

full of ruts, and winds down a bad bit of hill between two broken banks

of moor ground, succeeding immediately to the few enclosures which

surround the village; they can hardly be called gardens; but a decayed

fragment or two of fencing fill the gaps in the bank; and a

clothes-line, with some clothes on it, striped blue and red, and a

smock-frock, is stretched between the trunks of some stunted willows; a

_very_ small haystack and pigstye being seen at the back of the cottage

beyond. An empty, two-wheeled, lumbering cart, drawn by a pair of horses

with huge wooden collars, the driver sitting lazily in the sun, sideways

on the leader, is going slowly home along the rough road, it being about

country dinner-time. At the end of the village there is a better house,

with three chimneys and a dormer window in its roof, and the roof is of

stone shingle instead of thatch, but very rough. This house is no doubt

the clergyman's; there is some smoke from one of its chimneys, none

from any other in the village; this smoke is from the lowest chimney at

the back, evidently that of the kitchen, and it is rather thick, the

fire not having been long lighted. A few hundred yards from the

clergyman's house, nearer the shore, is the church, discernible from the

cottage only by its low-arched belfry, a little neater than one would

expect in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite

incumbent;[265] and beyond the church, close to the sea, are two

fragments of a border war-tower, standing on their circular mound, worn

on its brow deep into edges and furrows by the feet of the village

children. On the bank of moor, which forms the foreground, are a few

cows, the carter's dog barking at a vixenish one: the milkmaid is

feeding another, a gentle white one, which turns its head to her,

expectant of a handful of fresh hay, which she has brought for it in her

blue apron, fastened up round her waist; she stands with her pail on her

head, evidently the village coquette, for she has a neat bodice, and

pretty striped petticoat under the blue apron, and red stockings. Nearer

us, the cowherd, barefooted, stands on a piece of the limestone rock

(for the ground is thistly and not pleasurable to bare feet);--whether

boy or girl we are not sure; it may be a boy, with a girl's worn-out

bonnet on, or a girl with a pair of ragged trowsers on; probably the

first, as the old bonnet is evidently useful to keep the sun out of our

eyes when we are looking for strayed cows among the moorland hollows,

and helps us at present to watch (holding the bonnet's edge down) the

quarrel of the vixenish cow with the dog, which, leaning on our long

stick, we allow to proceed without any interference. A little to the

right the hay is being got in, of which the milkmaid has just taken her

apronful to the white cow; but the hay is very thin, and cannot well be

raked up because of the rocks; we must glean it like corn, hence the

smallness of our stack behind the willows, and a woman is pressing a

bundle of it hard together, kneeling against the rock's edge, to carry

it safely to the hay-cart without dropping any. Beyond the village is a

rocky hill, deep set with brushwood, a square crag or two of limestone

emerging here and there, with pleasant turf on their brows, heaved in

russet and mossy mounds against the sky, which, clear and calm, and as

golden as the moss, stretches down behind it towards the sea. A single

cottage just shows its roof over the edge of the hill, looking seaward;

perhaps one of the village shepherds is a sea captain now, and may have

built it there, that his mother may first see the sails of his ship

whenever it runs into the bay. Then under the hill, and beyond the

border tower, is the blue sea itself, the waves flowing in over the sand

in long curved lines, slowly; shadows of cloud and gleams of shallow

water on white sand alternating--miles away; but no sail is visible, not

one fisherboat on the beach, not one dark speck on the quiet horizon.

Beyond all are the Cumberland mountains, clear in the sun, with rosy

light on all their crags.

I should think the reader cannot but feel the kind of harmony there is

in this composition; the entire purpose of the painter to give us the

impression of wild, yet gentle, country life, monotonous as the

succession of the noiseless waves, patient and enduring as the rocks;

but peaceful, and full of health and quiet hope, and sanctified by the

pure mountain air and baptismal dew of heaven, falling softly between

days of toil and nights of innocence.

All noble composition of this kind can be reached only by instinct: you

cannot set yourself to arrange such a subject; you may see it, and seize

it, at all times, but never laboriously invent it. And your power of

discerning what is best in expression, among natural subjects, depends

wholly on the temper in which you keep your own mind; above all, on your

living so much alone as to allow it to become acutely sensitive in its

own stillness. The noisy life of modern days is wholly incompatible with

any true perception of natural beauty. If you go down into Cumberland by

the railroad, live in some frequented hotel, and explore the hills with

merry companions, however much you may enjoy your tour or their

conversation, depend upon it you will never choose so much as one

pictorial subject rightly; you will not see into the depth of any. But

take knapsack and stick, walk towards the hills by short day's

journeys--ten or twelve miles a day--taking a week from some

starting-place sixty or seventy miles away: sleep at the pretty little

wayside inns, or the rough village ones; then take the hills as they

tempt you, following glen or shore as your eye glances or your heart

guides, wholly scornful of local fame or fashion, and of everything

which it is the ordinary traveller's duty to see or pride to do. Never

force yourself to admire anything when you are not in the humour; but

never force yourself away from what you feel to be lovely, in search of

anything better: and gradually the deeper scenes of the natural world

will unfold themselves to you in still increasing fulness of passionate

power; and your difficulty will be no more to seek or to compose

subjects, but only to choose one from among the multitude of melodious

thoughts with which you will be haunted, thoughts which will of course

be noble or original in proportion to your own depth of character and

general power of mind: for it is not so much by the consideration you

give to any single drawing, as by the previous discipline of your powers

of thought, that the character of your composition will be determined.

Simplicity of life will make you sensitive to the refinement and modesty

of scenery, just as inordinate excitement and pomp of daily life will

make you enjoy coarse colours and affected forms. Habits of patient

comparison and accurate judgment will make your art precious, as they

will make your actions wise; and every increase of noble enthusiasm in

your living spirit will be measured by the reflection of its light upon

the works of your hands.

Faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[234] I give Rossetti this preeminence, because, though the leading

Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over colour in the abstract,

Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering

colour under effects of light; and of these two, Rossetti composes with

richer fancy and with a deeper sense of beauty, Hunt's stern realism

leading him continually into harshness. Rossetti's carelessness, to do

him justice, is only in water-colour, never in oil.

[235] All the degradation of art which was brought about, after the rise

of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow varnish, and brown trees,

would have been prevented, if only painters had been forced to work in

dead colour. Any colour will do for some people, if it is browned and

shining; but fallacy in dead colour is detected on the instant. I even

believe that whenever a painter begins to _wish_ that he could touch any

portion of his work with gum, he is going wrong.

It is necessary, however, in this matter, carefully to distinguish

between translucency and lustre. Translucency, though, as I have said

above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but lustre,

or _shininess_, is always, in painting, a defect. Nay, one of my best

painter-friends (the "best" being understood to attach to both divisions

of that awkward compound word), tried the other day to persuade me

thatlustre was an ignobleness in _anything_; and it was only the fear of

treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain streams, and to morning dew,

which kept me from yielding the point to him. One is apt always to

generalise too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question

that lustre is destructive of loveliness in colour, as it is of

intelligibility in form. Whatever may be the pride of a young beauty in

the knowledge that her eyes shine (though perhaps even eyes are most

beautiful in dimness), she would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which

of us would wish to polish a rose?

[236] But not shiny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed imperial,

or grey paper that feels slightly adhesive to the hand, is best. Coarse,

gritty, and sandy papers are fit only for blotters and blunderers; no

good draughtsman would lay a line on them. Turner worked much on a thin

tough paper, dead in surface; rolling up his sketches in tight bundles

that would go deep into his pockets.

[237] I insist upon this unalterability of colour the more because I

address you as a beginner, or an amateur; a great artist can sometimes

get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet

even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on his work.

[238] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few

colours; it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and

you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in

your colour-box in the order I have set them down, you will always

easily put your finger on the one you want.

Cobalt. Smalt. Antwerp blue. Prussian blue.

Black. Gamboge. Emerald green. Hooker's green.

Lemon yellow. Cadmium yellow. Yellow ochre. Roman ochre.

Raw sienna. Burnt sienna. Light red. Indian red.

Mars orange. Ext't of vermilion. Carmine. Violet carmine.

Brown madder. Burnt umber. Vandyke brown. Sepia.

Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colours, but you

need not care much about permanence in your own work as yet, and they

are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive

still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed colour, put in the

box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue.

No. 1. is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble colour for

laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other

colours.

If you wish to take up colouring seriously, you had better get Field's

"Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about

principles or harmonies of colour; but only to its statements of

practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each

other when mixed, &c.

[239] A more methodical, though, under general circumstances, uselessly

prolix way, is to cut a square hole, some half an inch wide, in the

sheet of cardboard, and a series of small circular holes in a slip of

cardboard an inch wide. Pass the slip over the square opening, and match

each colour beside one of the circular openings. You will thus have no

occasion to wash any of the colours away. But the first rough method is

generally all you want, as after a little practice, you only need to

_look_ at the hue through the opening in order to be able to transfer it

to your drawing at once.

[240] If colours were twenty times as costly as they are, we should have

many more good painters. If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer I would

lay a tax of twenty shillings a cake on all colours except black,

Prussian blue, Vandyke brown, and Chinese white, which I would leave for

students. I don't say this jestingly; I believe such a tax would do more

to advance real art than a great many schools of design.

[241] I say _modern_, because Titian's quiet way of blending colours,

which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any artist.

The best colour we reach is got by stippling; but this not quite right.

[242] The worst general character that colour can possibly have is a

prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a decaying

heap of vegetables; this colour is _accurately_ indicative of decline or

paralysis in missal-painting.

[243] That is to say, local colour inherent in the object. The

gradations of colour in the various shadows belonging to various lights

exhibit form, and therefore no one but a colourist can ever draw _forms_

perfectly (see "Modern Painters," vol. iv. chap. iii. at the end); but

all notions of explaining form by superimposed colour, as in

architectural mouldings, are absurd. Colour adorns form, but does not

interpret it. An apple is prettier, because it is striped, but it does

not look a bit rounder; and a cheek is prettier because it is flushed,

but you would see the form of the cheek bone better if it were not.

Colour may, indeed, detach one shape from another, as in grounding a

bas-relief, but it always diminishes the appearance of projection, and

whether you put blue, purple, red, yellow, or green, for your ground,

the bas-relief will be just as clearly or just as imperfectly relieved,

as long as the colours are of equal depth. The blue ground will not

retire the hundredth part of an inch more than the red one.

[244] See, however, at the close of this letter, the notice of one more

point connected with the management of colour, under the head "Law of

Harmony."

[245] See farther, on this subject, "Modern Painters," vol. iv. chap.

viii Sec. 6.

[246] "In general, throughout Nature, reflection and repetition are

peaceful things, associated with the idea of quiet succession in events,

that one day should be like another day, or one history the repetition

of another history, being more or less results of quietness, while

dissimilarity and non-succession are results of interference and

disquietude. Thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of

sound heard, its repetition of the note or syllable gives an idea of

calmness attainable in no other way; hence also the feeling of calm

given to a landscape by the voice of a cuckoo."

[247] This is obscure in the rude woodcut, the masts being so delicate

that they are confused among the lines of reflection. In the original

they have orange light upon them, relieved against purple behind.

[248] The cost of art in getting a bridge level is _always_ lost, for

you must get up to the height of the central arch at any rate, and you

only can make the whole bridge level by putting the hill farther back,

and pretending to have got rid of it when you have not, but have only

wasted money in building an unnecessary embankment. Of course, the

bridge should not be difficultly or dangerously steep, but the necessary

slope, whatever it may be, should be in the bridge itself, as far as the

bridge can take it, and not pushed aside into the approach, as in our

Waterloo road; the only rational excuse for doing which is that when the

slope must be long it is inconvenient to put on a drag at the top of the

bridge, and that any restiveness of the horse is more dangerous on the

bridge than on the embankment. To this I answer: first, it is not more

dangerous in reality, though it looks so, for the bridge is always

guarded by an effective parapet, but the embankment is sure to have no

parapet, or only a useless rail; and secondly, that it is better to have

the slope on the bridge, and make the roadway wide in proportion, so as

to be quite safe, because a little waste of space on the river is no

loss, but your wide embankment at the side loses good ground; and so my

picturesque bridges are right as well as beautiful, and I hope to see

them built again some day, instead of the frightful straight-backed

things which we fancy are fine, and accept from the pontifical

rigidities of the engineering mind.

[249] I cannot waste space here by reprinting what I have said in other

books: but the reader ought, if possible, to refer to the notices of

this part of our subject in "Modern Painters," vol. iv. chap. xviii.,

and "Stones of Venice," vol. iii. chap. i. Sec. 8.

[250] If you happen to be reading at this part of the book, without

having gone through any previous practice, turn back to the sketch of

the ramification of stone pine, Fig. 4. page 30., and examine the curves

of its boughs one by one, trying them by the conditions here stated

under the heads A. and B.

[251] The reader, I hope, observes always that every line in these

figures is itself one of varying curvature, and cannot be drawn by

compasses.

[252] I hope the reader understands that these woodcuts are merely

facsimiles of the sketches I make at the side of my paper to illustrate

my meaning as I write--often sadly scrawled if I want to get on to

something else. This one is really a little too careless; but it would

take more time and trouble to make a proper drawing of so odd a boat

than the matter is worth. It will answer the purpose well enough as it

is.

[253] Imperfect vegetable form I consider that which is in its nature

dependent, as in runners and climbers; or which is susceptible of

continual injury without materially losing the power of giving pleasure

by its aspect, as in the case of the smaller grasses. I have not, of

course, space here to explain these minor distinctions, but the laws

above stated apply to all the more important trees and shrubs likely to

be familiar to the student.

[254] There is a very tender lesson of this kind in the shadows of

leaves upon the ground; shadows which are the most likely of all to

attract attention, by their pretty play and change. If you examine them,

you will find that the shadows do not take the forms of the leaves, but

that, through each interstice, the light falls, at a little distance, in

the form of a round or oval spot; that is to say, it produces the image

of the sun itself, cast either vertically or obliquely, in circle or

ellipse according to the slope of the ground. Of course the sun's rays

produce the same effect, when they fall through any small aperture: but

the openings between leaves are the only ones likely to show it to an

ordinary observer, or to attract his attention to it by its frequency,

and lead him to think what this type may signify respecting the greater

Sun; and how it may show us that, even when the opening through which

the earth receives light is too small to let us see the Sun himself, the

ray of light that enters, if it comes straight from Him, will still bear

with it His image.

[255] In the smaller figure (32.), it will be seen that this

interruption is caused by a cart coming down to the water's edge; and

this object is serviceable as beginning another system of curves leading

out of the picture on the right, but so obscurely drawn as not to be

easily represented in outline. As it is unnecessary to the explanation

of our point here, it has been omitted in the larger diagram, the

direction of the curve it begins being indicated by the dashes only.

[256] Both in the Sketches in Flanders and Germany.

[257] If you happen to meet with the plate of Durer's representing a

coat of arms with a skull in the shield, note the value given to the

concave curves and sharp point of the helmet by the convex leafage

carried round it in front; and the use of the blank white part of the

shield in opposing the rich folds of the dress.

[258] Turner hardly ever, as far as I remember, allows a strong light to

oppose a full dark, without some intervening tint. His suns never set

behind dark mountains without a film of cloud above the mountain's edge.

[259]

"A prudent chief not always must display

His powers in equal ranks and fair array,

But with the occasion and the place comply,

Conceal his force; nay, seem sometimes to fly.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,

Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream."

_Essay on Criticism._

[260] I am describing from a MS., _circa_ 1300, of Gregory's

"Decretalia" in my own possession.

[261] One of the most wonderful compositions of Tintoret in Venice, is

little more than a field of subdued crimson, spotted with flakes of

scattered gold. The upper clouds in the most beautiful skies owe great

part of their power to infinitude of division; order being marked

through this division.

[262] I fully believe that the strange grey gloom, accompanied by

considerable power of effect, which prevails in modern French art must

be owing to the use of this mischievous instrument; the French landscape

always gives me the idea of Nature seen carelessly in the dark mirror,

and painted coarsely, but scientifically, through the veil of its

perversion.

[263] Various other parts of this subject are entered into, especially

in their bearing on the ideal of painting, in "Modern Painters," vol.

iv. chap. iii.

[264] In all the best arrangements of colour, the delight occasioned by

their mode of succession is entirely inexplicable, nor can it be

reasoned about; we like it just as we like an air in music, but cannot

reason any refractory person into liking it, if they do not: and yet

there is distinctly a right and a wrong in it, and a good taste and bad

taste respecting it, as also in music.

[265] "Puseyism" was unknown in the days when this drawing was made; but

the kindly and helpful influences of what may be called ecclesiastical

sentiment, which, in a morbidly exaggerated condition, forms one of the

principal elements of "Puseyism,"--I use this word regretfully, no other

existing which will serve for it,--had been known and felt in our wild

northern districts long before.

APPENDIX.

THINGS TO BE STUDIED.

The worst danger by far, to which a solitary student is exposed, is that

of liking things that he should not. It is not so much his difficulties,

as his tastes, which he must set himself to conquer; and although, under

the guidance of a master, many works of art may be made instructive,

which are only of partial excellence (the good and bad of them being

duly distinguished), his safeguard, as long as he studies alone, will be

in allowing himself to possess only things, in their way, so free from

faults, that nothing he copies in them can seriously mislead him, and to

contemplate only those works of art which he knows to be either perfect

or noble in their errors. I will therefore set down in clear order, the

names of the masters whom you may safely admire, and a few of the books

which you may safely possess. In these days of cheap illustration, the

danger is always rather of your possessing too much than too little. It

may admit of some question, how far the looking at bad art may set off

and illustrate the characters of the good; but, on the whole, I believe

it is best to live always on quite wholesome food, and that our taste of

it will not be made more acute by feeding, however temporarily, on

ashes. Of course the works of the great masters can only be serviceable

to the student after he has made considerable progress himself. It only

wastes the time and dulls the feelings of young persons, to drag them

through picture galleries; at least, unless they themselves wish to look

at particular pictures. Generally, young people only care to enter a

picture gallery when there is a chance of getting leave to run a race to

the other end of it; and they had better do that in the garden below.

If, however, they have any real enjoyment of pictures, and want to look

at this one or that, the principal point is never to disturb them in

looking at what interests them, and never to make them look at what does

not. Nothing is of the least use to young people (nor, by the way, of

much use to old ones), but what interests them; and therefore, though it

is of great importance to put nothing but good art into their

possession, yet when they are passing through great houses or galleries,

they should be allowed to look precisely at what pleases them: if it is

not useful to them as art, it will be in some other way: and the

healthiest way in which art can interest them is when they look at it,

not as art, but because it represents something they like in nature. If

a boy has had his heart filled by the life of some great man, and goes

up thirstily to a Vandyck portrait of him, to see what he was like, that

is the wholesomest way in which he can begin the study of portraiture;

if he love mountains, and dwell on a Turner drawing because he sees in

it a likeness to a Yorkshire scar, or an Alpine pass, that is the

wholesomest way in which he can begin the study of landscape; and if a

girl's mind is filled with dreams of angels and saints, and she pauses

before an Angelico because she thinks it must surely be indeed like

heaven, that is the wholesomest way for her to begin the study of

religious art.

When, however, the student has made some definite progress, and every

picture becomes really a guide to him, false or true, in his own work,

it is of great importance that he should never so much as look at bad

art; and then, if the reader is willing to trust me in the matter, the

following advice will be useful to him. In which, with his permission, I

will quit the indirect and return to the epistolary address, as being

the more convenient.

First, in Galleries of Pictures:

1. You may look, with trust in their being always right, at Titian,

Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John Bellini, and Velasquez; the

authenticity of the picture being of course established for you by

proper authority.

2. You may look with admiration, admitting, however question of right

and wrong,[266] at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico,

Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, Reynolds,

Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern Pre-Raphaelites.[267] You had

better look at no other painters than these, for you run a chance,

otherwise, of being led far off the road, or into grievous faults, by

some of the other great ones, as Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Rubens;

and of being, besides, corrupted in taste by the base ones, as Murillo,

Salvator, Claude, Gasper Poussin, Teniers, and such others. You may

look, however, for examples of evil, with safe universality of

reprobation, being sure that everything you see is bad, at Domenichino,

the Caracci, Bronzino, and the figure pieces of Salvator.

Among those named for study under question, you cannot look too much at,

nor grow too enthusiastically fond of, Angelico, Correggio, Reynolds,

Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites; but, if you find yourself getting

especially fond of any of the others, leave off looking at them, for you

must be going wrong some way or other. If, for instance, you begin to

like Rembrandt or Leonardo especially, you are losing your feeling for

colour; if you like Van Eyck or Perugino especially, you must be getting

too fond of rigid detail; and if you like Vandyck or Gainsborough

especially, you must be too much attracted by gentlemanly flimsiness.

Secondly, of published, or otherwise multiplied, art, such as you may be

able to get yourself, or to see at private houses or in shops, the works

of the following masters are the most desirable, after the Turners,

Rembrandts, and Durers, which I have asked you to get first:

1. Samuel Prout.

All his published lithographic sketches are of the greatest value,

wholly unrivalled in power of composition, and in love and feeling of

architectural subject. His somewhat mannered linear execution, though

not to be imitated in your own sketches from Nature, may be occasionally

copied, for discipline's sake, with great advantage; it will give you a

peculiar steadiness of hand, not quickly attainable in any other way;

and there is no fear of your getting into any faultful mannerism as long

as you carry out the different modes of more delicate study above

recommended.

If you are interested in architecture, and wish to make it your chief

study, you should draw much from photographs of it; and then from the

architecture itself, with the same completion of detail and gradation,

only keeping the shadows of due paleness, in photographs they are always

about four times as dark as they ought to be; and treat buildings with

as much care and love as artists do their rock foregrounds, drawing all

the moss and weeds, and stains upon them. But if, without caring to

understand architecture, you merely want the picturesque character of

it, and to be able to sketch it fast, you cannot do better than take

Prout for your _exclusive_ master; only do not think that you are

copying Prout by drawing straight lines with dots at the end of them.

Get first his "Rhine," and draw the subjects that have most hills, and

least architecture in them, with chalk on smooth paper, till you can lay

on his broad flat tints, and get his gradations of light, which are very

wonderful; then take up the architectural subjects in the "Rhine," and

draw again and again the groups of figures, &c., in his "Microcosm," and

"Lessons on Light and Shadow." After that, proceed to copy the grand

subjects in the sketches in "Flanders and Germany;" or in "Switzerland

and Italy," if you cannot get the Flanders; but the Switzerland is very

far inferior. Then work from Nature, not trying to Proutise Nature, by

breaking smooth buildings into rough ones, but only drawing _what you

see_, with Prout's simple method and firm lines. Don't copy his coloured

works. They are good, but not at all equal to his chalk and pencil

drawings, and you will become a mere imitator, and a very feeble

imitator, if you use colour at all in Prout's method. I have not space

to explain why this is so, it would take a long piece of reasoning;

trust me for the statement.

2. John Lewis.

His sketches in Spain, lithographed by himself, are very valuable. Get

them, if you can, and also some engravings (about eight or ten, I think,

altogether) of wild beasts, executed by his own hand a long time ago;

they are very precious in every way. The series of the "Alhambra" is

rather slight, and few of the subjects are lithographed by himself;

still it is well worth having.

But let _no_ lithographic work come into the house, if you can help it,

nor even look at any, except Prout's, and those sketches of Lewis's.

3. George Cruikshank.

If you ever happen to meet with the two volumes of "Grimm's German

Stories," which were illustrated by him long ago, pounce upon them

instantly; the etchings in them are the finest things, next to

Rembrandt's, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was

invented. You cannot look at them too much, nor copy them too often.

All his works are very valuable, though disagreeable when they touch on

the worst vulgarities of modern life; and often much spoiled by a

curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to the

mouth and eyes, and leave too little for forehead, the eyes being set

about two thirds up, instead of at half the height of the head. But his

manner of work is always right; and his tragic power, though rarely

developed, and warped by habits of caricature, is, in reality, as great

as his grotesque power.

There is no fear of his hurting your taste, as long as your principal

work lies among art of so totally different a character as most of that

which I have recommended to you; and you may, therefore, get great good

by copying almost anything of his that may come in your way; except only

his illustrations lately published to "Cinderella," and "Jack and the

Beanstalk," and "Tom Thumb," which are much over-laboured, and confused

in line. You should get them, but do not copy them.

4. Alfred Rethel.

I only know two publications by him; one, the "Dance of Death," with

text by Reinick, published in Leipsic, but to be had now of any London

bookseller for the sum, I believe, of eighteen pence, and containing six

plates full of instructive character; the other, of two plates only,

"Death the Avenger," and "Death the Friend." These two are far superior

to the "Todtentanz," and, if you can get them, will be enough in

themselves, to show all that Rethel can teach you. If you dislike

ghastly subjects, get "Death the Friend" only.

5. Bewick.

The execution of the plumage in Bewick's birds is the most masterly

thing ever yet done in wood-cutting; it is just worked as Paul Veronese

would have worked in wood, had he taken to it. His vignettes, though too

coarse in execution, and vulgar in types of form, to be good copies,

show, nevertheless, intellectual power of the highest order; and there

are pieces of sentiment in them, either pathetic or satirical, which

have never since been equalled in illustrations of this simple kind; the

bitter intensity of the feeling being just like that which characterises

some of the leading Pre-Raphaelites. Bewick is the Burns of painting.

6. Blake.

The "Book of Job," engraved by himself, is of the highest rank in

certain characters of imagination and expression; in the mode of

obtaining certain effects of light it will also be a very useful example

to you. In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light, Blake

is greater than Rembrandt.

7. Richter.

I have already told you what to guard against in looking at his works. I

am a little doubtful whether I have done well in including them in this

catalogue at all; but the fancies in them are so pretty and numberless,

that I must risk, for their sake, the chance of hurting you a little in

judgment of style. If you want to make presents of story-books to

children, his are the best you can now get.

8. Rossetti.

An edition of Tennyson, lately published, contains woodcuts from

drawings by Rossetti and other chief Pre-Raphaelite masters. They are

terribly spoiled in the cutting, and generally the best part, the

expression of feature, _entirely_ lost;[268] still they are full of

instruction, and cannot be studied too closely. But observe, respecting

these woodcuts, that if you have been in the habit of looking at much

spurious work, in which sentiment, action, and style are borrowed or

artificial, you will assuredly be offended at first by all genuine work,

which is intense in feeling. Genuine art, which is merely art, such as

Veronese's or Titian's, may not offend you, though the chances are that

you will not care about it: but genuine works of feeling, such as Maude

and Aurora Leigh in poetry, or the grand Pre-Raphaelite designs in

painting, are sure to offend you; and if you cease to work hard, and

persist in looking at vicious and false art, they will continue to

offend you. It will be well, therefore, to have one type of entirely

false art, in order to know what to guard against. Flaxman's outlines to

Dante contain, I think, examples of almost every kind of falsehood and

feebleness which it is possible for a trained artist, not base in

thought, to commit or admit, both in design and execution. Base or

degraded choice of subject, such as you will constantly find in Teniers

and others of the Dutch painters, I need not, I hope, warn you against;

you will simply turn away from it in disgust; while mere bad or feeble

drawing, which makes mistakes in every direction at once, cannot teach

you the particular sort of educated fallacy in question. But, in these

designs of Flaxman's, you have gentlemanly feeling, and fair knowledge

of anatomy, and firm setting down of lines, all applied in the

foolishest and worst possible way; you cannot have a more finished

example of learned error, amiable want of meaning, and bad drawing with

a steady hand.[269] Retsch's outlines have more real material in them

than Flaxman's, occasionally showing true fancy and power; in artistic

principle they are nearly as bad, and in taste worse. All outlines from

statuary, as given in works on classical art, will be very hurtful to

you if you in the least like them; and _nearly_ all finished line

engravings. Some particular prints I could name which possess

instructive qualities, but it would take too long to distinguish them,

and the best way is to avoid line engravings of figures altogether. If

you happen to be a rich person, possessing quantities of them, and if

you are fond of the large finished prints from Raphael, Correggio, &c.,

it is wholly impossible that you can make any progress in knowledge of

real art till you have sold them all--or burnt them, which would be a

greater benefit to the world. I hope that some day, true and noble

engravings will be made from the few pictures of the great schools,

which the restorations undertaken by the modern managers of foreign

galleries may leave us; but the existing engravings have nothing

whatever in common with the good in the works they profess to represent,

and if you like them, you like in the originals of them hardly anything

but their errors.

Finally, your judgment will be, of course, much affected by your taste

in literature. Indeed, I know many persons who have the purest taste in

literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon which

puzzles me not a little: but I have never known any one with false taste

in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also of the greatest

importance to you, not only for art's sake, but for all kinds of sake,

in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of

literature, and live on a rocky island of your own, with a spring and a

lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice of

your library to you, every several mind needs different books; but there

are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read Homer,[270]

Plato, AEschylus, Herodotus, Dante,[271] Shakspeare, and Spenser, as much

as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of shelves to right

and left of them for purposes of perpetual study. Among modern books,

avoid generally magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may contain

a useful abridgement or a wholesome piece of criticism; but the chances

are ten to one it will either waste your time or mislead you. If you

want to understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you

can hear of; not a review of the book. If you don't like the first book

you try, seek for another; but do not hope ever to understand the

subject without pains, by a reviewer's help. Avoid especially that class

of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous of all.

Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and awe; it may

contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor

asserts haughtily, and it always leads you to reverence or love

something with your whole heart. It is not always easy to distinguish

the satire of the venomous race of books from the satire of the noble

and pure ones; but in general you may notice that the cold-blooded

Crustacean and Batrachian books will sneer at sentiment; and the

warm-blooded, human books, at sin. Then, in general, the more you can

restrain your serious reading to reflective or lyric poetry, history,

and natural history, avoiding fiction and the drama, the healthier your

mind will become. Of modern poetry keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats,

Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry

Patmore, whose "Angel in the House" is a most finished piece of writing,

and the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling;

while Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" is, as far as I know, the greatest

poem which the century has produced in any language. Cast Coleridge at

once aside, as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose;

Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the

magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor

write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too

little in the world already.

Of reflective prose, read chiefly Bacon, Johnson, and Helps. Carlyle is

hardly to be named as a writer for "beginners," because his teaching,

though to some of us vitally necessary, may to others be hurtful. If you

understand and like him, read him; if he offends you, you are not yet

ready for him, and perhaps may never be so; at all events, give him up,

as you would sea-bathing if you found it hurt you, till you are

stronger. Of fiction, read Sir Charles Grandison, Scott's novels, Miss

Edgeworth's, and, if you are a young lady, Madame de Genlis', the French

Miss Edgeworth; making these, I mean, your constant companions. Of

course you must, or will read other books for amusement, once or twice;

but you will find that these have an element of perpetuity in them,

existing in nothing else of their kind: while their peculiar quietness

and repose of manner will also be of the greatest value in teaching you

to feel the same characters in art. Read little at a time, trying to

feel interest in little things, and reading not so much for the sake of

the story as to get acquainted with the pleasant people into whose

company these writers bring you. A common book will often give you much

amusement, but it is only a noble book which will give you dear friends.

Remember also that it is of less importance to you in your earlier

years, that the books you read should be clever, than that they should

be right. I do not mean oppressively or repulsively instructive; but

that the thoughts they express should be just, and the feelings they

excite generous. It is not necessary for you to read the wittiest or the

most suggestive books: it is better, in general, to hear what is already

known, and may be simply said. Much of the literature of the present

day, though good to be read by persons of ripe age, has a tendency to

agitate rather than confirm, and leaves its readers too frequently in a

helpless or hopeless indignation, the worst possible state into which

the mind of youth can be thrown. It may, indeed, become necessary for

you, as you advance in life, to set your hand to things that need to be

altered in the world, or apply your heart chiefly to what must be pitied

in it, or condemned; but, for a young person, the safest temper is one

of reverence, and the safest place one of obscurity. Certainly at

present, and perhaps through all your life, your teachers are wisest

when they make you content in quiet virtue, and that literature and art

are best for you which point out, in common life and familiar things,

the objects for hopeful labour, and for humble love.

FOOTNOTES:

[266] I do not mean necessarily to imply inferiority of rank, in saying

that this second class of painters have questionable qualities. The

greatest men have often many faults, and sometimes their faults are a

part of their greatness; but such men are not, of course, to be looked

upon by the student with absolute implicitness of faith.

[267] Including under this term, John Lewis, and William Hunt of the Old

Water-colour, who, take him all in all, is the best painter of still

life, I believe, that ever existed.

[268] This is especially the case in the St. Cecily, Rossetti's first

illustration to the "palace of art," which would have been the best in

the book had it been well engraved. The whole work should be taken up

again, and done by line engraving, perfectly; and wholly from

Pre-Raphaelite designs, with which no other modern work can bear the

least comparison.

[269] The praise I have given incidentally to Flaxman's sculpture in the

"Seven Lamps," and elsewhere, refers wholly to his studies from Nature,

and simple groups in marble, which were always good and interesting.

Still, I have overrated him, even in this respect; and it is generally

to be remembered that, in speaking of artists whose works I cannot be

supposed to have specially studied, the errors I fall into will always

be on the side of praise. For, of course, praise is most likely to be

given when the thing praised is above one's knowledge; and, therefore,

as our knowledge increases, such things may be found less praiseworthy

than we thought. But blame can only be justly given when the thing

blamed is below one's level of sight; and, practically, I never do blame

anything until I have got well past it, and am certain that there is

demonstrable falsehood in it. I believe, therefore, all my blame to be

wholly trustworthy, having never yet had occasion to repent of one

depreciatory word that I have ever written, while I have often found

that, with respect to things I had not time to study closely, I was led

too far by sudden admiration, helped, perhaps, by peculiar associations,

or other deceptive accidents; and this the more, because I never care to

check an expression of delight, thinking the chances are, that, even if

mistaken, it will do more good than harm; but I weigh every word of

blame with scrupulous caution. I have sometimes erased a strong passage

of blame from second editions of my books; but this was only when I

found it offended the reader without convincing him, never because I

repented of it myself.

[270] Chapman's, if not the original.

[271] Carey's or Cayley's, if not the original. I do not know which are

the best translations of Plato. Herodotus and AEschylus can only be read

in the original. It may seem strange that I name books like these for

"beginners:" but all the greatest books contain food for all ages; and

an intelligent and rightly bred youth or girl ought to enjoy much, even

in Plato, by the time they are fifteen or sixteen.