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43557	----	[Illustration: FROM THE ORIGINAL PAINTING BY R.C. MINOR. N.Y. PHOTOGRAVURE CO. _Evening_] A HANDBOOK OF ILLUSTRATION BY A. HORSLEY HINTON [Illustration] WITH REPRODUCTIONS FROM PHOTOGRAMS AND SKETCHES BY THE AUTHOR AND OTHER ARTISTS NEW YORK, U.S.A. G. GENNERT, 24 and 26 EAST THIRTEENTH ST. LONDON, ENG. DAWBARN & WARD, LIMITED CONTENTS. CHAPTER I.--INTRODUCTION.--Primitive illustrations--Art and illustration--Influence in photography--Illustrations from the Author's aspect--Some uses of illustration. CHAPTER II.--A NEGLECTED FIELD. CHAPTER III.--THEORY AND PRINCIPLES OF ILLUSTRATION.--Different kinds of illustration--Maps or plans--Scientific diagrams--Topographical views--In fiction--Author and Illustrator--Pictorial or artistic--Decorative--The "Two things." CHAPTER IV.--REPRODUCTION BY HALF-TONE PROCESS.--Processes other than photo-mechanical--The object of mechanical process--Intaglio, relief, and separate printing process--Description of half-tone process--The screen--Printing on the gelatine--Development--Etching--Inherent disadvantage of the screen--Cutting out lights--Comparative results. CHAPTER V.--PREPARATION OF ORIGINALS FOR REPRODUCTION BY HALF-TONE.--I.--Photograms--The best kind of Photograms for reproduction--Negative and print--Legitimate hand work--Relieving the shadows--Helping the high light and shadows--Application of photograms--"Stopping out"--Backgrounds not essential--Composition and arrangement--Decorative initials, &c. CHAPTER VI.--PREPARATION OF ORIGINALS FOR HALF-TONE. II.--Wash drawings, oil paintings, pencil and other drawings--Character of wash drawing or grey surface--Monochrome oil painting--Painting on a photographic basis--Mixed drawings--Pencil drawings--Coloured sketches for illustration--Thin reproduction. CHAPTER VII.--LINE PROCESS.--Requirements of the process--The processes described: Gelatine, Albumen, and Bitumen--Copying, printing, developing, mounting--Description of the copy negative--Reduction--Diminishing glasses--Pencil marks, &c.--Non-photographic methods. CHAPTER VIII.--METHODS OF LINE REPRODUCTION. I.--Pen-and-ink drawing--Character of line drawings--"Tone" interpreted into line--Various styles of line--Suggestion of colour, textures, &c.--The art of leaving out--What to copy and study--Line shading--Flat tints--Outlines--Reduction and thickening. CHAPTER IX.--MATERIALS FOR SIMPLE LINE DRAWING.--Papers and cardboards--Inks and fluids--Pens. CHAPTER X.--COMPARISON OF LINE PROCESSES.--Some characteristics of each described, and results in each compared--The roulette. CHAPTER XI.--OTHER METHODS FOR LINE REPRODUCTION. The Materials Required.--Mechanical tints--Their application--"Splatter" work--How produced--Grained clay surface boards or "scrape" boards--Their use described--Pencil and chalk drawing for line reproduction. CHAPTER XII.--MECHANICAL AIDS TO DRAWING.--Methods of tracing from a photogram--Drawing on a photogram--Drawing on a "blue" print--Tracing on transfer paper--Drawing from nature--Conclusion. Authors preface Increased use of the =Photographic Reproduction= process and a prevailing ignorance of their nature and application, made desirable a simple practical =Handbook of Illustration Methods= Such a book it has been my endeavour to produce A.H.H. London November 1894 [Illustration: PEN DRAWING. (_Original_ 9 x 5-1/8.)] A HANDBOOK OF ILLUSTRATION CHAPTER I. _INTRODUCTION--THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION._ Introduced to this country, in round numbers, some fifty years ago, Photography has progressed beyond its contemporaries of the present century. It has obtained a hold upon the people, entering equally into their work and their amusements; the speed, the reality, the brilliancy of it fit it peculiarly for the age into which it has been born. It has survived, and will survive, amidst the decay of other things, because of its extraordinary adaptability to changing circumstances, its readiness to meet altering tastes and requirements; versatile in aspect, elastic in its application. Amidst all its adaptations of modern date, in none has it been more successful than in that to which this book is devoted: that wherein photography, directly or indirectly, is employed to introduce into our literature expressions of thought, which are better so conveyed than by written or printed words. Be the language never so rich in words, or the writer's power in using them never so great, a clearer and a more lasting impression may be conveyed, even to the cultivated, and certainly to the popular mind, by the arrangement of lines and markings in such form as may be felt to actually represent the objects, and indicate the relative position and size of other objects or parts of the same. This may be said to be the primary and normal function of an Illustration. Throughout the pages of this book, and to whatever extent the student may practise the methods herein described, it may be well to keep very clearly in mind the legitimate function of an illustration, namely: to describe, to portray, and to do this _chiefly_ as an auxiliary to written language. To such a kind belongs the rude scratchings of the primæval man, whose limited powers of speech forbade his adequately describing the forms of those creatures whose pursuit meant life, whose disregard would mean death, and of such kind were the hieroglyphics of the East. Nay, who shall say that the very forms of letters themselves are not the outcome of early effort to convey to the eye of another what might otherwise only have been imperfectly communicated through other senses: a means to an end; a servant, a tool, in the hands of him who would wield it. But in the beginning there was a making of drawings and designs which had another purpose. The gourd, or rough clay vessel, was graved and marked with devices and forms suggested by the curves and shapes in Nature, but this was merely for decoration; to please the eye, and not to serve any purpose but to give pleasure. A means to an end in this sense perhaps, but note that the end was in the commencement of it, and went no further after completion; it gave pleasure to the beholder and no more, and nothing more was intended or asked. Thus was Art born--not to teach, nor to explain, nor to illustrate. Nor is this distinction out of place in the present work. The tendency to-day is too often to make a pretty picture rather than a good illustration; to sacrifice accuracy to beauty; to strive rather after the æsthetic pleasure in art, than the truth and fidelity of illustration. The artist is what he is from the possession of certain instinctive attributes which he is powerless to teach to another, whereas the simpler and expressive forms of draughtsmanship _may be attained by almost all_. From confusing art with illustration we find a man saying "I cannot do this, or that, because I am no artist," and it is with a hope of placing in the hands of such, at least to some extent, a means of graphic expression, that the present book has been undertaken. [Illustration: AN ESSEX LANDSCAPE. _Half-tone from oil sketch in monochrome._ (_Original_ 10-1/8 x 6-1/2). [See p. 51.]] Take also such a simple matter as a letter from a friend, and notice how often words alone fail to convey a correct impression, yet a few lines of simple form at once present a graphic description. Mr. Blackburn gives a capital example of such a case in his "Art of Illustration." He says: "A newspaper correspondent is in a boat on one of the Italian lakes, and wishes to describe the scene on a calm summer day. This is how he proceeds: "'We are shut in by mountains,' he says, 'but the blue lake seems as wide as the sea. On a rocky promontory on the left hand the trees grow down to the water's edge and the banks are precipitous, indicating the great depth of this part of the lake. The water is as smooth as glass; on its surface is one vessel, a heavily laden market boat' (and so on). There is no need to repeat it all; but when half a column of word-painting had been written (and well written) the correspondent failed to present the picture clearly to the eye without these _four_ explanatory lines (no more) which should of course have been sent with his letter." [Illustration] In the same way small sketch plans (no matter how roughly made) are of great assistance in describing the position of a fire, a murder, or anything else of public importance; not to mention the value such descriptive lines often are in private letters. Whilst, then, Art and Illustration are distinct, and much of the latter may be within the reach of many to whom the former is impossible, there is no reason why either should needlessly offend the canons of the other. Art--seeking, as it should, to awaken a sense of pleasure in the beautiful--adheres to truth, in idea if not in fact. Illustration, which portrays fact truthfully, may yet do so in such manner as shall not annoy the cultivated and artistic senses; and this is the art of illustration. Here, as in other matters, much depends on a knowledge and exercise of the mere technique or craftsmanship: the means to be employed, and the manner of employing them. With pen or pencil we might satisfactorily produce such a diagram or drawing as should _illustrate_ our speech, but the exigencies of such gigantic institutions of civilisation as books, magazines, and newspapers, demand that the same illustration shall be presented to thousands of readers at the same time. In former times the original drawing was copied by craftsmen on to wood or metal, and then carved so that a "block," containing the design in relief, might be set up in the printing press and printed in conjunction with the letterpress type. Wonderful skill did the wood-engraver acquire in reproducing the original and in interpreting the artist's idea; but his work took time, which had to be paid for, and sometimes the artist found that in passing through the intermediary wood-engraver, his intention had been wrongly construed, and even a departure made from the accuracy of his drawing. Then came Photography, and it was found possible to photograph the original on to the surface of the block instead of drawing it. It was next found possible, under given conditions, to substitute for the engraver a purely mechanical means, whereby the surface of the block was suitably carved to print with ink the requisite design. Thus a photographic and chemical _process_ supplants the hand-work of the engraver, and a perfect replica of the original, in no way dependent upon the personal ability of the engraver, is obtained. The same process, working blindly, produces a facsimile equivalent to the artist's own drawing; and does so with such speed, and at such small expense, that for one penny we may purchase to-day a newspaper filled with exact copies of drawings of events which happened only yesterday. Thousands of books and papers, the world over, are now replete with illustrations: the expense of producing which by the older methods would have made impossible such welcome additions to the printed page. Nor does it appear that the gigantic dimensions, and high state of perfection, which Process illustration has reached, in any way represents the limit of its possibilities in either respect. It has been reasonably conjectured that in the near future every newspaper and periodical publication will be illustrated, and almost each day sees some advancement, some improvement, in the daily practice of the various processes of reproduction, so that in writing a book of the present kind it is difficult to keep the information therein contained fully abreast of the times. While it is in the hands of the printer some new thing may be found out, some new application of a method successfully attempted, which shall make the novelty of yesterday give place to the invention of to-day. The pride of the _littérateur_ may make him feel that the use of pictures, as an assistance to writing, indicates incapacity or feebleness on the part of the author. Yet, able as is the description of such familiar characters as Mr. Pecksniff, Pickwick, Jingle, and others, how various would have been the idea conjured up by different readers, were it not for the inimitable drawings of Cruickshank or "Phiz." Were not Shakespeare's characters intended to be illustrated--not by drawings perhaps, but by "living pictures"? And, finally, out of the simple instruments for illustration there has been evolved a greater thing. The same means as are employed to reproduce the draughtsman's drawing, may also reproduce, and place in the hands of the multitude, reproductions of the works of great master artists; so that something of the treasures of the Pitti, and the Louvre, may be seen in English homes to-day. The same simple methods, used for mere illustration, have been wrestled with by those who possess art as a birthright from the gods, and through their efforts our books may now contain pictures (process reproductions) which are full of fine artistic feeling; not merely illustrating the text, but awakening a sense of pleasure and exaltation at the representation of nature's beauties. Decorative pages, ornate with noble designs, brighten a book like gleaming crystals in a rich but dark mine, and relieve the monotony of too perfect a symmetry. A chapter heading, a tail piece, a decorated initial, and here and there a picture page, exert an influence like sparkling spring and smiling flowers, for joy and sweet refreshment by the way. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER II. _A NEGLECTED FIELD._ A form of book illustration too much neglected, and one possessing peculiar advantages, is Margina Illustration. Decorated or illustrated margins may be associated in idea with the early monastic work, when the solitude and gloom of the recluse's life was relieved by the little enjoyment which must have attended the illumination of holy books, but it is not quite the purely decorative to which I would refer. In some modern editions, in which an old style is affected, a wide margin on the top, bottom, and outer edge of the letterpress is preserved so wide that ample space might be found to introduce such trifling illustrations as would be amply sufficient to fix an impression or suggest to the imagination of the reader ideas which the mere letterpress might fail to awaken. [Illustration: CANTO THE SECOND Night wanes--the vapours round the mountains curl'd Melt into the morn, and Light awakes the world. Man has another day to swell the past, And lead him near to little, but his last; But mighty Nature bounds as from her birth. The sun is in the heavens and life on earth; Flowers in the valley, splendour in the beam, Heath on the gale, and freshness in the stream. Immortan Man I behold her glory shine, And cry exulting inly, "They are thine!" Gaze on, while yet thy gladden'd eye may see, A morrow comes when they are not for thee; And Grieve what may above thy sensless bier, Nor earth Nor sky will yeild a single tear; Nor cloud shall gather more nor leaf shall fall, Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all; But creeping things shall revel in their spoil, And fit thy clay to fertilize the soil. 'Tis morn--'tis noon--assembled in the hall, The gather'd chieftains come to Otho's call; 'Tis now the promised hour that must proclaim The life or death of Lara's future fame. When Ezzlin has charge may here unfold. LINE REPRODUCTION FROM PEN SKETCH. (_Original 13 x 9 inches._)] Too often our illustrations in books are separated from the text to such a degree that a continuity of idea is all but impossible. We read, perhaps--"Night wanes--the vapours round the mountains curl'd melt into morn, and Light awakes the world. Man has another day to swell the past," &c., &c., &c.; but long before we come to the page which illustrates this delightfully pictorial passage from one of Lord Byron's romantic works we read--"'Tis morn--'tis noon--assembled in the hall. The gathered chieftains come to Otho's call:" and not perhaps until we have passed the third or fourth stanza, and are trying to picture in our minds the brilliant assemblage of Spanish chieftains, and the fierce challenge of the accused Lara terminating with "Demand thy life!" do we turn over a page and confront a dainty illustration of the opening lines "Night wanes," &c.--an interruption as undesirable and distracting as when the lecturer, through some mistake in the arranging of his lantern slides, sees projected on the screen a photogram of the grim walls of Newgate Prison, when, with the words "I will now show you a picture of where some of England's heroes have found a resting-place," he expected his assistant to put up a slide of Westminster Abbey. It is not always possible even to get our book illustrations to face the matter which refers to it, and even if that can be arranged, or the illustration can actually come into the same page, the act of turning from text to picture means an interruption and severing the continuous thought. Could our illustrations appear in the margin, between the lines, mingled with the letterpress, how smoothly we might _read_ the _illustrations_ along with the text, and how bright and pleasing would the pages appear! I have given a specimen page which may serve to better show the idea. We will suppose some book of travel or poetry be set up in type by the printer, and a proof copy be made up with broad margins under the direction of the illustrator, who then takes it in hand and decorates each page as desired; or the pages are pulled as proofs on two or three kinds of paper, smooth for pen work, rough for crayon, or medium for wash drawings--what delightful variety might be secured! When the artist has added his marginal and inter-paragraph illustrations the pages are photo-reproduced, the complete block including both letterpress and drawings. [Illustration: PENNED BY W.T. WHITEHEAD. (_Original_ 15 x 12 _inches._)] Of course the illustrations, if confined to the margins, could be reproduced separately, and set up with the type in the same form. In the example I have given on page 15, the letterpress was set up by the printer to occupy a given space, the type used being a clear, bold letter. This was printed from on two or three kinds of paper, and handed to me to add the illustrative matter. The proof used was about thirteen by nine inches, and this was subsequently reproduced by a simple zinco process to the size here shown. Of course the amount of letterpress possible on each page is small if the illustrating be carried to any great extent. An edition of Shakespeare's works treated in this fashion would of itself constitute a small library, but for smaller works, or for single plays or single poems, many a plain piece of reading might be by such means converted into a very delightful and beloved book. I have often thought that in fiction, when we read that the dainty little _billet doux_ slipped under the door, written in my lady's delicate and graceful style; or, the mysterious letter handed to the hero written in a strange handwriting "ran as follows," how much more forcible the thing would be if the author had given us a facsimile of the letter. I never read a letter in a story without feeling it was the author of the romance, instead of the character in the book, who composed the letter. Thus an author might, in addition to feature, figure, and dress, give us a fine suggestion of his _dramatis personæ_ by showing a little bit of their handwriting. CHAPTER III. _THE THEORY AND PRINCIPLES OF ILLUSTRATION._ Here it will probably be well to consider the different classes into which illustrations naturally seem to fall, and this because it is the common custom to regard the contents of an illustrated book as all belonging to one. Perhaps the simplest and most spontaneous form of illustration is seen when one is describing a position or locality, and takes pencil and paper to draw a rough plan showing this or that road, cross-road, turning, &c. We do this without any forethought, without any artistic ability, and never for a moment considering that we are fulfilling the first theoretical function of the illustrator, and we make this sketch-plan partly because we could not so graphically describe what we wish in words; and, again, the drawing will produce a more lasting impression upon the person appealed to, and that without so great an effort of memory on his part. "Seeing is believing," and to _see_ is also to _remember_. It is the same with the diagrams which illustrate the problems of Euclid, a tourist's map, an architect's plan; these are all illustrations of a diagrammatic kind. Only a little higher in the scale are the illustrations in scientific and physiological books. I say _higher_, because of the difficulties attaching to the photographing of such objects, and their more complex forms, which sometimes necessitate their being drawn from the objects at first hand by one possessing some amount of skill as a draughtsman. But the intention is to explain the text, added to which is perhaps the special office of enabling the student to recognise and identify the particular animal or vegetable structure, or a certain rock formation or crystal, when found; for which purpose it is of primary importance that the essential and specific characters of the particular object are carefully portrayed, and the entire figure be of faultless accuracy. This same quality must also be secured in topographical views with which the book of travels, with its description of far-distant places and people, is illustrated; it is in this class of drawings that there is most danger of a desire to make a pretty picture--overwhelming the purely descriptive or explanatory function. The representation of the principal characters in a story, with which it is the custom to illustrate a novel or work of fiction, has often appeared to me to be one of the least successful departments of illustration. Probably this arises from the fact that the artist has no actual models to work from; he creates, out of the author's description, imaginary beings, and portrays them accordingly. Therefore, unless author and artist have been in very close communication, it is as likely as not that the artist may get a conception of certain characters quite remote from the author's intention. At least, it must have occurred to many a reader to find the pictures in a favourite novel often quite fail to realise the ideal which he had himself formed of the hero or heroine, of whom, at the very outset, he had conjured up an image and an environment. Somewhat lately the experiment has been made of illustrating fiction with actual photograms from life, in which case the illustrator must select with great care individuals answering very exactly to the descriptions given, and use these as models grouped as required. Obviously this method must be confined to such books whose plot is laid in comparatively recent times and in ordinary scenes of life; for the difficulties, which are in any case great, assume insurmountable proportions when one conceives the idea of illustrating by photograms such books as "Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Progress," or "Don Quixote." [Illustration: PEN DRAWING BY W.T. WHITEHEAD. (_Original_ 8 x 5.)] The ideal condition would be for the author to illustrate his own writings, then indeed should we be sure of getting a glimpse of the character intended; and we can imagine with what care he would fashion the child of his imagination. Failing this, the author should control to a greater extent the work of the man who is to illustrate his writings, a point far too often overlooked in the making of a book. It will be seen that in this section of illustration the draughtsman draws upon his imagination, so that, to some extent at least, his art is _creative_. It must, however, be borne in mind that he is not at liberty to paint or draw his own unaided imaginings; he is merely interpreting another's words into a graphic representation; so that, be he never so fine an artist, his art, like Pegasus in harness, is restrained under the yoke of the illustrator. We may, however, find illustration ascending a step higher towards the sphere of art proper and creative, and that is in the _edition de luxe_, in which, with or without printed matter, we have plates which are pictures in the best sense, and appeal chiefly, or exclusively, to the æsthetic sense. Also in some dramatic works, in poetry, and in some prose, there is a much wider scope for the imagination of the artist, and we have high-class books of a real artistic merit. [Illustration: PEN DRAWING BY W.T. WHITEHEAD. (_Original_ 8 x 2.)] One other notable form of illustration remains, and that is the purely decorative. This is seen to advantage in the book-plates in which a device bears the name of the owner and is affixed to each book; to revive which custom an effort has happily been made of late. In allegorical figures and scrollwork on title-pages, at heads of chapters, in borders, in large initial letters, at the termination of a chapter, or a design interspersed with the type on a page, and in many other forms beyond the prescribed shape which its position determines, there is little to restrict the artist. Some examples of designs for book-plates were recently given in that excellent magazine _The Studio_; and some interesting and wholly praiseworthy "initials," formed on an actual photogram, appeared recently in _The Photogram_. These are two instances out of the many which may be seen on every hand, and in this connection I have long felt that photograms from nature might be more largely applied to book illustration or decoration. [Illustration] Thus I have endeavoured to indicate the principal uses of illustrations. Now in every work of art, its strength and its success are dependent in a great measure upon its composition and purpose possessing simplicity and unity, and I think that it cannot be too deeply impressed upon the illustrator that singleness of purpose will be a strong contributory to success. If the purpose of the illustration be to explain or to describe, then let it do that at the sacrifice, if need be, of all else; and if, at the same time, it be possible to introduce such qualities as will make it void of offence to the more cultivated eye, so much the better; but the particular aim and intention must be paramount. In like manner, if the illustration be for purely ornamental purposes, or purely pictorial, giving pleasure to the eye and the sense of beauty: then to attempt to make it fulfil the function of a teacher, to anything more than a subordinate degree, is to divide, and therefore to weaken, both capacities. An illustration, therefore, should be thought out, designed, and produced, with a definite and single purpose. Speaking of the rise and development of newspaper illustration, in a lecture delivered before the Society of Arts, in November, 1893, Mr. Henry Blackburn quoted from a discussion held at the same place in 1875, when the following conclusion was arrived at: "In the production of illustrations we have arrived at great proficiency, and from London are issued the best illustrated newspapers in the world. But our artistic skill has led us into temptation, and by degrees engendered a habit of making pictures when we ought to be recording facts. We have thus, through our cleverness, created a fashion, and a demand from the public, for something which is often elaborately untrue. "Would it, then, be too much to ask those who cater for (and really create) the public taste, that they should give us one of two things, or rather _two things_, in our illustrated papers--the real and the ideal. "1st. Pictorial records of events in the simplest and truest manner possible." "2nd. Pictures of the highest class that can be printed in a newspaper." This, it appears, was said before the mechanical process block was much used or even known; but what was true in principle in the old wood-engraving days is as true now that we have new and rapid means of reproduction. Having, in any given case, decided what is the purpose of the illustration required, it will next be necessary to determine by which of the methods at our disposal the scheme can best be carried out, both as regards the method of producing the original, and the method of reproducing it in print. And this naturally brings us to the subject of our next chapter. [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. _REPRODUCTION BY HALF-TONE PROCESS._ From the processes with which I propose to engage my reader's attention, wood and steel engraving, and kindred methods, stand apart. Were we dependent upon these alone, not one-thousandth part of the illustration matter of to-day could ever have been produced, encumbered as the older methods are with the two things which, in the production of anything "for the million," are serious drawbacks, namely, time and expense of production. Whilst these older methods undoubtedly possess characteristics which will always give them a peculiar value, and secure for them immunity from extermination (and make them, indeed, essential for certain purposes), there was long ago felt a need for a method of rapid reproduction unattended with individual artistic skill on the part of each worker employed, and, above all, free from heavy expense. Such a need has been more than met by what we now know as the mechanical processes. I say more than met, because, gradual improvement in the processes themselves, and an increased knowledge of the particular requirements of these processes on the part of the draughtsmen or artists, has resulted in giving us a process which is not only rapid and cheap, but which produces prints of high quality and merit. It will of course be at once apparent that in order to get our illustration into the printed pages of book or newspaper we must first transfer the original to a plate, or block, and then so manipulate the surface that, like a printer's type, it shall take the printing ink in such manner as shall leave an exact imprint upon the paper, or other surface, upon which it is pressed. The transfer of the original is accomplished by photography. The preparation of the surface is effected by a chemical or mechanical process. Correctly defined, these processes are "photo-mechanical," and such are generally understood by the literally ambiguous title "process," which is colloquially applied to all such methods. It is not the intention of the present book to give instructions whereby to work the processes, beyond a general outline which shall make the illustrator acquainted with the method in which his drawing or photogram is utilised. This knowledge will enable him, to some extent, to adapt himself and his work to its special requirements. Photo-mechanical processes are of two kinds: those by which the image is _ingraved_, known as _intaglio_, and those in which the image is produced in _relief_, or _relievo_. In the first of these the result is more or less similar to an ordinary engraved copper-plate, which, being wiped after inking, retains the ink in the engraved or indented portions, and prints accordingly. The intaglio processes are confined to what is known as Photogravure, or Photo-etching, and modifications thereof. This will not engage our attention, for, beautiful as are its results, it is comparatively expensive, and lacks that characteristic of speed which has made the _relief_ processes so useful. The engraved plate must be printed _separately_; it cannot be set up with type and printed as letterpress. At the same time, in order to clear my reader's mind, and my own course, before proceeding further, mention may be made of other separate-printing processes, such as Collotype.[1] (also known under many fancy titles), in which the image is printed on a machine or press from an inked gelatine surface. These can easily be distinguished by the image having a perfectly even appearance as though produced by a water-colour wash, without grain, reticulation, or lines. Photo-lithography, in which, as the name implies, the picture is transferred on to stone, from which it is then printed as in ordinary lithography, may also be mentioned here. [Illustration: HALF-TONE FROM PHOTOGRAM; HIGH LIGHTS STRENGTHENED WITH CHINESE WHITE.] Another beautiful process of reproduction is the Woodbury-type, named after its inventor, Walter B. Woodbury, in which a bichromated gelatine film is exposed under a negative, and the soluble portions afterwards removed by hot water. The resulting gelatine relief, which contains a facsimile picture, is allowed to dry, when it becomes as hard as stone. It is next forced by hydraulic pressure into a sheet of polished lead, leaving therein an exact counterpart of its every elevation and depression. The lead plate (_intaglio_) is next placed in a handpress, and flowed with a pool of hot gelatinous colour; a piece of paper is next placed on top and pressure applied, when all surplus colour oozes from the sides. After a few moments, when the gelatine becomes sufficiently cool, the paper bearing its delicate gelatine print is pulled off and dried. [Illustration: LINE REPRODUCTION FROM PEN AND INK. (_Original 14 x 11 inches._)] Beautiful as many of these are, they can only be applied where the expense attending them and the slower printing is not an objection, and where letterpress is not required on the same sheet at the same printing. Printing matter can of course be afterwards introduced, but this must be by a second operation. We have now left for consideration the relief processes, in which the design to be printed is produced similar in character and appearance to that of the movable letterpress type used by printers. [Illustration: FEEDING THE CHICKENS. (_Half-tone from photogram. Original 14 x 11 inches._)] These processes are roughly divisible into two sections, "tone" and "line," to understand which I will refer the reader to the accompanying illustrations. In these the image appears to be respectively composed of _lines_ of varying strength and proximity in the one, and of _tints_ ranging from grey to black in the other. If the latter be closely examined, however, or looked at through a magnifying glass, it will be found that what at first appears to be a flat even tint is composed of an infinite number of dots arranged in a reticulated or geometrical pattern. We will now see how this effect is produced, and what are the especial uses of this so-called "tone" or "half-tone" process. [Illustration: THE HERON HOUSE. _Half-tone from photogram._ (_Original 14 x 11 inches._)] HALF-TONE PROCESS. As has been already said, it is of course necessary to produce from the original a printing surface of such a kind as shall take ink and print an image therefrom. Now it will of course be obvious that with ink and white paper we can only produce two things--black and white--and that therefore all the intermediate shades must be produced by a greater or less number of black dots. The process under consideration, in common with some others, is based upon the fact that gelatine or albumen sensitised with bichromate of ammonium or potassium, becomes _insoluble_ after being acted upon by light. A solution of bitumen in benzole also forms a light sensitive coating which is frequently used in these processes. If we were to expose such a sensitive film to light under (for example) a photographic negative of a figure taken against a light background and then washed it in a suitable solvent, those parts which had been protected from light by the opaque portions of the negative, such as the background, the face, hands, and white portions of the dress, would dissolve away, leaving the insoluble or light affected portions standing. [Illustration: LINE REPRODUCTION FROM PEN AND INK. (_Original 14 x 11 inches._)] If we were now to ink these portions, we could print a black image which would represent the general form of the portrait like the old-fashioned silhouettes, or shadow pictures; but the "half-tone" process provides for the breaking up of the solid black image, substituting for it black dots closer and more numerous where the darker greys are, and less so where the shading is lighter. A very considerable variation in apparent tint may thus be effected. The actual method is briefly thus:--What is known as a "screen" is first made by taking a photographic negative of a print from a copper-plate, on which has been ruled about 120 fine parallel lines to the inch. This is done with extreme care and exactness, so that the negative gives a clear transparent copy of the ruled lines of microscopic sharpness. In many cases the ruled copy is moved round a quarter of a circle during the exposure, thus resulting in the effect of double ruling, the lines intersecting each other at right angles. Or two printings may be made from the copper-plate to produce the same result and the negative then taken. We shall thus have a negative having the appearance of a very fine lattice of transparent glass on an opaque ground. With this "screen" placed nearly in contact with an ordinary photographic plate, film to film, we proceed to make a copy negative, in the camera, of the original picture. This, when developed, will give the picture _and_ an image of the screen, which has been interposed, together on one plate. If this is now clear to my readers, they will probably at once see what will result when such a plate is used on a sensitised sheet of zinc or copper, and the soluble parts of the film washed away as before suggested. The parts of the film made insoluble from exposure to light will be reticulated all over by minute soluble dots or lines where the image of the screen has interrupted the light, and more so or less in proportion to the lightness or deeper shade of the original, and by this means what would have been unbroken blacks are sprinkled over, so to speak, with tiny white interstices, the ink when applied remaining on the alternating projections of undissolved film. Suppose the film to have been of bitumen and spread upon a sheet of zinc, we should have a reticulated image in insoluble bitumen with interstices of plain zinc. This bitumen forms a protective coating, so that when immersed in a weak solution of nitric acid the acid only eats a way into the bare metal. Gradually, and by subsequent acid baths, the parts covered by the film are left in strong relief, and in a fit condition to print from. The film which has thus resisted the acid is then washed away, leaving the zinc relief. To carry out the above process many details, which I have not thought it the office of this book to enter into, will be required. Thus the solvent used for developing, or, in other words, washing away the soluble portions of a bitumen film, is turpentine; but water is used in the case of bichromatised albumen. An acid resisting preparation is finally applied to the plain zinc relief, and the whole block re-etched or "re-bitten," so as to strengthen the image; certain precautions, moreover, are taken to prevent the acid "under etching" the image--and a great deal more which, of course, would have to be clearly described were it intended to teach the process of block-making. In the variety of half-tone blocks, known as Typogravure, a different method of breaking up the surface is adopted; no intervening screen is used, but the surface of the metal has imparted to it a preliminary roughness or grain, and the image is printed and etched on this rough surface. These blocks, when carefully printed from, yield exceedingly nice results, the grain having something of an "aquatint" character, which appears to be more discriminating than that derived through the use of the ruled screen. The softness of outline and freedom from anything like a mechanical texture is well seen in blocks made by this method. The remarkable difference obtained from the same block by different printers will at once suggest that a very great deal depends upon the printing quite irrespective of the quality of the block itself. Many letterpress printers make a specialty of block-printing, the chief art being in the "making-ready" and "underlaying," by which terms is understood the careful adjusting of the block, so that its surface be at exactly the proper elevation to secure the proper amount of pressure, neither more nor less, when on the printing machine. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in Chapter X. [Illustration] I trust, however, enough has been said to give a general idea to the uninitiated of how we arrive at the dotted ink print, which we recognise as a reproduction from a photogram, or wash-drawing, or indeed anything which is similarly made up of flat tints. [Illustration: UNTOUCHED HALF-TONE FROM PHOTOGRAM. (_Original 4 x 3._)] [Illustration: HALF-TONE FROM PHOTOGRAM--THE BLOCK ENGRAVED ON BY HAND. (_Original 4 x 3._)] It will, of course, have been understood that the ruled "screen," which is interposed between the picture to be copied and the plate on which it is copied, will appear over _the whole_ of the copy negative, whether the image extend so far or not, so that, in the reproduction, even what should be blank whites will be covered with the fine black dots or grain, though more widely separated by little white spaces. If the accompanying reproductions be examined, this will be found to be the case. To any one who has given pictorial matters much thought, the disadvantage of this will be at once apparent. [Illustration: ON SLAPTON LEY, SOUTH DEVON. _Photogram touched up by hand--block untouched._ (_Original 4 x 3._)] In black-and-white pictures, white is the highest expression of light, and yet how far the whitest paper is from sunlight, and how much shorter the whole gamut of tones, from blackest ink to whitest paper, is when compared with the scale of Nature, have often been pointed out and are now generally understood. But our half-tone process makes the range of tones still shorter by curtailing it at the top of the scale and cutting off the white: the pervading "tint," or "grain," reducing white to a light grey, and not even the deepest blacks and intermediate tones are nicely rendered except by very careful printing. The printing of half-tone process blocks has received great attention amongst better-class printers of late, with the result that marked improvement has taken place, and it is clearly seen that be a half-tone block ever so well made it is only admirable when special ink and special paper (notably a fine clay surface paper) are used, and more than ordinary knowledge and care expended in the machining. While the ideal process block is one in which, when the process is completed, the block is ready for the press (and many process houses pride themselves upon turning out "untouched" blocks), yet there are few houses who do not employ some hands who are constantly working with engraver's tools to "improve" the blocks after the last etching is done. Much brilliancy of contrast and effect may be accomplished if the engraver cut away the grain altogether on that part of the surface of the block where it should print white; but this must necessarily be done by men of instinctive taste and good judgment, for immediately hand carving be admitted the essential character of an _automatic facsimile_ process is lost. The illustrator or artist will, therefore, unless he give careful and precise instruction as to what parts are to be cut away, or can superintend the work himself, feel considerable hesitation in entrusting such a delicate task to a stranger. One little touch in the wrong place, one bit of plain white too many, and the harmony of the whole illustration will be upset; so that many will reasonably prefer a weak flat print to the uncertainty which must attend the leaving of a block to a mechanic's mercies. In the accompanying three illustrations we have, first, an untouched "half-tone" block from an ordinary photogram; secondly, a block from the same original, "fine etched" or with the etching controlled so as to brighten the effect; and thirdly, a block made from the same photogram which, in order to compensate for any failings of the process, has been worked on _by the artist_, strengthening the shadows and brightening the lights. [Illustration] This brings us to consider the subject of working on photograms by hand, and the preparation of illustrations generally, which is dealt with in a separate chapter. [Illustration] CHAPTER V. _THE PREPARATION OF ORIGINALS FOR REPRODUCTION BY HALF-TONE PROCESS._ I. PHOTOGRAMS. It will be understood from the foregoing chapter that in every case where the original to be reproduced is of such a nature that before a print in ink can be made the image must be broken up, the reproduction will have to be effected by means of the half-tone process. Of the various kinds of originals thus utilised, probably the two most common are photograms and wash-drawings. The rapidity, comparative ease, and absence of the draughtsman's skill, with which photograms can now be made, has placed a wonderful power in the hands of author or illustrator. But a short series of photograms of some subject of interest with a very little descriptive letterpress will often form an acceptable contribution to magazine or newspaper, and yet a thoughtful consideration of such illustrations can hardly fail to impress any one with the drawbacks and defects of the method. Such illustrations too often strike us as dull, misty, grey, and lacking brilliancy, when compared with black and white reproductions of another kind. This dulness is attributable to a great extent to the gauze-like screen through which the copy is made, as described in our last chapter. The bright lights are grained over with fine dots reducing white to grey, and the soft finely graduated half-tones are often lost altogether. In order to counteract these defects, the process worker will often take upon himself to "doctor" the negative made from the original before proceeding to make the block, a practice to be condemned because such an operator is rarely possessed of artistic judgment, and his "touching up" may often produce a result unexpected and unacceptable to the artist. A similar "touching up" may also be effected on the block itself, as previously suggested, which is only preferable because the artist may more directly control the engraver's tool by giving definite instructions. As far as possible, however, the block should not be meddled with by any one, if the originals have been produced in such a manner as to ensure the best possible effect by the mere mechanical process. In making photograms especially for reproduction a clear, bright negative, with good strong contrasts, should be aimed at. Probably the kind of negatives which it was customary to strive after in the older days of wet-plate photography would be the best; but, as wet-plate photography is hardly practicable for the illustrator of to-day, similar results with dry-plates should be sought. Unhappily, the extreme softness and exquisite gradations of some of the most modern and artistic work of photographers is thrown away in the process of reproduction, and little more than a flat, meaningless smudge is the best the process block can make of it. For this reason our photograms for illustration should somewhat exaggerate the effect we wish to reproduce: a matter which has led to the working on photograms with the brush to heighten the effect, of which I shall have more to say anon. Given the proper kind of negative the next care will be to make such a photographic print as shall not detract from the qualities secured in the negative, and shall in every possible way assist the "process." Many of the best and most pleasing photograms of our day are printed upon coarse-grained, rough-surfaced paper, presenting a difficulty to the reproductive process almost certain to prove disastrous to the result; for if, whilst being copied, the original is not very skilfully lighted, the inequalities of the surface reproduce as little lights and shadows in a very unpleasing manner, and the texture of even a comparatively smooth paper seems remarkably exaggerated. Almost as undesirable will be the very highly enamelled surfaces of some photographic papers, the surface gloss producing reflections which interfere with the copying. The best for general use will be the smoothest platinotype paper, or a not too highly-glazed _white_ albumenised paper, either of which are obtainable at most chemists and all photographic dealers. The print should be of a medium depth, not so dark as to give heavy solid shadows, nor so light as to omit all detail from the lightest portions. The various manipulations necessary for "toning" and "fixing" the print should be carried out carefully, especially avoiding staining or discoloration of the white paper. The print thus made, when mounted on card, is as far as an ordinary photogram can go for this purpose. It now remains to be seen, bearing in mind what we know of the method by which it is to be reproduced, what may be done to improve it, never forgetting, however, that the chief value of a photogram for illustrative purposes is its unimpeachable fidelity to truth. Additional hand-work should not violate this truthfulness by the introduction of any fresh matter, or the painting out of any characteristic detail, unless, of course, the illustration is merely for pictorial or decorative purposes. The inscription "From a photogram" usually possesses a charm over the popular mind, inspiring confidence and carrying conviction, and if the hand-work be discreetly introduced, only to improve the effect and counteract the inherent defects of the final process, the legend may be honestly used. In the first place, a photogram in which there are some large very dark objects, which by reason of their dark colour are disagreeably heavy, or obtrusive masses of deep shadow, may be made to reproduce better if a thin transparent wash of blue be applied to such portions. The great photogenic power of blue is, of course, the reason of this, but until some experience be gained as to the proper amount of blue required, I should recommend that a duplicate untouched photogram be sent in as well, with a few words of explanation and instruction to the process man. If the photogram be upon a glossy surface paper, a few drops of ox gall, procurable in bottles from the artists' colourman, will make the water-colour wash flow readily over the slimy surface. For working with a brush upon the photogram, the materials are simple and few. Our purpose is to strengthen the lights and deepen the darks, for which purpose Chinese white and two or three water-colours respectively will be used. The surface and general character of a platinotype or matt paper print will be pleasantest to work on; with an albumenised paper, ox gall will again be essential. If a liberal amount of hand-work is intended, the print had better be a light one, and it can then be built up to any degree. Chinese white, when applied thinly, has a bluish hue, and will consequently reproduce somewhat lighter than it appears. Therefore to produce a grey, it will sometimes be better, instead of using thin Chinese white, to make an admixture of Chinese white and Indian ink, or some suitable pigment, and apply it as a grey where grey is wanted. Such portions of the Chinese white which, when dry, appear harsh, may be softened with a clean almost dry sable brush; or the soft part of the finger, with little more than its natural moisture, carefully rubbed over the harsh parts may have the desired effect. By such and any tricks which may suggest themselves it is advisable to blend the hand-work with the actual photographic image. In applying pigment to the dark parts, to make them darker or sharper, it will be desirable to match the colour of the photographic print as nearly as possible. With platinotypes this may easily be done with Indian ink, with a little blue added according to whether the print is a warm or cold black. The precise colour of a silver print, whether on matt or albumenised paper, is not so easy to match, but may be best accomplished with sepia and cobalt, with a trace of crimson lake; one or two other colours, such as burnt umber, vandyke brown, sienna, &c., being kept in reserve for emergencies. Fine-pointed small sable-hair brushes will be found the best for all purposes. [Illustration: "STOPPED OUT" PHOTOGRAM. (_Original 6 x 4._)] In the process of reproduction the original may be enlarged upon or reduced. The former is not often attended with happy results, especially if there is much hand-work, but reduction may to some extent be relied on to clear away any trifling blemishes, should such exist. I should, however, lay emphasis upon making the original as perfect as possible; the "improving" effect of the process is an altogether too uncertain and unknown factor to be trusted. Having thus given particulars as to the preparation of photograms for reproduction, we may now suggest some various applications thereof. There is a great charm about illustrations which possess a spontaneous and a suggestive character, and in this direction photograms are too often painfully deficient. On rare occasions only, and in the hands of a few artistic workers alone, does photography rise above a certain mechanical and laboured impression, and the rare exceptions are of a character ill-suited for "half-tone" reproduction. For complete whole-page illustrations a photogram has few drawbacks; but when inserted with letterpress, and required for chapter headings and odd corners, the fact that the picture occupies the whole space enclosed within the boundary lines, and includes a great deal of detail which is not required, makes them less attractive. Their form and style is dull and monotonous. The accompanying illustration will suggest the manner in which I would recommend photograms to be sometimes employed--especially when the illustrator does not possess the requisite skill to produce the same thing with his brush. The "Little Gate-keepers" may be taken as an example of what I will call a "stopped-out" photogram; practically no hand-work has been employed upon it beyond the "stopping out" of the original negative. The figures of the children holding open the gate appear in the foreground of a large negative, a landscape near Dunster Castle; the background is composed of trees of an unpleasing form, and, beyond the topographical interest, the bulk of the subject has little to recommend it. The method of stopping-out is as follows:--The negative should be placed in such a position as to secure a strong transmitted light; it may be fastened to the window, so as to be able to look through it towards the sky, or may be placed in a retouching desk, as used by photographers, if very large plates. In my own practice I use an ordinary easel, sitting to it with my face to the window. On the film side of the negative carefully draw round the more critical outlines, such as figures, faces, trees, &c., with a very fine-pointed brush, or a pen, dipped in opaque black varnish, gradually broadening the line to about a quarter of an inch. Now on the reverse, or glass side of the negative, paint out with black varnish all the rest as required; the effect of painting-out on the reverse side being to give a slightly softer or vignetted effect as is seen in the ground and gate-posts of the accompanying illustration. Where it is desired to carry the vignetted effect to a greater length, some oil colour, red by preference (which may be thinned with copal varnish), may be used, and when partially dry the finger may be used as a dabber to remove just sufficient to admit of the plate printing very faintly. In such a practice as this a little resourcefulness and ingenuity will stand the operator in good stead, and many modifications and "dodges" will occur as the work proceeds. Thus, for instance, if the whole of the painting out be done on the film side, the bare outline of the background and surroundings may be scratched in with a needle so as to give a sketchy appearance in the print; such sketched outline may adhere to the original form or may be entirely invented. Some taste must be exercised to prevent the elaborate photographic image from appearing incongruous with the sketched outline. In the accompanying "Boy gathering Wortleberries," two children have been taken out of an unfortunately grouped trio, a badly developed transparent sky has been converted into a hill in the background, and some little details of landscape have been painted on to the print. A good deal has been said of the modern illustrator shirking or ignoring backgrounds in his illustrations, yet I am inclined to think that in such cases as these, and very many others, the background is best only suggested or omitted altogether. In an illustration which purposes to tell us some little fact, or is designed to beautify and enliven a page, we do not want a whole chapter from nature's book, but just such selected passages which the judgment of the artist illustrator shall select. In utilising photograms in this or any similar manner, it is difficult to place such methods in the hands of those unlearned in art matters without a word of caution and advice on the subject of composition and arrangement; but as it is not within the province of the present work to instruct my readers in art principles, such remarks must be of the briefest. It will be at once seen that whatever be the arrangement or "composition" of nature (as photographed), as soon as the illustrator commences stopping-out certain portions, the form or composition is at once entirely under his control, and the pleasing effect of the finished result will very greatly depend upon a nice arrangement of lines. Thus in my "Little Gate-keepers" the upper outline of the gate forms a striking line running obliquely upward from left to right, and so, to counteract this, I have let the ground take an oblique form in an opposite direction. To have done otherwise and repeated the first-named line would have given the whole thing a one-sided, running-upwards, effect. As a general rule (subject, as all such rules must be, to numerous exceptions), strong oblique lines should converge towards an imaginary centre some distance outside the picture, with some lesser opposing lines to form contrast and promote a balance. Neither should the sketched-in or created background repeat the form of the chief object. Thus in the "Boy gathering Wortleberries" the figure forms a vertical line; there are no strong oblique lines, and therefore the middle distance takes the form of a horizontal line. The summit of the hill, had it come directly over the boy's head, would have too evidently repeated his outline, and is therefore placed a little to the right. These are matters of taste, rather than the obedience to prescribed rules, but the reader who desires guidance can hardly do better than read Burnett's "Essays on Art." There are several handbooks to artistic photography which treat of this subject, such as "Pictorial Effect in Photography" and "Picture-making by Photography," both by H.P. Robinson; also "Studies in Photography," by J. Andrews; and many books for the art student. [Illustration: WORKED-UP PHOTOGRAM. (_Original 6 x 4._)] But, as already said, these are matters of individual taste and artistic instinct, and although I hope by this little book to make the path easy for those who have no especial artistic aptitude, yet, in such things as this, the possessor of such instinctive sense of form is at an advantage, lacking which the attentive study of other people's work and some amount of imitation seems to be the only possible substitute. Much knowledge may be gained from analysing, to this end, illustrations which greet the eye on nearly every page of current literature. While many methods of illustration _may_ be learned and practised in a mechanical manner, the course is beset with difficulties and pitfalls, and, to the artistically unlearned, the alternative dangers of gross error and sheer imitation are ever present. Mr. Henry Blackburn has justly said, "The illustrator's best protection against this tendency, his whole armour and coat of mail, is to be an artist first and an illustrator afterwards." Yet men have won battles without armour, and when the stripling slew the giant it was the latter who wore the coat of mail. Zeal and patient application will do much. In speaking of the application of the photogram to illustrative and decorative purposes, we can hardly leave the subject without making reference to the use to which they may be put for decorative initials, chapter headings, and the like. Some very excellent examples of initials were given in Mr. Gleeson White's articles on "Photographing the Nude," published in _The Photogram_, one of which we reproduce (see p. 48). The subject must be selected so as to harmonise in character and form with the letter required, and such letter may then be pasted, or painted, on the original negative, in which case it will print white; or it may be worked on the photogram with brush and pigment. In only a few cases would the initial, if represented in deep black, have any other than an overpowering and heavy effect. The "tail-piece" on page 56 is a further example which needs little explanation. Photograms cut to certain form, and arranged suitably, may make a great variety of chapter headings or tail-pieces. In the example here given, the background or distance was painted out on the negative, and ink lines were drawn around the print before reproduction. In order to ensure a symmetrical and sharp outline, a paper mask may be attached to the negative, and a scroll design painted on the negative, details being drawn in ink on the resulting print. [Illustration: THE BATTLE OF ALEXANDRIA; 42ND HIGHLANDERS GUARDING FRENCH PRISONERS. _By permission of the proprietors of "The Illustrated London News." Engraved from a wash drawing in black and white by The Meisenbach Co., Ltd., West Norwood._] [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. _THE PREPARATION OF ORIGINALS FOR HALF-TONE REPRODUCTION._ II. WASH DRAWINGS, OIL PAINTINGS, PENCIL AND OTHER DRAWINGS. Of the remaining methods, whereby originals for reproduction by half-tone process may be made, much less need be said. The same principles of avoiding too fine and delicate gradations of tone apply as when making a simple photogram, and the methods of brush and pencil appeal almost exclusively to the naturally artistic. The wash drawing, which is practically water-colour painting in monochrome, is the most popular, and, in the hands of those artists who have applied themselves to illustration for photo-reproduction, some very wonderful achievements are possible. Avoiding blue, green, red, orange, or colours approaching thereto, it matters little what colour is used, but probably black, such as Indian ink, or a good neutral grey or sepia, is the best to use. In any case, body colour reproduces better than transparent washes, the delicacy of which are wasted. Hence a liberal use of Chinese white to lighten the tints is preferable to making the colour thinner with water. Lamp black and Chinese white work well together and reproduce excellently. In using Indian ink, or indeed any colour, successive washes should not be made until each preceding one is dry, thereby escaping a "messy" effect and securing greater vigour. The brush-work must be bold and strong, and, as was said with regard to photograms, include as little of the softer half-tones as possible, the contrasts of light and shade must be accentuated and effect exaggerated to compensate for the degradation of contrast brought about by the process. Unless this be remembered, the result can hardly fail to give anything but a very flat poor copy of the original. The artist should hold himself under restraint, and instead of blending one tone with another keep them nicely distinct, limiting himself to some half-dozen different shades or tones between the extremes of white and black, and even then some portions of the white may require to be cut away on the block. Many illustrations from wash drawings of to-day are of a daring, spirited style in which figures are drawn with or without backgrounds, and when _well_ done they are undeniably attractive, and may be abundantly met with in such publications as _The Graphic_, _Illustrated London News_, _Sketch_, _In Town_, _St. Paul's_, and many others. Were we considering the subject of art in illustrations, comment on this sort of work not wholly in approbation might be made, but that it is thoroughly up to date, effective, and in ready demand cannot be denied, and it should be carefully studied by the student, who will no doubt profit by the suggestions of technique without necessarily copying or being unduly influenced by the style. Some capital effects may be obtained by making a wash drawing on grey-tinted paper and putting in the lights with white, an example of which is here given. Decorative designs done in Chinese white on dark-brown paper may be successfully produced, but should be made several times larger than required; the reduction in size usually improving the effect. Painting in oil in monochrome will offer a welcome field for illustration work to those who are more accustomed to use this medium. A smooth surface canvas or board should be chosen, however, and the painting should be smooth, all _strong_ brush marks, especially in the whites, being omitted or softened out with a badger. In thus softening, however, care should be exercised not to graduate one tone into another, but leave everything firm and distinct, the same restriction of tones being observed as in the other methods referred to previously. In using oil colours, turpentine must be liberally used, or benzine, as this will destroy the excessive gloss on the surface, a feature not liked by the process worker. [Illustration: ON THE RIVER ROTHER. _Half-tone from Indian-ink wash drawing on grey paper._ (_Original 5-5/8 x 3-7/8._)] Either water colour or oil may be worked upon a photographic basis in order to save labour or difficulties in drawing. In such cases the photographic print should be as faint as possible; any photographic paper may be used for water colour, but smooth platinotype will probably be the most pleasant. The surfaces to which oil colour may be applied will be naturally more limited, but ready-sized canvas for printing in bromide by artificial light is made, and is largely used for oil painting for the commoner kind of portraits. [Illustration: DESIGN--CHINESE WHITE ON ORDINARY BROWN PAPER--HALF-TONE. (_Original 7-1/4 x 4-3/4._)] It will, however, sometimes be found desirable to economise labour by using a photogram to paint on, thus saving time in re-drawing and ensuring accuracy of elaborate details. Moreover, paint may be put upon a photogram, and much matter that is not required, or which may be judged as injurious to the pictorial effect, can be omitted. After the painting is finished, the photographic basis or original will then require to be removed. Almost any photographic print may be prepared to receive oil paint by giving it a coating of common "size," and drying it _slowly_ by a fire or otherwise. The painting-on being then proceeded with, and the paint dry, the _back_ of the print is to be sponged or brushed with the iodine solution mentioned on page 114. Platinotype paper being already sized requires no further sizing, and by making a weak under-exposed print the subsequent reduction or bleaching of the image can be rendered unnecessary. [Illustration: _By permission of the proprietors of "The English Illustrated Magazine"._ _Engraved from pencil sketch by The Meisenbach Co., Ltd., West Norwood._] Many illustrators are fond of making wash drawings and then strengthening them with pen or pencil. The advantage is not easy to see, a mixed and indifferent character being usually felt. Pencil drawing with a reinforcement of a few ink lines, or pencil by itself, is a method which appears to me to be deserving of much more attention and cultivation than it has usually received. [Illustration: EVENING AT WEST MERSEA. _Half-tone from pencil drawing._ (_Original 4-1/2 x 3-1/2._)] Average pencil drawing is inclined to be too weak, and wanting in those characteristics which have been already pointed out as essential in wash drawings, but if the drawing be vigorous, and the pencil strokes clean and distinct, some capital results may be obtained. In order to procure the grey of pencil work a very fine screen is used, and the printing carefully attended to, so that pencil sketches are hardly suitable for the cheaper and more rapid class of printing. The lights should be cut away on the block. The accompanying sketch of a cottage is simply torn from the leaf of a sketch-book in which it was made without any regard for the requirements of the process; the strong shadows were slightly reinforced with pen and ink, and the whole carefully reproduced. [Illustration: COTTAGE AT HERONGATE. _Half-tone from pencil sketch slightly strengthened with pen and ink._ (_Original 4-1/2 x 3-1/2._)] It seems scarcely necessary to refer to the use of water colour and oil paintings in colour as illustrations, inasmuch as if produced for purposes of reproduction, colour would hardly be employed. Occasionally, however, one may require to make a photogram of a painting for some such purpose, in doing which it will be best to employ a professed photographer who is accustomed to copying, and this because the photographing of coloured objects possesses peculiar difficulties. Plates known as "Isochromatic" are used, these having certain dyes mixed with the sensitive film which makes them more sensitive to the least active colours, such as reds and yellows, and in addition a stained film of gelatine or glass is introduced into the lens to further correct the action of the colours. Special care, too, in lighting the picture to be copied is requisite, some experts recommending the use of coloured reflectors. If the greens, reds, and yellows are not very pronounced, or the effect is not greatly dependent upon blue and such hues which by reason of their great light activity photograph as white, a fair copy photogram may be produced under ordinary circumstances; but where any doubt exists, I should recommend that the work be done by an experienced operator. Throughout the foregoing remarks on the half-tone process, it will have been gathered that its inherent defects constantly stand in the way of our giving it unqualified approval. A recent writer on the subject, Mr. C.G. Harper, says of half-tone process that it is "inconstant and for ever incapable of rendering wash drawings as well as the wood-engraver." Be this as it may--and it may not be possible to gainsay it--each day sees such improvements made in the processes, that even before these sheets are in my reader's hands circumstances may require a change of opinion, and prejudices may have given way under the convincing influences of modern improvements. We may now turn our attention to the more direct processes of reproducing in _line_, in which, more than in any other direction, the revolution which photography has brought about in the art of illustration is evident. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER VII. _LINE PROCESS._ The methods of drawing for reproduction by, and in compliance with the requirements of, a line process, are numerous and varied. They include pen, pencil, and crayon, and modifications and combinations of all three. The information which I shall give is intended chiefly for such as know little or nothing of the manner in which such illustrations should be produced. Having already mastered the primary methods, the more practised draughtsman, knowing what any special reproduction process requires, will, to some extent, invent his own methods and often resort to some "dodge" which may occur to him, thereby producing some delightful and original result. In describing the half-tone process we found the necessity of having an image in relief of such a character that we could print from it in ink, hence the intervention of a ruled screen, which broke up the flat even tints of the original picture into minute dots. Line processes, as the term implies, are used to reproduce an illustration which, as in a pen and ink sketch, possesses no flat tints, and requires no screen, the actual lines being reproduced in relief and printed in facsimile. It will, of course, be remembered that a mechanical process block can only produce in simple black and white: that is, it either reproduces a line, to print black, or omits it altogether; so that a line drawn in grey ink, and another in black, would each reproduce exactly the same, namely black. Whereas in wash drawing we were limited to a few varying tones, we are now restricted to two--white and black--and, as may be seen by looking at any good line drawing, various degrees of shade are produced by a multiplicity of lines in greater or less proximity and of varying thickness. Before proceeding further, I will give an outline of the three principal processes used for producing drawing in line. These are the swelled gelatine, the albumen, and the bitumen processes;--other processes exist but are little practised, and offer no advantages over the above. The albumen and bitumen methods are processes of etching on zinc and familiarly known as "zinco" line process; not so the swelled gelatine, as will be seen from the following description of it. Gelatine of a hard variety is melted in water with the addition of a small quantity of sugar and chrome-alum, and is then spread evenly upon a perfectly clean glass plate. This gelatine film is, when required for use, sensitised by immersion in a solution of bichromate of potassium, methylated spirits, and water. The effect of this is to render the film, to some extent, insoluble where acted upon by light; or, more correctly speaking, non-absorbent when affected by light. A negative, made from the original to be reproduced, is placed in contact with the sensitised film and exposed to light. The film, which it will be remembered is resting upon a glass plate, is then placed in cold water, with the result that those parts which have been protected from light absorb water and swell up, leaving the non-absorbent parts, which represent the image, sunk in. When this operation has been carried far enough, a plaster of Paris cast is taken, and from this a wax mould is made, which is practically a duplicate of the gelatine mould from which the plaster cast was made. Into the wax mould copper is deposited, precisely as in ordinary electrotyping, thus giving us a copper relief from a gelatine or wax mould made direct from the original.[2] This process, while a favourite with the artist, is not so readily used by the process worker because it is somewhat expensive, the average cost of a block being from 9d. to 1s. 6d. per inch. But the results are very fine, especially when a drawing has been made in ignorance or regardless of the requirements of process reproduction. The zinc etching processes, by which the great mass of newspaper blocks are made, are less regardful of delicacies of execution which the swelled gelatine often reproduces with astonishing fidelity.[3] In the albumen process the sensitive film is composed of egg albumen, bichromate of ammonium or potassium, and water, which is spread upon a _zinc_ plate. After exposure to light under the negative, the whole surface is inked over with transfer ink, and then immersed in cold water and gently rubbed. The ink will wash away from those portions which have been protected from light by the opaque portions of the negative, and will adhere to those affected by light. Thus on a bed of zinc we have an ink image on a substratum of albumen, the exact copy of the original. The zinc has now to be etched with acid. With bitumen the procedure is somewhat similar. The bitumen is first treated with ether, which will dissolve out only those constituents which, not being sensitive to light, are not required. The residue is dissolved in benzole and spread upon a zinc plate, as with the albumen process. After exposure to light under the negative, the bitumen film is washed with turpentine, which takes away all except those portions acted upon by light. The film is next washed in water and placed in a very weak solution of nitric acid, which at once attacks those portions of the zinc unprotected by bitumen. If what now remains of the film be inked over we shall have, as in the last process, an ink image of the drawing on a zinc base, and the plate is now ready for etching. The etching is performed by successive baths of diluted nitric acid, gum and powdered resin being applied to the plate after each etching, and heated so as to run down the sides of the ridges of metal (which at each successive etching bath are gradually growing deeper) until the "biting" or etching be considered deep enough. The ink and substratum of albumen or bitumen are then cleaned off with American potash, and the plate is finally washed. Rebiting, or still further etching, may be required before the zinc relief is ready to be mounted on a wood block "type high" for printing purposes. As in the half-tone process, I do not pretend to have given working instructions, but only such general particulars as may interest the artist or draughtsman whose work is to be reproduced. For either of these processes the average cost is 4d. to 6d. per square inch, with a minimum charge of 5s. for a single block. Each process has its special uses and applications; the process craftsman (whom nothing delights so much as a sharp, brilliant line) will usually recommend the bitumen, but the albumen method will often give a more pleasing result. As a general rule, if your work is placed in good hands, the particular process to be used is best left to them to decide, and if a proof be submitted some little alterations may be suggested which can be carried out by an engraver. In the subsequent pages of this book I shall make little reference to these processes; enough has been said, and they are no part of the draughtsman's business, only it will be well to keep in mind throughout such general particulars as have just been given. Little has been said with reference to the negatives used in reproduction; but as the draughtsman who also possesses some knowledge of photography may be tempted to copy his work himself, it may be well to point out that the negative image must be as sharp as it is possible to get it. The most trifling deviation in focussing, unnoticeable in ordinary photography, will tell seriously in making a reproduction; moreover the kind of negative one may have learned to make for ordinary photographic purposes will not do here. The function of the negative is, it will be remembered, to protect certain portions of the film from light, and to freely admit light where the image is, hence the denser portions of the negative must be very nearly, if not absolutely, opaque, and the image as nearly transparent as possible; thus giving what photography proper has taught us to abhor--a black and white print. With ordinary plates, the required amount of density is not always easy to get, and special photo-mechanical plates are supplied by Mr. John Carbutt, of Wayne Junction, Philadelphia, Pa., which give the desired result. These plates are slow, thickly coated, and capable of giving great density, all of which are characteristics peculiarly suitable to the purpose. But in the end the process man will not thank you for saving him the trouble of making a negative; he is accustomed to make negatives of a certain kind, and very properly prefers to do this himself. Not the least contributory towards a good reproduction is the power which reduction from the original places in our hands. When making the copy negative it is most usual to make it much smaller, or, inversely, the original drawing is made a good deal larger than it is required to appear (See Illustration on page 72). A somewhat ragged line of (say) one-eighth of an inch in width, would, if sufficiently reduced in size, come out as a fine line no thicker than a hair. Though reduction carried to such a degree would be impracticable, a drawing twelve inches by nine inches, reduced to eight by six, will usually be advantageous. Not only is a certain degree of coarseness and roughness thus removed, but the lines themselves become smoother and rounder; lines, however, which are very close together, are apt to close up into a solid mass, both from the reduction and because lines sometimes have a tendency to thicken in reproduction--a point to be guarded against when drawing. If a drawing be examined through a simple double concave lens, that is to say the reverse of a magnifying-glass, the effect of reproduction can be seen, and the result anticipated; such lenses, called "diminishing glasses," are sold expressly for the purpose. The reader need hardly be reminded that everything on the drawing will be reproduced, except perhaps _blue_ pencil lines, this colour being photographically white; hence all finger-marks, spots, and stains must be carefully avoided. No doubt these, and sundry faults in drawing, can be cut away by the engraver, but an ideal block is one which requires no such helps to perfection, but which comes from the etcher's hands ready for use, and to such an ideal even the tyro must work. The strong point and chief recommendation of a process block is that it reproduces in _facsimile_ the draughtsman's original; once introduce hand-work and it begins to lose this character; moreover expense and delay in production are incurred, again depriving the mechanical block of its distinctive and valuable features. Sundry elemental methods of getting an image on to zinc for etching without the intervention of photography may perhaps suggest themselves to the reader. Thus, for instance, an outline drawing may be made in transfer ink on transfer paper and at once laid down on the zinc and etched. A glass plate, coated with a soft opaque substance, may have a design scratched thereon and be used in place of a negative; but such methods are crude and limited, and need not be considered here. We will now pass to an examination of the various kinds of drawings suitable for reproduction by relief process blocks, describing as nearly as possible how they are made and with what materials. [Illustration] CHAPTER VIII. _METHODS OF LINE REPRODUCTION._ To those who have not previously given the matter attention, it will be a source of some astonishment to find a wide range of tones, that is varying degrees of light and shade, may be suggested by so simple and unpromising a means as black lines on a white ground. Perhaps no better means exists for getting some insight of this than by careful and persistent study of the line illustrations constantly appearing in the better class periodicals, such as _The English Illustrated_, _The Strand_, _Harper's_, _Sketch_, _Black and White_, and many others. In these we get frequent examples of the work of different men, and shall soon begin to realise not only the wide possibilities of line work, but the extremely different styles of various artists; and so long as the practice is not too long continued, or too much relied on, some advantageous exercise may be found in carefully copying such examples; being watchful in so doing that, quite independent of outline, our copy suggests the same materials, fabrics, &c., as are suggested in the original, and that this suggestion be arrived at by the same kind of treatment. In this kind of drawing there is obviously no such thing actually as "tone," everything being black or white, and yet it is possible to suggest every gradation and most delicate tonal relationships of colours by this elementary means; the varied textures of objects can also be most convincingly suggested.[4] Probably one of the first things that will strike us, on inspecting many styles of drawing, is the fact that while some draughtsmen expend enormous labour in filling the whole design with multitudinous strokes of the pen, others obtain effect by a very few lines and great expanses of white paper. A great number of strokes rapidly put in, in the manner of shading with pencil, and a few bold lines slowly and deliberately drawn, constitute the two chief differences of style. In the latter, the principal study is perhaps to know _what to leave out_, and nowhere is the knowledge and skill of the artist better seen than when the subject is satisfactorily rendered with the least possible amount of labour, there being not one unnecessary or superfluous line. Such powerful sketches, by Mr. Reginald Cleaver, may be seen in _The Daily Graphic_, and by Mr. Phil May in _The Sketch_. In these drawings a maximum of effect is attained with a minimum of work, and one feels that every line is essential and not one can be spared. In most cases, for all the purposes of illustration, a black coat need not be suggested by any more lines of shading than a white gown; but the artist who so determines may carry his work to a higher standard and, with greater labour, even succeed in giving a suggestion of colour in the objects portrayed. But, even in such elaborate work, there should be no more execution than is essential, and the finished drawing should in no case make its elaborate execution felt. The thing which must first impress the spectator is the success of the general effect; never should there be first awakened a feeling of astonishment at the extraordinary amount of patience bestowed, or labour expended. If the first remark called forth is one of admiration for the extraordinary _dexterity_, we may be pretty sure that the draughtsman has been betrayed into the commonly besetting sin of over-elaboration, and whatever success has been attained in the effect rendered it would have been probably better if produced with less effort. It would have been more forcible if not overwhelmed, as it were, with so much work. [Illustration: DRAWING BY MR. PHIL. MAY. _From "English Illustrated Magazine". An example of bold open drawing._] Never, then, let the delight which we may feel in making a pretty "finished" drawing get the better of our judgment when drawing for reproduction. Remember that "prettiness" comes very near to "pettiness," and delicacy and fineness are apt to become "niggling" and pedantic; coarseness is a lesser danger than excessive neatness. Much of this, as already suggested, may be more clearly learned from the careful examination and comparison of good published drawings. Imitate, and copy if you like, up to a certain degree, remembering always that you are thus copying merely _to ascertain by what means other men express their ideas in line, and not for your own practice_. In like manner etchings, engravings, and indeed every kind of print made up of _lines_, may be studied and, to some extent, copied; but only in order to familiarise oneself with what lines, and combinations of lines, may be made to do; but the danger of continuing such a practice cannot be too much emphasised. Every artist or draughtsman, be he beginner or expert, must draw for himself and according to his own feelings and promptings. In every department of art the successful have had their imitators, and these again their imitators, and at each successive stage the further one gets from originality, the more trammelled, the more impotent and hopelessly beyond the possibility of really great work. That the drawing is not the end in view, but merely a means to an end (that end being the reproduction), is a matter to which I shall refer later on; but it should here be noted, and moreover the student may be reminded, that every line and every mark which he makes will be _similarly reproduced_ by the process. When drawing for wood engraving, the engraver could be instructed to strengthen this or leave out that; not so the mechanical block, which is to be regarded as normally an untouched and purely mechanical thing, only to be altered by hand on the rarest possible occasions, and then only when time and circumstances permit. This character of indiscriminating _facsimile_ is not to be considered as a disadvantage in any way; the good draughtsman is thankful for it, he knows what to reckon upon, and to all it must be an incentive to do one's best. It is the same difference as between a mirror and an average photographer's portrait: the mirror may show us all our faults and yet, if we have any beauty, it does not belie us; while we know how often the ordinary commercial _carte-de-visite_ is unreliable. In the course of studying various reproductions we shall probably have become aware that the same things may be very differently rendered by different hands. Thus trees and foliage in landscape may be represented by an outline, and a few black patches and dots, or by numerous clearly drawn parallel lines, or yet again by irregular strokes crossing and recrossing each other; evidently, then, there is no intention here of _imitating_ nature. And so, throughout, the aim of the pen draughtsman is to _suggest_, rather than to portray things exactly as they are. Lines, scratches, or dots, cannot pretend to imitate leafy foliage; and, be it noted, the same lines, scratches, or dots, may be similarly employed, in the same drawing, to suggest something quite different. It is in this employment of various pen marks, to suggest the composition of distinct objects, that individuality of style reveals itself; as does the discreet using of white blanks to express or suggest widely different things. I have presumed throughout these pages that I may be addressing many to whom the idea of drawing in pen and ink (or other material) for reproduction, is entirely a new one; hence it will be necessary to examine the pen strokes which go to make up a complete drawing. Let it be well understood that many things are possible to the accomplished artist which must not be attempted by the beginner; later on we may learn, from our own experience, little freaks and tricks of our own, but we must first of all content ourselves with simple conscientious work. In the following examples of pen and ink shading we have first the kind of strokes which the pen would make if used rapidly, as in writing, and without any particular care. In bold sketchy work this sort of handling may be permissible, but the student should practise shading by such lines as in No. 2. These are drawn rapidly in succession, the wrist being rested firmly on the table and the hand quite free, as in rapid writing. Commence at the top left-hand corner and work downwards; notice that each stroke is equidistant, parallel, and of the same thickness throughout its length. Look at this from a little distance and it appears like a grey, flat, even tint. This simple "shading" should be tried many times until perfect ease and certainty is acquired, each stroke of the pen being firm, distinct, and black; each stroke intended and nothing uncertain about it. [Illustration: No. I. No. II. No. III. EXAMPLES OF PEN AND INK SHADING. _Reduced to about half the size of original._] A good exercise will be to draw a square, and practise filling it with a flat tint consisting of lines either in the same direction, or else of lines in varying directions, and then with lines crossing each other or "cross-hatching." Having now discovered how a flat tint may be laid down, and how such may be made uniformly or gradually darker, we may apply such methods to simple objects as the cube and vase here shown. [Illustration: (_Original 1-1/2 x 1-1/4._)] By this time we may feel well on the road towards accomplishing any general subject which we are skilful enough to outline. Of the various mechanical helps to drawing outline, for those who lack the required skill, I shall speak hereafter. [Illusutration: (_Original 4 x 2-1/4._)] It need hardly be pointed out that as there is, in nature, no such thing as outline: it is purely an arbitrary means of indicating form, and separating one space from another; whether such spaces be occupied with shading or not, but especially where there is no shading. At first it may perhaps be best to make a clear sharp outline of uniform thickness; but later we shall find we may often advantageously dispense entirely with outline, letting the shading only distinguish one object from another. Notice the absence of outline in the hills in "Near Berry Head," page 94. A little experience will show us that an imperfect outline, and one which varies in thickness with various objects, will greatly assist in the attractiveness of our sketches. A too rigid outline, as also a too close adherence to what has been said about the precision of the shading strokes, tends to a stiff formal appearance which is not to be desired, and destroys anything like originality and individuality of style. In the accompanying drawing notice these points--the irregularity of _outline_, in some parts its entire absence, the value of white spaces, and the suggestive little dots on the white foreground. I have already remarked that the drawing is only to be regarded as a means to an end, and must therefore be made not so as to give satisfaction in itself, but so as to produce a good mechanical reproduction. However irksome some artists may feel this working for process reproduction, it is not accompanied with any great difficulties, nor are its special requirements so very restricting, if only we understand what is wanted. Two influences, for good or for evil, exist between the original and the reproduction (two influences to be taken into account, and reckoned with when we are drawing, so as to produce a definite effect in the reproduction), and these are reduction and thickening of the lines. A diminishing glass, used to examine any drawings, will at once show the effect of reduction or diminishing, and in rough and rapid drawing this reduction is depended upon to remove irregularities and coarseness.[5] [Illustration: IN HARBOUR. _Pen drawing._ (_Original 7 x 6._)] It may be taken for granted that nearly every reproduction we see has been reduced from the original, some more, some less, and while generally speaking we may say that the effect of reduction is to refine and soften; the beginner, however, will sometimes be troubled by finding an increase in the thickness of the lines which is less agreeable, and is very fickle, and can only to a limited degree be counted upon as to the result. Hence the need for keeping darkly shaded portions as open as possible: that is to say, when lines are very close together, or there is cross-hatching, see that the lines do not needlessly run into each other, but that the little white interstices are well preserved. Keep the shading open (the rough net-like effect can be got rid of by reduction), and remember that not only do some lines thicken up, and so engulf the intervening white, but in reduction the white spaces reduce as well as the black lines, and may be reduced into invisibility. Some definite rules have sometimes been suggested to guide the process man as to the amount of reduction best suited for average work; these, however, like many other rules of the kind, are quite arbitrary. On this subject Mr. Henry Blackburn says, with an authority based upon the experience of reducing, to various scales, some thousands of drawings: "As to the amount of reduction that a drawing will bear in reproduction, it cannot be sufficiently widely known that in spite of rules laid down there is no rule about it." [Illustration: _Same size as original._] In some instances no reduction is required, and the reproduction is so exact a replica of the original that it can hardly be distinguished, yet, "On the other hand, the value of reduction for certain styles of drawing can hardly be over-estimated"; and again, "Every drawing has its scale, to which it is best reduced." The effect of the reduction may be seen in the accompanying three examples, the first being the same size as the original, and the others reduced as marked. [Illustration: (_Original 4-3/4 x 4-1/4._)] Until some experience has been gained in this direction, and apart from the exigencies of the space the illustration is required to fill, the process engraver will probably be the best authority for us to consult as regards the amount of reduction suitable to each individual drawing. A reduction of one-third is a very usual one, so long as the drawing is not unusually rough or clumsy. Referring to the effect of reduction upon lines laid down to express a flat tint, Mr. H.R. Robertson gives some interesting notes upon the number of lines required to be drawn in an inch square to produce an even grey tint. I do not think too much importance should be attached to such calculations, as they are likely to embarrass the draughtsman and make him far too much concerned with the mere mechanism of his work; still, the matter is an interesting one. He says that from experiment he finds it will usually require about 108 to 120 lines within an inch to give to the naked eye the idea of a flat tint or wash, but that about 80 to an inch is as many as can be drawn to the inch by unaided vision; eighty lines to the inch gives 120 in 1-1/2 inches, which, if reduced in reproduction by one-third, will give the requisite number of 120 to the inch which Mr. Robertson finds desirable. The effect produced, however, by parallel lines of shading alters considerably when the direction of the lines alters, and I think it is only necessary for us to glance through "Academy Notes," or any similar collection of sketches made by artists who understand the importance of conveying suggestions with pencil or pen, to assure us that far fewer lines are in many cases quite capable of giving the idea of an even tint. Such rules and figures are interesting, and perhaps useful, but they are certainly dangerous if the student places himself too much in subjection to their influence. The beginner in pen drawing is probably destined to meet with severe disappointments at first from the manner in which the process will reproduce his work, and the inclination is to blame the process as unsympathetic, or the process man as incompetent, whereas the fault lies with the drawing, which is unsuitable through a want of proper regard for the requirements of process. For instance, nothing is commoner with the student than to find such portions of our drawing as distance, sky, and the more delicate shading come up heavy and black--quite different to the original, and robbing such parts of it of all delicacy; or it may be that lines which we believed to be fine, smooth, flowing lines, reproduce as broken and irregular. [Illustration: THE WILLOW HARVEST. (_Original 7 x 14._)] The root of both these evils will probably be found in the fact that in our drawing we have been producing light and distant effects by _grey_ lines instead of fine black ones. Drawing with the pen insufficiently charged with ink, or with ink diluted with water, will give these grey lines; but the line process, recognising nothing but black and white, either reproduces the grey lines as black, or reproduces them imperfectly as broken and irregular. Here, then, will be another matter for the beginner to exercise himself in: namely, the drawing of good _black_ lines and an avoidance of _grey_ ones. With drawings made on a fairly large scale, so that every line can be made firmly and boldly, we are less likely to fall into making grey lines. With etchings, in which the image is in intaglio, gradation in the lines is possible; because, according to the depth of the etched line, a greater or less amount of ink is contained, and a grey line can be printed therefrom. And so, for this reason, etchings are misleading if used as copies or examples from which to draw in pen and ink. When the drawing has been first drawn in with pencil and inked over, every vestige of pencil marks must be carefully removed, otherwise the process reproduces them, not as soft grey marks, but as black as those made in ink, and some very unpleasant surprises will be the result. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER IX. _TOOLS AND MATERIALS FOR LINE DRAWING._ To produce a line drawing which shall comprise such characteristics as have now been enunciated, three essentials will be required: a white surface, a black fluid, and a suitable instrument to convey the fluid at will. These we will take _seriatim_, in their conventional order--Papers, Inks, and Pens. The material most largely used for drawing on is probably white Bristol board, of four-sheet or six-sheet thickness, and this will answer better than anything else in almost all cases. Some attention should be paid to the tint of the card, many cardboards having a tendency to turn yellow with age and exposure. A cardboard of a pure white, or a slight tendency to a bluish tint, is what we require, a blue card being in photographic reproduction practically the same as white. Upon the surface of the cardboard will greatly depend the ease with which we shall get clean sharp lines. With many cardboards, in which the surface is apparently smooth, the pen finds irregularities and sometimes obstacles to its smooth and even progress, catching and "spluttering" over little particles of hard matter or hair. A good Bristol board, such as is procurable at any artists' colourman, presents no such difficulties, and the making of a fine smooth line should be quite easy. Messrs. Reynolds and Sons supply various kinds of boards equally suitable for pen work. The bank note Bristol manufactured by F.W. Devoe & Co. is also especially adapted to this work. The process man will very likely recommend you to use a "clay surface" board, and no doubt in some instances these have their advantages. On these clay boards the pen strokes are remarkably clean and crisp, and have a good deal the appearance of having been produced mechanically rather than by hand; a very fine line, however, is difficult to produce, the result being rather like, but in a much less degree, drawing on an enamelled card on which the ink spreads; at the same time, however, there will be less liability to make grey lines. A further advantage of a clay surface is that the surface is easily removable with the blade of a penknife, so that faults may be scraped or cut away--a feature put to very important use in boards specially made for scraping, which are described on p. 96. For large, bold work a clay board is useful, but it should not be too often used on account of the hard, mechanical appearance of the drawing. Whatman papers, or boards having a surface of Whatman paper, are also much used, and these are procurable in two surfaces: H.-P., or "Hot-pressed," the smoothest; and N., or "_Not_ hot-pressed," the surface of which is sufficiently rough to make it very pleasant to work on, but not too much so. If using the H.-P., the surface must be wiped over with a clean wet sponge to remove a certain gloss which the process of hot-pressing imparts to it. There is no particular virtue in any special paper or board beyond whiteness, evenness, and purity; any paper having these qualities may be used with success. I should not recommend the beginner to experiment with too many kinds; he will in the end be probably no nearer satisfaction than at the outset. Start on ordinary white Bristol and persevere, attributing failures to your own incompetence rather than to any fault in the materials. Some of the very best things have been produced on any scrap of notepaper or other white surface that has been at hand. Of suitable black fluids there are many varieties, and the beginner may as easily concern himself a great deal too much about inks as about any other part of the necessary materials. Cakes or sticks of dry pigment, or pans and tubes of moist colour, may be employed, but for general convenience a fluid black will be best. These are of two kinds: "fixed," which is not removable by water, and "ordinary"; and it may be well to consider beforehand the work we are going to do, and use the indelible, or fixed, ink if necessary. I mean by this that we may sometimes require to use Chinese white over our black lines to produce whites, which could not easily be left as blanks, in which case it will be necessary to use a fixed black, else the Chinese white would smear and spoil the black. The introduction of Chinese white is, however, an exception rather than the rule, and when the use of an indelible ink is not important, Stephens' Ebony Stain is admirable. It works easily, and although it dries with a slight gloss, which is usually a disadvantage, it reproduces well. It can be immediately thinned when becoming too thick by the addition of a little water, care being taken not to dilute it sufficiently to make it grey. It is sold in bottles at sixpence and a shilling, and is manufactured by the well-known makers of writing ink, but may be procured from the artists' colourmen. Messrs. Reeves and Sons have introduced a fluid black, called Artists' Black; this is made both "indelible" and "not indelible." This has become very popular of late, and is largely used; the not indelible, with water, making fine greys for wash drawing. Higgins' American "Waterproof" India Ink is also extensively used, and has received high commendation. Fixed Indian Ink is sold in fluid form, and Lampblack and Ivoryblack in tubes and cakes. Ordinary writing ink is quite unsuitable; it "runs" when fine lines cross, and is either too blue or too brown in colour. Common Indian Ink is also too brown to reproduce well, so that the beginner will do wisely to use one of the above-named blacks, which are prepared for the purpose, and so diminish his chances of failure. All are sold in bottles at sixpence or one shilling. Not taking account of eccentricities of accomplished artists, who may use some special medium to their fancy, and whose very mastership guarantees their success in whatever medium they may work, a dull intense black line on a pure white surface is the ideal to be attained. It may be mentioned that if for any exceptional purpose the reproduction is to be printed in coloured ink, the original had better be drawn in a like colour, always excepting blue or anything approaching thereto. But brown, green, red, and orange are permissible, and will photograph correctly. A black drawing, reproduced in brown or other colour, is apt to give a very different impression, and still more so if a colour be reproduced in black. Chinese white has been referred to, and should certainly always be at hand. If applied fairly thickly with a fine brush it will efface any faulty ink marks, and may also be used to introduce lights into shading which has been worked up too solid. It is also useful for putting in small lights, as in windows, or longitudinal white streaks on water which has been shaded in dark. It should be of good quality, and kept well stoppered in a strong glass or stone bottle. With regard to the pen to be used there is more latitude for individual taste, as what one man can do with a given pen another cannot. The manufacturers who have given most attention to the requirements of draughtsmen are J. Gillott and Sons, the well-known makers of pens of all kinds. Many kinds of Brandauer's and Blanzy Poure and Co.'s pens are also very good. It should not be supposed that a very fine-pointed pen is essential, for on the contrary a small tool often seems to lead to the making of small, niggling work. Mr. C.G. Harper finds a well-cut quill pen delightful for making pen studies, and says "it flies over all descriptions of paper, rough or smooth, without the least catching of fibres or spluttering. It is the freest and least trammelling of pens, and seems almost to draw of its own volition." A glass drawing-pen, such as is used by mechanical designers, &c., has its uses, but it is only capable of making a uniformly thick line. An assortment of one dozen of Gillott's pens can be obtained for one shilling, and from these our selection can be made. Brandauer's No. 515 and No. 342 E.F. are well spoken of, and have the advantage of not becoming scratchy with use. A flexible pen, capable of making fine as well as thick strokes, working evenly, and not soon worn out, is what should be sought, and having found two or three kinds to suit, stick to them, and make yourself thoroughly master of their capabilities. Should any difficulty exist in obtaining a special pen, an ordinary "F" writing nib will not lead you far wrong, while for bold vigorous drawing I should prefer a gold "J"; it is clear from this that mere fineness of point is not an essential matter. The possibilities of a particular pen are not learnt all at once, it should be persevered with and understood. It has been recommended that two or three pens of different character should respectively be used on different portions of the same drawing. There may be advantages in this, especially if a drawing contain a very wide variation in quality of its lines. It may sometimes be that very bold thick work in foreground is associated with fine delicate work in distance and sky. Some artists prefer to use a fine brush instead of a pen. A small sable brush, having the outside hairs cut away, or a long hair brush known as "tracer" or "rigger," is capable of making fine lines hardly to be distinguished from pen strokes. At first they are slow to work with, but considerable rapidity may be acquired with practice. The lines are rounder and not so harsh as those made with the pen, and it is said that an artist who has once accustomed himself to use a brush never goes back to pens. [Illustration: A FIELD PATH. _Bitumen process._ (_Original 7-1/2 x 6-1/2_). [_See p. 86._] ] The foregoing materials and pens are for the production of simple black line drawings on a white ground, and it is in this direction that I should advise the student to persevere and cultivate himself. All the beauty and expressiveness of lines is only realised after long practice; and, of the many ways of illustrating by line process, it is the best means of self-education, compared with which all others are flippant and inconsequent. [Illustration: A FIELD PATH. _Swelled gelatine._ (_Original 7-1/2 x 6-1/2._) [_See p. 86._]] Still, with some truth it has been said that it is only by experiment that we learn to achieve distinction, and so after a while we may indulge in experiments in other directions, and try our hand at the various tricks which the ingenious have placed within our reach. These will be described in Chapter XI. [Illustration] CHAPTER X. _COMPARISON OF PROCESSES._ The method of drawing in line referred to in the two preceding chapters may be regarded as traditional and of the normal character, and we shall next take under consideration various other methods of drawing equally suitable for reproduction by line process. In the meantime, we will see how the processes for producing blocks in relief may be applied and see by a few examples how the results compare. With the artist, the Swelled Gelatine process will probably rank as first favourite, and this because it is less exacting in its requirements. Although only rendering the drawing in black and white, it is certainly more sympathetic, and does to some extent recognise the weaker impression of a grey line. By this process many ordinary black and white drawings, made without any regard for the demands of the process man, reproduce well, but would be impossible by the cheaper zinc etching; moreover, it is admirably suited to reproduce drawings in which a mixture of pen and pencil has been employed, an example of which will be given later. [Illustration: MOONLIGHT. _Example of medium tint._ (_Original 4 x 7._)] The artist or draughtsman is not, however, usually master of the situation; the printer and publisher will use the cheaper methods, to suit which we must adopt, to a certain degree, a conventional manner. If a drawing be seriously studied, it is often surprising how much of the feeling of the draughtsman is conveyed to us through the strokes of his pen or pencil, and it is just this feeling which the Gelatine process preserves in great measure, but which the commoner methods sift out and give us a mere mechanical translation. Still, by suiting ourselves to these more ordinary processes, much may be done to compensate for the lack of sympathy which they display. I have given (pp. 82, 83) two reproductions from the identical drawing, in order that comparison may be made. The Bitumen process is characterised by the crude, sincere, line given, ignoring many finer lines, and bringing others up black and hard. The Albumen process is the one by which probably the greatest number of blocks are made in this country, and, when carried to a high degree of perfection, yields some very pleasing results which, though inferior to swelled Gelatine, are better than the Bitumen. Ordinarily, however, there is not very much to choose between these two, and a very great number of examples would have to be examined in order to properly exhibit the differences. The comparison of results by these three processes is a subject which has given rise to some controversy. The artist, who has also usually been the author in this matter, has pronounced favourably for the swelled gelatine; but in this the process expert is in disagreement. After comparing carefully a variety of results, I am inclined to think that perhaps too much importance is attached to the supposed advantages of the swelled gelatine, and two powerful contributories to success are not sufficiently considered. Swelled gelatine is not used for ordinary newspaper work, and is charged at a much higher rate; and for this reason, probably, greater care is taken in the block-making, and, being used in higher class publications, it is more carefully printed from than is possible in the vast majority of cases when the cheaper blocks are used. The use of zinc blocks in cheap, rapidly printed publications probably prohibits the process having full justice done to it, and we are apt to judge its possibilities by the examples we too often see. Cheapness, short time, and rapid printing are factors calculated to spoil the reputation of any process. If bitumen and albumen could receive the same amount of care and attention as is customarily bestowed upon the more expensive swelled gelatine, there seems little reason why results should not be equal. [Illustration: PEN DRAWING. _Three different shading media._ (_Original 8 x 5-3/4._)] [Illustration: UNTOUCHED LINE BLOCK. (_Original 7 x 6._)] In considering the application of such various methods, we are brought to that somewhat singular contest which seems to exist in every sphere of work wherein art is concerned, it is the disagreement and misunderstanding which exists between artist and craftsman. The enterprising endeavour of the process-block maker is to perfect his process to produce a clean, bright, faultless piece of technical work; a process which shall produce from all kinds of originals an equally brilliant print, so that, when he is called to reproduce a special effect which the artist may desire, he seems incapable of understanding as desirable anything which falls short of his own arbitrary standard. It is as though the artist's colourman said to the painter, you must varnish all your picture so as to show the full richness and gloss of the colours, no matter whether the painter reckoned on some degree of dulness to give a certain effect. [Illustration: LINE BLOCK LIGHTENED BY ROULETTE. (_Original 7 x 6._)] So the material maker will aim at supplying canvas or board of as fine and smooth a surface as possible, and it is at first difficult to persuade him that the artist is right in desiring a coarse, rough surface. The process man and material maker are ever on the side of polish, brilliancy, and fineness. Execution and craft invariably seem to be at war with feeling and art, and I would strongly caution my reader against being too much concerned about the relative virtues of various processes, or too much prejudiced by what others may have to say. Whatever your artist friend may advise is pretty certain to be discounted by your block-maker; and in course of time, and after experience, you will probably form your own individual opinion, which will be at variance with both. It is at this stage that more particular mention may be made of the use of the _roulette_ to correct by hand, on the zinc block, the misinterpretations of the process. The roulette consists of a sharp-edged toothed wheel of minute proportions, which is passed backwards and forwards across lines which have come up too black, thus breaking such lines into tiny dots, which therefore print greyer. It is well to know that such a revision of the block, as first turned out, is possible, and we shall sometimes be glad to make use of it. Still, as before pointed out, such hand-work must not be relied upon. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XI. _OTHER METHODS ADAPTED FOR LINE REPRODUCTION._ When a large space is required to be covered with an even tint, an immense saving of labour and time may be effected by the use of "Shading media"; but beyond a mere saving of labour they may, if discreetly used, be made to produce some very desirable effects. [Illustration] If applied to the entire surface, the result is very like a half-tone process block in appearance. This is seen in the illustration on page 85, in which the shading medium has been applied everywhere except in the few white spots. Such an application is particularly useful for evening or twilight subjects, but it is more usual to employ them locally, especially for skies. They are also largely used by some artists for figures, in the manner shown in illustration on page 65, in which the shading is so effectively used on the waistcoat and hat of the man. The pattern of the tint varies greatly, there being more than a dozen distinct designs, a few examples of which are given on page 91. [Illustration: SHADING MEDIUM ON PEN SKETCH VIGNETTE. (_Original 5 x 4._)] These shading media are introduced on to the zinc block after printing from the negative (see Chap. VII.), for which purpose transparent sheets of gelatine, on which the required pattern has been engraved and previously inked, are used. By pressing these on to the albumen or other surface of the block, an ink impression is transferred, which accordingly protects the surface during etching in the same manner as the rest of the picture. The "shading" need not be restricted to the blank spaces only, but may be pressed on to any part or the whole of the block; and there is no reason why two or more different patterns should not be used in combination on the same subject. The gelatine sheets being transparent, the process worker can see exactly where to apply them, and can do so with considerably intricacy. In sending to the etchers a drawing in which a shading medium is to be introduced, the practice is to mark such portions as are to be shaded by scribbling over with blue pencil; this is at once understood better than written instructions. It had better be stated whether a dark or light tint be required; also whether it is to be vignetted or shaded all over. Vignetting is the most usual, as seen in the accompanying block, page 92. It is usual for the process people to make a slight additional charge for the introduction of tints; especially if at all complicated. And, of course, if special experiments in the combination of various tints be intended, requiring special care, fair consideration must be made for the additional trouble and labour. Like most mechanical aids to drawing, shading media must be adopted with discretion, and they can at best be considered as a poor substitute for pure hand-work; they economise time and are useful in an emergency, but I should certainly caution the beginner against the too frequent use of them. An ingenious method of imparting a certain greyness to some portions of a drawing is illustrated by the accompanying sketch "Near Berry Head." This is known as "Splatter work," and consists of sprinkling minute dots of the black drawing fluid wherever required. The drawing is first executed in the usual way, and all portions which are not to be "splattered" upon are covered over with pieces of paper cut to the necessary shape and size. A stiff bristle brush is then inked; nothing serving for the purpose better than an ordinary tooth-brush. Holding the brush in the left hand, with the bristles downwards, the bristles are to be briskly stroked with any handy stick of wood; in this manner a spray of tiny dots of ink is splashed on to the paper beneath. [Illustration: NEAR BERRY HEAD. _Pen drawing--foreground dotted by "splatter" work._ (_Original 6-1/4 x 5._)] Perhaps a finer and more regular spray may be obtained by taking the brush in the right hand and brushing it over the fine teeth of a comb, by which means the splashes can be with more certainty directed to a particular spot. Superfluous ink should be struck off the brush before sprinkling the drawing, and some portions of the protecting paper masks can be removed before others if some of the "splattering" be required to extend further. It will be best to use an indelible or fixed ink for this work, as, even after practice, some ugly splashes are apt to occur, which will have to be afterwards corrected with Chinese white. Splatter work is more largely practised in America, and is just one of those tricks which in dexterous hands is sometimes so peculiarly happy in its results, and yet so apparently unresponsive in others. We now come to consider an important group of drawing methods, known as "Scratch boards." In speaking of white cardboards, reference was made to clay surface boards, and the possibility of removing any fault by scraping with a knife. We have now to do with a selection of boards in which the clay surface and the scraping-out possibilities are carried to the utmost practical extent, and made use of as a chief method of representation, not as a means to correct mistakes. These boards are of two principal kinds: 1st. White, on which are impressed white indented lines, giving the whole a ribbed appearance; and, 2nd, Black reticulations, or lines printed at right angles to the impressed grain or ribs. Canvas-like reticulations, irregular grain or "Aquatint" dots, and diagonal or vertical lines, are the most useful patterns (of which there are many); they may be obtained at F.W. Devoe & C.T. Raynolds Co. and most of the dealers in materials, and are known as scratch-out, scrape-out or stipple boards. Both boards are of a somewhat similar description, differing only in the method of producing the pattern. In the white boards the marks are _impressed_; whereas in the black ones they are _printed_. Taking the black patterns first, the grain printed thereon supplies us with a flat grey tint composed of numerous fine black lines; this for convenience we will call the _full_ tint. Now if we gently scrape the clay surface with the sharp point of a knife, moving it _across_ the black lines, they will be removed from the top of the impressed ridges which cross at right angles, thus at once converting the _black lines_ into rows of _black dots_, and giving a lighter tint which we will call a half-tint. Closely examine the accompanying series of specimens, and this will be at once recognised. [Illustration: No. I. No. II. DOTS. HORIZONTAL LINES.] [Illustration: No. III. No. IV. DIAGONAL LINES. AQUATINT.] [Illustration: THE SCRAPER.] EXAMPLES OF BLACK GRAIN "SCRAPE BOARDS." (_Original size._) In No. 1 we have a board with parallel ruling, as supplied by the makers; in No. 2, a few strokes of the knife have converted some of the lines into dots; in No. 3, the knife has been used more vigorously, scraping away lines altogether and thus producing plain whites. This, then, gives us full tint, half-tint, and white. Now if we work with pencil or pen on the full tint, building up the drawing precisely as if drawing on plain white card, and then scrape out, as just illustrated, it will be seen what a wide range of "tones" will be suggested. [Illustration: No. I. No. II. No. III.] The drawing is to be put in first either with crayon, pencil, or ink, and the scraping done afterwards; by this means any mistakes can readily be scratched out; no small consolation to the unpractised. But, on the other hand, a faulty scratch or scrape cannot be rectified, hence the greater need for care. The manner of handling the knife (an ordinary penknife, or a specially constructed blade, may be used) differs a good deal in individual workers, but the safer manner is perhaps to keep the knife well up and nearly vertical. Avoid outlines, allowing the different degrees of tint to separate one object from another, as one would do in a wash drawing, and proceed somewhat in the manner illustrated by the accompanying figures. [Illustration: A MISTY MOONRISE. (_Original 4 x 2-1/2._)] [Illustration: (_Original 4 x 2-1/2._)] One of the difficulties to be guarded against is the too great evidence of scraping, the knife marks often revealing themselves much more plainly in the reproduction than in the original, also the too sudden contrast between the full tint and the scratched half-tint. Notice in the two accompanying sketches on diagonal grain boards, by Mr. C.J. Vine, how the full tint, when it meets the half-tint, is broken up by slight irregular scratches; especially is this seen in the sky of "A Misty Moonrise." In this sketch, sky, sea, and the sails of the two more distant boats, are almost entirely made up by the diagonal tint and the scraped half-tint. Only in the hulls of the boats and the sails of the nearest boat is pen-work introduced, the lines being drawn diagonally from right to left, at right angles to the grain of the full tint.[6] [Illustration: PEN AND INK ON BLACK LINE SCRAPE BOARD. FIRST STAGE. (_Original 5-3/4 x 3._)] [Illustration: PEN AND INK ON BLACK LINE SCRAPE BOARD WITH WHITE SCRAPED OUT. (_Original 5-1/2 x 3-1/4._)] A more rapid way of obtaining an effect can hardly be imagined than by these "scraped" boards, and in good hands, or with practice, the effects obtainable are often very charming. The drawings should, as a rule, be not greatly larger than the reproduction intended--a reduction of one-third or one-half being about the best. All the different kinds of black grain boards are treated in the same manner as above described. [Illustration: PENCIL ON VERTICAL GRAIN WHITE SCRAPE BOARD. _By C.J. Vine._ (_Original 4 x 3._)] Now the use of white grained boards is less a scraping method than pure line drawing, much of the "line" being almost mechanically produced by drawing upon the "ribbed" surface with pencil. We know if we place a piece of paper upon a rough, cloth-covered book and rub a blacklead pencil over it we get a mottled effect, the blacks and whites of which are reproductions of the projections and depressions on the book cover; so if we draw on a ribbed surface clay-board with pen and ink, the ink follows elevation and depression in one continuous pen stroke. If, however, we draw with a black pencil, without undue pressure, the pencil passes from one elevation to another, or from one "rib" to another, and thus forms a broken or dotted line, which, although in actual colour as black as an ink line, yet being broken and not solid, will reproduce lighter or greyer. A number of adjacent pencil lines would therefore produce a flat tint of dots, very similar to the tint of a "half-tone" block or a "shading medium," in addition to which, and upon which, ink lines may be made to produce deeper blacks. On the accompanying illustration are pencil marks and ink strokes drawn on a piece of grained white board, the grain or "ribs" being vertical. To the left, a single detached pencil stroke forming dotted lines; next are adjacent pencil lines constituting a grained tint, something very like the full tone of the black-grained blocks before considered, and coarser or finer in proportion as the pencil is pressed more or less heavily; next we have some pen and ink lines, the difference of which will at once be seen; and finally, a mixture of pencil and pen, on which the knife has subsequently been used to scratch some small lights. This exhausts the practical possibilities of white grained scrape boards. [Illustration] The accompanying sketches will show somewhat the kind of things obtainable. [Illustration: PENCIL AND PEN ON VERTICAL LINE WHITE SCRAPE BOARD. _By C.J. Vine._ (_Original 4 x 3._)] Reduction causes a very marked improvement, and the drawings should be looked at from time to time whilst in progress with a "diminishing" glass. An indelible ink should be used, or one that does not penetrate but rests on the surface: such as ivory-black, lamp-black, or Indian ink. Instead of pencil, a stick of lithographic chalk will be of advantage. In the first place, the greyness of pencil is deceptive, and reproduces blacker than we expect, moreover pencil rubs and smears; not so lithographic chalk, which does not rub, and is black. The scratching or scraping must be the final stage of a drawing, as only solid pen marks can be put on the white board after the grained clay surface has been removed. DRAWINGS IN PENCIL OR CHALK ON ROUGH PAPERS. By the foregoing description of pencil or chalk drawing on ribbed surfaces, we see how a pencil drawing may be translated by an ordinary line zinco block, instead of the more expensive half-tone process described in the earlier chapters. The pencil or crayon point, in passing over a rough or broken surface, forms a series of dots instead of a continuous line. The same thing occurs when pencil is used on a rough surface drawing paper. Such pencillings, being examined, are found to be lead marks, interspersed with minute interstices of white paper, the whole giving a sort of grey tint of greater or less intensity. For broad sketchy effects such a drawing method is exceedingly valuable; some very delightful things may be done without the least appearance of the mechanical. [Illustration: SEWARDSTONE MARSHES. _Drawing on Conté crayon on rough paper._ (_Original 6 x 4._)] As may be readily understood from the accompanying examples, such drawings are best adapted for purely artistic impressions, and not for the portrayal of detail. Practically any paper may be used which is white, and whose surface is sufficiently rough; some particular kinds, about to be mentioned, have proved especially successful under experiment. Any material may be used to draw with, preference being given to a black substance which will not smear or rub on being touched. A good "B" blacklead pencil has the advantage of being pleasant to handle, and capable of being used with a sufficiently fine point to render some details; it has, however, the decided disadvantage of "rubbing" with a very little touching, and the strokes, although fairly intense, are not so black as crayon; hence, in reproduction, many portions which were expected to come out soft and delicate, reproduce much too black. We have, then, for our selection, Hardmuth's or Conté's crayons, made in several degrees, and also made into cedar-wood pencils--a cleaner and more handy form. Neither of these is, unfortunately, free from the disadvantage of blurring when rubbed, and will hence require to be fixed before being sent away; the photo-engraver, in the press of his business, rarely failing to subject drawings to a severe test. Fixing may be best effected by treating the drawing with a solution of one part pure gum mastic dissolved in seven parts methylated spirit. In Lemercier's lithographic crayons we have a drawing medium which gives as satisfactory results as the Conté or Hardmuth, and does not blur; it therefore saves the trouble of fixing. Being greasy, they should be used in a porte-crayon. They are made in three degrees as to hardness, the No. 1 being the hardest and best suited for drawing the limited amount of detail which is possible with crayons. So long as the drawing is not too heavily worked upon, a surprising improvement is secured by reducing. A reduction of one-half is not too much. As to the papers to be used, the following may be mentioned as only some which I have tested, and which others have spoken well of, but there must be a great many other rough surface materials well worth a trial. Of the well-known Whatman papers, both the "Hot-pressed" and "Not," the latter being, perhaps, preferable. A French paper, Allongé, has a very pleasing surface grain, and may be used on the right or wrong side with different results; the right side being the rougher, and perhaps the better. [Illustration: CRAYON DRAWING ON ALLONGÉ PAPER. _Small whites in Chinese white._ (_Original 9 x 6._)] Next, we have Lalanne and Michallet or Ingres papers, and some examples of crayon drawing on these are here given. [Illustration: CRAYON ON PYRAMID PAPER NO. 2. _Small whites in Chinese white._ (_Original 7 x 6._)] The most noticeable feature in these will be the lines, or grain, formed by the texture of the paper; this grain is apparently more perceptible when vertical, but if the paper is turned round so that the lines come into a horizontal position, they are much less discernible in the finished sketch. In many respects the effect of these papers is a good deal similar to that gained by using the white lined clay-boards; the grain being, however, less mechanical. In like manner the crayon sketch may be effectively helped by the addition of pen and ink, or fine brush work. Scraping out, however, is not within its capabilities; though Chinese white, if applied fairly solidly, may successfully stop-out small lights or efface errors. [Illustration: CRAYON ON PYRAMID NO. 1. (_Original 9 x 6._)] Other papers which may be attempted are Arnold's drawing papers, rough surface cartridge, various crayon papers, &c. Such houses as Penrose & Co., Amwell Street, E.C., London, or F.W. Devoe & C.T. Raynolds Co., of New York, would probably supply patterns and information in this respect. A paper known as Pyramid Grained paper has a granulated surface, breaking the crayon marks into a succession of dots rather than broken lines, and often yields very pleasing results; it is made in two varying degrees, No. 1 having a grain of 15,000 "pyramids" to the square inch, and No. 2, 9,000. For a further variation in effect, a drawing may be executed in crayon or pencil on a fairly smooth paper previously pressed into close contact with any rough surface, such as sandpaper or canvas. The unsized side of a canvas for oil painting, or the cover of a book, will answer the purpose; openness of work, and the amount of ultimate reduction desirable, being depended upon and controlled accordingly. The following sketches, by Mr. C.J. Vine, on Michallet and Lallane papers (pp. 111, 113, 115, 117), are pure untouched crayon work, reproduced by zinc line etching, so that these drawings may be safely entrusted to this cheapest and least sympathetic process; though there can be little doubt that the swelled gelatine would render fuller justice to work of this class. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. _MECHANICAL AIDS TO DRAUGHTSMANSHIP--DRAWING AND SKETCHING FROM NATURE._ The various methods whereby illustrations may be made for reproduction have now been reviewed, if not exhaustively, at least with sufficient completeness to enable the reader to start making those actual experiments in practice without which the most exact description is useless. But thus far, with the exception of such cases in which it is possible to use a photogram and reproduce it by "half-tone" process, some ability to draw, some certain amount of native artistry on the part of the student, has been taken for granted. Now, while in wash drawings, crayon, or pencil sketches, "scrape" boards, and the like, there must be some amount of instinctive artistic ability, not only to guide the hand in execution but to govern taste, idea, and selection; yet in simple line drawing with the pen, without any art knowledge or technical ability, it may be possible to produce a perfectly reproducible drawing, fulfilling in every way the essential duty of an illustration. And if this be so, there is no reason why very many more writers should not illustrate what they have to say, making matters more intelligible and producing a more lasting impression. For the purpose we shall require a photogram to commence with, and here is a use and an application of photography not always fully realised or appreciated. A man may be possessed of considerable taste and judgment in the selecting of a view, or particular aspect of a building, and yet be utterly lacking in ability to put down on paper correctly what he sees; that is, he is not a good draughtsman. No particular taste in selecting a position may be needed, or possessed, and yet it may be desirable to portray an object, or scene, and it is to such men that the camera becomes so important as an indirect means to illustration. Indirect because, as already pointed out, the reproduction of a photogram by half-tone process (the only way of reproducing a photogram for type machine printing) is attended with difficulties, and cannot always be resorted to. The half-tone block is not suitable for the most rapid printing in newspapers, &c.; its results are not all that could be wished; it is more expensive and takes longer to make, apart from such other drawbacks pointed out in an earlier chapter. Therefore it is desirable to see how we can utilise a photogram so as to produce the simpler, and often more acceptable, line block from it, and do this by a more mechanical method than re-drawing, or copying from it. Probably the first easy method that will suggest itself will be to make a tracing from it on tracing paper, and then with carbon paper transfer it to the desired card, &c. There is no objection to such a course, except that it is not always attended with equal satisfaction. To begin with, a photogram is often so dark in parts as to prevent our seeing many details through the tracing paper; also, however careful, if we are tracing a face, the slight deviation in tracing over the outlines and features, which is almost unavoidable, and further variations when afterwards transferring, will often seriously interfere with the likeness--presuming a likeness to be required. [Illustration: STUDY OF TREES. _Crayon drawing on Lalanne paper; vertical grain._ (_Original 8 x 4-1/2._)] An avoidance of error and saving of time may be effected by making a fairly pale print and, having "fixed" it, cover the back with the scribble of a blue pencil or chalk. We can now place this down upon the card board or paper to be drawn upon, and carefully go over everything that is to be drawn with a sharp hard point, which will leave a blue outline sketch which can then be inked in, and the blue need not be rubbed out afterwards as it will not appear in reproduction. In the same way the original photogram can be used with a piece of _blue_ carbon paper instead of chalking the back of the print. No attempt should be made to draw in all the details of a photogram, but only such salient points as may be required for illustration. Another method is as follows:--Make the photogram in the ordinary way, but on "plain salted paper," or "Matt silver sensitised paper," which has been previously prepared by immersion for a short while in a solution of ammonium chlorate, 100 grains; gelatine, 10 grains; water, 10 ounces. The photogram is to be fixed and washed, toning being unnecessary; when dry it can be drawn upon with a "_fixed_" or _indelible_ black ink, carefully putting in just what parts are needed and disregarding the rest of the picture. As soon as the ink is dry, the print is immersed in a bath of mercury bichlorate and alcohol, when the photogram will gradually disappear, leaving the black ink lines on plain white paper. Nothing more is required beyond mounting on card to fit it for reproduction. Of course corrections can be made and stains, &c., be removed with Chinese white. Should it be desired to restore the bleached photogram, it can be done by immersing in a weak solution of soda hyposulphite. The foregoing method is one given by Mr. C.G. Harper in his book "Drawing for Reproduction"; it appears, however, needlessly elaborate, and I presume mercury _bichloride_ is intended and not bichlorate. Even with care the photographic image is sometimes slow to get rid of, and will often refuse altogether to leave the clear white blank we require. [Illustration: ADVANCING TWILIGHT. _Crayon drawing on Lalanne paper; horizontal grain._ (_Original 10-1/2 x 6._)] A photographic print, however, on either albumenised or "Matt" paper will certainly disappear utterly if subjected to the following bath, for which formula I am indebted to Mr. E.J. Wall:-- Iodine 1 grain Iodide of Potassium 10 grains Cyanide of Potassium 20 " Water 102 " This is a similar solution as is used to remove ink-stains from linen, &c. The print may also be bleached by sponging over with the following preparation, recommended by W. Ethelbert Henry:-- Saturated Solution Iodine in Alcohol 1 part " " Cyanide of Potassium in Water 2 parts Water 2 " After which the print is to be washed well for a few minutes. Of course the reason for using a "fixed" ink in such processes is obvious. Yet another method on similar lines, but even simpler in operation. A certain photographic printing paper called "Ferro-prussiate" paper gives, on exposure to light, a _blue_ image, and only requires washing in water to "fix" or make it permanent. This blue print can now be used for drawing upon, as in the previous instance, only that the photographic image, being blue, does not need to be bleached, and will not interfere with the reproduction of the black lines drawn upon it. If for any reason it be desired to get rid of the blue print, this can be bleached by immersion in water containing a little common washing soda. [Illustration: BEACHY HEAD. _Crayon drawing on Michallet paper, right side._ (_Original 8-1/2 x 5-1/2._)] Thus from a photogram of even the most elaborate subject an absolutely correct drawing may be made fit for reproduction without the illustrator having any knowledge or skill as a draughtsman. By placing the unskilled in such a position, photography appears to have removed the last obstacle to the more frequent use of appropriate illustration; and the ease with which both pleasing and _accurate_ outlines can be made should render inexcusable the shamefully untruthful "sketches" which every day appear in newspaper and magazine. The method of drawing on thin transfer paper with transfer ink, and then placing the drawing direct on to a zinc block, hardly needs to be referred to here. Such a simple means of placing the image on the zinc and then etching is necessarily of limited application, neither reduction nor enlargement is possible, and photography is not employed; it is merely a mechanical etching of the zinc in all parts not protected by the ink image, as transferred from the drawing in transfer ink, and is used for very rapid and imperfect portraits, &c., in the commoner class of newspaper work. And now, whatever be the special characteristics and advantages of the camera, it is by no means my intention to advocate its use where even only a moderate amount of native artistic ability exists; and, in all probability, the possessor of such ability will more frequently prefer to use his sketch-book than his camera--and this is as it should be. There is always something of freshness about a first original sketch, be it in whatsoever medium, a quality which the most careful copy fails to repeat. This brings us to consider whether it would not be well to make our first impressions or sketches in such a manner that they could be handed to the process worker right away; and we shall then have to consider what medium and what materials are suitable for "drawing from life." Certainly the ordinary pencil sketch, as taken from the pocket sketch-book, would not do. In the first place such sketches would rarely be vigorous enough, and whatever vigour they possessed would be sadly diminished by rubbing and the pressure of the opposite page. [Illustration: A SUSSEX LANE. _Crayon drawing on Michallet paper, wrong side of paper used._ (_Original 9 x 4-1/2._)] Very few have successfully drawn from life in pen and ink. Some few well-known caricaturists and figure draughtsmen do so, and attain success purely through their splendid dash and spirit, but such things are forbidden the average man with whom the pen drawing is a matter of delicate care. But there seems no reason why the lithographic crayon on rough paper should not be thus utilised, and slight "touchings-up" added afterwards. In this way we might often have ready for immediate reproduction a sketch containing some of that spontaneous feeling which is so noticeable when glancing through the pages of an artist's sketch-book. I have noticed in some a very false idea existing with regard to draughting in a picture with pencil before using the pen and ink. Now I do not hesitate to say that the careful sketching in of the subject in pencil is essential to all except the genius, and I am not writing for the genius, who knows more than I can tell him and can dispense with what he does not know. There is nothing to be ashamed of in drawing first in pencil; one might perhaps be able to draw in quite as correctly with the pen, but the advantage of a pencil outline as a guide is that it gives more time and leisure thought for carefully considering the pen work before putting it in. By this course there is less danger of confused hesitating lines. From the first let the ink lines be clear, distinct, and black; no "messing about," to quote Mr. Blackburn's expressive phrase; be decided as to the sort of shading you are going to put in a certain place and put it there, once for all, and don't touch it again. Avoid, by constant self-restraint, over-elaboration or too much laboured detail; let each part of the drawing be _finished_ from the first, and do not return to it and work on it over and over again. And the first step to ensuring this precision will be by carefully pencilling everything, _indicating_ only where shading is to come. When the pen and ink drawing is completed, carefully erase the pencil marks with _bread crumbs_; do not use indiarubber, which will be sure to abrade the surface, and probably break the continuity of the ink lines. As we become more conversant with the possibilities of the zinco process, an intimacy which can only be brought by an experience built up of experiments and failures, we shall find it possible to sometimes leave in certain of the pencilling (allowing, of course, for their coming up as black as ink), but for the beginner such a practice is not recommended, as it is nearly sure to end in disappointment. There are many interesting modifications of recognised means which are possible to the experienced--especially the production of what may be termed "mixed drawings," either for reproduction in half-tone or line, drawings in which in order to produce less ordinary effects, wash, pen, and pencil are employed combinedly; but, by the time my gentle reader has reached a stage when he may advisedly attempt such excursions from the orthodox path, he will have passed beyond the sphere of this book and will be entitled to that liberty which art permits to its practitioners. In the meantime let me ask the student to repress for a time his more lofty aspirations, and content himself with patiently learning to produce--not a charming sketch, a delightful drawing, but--a drawing in which there is as much of artistic or pictorial merit as is compatible with the requirements of the process of reproduction. If you are drawing professedly for reproduction, no blame can attach to you if you "bear in mind during the production of your drawing the necessity of its making a good block, with as little sacrifice of artistic quality as may be." An exalted position as an art is not necessarily claimed for drawing or painting for reproduction; but how much of that difficult-to-be-defined quality which we call "artistic" exists in it, depends not so much upon the method, the means, or the application, as it does on those who work at it and their motive. Apart from this, viewed from the lowest aspect, its utility is beyond question, and at the present time it is an application of fine art showing the most vitality of any. The books devoted to the subject which have already been written, have perhaps given too much attention to the actual processes of reproduction--they have not appealed to the illustrator; or else, while professing to be books of instruction in practice, have dealt rather with the theory of illustration and the comparison of styles. It seemed to me there was need for a simple description of methods for the enlightening of a beginner: an elementary guide; a first step; in short, a Handbook of illustration. [Illustration] Higgins' American Drawing Inks [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] (Blacks and Colors) The Standard LIQUID DRAWING INKS of the World They are used and endorsed by the leading Illustrators, Schools, Colleges and Institutes. Three-fourths of the professional draughtsmen of this country use no other drawing ink. The manufacturers have never solicited a single testimonial, yet the merits of the inks have called forth endorsement from the most famous and experienced users of drawing inks in various professions, real masters of their arts. The following are a few commendations: JO. PENNELL, the celebrated pen artist of London, Eng.--"There is no ink equal to it for half a dozen reasons. From the time you open the bottle until you have put all its contents on paper, you have no reason to find fault with it." A.B. FROST, the famous American illustrator, Convent, N.J., U.S.A.--"I use a great deal of it, and it is certainly the best." E.W. SENIOR, C.E., Sydney, Australia.--"I cannot refrain from letting you know how I appreciate your 'American Drawing Ink.' It is an article long been looked for by us professional men. In my opinion, it is far superior to [_Blank's_] Liquid Indian Ink. I have been using it for 2-1/2 years now, and have during that time and up to the present ceased to have any other brand in the office--so pleased am I with it." T.B. NORGATE, Patent Attorney, Victoria, B.C.--"I have used your inks for some years and find them first-class." JACOB HAUCK, Draughtsman, County Surveyor's Office, Omaha, Neb.--"I have used hundreds of your 'General Inks,' and became a great admirer of your unequalled ink." The Inks are as follows: BLACKS--Two kinds. Waterproof (insoluble when dry) and General (soluble). COLORS--Carmine, Scarlet, Vermilion, Brick Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Orange, Brown, Indigo, Violet. Prices--Small bottles, 25 cents each; half pints, $2 each; pints, $3.75 each, and quarts, $7 each. Users are cautioned to refuse untried and experimental inks, which may be claimed as being equal to the =Higgins Inks=. =Higgins' American Drawing Inks= were first introduced in 1880, and have hence _stood the test of time_ unfailingly. Every bottle is strictly guaranteed from first to last by the manufacturers. Color cards showing actual inks sent free. * * * * * =FOR SALE BY DEALERS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD= * * * * * =CHAS. M. HIGGINS & CO.=, Originators and Manufacturers Inks and Adhesives, =168 to 172 Eighth Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.A.= =London Office, 106 Charing Cross Road.= THE FOLDING MONTAUK IS THE "IDEAL" ARTISTS' CAMERA [Illustration] It is fitted with a perfect lens for in or outdoor, snapshot or time exposures, and when examined and tested will show its superiority at once. When fitted with Ross Patent London-Made Lenses they are perfection itself, and will make perfect snapshots "ON A GRAY DAY" PRICES FROM $25 TO $150 Send for catalogue and full description to the maker G. GENNERT, 24 and 26 East 13th St. NEW YORK PHOTO-CERAMICS BY W. ETHELBERT HENRY AND H. SNOWDON WARD Photography applied to the decoration of China, Porcelain, Placques, Art Pottery and Ceramic and Metallic Surfaces in general. ILLUSTRATED...... Prices: Paper, 50c.; Cloth, 75c. POST PAID, FIVE CENTS EXTRA G. GENNERT, PUBLISHER 24 & 26 East 13th St. NEW YORK Photo Lithography * * * * * BY GEORGE FRITZ VICE-DIRECTOR OF THE COURT AND IMPERIAL STATE PRINTING WORKS AT VIENNA * * * * * TRANSLATED BY E.J. WALL FELLOW OF THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY * * * * * CONTAINING SIX FULL PAGE PLATES BY THE IMPERIAL STATE PRINTING WORKS AT VIENNA This book treats of the preparation of Collodions, etc., for Negative work, preparation of stones and of Zinc plates and the making of drawings for Photo-Lithographic work, and includes special detailed instructions for the various materials used, diagrams illustrating the best studios and work rooms, etc. ILLUSTRATED.... Cloth and Gold, $1.50 G. GENNERT, PUBLISHER 24 & 26 East 13th St. NEW YORK [Illustration] CHAMPION CARD AND PAPER CO. [Illustration] EAST PEPPERELL, MASS. MANUFACTURERS OF [Illustration] SURFACE-COATED PAPERS .... PLAIN AND COATED BLANKS FOR PRINTERS & LITHOGRAPHERS "THIS BOOK IS PRINTED ON OUR COATED PAPER" [Illustration] Hume's [Illustration] [Illustration] CANTILEVER ENLARGING APPARATUS In 30 Sizes, Various Patterns. [Illustration: The Standard Pattern ] 5½ in. Condensers, for 3¼ 4¼ plate, without objective, $35; with objective, $45. 8¼ in. Condensers, for 5×7 plate, without objective, $60; with objective, $80. Fine Screw Motion, for use with non-racking lenses. Price for all sizes, $5. Goods Tested Thoroughly and Packed Free G. GENNERT Sole American Agent 24 and 26 East 13th St. NEW YORK Adams [Illustration] "BRILLIANT" VIEW FINDERS [Illustration] A perfect, bright and distinct image in direct sunlight, or in a room where objects are hardly discernible on the ground glass. STYLE No. 1, FOR REGULAR CAMERAS STYLE No. 2, FOR DETECTIVE CAMERAS * * * * * =J.A. LEONARD, Civil Engineer.= NEWBURGH, N.Y., Oct. 2, 1895. The "Adams" Finder received this A.M., and I want to thank you for putting me in the way of getting such a perfect instrument. While the price seemed high, the results are so far beyond anything that I deemed possible, that I am more than satisfied. I find that in the brightest sunlight the Finder gives a beautiful, clear and brilliant image, without any necessity of shading. Very sincerely yours, (Signed) J.A. LEONARD. * * * * * Adams Brilliant Finders Style No. 1. Size No. 1, $4.50 Size No. 2, $5.50 Size No. 3, $6.50 Style No. 2. Size No. 1, 3.50 Size No. 2, 4.50 Size No. 3, 5.50 G. GENNERT, Sole Agent 24 and 26 East 13th Street, NEW YORK THE "GENNERT" "UNIVERSAL" Hard Rubber Fixing Box [Illustration: No. 1.] [Illustration: No. 2.] The "Gennert" Universal Fixing Box is a decided improvement over the well-known "Gennert" Hard Rubber Bath. The "Gennert" Universal Fixing Box is a substantial box with cover, made entirely of hard rubber, and has the following advantages over all other methods of fixing: It has ridges on all four sides, thus allowing any size plate to be fitted (see cut No. 2). The plate stands half an inch above the ridges, allowing the operator to remove it without touching the film, as the top of the box above the ridges flares out sufficiently to admit the fingers to reach the side of the plate. It fixes more plates. The cover prevents dust and light from entering the box. The hypo is always clean and fresh. All impurities sink to the bottom and the plate cannot touch them. It saves plates. No spots possible on your negatives. It saves spotting and retouching. It saves your temper. The "Gennert" Universal Fixing Box is made in two sizes: No. 1 allows of twenty 3-1/4×4-1/4, 4-1/4×5-1/2 or 4-1/4×6-1/2, or eleven 6-1/2×8-1/2 plates being fixed at one time: price, =$4.50=. No. 2 allows of twenty-two 4×5, 5×7 or 5×8, or eleven 8×10 plates being fixed at one time; price, =$5.00=. Buy a "Gennert" Universal Fixing Box, made of pure hard rubber, and save your hypo, plates and temper, by sending an order to your dealer for a UNIVERSAL. G. GENNERT, Manufacturer 24-26 East 13th Street NEW YORK CARBUTT'S Half-Tone Process Plates Specially made for Photo-Etchers on Copper, Brass or Zinc, giving negatives equal if not Superior to Wet Collodion Plates. [Illustration: JOHN CARBUTT MANUFACTURER OF Dry Plates, Films AND PHOTOGRAPHIC SPECIALTIES WAYNE JUNCTION PHILADELPHIA. ] PRICE LIST--Plain, Orthochromatic and Strippers Sizes. |Per Doz. |Per Doz. |No. of |Plain |Strippers.|Doz. |or Ortho.| |in Case. ----------------+---------+----------+--------- 3-1/4 × 4-1/4 | $0 45 | $0 70 | 36 4 × 5 | 0 65 | 0 90 | 36 4-3/4 × 6-1/2 | 1 00 | 1 25 | 24 5 × 7 | 1 10 | 1 45 | 24 5 × 8 | 1 25 | 1 65 | 24 6-1/2 × 8-1/2 | $1 65 | $2 20 | 12 8 × 10 | 2 40 | 3 20 | 12 10 × 12 | 3 80 | 5 00 | 4 11 × 14 | 5 00 | 6 65 | 3 14 × 17 | 9 00 | 12 00 | 2 =CARBUTT'S FLUID STRIPPING MEDIUM= Which has been arrived at after a series of exhaustive experiments, is destined to entirely supersede the old gelatine processes. It is supplied already prepared from the factory. It is applied _cold_, sets and dries quickly, forming a pellicle negative, _thin, tough and flexible_, and may be printed from either side. Full particulars for use accompany each package. Price: Pint bottles, 75c.; quart bottles, $1.35; per gallon, $5. =Testimonial= "We have been in the photo-engraving business over three years. Used wet-plates for two years, and your process-plates for the last year on half-tone work. Each lot seemed uniform with the others and worked well. Have not had a wet-plate bath in the place, even for line work (or half-tone either), for over a year, and have turned out just as good half-tone work as can be done, so our customers say. It is as good as we could ever get with wet plates."--H.... ENG. CO., per G.C.A. WRITE TO FACTORY FOR CIRCULARS =JOHN CARBUTT,= KEYSTONE DRY PLATE AND FILM WORKS =Wayne Junction, Philadelphia= Winsor & Newton's WATERPROOF INDIAN INK =With Patent Stopper and Quill Feeder= This new Preparation has been introduced to meet the requirements of those Artists, Architects and Designers who wish to lay washes of color over drawings in ink. Unlike many so-called "Indelible" Inks, Messrs. Winsor & Newton's Waterproof Indian ink, after it has dried, will be found absolutely unaffected by subsequent wetting. The lines of the drawing, from the thickest to the thinnest, remain undisturbed, and the purity of the most delicate color-wash is retained in an unsullied condition. Finally, it may be mentioned that Messrs. Winsor and Newton's preparation is made from genuine Indian Ink, and not, as is frequently the case, from an imitative article. Winsor and Newton's Waterproof Ink is made in 21 different colors. Sample card on application. [Illustration] WINSOR & NEWTON, Limited 88 Fulton Street Rathbone Place NEW YORK AND LONDON. PROCESS ILLUSTRATION PRACTICAL MATERIALS FOR PRACTICAL WORKERS * * * * * =ANGERER SCRAPER BOARDS= EIGHT VARIETIES. _Sample Packet, 1s. 6d._ =ANGERER LITHOGRAPHIC GRAINED PAPERS= FOUR VARIETIES. _Sample Packet, 6d._ =GILLOT SCRAPER BOARDS= EIGHT VARIETIES. _Sample Packet, 1s. 2d._ =PENROSE'S NEW STIPPLE BOARDS= _Imitating the Lithographic Hand Stipple_ TWO KINDS. _Sample Packet, 6d._ =GOODALL'S BRISTOL BOARDS= LITHOGRAPHIC TRANSFER PAPERS TRACING TRANSFER PAPERS =LEMERCIER'S INKS and CRAYONS= Gillott's Pens. Fine Sable Brushes * * * * * T Squares, Set Squares. Tracing Points, Ruling Pens, Magnifying and Diminishing Glasses * * * * * _All Materials, Tools, Chemicals, and Appliances for every Branch of Photo-mechanical Reproduction Catalogue, Sixpence, Post-free_ * * * * * PENROSE & CO. _The Photo Process Stores_ 8a, UPPER BAKER ST., Clerkenwell, LONDON F.W. DEVOE & C.T. RAYNOLDS CO F.W. DEVOE & C.T. RAYNOLDS CO MANUFACTURERS OF =Artists' Materials= [Illustration] SUPPLIES FOR =Oil and Water Color Painting= =Pastel and Miniature Painting= =Charcoal, Crayon and Lead Pencil Drawing= =Etching, Ornamenting and Designing= =Materials for Tapestry Painting= =Pyrography and China Painting= =Materials for Pen and Ink Drawing A Specialty= Liquid Inks, Crow Quill Pens, Process Papers, Roulettes, F.W. Devoe & Co.'s Superior Liquid Chinese White and Indian Ink, "Pen and Ink Carton," "Bank Note Bristol," best for Black and White Work, "Scratch Board," etc., etc. * * * * * =A Complete Line of Ross's Hand Stipple Process Papers at Wholesale and Retail= * * * * * =Fulton and William Streets, New York, and 176 Randolph Street, Chicago= GENNERT Hard Rubber [Illustration] [Illustration] Photographers' DEVELOPING and FIXING DISHES =The Standard of Excellence= * * * * * =Each Piece Marked= "GENNERT" =Manufacturer, New York= A.B. Fleming & Co. (LIMITED) Scottish Printing Ink Manufactory =Caroline Park, EDINBURGH= _Warehouse;_ 15 Whitefriars St., London, E.C. _Fine Color Department;_ 101 Leadenhall St., London, E.C. Manufacturers of Every Kind of Black and Colored Inks =HALF-TONE PRINTING INKS= =IN BLACK AND ART SHADES A SPECIALTY= (Any Shade Made to Order) =Our Half-Tone Inks will not fill up, do not contain Earth-Colors, and are permanent= =Photochromic Printing in Three Colors= THE THREE NEUTRAL COLORS (=Red, Blue and Yellow=) SPECIALLY PREPARED AND GUARANTEED ABSOLUTELY PERMANENT Shades Verified by Lovibond's Patent Tintometer =HIGH-CLASS COLLOTYPE INKS= OF ALL SHADES =THE "BRIGHTON" CAMERA= _Patented 1881-89 and Patent applied for_ [Illustration: AS A FRONT FOCUS.] The Brighton is the first desired step forward in view cameras for several years, and can justly be called perfect, as it has all the features so highly prized by Artists and View Photographers, and is also adapted for Studio use of the amateur or artist. 1st. It is a Front Focus Camera. 2d. It is a Back Focus Camera as well. 3d. It has more swing than any other Camera. 4th. It has a self-centering, rising and falling front. 5th. It has Rack and Pinion (forward) and slide (backward) movement. 6th. It has a new front board feature, and an extra large front board. 7th. It can be used with an extremely short or long focus lens and no lens is so wide in its angle that it can take in any part of the bed. 8th. While no Camera is more rigid when the back clamp is set, it can be taken entirely apart by reversing the tightening lever. 9th. It has an improvement which allows the bed to be raised without the screw catching. 10th. It can be set up and taken down quicker and easier than any Camera. Add to this absolutely perfect workmanship, materials and finish, and you have the Brighton Camera, the Twentieth Century product. [Illustration: AS A BACK FOCUS.] PRICE LIST.--Leather Bellows, Double Swing, including one "Xtralite" Plate Holder and Carrying Case, 5×7, $24.00; 5×8, $26.00; 6-1/2×8-1/2, $28.00; 8×10, $30.00; 11×14, $40.00; 14×17, $60.00. =G. GENNERT, Manufacturer= =24 & 26 East 13th Street, NEW YORK= [Illustration] ROSS LENSES ROSS ZEISS ANASTIGMATS ROSS-GOERZ DOUBLE ANASTIGMATS [Illustration] =The Best Photographic Objectives for all purposes. Several series especially adapted to Reproductions.= [Illustration] Catalogue on Application to G. GENNERT Sole American Agent =24 & 26 East 13th Street, NEW YORK= [Illustration] There are WASHING BOXES AND BOXES =That are Supposed to Wash, But Don't Do It= [Illustration] The Gennert Universal Washing Box [Illustration] WASHES CLEAN AND QUICK No. 1 Holds 22 Plates 3-1/4 × 4-1/4 or 4-1/4 × 6-1/2--11 Plates 6-1/2 × 8-1/2. Price, $2.00. No. 2 Holds 22 Plates 4 × 5, 5 × 7, or 5 × 8--11 Plates 8 × 10. Price, $2.25. G. GENNERT, Sole Mfr., =24 and 26 East 13th St. NEW YORK= "THE NEW YORK PHOTOGRAVURE CO., at 137 West 23d Street, makes perfect pictures for artistic, scientific and commercial purposes, by special, inimitable photogravure, photogelatine, and half-tone block processes. It has a gallery fitted to produce negatives of all sizes up to 24 × 30, by the best orthochromatic methods. From this department to the packing room, there is not a phase of any work, however trivial apparently, not carefully attended with the most zealous supervision." =From King's Handbook of New York City= * * * * * =Photographs in Colors= "Mr. Edwards spoke from the small stage at the end of the exhibition hall, and after an interesting résumé of the many 'processes' by which pictures and illustrations are now made with the aid of photography, the most important of which he explained in lucid and not too technical phraseology, he approached the most interesting part of his discourse, the modern method of three-color printing, which has, under the New York Photogravure Company, reached so high a state of perfection and resulted in such surprisingly attractive results." =From the Mail and Express, New York= * * * * * "SUN AND SHADE reproduces, not only the most notable paintings and portraits, but the best work of amateur and professional photographers. If it gave nothing but the latter work, it would be deserving of the most liberal patronage that it receives; but it is an admirable record of the greatest paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of living American players, of portraits of celebrated Americans, of great American painters, with reproductions of their work, and it is a monument of the New York Photogravure Co., which is a monument of artistic New York." FOOTNOTES: [1] Our frontispiece, a Collotype by S.B. Bolas and Co., is an excellent example of this process.] [2] The copper deposited by electro-deposition is little more than a thin skin of metal, which is then backed by a block of type-metal of the same thickness as the usual letterpress type.] [3] See remarks on printing in Chap. X.] [4] The term "tone," as used here and elsewhere throughout this book, is a word universally employed in art to express varying degrees of lightness and darkness irrespective of colour. The word "shade," as commonly used and accepted, comes nearest to its meaning, but that shade refers rather to varying tint of local colour, as when one says "a beautiful shade of pink." "Shade" is also used to express the reverse of "light," as "light and shade." Objects in nature, when represented in correct relationship of lightness and darkness, are said to be in correct relative tone.] [5] Refer to p. 72.] [6] Here, with all due deference, I may draw attention to the unpleasing effect of an illustration of elliptical or "cushion" shape, especially when mixed with letterpress on a book page, the general scheme of which is square or rectangular. Unless an irregular shape is for a special purpose desirable, it will be safer to keep the illustrations to a rectangular form.] +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcribers Notes: | | | | Fixed various commas and full-stops. | | P.16. 'astist' changed to 'artist'. | | P.32. 'ana' changed to 'and'. | | P.109. 'reveiwed' changed to 'reviewed'. | | Add: Camera: to 'be be raised', changed to 'be raised'. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ 
20165	----	CLXIII. Some Observations on Real Light and Shade 253 CLXIV. Reflection 257 CLXV. Angles of Reflection 259 CLXVI. Reflections of Objects at Different Distances 260 CLXVII. Reflection in a Looking-glass 262 CLXVIII. The Mirror at an Angle 264 CLXIX. The Upright Mirror at an Angle of 45° to the Wall 266 CLXX. Mental Perspective 269 BOOK FIRST THE NECESSITY OF THE STUDY OF PERSPECTIVE TO PAINTERS, SCULPTORS, AND ARCHITECTS Leonardo da Vinci tells us in his celebrated _Treatise on Painting_ that the young artist should first of all learn perspective, that is to say, he should first of all learn that he has to depict on a flat surface objects which are in relief or distant one from the other; for this is the simple art of painting. Objects appear smaller at a distance than near to us, so by drawing them thus we give depth to our canvas. The outline of a ball is a mere flat circle, but with proper shading we make it appear round, and this is the perspective of light and shade. 'The next thing to be considered is the effect of the atmosphere and light. If two figures are in the same coloured dress, and are standing one behind the other, then they should be of slightly different tone, so as to separate them. And in like manner, according to the distance of the mountains in a landscape and the greater or less density of the air, so do we depict space between them, not only making them smaller in outline, but less distinct.'[1] [Footnote 1: Leonardo da Vinci's _Treatise on Painting_.] Sir Edwin Landseer used to say that in looking at a figure in a picture he liked to feel that he could walk round it, and this exactly expresses the impression that the true art of painting should make upon the spectator. There is another observation of Leonardo's that it is well I should here transcribe; he says: 'Many are desirous of learning to draw, and are very fond of it, who are notwithstanding void of a proper disposition for it. This may be known by their want of perseverance; like boys who draw everything in a hurry, never finishing or shadowing.' This shows they do not care for their work, and all instruction is thrown away upon them. At the present time there is too much of this 'everything in a hurry', and beginning in this way leads only to failure and disappointment. These observations apply equally to perspective as to drawing and painting. Unfortunately, this study is too often neglected by our painters, some of them even complacently confessing their ignorance of it; while the ordinary student either turns from it with distaste, or only endures going through it with a view to passing an examination, little thinking of what value it will be to him in working out his pictures. Whether the manner of teaching perspective is the cause of this dislike for it, I cannot say; but certainly most of our English books on the subject are anything but attractive. All the great masters of painting have also been masters of perspective, for they knew that without it, it would be impossible to carry out their grand compositions. In many cases they were even inspired by it in choosing their subjects. When one looks at those sunny interiors, those corridors and courtyards by De Hooghe, with their figures far off and near, one feels that their charm consists greatly in their perspective, as well as in their light and tone and colour. Or if we study those Venetian masterpieces by Paul Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, and others, we become convinced that it was through their knowledge of perspective that they gave such space and grandeur to their canvases. I need not name all the great artists who have shown their interest and delight in this study, both by writing about it and practising it, such as Albert Dürer and others, but I cannot leave out our own Turner, who was one of the greatest masters in this respect that ever lived; though in his case we can only judge of the results of his knowledge as shown in his pictures, for although he was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy in 1807--over a hundred years ago--and took great pains with the diagrams he prepared to illustrate his lectures, they seemed to the students to be full of confusion and obscurity; nor am I aware that any record of them remains, although they must have contained some valuable teaching, had their author possessed the art of conveying it. However, we are here chiefly concerned with the necessity of this study, and of the necessity of starting our work with it. Before undertaking a large composition of figures, such as the 'Wedding-feast at Cana', by Paul Veronese, or 'The School of Athens', by Raphael, the artist should set out his floors, his walls, his colonnades, his balconies, his steps, &c., so that he may know where to place his personages, and to measure their different sizes according to their distances; indeed, he must make his stage and his scenery before he introduces his actors. He can then proceed with his composition, arrange his groups and the accessories with ease, and above all with correctness. But I have noticed that some of our cleverest painters will arrange their figures to please the eye, and when fairly advanced with their work will call in an expert, to (as they call it) put in their perspective for them, but as it does not form part of their original composition, it involves all sorts of difficulties and vexatious alterings and rubbings out, and even then is not always satisfactory. For the expert may not be an artist, nor in sympathy with the picture, hence there will be a want of unity in it; whereas the whole thing, to be in harmony, should be the conception of one mind, and the perspective as much a part of the composition as the figures. If a ceiling has to be painted with figures floating or flying in the air, or sitting high above us, then our perspective must take a different form, and the point of sight will be above our heads instead of on the horizon; nor can these difficulties be overcome without an adequate knowledge of the science, which will enable us to work out for ourselves any new problems of this kind that we may have to solve. Then again, with a view to giving different effects or impressions in this decorative work, we must know where to place the horizon and the points of sight, for several of the latter are sometimes required when dealing with large surfaces such as the painting of walls, or stage scenery, or panoramas depicted on a cylindrical canvas and viewed from the centre thereof, where a fresh point of sight is required at every twelve or sixteen feet. Without a true knowledge of perspective, none of these things can be done. The artist should study them in the great compositions of the masters, by analysing their pictures and seeing how and for what reasons they applied their knowledge. Rubens put low horizons to most of his large figure-subjects, as in 'The Descent from the Cross', which not only gave grandeur to his designs, but, seeing they were to be placed above the eye, gave a more natural appearance to his figures. The Venetians often put the horizon almost on a level with the base of the picture or edge of the frame, and sometimes even below it; as in 'The Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander', by Paul Veronese, and 'The Origin of the "Via Lactea"', by Tintoretto, both in our National Gallery. But in order to do all these things, the artist in designing his work must have the knowledge of perspective at his fingers' ends, and only the details, which are often tedious, should he leave to an assistant to work out for him. We must remember that the line of the horizon should be as nearly as possible on a level with the eye, as it is in nature; and yet one of the commonest mistakes in our exhibitions is the bad placing of this line. We see dozens of examples of it, where in full-length portraits and other large pictures intended to be seen from below, the horizon is placed high up in the canvas instead of low down; the consequence is that compositions so treated not only lose in grandeur and truth, but appear to be toppling over, or give the impression of smallness rather than bigness. Indeed, they look like small pictures enlarged, which is a very different thing from a large design. So that, in order to see them properly, we should mount a ladder to get upon a level with their horizon line (see Fig. 66, double-page illustration). We have here spoken in a general way of the importance of this study to painters, but we shall see that it is of almost equal importance to the sculptor and the architect. A sculptor student at the Academy, who was making his drawings rather carelessly, asked me of what use perspective was to a sculptor. 'In the first place,' I said, 'to reason out apparently difficult problems, and to find how easy they become, will improve your mind; and in the second, if you have to do monumental work, it will teach you the exact size to make your figures according to the height they are to be placed, and also the boldness with which they should be treated to give them their full effect.' He at once acknowledged that I was right, proved himself an efficient pupil, and took much interest in his work. I cannot help thinking that the reason our public monuments so often fail to impress us with any sense of grandeur is in a great measure owing to the neglect of the scientific study of perspective. As an illustration of what I mean, let the student look at a good engraving or photograph of the Arch of Constantine at Rome, or the Tombs of the Medici, by Michelangelo, in the sacristy of San Lorenzo at Florence. And then, for an example of a mistake in the placing of a colossal figure, let him turn to the Tomb of Julius II in San Pietro in Vinculis, Rome, and he will see that the figure of Moses, so grand in itself, not only loses much of its dignity by being placed on the ground instead of in the niche above it, but throws all the other figures out of proportion or harmony, and was quite contrary to Michelangelo's intention. Indeed, this tomb, which was to have been the finest thing of its kind ever done, was really the tragedy of the great sculptor's life. The same remarks apply in a great measure to the architect as to the sculptor. The old builders knew the value of a knowledge of perspective, and, as in the case of Serlio, Vignola, and others, prefaced their treatises on architecture with chapters on geometry and perspective. For it showed them how to give proper proportions to their buildings and the details thereof; how to give height and importance both to the interior and exterior; also to give the right sizes of windows, doorways, columns, vaults, and other parts, and the various heights they should make their towers, walls, arches, roofs, and so forth. One of the most beautiful examples of the application of this knowledge to architecture is the Campanile of the Cathedral, at Florence, built by Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi, who were painters as well as architects. Here it will be seen that the height of the windows is increased as they are placed higher up in the building, and the top windows or openings into the belfry are about six times the size of those in the lower story. WHAT IS PERSPECTIVE? [Illustration: Fig. 1.] Perspective is a subtle form of geometry; it represents figures and objects not as they are but as we see them in space, whereas geometry represents figures not as we see them but as they are. When we have a front view of a figure such as a square, its perspective and geometrical appearance is the same, and we see it as it really is, that is, with all its sides equal and all its angles right angles, the perspective only varying in size according to the distance we are from it; but if we place that square flat on the table and look at it sideways or at an angle, then we become conscious of certain changes in its form--the side farthest from us appears shorter than that near to us, and all the angles are different. Thus A (Fig. 2) is a geometrical square and B is the same square seen in perspective. [Illustration: Fig. 2.] [Illustration: Fig. 3.] The science of perspective gives the dimensions of objects seen in space as they appear to the eye of the spectator, just as a perfect tracing of those objects on a sheet of glass placed vertically between him and them would do; indeed its very name is derived from _perspicere_, to see through. But as no tracing done by hand could possibly be mathematically correct, the mathematician teaches us how by certain points and measurements we may yet give a perfect image of them. These images are called projections, but the artist calls them pictures. In this sketch _K_ is the vertical transparent plane or picture, _O_ is a cube placed on one side of it. The young student is the spectator on the other side of it, the dotted lines drawn from the corners of the cube to the eye of the spectator are the visual rays, and the points on the transparent picture plane where these visual rays pass through it indicate the perspective position of those points on the picture. To find these points is the main object or duty of linear perspective. Perspective up to a certain point is a pure science, not depending upon the accidents of vision, but upon the exact laws of reasoning. Nor is it to be considered as only pertaining to the craft of the painter and draughtsman. It has an intimate connexion with our mental perceptions and with the ideas that are impressed upon the brain by the appearance of all that surrounds us. If we saw everything as depicted by plane geometry, that is, as a map, we should have no difference of view, no variety of ideas, and we should live in a world of unbearable monotony; but as we see everything in perspective, which is infinite in its variety of aspect, our minds are subjected to countless phases of thought, making the world around us constantly interesting, so it is devised that we shall see the infinite wherever we turn, and marvel at it, and delight in it, although perhaps in many cases unconsciously. [Illustration: Fig. 4.] [Illustration: Fig. 5.] In perspective, as in geometry, we deal with parallels, squares, triangles, cubes, circles, &c.; but in perspective the same figure takes an endless variety of forms, whereas in geometry it has but one. Here are three equal geometrical squares: they are all alike. Here are three equal perspective squares, but all varied in form; and the same figure changes in aspect as often as we view it from a different position. A walk round the dining-room table will exemplify this. It is in proving that, notwithstanding this difference of appearance, the figures do represent the same form, that much of our work consists; and for those who care to exercise their reasoning powers it becomes not only a sure means of knowledge, but a study of the greatest interest. Perspective is said to have been formed into a science about the fifteenth century. Among the names mentioned by the unknown but pleasant author of _The Practice of Perspective_, written by a Jesuit of Paris in the eighteenth century, we find Albert Dürer, who has left us some rules and principles in the fourth book of his _Geometry_; Jean Cousin, who has an express treatise on the art wherein are many valuable things; also Vignola, who altered the plans of St. Peter's left by Michelangelo; Serlio, whose treatise is one of the best I have seen of these early writers; Du Cerceau, Serigati, Solomon de Cause, Marolois, Vredemont; Guidus Ubaldus, who first introduced foreshortening; the Sieur de Vaulizard, the Sieur Dufarges, Joshua Kirby, for whose _Method of Perspective made Easy_ (?) Hogarth drew the well-known frontispiece; and lastly, the above-named _Practice of Perspective_ by a Jesuit of Paris, which is very clear and excellent as far as it goes, and was the book used by Sir Joshua Reynolds.[2] But nearly all these authors treat chiefly of parallel perspective, which they do with clearness and simplicity, and also mathematically, as shown in the short treatise in Latin by Christian Wolff, but they scarcely touch upon the more difficult problems of angular and oblique perspective. Of modern books, those to which I am most indebted are the _Traité Pratique de Perspective_ of M. A. Cassagne (Paris, 1873), which is thoroughly artistic, and full of pictorial examples admirably done; and to M. Henriet's _Cours Rational de Dessin_. There are many other foreign books of excellence, notably M. Thibault's _Perspective_, and some German and Swiss books, and yet, notwithstanding this imposing array of authors, I venture to say that many new features and original problems are presented in this book, whilst the old ones are not neglected. As, for instance, How to draw figures at an angle without vanishing points (see p. 141, Fig. 162, &c.), a new method of angular perspective which dispenses with the cumbersome setting out usually adopted, and enables us to draw figures at any angle without vanishing lines, &c., and is almost, if not quite, as simple as parallel perspective (see p. 133, Fig. 150, &c.). How to measure distances by the square and diagonal, and to draw interiors thereby (p. 128, Fig. 144). How to explain the theory of perspective by ocular demonstration, using a vertical sheet of glass with strings, placed on a drawing-board, which I have found of the greatest use (see p. 29, Fig. 29). Then again, I show how all our perspective can be done inside the picture; that we can measure any distance into the picture from a foot to a mile or twenty miles (see p. 86, Fig. 94); how we can draw the Great Pyramid, which stands on thirteen acres of ground, by putting it 1,600 feet off (Fig. 224), &c., &c. And while preserving the mathematical science, so that all our operations can be proved to be correct, my chief aim has been to make it easy of application to our work and consequently useful to the artist. [Footnote 2: There is another book called _The Jesuit's Perspective_ which I have not yet seen, but which I hear is a fine work.] The Egyptians do not appear to have made any use of linear perspective. Perhaps it was considered out of character with their particular kind of decoration, which is to be looked upon as picture writing rather than pictorial art; a table, for instance, would be represented like a ground-plan and the objects upon it in elevation or standing up. A row of chariots with their horses and drivers side by side were placed one over the other, and although the Egyptians had no doubt a reason for this kind of representation, for they were grand artists, it seems to us very primitive; and indeed quite young beginners who have never drawn from real objects have a tendency to do very much the same thing as this ancient people did, or even to emulate the mathematician and represent things not as they appear but as they are, and will make the top of a table an almost upright square and the objects upon it as if they would fall off. No doubt the Greeks had correct notions of perspective, for the paintings on vases, and at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were either by Greek artists or copied from Greek pictures, show some knowledge, though not complete knowledge, of this science. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of any great artist making his perspective very wrong, for if he can draw the human figure as the Greeks did, surely he can draw an angle. The Japanese, who are great observers of nature, seem to have got at their perspective by copying what they saw, and, although they are not quite correct in a few things, they convey the idea of distance and make their horizontal planes look level, which are two important things in perspective. Some of their landscapes are beautiful; their trees, flowers, and foliage exquisitely drawn and arranged with the greatest taste; whilst there is a character and go about their figures and birds, &c., that can hardly be surpassed. All their pictures are lively and intelligent and appear to be executed with ease, which shows their authors to be complete masters of their craft. The same may be said of the Chinese, although their perspective is more decorative than true, and whilst their taste is exquisite their whole art is much more conventional and traditional, and does not remind us of nature like that of the Japanese. We may see defects in the perspective of the ancients, in the mediaeval painters, in the Japanese and Chinese, but are we always right ourselves? Even in celebrated pictures by old and modern masters there are occasionally errors that might easily have been avoided, if a ready means of settling the difficulty were at hand. We should endeavour then to make this study as simple, as easy, and as complete as possible, to show clear evidence of its correctness (according to its conditions), and at the same time to serve as a guide on any and all occasions that we may require it. To illustrate what is perspective, and as an experiment that any one can make, whether artist or not, let us stand at a window that looks out on to a courtyard or a street or a garden, &c., and trace with a paint-brush charged with Indian ink or water-colour the outline of whatever view there happens to be outside, being careful to keep the eye always in the same place by means of a rest; when this is dry, place a piece of drawing-paper over it and trace through with a pencil. Now we will rub out the tracing on the glass, which is sure to be rather clumsy, and, fixing our paper down on a board, proceed to draw the scene before us, using the main lines of our tracing as our guiding lines. If we take pains over our work, we shall find that, without troubling ourselves much about rules, we have produced a perfect perspective of perhaps a very difficult subject. After practising for some little time in this way we shall get accustomed to what are called perspective deformations, and soon be able to dispense with the glass and the tracing altogether and to sketch straight from nature, taking little note of perspective beyond fixing the point of sight and the horizontal-line; in fact, doing what every artist does when he goes out sketching. [Illustration: Fig. 6. This is a much reduced reproduction of a drawing made on my studio window in this way some twenty years ago, when the builder started covering the fields at the back with rows and rows of houses.] THE THEORY OF PERSPECTIVE DEFINITIONS I Fig. 7. In this figure, _AKB_ represents the picture or transparent vertical plane through which the objects to be represented can be seen, or on which they can be traced, such as the cube _C_. [Illustration: Fig. 7.] The line _HD_ is the +Horizontal-line+ or +Horizon+, the chief line in perspective, as upon it are placed the principal points to which our perspective lines are drawn. First, the +Point of Sight+ and next _D_, the +Point of Distance+. The chief vanishing points and measuring points are also placed on this line. Another important line is _AB_, the +Base+ or +Ground line+, as it is on this that we measure the width of any object to be represented, such as _ef_, the base of the square _efgh_, on which the cube _C_ is raised. _E_ is the position of the eye of the spectator, being drawn in perspective, and is called the +Station-point+. Note that the perspective of the board, and the line _SE_, is not the same as that of the cube in the picture _AKB_, and also that so much of the board which is behind the picture plane partially represents the +Perspective-plane+, supposed to be perfectly level and to extend from the base line to the horizon. Of this we shall speak further on. In nature it is not really level, but partakes in extended views of the rotundity of the earth, though in small areas such as ponds the roundness is infinitesimal. [Illustration: Fig. 8.] Fig. 8. This is a side view of the previous figure, the picture plane _K_ being represented edgeways, and the line _SE_ its full length. It also shows the position of the eye in front of the point of sight _S_. The horizontal-line _HD_ and the base or ground-line _AB_ are represented as receding from us, and in that case are called vanishing lines, a not quite satisfactory term. It is to be noted that the cube _C_ is placed close to the transparent picture plane, indeed touches it, and that the square _fj_ faces the spectator _E_, and although here drawn in perspective it appears to him as in the other figure. Also, it is at the same time a perspective and a geometrical figure, and can therefore be measured with the compasses. Or in other words, we can touch the square _fj_, because it is on the surface of the picture, but we cannot touch the square _ghmb_ at the other end of the cube and can only measure it by the rules of perspective. II THE POINT OF SIGHT, THE HORIZON, AND THE POINT OF DISTANCE There are three things to be considered and understood before we can begin a perspective drawing. First, the position of the eye in front of the picture, which is called the +Station-point+, and of course is not in the picture itself, but its position is indicated by a point on the picture which is exactly opposite the eye of the spectator, and is called the +Point of Sight+, or +Principal Point+, or +Centre of Vision+, but we will keep to the first of these. [Illustration: Fig. 9.] [Illustration: Fig. 10.] If our picture plane is a sheet of glass, and is so placed that we can see the landscape behind it or a sea-view, we shall find that the distant line of the horizon passes through that point of sight, and we therefore draw a line on our picture which exactly corresponds with it, and which we call the +Horizontal-line+ or +Horizon+.[3] The height of the horizon then depends entirely upon the position of the eye of the spectator: if he rises, so does the horizon; if he stoops or descends to lower ground, so does the horizon follow his movements. You may sit in a boat on a calm sea, and the horizon will be as low down as you are, or you may go to the top of a high cliff, and still the horizon will be on the same level as your eye. [Footnote 3: In a sea-view, owing to the rotundity of the earth, the real horizontal line is slightly below the sea line, which is noted in Chapter I.] This is an important line for the draughtsman to consider, for the effect of his picture greatly depends upon the position of the horizon. If you wish to give height and dignity to a mountain or a building, the horizon should be low down, so that these things may appear to tower above you. If you wish to show a wide expanse of landscape, then you must survey it from a height. In a composition of figures, you select your horizon according to the subject, and with a view to help the grouping. Again, in portraits and decorative work to be placed high up, a low horizon is desirable, but I have already spoken of this subject in the chapter on the necessity of the study of perspective. III POINT OF DISTANCE Fig. 11. The distance of the spectator from the picture is of great importance; as the distortions and disproportions arising from too near a view are to be avoided, the object of drawing being to make things look natural; thus, the floor should look level, and not as if it were running up hill--the top of a table flat, and not on a slant, as if cups and what not, placed upon it, would fall off. In this figure we have a geometrical or ground plan of two squares at different distances from the picture, which is represented by the line _KK_. The spectator is first at _A_, the corner of the near square _Acd_. If from _A_ we draw a diagonal of that square and produce it to the line _KK_ (which may represent the horizontal-line in the picture), where it intersects that line at _A·_ marks the distance that the spectator is from the point of sight _S_. For it will be seen that line _SA_ equals line _SA·_. In like manner, if the spectator is at _B_, his distance from the point _S_ is also found on the horizon by means of the diagonal _BB´_, so that all lines or diagonals at 45° are drawn to the point of distance (see Rule 6). Figs. 12 and 13. In these two figures the difference is shown between the effect of the short-distance point _A·_ and the long-distance point _B·_; the first, _Acd_, does not appear to lie so flat on the ground as the second square, _Bef_. From this it will be seen how important it is to choose the right point of distance: if we take it too near the point of sight, as in Fig. 12, the square looks unnatural and distorted. This, I may note, is a common fault with photographs taken with a wide-angle lens, which throws everything out of proportion, and will make the east end of a church or a cathedral appear higher than the steeple or tower; but as soon as we make our line of distance sufficiently long, as at Fig. 13, objects take their right proportions and no distortion is noticeable. [Illustration: Fig. 11.] [Illustration: Fig. 12.] [Illustration: Fig. 13.] In some books on perspective we are told to make the angle of vision 60°, so that the distance _SD_ (Fig. 14) is to be rather less than the length or height of the picture, as at _A_. The French recommend an angle of 28°, and to make the distance about double the length of the picture, as at _B_ (Fig. 15), which is far more agreeable. For we must remember that the distance-point is not only the point from which we are supposed to make our tracing on the vertical transparent plane, or a point transferred to the horizon to make our measurements by, but it is also the point in front of the canvas that we view the picture from, called the station-point. It is ridiculous, then, to have it so close that we must almost touch the canvas with our noses before we can see its perspective properly. [Illustration: Fig. 14.] Now a picture should look right from whatever distance we view it, even across the room or gallery, and of course in decorative work and in scene-painting a long distance is necessary. [Illustration: Fig. 15.] We need not, however, tie ourselves down to any hard and fast rule, but should choose our distance according to the impression of space we wish to convey: if we have to represent a domestic scene in a small room, as in many Dutch pictures, we must not make our distance-point too far off, as it would exaggerate the size of the room. [Illustration: Fig. 16. Cattle. By Paul Potter.] The height of the horizon is also an important consideration in the composition of a picture, and so also is the position of the point of sight, as we shall see farther on. In landscape and cattle pictures a low horizon often gives space and air, as in this sketch from a picture by Paul Potter--where the horizontal-line is placed at one quarter the height of the canvas. Indeed, a judicious use of the laws of perspective is a great aid to composition, and no picture ever looks right unless these laws are attended to. At the present time too little attention is paid to them; the consequence is that much of the art of the day reflects in a great measure the monotony of the snap-shot camera, with its everyday and wearisome commonplace. IV PERSPECTIVE OF A POINT, VISUAL RAYS, &C. We perceive objects by means of the visual rays, which are imaginary straight lines drawn from the eye to the various points of the thing we are looking at. As those rays proceed from the pupil of the eye, which is a circular opening, they form themselves into a cone called the +Optic Cone+, the base of which increases in proportion to its distance from the eye, so that the larger the view which we wish to take in, the farther must we be removed from it. The diameter of the base of this cone, with the visual rays drawn from each of its extremities to the eye, form the angle of vision, which is wider or narrower according to the distance of this diameter. Now let us suppose a visual ray _EA_ to be directed to some small object on the floor, say the head of a nail, _A_ (Fig. 17). If we interpose between this nail and our eye a sheet of glass, _K_, placed vertically on the floor, we continue to see the nail through the glass, and it is easily understood that its perspective appearance thereon is the point _a_, where the visual ray passes through it. If now we trace on the floor a line _AB_ from the nail to the spot _B_, just under the eye, and from the point _o_, where this line passes through or under the glass, we raise a perpendicular _oS_, that perpendicular passes through the precise point that the visual ray passes through. The line _AB_ traced on the floor is the horizontal trace of the visual ray, and it will be seen that the point _a_ is situated on the vertical raised from this horizontal trace. [Illustration: Fig. 17.] V TRACE AND PROJECTION If from any line _A_ or _B_ or _C_ (Fig. 18), &c., we drop perpendiculars from different points of those lines on to a horizontal plane, the intersections of those verticals with the plane will be on a line called the horizontal trace or projection of the original line. We may liken these projections to sun-shadows when the sun is in the meridian, for it will be remarked that the trace does not represent the length of the original line, but only so much of it as would be embraced by the verticals dropped from each end of it, and although line _A_ is the same length as line _B_ its horizontal trace is longer than that of the other; that the projection of a curve (_C_) in this upright position is a straight line, that of a horizontal line (_D_) is equal to it, and the projection of a perpendicular or vertical (_E_) is a point only. The projections of lines or points can likewise be shown on a vertical plane, but in that case we draw lines parallel to the horizontal plane, and by this means we can get the position of a point in space; and by the assistance of perspective, as will be shown farther on, we can carry out the most difficult propositions of descriptive geometry and of the geometry of planes and solids. [Illustration: Fig. 18.] The position of a point in space is given by its projection on a vertical and a horizontal plane-- [Illustration: Fig. 19.] Thus _e·_ is the projection of _E_ on the vertical plane _K_, and _e··_ is the projection of _E_ on the horizontal plane; _fe··_ is the horizontal trace of the plane _fE_, and _e·f_ is the trace of the same plane on the vertical plane _K_. VI SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION OF PERSPECTIVE The projections of the extremities of a right line which passes through a vertical plane being given, one on either side of it, to find the intersection of that line with the vertical plane. _AE_ (Fig. 20) is the right line. The projection of its extremity _A_ on the vertical plane is _a·_, the projection of _E_, the other extremity, is _e·_. _AS_ is the horizontal trace of _AE_, and _a·e·_ is its trace on the vertical plane. At point _f_, where the horizontal trace intersects the base _Bc_ of the vertical plane, raise perpendicular _fP_ till it cuts _a·e·_ at point _P_, which is the point required. For it is at the same time on the given line _AE_ and the vertical plane _K_. [Illustration: Fig. 20.] This figure is similar to the previous one, except that the extremity _A_ of the given line is raised from the ground, but the same demonstration applies to it. [Illustration: Fig. 21.] And now let us suppose the vertical plane _K_ to be a sheet of glass, and the given line _AE_ to be the visual ray passing from the eye to the object _A_ on the other side of the glass. Then if _E_ is the eye of the spectator, its projection on the picture is _S_, the point of sight. If I draw a dotted line from _E_ to little _a_, this represents another visual ray, and _o_, the point where it passes through the picture, is the perspective of little _a_. I now draw another line from _g_ to _S_, and thus form the shaded figure _ga·Po_, which is the perspective of _aAa·g_. Let it be remarked that in the shaded perspective figure the lines _a·P_ and _go_ are both drawn towards _S_, the point of sight, and that they represent parallel lines _Aa·_ and _ag_, which are at right angles to the picture plane. This is the most important fact in perspective, and will be more fully explained farther on, when we speak of retreating or so-called vanishing lines. RULES VII THE RULES AND CONDITIONS OF PERSPECTIVE The conditions of linear perspective are somewhat rigid. In the first place, we are supposed to look at objects with one eye only; that is, the visual rays are drawn from a single point, and not from two. Of this we shall speak later on. Then again, the eye must be placed in a certain position, as at _E_ (Fig. 22), at a given height from the ground, _S·E_, and at a given distance from the picture, as _SE_. In the next place, the picture or picture plane itself must be vertical and perpendicular to the ground or horizontal plane, which plane is supposed to be as level as a billiard-table, and to extend from the base line, _ef_, of the picture to the horizon, that is, to infinity, for it does not partake of the rotundity of the earth. We can only work out our propositions and figures in space with mathematical precision by adopting such conditions as the above. But afterwards the artist or draughtsman may modify and suit them to a more elastic view of things; that is, he can make his figures separate from one another, instead of their outlines coming close together as they do when we look at them with only one eye. Also he will allow for the unevenness of the ground and the roundness of our globe; he may even move his head and his eyes, and use both of them, and in fact make himself quite at his ease when he is out sketching, for Nature does all his perspective for him. At the same time, a knowledge of this rigid perspective is the sure and unerring basis of his freehand drawing. [Illustration: Fig. 22.] [Illustration: Fig. 23. Front view of above figure.] RULE 1 All straight lines remain straight in their perspective appearance.[4] [Footnote 4: Some will tell us that Nature abhors a straight line, that all long straight lines in space appear curved, &c., owing to certain optical conditions; but this is not apparent in short straight lines, so if our drawing is small it would be wrong to curve them; if it is large, like a scene or diorama, the same optical condition which applies to the line in space would also apply to the line in the picture.] RULE 2 Vertical lines remain vertical in perspective, and are divided in the same proportion as _AB_ (Fig. 24), the original line, and _a·b·_, the perspective line, and if the one is divided at _O_ the other is divided at _o·_ in the same way. [Illustration: Fig. 24.] It is not an uncommon error to suppose that the vertical lines of a high building should converge towards the top; so they would if we stood at the foot of that building and looked up, for then we should alter the conditions of our perspective, and our point of sight, instead of being on the horizon, would be up in the sky. But if we stood sufficiently far away, so as to bring the whole of the building within our angle of vision, and the point of sight down to the horizon, then these same lines would appear perfectly parallel, and the different stories in their true proportion. RULE 3 Horizontals parallel to the base of the picture are also parallel to that base in the picture. Thus _a·b·_ (Fig. 25) is parallel to _AB_, and to _GL_, the base of the picture. Indeed, the same argument may be used with regard to horizontal lines as with verticals. If we look at a straight wall in front of us, its top and its rows of bricks, &c., are parallel and horizontal; but if we look along it sideways, then we alter the conditions, and the parallel lines converge to whichever point we direct the eye. [Illustration: Fig. 25.] [Illustration: Fig. 26.] This rule is important, as we shall see when we come to the consideration of the perspective vanishing scale. Its use may be illustrated by this sketch, where the houses, walls, &c., are parallel to the base of the picture. When that is the case, then objects exactly facing us, such as windows, doors, rows of boards, or of bricks or palings, &c., are drawn with their horizontal lines parallel to the base; hence it is called parallel perspective. RULE 4 All lines situated in a plane that is parallel to the picture plane diminish in proportion as they become more distant, but do not undergo any perspective deformation; and remain in the same relation and proportion each to each as the original lines. This is called the front view. [Illustration: Fig. 27.] RULE 5 All horizontals which are at right angles to the picture plane are drawn to the point of sight. Thus the lines _AB_ and _CD_ (Fig. 28) are horizontal or parallel to the ground plane, and are also at right angles to the picture plane _K_. It will be seen that the perspective lines _Ba·_, _Dc·_, must, according to the laws of projection, be drawn to the point of sight. This is the most important rule in perspective (see Fig. 7 at beginning of Definitions). An arrangement such as there indicated is the best means of illustrating this rule. But instead of tracing the outline of the square or cube on the glass, as there shown, I have a hole drilled through at the point _S_ (Fig. 29), which I select for the point of sight, and through which I pass two loose strings _A_ and _B_, fixing their ends at _S_. [Illustration: Fig. 28.] [Illustration: Fig. 29.] As _SD_ represents the distance the spectator is from the glass or picture, I make string _SA_ equal in length to _SD_. Now if the pupil takes this string in one hand and holds it at right angles to the glass, that is, exactly in front of _S_, and then places one eye at the end _A_ (of course with the string extended), he will be at the proper distance from the picture. Let him then take the other string, _SB_, in the other hand, and apply it to point _b´_ where the square touches the glass, and he will find that it exactly tallies with the side _b´f_ of the square _a·b´fe_. If he applies the same string to _a·_, the other corner of the square, his string will exactly tally or cover the side _a·e_, and he will thus have ocular demonstration of this important rule. In this little picture (Fig. 30) in parallel perspective it will be seen that the lines which retreat from us at right angles to the picture plane are directed to the point of sight _S_. [Illustration: Fig. 30.] RULE 6 All horizontals which are at 45°, or half a right angle to the picture plane, are drawn to the point of distance. We have already seen that the diagonal of the perspective square, if produced to meet the horizon on the picture, will mark on that horizon the distance that the spectator is from the point of sight (see definition, p. 16). This point of distance becomes then the measuring point for all horizontals at right angles to the picture plane. Thus in Fig. 31 lines _AS_ and _BS_ are drawn to the point of sight _S_, and are therefore at right angles to the base _AB_. _AD_ being drawn to _D_ (the distance-point), is at an angle of 45° to the base _AB_, and _AC_ is therefore the diagonal of a square. The line 1C is made parallel to _AB_, consequently A1CB is a square in perspective. The line _BC_, therefore, being one side of that square, is equal to _AB_, another side of it. So that to measure a length on a line drawn to the point of sight, such as _BS_, we set out the length required, say _BA_, on the base-line, then from _A_ draw a line to the point of distance, and where it cuts _BS_ at _C_ is the length required. This can be repeated any number of times, say five, so that in this figure _BE_ is five times the length of _AB_. [Illustration: Fig. 31.] RULE 7 All horizontals forming any other angles but the above are drawn to some other points on the horizontal line. If the angle is greater than half a right angle (Fig. 32), as _EBG_, the point is within the point of distance, as at _V´_. If it is less, as _ABV´´_, then it is beyond the point of distance, and consequently farther from the point of sight. [Illustration: Fig. 32.] In Fig. 32, the dotted line _BD_, drawn to the point of distance _D_, is at an angle of 45° to the base _AG_. It will be seen that the line _BV´_ is at a greater angle to the base than _BD_; it is therefore drawn to a point _V´_, within the point of distance and nearer to the point of sight _S_. On the other hand, the line _BV´´_ is at a more acute angle, and is therefore drawn to a point some way beyond the other distance point. _Note._--When this vanishing point is a long way outside the picture, the architects make use of a centrolinead, and the painters fix a long string at the required point, and get their perspective lines by that means, which is very inconvenient. But I will show you later on how you can dispense with this trouble by a very simple means, with equally correct results. RULE 8 Lines which incline upwards have their vanishing points above the horizontal line, and those which incline downwards, below it. In both cases they are on the vertical which passes through the vanishing point (_S_) of their horizontal projections. [Illustration: Fig. 33.] This rule is useful in drawing steps, or roads going uphill and downhill. [Illustration: Fig. 34.] RULE 9 The farther a point is removed from the picture plane the nearer does its perspective appearance approach the horizontal line so long as it is viewed from the same position. On the contrary, if the spectator retreats from the picture plane _K_ (which we suppose to be transparent), the point remaining at the same place, the perspective appearance of this point will approach the ground-line in proportion to the distance of the spectator. [Illustrations: Fig. 35. Fig. 36. The spectator at two different distances from the picture.] Therefore the position of a given point in perspective above the ground-line or below the horizon is in proportion to the distance of the spectator from the picture, or the picture from the point. [Illustration: Fig. 37.] [Illustrations: The picture at two different distances from the point. Fig. 38. Fig. 39.] Figures 38 and 39 are two views of the same gallery from different distances. In Fig. 38, where the distance is too short, there is a want of proportion between the near and far objects, which is corrected in Fig. 39 by taking a much longer distance. RULE 10 Horizontals in the same plane which are drawn to the same point on the horizon are parallel to each other. [Illustration: Fig. 40.] This is a very important rule, for all our perspective drawing depends upon it. When we say that parallels are drawn to the same point on the horizon it does not imply that they meet at that point, which would be a contradiction; perspective parallels never reach that point, although they appear to do so. Fig. 40 will explain this. Suppose _S_ to be the spectator, _AB_ a transparent vertical plane which represents the picture seen edgeways, and _HS_ and _DC_ two parallel lines, mark off spaces between these parallels equal to _SC_, the height of the eye of the spectator, and raise verticals 2, 3, 4, 5, &c., forming so many squares. Vertical line 2 viewed from _S_ will appear on _AB_ but half its length, vertical 3 will be only a third, vertical 4 a fourth, and so on, and if we multiplied these spaces _ad infinitum_ we must keep on dividing the line _AB_ by the same number. So if we suppose _AB_ to be a yard high and the distance from one vertical to another to be also a yard, then if one of these were a thousand yards away its representation at _AB_ would be the thousandth part of a yard, or ten thousand yards away, its representation at _AB_ would be the ten-thousandth part, and whatever the distance it must always be something; and therefore _HS_ and _DC_, however far they may be produced and however close they may appear to get, can never meet. [Illustration: Fig. 41.] Fig. 41 is a perspective view of the same figure--but more extended. It will be seen that a line drawn from the tenth upright _K_ to _S_ cuts off a tenth of _AB_. We look then upon these two lines _SP_, _OP_, as the sides of a long parallelogram of which _SK_ is the diagonal, as _cefd_, the figure on the ground, is also a parallelogram. The student can obtain for himself a further illustration of this rule by placing a looking-glass on one of the walls of his studio and then sketching himself and his surroundings as seen therein. He will find that all the horizontals at right angles to the glass will converge to his own eye. This rule applies equally to lines which are at an angle to the picture plane as to those that are at right angles or perpendicular to it, as in Rule 7. It also applies to those on an inclined plane, as in Rule 8. [Illustration: Fig. 42. Sketch of artist in studio.] With the above rules and a clear notion of the definitions and conditions of perspective, we should be able to work out any proposition or any new figure that may present itself. At any rate, a thorough understanding of these few pages will make the labour now before us simple and easy. I hope, too, it may be found interesting. There is always a certain pleasure in deceiving and being deceived by the senses, and in optical and other illusions, such as making things appear far off that are quite near, in making a picture of an object on a flat surface to look as if it stood out and in relief by a kind of magic. But there is, I think, a still greater pleasure than this, namely, in invention and in overcoming difficulties--in finding out how to do things for ourselves by our reasoning faculties, in originating or being original, as it were. Let us now see how far we can go in this respect. VIII A TABLE OR INDEX OF THE RULES OF PERSPECTIVE The rules here set down have been fully explained in the previous pages, and this table is simply for the student's ready reference. RULE 1 All straight lines remain straight in their perspective appearance. RULE 2 Vertical lines remain vertical in perspective. RULE 3 Horizontals parallel to the base of the picture are also parallel to that base in the picture. RULE 4 All lines situated in a plane that is parallel to the picture plane diminish in proportion as they become more distant, but do not undergo any perspective deformation. This is called the front view. RULE 5 All horizontal lines which are at right angles to the picture plane are drawn to the point of sight. RULE 6 All horizontals which are at 45° to the picture plane are drawn to the point of distance. RULE 7 All horizontals forming any other angles but the above are drawn to some other points on the horizontal line. RULE 8 Lines which incline upwards have their vanishing points above the horizon, and those which incline downwards, below it. In both cases they are on the vertical which passes through the vanishing point of their ground-plan or horizontal projections. RULE 9 The farther a point is removed from the picture plane the nearer does it appear to approach the horizon, so long as it is viewed from the same position. RULE 10 Horizontals in the same plane which are drawn to the same point on the horizon are perspectively parallel to each other. BOOK SECOND THE PRACTICE OF PERSPECTIVE In the foregoing book we have explained the theory or science of perspective; we now have to make use of our knowledge and to apply it to the drawing of figures and the various objects that we wish to depict. The first of these will be a square with two of its sides parallel to the picture plane and the other two at right angles to it, and which we call IX THE SQUARE IN PARALLEL PERSPECTIVE From a given point on the base line of the picture draw a line at right angles to that base. Let _P_ be the given point on the base line _AB_, and _S_ the point of sight. We simply draw a line along the ground to the point of sight _S_, and this line will be at right angles to the base, as explained in Rule 5, and consequently angle _APS_ will be equal to angle _SPB_, although it does not look so here. This is our first difficulty, but one that we shall soon get over. [Illustration: Fig. 43.] In like manner we can draw any number of lines at right angles to the base, or we may suppose the point _P_ to be placed at so many different positions, our only difficulty being to conceive these lines to be parallel to each other. See Rule 10. [Illustration: Fig. 44.] X THE DIAGONAL From a given point on the base line draw a line at 45°, or half a right angle, to that base. Let _P_ be the given point. Draw a line from _P_ to the point of distance _D_ and this line _PD_ will be at an angle of 45°, or at the same angle as the diagonal of a square. See definitions. [Illustration: Fig. 45.] XI THE SQUARE Draw a square in parallel perspective on a given length on the base line. Let _ab_ be the given length. From its two extremities _a_ and _b_ draw _aS_ and _bS_ to the point of sight _S_. These two lines will be at right angles to the base (see Fig. 43). From _a_ draw diagonal _aD_ to point of distance _D_; this line will be 45° to base. At point _c_, where it cuts _bS_, draw _dc_ parallel to _ab_ and _abcd_ is the square required. [Illustration: Fig. 46.] We have here proceeded in much the same way as in drawing a geometrical square (Fig. 47), by drawing two lines _AE_ and _BC_ at right angles to a given line, _AB_, and from _A_, drawing the diagonal _AC_ at 45° till it cuts _BC_ at _C_, and then through _C_ drawing _EC_ parallel to _AB_. Let it be remarked that because the two perspective lines (Fig. 48) _AS_ and _BS_ are at right angles to the base, they must consequently be parallel to each other, and therefore are perspectively equidistant, so that all lines parallel to _AB_ and lying between them, such as _ad_, _cf_, &c., must be equal. [Illustration: Fig. 47.] So likewise all diagonals drawn to the point of distance, which are contained between these parallels, such as _Ad_, _af_, &c., must be equal. For all straight lines which meet at any point on the horizon are perspectively parallel to each other, just as two geometrical parallels crossing two others at any angle, as at Fig. 49. Note also (Fig. 48) that all squares formed between the two vanishing lines _AS_, _BS_, and by the aid of these diagonals, are also equal, and further, that any number of squares such as are shown in this figure (Fig. 50), formed in the same way and having equal bases, are also equal; and the nine squares contained in the square _abcd_ being equal, they divide each side of the larger square into three equal parts. [Illustration: Fig. 48.] [Illustration: Fig. 49.] From this we learn how we can measure any number of given lengths, either equal or unequal, on a vanishing or retreating line which is at right angles to the base; and also how we can measure any width or number of widths on a line such as _dc_, that is, parallel to the base of the picture, however remote it may be from that base. [Illustration: Fig. 50.] XII GEOMETRICAL AND PERSPECTIVE FIGURES CONTRASTED As at first there may be a little difficulty in realizing the resemblance between geometrical and perspective figures, and also about certain expressions we make use of, such as horizontals, perpendiculars, parallels, &c., which look quite different in perspective, I will here make a note of them and also place side by side the two views of the same figures. [Illustration: Fig. 51 A. The geometrical view.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 B. The perspective view.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 C. A geometrical square.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 D. A perspective square.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 E. Geometrical parallels.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 F. Perspective parallels.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 G. Geometrical perpendicular.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 H. Perspective perpendicular.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 I. Geometrical equal lines.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 J. Perspective equal lines.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 K. A geometrical circle.] [Illustration: Fig. 51 L. A perspective circle.] XIII OF CERTAIN TERMS MADE USE OF IN PERSPECTIVE Of course when we speak of +Perpendiculars+ we do not mean verticals only, but straight lines at right angles to other lines in any position. Also in speaking of +lines+ a right or +straight line+ is to be understood; or when we speak of +horizontals+ we mean all straight lines that are parallel to the perspective plane, such as those on Fig. 52, no matter what direction they take so long as they are level. They are not to be confused with the horizon or horizontal-line. [Illustration: Fig. 52. Horizontals.] There are one or two other terms used in perspective which are not satisfactory because they are confusing, such as vanishing lines and vanishing points. The French term, _fuyante_ or _lignes fuyantes_, or going-away lines, is more expressive; and _point de fuite_, instead of vanishing point, is much better. I have occasionally called the former retreating lines, but the simple meaning is, lines that are not parallel to the picture plane; but a vanishing line implies a line that disappears, and a vanishing point implies a point that gradually goes out of sight. Still, it is difficult to alter terms that custom has endorsed. All we can do is to use as few of them as possible. XIV HOW TO MEASURE VANISHING OR RECEDING LINES Divide a vanishing line which is at right angles to the picture plane into any number of given measurements. Let _SA_ be the given line. From _A_ measure off on the base line the divisions required, say five of 1 foot each; from each division draw diagonals to point of distance _D_, and where these intersect the line _AC_ the corresponding divisions will be found. Note that as lines _AB_ and _AC_ are two sides of the same square they are necessarily equal, and so also are the divisions on _AC_ equal to those on _AB_. [Illustration: Fig. 53.] The line _AB_ being the base of the picture, it is at the same time a perspective line and a geometrical one, so that we can use it as a scale for measuring given lengths thereon, but should there not be enough room on it to measure the required number we draw a second line, _DC_, which we divide in the same proportion and proceed to divide _cf_. This geometrical figure gives, as it were, a bird's-eye view or ground-plan of the above. [Illustration: Fig. 54.] XV HOW TO PLACE SQUARES IN GIVEN POSITIONS Draw squares of given dimensions at given distances from the base line to the right or left of the vertical line, which passes through the point of sight. [Illustration: Fig. 55.] Let _ab_ (Fig. 55) represent the base line of the picture divided into a certain number of feet; _HD_ the horizon, _VO_ the vertical. It is required to draw a square 3 feet wide, 2 feet to the right of the vertical, and 1 foot from the base. First measure from _V_, 2 feet to _e_, which gives the distance from the vertical. Second, from _e_ measure 3 feet to _b_, which gives the width of the square; from _e_ and _b_ draw _eS_, _bS_, to point of sight. From either _e_ or _b_ measure 1 foot to the left, to _f_ or _f·_. Draw _fD_ to point of distance, which intersects _eS_ at _P_, and gives the required distance from base. Draw _Pg_ and _B_ parallel to the base, and we have the required square. Square _A_ to the left of the vertical is 2½ feet wide, 1 foot from the vertical and 2 feet from the base, and is worked out in the same way. _Note._--It is necessary to know how to work to scale, especially in architectural drawing, where it is indispensable, but in working out our propositions and figures it is not always desirable. A given length indicated by a line is generally sufficient for our requirements. To work out every problem to scale is not only tedious and mechanical, but wastes time, and also takes the mind of the student away from the reasoning out of the subject. XVI HOW TO DRAW PAVEMENTS, &C. Divide a vanishing line into parts varying in length. Let _BS·_ be the vanishing line: divide it into 4 long and 3 short spaces; then proceed as in the previous figure. If we draw horizontals through the points thus obtained and from these raise verticals, we form, as it were, the interior of a building in which we can place pillars and other objects. [Illustration: Fig. 56.] Or we can simply draw the plan of the pavement as in this figure. [Illustration: Fig. 57.] [Illustration: Fig. 58.] And then put it into perspective. XVII OF SQUARES PLACED VERTICALLY AND AT DIFFERENT HEIGHTS, OR THE CUBE IN PARALLEL PERSPECTIVE On a given square raise a cube. [Illustration: Fig. 59.] _ABCD_ is the given square; from _A_ and _B_ raise verticals _AE_, _BF_, equal to _AB_; join _EF_. Draw _ES_, _FS_, to point of sight; from _C_ and _D_ raise verticals _CG_, _DH_, till they meet vanishing lines _ES_, _FS_, in _G_ and _H_, and the cube is complete. XVIII THE TRANSPOSED DISTANCE The transposed distance is a point _D·_ on the vertical _VD·_, at exactly the same distance from the point of sight as is the point of distance on the horizontal line. It will be seen by examining this figure that the diagonals of the squares in a vertical position are drawn to this vertical distance-point, thus saving the necessity of taking the measurements first on the base line, as at _CB_, which in the case of distant objects, such as the farthest window, would be very inconvenient. Note that the windows at _K_ are twice as high as they are wide. Of course these or any other objects could be made of any proportion. [Illustration: Fig. 60.] XIX THE FRONT VIEW OF THE SQUARE AND OF THE PROPORTIONS OF FIGURES AT DIFFERENT HEIGHTS According to Rule 4, all lines situated in a plane parallel to the picture plane diminish in length as they become more distant, but remain in the same proportions each to each as the original lines; as squares or any other figures retain the same form. Take the two squares _ABCD_, _abcd_ (Fig. 61), one inside the other; although moved back from square _EFGH_ they retain the same form. So in dealing with figures of different heights, such as statuary or ornament in a building, if actually equal in size, so must we represent them. [Illustration: Fig. 61.] [Illustration: Fig. 62.] In this square _K_, with the checker pattern, we should not think of making the top squares smaller than the bottom ones; so it is with figures. This subject requires careful study, for, as pointed out in our opening chapter, there are certain conditions under which we have to modify and greatly alter this rule in large decorative work. [Illustration: Fig. 63.] In Fig. 63 the two statues _A_ and _B_ are the same size. So if traced through a vertical sheet of glass, _K_, as at _c_ and _d_, they would also be equal; but as the angle _b_ at which the upper one is seen is smaller than angle _a_, at which the lower figure or statue is seen, it will appear smaller to the spectator (_S_) both in reality and in the picture. [Illustration: Fig. 64.] But if we wish them to appear the same size to the spectator who is viewing them from below, we must make the angles _a_ and _b_ (Fig. 64), at which they are viewed, both equal. Then draw lines through equal arcs, as at _c_ and _d_, till they cut the vertical _NO_ (representing the side of the building where the figures are to be placed). We shall then obtain the exact size of the figure at that height, which will make it look the same size as the lower one, _N_. The same rule applies to the picture _K_, when it is of large proportions. As an example in painting, take Michelangelo's large altar-piece in the Sistine Chapel, 'The Last Judgement'; here the figures forming the upper group, with our Lord in judgement surrounded by saints, are about four times the size, that is, about twice the height, of those at the lower part of the fresco. The figures on the ceiling of the same chapel are studied not only according to their height from the pavement, which is 60 ft., but to suit the arched form of it. For instance, the head of the figure of Jonah at the end over the altar is thrown back in the design, but owing to the curvature in the architecture is actually more forward than the feet. Then again, the prophets and sybils seated round the ceiling, which are perhaps the grandest figures in the whole range of art, would be 18 ft. high if they stood up; these, too, are not on a flat surface, so that it required great knowledge to give them their right effect. [Illustration: Fig. 65.] Of course, much depends upon the distance we view these statues or paintings from. In interiors, such as churches, halls, galleries, &c., we can make a fair calculation, such as the length of the nave, if the picture is an altar-piece--or say, half the length; so also with statuary in niches, friezes, and other architectural ornaments. The nearer we are to them, and the more we have to look up, the larger will the upper figures have to be; but if these are on the outside of a building that can be looked at from a long distance, then it is better not to have too great a difference. [Illustration: Fig. 66. 1909.] These remarks apply also to architecture in a great measure. Buildings that can only be seen from the street below, as pictures in a narrow gallery, require a different treatment from those out in the open, that are to be looked at from a distance. In the former case the same treatment as the Campanile at Florence is in some cases desirable, but all must depend upon the taste and judgement of the architect in such matters. All I venture to do here is to call attention to the subject, which seems as a rule to be ignored, or not to be considered of importance. Hence the many mistakes in our buildings, and the unsatisfactory and mean look of some of our public monuments. XX OF PICTURES THAT ARE PAINTED ACCORDING TO THE POSITION THEY ARE TO OCCUPY In this double-page illustration of the wall of a picture-gallery, I have, as it were, hung the pictures in accordance with the style in which they are painted and the perspective adopted by their painters. It will be seen that those placed on the line level with the eye have their horizon lines fairly high up, and are not suited to be placed any higher. The Giorgione in the centre, the Monna Lisa to the right, and the Velasquez and Watteau to the left, are all pictures that fit that position; whereas the grander compositions above them are so designed, and are so large in conception, that we gain in looking up to them. Note how grandly the young prince on his pony, by Velasquez, tells out against the sky, with its low horizon and strong contrast of light and dark; nor does it lose a bit by being placed where it is, over the smaller pictures. The Rembrandt, on the opposite side, with its burgomasters in black hats and coats and white collars, is evidently intended and painted for a raised position, and to be looked up to, which is evident from the perspective of the table. The grand Titian in the centre, an altar-piece in one of the churches in Venice (here reversed), is also painted to suit its elevated position, with low horizon and figures telling boldly against the sky. Those placed low down are modern French pictures, with the horizon high up and almost above their frames, but placed on the ground they fit into the general harmony of the arrangement. It seems to me it is well, both for those who paint and for those who hang pictures, that this subject should be taken into consideration. For it must be seen by this illustration that a bigger style is adopted by the artists who paint for high places in palaces or churches than by those who produce smaller easel-pictures intended to be seen close. Unfortunately, at our picture exhibitions, we see too often that nearly all the works, whether on large or small canvases, are painted for the line, and that those which happen to get high up look as if they were toppling over, because they have such a high horizontal line; and instead of the figures telling against the sky, as in this picture of the 'Infant' by Velasquez, the Reynolds, and the fat man treading on a flag, we have fields or sea or distant landscape almost to the top of the frame, and all, so methinks, because the perspective is not sufficiently considered. _Note._--Whilst on this subject, I may note that the painter in his large decorative work often had difficulties to contend with, which arose from the form of the building or the shape of the wall on which he had to place his frescoes. Painting on the ceiling was no easy task, and Michelangelo, in a humorous sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoya, gives a burlesque portrait of himself while he was painting the Sistine Chapel:-- _"I'ho già fatto un gozzo in questo stento."_ Now have I such a goitre 'neath my chin That I am like to some Lombardic cat, My beard is in the air, my head i' my back, My chest like any harpy's, and my face Patched like a carpet by my dripping brush. Nor can I see, nor can I budge a step; My skin though loose in front is tight behind, And I am even as a Syrian bow. Alas! methinks a bent tube shoots not well; So give me now thine aid, my Giovanni. At present that difficulty is got over by using large strong canvas, on which the picture can be painted in the studio and afterwards placed on the wall. However, the other difficulty of form has to be got over also. A great portion of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and notably the prophets and sibyls, are painted on a curved surface, in which case a similar method to that explained by Leonardo da Vinci has to be adopted. In Chapter CCCI he shows us how to draw a figure twenty-four braccia high upon a wall twelve braccia high. (The braccia is 1 ft. 10-7/8 in.). He first draws the figure upright, then from the various points draws lines to a point _F_ on the floor of the building, marking their intersections on the profile of the wall somewhat in the manner we have indicated, which serve as guides in making the outline to be traced. [Illustration: Fig. 67. 'Draw upon part of wall _MN_ half the figure you mean to represent, and the other half upon the cove above (_MR_).' Leonardo da Vinci's _Treatise on Painting_.] XXI INTERIORS [Illustration: Fig. 68. Interior by de Hoogh.] To draw the interior of a cube we must suppose the side facing us to be removed or transparent. Indeed, in all our figures which represent solids we suppose that we can see through them, and in most cases we mark the hidden portions with dotted lines. So also with all those imaginary lines which conduct the eye to the various vanishing points, and which the old writers called 'occult'. [Illustration: Fig. 69.] When the cube is placed below the horizon (as in Fig. 59), we see the top of it; when on the horizon, as in the above (Fig. 69), if the side facing us is removed we see both top and bottom of it, or if a room, we see floor and ceiling, but otherwise we should see but one side (that facing us), or at most two sides. When the cube is above the horizon we see underneath it. We shall find this simple cube of great use to us in architectural subjects, such as towers, houses, roofs, interiors of rooms, &c. In this little picture by de Hoogh we have the application of the perspective of the cube and other foregoing problems. XXII THE SQUARE AT AN ANGLE OF 45° When the square is at an angle of 45° to the base line, then its sides are drawn respectively to the points of distance, _DD_, and one of its diagonals which is at right angles to the base is drawn to the point of sight _S_, and the other _ab_, is parallel to that base or ground line. [Illustration: Fig. 70.] To draw a pavement with its squares at this angle is but an amplification of the above figure. Mark off on base equal distances, 1, 2, 3, &c., representing the diagonals of required squares, and from each of these points draw lines to points of distance _DD´_. These lines will intersect each other, and so form the squares of the pavement; to ensure correctness, lines should also be drawn from these points 1, 2, 3, to the point of sight _S_, and also horizontals parallel to the base, as _ab_. [Illustration: Fig. 71.] XXIII THE CUBE AT AN ANGLE OF 45° Having drawn the square at an angle of 45°, as shown in the previous figure, we find the length of one of its sides, _dh_, by drawing a line, _SK_, through _h_, one of its extremities, till it cuts the base line at _K_. Then, with the other extremity _d_ for centre and _dK_ for radius, describe a quarter of a circle _Km_; the chord thereof _mK_ will be the geometrical length of _dh_. At _d_ raise vertical _dC_ equal to _mK_, which gives us the height of the cube, then raise verticals at _a_, _h_, &c., their height being found by drawing _CD_ and _CD´_ to the two points of distance, and so completing the figure. [Illustration: Fig. 72.] XXIV PAVEMENTS DRAWN BY MEANS OF SQUARES AT 45° [Illustration: Fig. 73.] [Illustration: Fig. 74.] The square at 45° will be found of great use in drawing pavements, roofs, ceilings, &c. In Figs. 73, 74 it is shown how having set out one square it can be divided into four or more equal squares, and any figure or tile drawn therein. Begin by making a geometrical or ground plan of the required design, as at Figs. 73 and 74, where we have bricks placed at right angles to each other in rows, a common arrangement in brick floors, or tiles of an octagonal form as at Fig. 75. [Illustration: Fig. 75.] XXV THE PERSPECTIVE VANISHING SCALE The vanishing scale, which we shall find of infinite use in our perspective, is founded on the facts explained in Rule 10. We there find that all horizontals in the same plane, which are drawn to the same point on the horizon, are perspectively parallel to each other, so that if we measure a certain height or width on the picture plane, and then from each extremity draw lines to any convenient point on the horizon, then all the perpendiculars drawn between these lines will be perspectively equal, however much they may appear to vary in length. [Illustration: Fig. 76.] Let us suppose that in this figure (76) _AB_ and _A·B·_ each represent 5 feet. Then in the first case all the verticals, as _e_, _f_, _g_, _h_, drawn between _AO_ and _BO_ represent 5 feet, and in the second case all the horizontals _e_, _f_, _g_, _h_, drawn between _A·O_ and _B·O_ also represent 5 feet each. So that by the aid of this scale we can give the exact perspective height and width of any object in the picture, however far it may be from the base line, for of course we can increase or diminish our measurements at _AB_ and _A·B·_ to whatever length we require. As it may not be quite evident at first that the points _O_ may be taken at random, the following figure will prove it. XXVI THE VANISHING SCALE CAN BE DRAWN TO ANY POINT ON THE HORIZON From _AB_ (Fig. 77) draw _AO_, _BO_, thus forming the scale, raise vertical _C_. Now form a second scale from _AB_ by drawing _AO· BO·_, and therein raise vertical _D_ at an equal distance from the base. First, then, vertical _C_ equals _AB_, and secondly vertical _D_ equals _AB_, therefore _C_ equals _D_, so that either of these scales will measure a given height at a given distance. [Illustration: Fig. 77.] (See axioms of geometry.) [Illustration: Fig. 79. Schoolgirls.] [Illustration: Fig. 80. Cavaliers.] XXVII APPLICATION OF VANISHING SCALES TO DRAWING FIGURES In this figure we have marked off on a level plain three or four points _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, to indicate the places where we wish to stand our figures. _AB_ represents their average height, so we have made our scale _AO_, _BO_, accordingly. From each point marked we draw a line parallel to the base till it reaches the scale. From the point where it touches the line _AO_, raise perpendicular as _a_, which gives the height required at that distance, and must be referred back to the figure itself. [Illustration: Fig. 78.] XXVIII HOW TO DETERMINE THE HEIGHTS OF FIGURES ON A LEVEL PLANE _First Case._ This is but a repetition of the previous figure, excepting that we have substituted these schoolgirls for the vertical lines. If we wish to make some taller than the others, and some shorter, we can easily do so, as must be evident (see Fig. 79). Note that in this first case the scale is below the horizon, so that we see over the heads of the figures, those nearest to us being the lowest down. That is to say, we are looking on this scene from a slightly raised platform. _Second Case._ To draw figures at different distances when their heads are above the horizon, or as they would appear to a person sitting on a low seat. The height of the heads varies according to the distance of the figures (Fig. 80). _Third Case._ How to draw figures when their heads are about the height of the horizon, or as they appear to a person standing on the same level or walking among them. In this case the heads or the eyes are on a level with the horizon, and we have little necessity for a scale at the side unless it is for the purpose of ascertaining or marking their distances from the base line, and their respective heights, which of course vary; so in all cases allowance must be made for some being taller and some shorter than the scale measurement. [Illustration: Fig. 81.] XXIX THE HORIZON ABOVE THE FIGURES In this example from De Hoogh the doorway to the left is higher up than the figure of the lady, and the effect seems to me more pleasing and natural for this kind of domestic subject. This delightful painter was not only a master of colour, of sunlight effect, and perfect composition, but also of perspective, and thoroughly understood the charm it gives to a picture, when cunningly introduced, for he makes the spectator feel that he can walk along his passages and courtyards. Note that he frequently puts the point of sight quite at the side of his canvas, as at _S_, which gives almost the effect of angular perspective whilst it preserves the flatness and simplicity of parallel or horizontal perspective. [Illustration: Fig. 82. Courtyard by De Hoogh.] XXX LANDSCAPE PERSPECTIVE In an extended view or landscape seen from a height, we have to consider the perspective plane as in a great measure lying above it, reaching from the base of the picture to the horizon; but of course pierced here and there by trees, mountains, buildings, &c. As a rule in such cases, we copy our perspective from nature, and do not trouble ourselves much about mathematical rules. It is as well, however, to know them, so that we may feel sure we are right, as this gives certainty to our touch and enables us to work with freedom. Nor must we, when painting from nature, forget to take into account the effects of atmosphere and the various tones of the different planes of distance, for this makes much of the difference between a good picture and a bad one; being a more subtle quality, it requires a keener artistic sense to discover and depict it. (See Figs. 95 and 103.) If the landscape painter wishes to test his knowledge of perspective, let him dissect and work out one of Turner's pictures, or better still, put his own sketch from nature to the same test. XXXI FIGURES OF DIFFERENT HEIGHTS THE CHESSBOARD In this figure the same principle is applied as in the previous one, but the chessmen being of different heights we have to arrange the scale accordingly. First ascertain the exact height of each piece, as _Q_, _K_, _B_, which represent the queen, king, bishop, &c. Refer these dimensions to the scale, as shown at _QKB_, which will give us the perspective measurement of each piece according to the square on which it is placed. [Illustration: Fig. 83. Chessboard and Men.] This is shown in the above drawing (Fig. 83) in the case of the white queen and the black queen, &c. The castle, the knight, and the pawn being about the same height are measured from the fourth line of the scale marked _C_. [Illustration: Fig. 84.] XXXII APPLICATION OF THE VANISHING SCALE TO DRAWING FIGURES AT AN ANGLE WHEN THEIR VANISHING POINTS ARE INACCESSIBLE OR OUTSIDE THE PICTURE This is exemplified in the drawing of a fence (Fig. 84). Form scale _aS_, _bS_, in accordance with the height of the fence or wall to be depicted. Let _ao_ represent the direction or angle at which it is placed, draw _od_ to meet the scale at _d_, at _d_ raise vertical _dc_, which gives the height of the fence at _oo·_. Draw lines _bo·_, _eo_, _ao_, &c., and it will be found that all these lines if produced will meet at the same point on the horizon. To divide the fence into spaces, divide base line _af_ as required and proceed as already shown. XXXIII THE REDUCED DISTANCE. HOW TO PROCEED WHEN THE POINT OF DISTANCE IS INACCESSIBLE It has already been shown that too near a point of distance is objectionable on account of the distortion and disproportion resulting from it. At the same time, the long distance-point must be some way out of the picture and therefore inconvenient. The object of the reduced distance is to bring that point within the picture. [Illustration: Fig. 85.] In Fig. 85 we have made the distance nearly twice the length of the base of the picture, and consequently a long way out of it. Draw _Sa_, _Sb_, and from _a_ draw _aD_ to point of distance, which cuts _Sb_ at _o_, and determines the depth of the square _acob_. But we can find that same point if we take half the base and draw a line from ½ base to ½ distance. But even this ½ distance-point does not come inside the picture, so we take a fourth of the base and a fourth of the distance and draw a line from ¼ base to ¼ distance. We shall find that it passes precisely through the same point _o_ as the other lines _aD_, &c. We are thus able to find the required point _o_ without going outside the picture. Of course we could in the same way take an 8th or even a 16th distance, but the great use of this reduced distance, in addition to the above, is that it enables us to measure any depth into the picture with the greatest ease. It will be seen in the next figure that without having to extend the base, as is usually done, we can multiply that base to any amount by making use of these reduced distances on the horizontal line. This is quite a new method of proceeding, and it will be seen is mathematically correct. XXXIV HOW TO DRAW A LONG PASSAGE OR CLOISTER BY MEANS OF THE REDUCED DISTANCE [Illustration: Fig. 86.] In Fig. 86 we have divided the base of the first square into four equal parts, which may represent so many feet, so that A4 and _Bd_ being the retreating sides of the square each represents 4 feet. But we found point ¼D by drawing 3D from ¼ base to ¼ distance, and by proceeding in the same way from each division, _A_, 1, 2, 3, we mark off on _SB_ four spaces each equal to 4 feet, in all 16 feet, so that by taking the whole base and the ¼ distance we find point _O_, which is distant four times the length of the base _AB_. We can multiply this distance to any amount by drawing other diagonals to 8th distance, &c. The same rule applies to this corridor (Fig. 87 and Fig. 88). [Illustration: Fig. 87.] [Illustration: Fig. 88.] XXXV HOW TO FORM A VANISHING SCALE THAT SHALL GIVE THE HEIGHT, DEPTH, AND DISTANCE OF ANY OBJECT IN THE PICTURE If we make our scale to vanish to the point of sight, as in Fig. 89, we can make _SB_, the lower line thereof, a measuring line for distances. Let us first of all divide the base _AB_ into eight parts, each part representing 5 feet. From each division draw lines to 8th distance; by their intersections with _SB_ we obtain measurements of 40, 80, 120, 160, &c., feet. Now divide the side of the picture _BE_ in the same manner as the base, which gives us the height of 40 feet. From the side _BE_ draw lines 5S, 15S, &c., to point of sight, and from each division on the base line also draw lines 5S, 10S, 15S, &c., to point of sight, and from each division on _SB_, such as 40, 80, &c., draw horizontals parallel to base. We thus obtain squares 40 feet wide, beginning at base _AB_ and reaching as far as required. Note how the height of the flagstaff, which is 140 feet high and 280 feet distant, is obtained. So also any buildings or other objects can be measured, such as those shown on the left of the picture. [Illustration: Fig. 89.] XXXVI MEASURING SCALE ON GROUND A simple and very old method of drawing buildings, &c., and giving them their right width and height is by means of squares of a given size, drawn on the ground. [Illustration: Fig. 90.] In the above sketch (Fig. 90) the squares on the ground represent 3 feet each way, or one square yard. Taking this as our standard measure, we find the door on the left is 10 feet high, that the archway at the end is 21 feet high and 12 feet wide, and so on. [Illustration: Fig. 91. Natural Perspective.] [Illustration: Fig. 92. Honfleur.] Fig. 91 is a sketch made at Sandwich, Kent, and shows a somewhat similar subject to Fig. 84, but the irregularity and freedom of the perspective gives it a charm far beyond the rigid precision of the other, while it conforms to its main laws. This sketch, however, is the real artist's perspective, or what we might term natural perspective. XXXVII APPLICATION OF THE REDUCED DISTANCE AND THE VANISHING SCALE TO DRAWING A LIGHTHOUSE, &C. [Above illustration: Perspective of a lighthouse 135 feet high at 800 feet distance.] [Illustration: Fig. 93. Key to Fig. 92, Honfleur.] In the drawing of Honfleur (Fig. 92) we divide the base _AB_ as in the previous figure, but the spaces measure 5 feet instead of 3 feet: so that taking the 8th distance, the divisions on the vanishing line _BS_ measure 40 feet each, and at point _O_ we have 400 feet of distance, but we require 800. So we again reduce the distance to a 16th. We thus multiply the base by 16. Now let us take a base of 50 feet at _f_ and draw line _fD_ to 16th distance; if we multiply 50 feet by 16 we obtain the 800 feet required. The height of the lighthouse is found by means of the vanishing scale, which is 15 feet below and 15 feet above the horizon, or 30 feet from the sea-level. At _L_ we raise a vertical _LM_, which shows the position of the lighthouse. Then on that vertical measure the height required as shown in the figure. The 800 feet could be obtained at once by drawing line _fD_, or 50 feet, to 16th distance. The other measurements obtained by 8th distance serve for nearer buildings. XXXVIII HOW TO MEASURE LONG DISTANCES SUCH AS A MILE OR UPWARDS The wonderful effect of distance in Turner's pictures is not to be achieved by mere measurement, and indeed can only be properly done by studying Nature and drawing her perspective as she presents it to us. At the same time it is useful to be able to test and to set out distances in arranging a composition. This latter, if neglected, often leads to great difficulties and sometimes to repainting. To show the method of measuring very long distances we have to work with a very small scale to the foot, and in Fig. 94 I have divided the base _AB_ into eleven parts, each part representing 10 feet. First draw _AS_ and _BS_ to point of sight. From _A_ draw _AD_ to ¼ distance, and we obtain at 440 on line _BS_ four times the length of _AB_, or 110 feet × 4 = 440 feet. Again, taking the whole base and drawing a line from _S_ to 8th distance we obtain eight times 110 feet or 880 feet. If now we use the 16th distance we get sixteen times 110 feet, or 1,760 feet, one-third of a mile; by repeating this process, but by using the base at 1,760, which is the same length in perspective as _AB_, we obtain 3,520 feet, and then again using the base at 3,520 and proceeding in the same way we obtain 5,280 feet, or one mile to the archway. The flags show their heights at their respective distances from the base. By the scale at the side of the picture, _BO_, we can measure any height above or any depth below the perspective plane. [Illustration: Fig. 94.] _Note_.--This figure (here much reduced) should be drawn large by the student, so that the numbering, &c., may be made more distinct. Indeed, many of the other figures should be copied large, and worked out with care, as lessons in perspective. XXXIX FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF LONG DISTANCES AND EXTENDED VIEWS An extended view is generally taken from an elevated position, so that the principal part of the landscape lies beneath the perspective plane, as already noted, and we shall presently treat of objects and figures on uneven ground. In the previous figure is shown how we can measure heights and depths to any extent. But when we turn to a drawing by Turner, such as the 'View from Richmond Hill', we feel that the only way to accomplish such perspective as this, is to go and draw it from nature, and even then to use our judgement, as he did, as to how much we may emphasize or even exaggerate certain features. [Illustration: Fig. 95. Turner's View from Richmond Hill.] Note in this view the foreground on which the principal figures stand is on a level with the perspective plane, while the river and surrounding park and woods are hundreds of feet below us and stretch away for miles into the distance. The contrasts obtained by this arrangement increase the illusion of space, and the figures in the foreground give as it were a standard of measurement, and by their contrast to the size of the trees show us how far away those trees are. XL HOW TO ASCERTAIN THE RELATIVE HEIGHTS OF FIGURES ON AN INCLINED PLANE [Illustration: Fig. 96.] The three figures to the right marked _f_, _g_, _b_ (Fig. 96) are on level ground, and we measure them by the vanishing scale _aS_, _bS_. Those to the left, which are repetitions of them, are on an inclined plane, the vanishing point of which is _S·_; by the side of this plane we have placed another vanishing scale _a·S·_, _b·S·_, by which we measure the figures on that incline in the same way as on the level plane. It will be seen that if a horizontal line is drawn from the foot of one of these figures, say _G_, to point _O_ on the edge of the incline, then dropped vertically to _o·_, then again carried on to _o··_ where the other figure _g_ is, we find it is the same height and also that the other vanishing scale is the same width at that distance, so that we can work from either one or the other. In the event of the rising ground being uneven we can make use of the scale on the level plane. XLI HOW TO FIND THE DISTANCE OF A GIVEN FIGURE OR POINT FROM THE BASE LINE [Illustration: Fig. 97.] Let _P_ be the given figure. Form scale _ACS_, _S_ being the point of sight and _D_ the distance. Draw horizontal _do_ through _P_. From _A_ draw diagonal _AD_ to distance point, cutting _do_ in _o_, through _o_ draw _SB_ to base, and we now have a square _AdoB_ on the perspective plane; and as figure _P_ is standing on the far side of that square it must be the distance _AB_, which is one side of it, from the base line--or picture plane. For figures very far away it might be necessary to make use of half-distance. XLII HOW TO MEASURE THE HEIGHT OF FIGURES ON UNEVEN GROUND In previous problems we have drawn figures on level planes, which is easy enough. We have now to represent some above and some below the perspective plane. [Illustration: Fig. 98.] Form scale _bS_, _cS_; mark off distances 20 feet, 40 feet, &c. Suppose figure _K_ to be 60 feet off. From point at his feet draw horizontal to meet vertical _On_, which is 60 feet distant. At the point _m_ where this line meets the vertical, measure height _mn_ equal to width of scale at that distance, transfer this to _K_, and you have the required height of the figure in black. For the figures under the cliff 20 feet below the perspective plane, form scale _FS_, _GS_, making it the same width as the other, namely 5 feet, and proceed in the usual way to find the height of the figures on the sands, which are here supposed to be nearly on a level with the sea, of course making allowance for different heights and various other things. XLIII FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE SIZE OF FIGURES AT DIFFERENT DISTANCES AND ON UNEVEN GROUND [Illustration: Fig. 99.] Let _ab_ be the height of a figure, say 6 feet. First form scale _aS_, _bS_, the lower line of which, _aS_, is on a level with the base or on the perspective plane. The figure marked _C_ is close to base, the group of three is farther off (24 feet), and 6 feet higher up, so we measure the height on the vanishing scale and also above it. The two girls carrying fish are still farther off, and about 12 feet below. To tell how far a figure is away, refer its measurements to the vanishing scale (see Fig. 96). XLIV FIGURES ON A DESCENDING PLANE In this case (Fig. 100) the same rule applies as in the previous problem, but as the road on the left is going down hill, the vanishing point of the inclined plane is below the horizon at point _S·_; _AS_, _BS_ is the vanishing scale on the level plane; and _A·S·_, _B·S·_, that on the incline. Fig. 101. This is an outline of above figure to show the working more plainly. Note the wall to the left marked _W_ and the manner in which it appears to drop at certain intervals, its base corresponding with the inclined plane, but the upper lines of each division being made level are drawn to the point of sight, or to their vanishing point on the horizon; it is important to observe this, as it aids greatly in drawing a road going down hill. [Illustration: Fig. 100.] [Illustration: Fig. 101.] [Illustration: Fig. 102.] XLV FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE DESCENDING PLANE In the centre of this picture (Fig. 102) we suppose the road to be descending till it reaches a tunnel which goes under a road or leads to a river (like one leading out of the Strand near Somerset House). It is drawn on the same principle as the foregoing figure. Of course to see the road the spectator must get pretty near to it, otherwise it will be out of sight. Also a level plane must be shown, as by its contrast to the other we perceive that the latter is going down hill. XLVI FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF UNEVEN GROUND An extended view drawn from a height of about 30 feet from a road that descends about 45 feet. [Illustration: Fig. 103. Farningham.] In drawing a landscape such as Fig. 103 we have to bear in mind the height of the horizon, which being exactly opposite the eye, shows us at once which objects are below and which are above us, and to draw them accordingly, especially roofs, buildings, walls, hedges, &c.; also it is well to sketch in the different fields figures of men and cattle, as from the size of these we can judge of the rest. XLVII THE PICTURE STANDING ON THE GROUND Let _K_ represent a frame placed vertically and at a given distance in front of us. If stood on the ground our foreground will touch the base line of the picture, and we can fix up a standard of measurement both on the base and on the side as in this sketch, taking 6 feet as about the height of the figures. [Illustration: Fig. 104. Toledo.] XLVIII THE PICTURE ON A HEIGHT If we are looking at a scene from a height, that is from a terrace, or a window, or a cliff, then the near foreground, unless it be the terrace, window-sill, &c., would not come into the picture, and we could not see the near figures at _A_, and the nearest to come into view would be those at _B_, so that a view from a window, &c., would be as it were without a foreground. Note that the figures at _B_ would be (according to this sketch) 30 feet from the picture plane and about 18 feet below the base line. [Illustration: Fig. 105.] BOOK THIRD XLIX ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE Hitherto we have spoken only of parallel perspective, which is comparatively easy, and in our first figure we placed the cube with one of its sides either touching or parallel to the transparent plane. We now place it so that one angle only (_ab_), touches the picture. [Illustration: Fig. 106.] Its sides are no longer drawn to the point of sight as in Fig. 7, nor its diagonal to the point of distance, but to some other points on the horizon, although the same rule holds good as regards their parallelism; as for instance, in the case of _bc_ and _ad_, which, if produced, would meet at _V_, a point on the horizon called a vanishing point. In this figure only one vanishing point is seen, which is to the right of the point of sight _S_, whilst the other is some distance to the left, and outside the picture. If the cube is correctly drawn, it will be found that the lines _ae_, _bg_, &c., if produced, will meet on the horizon at this other vanishing point. This far-away vanishing point is one of the inconveniences of oblique or angular perspective, and therefore it will be a considerable gain to the draughtsman if we can dispense with it. This can be easily done, as in the above figure, and here our geometry will come to our assistance, as I shall show presently. L HOW TO PUT A GIVEN POINT INTO PERSPECTIVE Let us place the given point _P_ on a geometrical plane, to show how far it is from the base line, and indeed in the exact position we wish it to be in the picture. The geometrical plane is supposed to face us, to hang down, as it were, from the base line _AB_, like the side of a table, the top of which represents the perspective plane. It is to that perspective plane that we now have to transfer the point _P_. [Illustration: Fig. 107.] From _P_ raise perpendicular _Pm_ till it touches the base line at _m_. With centre _m_ and radius _mP_ describe arc _Pn_ so that _mn_ is now the same length as _mP_. As point _P_ is opposite point _m_, so must it be in the perspective, therefore we draw a line at right angles to the base, that is to the point of sight, and somewhere on this line will be found the required point _P·_. We now have to find how far from _m_ must that point be. It must be the length of _mn_, which is the same as _mP_. We therefore from _n_ draw _nD_ to the point of distance, which being at an angle of 45°, or half a right angle, makes _mP_· the perspective length of _mn_ by its intersection with _mS_, and thus gives us the point _P·_, which is the perspective of the original point. LI A PERSPECTIVE POINT BEING GIVEN, FIND ITS POSITION ON THE GEOMETRICAL PLANE To do this we simply reverse the foregoing problem. Thus let _P_ be the given perspective point. From point of sight _S_ draw a line through _P_ till it cuts _AB_ at _m_. From distance _D_ draw another line through _P_ till it cuts the base at _n_. From _m_ drop perpendicular, and then with centre _m_ and radius _mn_ describe arc, and where it cuts that perpendicular is the required point _P·_. We often have to make use of this problem. [Illustration: Fig. 108.] LII HOW TO PUT A GIVEN LINE INTO PERSPECTIVE This is simply a question of putting two points into perspective, instead of one, or like doing the previous problem twice over, for the two points represent the two extremities of the line. Thus we have to find the perspective of _A_ and _B_, namely _a·b·_. Join those points, and we have the line required. [Illustration: Fig. 109.] [Illustration: Fig. 110.] If one end touches the base, as at _A_ (Fig. 110), then we have but to find one point, namely _b_. We also find the perspective of the angle _mAB_, namely the shaded triangle mAb. Note also that the perspective triangle equals the geometrical triangle. [Illustration: Fig. 111.] When the line required is parallel to the base line of the picture, then the perspective of it is also parallel to that base (see Rule 3). LIII TO FIND THE LENGTH OF A GIVEN PERSPECTIVE LINE A perspective line _AB_ being given, find its actual length and the angle at which it is placed. This is simply the reverse of the previous problem. Let _AB_ be the given line. From distance _D_ through _A_ draw _DC_, and from _S_, point of sight, through _A_ draw _SO_. Drop _OP_ at right angles to base, making it equal to _OC_. Join _PB_, and line _PB_ is the actual length of _AB_. This problem is useful in finding the position of any given line or point on the perspective plane. [Illustration: Fig. 112.] LIV TO FIND THESE POINTS WHEN THE DISTANCE-POINT IS INACCESSIBLE [Illustration: Fig. 113.] If the distance-point is a long way out of the picture, then the same result can be obtained by using the half distance and half base, as already shown. From _a_, half of _mP_·, draw quadrant _ab_, from _b_ (half base), draw line from _b_ to half Dist., which intersects _Sm_ at _P_, precisely the same point as would be obtained by using the whole distance. LV HOW TO PUT A GIVEN TRIANGLE OR OTHER RECTILINEAL FIGURE INTO PERSPECTIVE Here we simply put three points into perspective to obtain the given triangle _A_, or five points to obtain the five-sided figure at _B_. So can we deal with any number of figures placed at any angle. [Illustration: Fig. 114.] Both the above figures are placed in the same diagram, showing how any number can be drawn by means of the same point of sight and the same point of distance, which makes them belong to the same picture. It is to be noted that the figures appear reversed in the perspective. That is, in the geometrical triangle the base at _ab_ is uppermost, whereas in the perspective _ab_ is lowermost, yet both are nearest to the ground line. LVI HOW TO PUT A GIVEN SQUARE INTO ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE Let _ABCD_ (Fig. 115) be the given square on the geometrical plane, where we can place it as near or as far from the base and at any angle that we wish. We then proceed to find its perspective on the picture by finding the perspective of the four points _ABCD_ as already shown. Note that the two sides of the perspective square _dc_ and _ab_ being produced, meet at point _V_ on the horizon, which is their vanishing point, but to find the point on the horizon where sides _bc_ and _ad_ meet, we should have to go a long way to the left of the figure, which by this method is not necessary. [Illustration: Fig. 115.] LVII OF MEASURING POINTS We now have to find certain points by which to measure those vanishing or retreating lines which are no longer at right angles to the picture plane, as in parallel perspective, and have to be measured in a different way, and here geometry comes to our assistance. [Illustration: Fig. 116.] Note that the perspective square _P_ equals the geometrical square _K_, so that side _AB_ of the one equals side _ab_ of the other. With centre _A_ and radius _AB_ describe arc _Bm·_ till it cuts the base line at _m·_. Now _AB_ = _Am·_, and if we join _bm·_ then triangle _BAm·_ is an isosceles triangle. So likewise if we join _m·b_ in the perspective figure will m·Ab be the same isosceles triangle in perspective. Continue line _m·b_ till it cuts the horizon in _m_, which point will be the measuring point for the vanishing line _AbV_. For if in an isosceles triangle we draw lines across it, parallel to its base from one side to the other, we divide both sides in exactly the same quantities and proportions, so that if we measure on the base line of the picture the spaces we require, such as 1, 2, 3, on the length _Am·_, and then from these divisions draw lines to the measuring point, these lines will intersect the vanishing line _AbV_ in the lengths and proportions required. To find a measuring point for the lines that go to the other vanishing point, we proceed in the same way. Of course great accuracy is necessary. Note that the dotted lines 1,1, 2,2, &c., are parallel in the perspective, as in the geometrical figure. In the former the lines are drawn to the same point _m_ on the horizon. LVIII HOW TO DIVIDE ANY GIVEN STRAIGHT LINE INTO EQUAL OR PROPORTIONATE PARTS [Illustration: Fig. 117.] Let _AB_ (Fig. 117) be the given straight line that we wish to divide into five equal parts. Draw _AC_ at any convenient angle, and measure off five equal parts with the compasses thereon, as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. From 5C draw line to 5B. Now from each division on _AC_ draw lines 4,4, 3,3, &c., parallel to 5,5. Then _AB_ will be divided into the required number of equal parts. LIX HOW TO DIVIDE A DIAGONAL VANISHING LINE INTO ANY NUMBER OF EQUAL OR PROPORTIONAL PARTS In a previous figure (Fig. 116) we have shown how to find a measuring point when the exact measure of a vanishing line is required, but if it suffices merely to divide a line into a given number of equal parts, then the following simple method can be adopted. We wish to divide _ab_ into five equal parts. From _a_, measure off on the ground line the five equal spaces required. From 5, the point to which these measures extend (as they are taken at random), draw a line through _b_ till it cuts the horizon at _O_. Then proceed to draw lines from each division on the base to point _O_, and they will intersect and divide _ab_ into the required number of equal parts. [Illustration: Fig. 118.] [Illustration: Fig. 119.] The same method applies to a given line to be divided into various proportions, as shown in this lower figure. [Illustration: Fig. 120.] [Illustration: Fig. 121.] LX FURTHER USE OF THE MEASURING POINT O One square in oblique or angular perspective being given, draw any number of other squares equal to it by means of this point _O_ and the diagonals. Let _ABCD_ (Fig. 120) be the given square; produce its sides _AB_, _DC_ till they meet at point _V_. From _D_ measure off on base any number of equal spaces of any convenient length, as 1, 2, 3, &c.; from 1, through corner of square _C_, draw a line to meet the horizon at _O_, and from _O_ draw lines to the several divisions on base line. These lines will divide the vanishing line _DV_ into the required number of parts equal to _DC_, the side of the square. Produce the diagonal of the square _DB_ till it cuts the horizon at _G_. From the divisions on line _DV_ draw diagonals to point _G_: their intersections with the other vanishing line _AV_ will determine the direction of the cross-lines which form the bases of other squares without the necessity of drawing them to the other vanishing point, which in this case is some distance to the left of the picture. If we produce these cross-lines to the horizon we shall find that they all meet at the other vanishing point, to which of course it is easy to draw them when that point is accessible, as in Fig. 121; but if it is too far out of the picture, then this method enables us to do without it. Figure 121 corroborates the above by showing the two vanishing points and additional squares. Note the working of the diagonals drawn to point _G_, in both figures. LXI FURTHER USE OF THE MEASURING POINT O Suppose we wish to divide the side of a building, as in Fig. 123, or to draw a balcony, a series of windows, or columns, or what not, or, in other words, any line above the horizon, as _AB_. Then from _A_ we draw _AC_ parallel to the horizon, and mark thereon the required divisions 5, 10, 15, &c.: in this case twenty-five (Fig. 122). From _C_ draw a line through _B_ till it cuts the horizon at _O_. Then proceed to draw the other lines from each division to _O_, and thus divide the vanishing line _AB_ as required. [Illustration: Fig. 122 is a front view of the portico, Fig. 123.] [Illustration: Fig. 123.] In this portico there are thirteen triglyphs with twelve spaces between them, making twenty-five divisions. The required number of parts to draw the columns can be obtained in the same way. LXII ANOTHER METHOD OF ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE, BEING THAT ADOPTED IN OUR ART SCHOOLS In the previous method we have drawn our squares by means of a geometrical plan, putting each point into perspective as required, and then by means of the perspective drawing thus obtained, finding our vanishing and measuring points. In this method we proceed in exactly the opposite way, setting out our points first, and drawing the square (or other figure) afterwards. [Illustration: Fig. 124.] Having drawn the horizontal and base lines, and fixed upon the position of the point of sight, we next mark the position of the spectator by dropping a perpendicular, _S ST_, from that point of sight, making it the same length as the distance we suppose the spectator to be from the picture, and thus we make _ST_ the station-point. To understand this figure we must first look upon it as a ground-plan or bird's-eye view, the line V2V1 or horizon line representing the picture seen edgeways, because of course the station-point cannot be in the picture itself, but a certain distance in front of it. The angle at _ST_, that is the angle which decides the positions of the two vanishing points V1, V2, is always a right angle, and the two remaining angles on that side of the line, called the directing line, are together equal to a right angle or 90°. So that in fixing upon the angle at which the square or other figure is to be placed, we say 'let it be 60° and 30°, or 70° and 20°', &c. Having decided upon the station-point and the angle at which the square is to be placed, draw TV1 and TV2, till they cut the horizon at V1 and V2. These are the two vanishing points to which the sides of the figure are respectively drawn. But we still want the measuring points for these two vanishing lines. We therefore take first, V1 as centre and V1T as radius, and describe arc of circle till it cuts the horizon in M1, which is the measuring point for all lines drawn to V1. Then with radius V2T describe arc from centre V2 till it cuts the horizon in M2, which is the measuring point for all vanishing lines drawn to V2. We have now set out our points. Let us proceed to draw the square _Abcd_. From _A_, the nearest angle (in this instance touching the base line), measure on each side of it the equal lengths _AB_ and _AE_, which represent the width or side of the square. Draw EM2 and BM1 from the two measuring points, which give us, by their intersections with the vanishing lines AV1 and AV2, the perspective lengths of the sides of the square _Abcd_. Join _b_ and V1 and dV2, which intersect each other at _C_, then _Adcb_ is the square required. This method, which is easy when you know it, has certain drawbacks, the chief one being that if we require a long-distance point, and a small angle, such as 10° on one side, and 80° on the other, then the size of the diagram becomes so large that it has to be carried out on the floor of the studio with long strings, &c., which is a very clumsy and unscientific way of setting to work. The architects in such cases make use of the centrolinead, a clever mechanical contrivance for getting over the difficulty of the far-off vanishing point, but by the method I have shown you, and shall further illustrate, you will find that you can dispense with all this trouble, and do all your perspective either inside the picture or on a very small margin outside it. Perhaps another drawback to this method is that it is not self-evident, as in the former one, and being rather difficult to explain, the student is apt to take it on trust, and not to trouble about the reasons for its construction: but to show that it is equally correct, I will draw the two methods in one figure. LXIII TWO METHODS OF ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE IN ONE FIGURE [Illustration: Fig. 125.] It matters little whether the station-point is placed above or below the horizon, as the result is the same. In Fig. 125 it is placed above, as the lower part of the figure is occupied with the geometrical plan of the other method. In each case we make the square _K_ the same size and at the same angle, its near corner being at _A_. It must be seen that by whichever method we work out this perspective, the result is the same, so that both are correct: the great advantage of the first or geometrical system being, that we can place the square at any angle, as it is drawn without reference to vanishing points. We will, however, work out a few figures by the second method. LXIV TO DRAW A CUBE, THE POINTS BEING GIVEN As in a previous figure (124) we found the various working points of angular perspective, we need now merely transfer them to the horizontal line in this figure, as in this case they will answer our purpose perfectly well. [Illustration: Fig. 126.] Let _A_ be the nearest angle touching the base. Draw AV1, AV2. From _A_, raise vertical _Ae_, the height of the cube. From _e_ draw eV1, eV2, from the other angles raise verticals _bf_, _dh_, _cg_, to meet eV1, eV2, fV2, &c., and the cube is complete. LXV AMPLIFICATION OF THE CUBE APPLIED TO DRAWING A COTTAGE [Illustration: Fig. 127.] Note that we have started this figure with the cube _Adhefb_. We have taken three times _AB_, its width, for the front of our house, and twice _AB_ for the side, and have made it two cubes high, not counting the roof. Note also the use of the measuring-points in connexion with the measurements on the base line, and the upper measuring line _TPK_. LXVI HOW TO DRAW AN INTERIOR AT AN ANGLE Here we make use of the same points as in a previous figure, with the addition of the point _G_, which is the vanishing point of the diagonals of the squares on the floor. [Illustration: Fig. 128.] From _A_ draw square _Abcd_, and produce its sides in all directions; again from _A_, through the opposite angle of the square _C_, draw a diagonal till it cuts the horizon at _G_. From _G_ draw diagonals through _b_ and _d_, cutting the base at _o_, _o_, make spaces _o_, _o_, equal to _Ao_ all along the base, and from them draw diagonals to _G_; through the points where these diagonals intersect the vanishing lines drawn in the direction of _Ab_, _dc_ and _Ad_, _bc_, draw lines to the other vanishing point V1, thus completing the squares, and so cover the floor with them; they will then serve to measure width of door, windows, &c. Of course horizontal lines on wall 1 are drawn to V1, and those on wall 2 to V2. In order to see this drawing properly, the eye should be placed about 3 inches from it, and opposite the point of sight; it will then stand out like a stereoscopic picture, and appear as actual space, but otherwise the perspective seems deformed, and the angles exaggerated. To make this drawing look right from a reasonable distance, the point of distance should be at least twice as far off as it is here, and this would mean altering all the other points and sending them a long way out of the picture; this is why artists use those long strings referred to above. I would however, advise them to make their perspective drawing on a small scale, and then square it up to the size of the canvas. LXVII HOW TO CORRECT DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE BY DOUBLING THE LINE OF DISTANCE Here we have the same interior as the foregoing, but drawn with double the distance, so that the perspective is not so violent and the objects are truer in proportion to each other. [Illustration: Fig. 129.] To redraw the whole figure double the size, including the station-point, would require a very large diagram, that we could not get into this book without a folding plate, but it comes to the same thing if we double the distances between the various points. Thus, if from _S_ to _G_ in the small diagram is 1 inch, in the larger one make it 2 inches. If from _S_ to M2 is 2 inches, in the larger make it 4, and so on. Or this form may be used: make _AB_ twice the length of _AC_ (Fig. 130), or in any other proportion required. On _AC_ mark the points as in the drawing you wish to enlarge. Make _AB_ the length that you wish to enlarge to, draw _CB_, and then from each division on _AC_ draw lines parallel to _CB_, and _AB_ will be divided in the same proportions, as I have already shown (Fig. 117). There is no doubt that it is easier to work direct from the vanishing points themselves, especially in complicated architectural work, but at the same time I will now show you how we can dispense with, at all events, one of them, and that the farthest away. [Illustration: Fig. 130.] LXVIII HOW TO DRAW A CUBE ON A GIVEN SQUARE, USING ONLY ONE VANISHING POINT _ABCD_ is the given square (Fig. 131). At _A_ raise vertical _Aa_ equal to side of square _AB·_, from _a_ draw _ab_ to the vanishing point. Raise _Bb_. Produce _VD_ to _E_ to touch the base line. From _E_ raise vertical _EF_, making it equal to _Aa_. From _F_ draw _FV_. Raise _Dd_ and _Cc_, their heights being determined by the line _FV_. Join _da_ and the cube is complete. It will be seen that the verticals raised at each corner of the square are equal perspectively, as they are drawn between parallels which start from equal heights, namely, from _EF_ and _Aa_ to the same point _V_, the vanishing point. Any other line, such as _OO·_, can be directed to the inaccessible vanishing point in the same way as _ad_, &c. _Note._ This is only one of many original figures and problems in this book which have been called up by the wish to facilitate the work of the artist, and as it were by necessity. [Illustration: Fig. 131.] LXIX A COURTYARD OR CLOISTER DRAWN WITH ONE VANISHING POINT [Illustration: Fig. 132.] In this figure I have first drawn the pavement by means of the diagonals _GA_, _Go_, _Go_, &c., and the vanishing point _V_, the square at _A_ being given. From _A_ draw diagonal through opposite corner till it cuts the horizon at _G_. From this same point _G_ draw lines through the other corners of the square till they cut the ground line at _o_, _o_. Take this measurement _Ao_ and mark it along the base right and left of _A_, and the lines drawn from these points _o_ to point _G_ will give the diagonals of all the squares on the pavement. Produce sides of square _A_, and where these lines are intersected by the diagonals _Go_ draw lines from the vanishing point _V_ to base. These will give us the outlines of the squares lying between them and also guiding points that will enable us to draw as many more as we please. These again will give us our measurements for the widths of the arches, &c., or between the columns. Having fixed the height of wall or dado, we make use of _V_ point to draw the sides of the building, and by means of proportionate measurement complete the rest, as in Fig. 128. LXX HOW TO DRAW LINES WHICH SHALL MEET AT A DISTANT POINT, BY MEANS OF DIAGONALS This is in a great measure a repetition of the foregoing figure, and therefore needs no further explanation. [Illustration: Fig. 133.] I must, however, point out the importance of the point _G_. In angular perspective it in a measure takes the place of the point of distance in parallel perspective, since it is the vanishing point of diagonals at 45° drawn between parallels such as _AV_, _DV_, drawn to a vanishing point _V_. The method of dividing line _AV_ into a number of parts equal to _AB_, the side of the square, is also shown in a previous figure (Fig. 120). LXXI HOW TO DIVIDE A SQUARE PLACED AT AN ANGLE INTO A GIVEN NUMBER OF SMALL SQUARES _ABCD_ is the given square, and only one vanishing point is accessible. Let us divide it into sixteen small squares. Produce side _CD_ to base at _E_. Divide _EA_ into four equal parts. From each division draw lines to vanishing point _V_. Draw diagonals _BD_ and _AC_, and produce the latter till it cuts the horizon in _G_. Draw the three cross-lines through the intersections made by the diagonals and the lines drawn to _V_, and thus divide the square into sixteen. [Illustration: Fig. 134.] This is to some extent the reverse of the previous problem. It also shows how the long vanishing point can be dispensed with, and the perspective drawing brought within the picture. LXXII FURTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW TO DIVIDE A GIVEN OBLIQUE SQUARE INTO A GIVEN NUMBER OF EQUAL SQUARES, SAY TWENTY-FIVE Having drawn the square _ABCD_, which is enclosed, as will be seen, in a dotted square in parallel perspective, I divide the line _EA_ into five equal parts instead of four (Fig. 135), and have made use of the device for that purpose by measuring off the required number on line _EF_, &c. Fig. 136 is introduced here simply to show that the square can be divided into any number of smaller squares. Nor need the figure be necessarily a square; it is just as easy to make it an oblong, as _ABEF_ (Fig. 136); for although we begin with a square we can extend it in any direction we please, as here shown. [Illustration: Fig. 135.] [Illustration: Fig. 136.] LXXIII OF PARALLELS AND DIAGONALS [Illustration: Fig. 137 A.] [Illustration: Fig. 137 B.] [Illustration: Fig. 137 C.] To find the centre of a square or other rectangular figure we have but to draw its two diagonals, and their intersection will give us the centre of the figure (see 137 A). We do the same with perspective figures, as at B. In Fig. C is shown how a diagonal, drawn from one angle of a square _B_ through the centre _O_ of the opposite side of the square, will enable us to find a second square lying between the same parallels, then a third, a fourth, and so on. At figure _K_ lying on the ground, I have divided the farther side of the square _mn_ into ¼, 1/3, ½. If I draw a diagonal from _G_ (at the base) through the half of this line I cut off on _FS_ the lengths or sides of two squares; if through the quarter I cut off the length of four squares on the vanishing line _FS_, and so on. In Fig. 137 D is shown how easily any number of objects at any equal distances apart, such as posts, trees, columns, &c., can be drawn by means of diagonals between parallels, guided by a central line _GS_. [Illustration: Fig. 137 D.] LXXIV THE SQUARE, THE OBLONG, AND THEIR DIAGONALS [Illustration: Fig. 138.] [Illustration: Fig. 139.] Having found the centre of a square or oblong, such as Figs. 138 and 139, if we draw a third line through that centre at a given angle and then at each of its extremities draw perpendiculars _AB_, _DC_, we divide that square or oblong into three parts, the two outer portions being equal to each other, and the centre one either larger or smaller as desired; as, for instance, in the triumphal arch we make the centre portion larger than the two outer sides. When certain architectural details and spaces are to be put into perspective, a scale such as that in Fig. 123 will be found of great convenience; but if only a ready division of the principal proportions is required, then these diagonals will be found of the greatest use. LXXV SHOWING THE USE OF THE SQUARE AND DIAGONALS IN DRAWING DOORWAYS, WINDOWS, AND OTHER ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES This example is from Serlio's _Architecture_ (1663), showing what excellent proportion can be obtained by the square and diagonals. The width of the door is one-third of the base of square, the height two-thirds. As a further illustration we have drawn the same figure in perspective. [Illustration: Fig. 140.] [Illustration: Fig. 141.] LXXVI HOW TO MEASURE DEPTHS BY DIAGONALS If we take any length on the base of a square, say from _A_ to _g_, and from _g_ raise a perpendicular till it cuts the diagonal _AB_ in _O_, then from _O_ draw horizontal _Og·_, we form a square AgOg·, and thus measure on one side of the square the distance or depth _Ag·_. So can we measure any other length, such as _fg_, in like manner. [Illustration: Fig. 142.] [Illustration: Fig. 143.] To do this in perspective we pursue precisely the same method, as shown in this figure (143). To measure a length _Ag_ on the side of square _AC_, we draw a line from _g_ to the point of sight _S_, and where it crosses diagonal _AB_ at _O_ we draw horizontal _Og_, and thus find the required depth _Ag_ in the picture. LXXVII HOW TO MEASURE DISTANCES BY THE SQUARE AND DIAGONAL It may sometimes be convenient to have a ready method by which to measure the width and length of objects standing against the wall of a gallery, without referring to distance-points, &c. [Illustration: Fig. 144.] In Fig. 144 the floor is divided into two large squares with their diagonals. Suppose we wish to draw a fireplace or a piece of furniture _K_, we measure its base _ef_ on _AB_, as far from _B_ as we wish it to be in the picture; draw _eo_ and _fo_ to point of sight, and proceed as in the previous figure by drawing parallels from _Oo_, &c. Let it be observed that the great advantage of this method is, that we can use it to measure such distant objects as _XY_ just as easily as those near to us. There is, however, a still further advantage arising from it, and that is that it introduces us to a new and simpler method of perspective, to which I have already referred, and it will, I hope, be found of infinite use to the artist. _Note._--As we have founded many of these figures on a given square in angular perspective, it is as well to have a ready and certain means of drawing that square without the elaborate setting out of a geometrical plan, as in the first method, or the more cumbersome and extended system of the second method. I shall therefore show you another method equally correct, but much simpler than either, which I have invented for our use, and which indeed forms one of the chief features of this book. LXXVIII HOW BY MEANS OF THE SQUARE AND DIAGONAL WE CAN DETERMINE THE POSITION OF POINTS IN SPACE Apart from the aid that perspective affords the draughtsman, there is a further value in it, in that it teaches us almost a new science, which we might call the mystery of aspect, and how it is that the objects around us take so many different forms, or rather appearances, although they themselves remain the same. And also that it enables us, with, I think, great pleasure to ourselves, to fathom space, to work out difficult problems by simple reasoning, and to exercise those inventive and critical faculties which give strength and enjoyment to mental life. And now, after this brief excursion into philosophy, let us come down to the simple question of the perspective of a point. [Illustration: Fig. 145.] [Illustration: Fig. 146.] Here, for instance, are two aspects of the same thing: the geometrical square _A_, which is facing us, and the perspective square _B_, which we suppose to lie flat on the table, or rather on the perspective plane. Line _A·C·_ is the perspective of line _AC_. On the geometrical square we can make what measurements we please with the compasses, but on the perspective square _B·_ the only line we can actually measure is the base line. In both figures this base line is the same length. Suppose we want to find the perspective of point _P_ (Fig. 146), we make use of the diagonal _CA_. From _P_ in the geometrical square draw _PO_ to meet the diagonal in _O_; through _O_ draw perpendicular _fe_; transfer length _fB_, so found, to the base of the perspective square; from _f_ draw _fS_ to point of sight; where it cuts the diagonal in _O_, draw horizontal _OP·_, which gives us the point required. In the same way we can find the perspective of any number of points on any side of the square. LXXIX PERSPECTIVE OF A POINT PLACED IN ANY POSITION WITHIN THE SQUARE Let the point _P_ be the one we wish to put into perspective. We have but to repeat the process of the previous problem, making use of our measurements on the base, the diagonals, &c. [Illustration: Fig. 147.] Indeed these figures are so plain and evident that further description of them is hardly necessary, so I will here give two drawings of triangles which explain themselves. To put a triangle into perspective we have but to find three points, such as _fEP_, Fig. 148 A, and then transfer these points to the perspective square 148 B, as there shown, and form the perspective triangle; but these figures explain themselves. Any other triangle or rectilineal figure can be worked out in the same way, which is not only the simplest method, but it carries its mathematical proof with it. [Illustration: Fig. 148 A.] [Illustration: Fig. 148 B.] [Illustration: Fig. 149 A.] [Illustration: Fig. 149 B.] LXXX PERSPECTIVE OF A SQUARE PLACED AT AN ANGLE NEW METHOD As we have drawn a triangle in a square so can we draw an oblique square in a parallel square. In Figure 150 A we have drawn the oblique square _GEPn_. We find the points on the base _Am_, as in the previous figures, which enable us to construct the oblique perspective square _n·G·E·P·_ in the parallel perspective square Fig. 150 B. But it is not necessary to construct the geometrical figure, as I will show presently. It is here introduced to explain the method. [Illustration: Fig. 150 A.] [Illustration: Fig. 150 B.] Fig. 150 B. To test the accuracy of the above, produce sides _G·E·_ and _n·P·_ of perspective square till they touch the horizon, where they will meet at _V_, their vanishing point, and again produce the other sides _n·G·_ and _P·E·_ till they meet on the horizon at the other vanishing point, which they must do if the figure is correctly drawn. In any parallel square construct an oblique square from a given point--given the parallel square at Fig. 150 B, and given point _n·_ on base. Make _A·f·_ equal to _n·m·_, draw _f·S_ and _n·S_ to point of sight. Where these lines cut the diagonal _AC_ draw horizontals to _P·_ and _G·_, and so find the four points _G·E·P·n·_ through which to draw the square. LXXXI ON A GIVEN LINE PLACED AT AN ANGLE TO THE BASE DRAW A SQUARE IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE, THE POINT OF SIGHT, AND DISTANCE, BEING GIVEN. [Illustration: Fig. 151.] Let _AB_ be the given line, _S_ the point of sight, and _D_ the distance (Fig. 151, 1). Through _A_ draw _SC_ from point of sight to base (Fig. 151, 2 and 3). From _C_ draw _CD_ to point of distance. Draw _Ao_ parallel to base till it cuts _CD_ at _o_, through _O_ draw _SP_, from _B_ mark off _BE_ equal to _CP_. From _E_ draw _ES_ intersecting _CD_ at _K_, from _K_ draw _KM_, thus completing the outer parallel square. Through _F_, where _PS_ intersects _MK_, draw _AV_ till it cuts the horizon in _V_, its vanishing point. From _V_ draw _VB_ cutting side _KE_ of outer square in _G_, and we have the four points _AFGB_, which are the four angles of the square required. Join _FG_, and the figure is complete. Any other side of the square might be given, such as _AF_. First through _A_ and _F_ draw _SC_, _SP_, then draw _Ao_, then through _o_ draw _CD_. From _C_ draw base of parallel square _CE_, and at _M_ through _F_ draw _MK_ cutting diagonal at _K_, which gives top of square. Now through _K_ draw _SE_, giving _KE_ the remaining side thereof, produce _AF_ to _V_, from _V_ draw _VB_. Join _FG_, _GB_, and _BA_, and the square required is complete. The student can try the remaining two sides, and he will find they work out in a similar way. LXXXII HOW TO DRAW SOLID FIGURES AT ANY ANGLE BY THE NEW METHOD As we can draw planes by this method so can we draw solids, as shown in these figures. The heights of the corners of the triangles are obtained by means of the vanishing scales _AS_, _OS_, which have already been explained. [Illustration: Fig. 152.] [Illustration: Fig. 153.] In the same manner we can draw a cubic figure (Fig. 154)--a box, for instance--at any required angle. In this case, besides the scale _AS_, _OS_, we have made use of the vanishing lines _DV_, _BV_, to corroborate the scale, but they can be dispensed with in these simple objects, or we can use a scale on each side of the figure as _a·o·S_, should both vanishing points be inaccessible. Let it be noted that in the scale _AOS_, _AO_ is made equal to _BC_, the height of the box. [Illustration: Fig. 154.] By a similar process we draw these two figures, one on the square, the other on the circle. [Illustration: Fig. 155.] [Illustration: Fig. 156.] LXXXIII POINTS IN SPACE The chief use of these figures is to show how by means of diagonals, horizontals, and perpendiculars almost any figure in space can be set down. Lines at any slope and at any angle can be drawn by this descriptive geometry. The student can examine these figures for himself, and will understand their working from what has gone before. Here (Fig. 157) in the geometrical square we have a vertical plane _AabB_ standing on its base _AB_. We wish to place a projection of this figure at a certain distance and at a given angle in space. First of all we transfer it to the side of the cube, where it is seen in perspective, whilst at its side is another perspective square lying flat, on which we have to stand our figure. By means of the diagonal of this flat square, horizontals from figure on side of cube, and lines drawn from point of sight (as already explained), we obtain the direction of base line _AB_, and also by means of lines _aa·_ and _bb·_ we obtain the two points in space _a·b·_. Join _Aa·_, _a·b·_ and _Bb·_, and we have the projection required, and which may be said to possess the third dimension. [Illustration: Fig. 157.] In this other case (Fig. 158) we have a wedge-shaped figure standing on a triangle placed on the ground, as in the previous figure, its three corners being the same height. In the vertical geometrical square we have a ground-plan of the figure, from which we draw lines to diagonal and to base, and notify by numerals 1, 3, 2, 1, 3; these we transfer to base of the horizontal perspective square, and then construct shaded triangle 1, 2, 3, and raise to the height required as shown at 1·, 2·, 3·. Although we may not want to make use of these special figures, they show us how we could work out almost any form or object suspended in space. [Illustration: Fig. 158.] LXXXIV THE SQUARE AND DIAGONAL APPLIED TO CUBES AND SOLIDS DRAWN THEREIN [Illustration: Fig. 159.] As we have made use of the square and diagonal to draw figures at various angles so can we make use of cubes either in parallel or angular perspective to draw other solid figures within them, as shown in these drawings, for this is simply an amplification of that method. Indeed we might invent many more such things. But subjects for perspective treatment will constantly present themselves to the artist or draughtsman in the course of his experience, and while I endeavour to show him how to grapple with any new difficulty or subject that may arise, it is impossible to set down all of them in this book. [Illustration: Fig. 160.] LXXXV TO DRAW AN OBLIQUE SQUARE IN ANOTHER OBLIQUE SQUARE WITHOUT USING VANISHING POINTS It is not often that both vanishing points are inaccessible, still it is well to know how to proceed when this is the case. We first draw the square _ABCD_ inside the parallel square, as in previous figures. To draw the smaller square _K_ we simply draw a smaller parallel square _h h h h_, and within that, guided by the intersections of the diagonals therewith, we obtain the four points through which to draw square _K_. To raise a solid figure on these squares we can make use of the vanishing scales as shown on each side of the figure, thus obtaining the upper square 1 2 3 4, then by means of the diagonal 1 3 and 2 4 and verticals raised from each corner of square _K_ to meet them we obtain the smaller upper square corresponding to _K_. It might be said that all this can be done by using the two vanishing points in the usual way. In the first place, if they were as far off as required for this figure we could not get them into a page unless it were three or four times the width of this one, and to use shorter distances results in distortion, so that the real use of this system is that we can make our figures look quite natural and with much less trouble than by the other method. [Illustration: Fig. 161.] LXXXVI SHOWING HOW A PEDESTAL CAN BE DRAWN BY THE NEW METHOD This is a repetition of the previous problem, or rather the application of it to architecture, although when there are many details it may be more convenient to use vanishing points or the centrolinead. [Illustration: Fig. 162.] [Illustration: Fig. 163. Honfleur.] LXXXVII SCALE ON EACH SIDE OF THE PICTURE As one of my objects in writing this book is to facilitate the working of our perspective, partly for the comfort of the artist, and partly that he may have no excuse for neglecting it, I will here show you how you may, by a very simple means, secure the general correctness of your perspective when sketching or painting out of doors. Let us take this example from a sketch made at Honfleur (Fig. 163), and in which my eye was my only guide, but it stands the test of the rule. First of all note that line _HH_, drawn from one side of the picture to the other, is the horizontal line; below that is a wall and a pavement marked _aV_, also going from one side of the picture to the other, and being lower down at _a_ than at _V_ it runs up as it were to meet the horizon at some distant point. In order to form our scale I take first the length of _Ha_, and measure it above and below the horizon, along the side to our left as many times as required, in this case four or five. I now take the length _HV_ on the right side of the picture and measure it above and below the horizon, as in the other case; and then from these divisions obtain dotted lines crossing the picture from one side to the other which must all meet at some distant point on the horizon. These act as guiding lines, and are sufficient to give us the direction of any vanishing lines going to the same point. For those that go in the opposite direction we proceed in the same way, as from _b_ on the right to _V·_ on the left. They are here put in faintly, so as not to interfere with the drawing. In the sketch of Toledo (Fig. 164) the same thing is shown by double lines on each side to separate the two sets of lines, and to make the principle more evident. [Illustration: Fig. 164. Toledo.] LXXXVIII THE CIRCLE If we inscribe a circle in a square we find that it touches that square at four points which are in the middle of each side, as at _a b c d_. It will also intersect the two diagonals at the four points _o_ (Fig. 165). If, then, we put this square and its diagonals, &c., into perspective we shall have eight guiding points through which to trace the required circle, as shown in Fig. 166, which has the same base as Fig. 165. [Illustration: Fig. 165.] [Illustration: Fig. 166.] LXXXIX THE CIRCLE IN PERSPECTIVE A TRUE ELLIPSE Although the circle drawn through certain points must be a freehand drawing, which requires a little practice to make it true, it is sufficient for ordinary purposes and on a small scale, but to be mathematically true it must be an ellipse. We will first draw an ellipse (Fig. 167). Let _ee_ be its long, or transverse, diameter, and _db_ its short or conjugate diameter. Now take half of the long diameter _eE_, and from point _d_ with _cE_ for radius mark on _ee_ the two points _ff_, which are the foci of the ellipse. At each focus fix a pin, then make a loop of fine string that does not stretch and of such a length that when drawn out the double thread will reach from _f_ to _e_. Now place this double thread round the two pins at the foci _ff·_ and distend it with the pencil point until it forms triangle _fdf·_, then push the pencil along and right round the two foci, which being guided by the thread will draw the curve, which is a true ellipse, and will pass through the eight points indicated in our first figure. This will be a sufficient proof that the circle in perspective and the ellipse are identical curves. We must also remember that the ellipse is an oblique projection of a circle, or an oblique section of a cone. The difference between the two figures consists in their centres not being in the same place, that of the perspective circle being at _c_, higher up than _e_ the centre of the ellipse. The latter being a geometrical figure, its long diameter is exactly in the centre of the figure, whereas the centre _c_ and the diameter of the perspective are at the intersection of the diagonals of the perspective square in which it is inscribed. [Illustration: Fig. 167.] XC FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE ELLIPSE In order to show that the ellipse drawn by a loop as in the previous figure is also a circle in perspective we must reconstruct around it the square and its eight points by means of which it was drawn in the first instance. We start with nothing but the ellipse itself. We have to find the points of sight and distance, the base, &c. Let us start with base _AB_, a horizontal tangent to the curve extending beyond it on either side. From _A_ and _B_ draw two other tangents so that they shall touch the curve at points such as _TT·_ a little above the transverse diameter and on a level with each other. Produce these tangents till they meet at point _S_, which will be the point of sight. Through this point draw horizontal line _H_. Now draw tangent _CD_ parallel to _AB_. Draw diagonal _AD_ till it cuts the horizon at the point of distance, this will cut through diameter of circle at its centre, and so proceed to find the eight points through which the perspective circle passes, when it will be found that they all lie on the ellipse we have drawn with the loop, showing that the two curves are identical although their centres are distinct. [Illustration: Fig. 168.] XCI HOW TO DRAW A CIRCLE IN PERSPECTIVE WITHOUT A GEOMETRICAL PLAN Divide base _AB_ into four equal parts. At _B_ drop perpendicular _Bn_, making _Bn_ equal to _Bm_, or one-fourth of base. Join _mn_ and transfer this measurement to each side of _d_ on base line; that is, make _df_ and _df·_ equal to _mn_. Draw _fS_ and _f·S_, and the intersections of these lines with the diagonals of square will give us the four points _o o o o_. [Illustration: Fig. 169.] The reason of this is that _ff·_ is the measurement on the base _AB_ of another square _o o o o_ which is exactly half of the outer square. For if we inscribe a circle in a square and then inscribe a second square in that circle, this second square will be exactly half the area of the larger one; for its side will be equal to half the diagonal of the larger square, as can be seen by studying the following figures. In Fig. 170, for instance, the side of small square _K_ is half the diagonal of large square _o_. [Illustration: Fig. 170.] [Illustration: Fig. 171.] In Fig. 171, _CB_ represents half of diagonal _EB_ of the outer square in which the circle is inscribed. By taking a fourth of the base _mB_ and drawing perpendicular _mh_ we cut _CB_ at _h_ in two equal parts, _Ch_, _hB_. It will be seen that _hB_ is equal to _mn_, one-quarter of the diagonal, so if we measure _mn_ on each side of _D_ we get _ff·_ equal to _CB_, or half the diagonal. By drawing _ff_, _f·f_ passing through the diagonals we get the four points _o o o o_ through which to draw the smaller square. Without referring to geometry we can see at a glance by Fig. 172, where we have simply turned the square _o o o o_ on its centre so that its angles touch the sides of the outer square, that it is exactly half of square _ABEF_, since each quarter of it, such as EoCo, is bisected by its diagonal _oo_. [Illustration: Fig. 172.] [Illustration: Fig. 173.] XCII HOW TO DRAW A CIRCLE IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE Let _ABCD_ be the oblique square. Produce _VA_ till it cuts the base line at _G_. [Illustration: Fig. 174.] Take _mD_, the fourth of the base. Find _mn_ as in Fig. 171, measure it on each side of _E_, and so obtain _Ef_ and _Ef·_, and proceed to draw _fV_, _EV_, _f·V_ and the diagonals, whose intersections with these lines will give us the eight points through which to draw the circle. In fact the process is the same as in parallel perspective, only instead of making our divisions on the actual base _AD_ of the square, we make them on _GD_, the base line. To obtain the central line _hh_ passing through _O_, we can make use of diagonals of the half squares; that is, if the other vanishing point is inaccessible, as in this case. XCIII HOW TO DRAW A CIRCLE IN PERSPECTIVE MORE CORRECTLY, BY USING SIXTEEN GUIDING POINTS First draw square _ABCD_. From _O_, the middle of the base, draw semicircle _AKB_, and divide it into eight equal parts. From each division raise perpendiculars to the base, such as _2 O_, _3 O_, _5 O_, &c., and from divisions _O_, _O_, _O_ draw lines to point of sight, and where these lines cut the diagonals _AC_, _DB_, draw horizontals parallel to base _AB_. Then through the points thus obtained draw the circle as shown in this figure, which also shows us how the circumference of a circle in perspective may be divided into any number of equal parts. [Illustration: Fig. 175.] XCIV HOW TO DIVIDE A PERSPECTIVE CIRCLE INTO ANY NUMBER OF EQUAL PARTS This is simply a repetition of the previous figure as far as its construction is concerned, only in this case we have divided the semicircle into twelve parts and the perspective into twenty-four. [Illustration: Fig. 176.] [Illustration: Fig. 177.] We have raised perpendiculars from the divisions on the semicircle, and proceeded as before to draw lines to the point of sight, and have thus by their intersections with the circumference already drawn in perspective divided it into the required number of equal parts, to which from the centre we have drawn the radii. This will show us how to draw traceries in Gothic windows, columns in a circle, cart-wheels, &c. The geometrical figure (177) will explain the construction of the perspective one by showing how the divisions are obtained on the line _AB_, which represents base of square, from the divisions on the semicircle _AKB_. XCV HOW TO DRAW CONCENTRIC CIRCLES [Illustration: Fig. 178.] First draw a square with its diagonals (Fig. 178), and from its centre _O_ inscribe a circle; in this circle inscribe a square, and in this again inscribe a second circle, and so on. Through their intersections with the diagonals draw lines to base, and number them 1, 2, 3, 4, &c.; transfer these measurements to the base of the perspective square (Fig. 179), and proceed to construct the circles as before, drawing lines from each point on the base to the point of sight, and drawing the curves through the inter-sections of these lines with the diagonals. [Illustration: Fig. 179.] Should it be required to make the circles at equal distances, as for steps for instance, then the geometrical plan should be made accordingly. Or we may adopt the method shown at Fig. 180, by taking quarter base of both outer and inner square, and finding the measurement _mn_ on each side of _C_, &c. [Illustration: Fig. 180.] XCVI THE ANGLE OF THE DIAMETER OF THE CIRCLE IN ANGULAR AND PARALLEL PERSPECTIVE The circle, whether in angular or parallel perspective, is always an ellipse. In angular perspective the angle of the circle's diameter varies in accordance with the angle of the square in which it is placed, as in Fig. 181, _cc_ is the diameter of the circle and _ee_ the diameter of the ellipse. In parallel perspective the diameter of the circle always remains horizontal, although the long diameter of the ellipse varies in inclination according to the distance it is from the point of sight, as shown in Fig. 182, in which the third circle is much elongated and distorted, owing to its being outside the angle of vision. [Illustration: Fig. 181.] [Illustration: Fig. 182.] XCVII HOW TO CORRECT DISPROPORTION IN THE WIDTH OF COLUMNS [Transcriber's Note: The column referred to as "1" in the text is marked "S" in both Figures.] The disproportion in the width of columns in Fig. 183 arises from the point of distance being too near the point of sight, or, in other words, taking too wide an angle of vision. It will be seen that column 3 is much wider than column 1. [Illustration: Fig. 183.] [Illustration: Fig. 184.] In our second figure (184) is shown how this defect is remedied, by doubling the distance, or by counting the same distance as half, which is easily effected by drawing the diagonal from _O_ to ½D, instead of from _A_, as in the other figure, _O_ being at half base. Here the squares lie much more level, and the columns are nearly the same width, showing the advantage of a long distance. XCVIII HOW TO DRAW A CIRCLE OVER A CIRCLE OR A CYLINDER First construct square and circle _ABE_, then draw square _CDF_ with its diagonals. Then find the various points _O_, and from these raise perpendiculars to meet the diagonals of the upper square at points _P_, which, with the other points will be sufficient guides to draw the circle required. This can be applied to towers, columns, &c. The size of the circles can be varied so that the upper portion of a cylinder or column shall be smaller than the lower. [Illustration: Fig. 185.] XCIX TO DRAW A CIRCLE BELOW A GIVEN CIRCLE Construct the upper square and circle as before, then by means of the vanishing scale _POV_, which should be made the depth required, drop perpendiculars from the various points marked _O_, obtained by the diagonals, making them the right depth by referring them to the vanishing scale, as shown in this figure. This can be used for drawing garden fountains, basins, and various architectural objects. [Illustration: Fig. 186.] C APPLICATION OF PREVIOUS PROBLEM That is, to draw a circle above a circle. In Fig. 187 can be seen how by means of the vanishing scale at the side we obtain the height of the verticals 1, 2, 3, 4, &c., which determine the direction of the upper circle; and in this second figure, how we resort to the same means to draw circular steps. [Illustration: Fig. 187.] [Illustration: Fig. 188.] CI DORIC COLUMNS It is as well for the art student to study the different orders of architecture, whether architect or not, as he frequently has to introduce them into his pictures, and at least must know their proportions, and how columns diminish from base to capital, as shown in this illustration. [Illustration: Fig. 189.] CII TO DRAW SEMICIRCLES STANDING UPON A CIRCLE AT ANY ANGLE [Illustration: Fig. 190.] Given the circle _ACBH_, on diagonal _AB_ draw semicircle _AKB_, and on the same line _AB_ draw rectangle _AEFB_, its height being determined by radius _OK_ of semicircle. From centre _O_ draw _OF_ to corner of rectangle. Through _f·_, where that line intersects the semicircle, draw _mn_ parallel to _AB_. This will give intersection _O·_ on the vertical _OK_, through which all such horizontals as _m·n·_, level with _mn_, must pass. Now take any other diameter, such as _GH_, and thereon raise rectangle _GghH_, the same height as the other. The manner of doing this is to produce diameter _GH_ to the horizon till it finds its vanishing point at _V_. From _V_ through _K_ draw _hg_, and through _O·_ draw _n·m·_. From _O_ draw the two diagonals _og_ and _oh_, intersecting _m·n·_ at _O_, _O_, and thus we have the five points _GOKOH_ through which to draw the required semicircle. CIII A DOME STANDING ON A CYLINDER [Illustration: Fig. 191.] This figure is a combination of the two preceding it. A cylinder is first raised on the circle, and on the top of that we draw semicircles from the different divisions on the circumference of the upper circle. This, however, only represents a small half-globular object. To draw the dome of a cathedral, or other building high above us, is another matter. From outside, where we can get to a distance, it is not difficult, but from within it will tax all our knowledge of perspective to give it effect. We shall go more into this subject when we come to archways and vaulted roofs, &c. CIV SECTION OF A DOME OR NICHE [Illustration: Fig. 192.] First draw outline of the niche _GFDBA_ (Fig. 193), then at its base draw square and circle _GOA_, _S_ being the point of sight, and divide the circumference of the circle into the required number of parts. Then draw semicircle _FOB_, and over that another semicircle _EOC_. The manner of drawing them is shown in Fig. 192. From the divisions on the circle _GOA_ raise verticals to semicircle _FOB_, which will divide it in the same way. Divide the smaller semicircle _EOC_ into the same number of parts as the others, which divisions will serve as guiding points in drawing the curves of the dome that are drawn towards _D_, but the shading must assist greatly in giving the effect of the recess. [Illustration: Fig. 193.] In Fig. 192 will be seen how to draw semicircles in perspective. We first draw the half squares by drawing from centres _O_ of their diameters diagonals to distance-point, as _OD_, which cuts the vanishing line BS at _m_, and gives us the depth of the square, and in this we draw the semicircle in the usual way. [Illustration: Fig. 194. A Dome.] CV A DOME First draw a section of the dome ACEDB (Fig. 194) the shape required. Draw _AB_ at its base and _CD_ at some distance above it. Keeping these as central lines, form squares thereon by drawing _SA_, _SB_, _SC_, _SD_, &c., from point of sight, and determining their lengths by diagonals _fh_, _f·h·_ from point of distance, passing through _O_. Having formed the two squares, draw perspective circles in each, and divide their circumferences into twelve or whatever number of parts are needed. To complete the figure draw from each division in the lower circle curves passing through the corresponding divisions in the upper one, to the apex. But as these are freehand lines, it requires some taste and knowledge to draw them properly, and of course in a large drawing several more squares and circles might be added to aid the draughtsman. The interior of the dome can be drawn in the same way. [Illustration] [Illustration: Fig. 195.] CVI HOW TO DRAW COLUMNS STANDING IN A CIRCLE In Fig. 195 are sixteen cylinders or columns standing in a circle. First draw the circle on the ground, then divide it into sixteen equal parts, and let each division be the centre of the circle on which to raise the column. The question is how to make each one the right width in accordance with its position, for it is evident that a near column must appear wider than the opposite one. On the right of the figure is the vertical scale _A_, which gives the heights of the columns, and at its foot is a horizontal scale, or a scale of widths _B_. Now, according to the line on which the column stands, we find its apparent width marked on the scale. Thus take the small square and circle at 15, without its column, or the broken column at 16; and note that on each side of its centre _O_ I have measured _oa_, _ob_, equal to spaces marked 3 on the same horizontal in the scale _B_. Through these points _a_ and _b_ I have drawn lines towards point of sight _S_. Through their intersections with diagonal _e_, which is directed to point of distance, draw the farther and nearer sides of the square in which to describe the circle and the cylinder or column thereon. I have made all the squares thus obtained in parallel perspective, but they do not represent the bases of columns arranged in circles, which should converge towards the centre, and I believe in some cases are modified in form to suit that design. CVII COLUMNS AND CAPITALS This figure shows the application of the square and diagonal in drawing and placing columns in angular perspective. [Illustration: Fig. 196.] CVIII METHOD OF PERSPECTIVE EMPLOYED BY ARCHITECTS The architects first draw a plan and elevation of the building to be put into perspective. Having placed the plan at the required angle to the picture plane, they fix upon the point of sight, and the distance from which the drawing is to be viewed. They then draw a line _SP_ at right angles to the picture plane _VV·_, which represents that distance so that _P_ is the station-point. The eye is generally considered to be the station-point, but when lines are drawn to that point from the ground-plan, the station-point is placed on the ground, and is in fact the trace or projection exactly under the point at which the eye is placed. From this station-point _P_, draw lines _PV_ and _PV·_ parallel to the two sides of the plan _ba_ and _ad_ (which will be at right angles to each other), and produce them to the horizon, which they will touch at points _V_ and _V·_. These points thus obtained will be the two vanishing points. [Illustration: Fig. 197. A method of angular Perspective employed by architects. [_To face p. 171_] ] The next operation is to draw lines from the principal points of the plan to the station-point _P_, such as _bP_, _cP_, _dP_, &c., and where these lines intersect the picture plane (_VV·_ here represents it as well as the horizon), drop perpendiculars _b·B_, _aA_, _d·D_, &c., to meet the vanishing lines _AV_, _AV·_, which will determine the points _A_, _B_, _C_, _D_, 1, 2, 3, &c., and also the perspective lengths of the sides of the figure _AB_, _AD_, and the divisions _B_, 1, 2, &c. Taking the height of the figure _AE_ from the elevation, we measure it on _Aa_; as in this instance _A_ touches the ground line, it may be used as a line of heights. I have here placed the perspective drawing under the ground plan to show the relation between the two, and how the perspective is worked out, but the general practice is to find the required measurements as here shown, to mark them on a straight edge of card or paper, and transfer them to the paper on which the drawing is to be made. This of course is the simplest form of a plan and elevation. It is easy to see, however, that we could set out an elaborate building in the same way as this figure, but in that case we should not place the drawing underneath the ground-plan, but transfer the measurements to another sheet of paper as mentioned above. CIX THE OCTAGON To draw the geometrical figure of an octagon contained in a square, take half of the diagonal of that square as radius, and from each corner describe a quarter circle. At the eight points where they touch the sides of the square, draw the eight sides of the octagon. [Illustration: Fig. 198.] [Illustration: Fig. 199.] To put this into perspective take the base of the square _AB_ and thereon form the perspective square _ABCD_. From either extremity of that base (say _B_) drop perpendicular _BF_, draw diagonal _AF_, and then from _B_ with radius _BO_, half that diagonal, describe arc _EOE_. This will give us the measurement _AE_. Make _GB_ equal to _AE_. Then draw lines from _G_ and _E_ towards _S_, and by means of the diagonals find the transverse lines _KK_, _hh_, which will give us the eight points through which to draw the octagon. CX HOW TO DRAW THE OCTAGON IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE Form square _ABCD_ (new method), produce sides _BC_ and _AD_ to the horizon at _V_, and produce _VA_ to _a·_ on base. Drop perpendicular from _B_ to _F_ the same length as _a·B_, and proceed as in the previous figure to find the eight points on the oblique square through which to draw the octagon. [Illustration: Fig. 200.] It will be seen that this operation is very much the same as in parallel perspective, only we make our measurements on the base line _a·B_ as we cannot measure the vanishing line _BA_ otherwise. CXI HOW TO DRAW AN OCTAGONAL FIGURE IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE In this figure in angular perspective we do precisely the same thing as in the previous problem, taking our measurements on the base line _EB_ instead of on the vanishing line _BA_. If we wish to raise a figure on this octagon the height of _EG_ we form the vanishing scale _EGO_, and from the eight points on the ground draw horizontals to _EO_ and thus find all the points that give us the perspective height of each angle of the octagonal figure. [Illustration: Fig. 201.] CXII HOW TO DRAW CONCENTRIC OCTAGONS, WITH ILLUSTRATION OF A WELL The geometrical figure 202 A shows how by means of diagonals _AC_ and _BD_ and the radii 1 2 3, &c., we can obtain smaller octagons inside the larger ones. Note how these are carried out in the second figure (202 B), and their application to this drawing of an octagonal well on an octagonal base. [Illustration: Fig. 202 A.] [Illustration: Fig. 202 B.] [Illustration: Fig. 203.] CXIII A PAVEMENT COMPOSED OF OCTAGONS AND SMALL SQUARES To draw a pavement with octagonal tiles we will begin with an octagon contained in a square _abcd_. Produce diagonal _ac_ to _V_. This will be the vanishing point for the sides of the small squares directed towards it. The other sides are directed to an inaccessible point out of the picture, but their directions are determined by the lines drawn from divisions on base to V2 (see back, Fig. 133). [Illustration: Fig. 204.] [Illustration: Fig. 205.] I have drawn the lower figure to show how the squares which contain the octagons are obtained by means of the diagonals, _BD_, _AC_, and the central line OV2. Given the square _ABCD_. From _D_ draw diagonal to _G_, then from _C_ through centre _o_ draw _CE_, and so on all the way up the floor until sufficient are obtained. It is easy to see how other squares on each side of these can be produced. CXIV THE HEXAGON The hexagon is a six-sided figure which, if inscribed in a circle, will have each of its sides equal to the radius of that circle (Fig. 206). If inscribed in a rectangle _ABCD_, that rectangle will be equal in length to two sides of the hexagon or two radii of the circle, as _EF_, and its width will be twice the height of an equilateral triangle _mon_. [Illustration: Fig. 206.] To put the hexagon into perspective, draw base of quadrilateral _AD_, divide it into four equal parts, and from each division draw lines to point of sight. From _h_ drop perpendicular _ho_, and form equilateral triangle _mno_. Take the height _ho_ and measure it twice along the base from _A_ to 2. From 2 draw line to point of distance, or from 1 to ½ distance, and so find length of side _AB_ equal to A2. Draw _BC_, and _EF_ through centre _o·_, and thus we have the six points through which to draw the hexagon. [Illustration: Fig. 207.] CXV A PAVEMENT COMPOSED OF HEXAGONAL TILES In drawing pavements, except in the cases of square tiles, it is necessary to make a plan of the required design, as in this figure composed of hexagons. First set out the hexagon as at _A_, then draw parallels 1 1, 2 2, &c., to mark the horizontal ends of the tiles and the intermediate lines _oo_. Divide the base into the required number of parts, each equal to one side of the hexagon, as 1, 2, 3, 4, &c.; from these draw perpendiculars as shown in the figure, and also the diagonals passing through their intersections. Then mark with a strong line the outlines of the hexagonals, shading some of them; but the figure explains itself. It is easy to put all these parallels, perpendiculars, and diagonals into perspective, and then to draw the hexagons. First draw the hexagon on _AD_ as in the previous figure, dividing _AD_ into four, &c., set off right and left spaces equal to these fourths, and from each division draw lines to point of sight. Produce sides _me_, _nf_ till they touch the horizon in points _V_, _V·_; these will be the two vanishing points for all the sides of the tiles that are receding from us. From each division on base draw lines to each of these vanishing points, then draw parallels through their intersections as shown on the figure. Having all these guiding lines it will not be difficult to draw as many hexagons as you please. [Illustration: Fig. 208.] Note that the vanishing points should be at equal distances from _S_, also that the parallelogram in which each tile is contained is oblong, and not square, as already pointed out. We have also made use of the triangle _omn_ to ascertain the length and width of that oblong. Another thing to note is that we have made use of the half distance, which enables us to make our pavement look flat without spreading our lines outside the picture. [Illustration: Fig. 209.] CXVI A PAVEMENT OF HEXAGONAL TILES IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE This is more difficult than the previous figure, as we only make use of one vanishing point; but it shows how much can be done by diagonals, as nearly all this pavement is drawn by their aid. First make a geometrical plan _A_ at the angle required. Then draw its perspective _K_. Divide line 4b into four equal parts, and continue these measurements all along the base: from each division draw lines to _V_, and draw the hexagon _K_. Having this one to start with we produce its sides right and left, but first to the left to find point _G_, the vanishing point of the diagonals. Those to the right, if produced far enough, would meet at a distant vanishing point not in the picture. But the student should study this figure for himself, and refer back to Figs. 204 and 205. [Illustration: Fig. 210.] CXVII FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE HEXAGON [Illustration: Fig. 211 A.] [Illustration: Fig. 211 B.] To draw the hexagon in perspective we must first find the rectangle in which it is inscribed, according to the view we take of it. That at _A_ we have already drawn. We will now work out that at _B_. Divide the base _AD_ into four equal parts and transfer those measurements to the perspective figure _C_, as at _AD_, measuring other equal spaces along the base. To find the depth _An_ of the rectangle, make _DK_ equal to base of square. Draw _KO_ to distance-point, cutting _DO_ at _O_, and thus find line _LO_. Draw diagonal _Dn_, and through its intersections with the lines 1, 2, 3, 4 draw lines parallel to the base, and we shall thus have the framework, as it were, by which to draw the pavement. [Illustration: Fig. 212.] CXVIII ANOTHER VIEW OF THE HEXAGON IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE [Illustration: Fig. 213.] Given the rectangle _ABCD_ in angular perspective, produce side _DA_ to _E_ on base line. Divide _EB_ into four equal parts, and from each division draw lines to vanishing point, then by means of diagonals, &c., draw the hexagon. In Fig. 214 we have first drawn a geometrical plan, _G_, for the sake of clearness, but the one above shows that this is not necessary. [Illustration: Fig. 214.] To raise the hexagonal figure _K_ we have made use of the vanishing scale _O_ and the vanishing point _V_. Another method could be used by drawing two hexagons one over the other at the required height. CXIX APPLICATION OF THE HEXAGON TO DRAWING A KIOSK [Illustration: Fig. 215.] This figure is built up from the hexagon standing on a rectangular base, from which we have raised verticals, &c. Note how the jutting portions of the roof are drawn from _o·_. But the figure explains itself, so there is no necessity to repeat descriptions already given in the foregoing problems. CXX THE PENTAGON [Illustration: Fig. 216.] The pentagon is a figure with five equal sides, and if inscribed in a circle will touch its circumference at five equidistant points. With any convenient radius describe circle. From half this radius, marked 1, draw a line to apex, marked 2. Again, with 1 as centre and 1 2 as radius, describe arc 2 3. Now with 2 as centre and 2 3 as radius describe arc 3 4, which will cut the circumference at point 4. Then line 2 4 will be one of the sides of the pentagon, which we can measure round the circle and so produce the required figure. To put this pentagon into parallel perspective inscribe the circle in which it is drawn in a square, and from its five angles 4, 2, 4, &c., drop perpendiculars to base and number them as in the figure. Then draw the perspective square (Fig. 217) and transfer these measurements to its base. From these draw lines to point of sight, then by their aid and the two diagonals proceed to construct the pentagon in the same way that we did the triangles and other figures. Should it be required to place this pentagon in the opposite position, then we can transfer our measurements to the far side of the square, as in Fig. 218. [Illustration: Fig. 217.] [Illustration: Fig. 218.] Or if we wish to put it into angular perspective we adopt the same method as with the hexagon, as shown at Fig. 219. [Illustration: Fig. 219.] Another way of drawing a pentagon (Fig. 220) is to draw an isosceles triangle with an angle of 36° at its apex, and from centre of each side of the triangle draw perpendiculars to meet at _o_, which will be the centre of the circle in which it is inscribed. From this centre and with radius _OA_ describe circle A 3 2, &c. Take base of triangle 1 2, measure it round the circle, and so find the five points through which to draw the pentagon. The angles at 1 2 will each be 72°, double that at _A_, which is 36°. [Illustration: Fig. 220.] CXXI THE PYRAMID Nothing can be more simple than to put a pyramid into perspective. Given the base (_abc_), raise from its centre a perpendicular (_OP_) of the required height, then draw lines from the corners of that base to a point _P_ on the vertical line, and the thing is done. These pyramids can be used in drawing roofs, steeples, &c. The cone is drawn in the same way, so also is any other figure, whether octagonal, hexangular, triangular, &c. [Illustration: Fig. 221.] [Illustration: Fig. 222.] [Illustration: Fig. 223.] [Illustration: Fig. 224.] CXXII THE GREAT PYRAMID This enormous structure stands on a square base of over thirteen acres, each side of which measures, or did measure, 764 feet. Its original height was 480 feet, each side being an equilateral triangle. Let us see how we can draw this gigantic mass on our little sheet of paper. In the first place, to take it all in at one view we must put it very far back, and in the second the horizon must be so low down that we cannot draw the square base of thirteen acres on the perspective plane, that is on the ground, so we must draw it in the air, and also to a very small scale. Divide the base _AB_ into ten equal parts, and suppose each of these parts to measure 10 feet, _S_, the point of sight, is placed on the left of the picture near the side, in order that we may get a long line of distance, _S ½ D_; but even this line is only half the distance we require. Let us therefore take the 16th distance, as shown in our previous illustration of the lighthouse (Fig. 92), which enables us to measure sixteen times the length of base _AB_, or 1,600 feet. The base _ef_ of the pyramid is 1,600 feet from the base line of the picture, and is, according to our 10-foot scale, 764 feet long. The next thing to consider is the height of the pyramid. We make a scale to the right of the picture measuring 50 feet from _B_ to 50 at point where _BP_ intersects base of pyramid, raise perpendicular _CG_ and thereon measure 480 feet. As we cannot obtain a palpable square on the ground, let us draw one 480 feet above the ground. From _e_ and _f_ raise verticals _eM_ and _fN_, making them equal to perpendicular _G_, and draw line _MN_, which will be the same length as base, or 764 feet. On this line form square _MNK_ parallel to the perspective plane, find its centre _O·_ by means of diagonals, and _O·_ will be the central height of the pyramid and exactly over the centre of the base. From this point _O·_ draw sloping lines _O·f_, _O·e_, _O·Y_, &c., and the figure is complete. Note the way in which we find the measurements on base of pyramid and on line _MN_. By drawing _AS_ and _BS_ to point of sight we find _Te_, which measures 100 feet at a distance of 1,600 feet. We mark off seven of these lengths, and an additional 64 feet by the scale, and so obtain the required length. The position of the third corner of the base is found by dropping a perpendicular from _K_, till it meets the line _eS_. Another thing to note is that the side of the pyramid that faces us, although an equilateral triangle, does not appear so, as its top angle is 382 feet farther off than its base owing to its leaning position. CXXIII THE PYRAMID IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE In order to show the working of this proposition I have taken a much higher horizon, which immediately detracts from the impression of the bigness of the pyramid. [Illustration: Fig. 225.] We proceed to make our ground-plan _abcd_ high above the horizon instead of below it, drawing first the parallel square and then the oblique one. From all the principal points drop perpendiculars to the ground and thus find the points through which to draw the base of the pyramid. Find centres _OO·_ and decide upon the height _OP_. Draw the sloping lines from _P_ to the corners of the base, and the figure is complete. CXXIV TO DIVIDE THE SIDES OF THE PYRAMID HORIZONTALLY Having raised the pyramid on a given oblique square, divide the vertical line OP into the required number of parts. From _A_ through _C_ draw _AG_ to horizon, which gives us _G_, the vanishing point of all the diagonals of squares parallel to and at the same angle as _ABCD_. From _G_ draw lines through the divisions 2, 3, &c., on _OP_ cutting the lines _PA_ and _PC_, thus dividing them into the required parts. Through the points thus found draw from _V_ all those sides of the squares that have _V_ for their vanishing point, as _ab_, _cd_, &c. Then join _bd_, _ac_, and the rest, and thus make the horizontal divisions required. [Illustration: Fig. 226.] [Illustration: Fig. 227.] The same method will apply to drawing steps, square blocks, &c., as shown in Fig. 227, which is at the same angle as the above. CXXV OF ROOFS The pyramidal roof (Fig. 228) is so simple that it explains itself. The chief thing to be noted is the way in which the diagonals are produced beyond the square of the walls, to give the width of the eaves, according to their position. [Illustration: Fig. 228.] Another form of the pyramidal roof is here given (Fig. 229). First draw the cube _edcba_ at the required height, and on the side facing us, _adcb_, draw triangle _K_, which represents the end of a gable roof. Then draw similar triangles on the other sides of the cube (see Fig. 159, LXXXIV). Join the opposite triangles at the apex, and thus form two gable roofs crossing each other at right angles. From _o_, centre of base of cube, raise vertical _OP_, and then from _P_ draw sloping lines to each corner of base _a_, _b_, &c., and by means of central lines drawn from _P_ to half base, find the points where the gable roofs intersect the central spire or pyramid. Any other proportions can be obtained by adding to or altering the cube. [Illustration: Fig. 229.] To draw a sloping or hip-roof which falls back at each end we must first draw its base, _CBDA_ (Fig. 230). Having found the centre _O_ and central line _SP_, and how far the roof is to fall back at each end, namely the distance _Pm_, draw horizontal line _RB_ through _m_. Then from _B_ through _O_ draw diagonal _BA_, and from _A_ draw horizontal _AD_, which gives us point _n_. From these two points _m_ and _n_ raise perpendiculars the height required for the roof, and from these draw sloping lines to the corners of the base. Join _ef_, that is, draw the top line of the roof, which completes it. Fig. 231 shows a plan or bird's-eye view of the roof and the diagonal _AB_ passing through centre _O_. But there are so many varieties of roofs they would take almost a book to themselves to illustrate them, especially the cottages and farm-buildings, barns, &c., besides churches, old mansions, and others. There is also such irregularity about some of them that perspective rules, beyond those few here given, are of very little use. So that the best thing for an artist to do is to sketch them from the real whenever he has an opportunity. [Illustration: Fig. 230.] [Illustration: Fig. 231.] CXXVI OF ARCHES, ARCADES, BRIDGES, &C. [Illustration: Fig. 232.] For an arcade or cloister (Fig. 232) first set up the outer frame _ABCD_ according to the proportions required. For round arches the height may be twice that of the base, varying to one and a half. In Gothic arches the height may be about three times the width, all of which proportions are chosen to suit the different purposes and effects required. Divide the base _AB_ into the desired number of parts, 8, 10, 12, &c., each part representing 1 foot. (In this case the base is 10 feet and the horizon 5 feet.) Set out floor by means of ¼ distance. Divide it into squares of 1 foot, so that there will be 8 feet between each column or pilaster, supposing we make them to stand on a square foot. Draw the first archway _EKF_ facing us, and its inner semicircle _gh_, with also its thickness or depth of 1 foot. Draw the span of the archway _EF_, then central line _PO_ to point of sight. Proceed to raise as many other arches as required at the given distances. The intersections of the central line with the chords _mn_, &c., will give the centres from which to describe the semicircles. CXXVII OUTLINE OF AN ARCADE WITH SEMICIRCULAR ARCHES This is to show the method of drawing a long passage, corridor, or cloister with arches and columns at equal distances, and is worked in the same way as the previous figure, using ¼ distance and ¼ base. The floor consists of five squares; the semicircles of the arches are described from the numbered points on the central line _OS_, where it intersects the chords of the arches. [Illustration: Fig. 233.] CXXVIII SEMICIRCULAR ARCHES ON A RETREATING PLANE First draw perspective square _abcd_. Let _ae·_ be the height of the figure. Draw _ae·f·b_ and proceed with the rest of the outline. To draw the arches begin with the one facing us, _Eo·F_ enclosed in the quadrangle _Ee·f·F_. With centre _O_ describe the semicircle and across it draw the diagonals _e·F_, _Ef·_, and through _nn_, where these lines intersect the semicircle, draw horizontal _KK_ and also _KS_ to point of sight. It will be seen that the half-squares at the side are the same size in perspective as the one facing us, and we carry out in them much the same operation; that is, we draw the diagonals, find the point _O_, and the points _nn_, &c., through which to draw our arches. See perspective of the circle (Fig. 165). [Illustration: Fig. 234.] If more points are required an additional diagonal from _O_ to _K_ may be used, as shown in the figure, which perhaps explains itself. The method is very old and very simple, and of course can be applied to any kind of arch, pointed or stunted, as in this drawing of a pointed arch (Fig. 235). [Illustration: Fig. 235.] CXXIX AN ARCADE IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE First draw the perspective square _ABCD_ at the angle required, by new method. Produce sides _AD_ and _BC_ to _V_. Draw diagonal _BD_ and produce to point _G_, from whence we draw the other diagonals to _cfh_. Make spaces 1, 2, 3, &c., on base line equal to _B 1_ to obtain sides of squares. Raise vertical _BM_ the height required. Produce _DA_ to _O_ on base line, and from _O_ raise vertical _OP_ equal to _BM_. This line enables us to dispense with the long vanishing point to the left; its working has been explained at Fig. 131. From _P_ draw _PRV_ to vanishing point _V_, which will intersect vertical _AR_ at _R_. Join _MR_, and this line, if produced, would meet the horizon at the other vanishing point. In like manner make O2 equal to B2·. From 2 draw line to _V_, and at 2, its intersection with _AR_, draw line 2 2, which will also meet the horizon at the other vanishing point. By means of the quarter-circle _A_ we can obtain the points through which to draw the semicircular arches in the same way as in the previous figure. [Illustration: Fig. 236.] CXXX A VAULTED CEILING From the square ceiling _ABCD_ we have, as it were, suspended two arches from the two diagonals _DB_, _AC_, which spring from the four corners of the square _EFGH_, just underneath it. The curves of these arches, which are not semicircular but elongated, are obtained by means of the vanishing scales _mS_, _nS_. Take any two convenient points _P_, _R_, on each side of the semicircle, and raise verticals _Pm_, _Rn_ to _AB_, and on these verticals form the scales. Where _mS_ and _nS_ cut the diagonal _AC_ drop perpendiculars to meet the lower line of the scale at points 1, 2. On the other side, using the other scales, we have dropped perpendiculars in the same way from the diagonal to 3, 4. These points, together with _EOG_, enable us to trace the curve _E 1 2 O 3 4 G_. We draw the arch under the other diagonal in precisely the same way. [Illustration: Fig. 237.] The reason for thus proceeding is that the cross arches, although elongated, hang from their diagonals just as the semicircular arch _EKF_ hangs from _AB_, and the lines _mn_, touching the circle at _PR_, are represented by 1, 2, hanging from the diagonal _AC_. [Illustration: Fig. 238.] Figure 238, which is practically the same as the preceding only differently shaded, is drawn in the following manner. Draw arch _EGF_ facing us, and proceed with the rest of the corridor, but first finding the flat ceiling above the square on the ground _ABcd_. Draw diagonals _ac_, _bd_, and the curves pending from them. But we no longer see the clear arch as in the other drawing, for the spaces between the curves are filled in and arched across. CXXXI A CLOISTER, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH This drawing of a cloister from a photograph shows the correctness of our perspective, and the manner of applying it to practical work. [Illustration: Fig. 239.] CXXXII THE LOW OR ELLIPTICAL ARCH Let _AB_ be the span of the arch and _Oh_ its height. From centre _O_, with _OA_, or half the span, for radius, describe outer semicircle. From same centre and _oh_ for radius describe the inner semicircle. Divide outer circle into a convenient number of parts, 1, 2, 3, &c., to which draw radii from centre _O_. From each division drop perpendiculars. Where the radii intersect the inner circle, as at _gkmo_, draw horizontals _op_, _mn_, _kj_, &c., and through their intersections with the perpendiculars _f_, _j_, _n_, _p_, draw the curve of the flattened arch. Transfer this to the lower figure, and proceed to draw the tunnel. Note how the vanishing scale is formed on either side by horizontals _ba_, _fe_, &c., which enable us to make the distant arches similar to the near ones. [Illustration: Fig. 240.] [Illustration: Fig. 241.] CXXXIII OPENING OR ARCHED WINDOW IN A VAULT First draw the vault _AEB_. To introduce the window _K_, the upper part of which follows the form of the vault, we first decide on its width, which is _mn_, and its height from floor _Ba_. On line _Ba_ at the side of the arch form scales _aa·S_, _bb·S_, &c. Raise the semicircular arch _K_, shown by a dotted line. The scale at the side will give the lengths _aa·_, _bb·_, &c., from different parts of this dotted arch to corresponding points in the curved archway or window required. [Illustration: Fig. 242.] Note that to obtain the width of the window _K_ we have used the diagonals on the floor and width _m n_ on base. This method of measurement is explained at Fig. 144, and is of ready application in a case of this kind. CXXXIV STAIRS, STEPS, &C. Having decided upon the incline or angle, such as _CBA_, at which the steps are to be placed, and the height _Bm_ of each step, draw _mn_ to _CB_, which will give the width. Then measure along base _AB_ this width equal to _DB_, which will give that for all the other steps. Obtain length _BF_ of steps, and draw _EF_ parallel to _CB_. These lines will aid in securing the exactness of the figure. [Illustration: Fig. 243.] [Illustration: Fig. 244.] CXXXV STEPS, FRONT VIEW In this figure the height of each step is measured on the vertical line _AB_ (this line is sometimes called the line of heights), and their depth is found by diagonals drawn to the point of distance _D_. The rest of the figure explains itself. [Illustration: Fig. 245.] CXXXVI SQUARE STEPS Draw first step _ABEF_ and its two diagonals. Raise vertical _AH_, and measure thereon the required height of each step, and thus form scale. Let the second step _CD_ be less all round than the first by _Ao_ or _Bo_. Draw _oC_ till it cuts the diagonal, and proceed to draw the second step, guided by the diagonals and taking its height from the scale as shown. Draw the third step in the same way. [Illustration: Fig. 246.] CXXXVII TO DIVIDE AN INCLINED PLANE INTO EQUAL PARTS--SUCH AS A LADDER PLACED AGAINST A WALL [Illustration: Fig. 247.] Divide the vertical _EC_ into the required number of parts, and draw lines from point of sight _S_ through these divisions 1, 2, 3, &c., cutting the line _AC_ at 1, 2, 3, &c. Draw parallels to _AB_, such as _mn_, from _AC_ to _BD_, which will represent the steps of the ladder. CXXXVIII STEPS AND THE INCLINED PLANE [Illustration: Fig. 248.] In Fig. 248 we treat a flight of steps as if it were an inclined plane. Draw the first and second steps as in Fig. 245. Then through 1, 2, draw 1V, _AV_ to _V_, the vanishing point on the vertical line _SV_. These two lines and the corresponding ones at _BV_ will form a kind of vanishing scale, giving the height of each step as we ascend. It is especially useful when we pass the horizontal line and we no longer see the upper surface of the step, the scale on the right showing us how to proceed in that case. In Fig. 249 we have an example of steps ascending and descending. First set out the ground-plan, and find its vanishing point _S_ (point of sight). Through _S_ draw vertical _BA_, and make _SA_ equal to _SB_. Set out the first step _CD_. Draw _EA_, _CA_, _DA_, and _GA_, for the ascending guiding lines. Complete the steps facing us, at central line _OO_. Then draw guiding line _FB_ for the descending steps (see Rule 8). [Illustration: Fig. 249.] CXXXIX STEPS IN ANGULAR PERSPECTIVE First draw the base _ABCD_ (Fig. 251) at the required angle by the new method (Fig. 250). Produce _BC_ to the horizon, and thus find vanishing point _V_. At this point raise vertical _VV·_. Construct first step _AB_, refer its height at _B_ to line of heights hI on left, and thus obtain height of step at _A_. Draw lines from _A_ and _F_ to _V·_. From _n_ draw diagonal through _O_ to _G_. Raise vertical at _O_ to represent the height of the next step, its height being determined by the scale of heights at the side. From _A_ and _F_ draw lines to _V·_, and also similar lines from _B_, which will serve as guiding lines to determine the height of the steps at either end as we raise them to the required number. [Illustration: Fig. 250.] [Illustration: Fig. 251.] CXL A STEP LADDER AT AN ANGLE [Illustration: Fig. 252.] First draw the ground-plan _G_ at the required angle, using vanishing and measuring points. Find the height _hH_, and width at top _HH·_, and draw the sides _HA_ and _H·E_. Note that _AE_ is wider than _HH·_, and also that the back legs are not at the same angle as the front ones, and that they overlap them. From _E_ raise vertical _EF_, and divide into as many parts as you require rounds to the ladder. From these divisions draw lines 1 1, 2 2, &c., towards the other vanishing point (not in the picture), but having obtained their direction from the ground-plan in perspective at line _Ee_, you may set up a second vertical _ef_ at any point on _Ee_ and divide it into the same number of parts, which will be in proportion to those on _EF_, and you will obtain the same result by drawing lines from the divisions on _EF_ to those on _ef_ as in drawing them to the vanishing point. CXLI SQUARE STEPS PLACED OVER EACH OTHER [Illustration: Fig. 253.] This figure shows the other method of drawing steps, which is simple enough if we have sufficient room for our vanishing points. The manner of working it is shown at Fig. 124. CXLII STEPS AND A DOUBLE CROSS DRAWN BY MEANS OF DIAGONALS AND ONE VANISHING POINT Although in this figure we have taken a longer distance-point than in the previous one, we are able to draw it all within the page. [Illustration: Fig. 254.] Begin by setting out the square base at the angle required. Find point _G_ by means of diagonals, and produce _AB_ to _V_, &c. Mark height of step _Ao_, and proceed to draw the steps as already shown. Then by the diagonals and measurements on base draw the second step and the square inside it on which to stand the foot of the cross. To draw the cross, raise verticals from the four corners of its base, and a line _K_ from its centre. Through any point on this central line, if we draw a diagonal from point _G_ we cut the two opposite verticals of the shaft at _mn_ (see Fig. 255), and by means of the vanishing point _V_ we cut the other two verticals at the opposite corners and thus obtain the four points through which to draw the other sides of the square, which go to the distant or inaccessible vanishing point. It will be seen by carefully examining the figure that by this means we are enabled to draw the double cross standing on its steps. [Illustration: Fig. 255.] [Illustration: Fig. 256.] CXLIII A STAIRCASE LEADING TO A GALLERY In this figure we have made use of the devices already set forth in the foregoing figures of steps, &c., such as the side scale on the left of the figure to ascertain the height of the steps, the double lines drawn to the high vanishing point of the inclined plane, and so on; but the principal use of this diagram is to show on the perspective plane, which as it were runs under the stairs, the trace or projection of the flights of steps, the landings and positions of other objects, which will be found very useful in placing figures in a composition of this kind. It will be seen that these underneath measurements, so to speak, are obtained by the half-distance. CXLIV WINDING STAIRS IN A SQUARE SHAFT Draw square _ABCD_ in parallel perspective. Divide each side into four, and raise verticals from each division. These verticals will mark the positions of the steps on each wall, four in number. From centre _O_ raise vertical _OP_, around which the steps are to wind. Let _AF_ be the height of each step. Form scale _AB_, which will give the height of each step according to its position. Thus at _mn_ we find the height at the centre of the square, so if we transfer this measurement to the central line _OP_ and repeat it upwards, say to fourteen, then we have the height of each step on the line where they all meet. Starting then with the first on the right, draw the rectangle _gD1f_, the height of _AF_, then draw to the central line _go_, f1, and 1 1, and thus complete the first step. On _DE_, measure heights equal to _D 1_. Draw 2 2 towards central line, and 2n towards point of sight till it meets the second vertical _nK_. Then draw n2 to centre, and so complete the second step. From 3 draw 3a to third vertical, from 4 to fourth, and so on, thus obtaining the height of each ascending step on the wall to the right, completing them in the same way as numbers 1 and 2, when we come to the sixth step, the other end of which is against the wall opposite to us. Steps 6, 7, 8, 9 are all on this wall, and are therefore equal in height all along, as they are equally distant. Step 10 is turned towards us, and abuts on the wall to our left; its measurement is taken on the scale _AB_ just underneath it, and on the same line to which it is drawn. Step 11 is just over the centre of base _mo_, and is therefore parallel to it, and its height is _mn_. The widths of steps 12 and 13 seem gradually to increase as they come towards us, and as they rise above the horizon we begin to see underneath them. Steps 13, 14, 15, 16 are against the wall on this side of the picture, which we may suppose has been removed to show the working of the drawing, or they might be an open flight as we sometimes see in shops and galleries, although in that case they are generally enclosed in a cylindrical shaft. [Illustration: Fig. 257.] [Illustration: Fig. 258.] CXLV WINDING STAIRS IN A CYLINDRICAL SHAFT First draw the circular base _CD_. Divide the circumference into equal parts, according to the number of steps in a complete round, say twelve. Form scale _ASF_ and the larger scale _ASB_, on which is shown the perspective measurements of the steps according to their positions; raise verticals such as _ef_, _Gh_, &c. From divisions on circumference measure out the central line _OP_, as in the other figure, and find the heights of the steps 1, 2, 3, 4, &c., by the corresponding numbers in the large scale to the left; then proceed in much the same way as in the previous figure. Note the central column _OP_ cuts off a small portion of the steps at that end. In ordinary cases only a small portion of a winding staircase is actually seen, as in this sketch. [Illustration: Fig. 259. Sketch of Courtyard in Toledo.] CXLVI OF THE CYLINDRICAL PICTURE OR DIORAMA [Illustration: Fig. 260.] Although illusion is by no means the highest form of art, there is no picture painted on a flat surface that gives such a wonderful appearance of truth as that painted on a cylindrical canvas, such as those panoramas of 'Paris during the Siege', exhibited some years ago; 'The Battle of Trafalgar', only lately shown at Earl's Court; and many others. In these pictures the spectator is in the centre of a cylinder, and although he turns round to look at the scene the point of sight is always in front of him, or nearly so. I believe on the canvas these points are from 12 to 16 feet apart. The reason of this look of truth may be explained thus. If we place three globes of equal size in a straight line, and trace their apparent widths on to a straight transparent plane, those at the sides, as _a_ and _b_, will appear much wider than the centre one at _c_. Whereas, if we trace them on a semicircular glass they will appear very nearly equal and, of the three, the central one _c_ will be rather the largest, as may be seen by this figure. We must remember that, in the first case, when we are looking at a globe or a circle, the visual rays form a cone, with a globe at its base. If these three cones are intersected by a straight glass _GG_, and looked at from point _S_, the intersection of _C_ will be a circle, as the cone is cut straight across. The other two being intersected at an angle, will each be an ellipse. At the same time, if we look at them from the station point, with one eye only, then the three globes (or tracings of them) will appear equal and perfectly round. Of course the cylindrical canvas is necessary for panoramas; but we have, as a rule, to paint our pictures and wall-decorations on flat surfaces, and therefore must adapt our work to these conditions. In all cases the artist must exercise his own judgement both in the arrangement of his design and the execution of the work, for there is perspective even in the touch--a painting to be looked at from a distance requires a bold and broad handling; in small cabinet pictures that we live with in our own rooms we look for the exquisite workmanship of the best masters. BOOK FOURTH CXLVII THE PERSPECTIVE OF CAST SHADOWS There is a pretty story of two lovers which is sometimes told as the origin of art; at all events, I may tell it here as the origin of sciagraphy. A young shepherd was in love with the daughter of a potter, but it so happened that they had to part, and were passing their last evening together, when the girl, seeing the shadow of her lover's profile cast from a lamp on to some wet plaster or on the wall, took a metal point, perhaps some sort of iron needle, and traced the outline of the face she loved on to the plaster, following carefully the outline of the features, being naturally anxious to make it as like as possible. The old potter, the father of the girl, was so struck with it that he began to ornament his wares by similar devices, which gave them increased value by the novelty and beauty thus imparted to them. Here then we have a very good illustration of our present subject and its three elements. First, the light shining on the wall; second, the wall or the plane of projection, or plane of shade; and third, the intervening object, which receives as much light on itself as it deprives the wall of. So that the dark portion thus caused on the plane of shade is the cast shadow of the intervening object. We have to consider two sorts of shadows: those cast by a luminary a long way off, such as the sun; and those cast by artificial light, such as a lamp or candle, which is more or less close to the object. In the first case there is no perceptible divergence of rays, and the outlines of the sides of the shadows of regular objects, as cubes, posts, &c., will be parallel. In the second case, the rays diverge according to the nearness of the light, and consequently the lines of the shadows, instead of being parallel, are spread out. CXLVIII THE TWO KINDS OF SHADOWS In Figs. 261 and 262 is seen the shadow cast by the sun by parallel rays. Fig. 263 shows the shadows cast by a candle or lamp, where the rays diverge from the point of light to meet corresponding diverging lines which start from the foot of the luminary on the ground. [Illustration: Fig. 261.] [Illustration: Fig. 262.] The simple principle of cast shadows is that the rays coming from the point of light or luminary pass over the top of the intervening object which casts the shadow on to the plane of shade to meet the horizontal trace of those rays on that plane, or the lines of light proceed from the point of light, and the lines of the shadow are drawn from the foot or trace of the point of light. [Illustration: Fig. 263.] [Illustration: Fig. 264.] Fig. 264 shows this in profile. Here the sun is on the same plane as the picture, and the shadow is cast sideways. Fig. 265 shows the same thing, but the sun being behind the object, casts its shadow forwards. Although the lines of light are parallel, they are subject to the laws of perspective, and are therefore drawn from their respective vanishing points. [Illustration: Fig. 265.] CXLIX SHADOWS CAST BY THE SUN Owing to the great distance of the sun, we have to consider the rays of light proceeding from it as parallel, and therefore subject to the same laws as other parallel lines in perspective, as already noted. And for the same reason we have to place the foot of the luminary on the horizon. It is important to remember this, as these two things make the difference between shadows cast by the sun and those cast by artificial light. The sun has three principal positions in relation to the picture. In the first case it is supposed to be in the same plane either to the right or to the left, and in that case the shadows will be parallel with the base of the picture. In the second position it is on the other side of it, or facing the spectator, when the shadows of objects will be thrown forwards or towards him. In the third, the sun is in front of the picture, and behind the spectator, so that the shadows are thrown in the opposite direction, or towards the horizon, the objects themselves being in full light. CL THE SUN IN THE SAME PLANE AS THE PICTURE Besides being in the same plane, the sun in this figure is at an angle of 45° to the horizon, consequently the shadows will be the same length as the figures that cast them are high. Note that the shadow of step No. 1 is cast upon step No. 2, and that of No. 2 on No. 3, the top of each of these becoming a plane of shade. [Illustration: Fig. 266.] [Illustration: Fig. 267.] [Illustration: Fig. 268.] When the shadow of an object such as _A_, Fig. 268, which would fall upon the plane, is interrupted by another object _B_, then the outline of the shadow is still drawn on the plane, but being interrupted by the surface _B_ at _C_, the shadow runs up that plane till it meets the rays 1, 2, which define the shadow on plane _B_. This is an important point, but is quite explained by the figure. Although we have said that the rays pass over the top of the object casting the shadow, in the case of an archway or similar figure they pass underneath it; but the same principle holds good, that is, we draw lines from the guiding points in the arch, 1, 2, 3, &c., at the same angle of 45° to meet the traces of those rays on the plane of shade, and so get the shadow of the archway, as here shown. [Illustration: Fig. 269.] CLI THE SUN BEHIND THE PICTURE We have seen that when the sun's altitude is at an angle of 45° the shadows on the horizontal plane are the same length as the height of the objects that cast them. Here (Fig. 270), the sun still being at 45° altitude, although behind the picture, and consequently throwing the shadow of _B_ forwards, that shadow must be the same length as the height of cube _B_, which will be seen is the case, for the shadow _C_ is a square in perspective. [Illustration: Fig. 270.] To find the angle of altitude and the angle of the sun to the picture, we must first find the distance of the spectator from the foot of the luminary. [Illustration: Fig. 271.] From point of sight _S_ (Fig. 270) drop perpendicular to _T_, the station-point. From _T_ draw _TF_ at 45° to meet horizon at _F_. With radius _FT_ make _FO_ equal to it. Then _O_ is the position of the spectator. From _F_ raise vertical _FL_, and from _O_ draw a line at 45° to meet _FL_ at _L_, which is the luminary at an altitude of 45°, and at an angle of 45° to the picture. Fig. 272 is similar to the foregoing, only the angles of altitude and of the sun to the picture are altered. _Note._--The sun being at 50° to the picture instead of 45°, is nearer the point of sight; at 90° it would be exactly opposite the spectator, and so on. Again, the elevation being less (40° instead of 45°) the shadow is longer. Owing to the changed position of the sun two sides of the cube throw a shadow. Note also that the outlines of the shadow, 1 2, 2 3, are drawn to the same vanishing points as the cube itself. It will not be necessary to mark the angles each time we make a drawing, as it must be seen we can place the luminary in any position that suits our convenience. [Illustration: Fig. 272.] CLII SUN BEHIND THE PICTURE, SHADOWS THROWN ON A WALL As here we change the conditions we must also change our procedure. An upright wall now becomes the plane of shade, therefore as the principle of shadows must always remain the same we have to change the relative positions of the luminary and the foot thereof. At _S_ (point of sight) raise vertical _SF·_, making it equal to _fL_. _F·_ becomes the foot of the luminary, whilst the luminary itself still remains at _L_. [Illustration: Fig. 273.] We have but to turn this page half round and look at it from the right, and we shall see that _SF·_ becomes as it were the horizontal line. The luminary _L_ is at the right side of point _S_ instead of the left, and the foot thereof is, as before, the trace of the luminary, as it is just underneath it. We shall also see that by proceeding as in previous figures we obtain the same results on the wall as we did on the horizontal plane. Fig. B being on the horizontal plane is treated as already shown. The steps have their shadows partly on the wall and partly on the horizontal plane, so that the shadows on the wall are outlined from _F·_ and those on the ground from _f_. Note shadow of roof _A_, and how the line drawn from _F·_ through _A_ is met by the line drawn from the luminary _L_, at the point _P_, and how the lower line of the shadow is directed to point of sight _S_. [Illustration: Fig. 274.] Fig. 274 is a larger drawing of the steps, &c., in further illustration of the above. CLIII SUN BEHIND THE PICTURE THROWING SHADOW ON AN INCLINED PLANE [Illustration: Fig. 275.] The vanishing point of the shadows on an inclined plane is on a vertical dropped from the luminary to a point (_F_) on a level with the vanishing point (_P_) of that inclined plane. Thus _P_ is the vanishing point of the inclined plane _K_. Draw horizontal _PF_ to meet _fL_ (the line drawn from the luminary to the horizon). Then _F_ will be the vanishing point of the shadows on the inclined plane. To find the shadow of _M_ draw lines from _F_ through the base _eg_ to _cd_. From luminary _L_ draw lines through _ab_, also to _cd_, where they will meet those drawn from _F_. Draw _CD_, which determines the length of the shadow _egcd_. CLIV THE SUN IN FRONT OF THE PICTURE [Illustration: Fig. 276.] When the sun is in front of the picture we have exactly the opposite effect to that we have just been studying. The shadows, instead of coming towards us, are retreating from us, and the objects throwing them are in full light, consequently we have to reverse our treatment. Let us suppose the sun to be placed above the horizon at _L·_, on the right of the picture and behind the spectator (Fig. 276). If we transport the length _L·f·_ to the opposite side and draw the vertical downwards from the horizon, as at _FL_, we can then suppose point _L_ to be exactly opposite the sun, and if we make that the vanishing point for the sun's rays we shall find that we obtain precisely the same result. As in Fig. 277, if we wish to find the length of _C_, which we may suppose to be the shadow of _P_, we can either draw a line from _A_ through _O_ to _B_, or from _B_ through _O_ to _A_, for the result is the same. And as we cannot make use of a point that is behind us and out of the picture, we have to resort to this very ingenious device. [Illustration: Fig. 277.] In Fig. 276 we draw lines L1, L2, L3 from the luminary to the top of the object to meet those drawn from the foot _F_, namely F1, F2, F3, in the same way as in the figures we have already drawn. [Illustration: Fig. 278.] Fig. 278 gives further illustration of this problem. CLV THE SHADOW OF AN INCLINED PLANE The two portions of this inclined plane which cast the shadow are first the side _fbd_, and second the farther end _abcd_. The points we have to find are the shadows of _a_ and _b_. From luminary _L_ draw _La_, _Lb_, and from _F_, the foot, draw _Fc_, _Fd_. The intersection of these lines will be at _a·b·_. If we join _fb·_ and _db·_ we have the shadow of the side _fbd_, and if we join _ca·_ and _a·b·_ we have the shadow of _abcd_, which together form that of the figure. [Illustration: Fig. 279.] CLVI SHADOW ON A ROOF OR INCLINED PLANE To draw the shadow of the figure _M_ on the inclined plane _K_ (or a chimney on a roof). First find the vanishing point _P_ of the inclined plane and draw horizontal _PF_ to meet vertical raised from _L_, the luminary. Then _F_ will be the vanishing point of the shadow. From _L_ draw L1, L2, L3 to top of figure _M_, and from the base of _M_ draw 1F, 2F, 3F to _F_, the vanishing point of the shadow. The intersections of these lines at 1, 2, 3 on _K_ will determine the length and form of the shadow. [Illustration: Fig. 280.] CLVII TO FIND THE SHADOW OF A PROJECTION OR BALCONY ON A WALL To find the shadow of the object _K_ on the wall _W_, drop verticals _OO_ till they meet the base line _B·B·_ of the wall. Then from the point of sight _S_ draw lines through _OO_, also drop verticals _Dd·_, _Cc·_, to meet these lines in _d·c·_; draw _c·F_ and _d·F_ to foot of luminary. From the points _xx_ where these lines cut the base _B_ raise perpendiculars _xa·_, _xb·_. From _D_, _A_, and _B_ draw lines to the luminary _L_. These lines or rays intersecting the verticals raised from _xx_ at _a·b·_ will give the respective points of the shadow. [Illustration: Fig. 281.] The shadow of the eave of a roof can be obtained in the same way. Take any point thereon, mark its trace on the ground, and then proceed as above. CLVIII SHADOW ON A RETREATING WALL, SUN IN FRONT Let _L_ be the luminary. Raise vertical _LF_. _F_ will be the vanishing point of the shadows on the ground. Draw _Lf·_ parallel to _FS_. Drop _Sf·_ from point of sight; _f·_ (so found) is the vanishing point of the shadows on the wall. For shadow of roof draw _LE_ and _f·B_, giving us _e_, the shadow of _E_. Join _Be_, &c., and so draw shadow of eave of roof. [Illustration: Fig. 282.] For shadow of _K_ draw lines from luminary _L_ to meet those from _f·_ the foot, &c. The shadow of _D_ over the door is found in a similar way to that of the roof. [Illustration: Fig. 283.] Figure 283 shows how the shadow of the old man in the preceding drawing is found. CLIX SHADOW OF AN ARCH, SUN IN FRONT Having drawn the arch, divide it into a certain number of parts, say five. From these divisions drop perpendiculars to base line. From divisions on _AB_ draw lines to _F_ the foot, and from those on the semicircle draw lines to _L_ the luminary. Their intersections will give the points through which to draw the shadow of the arch. [Illustration: Fig. 284.] CLX SHADOW IN A NICHE OR RECESS In this figure a similar method to that just explained is adopted. Drop perpendiculars from the divisions of the arch 1 2 3 to the base. From the foot of each draw 1S, 2S, 3S to foot of luminary _S_, and from the top of each, A 1 2 3 B, draw lines to _L_ as before. Where the former intersect the curve on the floor of the niche raise verticals to meet the latter at P 1 2 B, &c. These points will indicate about the position of the shadow; but the niche being semicircular and domed at the top the shadow gradually loses itself in a gradated and somewhat serpentine half-tone. [Illustration: Fig. 285.] CLXI SHADOW IN AN ARCHED DOORWAY [Illustration: Fig. 286.] This is so similar to the last figure in many respects that I need not repeat a description of the manner in which it is done. And surely an artist after making a few sketches from the actual thing will hardly require all this machinery to draw a simple shadow. CLXII SHADOWS PRODUCED BY ARTIFICIAL LIGHT [Illustration: Fig. 287.] Shadows thrown by artificial light, such as a candle or lamp, are found by drawing lines from the seat of the luminary through the feet of the objects to meet lines representing rays of light drawn from the luminary itself over the tops or the corners of the objects; very much as in the cases of sun-shadows, but with this difference, that whereas the foot of the luminary in this latter case is supposed to be on the horizon an infinite distance away, the foot in the case of a lamp or candle may be on the floor or on a table close to us. First draw the table and chair, &c. (Fig. 287), and let _L_ be the luminary. For objects on the table such as _K_ the foot will be at _f_ on the table. For the shadows on the floor, of the chair and table itself, we must find the foot of the luminary on the floor. Draw _So_, find trace of the edge of the table, drop vertical _oP_, draw _PS_ to point of sight, drop vertical from foot of candlestick to meet _PS_ in _F_. Then _F_ is the foot of the luminary on the floor. From this point draw lines through the feet or traces of objects such as the corners of the table, &c., to meet other lines drawn from the point of light, and so obtain the shadow. CLXIII SOME OBSERVATIONS ON REAL LIGHT AND SHADE Although the figures we have been drawing show the principles on which sun-shadows are shaped, still there are so many more laws to be considered in the great art of light and shade that it is better to observe them in Nature herself or under the teaching of the real sun. In the study of a kitchen and scullery in an old house in Toledo (Fig. 288) we have an example of the many things to be considered besides the mere shapes of shadows of regular forms. It will be seen that the light is dispersed in all directions, and although there is a good deal of half-shade there are scarcely any cast shadows except on the floor; but the light on the white walls in the outside gallery is so reflected into the cast shadows that they are extremely faint. The luminosity of this part of the sketch is greatly enhanced by the contrast of the dark legs of the bench and the shadows in the roof. The warm glow of all this portion is contrasted by the grey door and its frame. [Illustration: Fig. 288.] Note that the door itself is quite luminous, and lighted up by the reflection of the sun from the tiled floor, so that the bars in the upper part throw distinct shadows, besides the mystery of colour thus introduced. The little window to the left, though not admitting much direct sunlight, is evidence of the brilliant glare outside; for the reflected light is very conspicuous on the top and on the shutters on each side; indeed they cast distinct shadows up and down, while some clear daylight from the blue sky is reflected on the window-sill. As to the sink, the table, the wash-tubs, &c., although they seem in strong light and shade they really receive little or no direct light from a single point; but from the strong reflected light re-reflected into them from the wall of the doorway. There are many other things in such effects as this which the artist will observe, and which can only be studied from real light and shade. Such is the character of reflected light, varying according to the angle and intensity of the luminary and a hundred other things. When we come to study light in the open air we get into another region, and have to deal with it accordingly, and yet we shall find that our sciagraphy will be a help to us even in this bewilderment; for it will explain in a manner the innumerable shapes of sun-shadows that we observe out of doors among hills and dales, showing up their forms and structure; its play in the woods and gardens, and its value among buildings, showing all their juttings and abuttings, recesses, doorways, and all the other architectural details. Nor must we forget light's most glorious display of all on the sea and in the clouds and in the sunrises and the sunsets down to the still and lovely moonlight. These sun-shadows are useful in showing us the principle of light and shade, and so also are the shadows cast by artificial light; but they are only the beginning of that beautiful study, that exquisite art of tone or _chiaro-oscuro_, which is infinite in its variety, is full of the deepest mystery, and is the true poetry of art. For this the student must go to Nature herself, must study her in all her moods from early dawn to sunset, in the twilight and when night sets in. No mathematical rules can help him, but only the thoughtful contemplation, the silent watching, and the mental notes that he can make and commit to memory, combining them with the sentiments to which they in turn give rise. The _plein air_, or broad daylight effects, are but one item of the great range of this ever-changing and deepening mystery--from the hard reality to the soft blending of evening when form almost disappears, even to the merging of the whole landscape, nay, the whole world, into a dream--which is felt rather than seen, but possesses a charm that almost defies the pencil of the painter, and can only be expressed by the deep and sweet notes of the poet and the musician. For love and reverence are necessary to appreciate and to present it. There is also much to learn about artificial light. For here, again, the study is endless: from the glare of a hundred lights--electric and otherwise--to the single lamp or candle. Indeed a whole volume could be filled with illustrations of its effects. To those who aim at producing intense brilliancy, refusing to acknowledge any limitations to their capacity, a hundred or a thousand lights commend themselves; and even though wild splashes of paint may sometimes be the result, still the effort is praiseworthy. But those who prefer the mysterious lighting of a Rembrandt will find, if they sit contemplating in a room lit with one lamp only, that an endless depth of mystery surrounds them, full of dark recesses peopled by fancy and sweet thought, whilst the most beautiful gradations soften the forms without distorting them; and at the same time he can detect the laws of this science of light and shade a thousand times repeated and endless in its variety. _Note._--Fig. 288 must be looked upon as a rough sketch which only gives the general effect of the original drawing; to render all the delicate tints, tones and reflections described in the text would require a highly-finished reproduction in half-tone or in colour. As many of the figures in this book had to be re-drawn, not a light task, I must here thank Miss Margaret L. Williams, one of our Academy students, for kindly coming to my assistance and volunteering her careful co-operation. CLXIV REFLECTION [Transcriber's Note: In this chapter, [R] represents "R" printed upside-down.] Reflections in still water can best be illustrated by placing some simple object, such as a cube, on a looking-glass laid horizontally on a table, or by studying plants, stones, banks, trees, &c., reflected in some quiet pond. It will then be seen that the reflection is the counterpart of the object reversed, and having the same vanishing points as the object itself. [Illustration: Fig. 289.] Let us suppose _R_ (Fig. 289) to be standing on the water or reflecting plane. To find its reflection make square [R] equal to the original square _R_. Complete the reversed cube by drawing its other sides, &c. It is evident that this lower cube is the reflection of the one above it, although it differs in one respect, for whereas in figure _R_ the top of the cube is seen, in its reflection [R] it is hidden, &c. In figure A of a semicircular arch we see the underneath portion of the arch reflected in the water, but we do not see it in the actual object. However, these things are obvious. Note that the reflected line must be equal in length to the actual one, or the reflection of a square would not be a square, nor that of a semicircle a semicircle. The apparent lengthening of reflections in water is owing to the surface being broken by wavelets, which, leaping up near to us, catch some of the image of the tree, or whatever it is, that it is reflected. [Illustration: Fig. 290.] In this view of an arch (Fig. 290) note that the reflection is obtained by dropping perpendiculars from certain points on the arch, 1, 0, 2, &c., to the surface of the reflecting plane, and then measuring the same lengths downwards to corresponding points, 1, 0, 2, &c., in the reflection. CLXV ANGLES OF REFLECTION In Fig. 291 we take a side view of the reflected object in order to show that at whatever angle the visual ray strikes the reflecting surface it is reflected from it at the same angle. [Illustration: Fig. 291.] We have seen that the reflected line must be equal to the original line, therefore _mB_ must equal _Ma_. They are also at right angles to _MN_, the plane of reflection. We will now draw the visual ray passing from _E_, the eye, to _B_, which is the reflection of _A_; and just underneath it passes through _MN_ at _O_, which is the point where the visual ray strikes the reflecting surface. Draw _OA_. This line represents the ray reflected from it. We have now two triangles, _OAm_ and _OmB_, which are right-angled triangles and equal, therefore angle _a_ equals angle _b_. But angle _b_ equals angle _c_. Therefore angle _EcM_ equals angle _Aam_, and the angle at which the ray strikes the reflecting plane is equal to the angle at which it is reflected from it. CLXVI REFLECTIONS OF OBJECTS AT DIFFERENT DISTANCES In this sketch the four posts and other objects are represented standing on a plane level or almost level with the water, in order to show the working of our problem more clearly. It will be seen that the post _A_ is on the brink of the reflecting plane, and therefore is entirely reflected; _B_ and _C_ being farther back are only partially seen, whereas the reflection of _D_ is not seen at all. I have made all the posts the same height, but with regard to the houses, where the length of the vertical lines varies, we obtain their reflections by measuring from the points _oo_ upwards and downwards as in the previous figure. [Illustration: Fig. 292.] Of course these reflections vary according to the position they are viewed from; the lower we are down, the more do we see of the reflections of distant objects, and vice versa. When the figures are on a higher plane than the water, that is, above the plane of reflection, we have to find their perspective position, and drop a perpendicular _AO_ (Fig. 293) till it comes in contact with the plane of reflection, which we suppose to run under the ground, then measure the same length downwards, as in this figure of a girl on the top of the steps. Point _o_ marks the point of contact with the plane, and by measuring downwards to _a·_ we get the length of her reflection, or as much as is seen of it. Note the reflection of the steps and the sloping bank, and the application of the inclined plane ascending and descending. [Illustration: Fig. 293.] CLXVII REFLECTION IN A LOOKING-GLASS I had noticed that some of the figures in Titian's pictures were only half life-size, and yet they looked natural; and one day, thinking I would trace myself in an upright mirror, I stood at arm's length from it and with a brush and Chinese white, I made a rough outline of my face and figure, and when I measured it I found that my drawing was exactly half as long and half as wide as nature. I went closer to the glass, but the same outline fitted me. Then I retreated several paces, and still the same outline surrounded me. Although a little surprising at first, the reason is obvious. The image in the glass retreats or advances exactly in the same measure as the spectator. [Illustration: Fig. 294.] Suppose him to represent one end of a parallelogram _e·s·_, and his image _a·b·_ to represent the other. The mirror _AB_ is a perpendicular half-way between them, the diagonal _e·b·_ is the visual ray passing from the eye of the spectator to the foot of his image, and is the diagonal of a rectangle, therefore it cuts _AB_ in the centre _o_, and _AO_ represents _a·b·_ to the spectator. This is an experiment that any one may try for himself. Perhaps the above fact may have something to do with the remarks I made about Titian at the beginning of this chapter. [Illustration: Fig. 295.] [Illustration: Fig. 296.] CLXVIII THE MIRROR AT AN ANGLE If an object or line _AB_ is inclined at an angle of 45° to the mirror _RR_, then the angle _BAC_ will be a right angle, and this angle is exactly divided in two by the reflecting plane _RR_. And whatever the angle of the object or line makes with its reflection that angle will also be exactly divided. [Illustration: Fig. 297.] [Illustration: Fig. 298.] Now suppose our mirror to be standing on a horizontal plane and on a pivot, so that it can be inclined either way. Whatever angle the mirror is to the plane the reflection of that plane in the mirror will be at the same angle on the other side of it, so that if the mirror _OA_ (Fig. 298) is at 45° to the plane _RR_ then the reflection of that plane in the mirror will be 45° on the other side of it, or at right angles, and the reflected plane will appear perpendicular, as shown in Fig. 299, where we have a front view of a mirror leaning forward at an angle of 45° and reflecting the square _aob_ with a cube standing upon it, only in the reflection the cube appears to be projecting from an upright plane or wall. [Illustration: Fig. 299.] If we increase the angle from 45° to 60°, then the reflection of the plane and cube will lean backwards as shown in Fig. 300. If we place it on a level with the original plane, the cube will be standing upright twice the distance away. If the mirror is still farther tilted till it makes an angle of 135° as at _E_ (Fig. 298), or 45° on the other side of the vertical _Oc_, then the plane and cube would disappear, and objects exactly over that plane, such as the ceiling, would come into view. In Fig. 300 the mirror is at 60° to the plane _mn_, and the plane itself at about 15° to the plane _an_ (so that here we are using angular perspective, _V_ being the accessible vanishing point). The reflection of the plane and cube is seen leaning back at an angle of 60°. Note the way the reflection of this cube is found by the dotted lines on the plane, on the surface of the mirror, and also on the reflection. [Illustration: Fig. 300.] CLXIX THE UPRIGHT MIRROR AT AN ANGLE OF 45° TO THE WALL In Fig. 301 the mirror is vertical and at an angle of 45° to the wall opposite the spectator, so that it reflects a portion of that wall as though it were receding from us at right angles; and the wall with the pictures upon it, which appears to be facing us, in reality is on our left. [Illustration: Fig. 301.] An endless number of complicated problems could be invented of the inclined mirror, but they would be mere puzzles calculated rather to deter the student than to instruct him. What we chiefly have to bear in mind is the simple principle of reflections. When a mirror is vertical and placed at the end or side of a room it reflects that room and gives the impression that we are in one double the size. If two mirrors are placed opposite to each other at each end of a room they reflect and reflect, so that we see an endless number of rooms. Again, if we are sitting in a gallery of pictures with a hand mirror, we can so turn and twist that mirror about that we can bring any picture in front of us, whether it is behind us, at the side, or even on the ceiling. Indeed, when one goes to those old palaces and churches where pictures are painted on the ceiling, as in the Sistine Chapel or the Louvre, or the palaces at Venice, it is not a bad plan to take a hand mirror with us, so that we can see those elevated works of art in comfort. There are also many uses for the mirror in the studio, well known to the artist. One is to look at one's own picture reversed, when faults become more evident; and another, when the model is required to be at a longer distance than the dimensions of the studio will admit, by drawing his reflection in the glass we double the distance he is from us. The reason the mirror shows the fault of a work to which the eye has become accustomed is that it doubles it. Thus if a line that should be vertical is leaning to one side, in the mirror it will lean to the other; so that if it is out of the perpendicular to the left, its reflection will be out of the perpendicular to the right, making a double divergence from one to the other. CLXX MENTAL PERSPECTIVE Before we part, I should like to say a word about mental perspective, for we must remember that some see farther than others, and some will endeavour to see even into the infinite. To see Nature in all her vastness and magnificence, the thought must supplement and must surpass the eye. It is this far-seeing that makes the great poet, the great philosopher, and the great artist. Let the student bear this in mind, for if he possesses this quality or even a share of it, it will give immortality to his work. To explain in detail the full meaning of this suggestion is beyond the province of this book, but it may lead the student to think this question out for himself in his solitary and imaginative moments, and should, I think, give a charm and virtue to his work which he should endeavour to make of value, not only to his own time but to the generations that are to follow. Cultivate, therefore, this mental perspective, without forgetting the solid foundation of the science I have endeavoured to impart to you. INDEX [Transcriber's Note: Index citations in the original book referred to page numbers. References to chapters (Roman numerals) or figures (Arabic numerals) have been added in brackets where possible. Note that the last two entries for "Toledo" are figure numbers rather than pages; these have not been corrected.] A Albert Dürer, 2, 9. Angles of Reflection, 259 [CLXV]. Angular Perspective, 98 [XLIX] - 123 [LXXII], 133 [LXXX], 170. " " New Method, 133 [LXXX], 134 [LXXXI], 135 [LXXXII], 136 [LXXXIII]. Arches, Arcades, &c., 198 [CXXVI], 200 [CXXVII] - 208 [CXXIII]. Architect's Perspective, 170 [CVIII], 171 [197]. Art Schools Perspective, 112 [LXII] - 118 [LXVI], 217 [CXLI]. Atmosphere, 1, 74 [XXX]. B Balcony, Shadow of, 246 [CLVII]. Base or groundline, 89 [XLI]. C Campanile Florence, 5, 59. Cast Shadows, 229 [CXLVII] - 253 [CLXII]. Centre of Vision, 15 [II]. Chessboard, 74 [XXXI]. Chinese Art, 11. Circle, 145 [LXXXVIII], 151 [XCII] - 156 [XCVI], 159 [XCIX]. Columns, 157 [XCVII], 159 [XCIX], 161 [CI], 169 [CVI], 170 [CVII]. Conditions of Perspective, 24 [VII], 25. Cottage in Angular Perspective, 116 [LXV]. Cube, 53 [XVII], 65 [XXIII], 115 [LXIV], 119 [LXVIII]. Cylinder, 158 [XCVIII], 159 [CXIX]. Cylindrical picture, 227 [CXLVI]. D De Hoogh, 2, 62 [68], 73 [82]. Depths, How to measure by diagonals, 127 [LXXVI], 128 [LXXVII]. Descending plane, 92 [XLIV] - 95 [XLV]. Diagonals, 45, 124 [LXXIII], 125 [LXXIV], 126 [LXXV]. Disproportion, How to correct, 35, 118 [LXVII], 157 [XCVII]. Distance, 16 [III], 77 [XXXIII], 78 [XXXIV], 85 [XXXVII], 87 [XXXIX], 103 [LIV], 128 [LXXVII]. Distorted perspective, How to correct, 118 [LXVII]. Dome, 163 [CIII] - 167 [CV]. Double Cross, 218 [CXLII]. E Ellipse, 145 [LXXXIX], 146 [XC], 147 [168]. Elliptical Arch, 207 [CXXXII]. F Farningham, 95 [103]. figures on descending plane, 92 [XLIV], 93 [100], 94 [102], 95 [XLV]. " " an inclined plane, 88 [XL]. " " a level plane, 70 [79], 71 [XXVIII], 72 [81], 73 [82], 74 [XXX], 75 [XXXI]. " " uneven ground, 90 [XLII], 91 [XLIII]. G Geometrical and Perspective figures contrasted, 46 [XII] - 48. " plane, 99 [L]. Giovanni da Pistoya, Sonnet to, by Michelangelo, 60. Great Pyramid, 190 [CXXII]. H Hexagon, 177 [CXIV], 183 [CXVII], 185 [CXIX]. Hogarth, 9. Honfleur, 83 [92], 142 [163]. Horizon, 3, 4, 15 [II], 20, 59 [XX], 60 [66]. Horizontal line, 13 [I], 15 [II]. Horizontals, 30, 31, 36. I Inaccessible vanishing points, 77 [XXXII], 78 [XXXIII], 136, 140 - 144. Inclined plane, 33, 118, 213 [CXXXVIII], 244 [XLV], 245 [XLVI]. Interiors, 62 [XXI], 117 [LXVI], 118 [LXVII], 128. J Japanese Art, 11. Jesuit of Paris, Practice of Perspective by, 9. K Kiosk, Application of Hexagon, 185 [XCIX]. Kirby, Joshua, Perspective made Easy (?), 9. L Ladder, Step, 212 [CXXXVII], 216 [CXL]. Landscape Perspective, 74 [XXX]. Landseer, Sir Edwin, 1. Leonardo da Vinci, 1, 61. Light, Observations on, 253 [CLXIII]. Light-house, 84 [XXXVII]. Long distances, 85 [XXXVIII], 87 [XXXIX]. M Measure distances by square and diagonal, 89 [XLI], 128 [LXXVII], 129. " vanishing lines, How to, 49 [XIV], 50 [XV]. Measuring points, 106 [LVII], 113. " point O, 108, 109, 110 [LX]. Mental Perspective, 269 [CLXX]. Michelangelo, 5, 57, 58, 60. N Natural Perspective, 12, 82 [91], 95 [103], 142 [163], 144 [164]. New Method of Angular Perspective, 133 [LXXX], 134 [LXXXI], 135 [LXXXII], 141 [LXXXVI], 215 [CXXXIX], 219. Niche, 164 [CIV], 165 [193], 250 [CLX]. O Oblique Square, 139 [LXXXV]. Octagon, 172 [CIX] - 175 [202]. O, measuring point, 110 [LX]. Optic Cone, 20 [IV]. P Parallels and Diagonals, 124 [LXXIII] - 128 [LXXVI]. Paul Potter, cattle, 19 [16]. Paul Veronese, 4. Pavements, 64 [XXII], 66 [XXIV], 176 [CXIII], 178 [CXV], 180 [209],181 [CXVI], 183 [CXVII]. Pedestal, 141 [LXXXVI], 161 [CI]. Pentagon, 186 [CXX], 187 [217], 188 [219]. Perspective, Angular, 98 [XLIX] - 123 [LXXII]. " Definitions, 13 [I] - 23 [VI]. " Necessity of, 1. " Parallel, 42 - 97 [XLVII]. " Rules and Conditions of, 24 [VII] - 41. " Scientific definition of, 22 [VI]. " Theory of, 13 - 24 [VI]. " What is it? 6 - 12. Pictures painted according to positions they are to occupy, 59 [XX]. Point of Distance, 16 [III] - 21 [IV]. " " Sight, 12, 15 [II]. Points in Space, 129 [LXXVIII], 137 [LXXXIII]. Portico, 111 [122]. Projection, 21 [V], 137. Pyramid, 189 [CXXI], 190 [224], 191 [CXXII], 193 [CXXIII] - 196 [CXXV]. R Raphael, 3. Reduced distance, 77 [XXXIII], 78 [XXXIV], 79 [XXXV], 84 [90]. Reflection, 257 [CLXIV] - 268 [CLXIX]. Rembrandt, 59 [XX], 256. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 9, 60. Rubens, 4. Rules of Perspective, 24 - 41. S Scale on each side of Picture, 141 [LXXXVII], 142 [163] - 144 [164]. " Vanishing, 69 [XXVI], 71 [XXVII], 81 [XXXVI], 84 [90]. Serlio, 5, 126 [LXXV]. Shadows cast by sun, 229 [CXLVII] - 252 [CLXI]. " " " artificial light, 252 [CLXII]. Sight, Point of, 12, 15 [II]. Sistine Chapel, 60. Solid figures, 135 [LXXXII] - 140 [LXXXV]. Square in Angular Perspective, 105 [LVI], 106 [LVII], 109 [120], 112 [LXII], 114 [LXIII], 121 [LXX], 122 [LXXI], 123 [LXXII], 133 [LXXX], 134 [LXXXI], 139 [LXXXV]. " and diagonals, 125 [LXXIV], 138 [LXXXIV], 139 [LXXXV], 141 [LXXXVI]. " of the hypotenuse (fig. 170), 149 [170]. " in Parallel Perspective, 42 [IX], 43 [X], 50 [XV], 53 [XVII], 54 [XIX]. " at 45°, 64 [XXII] - 66 [XXIV]. Staircase leading to a Gallery, 221 [CXLIII]. Stairs, Winding, 222 [CXLIV], 225 [CXLV]. Station Point, 13 [I]. Steps, 209 [CXXXIV] - 218 [CXLII]. T Taddeo Gaddi, 5. Terms made use of, 48 [XIII]. Tiles, 176 [CXIII], 178 [CXV], 181 [CXVI]. Tintoretto, 4. Titian, 59 [XX], 262 [CLXVII]. Toledo, 96 [104], 144 [164], 259 [259], 288 [288]. Trace and projection, 21 [V]. Transposed distance, 53 [XVIII]. Triangles, 104 [LV], 106 [LVII], 132 [148], 135 [151], 138 [158]. Turner, 2, 87 [95]. U Ubaldus, Guidus, 9. V Vanishing lines, 49 [XIV]. " point, 119 [LXVIII]. " scale, 68 [XXV] - 72 [XXVIII], 74 [XXX], 77 [XXXII], 79 [XXXV], 84 [90]. Vaulted Ceiling, 203 [CXXX]. Velasquez, 59 [XX]. Vertical plane, 13 [I]. Visual rays, 20 [IV]. W Winding Stairs, 222 [CXLIV] - 225 [CXLV]. Water, Reflections in, 257 [CLXIV], 258 [CLXV], 260 [CLXVI], 261 [293]. * * * * * Errors and Anomalies: Missing punctuation in the Index has been silently supplied. The name form "Albert Dürer" (for Albrecht) is used throughout. In all references to Kirby, _Perspective made Easy_ (?), the question mark is in the original text. Figure 66: _Caption missing, but number is given in text_ ground plan of the required design, as at Figs. 73 and 74 _text reads "Figs. 74 and 75"_ CV [Chapter head] _"C" invisible_ _Index_ Dürer, Albert _umlaut missing_ Taddeo Gaddi _text reads "Tadeo"_ Titian _text reads Titien_ 
14264	----	THE PRACTICE & SCIENCE OF DRAWING BY HAROLD SPEED Associé de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, &c. * * * * * With 93 Illustrations & Diagrams * * * * * LONDON SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET 1913 * * * * * [Illustration: Plate I. FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF SAME MONOCHROME PAINTING IN DIFFERENT STAGES ILLUSTRATING A METHOD OF STUDYING MASS DRAWING WITH THE BRUSH] * * * * * PREFACE Permit me in the first place to anticipate the disappointment of any student who opens this book with the idea of finding "wrinkles" on how to draw faces, trees, clouds, or what not, short cuts to excellence in drawing, or any of the tricks so popular with the drawing masters of our grandmothers and still dearly loved by a large number of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no short cuts to excellence. But help of a very practical kind it is the aim of the following pages to give; although it may be necessary to make a greater call upon the intelligence of the student than these Victorian methods attempted. It was not until some time after having passed through the course of training in two of our chief schools of art that the author got any idea of what drawing really meant. What was taught was the faithful copying of a series of objects, beginning with the simplest forms, such as cubes, cones, cylinders, &c. (an excellent system to begin with at present in danger of some neglect), after which more complicated objects in plaster of Paris were attempted, and finally copies of the human head and figure posed in suspended animation and supported by blocks, &c. In so far as this was accurately done, all this mechanical training of eye and hand was excellent; but it was not enough. And when with an eye trained to the closest mechanical accuracy the author visited the galleries of the Continent and studied the drawings of the old masters, it soon became apparent that either his or their ideas of drawing were all wrong. Very few drawings could be found sufficiently "like the model" to obtain the prize at either of the great schools he had attended. Luckily there was just enough modesty left for him to realise that possibly they were in some mysterious way right and his own training in some way lacking. And so he set to work to try and climb the long uphill road that separates mechanically accurate drawing from artistically accurate drawing. Now this journey should have been commenced much earlier, and perhaps it was due to his own stupidity that it was not; but it was with a vague idea of saving some students from such wrong-headedness, and possibly straightening out some of the path, that he accepted the invitation to write this book. In writing upon any matter of experience, such as art, the possibilities of misunderstanding are enormous, and one shudders to think of the things that may be put down to one's credit, owing to such misunderstandings. It is like writing about the taste of sugar, you are only likely to be understood by those who have already experienced the flavour; by those who have not, the wildest interpretation will be put upon your words. The written word is necessarily confined to the things of the understanding because only the understanding has written language; whereas art deals with ideas of a different mental texture, which words can only vaguely suggest. However, there are a large number of people who, although they cannot be said to have experienced in a full sense any works of art, have undoubtedly the impelling desire which a little direction may lead on to a fuller appreciation. And it is to such that books on art are useful. So that although this book is primarily addressed to working students, it is hoped that it may be of interest to that increasing number of people who, tired with the rush and struggle of modern existence, seek refreshment in artistic things. To many such in this country modern art is still a closed book; its point of view is so different from that of the art they have been brought up with, that they refuse to have anything to do with it. Whereas, if they only took the trouble to find out something of the point of view of the modern artist, they would discover new beauties they little suspected. If anybody looks at a picture by Claude Monet from the point of view of a Raphael, he will see nothing but a meaningless jargon of wild paint-strokes. And if anybody looks at a Raphael from the point of view of a Claude Monet, he will, no doubt, only see hard, tinny figures in a setting devoid of any of the lovely atmosphere that always envelops form seen in nature. So wide apart are some of the points of view in painting. In the treatment of form these differences in point of view make for enormous variety in the work. So that no apology need be made for the large amount of space occupied in the following pages by what is usually dismissed as mere theory; but what is in reality the first essential of any good practice in drawing. To have a clear idea of what it is you wish to do, is the first necessity of any successful performance. But our exhibitions are full of works that show how seldom this is the case in art. Works showing much ingenuity and ability, but no artistic brains; pictures that are little more than school studies, exercises in the representation of carefully or carelessly arranged objects, but cold to any artistic intention. At this time particularly some principles, and a clear intellectual understanding of what it is you are trying to do, are needed. We have no set traditions to guide us. The times when the student accepted the style and traditions of his master and blindly followed them until he found himself, are gone. Such conditions belonged to an age when intercommunication was difficult, and when the artistic horizon was restricted to a single town or province. Science has altered all that, and we may regret the loss of local colour and singleness of aim this growth of art in separate compartments produced; but it is unlikely that such conditions will occur again. Quick means of transit and cheap methods of reproduction have brought the art of the whole world to our doors. Where formerly the artistic food at the disposal of the student was restricted to the few pictures in his vicinity and some prints of others, now there is scarcely a picture of note in the world that is not known to the average student, either from personal inspection at our museums and loan exhibitions, or from excellent photographic reproductions. Not only European art, but the art of the East, China and Japan, is part of the formative influence by which he is surrounded; not to mention the modern science of light and colour that has had such an influence on technique. It is no wonder that a period of artistic indigestion is upon us. Hence the student has need of sound principles and a clear understanding of the science of his art, if he would select from this mass of material those things which answer to his own inner need for artistic expression. The position of art to-day is like that of a river where many tributaries meeting at one point, suddenly turn the steady flow to turbulence, the many streams jostling each other and the different currents pulling hither and thither. After a time these newly-met forces will adjust themselves to the altered condition, and a larger, finer stream be the result. Something analogous to this would seem to be happening in art at the present time, when all nations and all schools are acting and reacting upon each other, and art is losing its national characteristics. The hope of the future is that a larger and deeper art, answering to the altered conditions of humanity, will result. There are those who would leave this scene of struggling influences and away up on some bare primitive mountain-top start a new stream, begin all over again. But however necessary it may be to give the primitive mountain waters that were the start of all the streams a more prominent place in the new flow onwards, it is unlikely that much can come of any attempt to leave the turbulent waters, go backwards, and start again; they can only flow onwards. To speak more plainly, the complexity of modern art influences may make it necessary to call attention to the primitive principles of expression that should never be lost sight of in any work, but hardly justifies the attitude of those anarchists in art who would flout the heritage of culture we possess and attempt a new start. Such attempts however when sincere are interesting and may be productive of some new vitality, adding to the weight of the main stream. But it must be along the main stream, along lines in harmony with tradition that the chief advance must be looked for. Although it has been felt necessary to devote much space to an attempt to find principles that may be said to be at the basis of the art of all nations, the executive side of the question has not been neglected. And it is hoped that the logical method for the study of drawing from the two opposite points of view of line and mass here advocated may be useful, and help students to avoid some of the confusion that results from attempting simultaneously the study of these different qualities of form expression. * * * * * CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION II. DRAWING III. VISION IV. LINE DRAWING V. MASS DRAWING VI. THE ACADEMIC AND CONVENTIONAL VII. THE STUDY OF DRAWING VIII. LINE DRAWING: PRACTICAL IX. MASS DRAWING: PRACTICAL X. RHYTHM XI. RHYTHM: VARIETY OF LINE XII. RHYTHM: UNITY OF LINE XIII. RHYTHM: VARIETY OF MASS XIV. RHYTHM: UNITY OF MASS XV. RHYTHM: BALANCE XVI. RHYTHM: PROPORTION XVII. PORTRAIT DRAWING XVIII. THE VISUAL MEMORY XIX. PROCEDURE XX. MATERIALS XXI. CONCLUSION APPENDIX INDEX LIST OF PLATES I. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME STUDY FROM THE LIFE IN DIFFERENT STAGES II. DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI III. STUDY FOR "APRIL" IV. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF "BOREAS" V. FROM A STUDY BY BOTTICELLI VI. STUDY BY ALFRED STEPHENS VII. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF APOLLO VIII. STUDY FOR A PICTURE IX. STUDY BY WATTEAU X. EXAMPLE OF XVTH CENTURY CHINESE WORK XI. LOS MENENAS. BY VELAZQUEZ XII. STUDY ATTRIBUTED TO MICHAEL ANGELO XIII. STUDY BY DEGAS XIV. DRAWING BY ERNEST COLE XV. FROM A PENCIL DRAWING BY INGRES XVI. STUDY BY RUBENS XVII. A DEMONSTRATION DRAWING AT THE GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE XVIII. STUDY ILLUSTRATING METHOD OF DRAWING XIX. ILLUSTRATING CURVED LINES XX. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF "Love" XXI. STUDY ILLUSTRATING TREATMENT OF HAIR XXII. STUDY FOR DECORATION AT AMIENS XXIII. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE PAINTING FROM A CAST (1) XXIII. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE PAINTING FROM A CAST (2) XXIV. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE PAINTING FROM A CAST (3) XXIV. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE PAINTING FROM A CAST (4) XXV. ILLUSTRATING SOME TYPICAL BRUSH STROKES XXVI. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE SAME STUDY (1) XXVII. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE SAME STUDY (2) XXVIII. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE SAME STUDY (3) XXIX. DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE SAME STUDY (4) XXX. A STUDY FOR A PICTURE OF "ROSALIND AND ORLANDO" XXXI. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM BLAKE'S "JOB" (PLATES I., V., X., XXI.) XXXII. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM BLAKE'S "JOB" (PLATES II., XI., XVIII., XIV.) XXXIII. FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE XXXIV. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE XXXV. LOVE AND DEATH XXXVI. SURRENDER OF BREDA XXXVII. THE BIRTH OF VENUS XXXVIII. THE RAPE OF EUROPA XXXIX. BATTLE OF S. EGIDIO XL. THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST XLI. THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST XLII. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S DAUGHTER XLIII. MONTE SOLARO, CAPRI XLIV. PART OF THE "SURRENDER OF BREDA" XLV. VENUS, MERCURY, AND CUPID XLVI. OLYMPIA XLVII. L'EMBARQUEMENT POUR CYTHÈRE XLVIII. THE ANSIDEI MADONNA XLIX. FINDING OF THE BODY OF ST. MARK L. FROM A DRAWING BY HOLBEIN LI. SIR CHARLES DILKE LII. JOHN REDMOND, M.P. LIII. THE LADY AUDLEY LIV. STUDY ON BROWN PAPER LV. FROM A SILVER POINT DRAWING LVI. STUDY FOR TREE IN "THE BOAR HUNT" LIST OF DIAGRAMS I. TYPES OF FIRST DRAWINGS BY CHILDREN II. SHOWING WHERE SQUARENESSES MAY BE LOOKED FOR III. A DEVICE FOR ENABLING STUDENTS TO OBSERVE APPEARANCES AS A FLAT SUBJECT IV. SHOWING THREE PRINCIPLES OF CONSTRUCTION USED IN OBSERVING MASSES, CURVES, AND POSITION OF POINTS V. PLAN OF CONE ILLUSTRATING PRINCIPLES OF LIGHT AND SHADE VI. ILLUSTRATING SOME POINTS CONNECTED WITH THE EYES VII. EGG AND DART MOULDING VIII. ILLUSTRATING VARIETY IN SYMMETRY IX. ILLUSTRATING VARIETY IN SYMMETRY X. ILLUSTRATING INFLUENCE OF HORIZONTAL LINES XI. ILLUSTRATING INFLUENCE OF VERTICAL LINES XII. ILLUSTRATING INFLUENCE OF THE RIGHT ANGLE XIII. LOVE AND DEATH XIV. ILLUSTRATING POWER OF CURVED LINES XV. THE BIRTH OF VENUS XVI. THE RAPE OF EUROPA XVII. BATTLE OF S. EGIDIO XVIII. SHOWING HOW LINES UNRELATED CAN BE BROUGHT INTO HARMONY XIX. SHOWING HOW LINES UNRELATED CAN BE BROUGHT INTO HARMONY XX. THE ARTIST'S DAUGHTER XXI. THE INFLUENCE ON THE FACE OF DIFFERENT WAYS OF DOING THE HAIR XXII. THE INFLUENCE ON THE FACE OF DIFFERENT WAYS OF DOING THE HAIR XXIII. EXAMPLES OF EARLY ITALIAN TREATMENT OF TREES XXIV. THE PRINCIPLE OF MASS OR TONE RHYTHM XXV. MASS OR TONE RHYTHM IN "ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS" XXVI. EXAMPLE OF COROT'S SYSTEM OF MASS RHYTHM XXVII. ILLUSTRATING HOW INTEREST MAY BALANCE MASS XXVIII. PROPORTION * * * * * THE PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF DRAWING I INTRODUCTION The best things in an artist's work are so much a matter of intuition, that there is much to be said for the point of view that would altogether discourage intellectual inquiry into artistic phenomena on the part of the artist. Intuitions are shy things and apt to disappear if looked into too closely. And there is undoubtedly a danger that too much knowledge and training may supplant the natural intuitive feeling of a student, leaving only a cold knowledge of the means of expression in its place. For the artist, if he has the right stuff in him, has a consciousness, in doing his best work, of something, as Ruskin has said, "not in him but through him." He has been, as it were, but the agent through which it has found expression. Talent can be described as "that which we have," and Genius as "that which has us." Now, although we may have little control over this power that "has us," and although it may be as well to abandon oneself unreservedly to its influence, there can be little doubt as to its being the business of the artist to see to it that his talent be so developed, that he may prove a fit instrument for the expression of whatever it may be given him to express; while it must be left to his individual temperament to decide how far it is advisable to pursue any intellectual analysis of the elusive things that are the true matter of art. Provided the student realises this, and that art training can only deal with the perfecting of a means of expression and that the real matter of art lies above this and is beyond the scope of teaching, he cannot have too much of it. For although he must ever be a child before the influence that moves him, if it is not with the knowledge of the grown man that he takes off his coat and approaches the craft of painting or drawing, he will be poorly equipped to make them a means of conveying to others in adequate form the things he may wish to express. Great things are only done in art when the creative instinct of the artist has a well-organised executive faculty at its disposal. * * * * * Of the two divisions into which the technical study of painting can be divided, namely Form and Colour, we are concerned in this book with Form alone. But before proceeding to our immediate subject something should be said as to the nature of art generally, not with the ambition of arriving at any final result in a short chapter, but merely in order to give an idea of the point of view from which the following pages are written, so that misunderstandings may be avoided. The variety of definitions that exist justifies some inquiry. The following are a few that come to mind: "Art is nature expressed through a personality." But what of architecture? Or music? Then there is Morris's "Art is the expression of pleasure in work." But this does not apply to music and poetry. Andrew Lang's "Everything which we distinguish from nature" seems too broad to catch hold of, while Tolstoy's "An action by means of which one man, having experienced a feeling, intentionally transmits it to others" is nearer the truth, and covers all the arts, but seems, from its omitting any mention of #rhythm#, very inadequate. * * * * * Now the facts of life are conveyed by our senses to the consciousness within us, and stimulate the world of thought and feeling that constitutes our real life. Thought and feeling are very intimately connected, few of our mental perceptions, particularly when they first dawn upon us, being unaccompanied by some feeling. But there is this general division to be made, on one extreme of which is what we call pure intellect, and on the other pure feeling or emotion. The arts, I take it, are a means of giving expression to the emotional side of this mental activity, intimately related as it often is to the more purely intellectual side. The more sensual side of this feeling is perhaps its lowest, while the feelings associated with the intelligence, the little sensitivenesses of perception that escape pure intellect, are possibly its noblest experiences. Pure intellect seeks to construct from the facts brought to our consciousness by the senses, an accurately measured world of phenomena, uncoloured by the human equation in each of us. It seeks to create a point of view outside the human standpoint, one more stable and accurate, unaffected by the ever-changing current of human life. It therefore invents mechanical instruments to do the measuring of our sense perceptions, as their records are more accurate than human observation unaided. But while in science observation is made much more effective by the use of mechanical instruments in registering facts, the facts with which art deals, being those of feeling, can only be recorded by the feeling instrument--man, and are entirely missed by any mechanically devised substitutes. The artistic intelligence is not interested in things from this standpoint of mechanical accuracy, but in the effect of observation on the living consciousness--the sentient individual in each of us. The same fact accurately portrayed by a number of artistic intelligences should be different in each case, whereas the same fact accurately expressed by a number of scientific intelligences should be the same. But besides the feelings connected with a wide range of experience, each art has certain emotions belonging to the particular sense perceptions connected with it. That is to say, there are some that only music can convey: those connected with sound; others that only painting, sculpture, or architecture can convey: those connected with the form and colour that they severally deal with. In abstract form and colour--that is, form and colour unconnected with natural appearances--there is an emotional power, such as there is in music, the sounds of which have no direct connection with anything in nature, but only with that mysterious sense we have, the sense of Harmony, Beauty, or Rhythm (all three but different aspects of the same thing). This inner sense is a very remarkable fact, and will be found to some extent in all, certainly all civilised, races. And when the art of a remote people like the Chinese and Japanese is understood, our senses of harmony are found to be wonderfully in agreement. Despite the fact that their art has developed on lines widely different from our own, none the less, when the surprise at its newness has worn off and we begin to understand it, we find it conforms to very much the same sense of harmony. But apart from the feelings connected directly with the means of expression, there appears to be much in common between all the arts in their most profound expression; there seems to be a common centre in our inner life that they all appeal to. Possibly at this centre are the great primitive emotions common to all men. The religious group, the deep awe and reverence men feel when contemplating the great mystery of the Universe and their own littleness in the face of its vastness--the desire to correspond and develop relationship with the something outside themselves that is felt to be behind and through all things. Then there are those connected with the joy of life, the throbbing of the great life spirit, the gladness of being, the desire of the sexes; and also those connected with the sadness and mystery of death and decay, &c. The technical side of an art is, however, not concerned with these deeper motives but with the things of sense through which they find expression; in the case of painting, the visible universe. The artist is capable of being stimulated to artistic expression by all things seen, no matter what; to him nothing comes amiss. Great pictures have been made of beautiful people in beautiful clothes and of squalid people in ugly clothes, of beautiful architectural buildings and the ugly hovels of the poor. And the same painter who painted the Alps painted the Great Western Railway. The visible world is to the artist, as it were, a wonderful garment, at times revealing to him the Beyond, the Inner Truth there is in all things. He has a consciousness of some correspondence with something the other side of visible things and dimly felt through them, a "still, small voice" which he is impelled to interpret to man. It is the expression of this all-pervading inner significance that I think we recognise as beauty, and that prompted Keats to say: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." And hence it is that the love of truth and the love of beauty can exist together in the work of the artist. The search for this inner truth is the search for beauty. People whose vision does not penetrate beyond the narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture painted of one, and say that the artist has idealised it, meaning that he has consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision than they had been aware of. The commonplace is not the true, but only the shallow, view of things. [Illustration: Plate II. DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION AT WINDSOR _Copyright photo, Braun & Co._] Fromentin's "Art is the expression of the invisible by means of the visible" expresses the same idea, and it is this that gives to art its high place among the works of man. Beautiful things seem to put us in correspondence with a world the harmonies of which are more perfect, and bring a deeper peace than this imperfect life seems capable of yielding of itself. Our moments of peace are, I think, always associated with some form of beauty, of this spark of harmony within corresponding with some infinite source without. Like a mariner's compass, we are restless until we find repose in this one direction. In moments of beauty (for beauty is, strictly speaking, a state of mind rather than an attribute of certain objects, although certain things have the power of inducing it more than others) we seem to get a glimpse of this deeper truth behind the things of sense. And who can say but that this sense, dull enough in most of us, is not an echo of a greater harmony existing somewhere the other side of things, that we dimly feel through them, evasive though it is. But we must tread lightly in these rarefied regions and get on to more practical concerns. By finding and emphasising in his work those elements in visual appearances that express these profounder things, the painter is enabled to stimulate the perception of them in others. In the representation of a fine mountain, for instance, there are, besides all its rhythmic beauty of form and colour, associations touching deeper chords in our natures--associations connected with its size, age, and permanence, &c.; at any rate we have more feelings than form and colour of themselves are capable of arousing. And these things must be felt by the painter, and his picture painted under the influence of these feelings, if he is instinctively to select those elements of form and colour that convey them. Such deeper feelings are far too intimately associated even with the finer beauties of mere form and colour for the painter to be able to neglect them; no amount of technical knowledge will take the place of feeling, or direct the painter so surely in his selection of what is fine. There are those who would say, "This is all very well, but the painter's concern is with form and colour and paint, and nothing else. If he paints the mountain faithfully from that point of view, it will suggest all these other associations to those who want them." And others who would say that the form and colour of appearances are only to be used as a language to give expression to the feelings common to all men. "Art for art's sake" and "Art for subject's sake." There are these two extreme positions to consider, and it will depend on the individual on which side his work lies. His interest will be more on the aesthetic side, in the feelings directly concerned with form and colour; or on the side of the mental associations connected with appearances, according to his temperament. But neither position can neglect the other without fatal loss. The picture of form and colour will never be able to escape the associations connected with visual things, neither will the picture all for subject be able to get away from its form and colour. And it is wrong to say "If he paints the mountain faithfully from the form and colour point of view it will suggest all those other associations to those who want them," unless, as is possible with a simple-minded painter, he be unconsciously moved by deeper feelings, and impelled to select the significant things while only conscious of his paint. But the chances are that his picture will convey the things he was thinking about, and, in consequence, instead of impressing us with the grandeur of the mountain, will say something very like "See what a clever painter I am!" Unless the artist has painted his picture under the influence of the deeper feelings the scene was capable of producing, it is not likely anybody will be so impressed when they look at his work. And the painter deeply moved with high ideals as to subject matter, who neglects the form and colour through which he is expressing them, will find that his work has failed to be convincing. The immaterial can only be expressed through the material in art, and the painted symbols of the picture must be very perfect if subtle and elusive meanings are to be conveyed. If he cannot paint the commonplace aspect of our mountain, how can he expect to paint any expression of the deeper things in it? The fact is, both positions are incomplete. In all good art the matter expressed and the manner of its expression are so intimate as to have become one. The deeper associations connected with the mountain are only matters for art in so far as they affect its appearance and take shape as form and colour in the mind of the artist, informing the whole process of the painting, even to the brush strokes. As in a good poem, it is impossible to consider the poetic idea apart from the words that express it: they are fired together at its creation. Now an expression by means of one of our different sense perceptions does not constitute art, or the boy shouting at the top of his voice, giving expression to his delight in life but making a horrible noise, would be an artist. If his expression is to be adequate to convey his feeling to others, there must be some arrangement. The expression must be ordered, rhythmic, or whatever word most fitly conveys the idea of those powers, conscious or unconscious, that select and arrange the sensuous material of art, so as to make the most telling impression, by bringing it into relation with our innate sense of harmony. If we can find a rough definition that will include all the arts, it will help us to see in what direction lie those things in painting that make it an art. The not uncommon idea, that painting is "the production by means of colours of more or less perfect representations of natural objects" will not do. And it is devoutly to be hoped that science will perfect a method of colour photography finally to dispel this illusion. What, then, will serve as a working definition? There must be something about feeling, the expression of that individuality the secret of which everyone carries in himself; the expression of that ego that perceives and is moved by the phenomena of life around us. And, on the other hand, something about the ordering of its expression. But who knows of words that can convey a just idea of such subtle matter? If one says "Art is the rhythmic expression of Life, or emotional consciousness, or feeling," all are inadequate. Perhaps the "rhythmic expression of life" would be the more perfect definition. But the word "life" is so much more associated with eating and drinking in the popular mind, than with the spirit or force or whatever you care to call it, that exists behind consciousness and is the animating factor of our whole being, that it will hardly serve a useful purpose. So that, perhaps, for a rough, practical definition that will at least point away from the mechanical performances that so often pass for art, "#the Rhythmic expression of Feeling#" will do: for by Rhythm is meant that ordering of the materials of art (form and colour, in the case of painting) so as to bring them into relationship with our innate sense of harmony which gives them their expressive power. Without this relationship we have no direct means of making the sensuous material of art awaken an answering echo in others. The boy shouting at the top of his voice, making a horrible noise, was not an artist because his expression was inadequate--was not related to the underlying sense of harmony that would have given it expressive power. [Illustration: Plate III. STUDY FOR "APRIL" In red chalk on toned paper.] Let us test this definition with some simple cases. Here is a savage, shouting and flinging his arms and legs about in wild delight; he is not an artist, although he may be moved by life and feeling. But let this shouting be done on some ordered plan, to a rhythm expressive of joy and delight, and his leg and arm movements governed by it also, and he has become an artist, and singing and dancing (possibly the oldest of the arts) will result. Or take the case of one who has been deeply moved by something he has seen, say a man killed by a wild beast, which he wishes to tell his friends. If he just explains the facts as he saw them, making no effort to order his words so as to make the most telling impression upon his hearers and convey to them something of the feelings that are stirring in him, if he merely does this, he is not an artist, although the recital of such a terrible incident may be moving. But the moment he arranges his words so as to convey in a telling manner not only the plain facts, but the horrible feelings he experienced at the sight, he has become an artist. And if he further orders his words to a rhythmic beat, a beat in sympathy with his subject, he has become still more artistic, and a primitive form of poetry will result. Or in building a hut, so long as a man is interested solely in the utilitarian side of the matter, as are so many builders to-day, and just puts up walls as he needs protection from wild beasts, and a roof to keep out the rain, he is not yet an artist. But the moment he begins to consider his work with some feeling, and arranges the relative sizes of his walls and roof so that they answer to some sense he has for beautiful proportion, he has become an artist, and his hut has some architectural pretensions. Now if his hut is of wood, and he paints it to protect it from the elements, nothing necessarily artistic has been done. But if he selects colours that give him pleasure in their arrangement, and if the forms his colour masses assume are designed with some personal feeling, he has invented a primitive form of decoration. And likewise the savage who, wishing to illustrate his description of a strange animal he has seen, takes a piece of burnt wood and draws on the wall his idea of what it looked like, a sort of catalogue of its appearance in its details, he is not necessarily an artist. It is only when he draws under the influence of some feeling, of some pleasure he felt in the appearance of the animal, that he becomes an artist. Of course in each case it is assumed that the men have the power to be moved by these things, and whether they are good or poor artists will depend on the quality of their feeling and the fitness of its expression. [Illustration: Plate IV. STUDY ON TISSUE-PAPER IN RED CHALK FOR FIGURE OF BOREAS] The purest form of this "rhythmic expression of feeling" is music. And as Walter Pater shows us in his essay on "The School of Giorgione," "music is the type of art." The others are more artistic as they approach its conditions. Poetry, the most musical form of literature, is its most artistic form. And in the greatest pictures form, colour, and idea are united to thrill us with harmonies analogous to music. The painter expresses his feelings through the representation of the visible world of Nature, and through the representation of those combinations of form and colour inspired in his imagination, that were all originally derived from visible nature. If he fails from lack of skill to make his representation convincing to reasonable people, no matter how sublime has been his artistic intention, he will probably have landed in the ridiculous. And yet, #so great is the power of direction exercised by the emotions on the artist that it is seldom his work fails to convey something, when genuine feeling has been the motive#. On the other hand, the painter with no artistic impulse who makes a laboriously commonplace picture of some ordinary or pretentious subject, has equally failed as an artist, however much the skilfulness of his representations may gain him reputation with the unthinking. The study, therefore, of the #representation of visible nature# and of #the powers of expression possessed by form and colour# is the object of the painter's training. And a command over this power of representation and expression is absolutely necessary if he is to be capable of doing anything worthy of his art. This is all in art that one can attempt to teach. The emotional side is beyond the scope of teaching. You cannot teach people how to feel. All you can do is to surround them with the conditions calculated to stimulate any natural feeling they may possess. And this is done by familiarising students with the best works of art and nature. * * * * * It is surprising how few art students have any idea of what it is that constitutes art. They are impelled, it is to be assumed, by a natural desire to express themselves by painting, and, if their intuitive ability is strong enough, it perhaps matters little whether they know or not. But to the larger number who are not so violently impelled, it is highly essential that they have some better idea of art than that it consists in setting down your canvas before nature and copying it. Inadequate as this imperfect treatment of a profoundly interesting subject is, it may serve to give some idea of the point of view from which the following pages are written, and if it also serves to disturb the "copying theory" in the minds of any students and encourages them to make further inquiry, it will have served a useful purpose. II DRAWING By drawing is here meant #the expression of form upon a plane surface#. Art probably owes more to form for its range of expression than to colour. Many of the noblest things it is capable of conveying are expressed by form more directly than by anything else. And it is interesting to notice how some of the world's greatest artists have been very restricted in their use of colour, preferring to depend on form for their chief appeal. It is reported that Apelles only used three colours, black, red, and yellow, and Rembrandt used little else. Drawing, although the first, is also the last, thing the painter usually studies. There is more in it that can be taught and that repays constant application and effort. Colour would seem to depend much more on a natural sense and to be less amenable to teaching. A well-trained eye for the appreciation of form is what every student should set himself to acquire with all the might of which he is capable. It is not enough in artistic drawing to portray accurately and in cold blood the appearance of objects. To express form one must first be moved by it. There is in the appearance of all objects, animate and inanimate, what has been called an #emotional significance#, a hidden rhythm that is not caught by the accurate, painstaking, but cold artist. The form significance of which we speak is never found in a mechanical reproduction like a photograph. You are never moved to say when looking at one, "What fine form." It is difficult to say in what this quality consists. The emphasis and selection that is unconsciously given in a drawing done directly under the guidance of strong feeling, are too subtle to be tabulated; they escape analysis. But it is this selection of the significant and suppression of the non-essential that often gives to a few lines drawn quickly, and having a somewhat remote relation to the complex appearance of the real object, more vitality and truth than are to be found in a highly-wrought and painstaking drawing, during the process of which the essential and vital things have been lost sight of in the labour of the work; and the non-essential, which is usually more obvious, is allowed to creep in and obscure the original impression. Of course, had the finished drawing been done with the mind centred upon the particular form significance aimed at, and every touch and detail added in tune to this idea, the comparison might have been different. But it is rarely that good drawings are done this way. Fine things seem only to be seen in flashes, and the nature that can carry over the impression of one of these moments during the labour of a highly-wrought drawing is very rare, and belongs to the few great ones of the craft alone. It is difficult to know why one should be moved by the expression of form; but it appears to have some physical influence over us. In looking at a fine drawing, say of a strong man, we seem to identify ourselves with it and feel a thrill of its strength in our own bodies, prompting us to set our teeth, stiffen our frame, and exclaim "That's fine." Or, when looking at the drawing of a beautiful woman, we are softened by its charm and feel in ourselves something of its sweetness as we exclaim, "How beautiful." The measure of the feeling in either case will be the extent to which the artist has identified himself with the subject when making the drawing, and has been impelled to select the expressive elements in the forms. Art thus enables us to experience life at second hand. The small man may enjoy somewhat of the wider experience of the bigger man, and be educated to appreciate in time a wider experience for himself. This is the true justification for public picture galleries. Not so much for the moral influence they exert, of which we have heard so much, but that people may be led through the vision of the artist to enlarge their experience of life. This enlarging of the experience is true education, and a very different thing from the memorising of facts that so often passes as such. In a way this may be said to be a moral influence, as a larger mind is less likely to harbour small meannesses. But this is not the kind of moral influence usually looked for by the many, who rather demand a moral story told by the picture; a thing not always suitable to artistic expression. One is always profoundly impressed by the expression of a sense of bulk, vastness, or mass in form. There is a feeling of being lifted out of one's puny self to something bigger and more stable. It is this splendid feeling of bigness in Michael Angelo's figures that is so satisfying. One cannot come away from the contemplation of that wonderful ceiling of his in the Vatican without the sense of having experienced something of a larger life than one had known before. Never has the dignity of man reached so high an expression in paint, a height that has been the despair of all who have since tried to follow that lonely master. In landscape also this expression of largeness is fine: one likes to feel the weight and mass of the ground, the vastness of the sky and sea, the bulk of a mountain. On the other hand one is charmed also by the expression of lightness. This may be noted in much of the work of Botticelli and the Italians of the fifteenth century. Botticelli's figures seldom have any weight; they drift about as if walking on air, giving a delightful feeling of otherworldliness. The hands of the Madonna that hold the Child might be holding flowers for any sense of support they express. It is, I think, on this sense of lightness that a great deal of the exquisite charm of Botticelli's drawing depends. The feathery lightness of clouds and of draperies blown by the wind is always pleasing, and Botticelli nearly always has a light wind passing through his draperies to give them this sense. As will be explained later, in connection with academic drawing, it is eminently necessary for the student to train his eye accurately to observe the forms of things by the most painstaking of drawings. In these school studies feeling need not be considered, but only a cold accuracy. In the same way a singer trains himself to sing scales, giving every note exactly the same weight and preserving a most mechanical time throughout, so that every note of his voice may be accurately under his control and be equal to the subtlest variations he may afterwards want to infuse into it at the dictates of feeling. For how can the draughtsman, who does not know how to draw accurately the cold, commonplace view of an object, hope to give expression to the subtle differences presented by the same thing seen under the excitement of strong feeling? [Illustration: Plate V. FROM A STUDY BY BOTTICELLI In the Print Room at the British Museum.] These academic drawings, too, should be as highly finished as hard application can make them, so that the habit of minute visual expression may be acquired. It will be needed later, when drawing of a finer kind is attempted, and when in the heat of an emotional stimulus the artist has no time to consider the smaller subtleties of drawing, which by then should have become almost instinctive with him, leaving his mind free to dwell on the bigger qualities. Drawing, then, to be worthy of the name, must be more than what is called accurate. It must present the form of things in a more vivid manner than we ordinarily see them in nature. Every new draughtsman in the history of art has discovered a new significance in the form of common things, and given the world a new experience. He has represented these qualities under the stimulus of the feeling they inspired in him, hot and underlined, as it were, adding to the great book of sight the world possesses in its art, a book by no means completed yet. So that to say of a drawing, as is so often said, that it is not true because it does not present the commonplace appearance of an object accurately, may be foolish. Its accuracy depends on the completeness with which it conveys the particular emotional significance that is the object of the drawing. What this significance is will vary enormously with the individual artist, but it is only by this standard that the accuracy of the drawing can be judged. It is this difference between scientific accuracy and artistic accuracy that puzzles so many people. Science demands that phenomena be observed with the unemotional accuracy of a weighing machine, while artistic accuracy demands that things be observed by a sentient individual recording the sensations produced in him by the phenomena of life. And people with the scientific habit that is now so common among us, seeing a picture or drawing in which what are called facts have been expressed emotionally, are puzzled, if they are modest, or laugh at what they consider a glaring mistake in drawing if they are not, when all the time it may be their mistaken point of view that is at fault. But while there is no absolute artistic standard by which accuracy of drawing can be judged, as such standard must necessarily vary with the artistic intention of each individual artist, this fact must not be taken as an excuse for any obviously faulty drawing that incompetence may produce, as is often done by students who when corrected say that they "saw it so." For there undoubtedly exists a rough physical standard of rightness in drawing, any violent deviations from which, even at the dictates of emotional expression, is productive of the grotesque. This physical standard of accuracy in his work it is the business of the student to acquire in his academic training; and every aid that science can give by such studies as Perspective, Anatomy, and, in the case of Landscape, even Geology and Botany, should be used to increase the accuracy of his representations. For the strength of appeal in artistic work will depend much on the power the artist possesses of expressing himself through representations that arrest everyone by their truth and naturalness. And although, when truth and naturalness exist without any artistic expression, the result is of little account as art, on the other hand, when truly artistic expression is clothed in representations that offend our ideas of physical truth, it is only the few who can forgive the offence for the sake of the genuine feeling they perceive behind it. [Illustration: Plate VI. STUDY IN NATURAL RED CHALK BY ALFRED STEPHENS From the collection of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon] How far the necessities of expression may be allowed to override the dictates of truth to physical structure in the appearance of objects will always be a much debated point. In the best drawing the departures from mechanical accuracy are so subtle that I have no doubt many will deny the existence of such a thing altogether. Good artists of strong natural inspiration and simple minds are often quite unconscious of doing anything when painting, but are all the same as mechanically accurate as possible. Yet however much it may be advisable to let yourself go in artistic work, during your academic training let your aim be #a searching accuracy#. III VISION It is necessary to say something about Vision in the first place, if we are to have any grasp of the idea of form. An act of vision is not so simple a matter as the student who asked her master if she should "paint nature as she saw nature" would seem to have thought. And his answer, "Yes, madam, provided you don't see nature as you paint nature," expressed the first difficulty the student of painting has to face: the difficulty of learning to see. Let us roughly examine what we know of vision. Science tells us that all objects are made visible to us by means of light; and that white light, by which we see things in what may be called their normal aspect, is composed of all the colours of the solar spectrum, as may be seen in a rainbow; a phenomenon caused, as everybody knows, by the sun's rays being split up into their component parts. This light travels in straight lines and, striking objects before us, is reflected in all directions. Some of these rays passing through a point situated behind the lenses of the eye, strike the retina. The multiplication of these rays on the retina produces a picture of whatever is before the eye, such as can be seen on the ground glass at the back of a photographer's camera, or on the table of a camera obscura, both of which instruments are constructed roughly on the same principle as the human eye. These rays of light when reflected from an object, and again when passing through the atmosphere, undergo certain modifications. Should the object be a red one, the yellow, green, and blue rays, all, in fact, except the red rays, are absorbed by the object, while the red is allowed to escape. These red rays striking the retina produce certain effects which convey to our consciousness the sensation of red, and we say "That is a red object." But there may be particles of moisture or dust in the air that will modify the red rays so that by the time they reach the eye they may be somewhat different. This modification is naturally most effective when a large amount of atmosphere has to be passed through, and in things very distant the colour of the natural object is often entirely lost, to be replaced by atmospheric colours, as we see in distant mountains when the air is not perfectly clear. But we must not stray into the fascinating province of colour. What chiefly concerns us here is the fact that the pictures on our retinas are flat, of two dimensions, the same as the canvas on which we paint. If you examine these visual pictures without any prejudice, as one may with a camera obscura, you will see that they are composed of masses of colour in infinite variety and complexity, of different shapes and gradations, and with many varieties of edges; giving to the eye the illusion of nature with actual depths and distances, although one knows all the time that it is a flat table on which one is looking. Seeing then that our eyes have only flat pictures containing two-dimension information about the objective world, from whence is this knowledge of distance and the solidity of things? How do we _see_ the third dimension, the depth and thickness, by means of flat pictures of two dimensions? The power to judge distance is due principally to our possessing two eyes situated in slightly different positions, from which we get two views of objects, and also to the power possessed by the eyes of focussing at different distances, others being out of focus for the time being. In a picture the eyes can only focus at one distance (the distance the eye is from the plane of the picture when you are looking at it), and this is one of the chief causes of the perennial difficulty in painting backgrounds. In nature they are out of focus when one is looking at an object, but in a painting the background is necessarily on the same focal plane as the object. Numerous are the devices resorted to by painters to overcome this difficulty, but they do not concern us here. The fact that we have two flat pictures on our two retinas to help us, and that we can focus at different planes, would not suffice to account for our knowledge of the solidity and shape of the objective world, were these senses not associated with another sense all important in ideas of form, #the sense of touch#. This sense is very highly developed in us, and the earlier period of our existence is largely given over to feeling for the objective world outside ourselves. Who has not watched the little baby hands feeling for everything within reach, and without its reach, for the matter of that; for the infant has no knowledge yet of what is and what is not within its reach. Who has not offered some bright object to a young child and watched its clumsy attempts to feel for it, almost as clumsy at first as if it were blind, as it has not yet learned to focus distances. And when he has at last got hold of it, how eagerly he feels it all over, looking intently at it all the time; thus learning early to associate the "feel of an object" with its appearance. In this way by degrees he acquires those ideas of roughness and smoothness, hardness and softness, solidity, &c., which later on he will be able to distinguish by vision alone, and without touching the object. Our survival depends so much on this sense of touch, that it is of the first importance to us. We must know whether the ground is hard enough for us to walk on, or whether there is a hole in front of us; and masses of colour rays striking the retina, which is what vision amounts to, will not of themselves tell us. But associated with the knowledge accumulated in our early years, by connecting touch with sight, we do know when certain combinations of colour rays strike the eye that there is a road for us to walk on, and that when certain other combinations occur there is a hole in front of us, or the edge of a precipice. And likewise with hardness and softness, the child who strikes his head against the bed-post is forcibly reminded by nature that such things are to be avoided, and feeling that it is hard and that hardness has a certain look, it avoids that kind of thing in the future. And when it strikes its head against the pillow, it learns the nature of softness, and associating this sensation with the appearance of the pillow, knows in future that when softness is observed it need not be avoided as hardness must be. Sight is therefore not a matter of the eye alone. A whole train of associations connected with the objective world is set going in the mind when rays of light strike the retina refracted from objects. And these associations vary enormously in quantity and value with different individuals; but the one we are here chiefly concerned with is this universal one of touch. Everybody "sees" the shape of an object, and "sees" whether it "looks" hard or soft, &c. Sees, in other words, the "feel" of it. If you are asked to think of an object, say a cone, it will not, I think, be the visual aspect that will occur to most people. They will think of a circular base from which a continuous side slopes up to a point situated above its centre, as one would feel it. The fact that in almost every visual aspect the base line is that of an ellipse, not a circle, comes as a surprise to people unaccustomed to drawing. But above these cruder instances, what a wealth of associations crowd in upon the mind, when a sight that moves one is observed. Put two men before a scene, one an ordinary person and the other a great poet, and ask them to describe what they see. Assuming them both to be possessed of a reasonable power honestly to express themselves, what a difference would there be in the value of their descriptions. Or take two painters both equally gifted in the power of expressing their visual perceptions, and put them before the scene to paint it. And assuming one to be a commonplace man and the other a great artist, what a difference will there be in their work. The commonplace painter will paint a commonplace picture, while the form and colour will be the means of stirring deep associations and feelings in the mind of the other, and will move him to paint the scene so that the same splendour of associations may be conveyed to the beholder. [Illustration: Plate VII. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF APOLLO IN THE PICTURE "APOLLO AND DAPHNE" In natural red chalk rubbed with finger; the high lights are picked out with rubber.] But to return to our infant mind. While the development of the perception of things has been going on, the purely visual side of the question, the observation of the picture on the retina for what it is as form and colour, has been neglected--neglected to such an extent that when the child comes to attempt drawing, #sight is not the sense he consults#. The mental idea of the objective world that has grown up in his mind is now associated more directly with touch than with sight, with the felt shape rather than the visual appearance. So that if he is asked to draw a head, he thinks of it first as an object having a continuous boundary in space. This his mind instinctively conceives as a line. Then, hair he expresses by a row of little lines coming out from the boundary, all round the top. He thinks of eyes as two points or circles, or as points in circles, and the nose either as a triangle or an L-shaped line. If you feel the nose you will see the reason of this. Down the front you have the L line, and if you feel round it you will find the two sides meeting at the top and a base joining them, suggesting the triangle. The mouth similarly is an opening with a row of teeth, which are generally shown although so seldom seen, but always apparent if the mouth is felt (see diagram A). This is, I think, a fair type of the first drawing the ordinary child makes--and judging by some ancient scribbling of the same order I remember noticing scratched on a wall at Pompeii, and by savage drawing generally, it appears to be a fairly universal type. It is a very remarkable thing which, as far as I know, has not yet been pointed out, that in these first attempts at drawing the vision should not be consulted. A blind man would not draw differently, could he but see to draw. Were vision the first sense consulted, and were the simplest visual appearance sought after, one might expect something like diagram B, the shadows under eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, with the darker mass of the hair being the simplest thing the visual appearance can be reduced to. But despite this being quite as easy to do, it does not appeal to the ordinary child as the other type does, because it does not satisfy the sense of touch that forms so large a part of the idea of an object in the mind. All architectural elevations and geometrical projections generally appeal to this mental idea of form. They consist of views of a building or object that could never possibly be seen by anybody, assuming as they do that the eye of the spectator is exactly in front of every part of the building at the same time, a physical impossibility. And yet so removed from the actual visual appearance is our mental idea of objects that such drawings do convey a very accurate idea of a building or object. And of course they have great advantage as working drawings in that they can be scaled. [Illustration: Diagram I. A. TYPE OF FIRST DRAWING MADE BY CHILDREN, SHOWING HOW VISION HAS NOT BEEN CONSULTED B. TYPE OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPECTED IF CRUDEST EXPRESSION OF VISUAL APPEARANCE HAD BEEN ATTEMPTED] If so early the sense of vision is neglected and relegated to be the handmaiden of other senses, it is no wonder that in the average adult it is in such a shocking state of neglect. I feel convinced that with the great majority of people vision is seldom if ever consulted for itself, but only to minister to some other sense. They look at the sky to see if it is going to be fine; at the fields to see if they are dry enough to walk on, or whether there will be a good crop of hay; at the stream not to observe the beauty of the reflections from the blue sky or green fields dancing upon its surface or the rich colouring of its shadowed depths, but to calculate how deep it is or how much power it would supply to work a mill, how many fish it contains, or some other association alien to its visual aspect. If one looks up at a fine mass of cumulus clouds above a London street, the ordinary passer-by who follows one's gaze expects to see a balloon or a flying-machine at least, and when he sees it is only clouds he is apt to wonder what one is gazing at. The beautiful form and colour of the cloud seem to be unobserved. Clouds mean nothing to him but an accumulation of water dust that may bring rain. This accounts in some way for the number of good paintings that are incomprehensible to the majority of people. It is only those pictures that pursue the visual aspect of objects to a sufficient completion to contain the suggestion of these other associations, that they understand at all. Other pictures, they say, are not finished enough. And it is so seldom that a picture can have this petty realisation and at the same time be an expression of those larger emotional qualities that constitute good painting. The early paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood appear to be a striking exception to this. But in their work the excessive realisation of all details was part of the expression and gave emphasis to the poetic idea at the basis of their pictures, and was therefore part of the artistic intention. In these paintings the fiery intensity with which every little detail was painted made their picture a ready medium for the expression of poetic thought, a sort of "painted poetry," every detail being selected on account of some symbolic meaning it had, bearing on the poetic idea that was the object of the picture. But to those painters who do not attempt "painted poetry," but seek in painting a poetry of its own, a visual poetry, this excessive finish (as it is called) is irksome, as it mars the expression of those qualities in vision they wish to express. Finish in art has no connection with the amount of detail in a picture, but has reference only to the completeness with which the emotional idea the painter set out to express has been realised. [Illustration: Plate VIII. STUDY FOR A PICTURE In red conté chalk and white pastel rubbed on toned paper.] The visual blindness of the majority of people is greatly to be deplored, as nature is ever offering them on their retina, even in the meanest slum, a music of colour and form that is a constant source of pleasure to those who can see it. But so many are content to use this wonderful faculty of vision for utilitarian purposes only. It is the privilege of the artist to show how wonderful and beautiful is all this music of colour and form, so that people, having been moved by it in his work, may be encouraged to see the same beauty in the things around them. This is the best argument in favour of making art a subject of general education: that it should teach people to see. Everybody does not need to draw and paint, but if everybody could get the faculty of appreciating the form and colour on their retinas as form and colour, what a wealth would always be at their disposal for enjoyment! The Japanese habit of looking at a landscape upside down between their legs is a way of seeing without the deadening influence of touch associations. Thus looking, one is surprised into seeing for once the colour and form of things with the association of touch for the moment forgotten, and is puzzled at the beauty. The odd thing is that although thus we see things upside down, the pictures on our retinas are for once the right way up; for ordinarily the visual picture is inverted on the retina, like that on the ground glass at the back of a photographic camera. To sum up this somewhat rambling chapter, I have endeavoured to show that there are two aspects from which the objective world can be apprehended. There is the purely mental perception founded chiefly on knowledge derived from our sense of touch associated with vision, whose primitive instinct is to put an outline round objects as representing their boundaries in space. And secondly, there is the visual perception, which is concerned with the visual aspects of objects as they appear on the retina; an arrangement of colour shapes, a sort of mosaic of colour. And these two aspects give us two different points of view from which the representation of visible things can be approached. When the representation from either point of view is carried far enough, the result is very similar. Work built up on outline drawing to which has been added light and shade, colour, aerial perspective, &c., may eventually approximate to the perfect visual appearance. And inversely, representations approached from the point of view of pure vision, the mosaic of colour on the retina, if pushed far enough, may satisfy the mental perception of form with its touch associations. And of course the two points of view are intimately connected. You cannot put an accurate outline round an object without observing the shape it occupies in the field of vision. And it is difficult to consider the "mosaic of colour forms" without being very conscious of the objective significance of the colour masses portrayed. But they present two entirely different and opposite points of view from which the representation of objects can be approached. In considering the subject of drawing I think it necessary to make this division of the subject, and both methods of form expression should be studied by the student. Let us call the first method Line Drawing and the second Mass Drawing. Most modern drawing is a mixture of both these points of view, but they should be studied separately if confusion is to be avoided. If the student neglects line drawing, his work will lack the expressive significance of form that only a feeling for lines seems to have the secret of conveying; while, if he neglects mass drawing, he will be poorly equipped when he comes to express form with a brush full of paint to work with. IV LINE DRAWING Most of the earliest forms of drawing known to us in history, like those of the child we were discussing in the last chapter, are largely in the nature of outline drawings. This is a remarkable fact considering the somewhat remote relation lines have to the complete phenomena of vision. Outlines can only be said to exist in appearances as the boundaries of masses. But even here a line seems a poor thing from the visual point of view; as the boundaries are not always clearly defined, but are continually merging into the surrounding mass and losing themselves to be caught up again later on and defined once more. Its relationship with visual appearances is not sufficient to justify the instinct for line drawing. It comes, I think, as has already been said, from the sense of touch. When an object is felt there is no merging in the surrounding mass, but a firm definition of its boundary, which the mind instinctively conceives as a line. There is a more direct appeal to the imagination in line drawing than in possibly anything else in pictorial art. The emotional stimulus given by fine design is due largely to line work. The power a line possesses of instinctively directing the eye along its course is of the utmost value also, enabling the artist to concentrate the attention of the beholder where he wishes. Then there is a harmonic sense in lines and their relationships, a music of line that is found at the basis of all good art. But this subject will be treated later on when talking of line rhythm. Most artists whose work makes a large appeal to the imagination are strong on the value of line. Blake, whose visual knowledge was such a negligible quantity, but whose mental perceptions were so magnificent, was always insisting on its value. And his designs are splendid examples of its powerful appeal to the imagination. On this basis of line drawing the development of art proceeded. The early Egyptian wall paintings were outlines tinted, and the earliest wall sculpture was an incised outline. After these incised lines some man of genius thought of cutting away the surface of the wall between the outlines and modelling it in low relief. The appearance of this may have suggested to the man painting his outline on the wall the idea of shading between his outlines. At any rate the next development was the introduction of a little shading to relieve the flatness of the line-work and suggest modelling. And this was as far as things had gone in the direction of the representation of form, until well on in the Italian Renaissance. Botticelli used nothing else than an outline lightly shaded to indicate form. Light and shade were not seriously perceived until Leonardo da Vinci. And a wonderful discovery it was thought to be, and was, indeed, although it seems difficult to understand where men's eyes had been for so long with the phenomena of light and shade before them all the time. But this is only another proof of what cannot be too often insisted on, namely that the eye only sees what it is on the look-out for, and it may even be there are things just as wonderful yet to be discovered in vision. But it was still the touch association of an object that was the dominant one; it was within the outline demanded by this sense that the light and shade were to be introduced as something as it were put on the object. It was the "solids in space" idea that art was still appealing to. "The first object of a painter is to make a simple flat surface appear like a relievo, and some of its parts detached from the ground; he who excels all others in that part of the art deserves the greatest praise,"[1] wrote Leonardo da Vinci, and the insistence on this "standing out" quality, with its appeal to the touch sense as something great in art, sounds very strange in these days. But it must be remembered that the means of creating this illusion were new to all and greatly wondered at. [Footnote 1: Leonardo da Vinci, _Treatise on Painting_, paragraph 178.] And again, in paragraph 176 of his treatise, Leonardo writes: "The knowledge of the outline is of most consequence, and yet may be acquired to great certainty by dint of study; as the outlines of the human figure, particularly those which do not bend, are invariably the same. But the knowledge of the situation, quality and quantity of shadows, being infinite, requires the most extensive study." The outlines of the human figure are "invariably the same"? What does this mean? From the visual point of view we know that the space occupied by figures in the field of our vision is by no means "invariably the same," but of great variety. So it cannot be the visual appearance he is speaking about. It can only refer to the mental idea of the shape of the members of the human figure. The remark "particularly those that do not bend" shows this also, for when the body is bent up even the mental idea of its form must be altered. There is no hint yet of vision being exploited for itself, but only in so far as it yielded material to stimulate this mental idea of the exterior world. [Illustration: Plate IX. STUDY BY WATTEAU From an original drawing in the collection of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon.] All through the work of the men who used this light and shade (or chiaroscuro, as it was called) the outline basis remained. Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, and the Venetians were all faithful to it as the means of holding their pictures together; although the Venetians, by fusing the edges of their outline masses, got very near the visual method to be introduced later by Velazquez. In this way, little by little, starting from a basis of simple outline forms, art grew up, each new detail of visual appearance discovered adding, as it were, another instrument to the orchestra at the disposal of the artist, enabling him to add to the somewhat crude directness and simplicity of the early work the graces and refinements of the more complex work, making the problem of composition more difficult but increasing the range of its expression. But these additions to the visual formula used by artists was not all gain; the simplicity of the means at the disposal of a Botticelli gives an innocence and imaginative appeal to his work that it is difficult to think of preserving with the more complete visual realisation of later schools. When the realisation of actual appearance is most complete, the mind is liable to be led away by side issues connected with the things represented, instead of seeing the emotional intentions of the artist expressed through them. The mind is apt to leave the picture and looking, as it were, not at it but through it, to pursue a train of thought associated with the objects represented as real objects, but alien to the artistic intention of the picture. There is nothing in these early formulae to disturb the contemplation of the emotional appeal of pure form and colour. To those who approach a picture with the idea that the representation of nature, the "making it look like the real thing," is the sole object of painting, how strange must be the appearance of such pictures as Botticelli's. The accumulation of the details of visual observation in art is liable eventually to obscure the main idea and disturb the large sense of design on which so much of the imaginative appeal of a work of art depends. The large amount of new visual knowledge that the naturalistic movements of the nineteenth century brought to light is particularly liable at this time to obscure the simpler and more primitive qualities on which all good art is built. At the height of that movement line drawing went out of fashion, and charcoal, and an awful thing called a stump, took the place of the point in the schools. Charcoal is a beautiful medium in a dexterous hand, but is more adaptable to mass than to line drawing. The less said about the stump the better, although I believe it still lingers on in some schools. Line drawing is happily reviving, and nothing is so calculated to put new life and strength into the vagaries of naturalistic painting and get back into art a fine sense of design. This obscuring of the direct appeal of art by the accumulation of too much naturalistic detail, and the loss of power it entails, is the cause of artists having occasionally gone back to a more primitive convention. There was the Archaistic movement in Greece, and men like Rossetti and Burne-Jones found a better means of expressing the things that moved them in the technique of the fourteenth century. And it was no doubt a feeling of the weakening influence on art, as an expressive force, of the elaborate realisations of the modern school, that prompted Puvis de Chavannes to invent for himself his large primitive manner. It will be noticed that in these instances it is chiefly the insistence upon outline that distinguishes these artists from their contemporaries. Art, like life, is apt to languish if it gets too far away from primitive conditions. But, like life also, it is a poor thing and a very uncouth affair if it has nothing but primitive conditions to recommend it. Because there is a decadent art about, one need not make a hero of the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the centuries of culture that art inherits, as it is now fashionable in many places to do, students will do well to study at first the early rather than the late work of the different schools, so as to get in touch with the simple conditions of design on which good work is built. It is easier to study these essential qualities when they are not overlaid by so much knowledge of visual realisation. The skeleton of the picture is more apparent in the earlier than the later work of any school. The finest example of the union of the primitive with the most refined and cultured art the world has ever seen is probably the Parthenon at Athens, a building that has been the wonder of the artistic world for over two thousand years. Not only are the fragments of its sculptures in the British Museum amazing, but the beauty and proportions of its architecture are of a refinement that is, I think, never even attempted in these days. What architect now thinks of correcting the poorness of hard, straight lines by very slightly curving them? Or of slightly sloping inwards the columns of his facade to add to the strength of its appearance? The amount of these variations is of the very slightest and bears witness to the pitch of refinement attempted. And yet, with it all, how simple! There is something of the primitive strength of Stonehenge in that solemn row of columns rising firmly from the steps #without any base#. With all its magnificence, it still retains the simplicity of the hut from which it was evolved. Something of the same combination of primitive grandeur and strength with exquisite refinement of visualisation is seen in the art of Michael Angelo. His followers adopted the big, muscular type of their master, but lost the primitive strength he expressed; and when this primitive force was lost sight of, what a decadence set in! This is the point at which art reaches its highest mark: when to the primitive strength and simplicity of early art are added the infinite refinements and graces of culture without destroying or weakening the sublimity of the expression. In painting, the refinement and graces of culture take the form of an increasing truth to natural appearances, added bit by bit to the primitive baldness of early work; until the point is reached, as it was in the nineteenth century, when apparently the whole facts of visual nature are incorporated. From this wealth of visual material, to which must be added the knowledge we now have of the arts of the East, of China, Japan, and India, the modern artist has to select those things that appeal to him; has to select those elements that answer to his inmost need of expressing himself as an artist. No wonder a period of artistic dyspepsia is upon us, no wonder our exhibitions, particularly those on the Continent, are full of strange, weird things. The problem before the artist was never so complex, but also never so interesting. New forms, new combinations, new simplifications are to be found. But the steadying influence and discipline of line work were never more necessary to the student. The primitive force we are in danger of losing depends much on line, and no work that aims at a sublime impression can dispense with the basis of a carefully wrought and simple line scheme. The study, therefore, of pure line drawing is of great importance to the painter, and the numerous drawings that exist by the great masters in this method show how much they understood its value. And the revival of line drawing, and the desire there is to find a simpler convention founded on this basis, are among the most hopeful signs in the art of the moment. V MASS DRAWING In the preceding chapter it has, I hope, been shown that outline drawing is an instinct with Western artists and has been so from the earliest times; that this instinct is due to the fact that the first mental idea of an object is the sense of its form as a felt thing, not a thing seen; and that an outline drawing satisfies and appeals directly to this mental idea of objects. But there is another basis of expression directly related to visual appearances that in the fulness of time was evolved, and has had a very great influence on modern art. This form of drawing is based on the consideration of the flat appearances on the retina, with the knowledge of the felt shapes of objects for the time being forgotten. In opposition to line drawing, we may call this Mass Drawing. The scientific truth of this point of view is obvious. If only the accurate copying of the appearances of nature were the sole object of art (an idea to be met with among students) the problem of painting would be simpler than it is, and would be likely ere long to be solved by the photographic camera. This form of drawing is the natural means of expression when a brush full of paint is in your hands. The reducing of a complicated appearance to a few simple masses is the first necessity of the painter. But this will be fully explained in a later chapter treating more practically of the practice of mass drawing. [Illustration: Plate X. EXAMPLE OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CHINESE WORK BY LUI LIANG (BRITISH MUSEUM) Showing how early Chinese masters had developed the mass-drawing point of view.] The art of China and Japan appears to have been more [influenced by this view of natural appearances than that of the West has been, until quite lately. The Eastern mind does not seem to be so obsessed by the objectivity of things as is the Western mind. With us the practical sense of touch is all powerful. "I know that is so, because I felt it with my hands" would be a characteristic expression with us. Whereas I do not think it would be an expression the Eastern mind would use. With them the spiritual essence of the thing seen appears to be the more real, judging from their art. And who is to say they may not be right? This is certainly the impression one gets from their beautiful painting, with its lightness of texture and avoidance of solidity. It is founded on nature regarded as a flat vision, instead of a collection of solids in space. Their use of line is also much more restrained than with us, and it is seldom used to accentuate the solidity of things, but chiefly to support the boundaries of masses and suggest detail. Light and shade, which suggest solidity, are never used, a wide light where there is no shadow pervades everything, their drawing being done with the brush in masses. When, as in the time of Titian, the art of the West had discovered light and shade, linear perspective, aerial perspective, &c., and had begun by fusing the edges of the masses to suspect the necessity of painting to a widely diffused focus, they had got very near considering appearances as a visual whole. But it was not until Velazquez that a picture was painted that was founded entirely on visual appearances, in which a basis of objective outlines was discarded and replaced by a structure of tone masses. When he took his own painting room with the little Infanta and her maids as a subject, Velazquez seems to have considered it entirely as one flat visual impression. The focal attention is centred on the Infanta, with the figures on either side more or less out of focus, those on the extreme right being quite blurred. The reproduction here given unfortunately does not show these subtleties, and flattens the general appearance very much. The focus is nowhere sharp, as this would disturb the contemplation of the large visual impression. And there, I think, for the first time, the whole gamut of natural vision, tone, colour, form, light and shade, atmosphere, focus, &c., considered as one impression, were put on canvas. All sense of design is lost. The picture has no surface; it is all atmosphere between the four edges of the frame, and the objects are within. Placed as it is in the Prado, with the light coming from the right as in the picture, there is no break between the real people before it and the figures within, except the slight yellow veil due to age. But wonderful as this picture is, as a "tour de force," like his Venus of the same period in the National Gallery, it is a painter's picture, and makes but a cold impression on those not interested in the technique of painting. With the cutting away of the primitive support of fine outline design and the absence of those accents conveying a fine form stimulus to the mind, art has lost much of its emotional significance. [Illustration: Plate XI. LOS MENENAS. BY VELAZQUEZ (PRADO) Probably the first picture ever painted entirely from the visual or impressionist standpoint. _Photo Anderson_] [Sidenote: The Impressionist Point of View.] But art has gained a new point of view. With this subjective way of considering appearances--this "impressionist vision," as it has been called--many things that were too ugly, either from shape or association, to yield material for the painter, were yet found, when viewed as part of a scheme of colour sensations on the retina which the artist considers emotionally and rhythmically, to lend themselves to new and beautiful harmonies and "ensembles," undreamt of by the earlier formulae. And further, many effects of light that were too hopelessly complicated for painting, considered on the old light and shade principles (for instance, sunlight through trees in a wood), were found to be quite paintable, considered as an impression of various colour masses. The early formula could never free itself from the object as a solid thing, and had consequently to confine its attention to beautiful ones. But from the new point of view, form consists of the shape and qualities of masses of colour on the retina; and what objects happen to be the outside cause of these shapes matters little to the impressionist. Nothing is ugly when seen in a beautiful aspect of light, and aspect is with them everything. This consideration of the visual appearance in the first place necessitated an increased dependence on the model. As he does not now draw from his mental perceptions the artist has nothing to select the material of his picture from until it has existed as a seen thing before him: until he has a visual impression of it in his mind. With the older point of view (the representation by a pictorial description, as it were, based on the mental idea of an object), the model was not so necessary. In the case of the Impressionist the mental perception is arrived at from the visual impression, and in the older point of view the visual impression is the result of the mental perception. Thus it happens that the Impressionist movement has produced chiefly pictures inspired by the actual world of visual phenomena around us, the older point of view producing most of the pictures deriving their inspiration from the glories of the imagination, the mental world in the mind of the artist. And although interesting attempts are being made to produce imaginative works founded on the impressionist point of view of light and air, the loss of imaginative appeal consequent upon the destruction of contours by scintillation, atmosphere, &c., and the loss of line rhythm it entails, have so far prevented the production of any very satisfactory results. But undoubtedly there is much new material brought to light by this movement waiting to be used imaginatively; and it offers a new field for the selection of expressive qualities. This point of view, although continuing to some extent in the Spanish school, did not come into general recognition until the last century in France. The most extreme exponents of it are the body of artists who grouped themselves round Claude Monet. This impressionist movement, as the critics have labelled it, was the result of a fierce determination to consider nature solely from the visual point of view, making no concessions to any other associations connected with sight. The result was an entirely new vision of nature, startling and repulsive to eyes unaccustomed to observation from a purely visual point of view and used only to seeing the "feel of things," as it were. The first results were naturally rather crude. But a great amount of new visual facts were brought to light, particularly those connected with the painting of sunlight and half light effects. Indeed the whole painting of strong light has been permanently affected by the work of this group of painters. Emancipated from the objective world, they no longer dissected the object to see what was inside it, but studied rather the anatomy of the light refracted from it to their eyes. Finding this to be composed of all the colours of the rainbow as seen in the solar spectrum, and that all the effects nature produced are done with different proportions of these colours, they took them, or the nearest pigments they could get to them, for their palette, eliminating the earth colours and black. And further, finding that nature's colours (the rays of coloured light) when mixed produced different results than their corresponding pigments mixed together, they determined to use their paints as pure as possible, placing them one against the other to be mixed as they came to the eye, the mixture being one of pure colour rays, not pigments, by this means. But we are here only concerned with the movement as it affected form, and must avoid the fascinating province of colour. Those who had been brought up in the old school of outline form said there was no drawing in these impressionist pictures, and from the point of view of the mental idea of form discussed in the last chapter, there was indeed little, although, had the impression been realised to a sufficiently definite focus, the sense of touch and solidity would probably have been satisfied. But the particular field of this new point of view, the beauty of tone and colour relations considered as an impression apart from objectivity, did not tempt them to carry their work so far as this, or the insistence on these particular qualities would have been lost. But interesting and alluring as is the new world of visual music opened up by this point of view, it is beginning to be realised that it has failed somehow to satisfy. In the first place, the implied assumption that one sees with the eye alone is wrong: "In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing,"[2] [Footnote 2: Goethe, quoted in Carlyle's _French Revolution_, chap. i.] and it is the mind behind the eye that supplies this means of perception: #one sees with the mind#. The ultimate effect of any picture, be it impressionist, post, anti, or otherwise--is its power to stimulate these mental perceptions within the mind. But even from the point of view of the _true_ visual perception (if there is such a thing) that modern art has heard so much talk of, the copying of the retina picture is not so great a success. The impression carried away from a scene that has moved us is not its complete visual aspect. Only those things that are significant to the felt impression have been retained by the mind; and if the picture is to be a true representation of this, the significant facts must be sorted out from the mass of irrelevant matter and presented in a lively manner. The impressionist's habit of painting before nature entirely is not calculated to do this. Going time after time to the same place, even if similar weather conditions are waited for, although well enough for studies, is against the production of a fine picture. Every time the artist goes to the selected spot he receives a different impression, so that he must either paint all over his picture each time, in which case his work must be confined to a small scale and will be hurried in execution, or he must paint a bit of today's impression alongside of yesterday's, in which case his work will be dull and lacking in oneness of conception. And further, in decomposing the colour rays that come to the eye and painting in pure colour, while great addition was made to the power of expressing light, yet by destroying the definitions and enveloping everything in a scintillating atmosphere, the power to design in a large manner was lost with the wealth of significance that the music of line can convey. But impressionism has opened up a view from which much interesting matter for art is to be gleaned. And everywhere painters are selecting from this, and grafting it on to some of the more traditional schools of design. Our concern here is with the influence this point of view has had upon draughtsmanship. The influence has been considerable, particularly with those draughtsmen whose work deals with the rendering of modern life. It consists in drawing from the observation of the silhouette occupied by objects in the field of vision, observing the flat appearance of things as they are on the retina. This is, of course, the only accurate way in which to observe visual shapes. The difference between this and the older point of view is its insistence on the observation of the flat visual impression to the exclusion of the tactile or touch sense that by the association of ideas we have come to expect in things seen. An increased truth to the character of appearances has been the result, with a corresponding loss of plastic form expression. On pages 66 and 67 a reproduction of a drawing in the British Museum, attributed to Michael Angelo, is contrasted with one in the Louvre by Degas. The one is drawn from the line point of view and the other from the mass. They both contain lines, but in the one case the lines are the contours of felt forms and in the other the boundaries of visual masses. In the Michael Angelo the silhouette is only the result of the overlapping of rich forms considered in the round. Every muscle and bone has been mentally realised as a concrete thing and the drawing made as an expression of this idea. Note the line rhythm also; the sense of energy and movement conveyed by the swinging curves; and compare with what is said later (page 162 [Transcribers Note: Sidenote "Curved Lines"]) about the rhythmic significance of swinging curves. Then compare it with the Degas and observe the totally different attitude of mind in which this drawing has been approached. Instead of the outlines being the result of forms felt as concrete things, the silhouette is everywhere considered first, the plastic sense (nowhere so great as in the other) being arrived at from the accurate consideration of the mass shapes. Notice also the increased attention to individual character in the Degas, observe the pathos of those underfed little arms, and the hand holding the tired ankle--how individual it all is. What a different tale this little figure tells from that given before the footlights! See with what sympathy the contours have been searched for those accents expressive of all this. [Illustration: Plate XII. STUDY ATTRIBUTED TO MICHAEL ANGELO (BRITISH MUSEUM) Note the desire to express form as a felt solid thing, the contours resulting from the overlapping forms. The visual appearance is arrived at as a result of giving expression to the mental idea of a solid object.] [Illustration: Plate XIII. STUDY BY DEGAS (LUXEMBOURG) In contrast with Michael Angelo's drawing, note the preoccupation with the silhouette the spaces occupied by the different masses in the field of vision; how the appearance solid forms is the result of accurately portraying this visual appearance. _Photo Levi_] How remote from individual character is the Michael Angelo in contrast with this! Instead of an individual he gives us the expression of a glowing mental conception of man as a type of physical strength and power. The rhythm is different also, in the one case being a line rhythm, and in the other a consideration of the flat pattern of shapes or masses with a play of lost-and-foundness on the edges (see later, pages 192 [Transcribers Note: Sidenote "Variety of Edges."] _et seq._, variety of edges). It is this feeling for rhythm and the sympathetic searching for and emphasis of those points expressive of character, that keep this drawing from being the mechanical performance which so much concern with scientific visual accuracy might well have made it, and which has made mechanical many of the drawings of Degas's followers who unintelligently copy his method. VI THE ACADEMIC AND CONVENTIONAL The terms Academic and Conventional are much used in criticism and greatly feared by the criticised, often without either party appearing to have much idea of what is meant. New so-called schools of painting seem to arrive annually with the spring fashions, and sooner or later the one of last year gets called out of date, if not conventional and academic. And as students, for fear of having their work called by one or other of these dread terms, are inclined to rush into any new extravagance that comes along, some inquiry as to their meaning will not be out of place before we pass into the chapters dealing with academic study. It has been the cry for some time that Schools of Art turned out only academic students. And one certainly associates a dead level of respectable mediocrity with much school work. We can call to mind a lot of dull, lifeless, highly-finished work, imperfectly perfect, that has won the prize in many a school competition. Flaubert says "a form deadens," and it does seem as if the necessary formality of a school course had some deadening influence on students; and that there was some important part of the artist's development which it has failed to recognise and encourage. The freer system of the French schools has been in many cases more successful. But each school was presided over by an artist of distinction, and this put the students in touch with real work and thus introduced vitality. In England, until quite lately, artists were seldom employed in teaching, which was left to men set aside for the purpose, without any time to carry on original work of their own. The Royal Academy Schools are an exception to this. There the students have the advantage of teaching from some distinguished member or associate who has charge of the upper school for a month at a time. But as the visitor is constantly changed, the less experienced students are puzzled by the different methods advocated, and flounder hopelessly for want of a definite system to work on; although for a student already in possession of a good grounding there is much to be said for the system, as contact with the different masters widens their outlook. But perhaps the chief mistake in Art Schools has been that they have too largely confined themselves to training students mechanically to observe and portray the thing set before them to copy, an antique figure, a still-life group, a living model sitting as still and lifeless as he can. Now this is all very well as far as it goes, but the real matter of art is not necessarily in all this. And if the real matter of art is neglected too long the student may find it difficult to get in touch with it again. These accurate, painstaking school studies are very necessary indeed as a training for the eye in observing accurately, and the hand in reproducing the appearances of things, because it is through the reproduction of natural appearances and the knowledge of form and colour derived from such study that the student will afterwards find the means of giving expression to his feelings. But when valuable prizes and scholarships are given for them, and _not_ for really artistic work, they do tend to become the end instead of the means. It is of course improbable that even school studies done with the sole idea of accuracy by a young artist will in all cases be devoid of artistic feeling; it will creep in, if he has the artistic instinct. But it is not enough #encouraged#, and the prize is generally given to the drawing that is most complete and like the model in a commonplace way. If a student, moved by a strong feeling for form, lets himself go and does a fine thing, probably only remotely like the model to the average eye, the authorities are puzzled and don't usually know what to make of it. There are schools where the most artistic qualities are encouraged, but they generally neglect the academic side; and the student leaves them poorly equipped for fine work. Surely it would be possible to make a distinction, giving prizes for academic drawings which should be as thoroughly accurate in a mechanical way as industry and application can make them, and also for artistic drawings, in which the student should be encouraged to follow his bent, striving for the expression of any qualities that delight him, and troubling less about mechanical accuracy. The use of drawing as an expression of something felt is so often left until after the school training is done that many students fail to achieve it altogether. And rows of lifeless pictures, made up of models copied in different attitudes, with studio properties around them, are the result, and pass for art in many quarters. Such pictures often display considerable ability, for as Burne-Jones says in one of his letters, "It is very difficult to paint even a bad picture." But had the ability been differently directed, the pictures might have been good. [Illustration: Plate XIV. DRAWING IN RED CHALK BY ERNEST COLE Example of unacademic drawing made in the author's class at the Goldsmiths College School of Art.] It is difficult to explain what is wrong with an academic drawing, and what is the difference between it and fa fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine--the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between, &c.--it #will not work#, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; "dither" is, I believe, the Scotch word for it. The piston must be allowed some play in the opening of the cylinder through which it passes, or it will not be able to move and show any life. And the axles of the wheels in their sockets, and, in fact, all parts of the machine where life and movement are to occur, must have this play, this "dither." It has always seemed to me that the accurately fitting engine was like a good academic drawing, in a way a perfect piece of workmanship, but lifeless. Imperfectly perfect, because there was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing. There must be the smallest amount of play that will allow of its working. And the more perfectly made the engine, the less will the amount of this "dither" be. The word "dither" will be a useful name to give that elusive quality, that play on mechanical accuracy, existing in all vital art. #It is this vital quality that has not yet received much attention in art training.# It is here that the photograph fails, it can only at best give mechanical accuracy, whereas art gives the impression of a live, individual consciousness. Where the recording instrument is a live individual, there is no mechanical standard of accuracy possible, as every recording instrument is a different personality. And it is the subtle differences in the individual renderings of nature that are the life-blood of art. The photograph, on account of its being chained to mechanical accuracy, has none of this play of life to give it charm. It only approaches artistic conditions when it is blurred, vague, and indefinite, as in so-called artistic photography, for then only can some amount of this vitalising play, this "dither" be imagined to exist. It is this perfect accuracy, this lack of play, of variety, that makes the machine-made article so lifeless. Wherever there is life there is variety, and the substitution of the machine-made for the hand-made article has impoverished the world to a greater extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier period. But to return to our drawings. If the variations from strict accuracy made under the influence of feeling are too great, the result will be a caricature. The variations in a beautiful drawing are so subtle as often to defy detection. The studies of Ingres are an instance of what I mean. How true and instinct with life are his lines, and how easily one might assume that they were merely accurate. But no merely accurate work would have the impelling quality these drawings possess. If the writer may venture an opinion on so great an artist, the subtle difference we are talking about was sometimes missed by even Ingres himself, when he transferred his drawings to the canvas; and the pictures have in some cases become academic and lifeless. Without the stimulus of nature before him it was difficult to preserve the "dither" in the drawing, and the life has escaped. This is the great difficulty of working from studies; it is so easy to lose those little points in your drawing that make for vitality of expression, in the process of copying in cold blood. [Illustration: Plate XV. FROM A PENCIL DRAWING BY INGRES _Photo Bulloz_] The fact is: it is only the academic that can be taught. And it is no small thing if this is well done in a school. The qualities that give vitality and distinction to drawing must be appreciated by the student himself, and may often assert themselves in his drawing without his being aware that he is doing aught but honestly copying. And if he has trained himself thoroughly he will not find much difficulty when he is moved to vital expression. All the master can do is to stand by and encourage whenever he sees evidence of the real thing. But there is undoubtedly this danger of the school studies becoming the end instead of the means. A drawing is not necessarily academic because it is thorough, but only because it is dead. Neither is a drawing necessarily academic because it is done in what is called a conventional style, any more than it is good because it is done in an unconventional style. The test is whether it has life and conveys genuine feeling. * * * * * There is much foolish talk about conventional art, as if art could ever get away from conventions, if it would. The convention will be more natural or more abstract according to the nature of the thing to be conveyed and the medium employed to express it. But naturalism is just as much a convention as any of the other isms that art has lately been so assailed with. For a really unconventional art there is Madame Tussaud's Waxworks. There, even the convention of a frame and flat surface are done away with, besides the painted symbols to represent things. They have real natural chairs, tables, and floors, real clothes, and even real hair. Realism everywhere, but no life. And we all know the result. There is more expression of life in a few lines scribbled on paper by a good artist than in all the reality of the popular show. It would seem that, after a certain point, the nearer your picture approaches the actual illusion of natural appearance, the further you are from the expression of life. One can never hope to surpass the illusionary appearance of a #tableau vivant#. There you have real, living people. But what an awful deathlike stillness is felt when the curtain is drawn aside. The nearer you approach the actual in all its completeness, the more evident is the lack of that #movement# which always accompanies life. You cannot express life by copying laboriously natural appearances. Those things in the appearance that convey vital expression and are capable of being translated into the medium he is working with, have to be sought by the artist, and the painted symbols of his picture made accordingly. This lack of the movement of life is never noticed in a good picture, on the other hand the figures are often felt to move. Pictures are blamed for being conventional when it is lack of vitality that is the trouble. If the convention adopted has not been vitalised by the emotion that is the reason of the painting, it will, of course, be a lifeless affair. But however abstract and unnaturalistic the manner adopted, if it has been truly felt by the artist as the right means of expressing his emotional idea, it will have life and should not be called conventional in the commonly accepted offensive use of the term. It is only when a painter consciously chooses a manner not his own, which he does not comprehend and is incapable of firing with his own personality, that his picture is ridiculous and conventional in the dead sense. But every age differs in its temperament, and the artistic conventions of one age seldom fit another. The artist has to discover a convention for himself, one that fits his particular individuality. But this is done simply and naturally--not by starting out with the intention of flouting all traditional conventions on principle; nor, on the other hand, by accepting them all on principle, but by simply following his own bent and selecting what appeals to him in anything and everything that comes within the range of his vision. The result is likely to be something very different from the violent exploits in peculiarity that have been masquerading as originality lately. #Originality is more concerned with sincerity than with peculiarity.# The struggling and fretting after originality that one sees in modern art is certainly an evidence of vitality, but one is inclined to doubt whether anything really original was ever done in so forced a way. The older masters, it seems, were content sincerely to try and do the best they were capable of doing. And this continual striving to do better led them almost unconsciously to new and original results. Originality is a quality over which an artist has as little influence as over the shape and distinction of his features. All he can do is to be sincere and try and find out the things that really move him and that he really likes. If he has a strong and original character, he will have no difficulty in this, and his work will be original in the true sense. And if he has not, it is a matter of opinion whether he is not better employed in working along the lines of some well-tried manner that will at any rate keep him from doing anything really bad, than in struggling to cloak his own commonplaceness under violent essays in peculiarity and the avoidance of the obvious at all costs. But while speaking against fretting after eccentricity, don't let it be assumed that any discouragement is being given to genuine new points of view. In art, when a thing has once been well done and has found embodiment in some complete work of art, it has been done once for all. The circumstances that produced it are never likely to occur again. That is why those painters who continue to reproduce a picture of theirs (we do not mean literally) that had been a success in the first instance, never afterwards obtain the success of the original performance. Every beautiful work of art is a new creation, the result of particular circumstances in the life of the artist and the time of its production, that have never existed before and will never recur again. Were any of the great masters of the past alive now, they would do very different work from what they did then, the circumstances being so entirely different. So that should anybody seek to paint like Titian now, by trying to paint like Titian did in his time, he could not attempt anything more unlike the spirit of that master; which in its day, like the spirit of all masters, was most advanced. But it is only by a scrupulously sincere and truthful attitude of mind that the new and original circumstances in which we find ourselves can be taken advantage of for the production of original work. And self-conscious seeking after peculiarity only stops the natural evolution and produces abortions. But do not be frightened by conventions, the different materials in which the artist works impose their conventions. And as it is through these materials that he has to find expression, what expressive qualities they possess must be studied, and those facts in nature selected that are in harmony with them. The treatment of hair by sculptors is an extreme instance of this. What are those qualities of hair that are amenable to expression in stone? Obviously they are few, and confined chiefly to the mass forms in which the hair arranges itself. The finest sculptors have never attempted more than this, have never lost sight of the fact that it was stone they were working with, and never made any attempt to create an illusion of real hair. And in the same way, when working in bronze, the fine artist never loses sight of the fact that it is bronze with which he is working. How sadly the distinguished painter to whom a misguided administration entrusted the work of modelling the British emblem overlooked this, may be seen any day in Trafalgar Square, the lions there possessing none of the splendour of bronze but looking as if they were modelled in dough, and possessing in consequence none of the vital qualities of the lion. It is interesting to compare them with the little lion Alfred Stevens modelled for the railing of the British Museum, and to speculate on what a thrill we might have received every time we passed Trafalgar Square, had he been entrusted with the work, as he might have been. And in painting, the great painters never lose sight of the fact that it is paint with which they are expressing themselves. And although paint is capable of approaching much nearer an actual illusory appearance of nature than stone or bronze, they never push this to the point where you forget that it is paint. This has been left for some of the smaller men. And when it comes to drawing, the great artists have always confined themselves to the qualities in nature that the tool they were drawing with was capable of expressing, and no others. Whether working with pen, pencil, chalk, or charcoal, they always created a convention within which unlimited expression has been possible. To sum up, academic drawing is all that can be really taught, and is as necessary to the painter as the practising of exercises is to the musician, that his powers of observation and execution may be trained. But the vital matter of art is not in all this necessary training. And this fact the student should always keep in mind, and be ever ready to give rein to those natural enthusiasms which, if he is an artist, he will find welling up within him. The danger is that the absorbing interest in his academic studies may take up his whole attention, to the neglect of the instinctive qualities that he should possess the possession of which alone will entitle him to be an artist. VII THE STUDY OF DRAWING We have seen that there are two extreme points of view from which the representation of form can be approached, that of outline directly related to the mental idea of form with its touch association on the one hand, and that of mass connected directly with the visual picture on the retina on the other. Now, between these two extreme points of view there are an infinite variety of styles combining them both and leaning more to the one side or the other, as the case may be. But it is advisable for the student to study both separately, for there are different things to be learnt and different expressive qualities in nature to be studied in both. From the study of outline drawing the eye is trained to accurate observation and learns the expressive value of a line. And the hand is also trained to definite statement, the student being led on by degrees from simple outlines to approach the full realisation of form in all the complexity of light and shade. But at the same time he should study mass drawing with paint from the purely visual point of view, in order to be introduced to the important study of tone values and the expression of form by means of planes. And so by degrees he will learn accurately to observe and portray the tone masses (their shapes and values) to which all visual appearances can be reduced; and he will gradually arrive at the full realisation of form--a realisation that will bring him to a point somewhat similar to that arrived at from the opposite point of view of an outline to which has been added light and shade, &c. But unless both points of view are studied, the student's work will be incomplete. If form be studied only from the outline point of view, and what have been called sculptor's drawings alone attempted, the student will lack knowledge of the tone and atmosphere that always envelop form in nature. And also he will be poorly equipped when he comes to exchange the pencil for a brush and endeavours to express himself in paint. And if his studies be only from the mass point of view, the training of his eye to the accurate observation of all the subtleties of contours and the construction of form will be neglected. And he will not understand the mental form stimulus that the direction and swing of a brush stroke can give. These and many things connected with expression can best be studied in line work. Let the student therefore begin on the principles adopted in most schools, with outline studies of simple casts or models, and gradually add light and shade. When he has acquired more proficiency he may approach drawing from the life. This is sufficiently well done in the numerous schools of art that now exist all over the country. But, at the same time (and this, as far as I know, is not done anywhere), the student should begin some simple form of mass drawing in paint, simple exercises, as is explained later in the chapter on Mass Drawing, Practical, being at first attempted and criticised solely from the point of view of tone values. [Illustration: Diagram II. SHOWING WHERE SQUARENESSES MAY BE LOOKED FOR IN THE DRAWING ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE] [Illustration: Plate XVI. STUDY BY RUBENS FROM THE COLLECTION OF CHARLES RICKETTS AND CHARLES SHANNON A splendid example of Rubens' love of rich, full forms. Compare with the diagram opposite, and note the flatnesses that give strength to the forms.] From lack of this elementary tone study, the student, when he approaches painting for the first time, with only his outline and light and shade knowledge, is entirely at sea. With brushes and paint he is presented with a problem of form expressions entirely new. And he usually begins to flounder about, using his paint as much like chalk on paper as possible. And timid of losing his outlines, he fears to put down a mass, as he has no knowledge of reducing appearances to a structure of tone masses or planes. I would suggest, therefore, that the student should study simultaneously from these two points of view, beginning with their most extreme positions, that is, bare outline on the one side and on the other side tone masses criticised for their accuracy of values only in the first instance. As he advances, the one study will help the other. The line work will help the accuracy with which he observes the shapes of masses, and when he comes to light and shade his knowledge of tone values will help him here. United at last, when complete light and shade has been added to his outline drawings and to his mass drawing an intimate knowledge of form, the results will approximate and the two paths will meet. But if the qualities appertaining to either point of view are not studied separately, the result is confusion and the "muddling through" method so common in our schools of art. VIII LINE DRAWING: PRACTICAL Seeing that the first condition of your drawing is that it has to be made on a flat surface, no matter whether it is to be in line or mass you intend to draw, it is obvious that appearances must be reduced to terms of a flat surface before they can be expressed on paper. And this is the first difficulty that confronts the student in attempting to draw a solid object. He has so acquired the habit of perceiving the solidity of things, as was explained in an earlier chapter, that no little difficulty will be experienced in accurately seeing them as a flat picture. [Sidenote: Observing Solids as a Flat copy.] As it is only from one point of view that things can be drawn, and as we have two eyes, therefore two points of view, the closing of one eye will be helpful at first. The simplest and most mechanical way of observing things as a flat subject is to have a piece of cardboard with a rectangular hole cut out of the middle, and also pieces of cotton threaded through it in such a manner that they make a pattern of squares across the opening, as in the accompanying sketch. To make such a frame, get a piece of stiff cardboard, about 12 inches by 9 inches, and cut a rectangular hole in the centre, 7 inches by 5 inches, as in Diagram III. Now mark off the inches on all sides of the opening, and taking some black thread, pass it through the point A with a needle (fixing the end at this point with sealing-wax), and across the opening to the corresponding point on the opposite side. Take it along to the next point, as shown by the dotted line, and pass it through and across the opening again, and so on, until B is reached, when the thread should be held by some sealing-wax quite taut everywhere. Do the same for the other side. This frame should be held between the eye and the object to be drawn (one eye being closed) in a perfectly vertical position, and with the rectangular sides of the opening vertical and horizontal. The object can then be observed as a flat copy. The trellis of cotton will greatly help the student in seeing the subject to be drawn in two dimensions, and this is the first technical difficulty the young draughtsman has to overcome. It is useful also in training the eye to see the proportions of different parts one to another, the squares of equal size giving one a unit of measurement by which all parts can be scaled. [Illustration: Diagram III. A DEVICE FOR ENABLING STUDENTS TO OBSERVE APPEARANCES AS A FLAT SUBJECT] [Sidenote: Fixing Positions of Salient Points] Vertical and horizontal lines are also of the utmost importance in that first consideration for setting out a drawing, namely the fixing of salient points, and getting their relative Positions. Fig. Z, on page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV], will illustrate what is meant. Let A B C D E be assumed to be points of some importance in an object you wish to draw. Unaided, the placing of these points would be a matter of considerable difficulty. But if you assume a vertical line drawn from A, the positions of B, C, D, and E can be observed in relation to it by noting the height and length of horizontal lines drawn from them to this vertical line. This vertical can be drawn by holding a plumb line at arm's length (closing one eye, of course) and bringing it to a position where it will cover the point A on your subject. The position of the other points on either side of this vertical line can then be observed. Or a knitting-needle can be held vertically before you at arm's length, giving you a line passing through point A. The advantage of the needle is that comparative measurements can be taken with it. [Illustration: Diagram IV. SHOWING THREE PRINCIPLES OF CONSTRUCTION USED IN OBSERVING FIG. X, MASSES; FIG. Y, CURVES; FIG. Z, POSITION OF POINTS] In measuring comparative distances the needle should always be held at arm's length and the eye kept in one position during the operation; and, whether held vertically or horizontally, always kept in a vertical plane, that is, either straight up and down, or across at right angles to the line of your vision. If these things are not carefully observed, your comparisons will not be true. The method employed is to run the thumb-nail up the needle until the distance from the point so reached to the top exactly corresponds with the distance on the object you wish to measure. Having this carefully noted on your needle, without moving the position of your eye, you can move your outstretched arm and compare it with other distances on the object. #It is never advisable to compare other than vertical and horizontal measurements.# In our diagram the points were drawn at random and do not come in any obvious mathematical relationship, and this is the usual circumstance in nature. But point C will be found to be a little above the half, and point D a little less than a third of the way up the vertical line. How much above the half and less than the third will have to be observed by eye and a corresponding amount allowed in setting out your drawing. In the horizontal distances, B will be found to be one-fourth the distance from X to the height of C on the right of our vertical line, and C a little more than this distance to the left, while the distance on the right of D is a little less than one-fifth of the whole height. The height of B is so near the top as to be best judged by eye, and its distance to the right is the same as B. These measurements are never to be taken as absolutely accurate, but are a great help to beginners in training the eye, and are at times useful in every artist's work. [Illustration: Plate XVII. DEMONSTRATION DRAWING MADE BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF THE GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE SCHOOL OF ART Illustrating how different directions of lines can help expression of form.] It is useful if one can establish a unit of measurement, some conspicuous distance that does not vary in the object (if a living model a great many distances will be constantly varying), and with which all distances can be compared. In setting out a drawing, this fixing of certain salient points is the first thing for the student to do. The drawing reproduced on page 90 [Transcribers Note: Plate XVIII] has been made to illustrate the method of procedure it is advisable to adopt in training the eye to accurate observation. It was felt that a vertical line drawn through the pit of the arm would be the most useful for taking measurements on, and this was first drawn and its length decided upon. Train yourself to draw between limits decided upon at the start. This power will be of great use to you when you wish to place a figure in an exact position in a picture. The next thing to do is to get the relative heights of different points marked upon this line. The fold at the pit of the stomach was found to be exactly in the centre. This was a useful start, and it is generally advisable to note where the half comes first, and very useful if it comes in some obvious place. Other measurements were taken in the same way as our points A B C D E in the diagram on page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV], and horizontal lines drawn across, and the transverse distances measured in relation to the heights. I have left these lines on the drawing, and also different parts of it unfinished, so as to show the different stages of the work. These guide lines are done mentally later on, when the student is more advanced, and with more accuracy than the clumsy knitting-needle. But before the habit of having constantly in mind a vertical and horizontal line with which to compare positions is acquired, they should be put in with as much accuracy as measuring can give. [Sidenote: Blocking in your Drawing.] The next thing to do is to block out the spaces corresponding to those occupied by the model in the field of your vision. The method employed to do this is somewhat similar to that adopted by a surveyor in drawing the plan of a field. Assuming he had an irregular shaped one, such as is drawn in Fig. X, page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV], he would proceed to invest it with straight lines, taking advantage of any straightness in the boundary, noting the length and the angles at which these straight lines cut each other, and then reproducing them to scale on his plan. Once having got this scaffolding accurately placed, he can draw the irregularities of the shape in relation to these lines with some certainty of getting them right. You should proceed in very much the same way to block out the spaces that the forms of your drawing are to occupy. I have produced these blocking-out lines beyond what was necessary in the accompanying drawing (page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV]), in order to show them more clearly. [Sidenote: How to observe the Shape of Curves.] There is yet another method of construction useful in noting accurately the shape of a curved line, which is illustrated in Fig. Y, page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV]. First of all, fix the positions of the extremities of the line by means of the vertical and horizontal. And also, as this is a double curve, the point at which the curvature changes from one direction to the other: point C. By drawing lines CA, CB and noting the distances your curves travel from these straight lines, and particularly the relative position of the farthest points reached, their curvature can be accurately observed and copied. In noting the varying curvature of forms, this construction should always be in your mind to enable you to observe them accurately. First note the points at which the curvature begins and ends, and then the distances it travels from a line joining these two points, holding up a pencil or knitting-needle against the model if need be. [Illustration: Plate XVIII. STUDY ILLUSTRATING METHOD OF DRAWING Note the different stages. 1st. Centre line and transverse lines for settling position of salient points. 2nd. Blocking in, as shown in further leg. 3rd. Drawing in the forms and shading, as shown in front leg. 4th. Rubbing with fingers (giving a faint middle tone over the whole), and picking out high lights with bread, as shown on back and arms.] [Sidenote: The Drawing proper.] A drawing being blocked out in such a state as the further leg and foot of our demonstration drawing (page 90 [Transcribers Note: Plate XVIII]), it is time to begin the drawing proper. So far you have only been pegging out the ground it is going to occupy. This initial scaffolding, so necessary to train the eye, should be done as accurately as possible, but don't let it interfere with your freedom in expressing the forms afterwards. The work up to this point has been mechanical, but it is time to consider the subject with some feeling for form. Here knowledge of the structure of bones and muscles that underlie the skin will help you to seize on those things that are significant and express the form of the figure. And the student cannot do better than study the excellent book by Sir Alfred D. Fripp on this subject, entitled Human Anatomy for Art Students. Notice particularly the swing of the action, such things as the pull occasioned by the arm resting on the farther thigh, and the prominence given to the forms by the straining of the skin at the shoulder. Also the firm lines of the bent back and the crumpled forms of the front of the body. Notice the overlapping of the contours, and where they are accentuated and where more lost, &c., drawing with as much feeling and conviction as you are capable of. You will have for some time to work tentatively, feeling for the true shapes that you do not yet rightly see, but as soon as you feel any confidence, remember it should be your aim to express yourself freely and swiftly. There is a tendency in some quarters to discourage this blocking in of the forms in straight lines, and certainly it has been harmful to the freedom of expression in the work of some students. They not only begin the drawing with this mechanical blocking in, but continue it in the same mechanical fashion, cutting up almost all their curves into flatnesses, and never once breaking free from this scaffolding to indulge in the enjoyment of free line expression. This, of course, is bad, and yet the character of a curved line is hardly to be accurately studied in any other way than by observing its relation to straight lines. The inclination and length of straight lines can be observed with certainty. But a curve has not this definiteness, and is a very unstable thing to set about copying unaided. Who but the highly skilled draughtsman could attempt to copy our random shape at Fig. X, page 87 [Transcribers Note: Diagram IV], without any guiding straight lines? And even the highly skilled draughtsman would draw such straight lines mentally. So that some blocking out of the curved forms, either done practically or in imagination, must be adopted to rightly observe any shapes. But do not forget that this is only a scaffolding, and should always be regarded as such and kicked away as soon as real form expression with any feeling begins. But it will be some years before the beginner has got his eye trained to such accuracy of observation that he can dispense with it. [Sidenote: In Blocking-in observe Shape of the Background as much as the Object.] In the case of foreshortenings, the eye, unaided by this blocking out, is always apt to be led astray. And here the observation of the shape of the background against the object will be of great assistance. The appearance of the foreshortened object is so unlike what you know it to be as a solid thing, that much as it is as well to concentrate the attention on the background rather than on the form in this blocking-out process. And in fact, in blocking out any object, whether foreshortened or not, the shape of the background should be observed as carefully as any other shape. But in making the drawing proper, the forms must be observed in their inner relations. That is to say, the lines bounding one side of a form must be observed in relation to the lines bounding the other side; as the true expression of form, which is the object of drawing, depends on the true relationship of these boundaries. The drawing of the two sides should be carried on simultaneously, so that one may constantly compare them. [Sidenote: Boundaries a series of Overlappings.] The boundaries of forms with any complexity, such as the human figure, are not continuous lines. One form overlaps another, like the lines of a range of hills. And this overlapping should be sought for and carefully expressed, the outlines being made up of a series of overlappings. [Sidenote: Shading.] In Line Drawing shading should only be used to aid the expression of form. It is not advisable to aim at representing the true tone values. In direct light it will be observed that a solid object has some portion of its surface in light, while other portions, those turned away from the light, are in shadow. Shadows are also cast on the ground and surrounding objects, called cast shadows. The parts of an object reflecting the most direct light are called the high lights. If the object have a shiny surface these lights are clear and distinct; if a dull surface, soft and diffused. In the case of a very shiny surface, such as a glazed pot, the light may be reflected so completely that a picture of the source of light, usually a window, will be seen. In the diagram on page 95 [Transcribers Note: Diagram V], let A represent the plan of a cone, B C the opening of a window, and D the eye of the spectator, and E F G the wall of a room. Light travels in straight lines from the window, strikes the surface of the cone, and is reflected to the eye, making the angle of incidence equal to the angle of reflection, the angle of incidence being that made by the light striking an object, and the angle of reflection that made by the light in leaving the surface. It will be seen that the lines B1D, C2D are the limits of the direct rays of light that come to the eye from the cone, and that therefore between points 1 and 2 will be seen the highest light. If the cone have a perfect reflecting surface, such as a looking-glass has, this would be all the direct light that would be reflected from the cone to the eye. But assuming it to have what is called a dull surface, light would be reflected from other parts also, although not in so great a quantity. If what is called a dull surface is looked at under a microscope it will be found to be quite rough, _i.e._ made up of many facets which catch light at different angles. [Illustration: Diagram V. PLAN OF CONE A, LIT BY WINDOW BC; POSITION OF EYE D. ILLUSTRATING PRINCIPLES OF LIGHT AND SHADE] Lines B4, C3 represent the extreme limits of light that can be received by the cone, and therefore at points 3 and 4 the shadow will commence. The fact that light is reflected to the eye right up to the point 3 does not upset the theory that it can only be reflected from points where the angle of incidence can equal the angle of reflection, as it would seem to do, because the surface being rough presents facets at different angles, from some of which it can be reflected to the eye right up to point 3. The number of these facets that can so reflect is naturally greatest near the high lights, and gets gradually less as the surface turns more away; until the point is reached where the shadows begin, at which point the surface positively turns away from the light and the reflection of direct light ceases altogether. After point 3 there would be no light coming to the eye from the object, were it not that it receives reflected light. Now, the greatest amount of reflected light will come from the direction opposite to that of the direct light, as all objects in this direction are strongly lit. The surface of the wall between points E and H, being directly opposite the light, will give most reflection. And between points 5 and 6 this light will be reflected by the cone to the eye in its greatest intensity, since at these points the angles of incidence equal the angles of reflection. The other parts of the shadow will receive a certain amount of reflected light, lessening in amount on either side of these points. We have now rays of light coming to the eye from the cone between the extreme points 7 and 8. From 7 to 3 we have the light, including the half tones. Between 1 and 2 the high light. Between 3 and 8 the shadows, with the greatest amount of reflected light between 5 and 6. [Illustration: Plate XIX. ILLUSTRATING CURVED LINKS SUGGESTING FULLNESS AND FORESHORTENING] I should not have troubled the reader with this tedious diagram were it not that certain facts about light and shade can be learned from it. The first is that the high lights come much more within the edge of the object than you would have expected. With the light directly opposite point 7, one might have thought the highest light would have come there, and that is where many students put it, until the loss of roundness in the appearance of their work makes them look more carefully for its position. So remember always to look out for high lights within the contours of forms, not on the edges. The next thing to notice is that #the darkest part of the shadow will come nearest the lights between points 3 and 5#. This is the part turned most away from the direction of the greatest amount of reflected light, and therefore receiving least. The lightest part of the shadow will be in the middle, rather towards the side away from the light, generally speaking. The shadow cast on the ground will be dark, like the darkest part of the shadow on the cone, as its surface is also turned away from the chief source of reflected light. Although the artist will very seldom be called upon to draw a cone, the same principles of light and shade that are so clearly seen in such a simple figure obtain throughout the whole of nature. This is why the much abused drawing and shading from whitened blocks and pots is so useful. Nothing so clearly impresses the general laws of light and shade as this so-called dull study. This lightening of shadows in the middle by reflected light and darkening towards their edges is a very important thing to remember, the heavy, smoky look students' early work is so prone to, being almost entirely due to their neglect through ignorance of this principle. Nothing is more awful than shadows darker in the middle and gradually lighter towards their edges. Of course, where there is a deep hollow in the shadow parts, as at the armpit and the fold at the navel in the drawing on page 90 [Transcribers Note: Plate XVIII], you will get a darker tone. But this does not contradict the principle that generally shadows are lighter in the middle and darker towards the edges. Note the luminous quality the observation of this principle gives the shadow on the body of our demonstration drawing. This is a crude statement of the general principles of light and shade on a simple round object. In one with complex surfaces the varieties of light and shade are infinite. But the same principles hold good. The surfaces turned more to the source of light receive the greatest amount, and are the lightest. And from these parts the amount of light lessens through what are called the half tones as the surface turns more away, until a point is reached where no more direct light is received, and the shadows begin. And in the shadows the same law applies: those surfaces turned most towards the source of reflected light will receive the most, and the amount received will gradually lessen as the surface turns away, until at the point immediately before where the half tones begin the amount of reflected light will be very little, and in consequence the darkest part of the shadows may be looked for. There may, of course, be other sources of direct light on the shadow side that will entirely alter and complicate the effect. Or one may draw in a wide, diffused light, such as is found in the open air on a grey day; in which case there will be little or no shadow, the modelling depending entirely on degrees of light and half tone. In studying the principles of simple light and shade it is advisable to draw from objects of one local colour, such as white casts. In parti-coloured objects the problem is complicated by the different tones of the local colour. In line drawing it is as well to take as little notice as possible of these variations which disturb the contemplation of pure form and do not belong to the particular province of form expression with which drawing is concerned. Although one has selected a strong half light and half shade effect to illustrate the general principles of light and shade, it is not advisable in making line drawings to select such a position. A point of view with a fairly wide light at your back is the best. In this position little shadow will be seen, most of the forms being expressed by the play of light and half tone. The contours, as they are turned away from the light, will naturally be darker, and against a light background your subject has an appearance with dark edges that is easily expressed by a line drawing. Strong light and shade effects should be left for mass drawing. You seldom see any shadows in Holbein's drawings; he seems to have put his sitters near a wide window, close against which he worked. Select also a background as near the tone of the highest light on the object to be drawn as possible. This will show up clearly the contour. In the case of a portrait drawing, a newspaper hung behind the head answers very well and is always easily obtained. The tone of it can be varied by the distance at which it is placed from the head, and by the angle at which it is turned away from or towards the light. Don't burden a line drawing with heavy half tones and shadows; keep them light. The beauty that is the particular province of line drawing is the beauty of contours, and this is marred by heavy light and shade. Great draughtsmen use only just enough to express the form, but never to attempt the expression of tone. Think of the half tones as part of the lights and not as part of the shadows. There are many different methods of drawing in line, and a student of any originality will find one that suits his temperament. But I will try and illustrate one that is at any rate logical, and that may serve as a fair type of line drawing generally. The appearance of an object is first considered as a series of contours, some forming the boundaries of the form against the background, and others the boundaries of the subordinate forms within these bounding lines. The light and shade and differences of local colour (like the lips, eyebrows, and eyes in a head) are considered together as tones of varying degrees of lightness and darkness, and suggested by means of lines drawn parallel across the drawing from left to right, and from below upwards, or vice versa, darker and closer together when depth is wanted, and fainter and further apart where delicacy is demanded, and varying in thickness when gradation is needed. This rule of parallel shading is broken only when strongly marked forms, such as the swing lines of hair, a prominent bone or straining muscles, &c., demand it. This parallel shading gives a great beauty of surface and fleshiness to a drawing. The lines following, as it were, the direction of the light across the object rather than the form, give a unity that has a great charm. It is more suited to drawings where extreme delicacy of form is desired, and is usually used in silver point work, a medium capable of the utmost refinement. [Illustration: Plate XX. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF LOVE IN THE PICTURE "LOVE LEAVING PSYCHE" ILLUSTRATING A METHOD OF DRAWING The lines of shading following a convenient parallel direction unless prominent forms demand otherwise.] In this method the lines of shading not being much varied in direction or curved at all, a minimum amount of that "form stimulus" is conveyed. The curving of the lines in shading adds considerably to the force of the relief, and suggests much stronger modelling. In the case of foreshortened effects, where the forms are seen at their fullest, arching one over the other, some curvature in the lines of shading is of considerable advantage in adding to the foreshortened look. Lines drawn down the forms give an appearance of great strength and toughness, a tense look. And this quality is very useful in suggesting such things as joints and sinews, rocks, hard ground, or gnarled tree-trunks, &c. In figure drawing it is an interesting quality to use sparingly, with the shading done on the across-the-form principle; and to suggest a difference of texture or a straining of the form. Lines of shading drawn in every direction, crossing each other and resolving themselves into tone effects, suggest atmosphere and the absence of surface form. This is more often used in the backgrounds of pen and ink work and is seldom necessary in pencil or chalk drawing, as they are more concerned with form than atmosphere. Pen and ink is more often used for elaborate pictorial effects in illustration work, owing to the ease with which it can be reproduced and printed; and it is here that one more often finds this muddled quality of line spots being used to fill up interstices and make the tone even. Speaking generally, #lines of shading drawn across the forms suggest softness, lines drawn in curves fulness of form, lines drawn down the forms hardness, and lines crossing in all directions so that only a mystery of tone results, atmosphere#. And if these four qualities of line be used judiciously, a great deal of expressive power is added to your shading. And, as will be explained in the next chapter, somewhat the same principle applies to the direction of the swing of the brush in painting. Shading lines should never be drawn backwards and forwards from left to right (scribbled), except possibly where a mystery of shadow is wanted and the lines are being crossed in every direction; but never when lines are being used to express form. They are not sufficiently under control, and also the little extra thickness that occurs at the turn is a nuisance. The crossing of lines in shading gives a more opaque look. This is useful to suggest the opaque appearance of the darker passage that occurs in that part of a shadow nearest the lights; and it is sometimes used in the half tones also. Draughtsmen vary very much in their treatment of hair, and different qualities of hair require different treatment. The particular beauty of it that belongs to point drawing is the swing and flow of its lines. These are especially apparent in the lights. In the shadows the flow of line often stops, to be replaced by a mystery of shadow. So that a play of swinging lines alternating with shadow passages, drawn like all the other shadows with parallel lines not following the form, is often effective, and suggests the quality of hair in nature. The swinging lines should vary in thickness along their course, getting darker as they pass certain parts, and gradating into lighter lines at other parts according to the effect desired. (See illustration, page 102 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXI].) [Illustration: Plate XXI. STUDY IN RED CHALK Illustrating a treatment of hair in line-work.] To sum up, in the method of line drawing we are trying to explain (the method employed for most of the drawings by the author in this book) the lines of shading are made parallel in a direction that comes easy to the hand, unless some quality in the form suggests their following other directions. So that when you are in doubt as to what direction they should follow, draw them on the parallel principle. This preserves a unity in your work, and allows the lines drawn in other directions for special reasons to tell expressively. As has already been explained, it is not sufficient in drawing to concentrate the attention on copying accurately the visual appearance of anything, important as the faculty of accurate observation is. Form to be expressed must first be appreciated. And here the science of teaching fails. "You can take a horse to the fountain, but you cannot make him drink," and in art you can take the student to the point of view from which things are to be appreciated, but you cannot make him see. How, then, is this appreciation of form to be developed? Simply by feeding. Familiarise yourself with all the best examples of drawing you can find, trying to see in nature the same qualities. Study the splendid drawing by Puvis de Chavannes reproduced on page 104 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXII]. Note the way the contours have been searched for expressive qualities. Look how the expressive line of the back of the seated figure has been "felt," the powerful expression of the upraised arm with its right angle (see later page 155 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XII], chapter on line rhythm). And then observe the different types of the two standing figures; the practical vigour of the one and the soft grace of the other, and how their contours have been studied to express this feeling, &c. There is a mine of knowledge to be unearthed in this drawing. There never was an age when such an amount of artistic food was at the disposal of students. Cheap means of reproduction have brought the treasures of the world's galleries and collections to our very doors in convenient forms for a few pence. The danger is not from starvation, but indigestion. Students are so surfeited with good things that they often fail to digest any of them; but rush on from one example to another, taking but snapshot views of what is offered, until their natural powers of appreciation are in a perfect whirlwind of confused ideas. What then is to be done? You cannot avoid the good things that are hurled at you in these days, but when you come across anything that strikes you as being a particularly fine thing, feed deeply on it. Hang it up where you will see it constantly; in your bedroom, for instance, where it will entertain your sleepless hours, if you are unfortunate enough to have any. You will probably like very indifferent drawings at first, the pretty, the picturesque and the tricky will possibly attract before the sublimity of finer things. But be quite honest and feed on the best that you genuinely like, and when you have thoroughly digested and comprehended that, you will weary of it and long for something better, and so, gradually, be led on to appreciate the best you are capable of appreciating. [Illustration: Plate XXII. STUDY FOR DECORATION AT AMIENS "REPOSE" BY PEUVIS DE CHAVANNES Note how the contours are searched for expressive forms, the power given to the seated figure by the right angle of the raised arm, and the contrast between the upright vigour of the right-hand figure with the softer lines of the middle one. _Photo Neurdein_] Before closing this chapter there are one or two points connected with the drawing of a head that might be mentioned, as students are not always sufficiently on the look out for them. In our diagram on page 107 [Transcribers Note: Diagram VI], let Fig. 1 represent a normal eye. At Fig. 2 we have removed the skin and muscles and exposed the two main structural features in the form of the eye, namely the bony ring of the socket and the globe containing the lenses and retina. Examining this opening, we find from A to B that it runs smoothly into the bony prominence at the top of the nose, and that the rest of the edge is sharp, and from point C to E quite free. It is at point A, starting from a little hole, that the sharp edge begins; and near this point the corner of the eye is situated: A, Figs. 1, 2, 3. From points A to F the bony edge of the opening is very near the surface and should be looked for. The next thing to note is the fact that the eyebrow at first follows the upper edge of the bony opening from B to C, but that from point C it crosses the free arch between C and D and soon ends. So that considering the under side of the eyebrow, whereas from point C towards B there is usually a cavernous hollow, from C towards D there is a prominence. The character of eyes varies greatly, and this effect is often modified by the fleshy fulness that fills in the space between the eyelid and the brow, but some indication of a change is almost always to be observed at a point somewhere about C, and should be looked out for. Any bony prominence from this point towards D should be carefully constructed. Look out for the bone, therefore, between the points CD and AF. Never forget when painting an eye that what we call the white of the eye is part of a sphere and will therefore have the light and shade of a sphere. It will seldom be the same tone all over; if the light is coming from the right, it will be in shade towards the left and vice versa. Also the eyelids are bands of flesh placed on this spherical surface. They will therefore partake of the modelling of the sphere and not be the same tone all across. Note particularly the sudden change of plane usually marked by a fold, where the under eyelid meets the surface coming from the cheek bone. The neglect to construct these planes of the under eyelid is a very common fault in poorly painted eyes. Note also where the upper eyelid comes against the flesh under the eyebrow (usually a strongly marked fold) and the differences of planes that occur at this juncture. In some eyes, when there is little loose flesh above the eyelid, there is a deep hollow here, the eyelid running up under the bony prominence, C D. This is an important structural line, marking as it does the limit of the spherical surface of the eyeball, on which surface the eyelids are placed. Fig. 4 is a rough diagram of the direction it is usual for the hairs forming the eyebrow to take. From A a few scant hairs start radiating above the nose and quite suddenly reach their thickest and strongest growth between B and E. They continue, still following a slightly radiating course until D. These hairs are now met by another lot, starting from above downwards, and growing from. B to C. An eyebrow is considered by the draughtsman as a tone of a certain shape and qualities of edge. And what interests us here is to note the effect of this order of growth upon its appearance as tone. The meeting of the strong growth of hair upwards with the downward growth between points B and E creates what is usually the darkest part of the eyebrow at this point. And the coming together of the hairs towards D often makes another dark part in this direction. The edge from C to B is nearly always a soft one, the tone melting into the flesh, and this should be looked out for, giving as it does a pretty variety to the run of the line. Another thing that tends to make this edge soft is the fact that a bony prominence is situated here and has usually a high light upon it that crosses the eyebrow. From C to D you usually find a sharper edge, the hairs running parallel to the line of the eyebrow, while from D to B and A to B a softer boundary can be looked for. The chief accent will generally be found at B, where a dark mass often comes sharply against the tone of the forehead. [Illustration: Diagram VI. ILLUSTRATING SOME POINTS CONNECTED WITH THE EYES NOT ALWAYS OBSERVED IN DRAWING A HEAD] The eyelashes do not count for much in drawing a head, except in so far as they affect the tone impression. In the first place they shade the white of the eye when the light is above, as is usually the case. They are much thicker on the outer than on the inner side of the eyelids, and have a tendency to grow in an outward direction, so that when the light comes from the left, as is shown by arrow, Fig. 5, the white of the eye at A1 will not be much shaded, and the light tone will run nearly up to the top. But at B4, which should be the light side of this eye, the thick crop of eyelashes will shade it somewhat and the light will not run far up in consequence, while B3, A2 will be in the shade from the turning away from the direction of the light of the spherical surface of the whites of the eyes. These may seem small points to mention, but the observance of such small points makes a great difference to the construction of a head. Fig. 6 gives a series of blocks all exactly alike in outline, with lines showing how the different actions of the head affect the guide lines on which the features hang; and how these actions can be suggested even when the contours are not varied. These archings over should be carefully looked out for when the head is in any but a simple full face position. IX MASS DRAWING: PRACTICAL This is the form of drawing with which painting in the oil medium is properly concerned. The distinction between drawing and painting that is sometimes made is a wrong one in so far as it conveys any idea of painting being distinct from drawing. Painting is drawing (_i.e._ the expression of form) with the added complication of colour and tone. And with a brush full of paint as your tool, some form of mass drawing must be adopted, so that at the same time that the student is progressing with line drawing, he should begin to accustom, himself to this other method of seeing, by attempting very simple exercises in drawing with the brush. Most objects can be reduced broadly into three tone masses, the lights (including the high lights), the half tones, and the shadows. And the habit of reducing things into a simple equation of three tones as a foundation on which to build complex appearances should early be sought for. [Sidenote: Exercise in Mass Drawing.] Here is a simple exercise in mass drawing with the brush that is, as far as I know, never offered to the young student. Select a simple object: some of those casts of fruit hanging up that are common in art schools will do. Place it in a strong light and shade, preferably by artificial light, as it is not so subtle, and therefore easier; the light coming from either the right or left hand, but not from in front. Try and arrange it so that the tone of the ground of your cast comes about equal to the half tones in the relief. [Illustration: Plate XXIII. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME PAINTING FROM A CAST IN DIFFERENT STAGES No. 1. Blocking out the shape of spaces to be occupied by masses. No. 2. A middle tone having been scumbled over the whole, the lights are now painted. Their shapes and the play of lost-and-foundness on their edges being observed. Gradations are got by thinner paint, which is mixed with the wet middle tone of the ground, and is darkened.] [Illustration: Plate XXIV. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME PAINTING FROM A CAST IN DIFFERENT STAGES No. 3. The same as the last, with the addition of the darks; variety being got in the same way as in the case of the lights, only here the thinner part is lighter, whereas in the case of the lights it was darker. No. 4. The finished work, refinements being added and mistakes corrected.] First draw in the outlines of the #masses# strongly in charcoal, noting the shapes of the shadows carefully, taking great care that you get their shapes blocked out in square lines in true proportion relative to each other, and troubling about little else. Let this be a setting out of the ground upon which you will afterwards express the form, rather than a drawing--the same scaffolding, in fact, that you were advised to do in the case of a line drawing, only, in that case, the drawing proper was to be done with a point, and in this case the drawing proper is to be done with a brush full of paint. Fix the charcoal #well# with a spray diffuser and the usual solution of white shellac in spirits of wine. Taking raw umber and white (oil paint), mix up a tone that you think equal to the half tones of the cast before you. Extreme care should be taken in matching this tone. Now scumble this with a big brush equally over the whole canvas (or whatever you are making your study on). Don't use much medium, but if it is too stiff to go on thinly enough, put a little oil with it, but no turpentine. By scumbling is meant rubbing the colour into the canvas, working the brush from side to side rapidly, and laying just the #thinnest solid tone# that will cover the surface. If this is properly done, and your drawing was well fixed, you will just be able to see it through the paint. Now mix up a tone equal to the highest lights on the cast, and map out simply the shapes of the light masses on your study, leaving the scumbled tone for the half tones. Note carefully where the light masses come sharply against the half tones and where they merge softly into them. You will find that the scumbled tone of your ground will mix with the tone of the lights with which you are painting, and darken it somewhat. This will enable you to get the amount of variety you want in the tone of the lights. The thicker you paint the lighter will be the tone, while the thinner paint will be more affected by the original half tone, and will consequently be darker. When this is done, mix up a tone equal to the darkest shadow, and proceed to map out the shadows in the same way as you did the lights; noting carefully where they come sharply against the half tone and where they are lost. In the case of the shadows the thicker you paint the darker will be the tone; and the thinner, the lighter. When the lights and shadows have been mapped out, if this has been done with any accuracy, your work should be well advanced. And it now remains to correct and refine it here and there, as you feel it wants it. Place your work alongside the cast, and walk back to correct it. Faults that are not apparent when close, are easily seen at a little distance. I don't suggest that this is the right or only way of painting, but I do suggest that exercises of this description will teach the student many of the rudimentary essentials of painting, such elementary things as how to lay a tone, how to manage a brush, how to resolve appearances into a simple structure of tones, and how to manipulate your paint so as to express the desired shape. This elementary paint drawing is, as far as I know, never given as an exercise, the study of drawing at present being confined to paper and charcoal or chalk mediums. Drawing in charcoal is the nearest thing to this "paint drawing," it being a sort of mixed method, half line and half mass drawing. But although allied to painting, it is a very different thing from expressing form with paint, and no substitute for some elementary exercise with the brush. The use of charcoal to the neglect of line drawing often gets the student into a sloppy manner of work, and is not so good a training to the eye and hand in clear, definite statement. Its popularity is no doubt due to the fact that you can get much effect with little knowledge. Although this painting into a middle tone is not by any means the only method of painting, I do feel that it is the best method for studying form expression with the brush. But, when you come to colour, the fact of the opaque middle tone (or half tone) being first painted over the whole will spoil the clearness and transparency of your shadows, and may also interfere with the brilliancy of the colour in the lights. When colour comes to be considered it may be necessary to adopt many expedients that it is as well not to trouble too much about until a further stage is reached. But there is no necessity for the half tone to be painted over the shadows. In working in colour the half tone or middle tone of the lights can be made, and a middle tone of the shadows, and these two first painted separately, the edges where they come together being carefully studied and finished. Afterwards the variety of tone in the lights and the shadows can be added. By this means the difference in the quality of the colour between lights and shadows is preserved. This is an important consideration, as there is generally a strong contrast between them, the shadows usually being warm if the lights are cool and vice versa; and such contrasts greatly affect the vitality of colouring. Try always to do as much as possible with one stroke of the brush; paint has a vitality when the touches are deft, that much handling and continual touching kills. Look carefully at the shape and variety of the tone you wish to express, and try and manipulate the swing of your brush in such a way as to get in one touch as near the quality of shape and gradation you want. Remember that the lightest part of your touch will be where the brush first touches the canvas when you are painting lights into a middle tone; and that as the amount of paint in the brush gets less, so the tone will be more affected by what you are painting into, and get darker. And in painting the shadows, the darkest part of your stroke will be where the brush first touches the canvas; and it will gradually lighten as the paint in your brush gets less and therefore more affected by the tone you are painting into. If your brush is very full it will not be influenced nearly so much. And if one wants a touch that shall be distinct, as would be the case in painting the shiny light on a glazed pot, a very full brush would be used. But generally speaking, get your effects with as little paint as possible. Thinner paint is easier to refine and manipulate. There will be no fear of its not being solid if you are painting into a solidly scumbled middle tone. Many charming things are to be done with a mixture of solid and transparent paint, but it is well at first not to complicate the problem too much, and therefore to leave this until later on, when you are competent to attack problems of colour. Keep your early work both in monochrome and colour #quite solid#, but as thin as you can, reserving thicker paint for those occasions when you wish to put a touch that shall not be influenced by what you are painting into. [Illustration: Plate XXV. ILLUSTRATING SOME TYPICAL BRUSH STROKES MADE WITH FOUR CLASSES OF BRUSH Class A, round; Class B, flat; Class C, full flat brush with rounded corners; Class D, filbert shape.] It will perhaps be as well to illustrate a few of the different brush strokes, and say something about the different qualities of each. These are only given as typical examples of the innumerable ways a brush may be used as an aid to very elementary students; every artist will, of course, develop ways of his own. The touch will of necessity depend in the first instance upon the shape of the brush, and these shapes are innumerable. But there are two classes into which they can roughly be divided, flat and round. The round brushes usually sold, which we will call Class A, have rather a sharp point, and this, although helpful in certain circumstances, is against their general usefulness. But a round brush with a round point is also made, and this is much more convenient for mass drawing. Where there is a sharp point the central hairs are much longer, and consequently when the brush is drawn along and pressed so that all the hairs are touching the canvas, the pressure in the centre, where the long hairs are situated, is different from that at the sides. This has the effect of giving a touch that is not equal in quality all across, and the variety thus given is difficult to manipulate. I should therefore advise the student to try the blunt-ended round brushes first, as they give a much more even touch, and one much more suited to painting in planes of tone. The most extreme flat brushes (Class B) are thin and rather short, with sharp square ends, and have been very popular with students. They can be relied upon to give a perfectly flat, even tone, but with a rather hard sharp edge at the sides, and also at the commencement of the touch. In fact, they make touches like little square bricks. But as the variety that can be got out of them is limited, and the amount of paint they can carry so small that only short strokes can be made, they are not the best brush for general use. They are at times, when great refinement and delicacy are wanted, very useful, but are, on the whole, poor tools for the draughtsman in paint. Some variety can be got by using one or other of their sharp corners, by which means the smallest possible touch can be made to begin with, which can be increased in size as more pressure is brought to bear, until the whole surface of the brush is brought into play. They are also often used to paint across the form, a manner illustrated in the second touch, columns 1 and 2 of the illustration on page 114 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXVI]. A more useful brush (Class C) partakes of the qualities of both flat and round. It is made with much more hair than the last, is longer, and has a square top with rounded corners. This brush carries plenty of paint, will lay an even tone, and, from the fact that the corners are rounded and the pressure consequently lessened at the sides, does not leave so hard an edge on either side of your stroke. Another brush that has recently come into fashion is called a filbert shape (Class D) by the makers. It is a fine brush to draw with, as being flat it paints in planes, and having a rounded top is capable of getting in and out of a variety of contours. They vary in shape, some being more pointed than others. The blunt-ended form is the best for general use. Either this class of brush or Class C are perhaps the best for the exercises in mass drawing we have been describing. But Class A should also be tried, and even Class B, to find out which suits the particular individuality of the student. On page 114 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXVI] a variety of touches have been made in turn by these different shaped brushes. In all the strokes illustrated it is assumed that the brush is moderately full of paint of a consistency a little thinner than that usually put up by colourmen. To thin it, mix a little turpentine and linseed oil in equal parts with it; and get it into easy working consistency before beginning your work, so as not to need any medium. In the first column (No. 1), a touch firmly painted with an equal pressure all along its course is given. This gives you a plane of tone with firm edges the width of your brush, getting gradually darker or lighter as your brush empties, according to the length of the stroke and to whether you are painting into a lighter or darker ground. In column No. 2 a drag touch is illustrated. This is a very useful one. The brush is placed firmly on the canvas and then dragged from the point lightly away, leaving a gradated tone. A great deal of the modelling in round objects is to be expressed by this variety of handling. The danger is that its use is apt to lead to a too dexterous manner of painting; a dexterity more concerned with the clever manner in which a thing is painted than with the truth expressed. Column No. 3. This is a stroke lightly and quickly painted, where the brush just grazes the surface of the canvas. The paint is put on in a manner that is very brilliant, and at the same time of a soft quality. If the brush is only moderately full, such touches will not have any hard edges, but be of a light, feathery nature. It is a most useful manner of putting on paint when freshness of colour is wanted, as it prevents one tone being churned up with another and losing its purity. And in the painting of hair, where the tones need to be kept very separate, and at the same time not hard, it is very useful. But in monochrome painting from the cast it is of very little service. Another method of using a brush is hatching, the drawing of rows of parallel lines in either equal or varying thicknesses. This method will lighten or darken a tone in varying degree, according to whether the lines are thick, thin, or gradated--somewhat in the same way that lines of shading are drawn in line work. In cases where the correction of intricate modelling is desired and where it would be very difficult to alter a part accurately by a deft stroke of the brush, this method is useful to employ. A dry brush can be drawn across the lines to unite them with the rest of the work afterwards. This method of painting has lately been much used by those artists who have attempted painting in separate, pure colours, after the so-called manner of Claude Monet, although so mechanical a method is seldom used by that master. As your power of drawing increases (from the line drawing you have been doing), casts of hands and heads should be attempted in the same manner as has been described. Illustrations are given of exercises of this description on pages 110 and 122. Unfortunately the photographs, which were taken from the same study at different stages during the painting, are not all alike, the first painting of the lights being too darkly printed in some cases. But they show how much can be expressed with the one tone, when variety is got by using the middle tone to paint into. The two tones used are noted in the right-hand lower corner. Try to train yourself to do these studies at one sitting. But if you find you cannot manage this, use slower drying colours, say bone brown and zinc white, which will keep wet until the next day. When you begin studying from the life, proceed in the same way with monochrome studies painted into a middle tone. And what are you to do if you find, when you have finished, that it is all wrong? I should advise you to let it dry, and then scumble a middle tone right over the whole thing, as you did at first, which will show the old work through, and you can then correct your drawing and proceed to paint the lights and shadows as before. And if only a part of it is wrong, when it is quite dry rub a little, poppy oil thinned with turpentine over the work, as little as will serve to cover the surface. If it is found difficult to get it to cover, breathe on the canvas, the slightest moisture will help it to bite. When this is done, wipe it off with the palm of your hand or an old piece of clean linen. Now paint a middle tone right over the part you wish to retouch, being careful about joining it up to the surrounding work, and proceed as before, drawing in the light and shadow masses. This form of drawing you will probably find more difficult at first. For the reason already explained it seems natural to observe objects as made up of outlines, not masses. The frame with cottons across it should be used to flatten the appearance, as in making outline drawings. And besides this a black glass should be used. This can easily be made by getting a small piece of glass--a photographic negative will do--and sticking some black paper on the back; turning it over the front to keep the raw edges of the glass from cutting the fingers. Or the glass can be painted on the back with black paint. Standing with your back to the object and your painting, hold this glass close in front of one of your eyes (the other being closed), so that you can see both your painting and the object. Seeing the tones thus reduced and simplified, you will be enabled more easily to correct your work. I should like to emphasise the importance of the setting-out work necessary for brush-drawing. While it is not necessary to put expressive work into this preparatory work, the utmost care should be taken to ensure its accuracy as far as it goes. It is a great nuisance if, after you have put up some of your fair structure, you find the foundations are in the wrong place and the whole thing has to be torn down and shifted. It is of the utmost necessity to have the proportions and the main masses settled at this early stage, and every device of blocking out with square lines and measuring with your knitting-needle, &c., should be adopted to ensure the accuracy of these large proportions. The variations and emphases that feeling may dictate can be done in the painting stage. This initial stage is not really a drawing at all, but a species of mapping out, and as such it should be regarded. The only excuse for making the elaborate preparatory drawings on canvas students sometimes do, is that it enables them to learn the subject, so that when they come to paint it, they already know something about it. But the danger of making these preparatory drawings interesting is that the student fears to cover them up and lose an outline so carefully and lovingly wrought; and this always results in a poor painting. When you take up a brush to express yourself, it must be with no fear of hurting a careful drawing. Your drawing is going to be done with the brush, and only the general setting out of the masses will be of any use to you in the work of this initial stage. Never paint with the poor spirit of the student who fears to lose his drawing, or you will never do any fine things in painting. Drawing (expressing form) is the thing you should be doing all the time. And in art, "he that would save his work must often lose it," if you will excuse the paraphrase of a profound saying which, like most profound sayings, is applicable to many things in life besides what it originally referred to. It is often necessary when a painting is #nearly# right to destroy the whole thing in order to accomplish the apparently little that still divides it from what you conceive it should be. It is like a man rushing a hill that is just beyond the power of his motor-car to climb, he must take a long run at it. And if the first attempt lands him nearly up at the top but not #quite#, he has to go back and take the long run all over again, to give him the impetus that shall carry him right through. Another method of judging tone drawing is our old method of half closing the eyes. This, by lowering the tone and widening the focus, enables you to correct the work more easily. In tone drawing there is not only the shape of the masses to be considered, but their values--that is, their position in an imagined scale from dark to light. The relation of the different tones in this way--the values, as it is called--is an extremely important matter in painting. But it more properly belongs to the other department of the subject, namely Colour, and this needs a volume to itself. But something more will be said on this subject when treating of Rhythm. We saw, in speaking of line drawing, how the character of a line was found by observing its flatnesses and its relation to straight lines. In the same way #the character of modelling is found by observing its planes#. So that in building up a complicated piece of form, like a head or figure, the planes (or flat tones) should be sought for everywhere. As a carver in stone blocks out his work in square surfaces, the modelling of a figure or any complex surface that is being studied should be set out in planes of tone, painting in the first instance the larger ones, and then, to these, adding the smaller; when it will be seen that the roundnesses have, with a little fusing of edges here and there, been arrived at. Good modelling is full of these planes subtly fused together. Nothing is so characteristic of bad modelling as "gross roundnesses." The surface of a sphere is the surface with the least character, like the curve of a circle, and the one most to be avoided in good modelling. In the search for form the knowledge of anatomy, and particularly the bony structures, is of the utmost importance. During the rage for realism and naturalism many hard things were said about the study of anatomy. And certainly, were it to be used to overstep the modesty of nature in these respects and to be paraded to the exclusion of the charm and character of life, it would be as well left alone. But if we are to make a drawing that shall express something concrete, we must know something of its structure, whatever it is. In the case of the human figure it is impossible properly to understand its action and draw it in a way that shall give a powerful impression without a knowledge of the mechanics of its construction. But I hardly think the case for anatomy needs much stating at the present time. Never let anatomical knowledge tempt you into exaggerated statements of internal structure, unless such exaggeration helps the particular thing you wish to express. In drawing a figure in violent action it might, for instance, be essential to the drawing, whereas in drawing a figure at rest or a portrait, it would certainly be out of place. [Illustration: Plate XXVI. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME STUDY FROM THE LIFE IN DIFFERENT STAGES No. 1. Blocking out the spaces occupied by different masses in charcoal.] [Illustration: Plate XXVII. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME STUDY FROM THE LIFE IN DIFFERENT STAGES No. 2. A middle tone having been scumbled over the whole, the lights are painted into it; variety being got by varying the thickness of the paint. The darks are due to the charcoal lines of initial drawing showing through middle tone.] [Illustration: Plate XXVIII. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME STUDY FROM THE LIFE IN DIFFERENT STAGES No. 3. The same as the last, but with the shadows added; variety being got by varying thickness of paint as before.] [Illustration: Plate XXIX. SET OF FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SAME STUDY FROM THE LIFE IN DIFFERENT STAGES No. 4. The completed head.] In the chapter on line work it was stated that: "Lines of shading drawn across the forms suggest softness, lines drawn in curves fulness of form, lines drawn down the forms hardness, and lines crossing in every direction atmosphere," and these rules apply equally well to the direction of the brush strokes (the brush work) in a painting. #The brush swinging round the forms suggests fore-shortening, and fulness of form generally, and across the forms softness, while the brush following down the forms suggests toughness and hardness, and crossing in every direction atmosphere#. A great deal of added force can be given to form expression in this way. In the foreshortened figure on the ground at the left of Tintoretto's "Finding of the Body of St. Mark," the foreshortened effect helped by the brush work swinging round can be seen (see illustration, page 236 [Transcribers Note: Plate XLIX]). The work of Henner in France is an extreme instance of the quality of softness and fleshiness got by painting across the form. The look of toughness and hardness given by the brush work following down the forms is well illustrated in much of the work of James Ward, the animal painter. In his picture in the National Gallery, "Harlech Castle," No. 1158, this can be seen in the painting of the tree-trunks, &c. The crossing of the brush work in every direction, giving a look of atmosphere, is naturally often used in painting backgrounds and also such things as the plane surfaces of sky and mist, &c. It is often inconvenient to paint across the form when softness is wanted. It is only possible to have one colour in your brush sweep, and the colour changes across, much more than down the form as a rule. For the shadows, half tones and lights, besides varying in tone, vary also in colour; so that it is not always possible to sweep across them with one colour. It is usually more convenient to paint down where the colours can be laid in overlapping bands of shadow, half tone and light, &c. Nevertheless, if this particular look of softness and fleshiness is desired, either the painting must be so thin or the tones so fused together that no brush strokes show, or a dry flat brush must afterwards be drawn lightly across when the painting is done, to destroy the downward brush strokes and substitute others going across, great care being taken to drag only from light to dark, and to wipe the brush carefully after each touch; and also never to go over the same place twice, or the paint will lose vitality. This is a method much employed by artists who delight in this particular quality. But when a strong, tough look is desired, such as one sees when a muscle is in violent action, or in the tendon above the wrist or above the heel in the leg, or generally where a bone comes to the surface, in all these cases the brush work should follow down the forms. It is not necessary and is often inadvisable for the brush work to show at all, in which case these principles will be of little account. But when in vigorously painted work they do, I think it will generally be found to create the effects named. Drawing on toned paper with white chalk or Chinese white and black or red chalk is another form of mass drawing. And for studies it is intended to paint from, this is a quick and excellent manner. The rapidity with which the facts of an appearance can be noted makes it above all others the method for drapery studies. The lights are drawn with white, the toned paper being allowed to show through where a darker tone is needed, the white (either chalk or Chinese white) being put on thickly when a bright light is wanted and thinly where a quieter light is needed. So with the shadows, the chalk is put on heavily in the darks and less heavily in the lighter shadows. Since the days of the early Italians this has been a favourite method of drawing drapery studies (see illustrations, page 260 [Transcribers Note: Plate LIV]). Some artists have shaded their lights with gold and silver paint. The late Sir Edward Burne-Jones was very fond of this, and drawings with much decorative charm have been done this way. The principle is the same as in drawing with white chalk, the half tone being given by the paper. Keep the lights separate from the shadows, let the half tone paper always come as a buffer state between them. Get as much information into the drawing of your lights and shadows as possible; don't be satisfied with a smudge effect. Use the side of your white chalk when you want a mass, or work in parallel lines (hatching) on the principle described in the chapter on line drawing. X RHYTHM The subject of Rhythm in what are called the Fine Arts is so vague, and has received so little attention, that some courage, or perhaps foolhardiness, is needed to attack it. And in offering the following fragmentary ideas that have been stumbled on in my own limited practice, I want them to be accepted only for what they are worth, as I do not know of any proper authority for them. But they may serve as a stimulus, and offer some lines on which the student can pursue the subject for himself. The word rhythm is here used to signify the power possessed by lines, tones, and colours, by their ordering and arrangement, to affect us, somewhat as different notes and combinations of sound do in music. And just as in music, where sounds affect us without having any direct relation with nature, but appeal directly to our own inner life; so in painting, sculpture, and architecture #there is a music that appeals directly to us apart from any significance that may be associated with the representation of natural phenomena#. There is, as it were, an abstract music of line, tone, and colour. The danger of the naturalistic movement in painting in the nineteenth century has been that it has turned our attention away from this fundamental fact of art to the contemplation of interesting realisations of appearances--realisations often full of poetic suggestiveness due to associations connected with the objects painted as concrete things, but not always made directly significant as artistic expression; whereas #it is the business of the artist to relate the form, colour, and tone of natural appearances to this abstract musical quality, with which he should never lose touch even in the most highly realised detail of his work#. For only thus, when related to rhythm, do the form, tone, and colour of appearances obtain their full expressive power and become a means of vitally conveying the feeling of the artist. Inquiry as to the origin of this power and of rhythm generally is a profoundly interesting subject; and now that recent advances in science tend to show that sound, heat, light, and possibly electricity and even nerve force are but different rhythmic forms of energy, and that matter itself may possibly be resolved eventually into different rhythmic motions, it does look as if rhythm may yet be found to contain even the secret of life itself. At any rate it is very intimately associated with life; and primitive man early began to give expression in some form of architecture, sculpture, or painting to the deeper feelings that were moving him; found some correspondence between the lines and colours of architecture, sculpture, and painting and the emotional life that was awakening within him. Thus, looking back at the remains of their work that have come down to us, we are enabled to judge of the nature of the people from the expression we find in hewn stone and on painted walls. It is in primitive art generally that we see more clearly the direct emotional significance of line and form. Art appears to have developed from its most abstract position, to which bit by bit have been added the truths and graces of natural appearance, until as much of this naturalistic truth has been added as the abstract significance at the base of the expression could stand without loss of power. At this point, as has already been explained, a school is at the height of its development. The work after this usually shows an increased concern with naturalistic truth, which is always very popular, to the gradual exclusion of the backbone of abstract line and form significance that dominated the earlier work. And when these primitive conditions are lost touch with, a decadence sets in. At least, this is roughly the theory to which a study of the two great art developments of the past, in Greece and Italy, would seem to point. And this theory is the excuse for all the attempts at primitivism of which we have lately seen so much. Art having lost touch with its primitive base owing to the over-doses of naturalism it has had, we must, these new apostles say, find a new primitive base on which to build the new structure of art. The theory has its attractions, but there is this difference between the primitive archaic Greek or early Italian and the modern primitive; the early men reverently clothed the abstract idea they started with in the most natural and beautiful form within their knowledge, ever seeking to discover new truths and graces from nature to enrich their work; while the modern artist, with the art treasures of all periods of the world before him, can never be in the position of these simple-minded men. It is therefore unlikely that the future development of art will be on lines similar to that of the past. The same conditions of simple ignorance are never likely to occur again. Means of communication and prolific reproduction make it very unlikely that the art of the world will again be lost for a season, as was Greek art in the Middle Ages. Interesting intellectually as is the theory that the impressionist point of view (the accepting of the flat retina picture as a pattern of colour sensations) offers a new field from which to select material for a new basis of artistic expression, so far the evidence of results has not shown anything likely seriously to threaten the established principles of traditional design. And anything more different in spirit from the genuine primitive than the irreverent anarchy and flouting of all refinement in the work of some of these new primitives, it would be difficult to imagine. But much of the work of the movement has undoubted artistic vitality, and in its insistence on design and selection should do much to kill "realism" and the "copying nature" theory of a few years back. Although it is perfectly true that the feelings and ideas that impel the artist may sooner or later find their own expression, there are a great many principles connected with the arranging of lines, tones, and colours in his picture that it is difficult to transgress without calamity. At any rate the knowledge of some of them will aid the artist in gaining experience, and possibly save him some needless fumbling. But don't for one moment think that anything in the nature of rules is going to take the place of the initial artistic impulse which must come from within. This is not a matter for teaching, art training being only concerned with perfecting the means of its expression. [Illustration: Plate XXX. A STUDY FOR A PICTURE OF "ROSALIND AND ORLANDO" _Ros._ "He calls us back; my pride fell with my fortunes."] It is proposed to treat the subject from the material side of line and tone only, without any reference to subject matter, with the idea of trying to find out something about the expressive qualities line and tone are capable of yielding unassociated with visual things. What use can be made of any such knowledge to give expression to the emotional life of the artist is not our concern, and is obviously a matter for the individual to decide for himself. * * * * * There is at the basis of every picture a structure of lines and masses. They may not be very obvious, and may be hidden under the most broken of techniques, but they will always be found underlying the planning of any painting. Some may say that the lines are only the boundaries of the masses, and others that the masses are only the spaces between the lines. But whichever way you care to look at it, there are particular emotional qualities analogous to music that affect us in lines and line arrangements and also in tone or mass arrangements. And any power a picture may have to move us will be largely due to the rhythmic significance of this original planning. These qualities, as has already been stated, affect us quite apart from any association they may have with natural things: arrangements of mere geometrical lines are sufficient to suggest them. But of course other associations connected with the objects represented will largely augment the impression, when the line and tone arrangements and the sentiment of the object are in sympathy. And if they are not, it may happen that associations connected with the representation will cut in and obscure or entirely destroy this line and tone music. That is to say, if the line and tone arrangement in the abstract is expressive of the sublime, and the objects whose representation they support something ridiculous, say a donkey braying, the associations aroused by so ridiculous an appearance will override those connected with the line and tone arrangement. But it is remarkable how seldom this occurs in nature, the sentiment of the line and tone arrangements things present being usually in harmony with the sentiment of the object itself. As a matter of fact, the line effect of a donkey in repose is much more sublime than when he is braying. [Sidenote: Unity and Variety.] There are two qualities that may be allowed to divide the consideration of this subject, two points of view from which the subject can be approached: #Unity# and #Variety#, qualities somewhat opposed to each other, as are harmony and contrast in the realm of colour. Unity is concerned with the relationship of all the parts to that oneness of conception that should control every detail of a work of art. All the more profound qualities, the deeper emotional notes, are on this side of the subject. On the other hand, variety holds the secrets of charm, vitality, and the picturesque, it is the "dither," the play between the larger parts, that makes for life and character. #Without variety there can be no life#. In any conception of a perfect unity, like the perfected life of the Buddhist, Nirvana or Nibbana (literally "dying out" or "extinction" as of an expiring fire), there is no room for variety, for the play of life; all such fretfulness ceases, to be replaced by an all-pervading calm, beautiful, if you like, but lifeless. There is this deadness about any conception of perfection that will always make it an unattainable ideal in life. Those who, like the Indian fakir or the hermits of the Middle Ages, have staked their all on this ideal of perfection, have found it necessary to suppress life in every way possible, the fakirs often remaining motionless for long periods at a time, and one of the mediaeval saints going so far as to live on the top of a high column where life and movement were well-nigh impossible. And in art it is the same; all those who have aimed at an absolute perfection have usually ended in a deadness. The Greeks knew better than many of their imitators this vital necessity in art. In their most ideal work there is always that variety that gives character and life. No formula or canon of proportions or other mechanical device for the attainment of perfection was allowed by this vital people entirely to subdue their love of life and variety. And however near they might go towards a perfect type in their ideal heads and figures, they never went so far as to kill the individual in the type. It is the lack of this subtle distinction that, I think, has been the cause of the failure of so much art founded on so-called Greek ideals. Much Roman sculpture, if you except their portrait busts, illustrates this. Compared with Greek work it lacks that subtle variety in the modelling that gives vitality. The difference can be felt instinctively in the merest fragment of a broken figure. It is not difficult to tell Greek from Roman fragments, they pulsate with a life that it is impossible to describe but that one instinctively feels. And this vitality depends, I think it will be found, on the greater amount of life-giving variety in the surfaces of the modelling. In their architectural mouldings, the difference of which we are speaking can be more easily traced. The vivacity and brilliancy of a Greek moulding makes a Roman work look heavy and dull. And it will generally be found that the Romans used the curve of the circle in the sections of their mouldings, a curve possessing the least amount of variety, as is explained later, where the Greeks used the lines of conic sections, curves possessed of the greatest amount of variety. But while unity must never exist without this life-giving variety, variety must always be under the moral control of unity, or it will get out of hand and become extravagant. In fact, the most perfect work, like the most perfect engine of which we spoke in a former chapter, has the least amount of variety, as the engine has the least amount of "dither," that is compatible with life. One does not hear so much talk in these days about a perfect type as was the fashion at one time; and certainly the pursuit of this ideal by a process of selecting the best features from many models and constructing a figure out of them as an ideal type, was productive of very dead and lifeless work. No account was taken of the variety from a common type necessary in the most perfect work, if life and individual interest are not to be lost, and the thing is not to become a dead abstraction. But the danger is rather the other way at the moment. Artists revel in the oddest of individual forms, and the type idea is flouted on all hands. An anarchy of individualism is upon us, and the vitality of disordered variety is more fashionable than the calm beauty of an ordered unity. Excess of variations from a common type is what I think we recognise as ugliness in the objective world, whereas beauty is on the side of unity and conformity to type. Beauty possesses both variety and unity, and is never extreme, erring rather on the side of unity. Burke in his essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful" would seem to use the word beautiful where we should use the word pretty, placing it at the opposite pole from the sublime, whereas I think beauty always has some elements of the sublime in it, while the merely pretty has not. Mere prettiness is a little difficult to place, it does not come between either of our extremes, possessing little character or type, variety or unity. It is perhaps charm without either of these strengthening associates, and in consequence is always feeble, and the favourite diet of weak artistic digestions. The sculpture of ancient Egypt is an instance of great unity in conception, and the suppression of variety to a point at which life scarcely exists. The lines of the Egyptian figures are simple and long, the surfaces smooth and unvaried, no action is allowed to give variety to the pose, the placing of one foot a little in front of the other being alone permitted in the standing figures; the arms, when not hanging straight down the sides, are flexed stiffly at the elbow at right angles; the heads stare straight before them. The expression of sublimity is complete, and this was, of course, what was aimed at. But how cold and terrible is the lack of that play and variety that alone show life. What a relief it is, at the British Museum, to go into the Elgin Marble room and be warmed by the noble life pulsating in the Greek work, after visiting the cold Egyptian rooms. In what we call a perfect face it is not so much the perfect regularity of shape and balance in the features that charms us, not the things that belong to an ideal type, but rather the subtle variations from this type that are individual to the particular head we are admiring. A perfect type of head, if such could exist, might excite our wonder, but would leave us cold. But it can never exist in life; the slightest movement of the features, which must always accompany life and expression, will mar it. And the influence of these habitual movements on the form of the features themselves will invariably mould them into individual shapes away from the so-called perfect type, whatever may have been nature's intention in the first instance. If we call these variations from a common type in the features imperfections, as it is usual to do, it would seem to be the imperfections of perfection that charm and stir us; and that perfection without these so-called imperfections is a cold, dead abstraction, devoid of life: that unity without variety is lifeless and incapable of touching us. On the other hand, variety without unity to govern it is a riotous exuberance of life, lacking all power and restraint and wasting itself in a madness of excess. So that in art a balance has to be struck between these two opposing qualities. In good work unity is the dominating quality, all the variety being done in conformity to some large idea of the whole, which is never lost sight of, even in the smallest detail of the work. Good style in art has been defined as "variety in unity," and Hogarth's definition of composition as the art of "varying well" is similar. And I am not sure that "contrasts in harmony" would not be a suggestive definition of good colour. Let us consider first variety and unity as they are related to line drawing, and afterwards to mass drawing. XI RHYTHM: VARIETY OF LINE Line rhythm or music depends on the shape of your lines, their relation to each other and their relation to the boundaries of your panel. In all good work this music of line is in harmony with the subject (the artistic intention) of your picture or drawing. The two lines with the least variation are a perfectly straight line and a circle. A perfectly straight line has obviously no variety at all, while a circle, by curving at exactly the same ratio all along, has no variation of curvature, it is of all curves the one with the least possible variety. These two lines are, therefore, two of the dullest, and are seldom used in pictures except to enhance the beauty and variety of others. And even then, subtle variations, some amount of play, is introduced to relieve their baldness. But used in this way, vertical and horizontal lines are of the utmost value in rectangular pictures, uniting the composition to its bounding lines by their parallel relationship with them. And further, as a contrast to the richness and beauty of curves they are of great value, and are constantly used for this purpose. The group of mouldings cutting against the head in a portrait, or the lines of a column used to accentuate the curved forms of a face or figure, are well-known instances; and the portrait painter is always on the look out for an object in his background that will give him such straight lines. You may notice, too, how the lines drawn across a study in order to copy it (squaring it out, as it is called) improve the look of a drawing, giving a greater beauty to the variety of the curves by contrast with the variety lacking in straight lines. The perfect curve of the circle should always be avoided in the drawing of natural objects (even a full moon), and in vital drawings of any sort some variety should always be looked for. Neither should the modelling of the sphere ever occur in your work, the dullest of all curved surfaces. Although the curve of the perfect circle is dull from its lack of variety, it is not without beauty, and this is due to its perfect unity. It is of all curves the most perfect example of static unity. Without the excitement of the slightest variation it goes on and on for ever. This is, no doubt, the reason why it was early chosen as a symbol of Eternity, and certainly no more perfect symbol could be found. The circle seen in perspective assumes the more beautiful curve of the ellipse, a curve having much variety; but as its four quarters are alike, not so much as a symmetrical figure can have. Perhaps the most beautiful symmetrically curved figure of all is the so-called egg of the well-known moulding from such a temple as the Erechtheum, called the egg and dart moulding. Here we have a perfect balance between variety and unity. The curvature is varied to an infinite degree, at no point is its curving at the same ratio as at any other point; perhaps the maximum amount of variety that can be got in a symmetrical figure, preserving, as it does, its almost perfect continuity, for it approaches the circle in the even flow of its curvature. This is, roughly, the line of the contour of a face, and you may note how much painters who have excelled in grace have insisted on it in their portraits. Gainsborough and Vandyke are striking, instances. [Illustration: Diagram VII. EGG AND DART MOULDING FROM ONE OF THE CARYATIDES FROM THE ERECHTHEUM IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM] The line of a profile is often one of great beauty, only here the variety is apt to overbalance the unity or run of the line. The most beautiful profiles are usually those in which variety is subordinated to the unity of the contour. I fancy the Greeks felt this when they did away with the hollow above the nose, making the line of the forehead run, with but little interruption, to the tip of the nose. The unity of line is increased, and the variety made more interesting. The idea that this was the common Greek type is, I should imagine, untrue, for their portrait statues do not show it. It does occur in nature at rare intervals, and in most Western nationalities, but I do not think there is much evidence of its ever having been a common type anywhere. [Illustration: Diagram VIII. ILLUSTRATING VARIETY IN SYMMETRY Note how the hollows marked A are opposed by fullnesses marked B.] In drawing or painting a profile this run or unity of the line is the thing to feel, if you would express its particular beauty. This is best done in the case of a painting by finally drawing it with the brush from the background side, after having painted all the variety there is of tone and colour on the face side of the line. As the background usually varies little, the swing of the brush is not hampered on this side as it is on the other. I have seen students worried to distraction trying to paint the profile line from the face side, fearing to lose the drawing by going over the edge. With the edge blurred out from the face side, it is easy to come with a brush full of the colour the background is immediately against the face (a different colour usually from what it is further away), and draw it with some decision and conviction, care being taken to note all the variations on the edge, where the sharpnesses come and where the edge is more lost, &c. [Sidenote: Variety in Symmetry.] The contours of the limbs illustrate another form of line variety--what may be called "Variety in Symmetry." While roughly speaking the limbs are symmetrical, each side not only has variety in itself, but there is usually variety of opposition. Supposing there is a convex curve on the one side, you will often have a concave form on the other. Always look out for this in drawing limbs, and it will often improve a poorly drawn part if more of this variation on symmetry is discovered. The whole body, you may say, is symmetrical, but even here natural conditions make for variety. The body is seldom, except in soldiering, held in a symmetrical position. The slightest action produces the variety we are speaking about. The accompanying sketches will indicate what is meant. [Illustration: Diagram IX. ILLUSTRATING VARIETY IN SYMMETRY Note how the hollows marked A are opposed by the fullnesses marked B.] Of course the student, if he has any natural ability, instinctively looks out for all these variations that give the play of life to his drawing. It is not for him in the full vigour of inspiration that books such as this are written. But there may come a time when things "won't come," and it is then that it is useful to know where to look for possible weak spots in your work. [Sidenote: Variety of Thickness and Accent.] A line of equal thickness is a very dead and inexpressive thing compared with one varied and stressed at certain points. If you observe any of the boundaries in nature we use a line to express, you will notice some points are accentuated, attract the attention, more than others. The only means you have to express this in a line drawing is by darkening and sharpening the line. At other points, where the contour is almost lost, the line can be soft and blurred. It is impossible to write of the infinite qualities of variety that a fine draughtsman will get into his line work; they must be studied first hand. But on this play of thickness and quality of line much of the vitality of your drawing will depend. XII RHYTHM: UNITY OF LINE Unity of line is a bigger quality than variety, and as it requires a larger mental grasp, is more rarely met with. The bigger things in drawing and design come under its consideration, including, as it does, the relation of the parts to the whole. Its proper consideration would take us into the whole field of Composition, a subject needing far more consideration than it can be given in this book. In almost all compositions a rhythmic flow of lines can be traced. Not necessarily a flow of actual lines (although these often exist); they may be only imaginary lines linking up or massing certain parts, and bringing them into conformity with the rhythmic conception of the whole. Or again, only a certain stress and flow in the forms, suggesting line movements. But these line movements flowing through your panel are of the utmost importance; they are like the melodies and subjects of a musical symphony, weaving through and linking up the whole composition. Often, the line of a contour at one part of a picture is picked up again by the contour of some object at another part of the composition, and although no actual line connects them, a unity is thus set up between them. (See diagrams, pages 166 and 168, illustrating line compositions of pictures by Botticelli and Paolo Veronese). This imaginary following through of contours across spaces in a composition should always be looked out for and sought after, as nothing serves to unite a picture like this relationship of remote parts. The flow of these lines will depend on the nature of the subject: they will be more gracious and easy, or more vigorous and powerful, according to the demands of your subject. This linking up of the contours applies equally well to the drawing of a single figure or even a head or hand, and the student should always be on the look out for this uniting quality. It is a quality of great importance in giving unity to a composition. [Sidenote: Parallelism] When groups of lines in a picture occur parallel to each other they produce an accentuation of the particular quality the line may contain, a sort of sustained effect, like a sustained chord on an organ, the effect of which is much bigger than that of the same chord struck staccato. This sustained quality has a wonderful influence in steadying and uniting your work. This parallelism can only be used successfully with the simplest lines, such as a straight line or a simple curve; it is never advisable except in decorative patterns to be used with complicated shapes. Blake is very fond of the sustained effect parallelism gives, and uses the repetition of curved and straight lines very often in his compositions. Note in Plate I of the Job series, page 146 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXI], the use made of this sustaining quality in the parallelism of the sheep's backs in the background and the parallel upward flow of the lines of the figures. In Plate II you see it used in the curved lines of the figures on either side of the throne above, and in the two angels with the scroll at the left-hand corner. Behind these two figures you again have its use accentuating by repetition the peaceful line of the hacks of the sheep. The same thing can be seen in Plate XXXI, B, where the parallelism of the back lines of the sheep and the legs of the seated figures gives a look of peace contrasting with the violence of the messenger come to tell of the destruction of Job's sons. The emphasis that parallelism gives to the music of particular lines is well illustrated in all Blake's work. He is a mine of information on the subject of line rhythm. Compare A with Plate XXXI, C; note how the emotional quality is dependent in both cases on the parallelism of the upward flow of the lines. How also in Plate I he has carried the vertical feeling even into the sheep in the front, introducing little bands of vertical shading to carry through the vertical lines made by the kneeling figures. And in the last plate, "So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning," note how the greater completeness with which the parallelism has been carried out has given a much greater emphasis to the effect, expressing a greater exaltation and peace than in Plate XXXI, A. Notice in Plate XXXI, D, where "The just, upright man is laughed to scorn," how this power of emphasis is used to increase the look of scorn hurled at Job by the pointing fingers of his three friends. Of the use of this principle in curved forms, the repetition of the line of the back in stooping figures is a favourite device with Blake. There will be found instances of this in Plate XXXII, E and G. (Further instances will be found on reference to Plates VII, VIII, XIII, and XVII, in Blake's Job.) In the last instance it is interesting to note how he has balanced the composition, which has three figures kneeling on the right and only one on the left. By losing the outline of the third figure on the right and getting a double line out of the single figure on the left by means of the outline of the mass of hair, and also by shading this single figure more strongly, he has contrived to keep a perfect balance. The head of Job is also turned to the left, while he stands slightly on that side, still further balancing the three figures on the right. (This does not show so well in the illustration here reproduced as in the original print.) [Illustration: Plate XXXI. Thus did Job continually. (_Plate I, Blake's Job_) And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. (_Plate IV, Blake's Job_) So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning. (_Plate XXI, Blake's Job_) The just upright man is laughed to scorn. (_Plate X, Blake's Job_)] Some rude things were said above about the straight line and the circle, on account of their lack of variety, and it is true that a mathematically straight line, or a mathematically perfect circle, are never found in good artistic drawing. For without variety is no charm or life. But these lines possess other qualities, due to their maximum amount of unity, that give them great power in a composition; and where the expression of sublimity or any of the deeper and more profound sentiments are in evidence, they are often to be found. The rows of columns in a Greek temple, the clusters of vertical lines in a Gothic cathedral interior, are instances of the sublimity and power they possess. The necessary play that makes for vitality--the "dither" as we called this quality in a former chapter--is given in the case of the Greek temple by the subtle curving of the lines of columns and steps, and by the rich variety of the sculpture, and in the case of the Gothic cathedral by a rougher cutting of the stone blocks and the variety in the colour of the stone. But generally speaking, in Gothic architecture this particular quality of "dither" or the play of life in all the parts is conspicuous, the balance being on the side of variety rather than unity. The individual workman was given a large amount of freedom and allowed to exercise his personal fancy. The capitals of columns, the cusping of windows, and the ornaments were seldom repeated, but varied according to the taste of the craftsman. Very high finish was seldom attempted, the marks of the chisel often being left showing in the stonework. All this gave a warmth and exuberance of life to a fine Gothic building that makes a classical building look cold by comparison. The freedom with which new parts were built on to a Gothic building is another proof of the fact that it is not in the conception of the unity of the whole that their chief charm consists. On the other hand, a fine classic building is the result of one large conception to which every part has rigorously to conform. Any addition to this in after years is usually disastrous. A high finish is always attempted, no tool marks nor any individuality of the craftsman is allowed to mar the perfect symmetry of the whole. It may be colder, but how perfect in sublimity! The balance here is on the side of unity rather than variety. The strength and sublimity of Norman architecture is due to the use of circular curves in the arches, combined with straight lines and the use of square forms in the ornaments--lines possessed of least variety. All objects with which one associates the look of strength will be found to have straight lines in their composition. The look of strength in a strong man is due to the square lines of the contours, so different from the rounded forms of a fat man. And everyone knows the look of mental power a square forehead gives to a head and the look of physical power expressed by a square jaw. The look of power in a rocky landscape or range of hills is due to the same cause. [Illustration: Plate XXXII. When the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me. (_Plate II, Blake's Job_) With dreams upon my bed Thou scarest me, and affrightest me with visions. (_Plate XI, Blake's Job_) Printed the wrong way up in order to show that the look of horror is not solely dependent on the things represented but belongs to the rhythm, the pattern of the composition. And my servant Job shall pray for you. (_Plate XVIII, Blake's Job_) When the morning-stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. (_Plate XIV, Blake's Job_)] [Sidenote: The Horizontal and the Vertical] The horizontal and the vertical are two very important lines, the horizontal being associated with calm and contemplation and the vertical with a feeling of elevation. As was said above, their relation to the sides of the composition to which they are parallel in rectangular pictures is of great importance in uniting the subject to its bounding lines and giving it a well-knit look, conveying a feeling of great stability to a picture. How impressive and suggestive of contemplation is the long line of the horizon on a calm day at sea, or the long, horizontal line of a desert plain! The lack of variety, with all the energy and vitality that accompany it, gives one a sense of peace and rest, a touch of infinity that no other lines can convey. The horizontal lines which the breeze makes on still water, and which the sky often assumes at sunset, affect us from the same harmonic cause. The stone pine and the cypress are typical instances of the sublime associated with the vertical in nature. Even a factory chimney rising above a distant town, in spite of its unpleasant associations, is impressive, not to speak of the beautiful spires of some of our Gothic cathedrals, pointing upwards. How well Constable has used the vertical sublimity of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral can be seen in his picture, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he has contrasted it with the gay tracery of an arch of elm trees. Gothic cathedrals generally depend much on this vertical feeling of line for their impressiveness. The Romans knew the expressive power of the vertical when they set up a lonely column as a monument to some great deed or person. And a sense of this sublimity may be an unconscious explanation of the craze for putting towers and obelisks on high places that one comes across in different parts of the country, usually called someone's "folly." In the accompanying diagrams, A, B, C and D, E, F, pages 152 [Transcribers Note: Diagram X] and 153 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XI], are examples of the influence to be associated with the horizontal and vertical lines. A is nothing but six straight lines drawn across a rectangular shape, and yet I think they convey something of the contemplative and peaceful sense given by a sunset over the sea on a calm evening. And this is entirely due to the expressive power straight lines possess, and the feelings they have the power to call up in the mind. In B a little more incident and variety has been introduced, and although there is a certain loss of calm, it is not yet enough to destroy the impression. The line suggesting a figure is vertical and so plays up to the same calm feeling as the horizontal lines. The circular disc of the sun has the same static quality, being the curve most devoid of variety. It is the lines of the clouds that give some excitement, but they are only enough to suggest the dying energy of departing day. Now let us but bend the figure in a slight curve, as at C, and destroy its vertical direction, partly cover the disc of the sun so as to destroy the complete circle, and all this is immediately altered, our calm evening has become a windy one, our lines now being expressive of some energy. [Illustration: PLATE XXXIII. FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE. GIORGIONI (LOUVRE) Note the straight line introduced in seated female figure with flute to counteract rich forms.] To take a similar instance with vertical lines. Let D represent a row of pine trees in a wide plain. Such lines convey a sense of exaltation and infinite calm. Now if some foliage is introduced, as at E, giving a swinging line, and if this swinging line is carried on by a corresponding one in the sky, we have introduced some life and variety. If we entirely destroy the vertical feeling and bend our trees, as at F, the expression of much energy will be the result, and a feeling of the stress and struggle of the elements introduced where there was perfect calm. It is the aloofness of straight lines from all the fuss and flurry of variety that gives them this calm, infinite expression. And their value as a steadying influence among the more exuberant forms of a composition is very great. The Venetians knew this and made great use of straight lines among the richer forms they so delighted in. It is interesting to note how Giorgione in his "Fête Champêtre" of the Louvre (see illustration, page 151 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXIII]), went out of his way to get a straight line to steady his picture and contrast with the curves. Not wanting it in the landscape, he has boldly made the contour of the seated female conform to a rigid straight line, accentuated still further by the flute in her hand. If it were not for this and other straight lines in the picture, and a certain squareness of drawing in the draperies, the richness of the trees in the background, the full forms of the flesh and drapery would be too much, and the effect become sickly, if not positively sweet. Van Dyck, also, used to go out of his way to introduce a hard straight line near the head in his portraits for the same reason, often ending abruptly, without any apparent reason, a dark background in a hard line, and showing a distant landscape beyond in order to get a light mass to accentuate the straight line. [Illustration: Diagram X. ILLUSTRATING, A, CALM RHYTHMIC INFLUENCE OF HORIZONTAL LINES SUCH AS A SUNSET OVER THE SEA MIGHT GIVE; B, INTRODUCTION OF LINES CONVEYING SOME ENERGY; C, SHOWING DESTRUCTION OF REPOSE BY FURTHER CURVING OF LINES. THE CALM EVENING HAS BECOME A WINDY ONE.] [Illustration: Diagram XI. ILLUSTRATING, D, RHYTHMIC INFLUENCE OF VERTICAL LINES; E, THE INTRODUCTION OF SOME VARIETY; F, THE DESTRUCTION OF THE VERTICAL AND CONSEQUENT LOSS OF REPOSE.] The rich modelling and swinging lines of the "Bacchus and Ariadne" of Titian in the National Gallery, here reproduced, page 154 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXIV], would be too gross, were it not for the steadying influence of the horizontal lines in the sky and the vertical lines of the tree-trunks. While speaking of this picture, it might not be out of place to mention an idea that occurred to me as to the reason for the somewhat aggressive standing leg of the female figure with the cymbals leading the procession of revellers. I will not attempt any analysis of this composition, which is ably gone into in another book of this series. But the standing leg of this figure, given such prominence in the composition, has always rather puzzled me. I knew Titian would not have given it that vigorous stand without a good reason. It certainly does not help the run of the composition, although it may be useful in steadying it, and it is not a particularly beautiful thing in itself, as the position is one better suited to a man's leg than to a woman's. But if you cover it over with your finger and look at the composition without it, I think the reason of its prominence becomes plainer. Titian evidently had some trouble, as well he might have, with the forward leg of the Bacchus. He wished to give the look of his stepping from the car lightly treading the air, as gods may be permitted to do. But the wheel of the car that comes behind the foot made it difficult to evade the idea that he was stepping on it, which would be the way an ordinary mortal would alight. I think the duty of the aggressive standing leg of the leading Bacchante, with its great look of weight, is to give a look of lightness to this forward leg of Bacchus, by contrast--which it certainly does. On examining the picture closely in a good light, you will see that he has had the foot of Bacchus in several positions before he got it right. Another foot can distinctly be seen about a couple of inches or so above the present one. The general vertical direction of this leg is also against its look of lightness and motion, tending rather to give it a stationary, static look. I could not at first see why he did not bring the foot further to the right, which would have aided the lightness of the figure and increased its movement. But you will observe that this would have hurled the whole weight of the mass of figures on the right, forward on to the single figure of Ariadne, and upset the balance; as you can see by covering this leg with your finger and imagining it swinging to the right. So that Titian, having to retain the vertical position for Bacchus' forward leg, used the aggressive standing leg of the cymbal lady to accentuate its spring and lightness. [Illustration: Plate XXXIV. BACCHUS AND ARIADNE. TITIAN _Photo Hanfstaengl_] A feeling of straight-up-ness in a figure or of the horizontal plane in anything will produce the same effect as a vertical or horizontal line without any actual line being visible. Blake's "Morning Stars Singing Together" is an instance of the vertical chord, although there is no actual upright line in the figures. But they all have a vigorous straight-up-ness that gives them the feeling of peace and elevation coupled with a flame-like line running through them that gives them their joyous energy. [Illustration: Diagram XII. A, B, C] [Sidenote: The Right Angle] The combination of the vertical with the horizontal produces one of the strongest and most arresting chords that you can make, and it will be found to exist in most pictures and drawings where there is the expression of dramatic power. The cross is the typical example of this. It is a combination of lines that instantly rivets the attention, and has probably a more powerful effect upon the mind--quite apart from anything symbolised by it--than any other simple combinations that could have been devised. How powerful is the effect of a vertical figure, or even a post, seen cutting the long horizontal line of the horizon on the sea-shore. Or a telegraph post by the side of the road, seen against the long horizontal line of a hill at sunset. The look of power given by the vertical lines of a contracted brow is due to the same cause. The vertical furrows of the brow continuing the lines of the nose, make a continuous vertical which the horizontal lines of the brow cross (see Fig. A in the illustration). The same cause gives the profile a powerful look when the eyebrows make a horizontal line contrasting with the vertical line of the forehead (Fig. B). Everybody knows the look of power associated with a square brow: it is not that the square forehead gives the look of a larger brain capacity, for if the forehead protrudes in a curved line, as at C, the look of power is lost, although there is obviously more room for brains. This power of the right angle is well exemplified in Watts' "Love and Death," here reproduced, page 158 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXV]. In this noble composition, in the writer's opinion one of the most sublime expressions produced by nineteenth-century art, the irresistible power and majesty of the slowly advancing figure of Death is largely due to the right angle felt through the pose. Not getting it in the contour, Watts has boldly introduced it by means of shading the farther arm and insisting on the light upper edge of the outstretched arm and hand, while losing somewhat the, outline of the head beyond. Note also the look of power the insistence on square forms in the drapery gives this figure. The expression is still further emphasised by the hard square forms of the steps, and particularly by the strong horizontal line of the first step so insisted on, at right angles to the vertical stand of the figure; and also the upright lines of the doorway above. In contrast with the awful sublimity of this figure of Death, how touching is the expression of the little figure of Love, trying vainly to stop the inevitable advance. And this expression is due to the curved lines on which the action of the figure is hung, and the soft undulating forms of its modelling. Whereas the figure of Death is all square lines and flat crisp planes, the whole hanging on a dramatic right angle; this figure is all subtle fullness both of contour and modelling melting one into the other, the whole hung upon a rich full curve starting at the standing foot of the advancing figure. And whereas the expression of Death is supported and emphasised by the hard, square forms and texture of the stone steps, the expression of Love is supported and emphasised by the rounded forms and soft texture of the clustering roses. On this contrast of line and form, so in sympathy with the profound sentiment to which this picture owes its origin, the expressive power of this composition will be found to depend. [Illustration: Diagram XIII. ILLUSTRATING SOME OF THE LINES ON WHICH THE RHYTHMIC POWER OF THIS PICTURE DEPENDS.] [Illustration: Plate XXXV. LOVE AND DEATH. BY G.F. WATTS A noble composition, founded on the power of the right angle in the figure of Death, in contrast with the curved lines in the figure of Love. (See diagram opposite.) _Photo Hollyer_] In the diagram accompanying the reproduction of this picture I have tried to indicate in diagrammatical form some of the chief lines of its anatomy. In these diagrams of the anatomy of compositions the lines selected are not always very obvious in the originals and are justly much broken into by truths of natural appearance. But an emotional significance depending on some arrangement of abstract lines is to be found underlying the expression in every good picture, carefully hidden as it is by all great artists. And although some apology is perhaps necessary for the ugliness of these diagrams, it is an ugliness that attends all anatomy drawings. If the student will trace them and put his tracing over the reproductions of the originals, they will help him to see on what things in the arrangement the rhythmic force of the picture depends. Other lines, as important as those selected, may have been overlooked, but the ones chosen will suffice to show the general character of them all. * * * * * There is one condition in a composition, that is laid down before you begin, and that is the shape of your panel or canvas. This is usually a rectangular form, and all the lines of your design will have to be considered in relation to this shape. Vertical and horizontal lines being parallel to the boundaries of rectangular pictures, are always right and immediately set up a relationship, as we have seen. The arresting power of the right angle exists at each corner of a rectangular picture, where the vertical sides meet the horizontal base, and this presents a difficulty, because you do not wish the spectator's attention drawn to the corners, and this dramatic combination of lines always attracts the eye. A favourite way of getting rid of this is to fill them with some dark mass, or with lines swinging round and carrying the eye past them, so that the attention is continually swung to the centre of the picture. For lines have a power of directing the attention, the eye instinctively running with them, and this power is of the greatest service in directing the spectator to the principal interest. It is this trouble with the corners that makes the problem of filling a square so exacting. In an ordinary rectangular panel you have a certain amount of free space in the middle, and the difficulty of filling the corners comfortably does not present itself until this space is arranged for. But in a square, the moment you leave the centre you are in one or other of the corners, and the filling of them governs the problem much more than in the case of other shapes. It is a good exercise for students to give themselves a square to fill, in order to understand this difficulty and learn to overcome it. Other lines that possess a direct relation to a rectangular shape are the diagonals. Many compositions that do not hang on a vertical or horizontal basis are built on this line, and are thus related to the bounding shape. [Illustration: Plate XXXVI. THE SURRENDER OF BREDA VELAZQUEZ (PRADO) _Photo Anderson_] When vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines are referred to, it must not be assumed that one means in all cases naked lines. There is no pure vertical line in a stone pine or cypress tree, nor pure horizontal line in a stretch of country, but the whole swing of their lines is vertical or horizontal. And in the same way, when one speaks of a composition being hung upon a diagonal, it is seldom that a naked diagonal line exists in the composition, but the general swing is across the panel in harmony with one or other diagonal. And when this is so, there is a unity set up between the design and its boundaries. A good instance of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines to unite a picture is Velazquez's "The Surrender of Breda," here reproduced. Note the vertical chord in the spears on the left, continued in the leg of the horse and front leg of the figure receiving the key, and the horizontal line made by the dark mass of distant city, to be continued by the gun carried over the shoulder of the figure with the slouch hat behind the principal group. Velazquez has gone out of his way to get this line, as it could hardly have been the fashion to carry a gun in this position, pointing straight at the head of the man behind. Horizontal lines also occur in the sky and distant landscape, one running right through the group of spears. The use of the diagonal is another remarkable thing in the lines of this picture. If you place a ruler on the slanting line of the flag behind the horse's head to the right, you find it is exactly parallel to a diagonal drawn from the top right-hand corner to the lower left-hand corner. Another line practically parallel to this diagonal is the line of the sword belonging to the figure offering the key, the feeling of which is continued in the hand and key of this same figure. It may be noted also that the back right leg of the horse in the front is parallel to the other diagonal, the under side of it being actually on the diagonal and thus brought into relation with the bounding lines of the picture. And all these lines, without the artifice being too apparent, give that well-knit, dignified look so in harmony with the nature of the subject. [Sidenote: Curved Lines] Curved lines have not the moral integrity of straight lines. Theirs is not so much to minister to the expression of the sublime as to woo us to the beauteous joys of the senses. They hold the secrets of charm. But without the steadying power of straight lines and flatnesses, curves get out of hand and lose their power. In architecture the rococo style is an example of this excess. While all expressions of exuberant life and energy, of charm and grace depend on curved lines for their effect, yet in their most refined and beautiful expression they err on the side of the square forms rather than the circle. When the uncontrolled use of curves approaching the circle and volute are indulged in, unrestrained by the steadying influence of any straight lines, the effect is gross. The finest curves are full of restraint, and excessive curvature is a thing to be avoided in good drawing. We recognise this integrity of straight lines when we say anybody is "an upright man" or is "quite straight," wishing to convey the impression of moral worth. Rubens was a painter who gloried in the unrestrained expression of the zeal to live and drink deeply of life, and glorious as much of his work is, and wonderful as it all is, the excessive use of curves and rounded forms in his later work robs it of much of its power and offends us by its grossness. His best work is full of squarer drawing and planes. #Always be on the look out for straightnesses in curved forms and for planes in your modelling.# Let us take our simplest form of composition again, a stretch of sea and sky, and apply curved lines where we formerly had straight lines. You will see how the lines at A, page 164 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XIV], although but slightly curved, express some energy, where the straight lines of our former diagram expressed repose, and then how in B and C the increasing curvature of the lines increases the energy expressed, until in D, where the lines sweep round in one vigorous swirl, a perfect hurricane is expressed. This last, is roughly the rhythmic basis of Turner's "Hannibal Crossing the Alps" in the Turner Gallery. One of the simplest and most graceful forms the tying lines of a composition may take is a continuous flow, one line evolving out of another in graceful sequence, thus leading the eye on from one part to another and carrying the attention to the principal interests. Two good instances of this arrangement are Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and the "Rape of Europa," by Paolo Veronese, reproduced on pages 166 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XV, Plate XXXVII] and 168 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XVI, Plate XXXVIII]. The Venetian picture does not depend so much on the clarity of its line basis as the Florentine. And it is interesting to note how much nearer to the curves of the circle the lines of Europa approach than do those of the Venus picture. Were the same primitive treatment applied to the later work painted in the oil medium as has been used by Botticelli in his tempera picture, the robustness of the curves would have offended and been too gross for the simple formula; whereas overlaid and hidden under such a rich abundance of natural truth as it is in this gorgeous picture, we are too much distracted and entertained by such wealth to have time to dwell on the purity of the line arrangement at its base. And the rich fullness of line arrangement, although rather excessive, seen detached, is in keeping with the sumptuous luxuriance the Venetian loved so well to express. But for pure line beauty the greater restraint of the curves in Botticelli's picture is infinitely more satisfying, though here we have not anything like the same wealth and richness of natural appearance to engage our attention, and the innocent simplicity of the technique leaves much more exposed the structure of lines, which in consequence play a greater part in the effect of the picture. [Illustration: Diagram XIV. ILLUSTRATING POWER OF CURVED LINES TO CONVEY ENERGY. A, B, C, D.] [Illustration: Diagram XV. ILLUSTRATING THE FLOW OF LINES ON WHICH THE RHYTHMIC UNITY OF THIS PICTURE DEPENDS.] [Illustration: Plate XXXVII. THE BIRTH OF VENUS. BOTTICELLI (FLORENCE) A beautiful example of Botticelli's refined line rhythm. (See diagram on opposite page for analysis.) _Photo Anderson_] In both cases note the way the lines lead up to the principal subject, and the steadying power introduced by means of horizontal, vertical, and other straight lines. Veronese has contented himself with keeping a certain horizontal feeling in the sky, culminating in the straight lines of the horizon and of the sea edge. And he has also introduced two pyramids, giving straight lines in among the trees, the most pronounced of which leads the eye straight on to the principal head. Botticelli has first the long line of the horizon echoed in the ground at the right-hand lower corner. And then he has made a determined stand against the flow of lines carrying you out of the picture on the right, by putting straight, upright trees and insisting upon their straightness. [Illustration: Diagram XVI. ILLUSTRATING SOME OF THE MAIN LINES ON WHICH THE RHYTHMIC UNITY OF THIS PICTURE DEPENDS.] [Illustration: Plate XXXVIII. THE RAPE OF EUROPA. BY PAOLO VERONESE (VENICE) A composition of rich full forms and rich full colour. (See the diagram on opposite page for analysis of line rhythm.) _Photo Anderson_] Another rhythmic form the lines at the basis of a composition may take is a flame-like flow of lines; curved lines meeting and parting and meeting again, or even crossing in one continual movement onwards. A striking instance of the use of this quality is the work of the remarkable Spanish painter usually called El Greco, two of whose works are here shown (page 172 [Transcribers Note: Plate XL]). Whatever may be said by the academically minded as to the incorrectness of his drawing, there can be no two opinions as to the remarkable rhythmic vitality of his work. The upward flow of his lines and the flame-like flicker of his light masses thrills one in much the same way as watching a flaring fire. There is something exalting and stimulating in it, although, used to excess as he sometimes uses it, it is apt to suffer from lack of repose. Two examples of his pictures are reproduced here, and illustrate his use of this form of movement in the lines and masses of his compositions. Nowhere does he let the eye rest, but keeps the same flickering movement going throughout all his masses and edges. The extraordinary thing about this remarkable painter is that while this restless, unrestrained form of composition makes his work akin to the rococo work of a later period, there is a fiery earnestness and sincerity in all he does, only to be matched among the primitive painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and very different from the false sentiment of the later school. Blake was also fond of this flame line, but usually used it in combination with more straight lines than the energetic Spaniard allowed himself. Plates III and V in the Job series are good examples of his use of this form. In both cases it will be seen that he uses it in combination with the steadying influence of straight lines, which help to keep the balance and repose necessary in the treatment of even the most violent subjects in art. A continual interruption in the flow of lines, and a harsh jarring of one against another in an angular, jagged fashion, produces a feeling of terror and horror. A streak of fork lightning is a natural example of this. The plate of Blake's No. XI, p. 148 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXII], reproduced here, is also a good example. I have had it put sideways on so that you may see that the look of horror is not only in the subject but belongs to the particular music of line in the picture. The effect of the harsh contrasts in the lines is further added to by the harsh contrasts of tone: everywhere hard lights are brought up against hard darks. Harsh contrasts of tone produce much the same look of terror as harsh contrasts of line. Battle pictures are usually, when good, full of these clashes of line and tone, and thrilling dramatic effects in which a touch of horror enters are usually founded on the same principle. In the picture by Paolo Uccello in the National Gallery, reproduced on page 170 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXIX], a milder edition of this effect is seen. The artist has been more interested in the pageantry of war and a desire to show off his newly-acquired knowledge of perspective, than anything very terrible. The contrasts of line are here but confined to the smaller parts, and there are no contrasts of light and shade, chiaroscuro not being yet invented. However, it will be seen by the accompanying diagram how consistently the harsh contrasts of line were carried out in the planning of this picture. Notice the unconscious humour of the foreshortened spears and figure carefully arranged on the ground to vanish to the recently discovered vanishing point. [Illustration: Diagram XVII. SHOWING THE CLASH OF LINES IN SYMPATHY WITH THE MARTIAL NATURE OF THIS SUBJECT.] [Illustration: Plate XXXIX. BATTLE OF ST. EGIDIO. PAOLO UCCELLO (NATIONAL GALLERY) Illustrating the effect of jarring lines in composition. (See diagram on opposite page.) _Photo Morelli_] * * * * * Lines radiating in smooth curves from a common centre are another form employed to give unity in pictorial design. The point from which they radiate need not necessarily be within the picture, and is often considerably outside it. But the feeling that they would meet if produced gives them a unity that brings them into harmonious relationship. There is also another point about radiating lines, and that is their power of setting up a relationship between lines otherwise unrelated. Let us try and explain this. In Panel A, page 174 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XVIII], are drawn some lines at random, with the idea of their being as little related to each other as possible. In B, by the introduction of radiating lines in sympathy with them, they have been brought into some sort of relationship. The line 1-2 has been selected as the dominating line, and an assortment of radiating ones drawn about it. Now, by drawing 7-8, we have set up a relationship between lines 3-4, 5-6, and 1-2, for this line radiates with all of them. Line 9-10 accentuates this relationship with 1-2. The others echo the same thing. It is this echoing of lines through a composition that unites the different parts and gives unity to the whole. The crossing of lines at angles approaching the right angle is always harsh and somewhat discordant, useful when you want to draw attention dramatically to a particular spot, but to be avoided or covered up at other times. There is an ugly clash of crossing lines in our original scribble, and at C we have introduced a mass to cover this up, and also the angles made by line 3-4 as it crosses the radiating lines above 1-2. With a small mass at 11 to make the balance right, you have a basis for a composition, Diagram C, not at all unpleasing in arrangement, although based on a group of discordant lines drawn at random, but brought into harmony by means of sympathetic radiation. [Illustration: Plate XL. THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST. BY DOMINICO THEOTOCOPULI CALLED EL GRECO. Note the flame-like form and flow of the light masses, and the exalted feeling this conveys. _Photo Anderson_] [Illustration: Plate XLI. THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST. BY DOMINICO THEOTOCOPULI CALLED EL GRECO Another example of his restless, flame-like composition. _Photo Anderson_] In Panel D the same group is taken, but this time line 3-4 is used as the dominant one. Line 7-8 introduces 3-4 to 1-2, as it is related to both. Lines 9-10 and 11-12 introduce 3-4 to 5-6, as they are related to both, and the others follow on the same principle. By introducing some masses covering up the crossings, a rhythmic basis for a composition (Diagram E) entirely different from C is obtained, based on the same random group. In Panel F, 1-2 has been taken as the dominant line, and sympathetic lines drawn on the same principle as before. By again covering the crossings and introducing balancing masses we obtain yet another arrangement from the same random scribble. I would suggest this as a new game to students, one giving another two or three lines drawn in a panel at random, the problem being to make harmonious arrangements by the introduction of others radiating in sympathy. Often in a picture certain conditions are laid down to start with; something as ugly as our original group of lines drawn at random has to be treated pictorially, and it is by means such as here suggested that its discordancy can be subdued and the whole brought into harmony with the shape of your panel. The same principles apply in colour, discordant notes can be brought into harmony by the introduction of others related to both the original colours, thus leading the eye from one to the other by easy stages and destroying the shock. Somewhat in the way a musician will take you from one key into another very remote by means of a few chords leading from the one to the other; whereas, had he taken you straight there, the shock would have been terrible. As it is, these transitions from one key into another please and surprise one, and are very effective. [Illustration: Diagram XVIII. SHOWING HOW LINES UNRELATED CAN BE BROUGHT INTO HARMONY BY THE INTRODUCTION OF OTHERS IN SYMPATHY WITH THEM. A. LINES DRAWN AT RANDOM. B. TAKING LINE 1-2 AS DOMINANT LINE. C. AS AT B BUT WITH ADDITION OF MASSES TO COVER LINES CROSSING AND RESTORE BALANCE D. TAKING LINE 3-4 AS DOMINANT LINE E. AS AT D BUT WITH ADDITION OF MASSES TO COVER LINES CROSSING AND GIVE BALANCE F. TAKING LINE 5-6 AS DOMINANT LINE G. AS AT F BUT WITH MASSES TO COVER LINES CROSSING & TO GIVE BALANCE] [Illustration: Diagram XIX. SHOWING HOW LINES UNRELATED CAN BE BROUGHT INTO HARMONY BY THE INTRODUCTION OF OTHERS IN SYMPATHY WITH THEM. H. LINES DRAWN AT RANDOM. I. LINES DRAWN AT RANDOM. J. ADDITIONAL LINES DRAWN TO RELATE ORIGINAL LINES AND BRING THE WHOLE INTO HARMONY TAKING LINE 1-2, AS DOMINANT. K. ADDITIONAL LINES DRAWN TO RELATE ORIGINAL LINES TAKING 1-2 AS DOMINANT. L. THE SAME AS J WITH ADDITION OF MASSES TO COVER CROSSING OF LINES. M. THE SAME AS AT K WITH ADDITION OF MASSES TO COVER CROSSING LINES.] In H, I have introduced a straight line into our initial scribble, and this somewhat increases the difficulties of relating them. But by drawing 7-8 and 9-10 radiating from 1-2, we have introduced this straight line to 5-6. For although 5-6 and 9-10 do not radiate from the same point, they are obviously in sympathy. It is only a short part of the line at the end marked 5 that is out of sympathy, and had 5-6 taken the course of the dotted line, it would have radiated from the same point as 9-10. We still have line 3-4 to account for. But by drawing 11-12 we bring it into relationship with 5-6, and so by stages through 9-10 and 7-8 to the original straight line 1-2. Line 13-14, by being related to 3-4, 11-12, and also 5-6, still further harmonises the group, and the remainder echo 5-6 and increase the dominant swing. At L masses have been introduced, covering crossing lines, and we have a basis for a composition. In Diagram I lines have been drawn as before, at random, but two of them are straight and at right angles, the longer being across the-centre of the panel. The first thing to do is to trick the eye out of knowing that this line is in the centre by drawing others parallel to it, leading the eye downwards to line 9-10, which is now much more important than 1-2 and in better proportion with the height of the panel. The vertical line 3-4 is rather stark and lonely, and so we' introduce two more verticals at 11-12 and 13-14, which modify this, and with another two lines in sympathy with 5-6 and leading the eye back to the horizontal top of the panel, some sort of unity is set up, the introduction of some masses completing the scheme at M. There is a quality of sympathy set up by certain line relationships about which it is important to say something. Ladies who have the instinct for choosing a hat or doing their hair to suit their face instinctively know something of this; know that certain things in their face are emphasised by certain forms in their hats or hair, and the care that has to be taken to see that the things thus drawn attention to are their best and not their worst points. The principle is more generally understood in relation to colour; everybody knows how the blueness of blue eyes is emphasised by a sympathetic blue dress or touch of blue on a hat, &c. But the same principle applies to lines. The qualities of line in beautiful eyes and eyebrows are emphasised by the long sympathetic curve of a picture hat, and the becoming effect of a necklace is partly due to the same cause, the lines being in sympathy with the eyes or the oval of the face, according to how low or high they hang. The influence of long lines is thus to "pick out" from among the lines of a face those with which they are in sympathy, and thus to accentuate them. To illustrate this, on page 178 [Transcribers Note: Plate XLII] is reproduced "The Portrait of the Artist's Daughter," by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The two things that are brought out by the line arrangement in this portrait are the beauty of the eyes and the shape of the face. Instead of the picture hat you have the mirror, the widening circles of which swing round in sympathy with the eyes and concentrate the attention on them. That on the left (looking at the picture) being nearest the centre, has the greatest attention concentrated upon it, the lines of the mirror being more in sympathy with this than the other eye, as it is nearer the centre. If you care to take the trouble, cut a hole in a piece of opaque paper the size of the head and placing it over the illustration look at the face without the influence of these outside lines; and note how much more equally divided the attention is between the two eyes without the emphasis given to the one by the mirror. This helps the unity of impression, which with both eyes realised to so intense a focus might have suffered. This mirror forms a sort of echo of the pupil of the eye with its reflection of the window in the left-hand corner corresponding to the high light, greatly helping the spell these eyes hold. [Illustration: Diagram XX. INDICATING THE SYMPATHETIC FLOW OF LINES THAT GIVE UNITY TO THIS COMPOSITION.] [Illustration: Plate XLII. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S DAUGHTER SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES, BART. An example of sympathetic rhythm. (See diagram on opposite page.) _Photo Hollyer_] The other form accentuated by the line arrangement is the oval of the face. There is the necklace the lines of which lead on to those on the right in the reflection. It is no mere accident that this chain is so in sympathy with the line of the face: it would hardly have remained where it is for long, and must have been put in this position by the artist with the intention (conscious or instinctive) of accentuating the face line. The line of the reflection on the left and the lines of the mirror are also sympathetic. Others in the folds of the dress, and those forming the mass of the hands and arms, echo still further this line of the face and bring the whole canvas into intense sympathetic unity of expression. The influence that different ways of doing the hair may have on a face is illustrated in the accompanying scribbles. The two profiles are exactly alike--I took great trouble to make them so. It is quite remarkable the difference the two ways of doing the hair make to the look of the faces. The upward swing of the lines in A sympathise with the line of the nose and the sharper projections of the face generally (see dotted lines), while the full downward curves of B sympathise with the fuller curves of the face and particularly emphasise the fullness under the chin so dreaded by beauty past its first youth (see dotted lines). It is only a very sharply-cut face that can stand this low knot at the back of the head, in which case it is one of the simplest and most beautiful ways of doing the hair. The hair dragged up high at the back sharpens the lines of the profile as the low knot blunts them. [Illustration: Diagram XXI. ILLUSTRATING THE EFFECT ON THE FACE OF PUTTING THE HAIR UP AT THE BACK. HOW THE UPWARD FLOW OF LINES ACCENTUATES THE SHARPNESSES OF THE FEATURES.] [Illustration: Diagram XXII. ILLUSTRATING THE EFFECT ON THE SAME FACE AS DIAGRAM XXI, OF PUTTING THE HAIR LOW AT THE BACK. HOW THE FULLER LINES THUS GIVEN ACCENTUATE THE FULLNESSES OF THE FEATURES.] The illustrations to this chapter have been drawn in diagrammatical form in order to try and show that the musical quality of lines and the emotions they are capable of calling up are not dependent upon truth to natural forms but are inherent in abstract arrangements themselves. That is to say, whenever you get certain arrangements of lines, no matter what the objects in nature may be that yield them, you will always get the particular emotional stimulus belonging to such arrangements. For instance, whenever you get long uninterrupted horizontal lines running through a picture not opposed by any violent contrast, you will always get an impression of intense quiet and repose; no matter whether the natural objects yielding these lines are a wide stretch of country with long horizontal clouds in the sky, a pool with a gentle breeze making horizontal bars on its surface, or a pile of wood in a timber yard. And whenever you get long vertical lines in a composition, no matter whether it be a cathedral interior, a pine forest, or a row of scaffold poles, you will always have the particular feeling associated with rows of vertical lines in the abstract. And further, whenever you get the swinging lines of the volute, an impression of energy will be conveyed, no matter whether it be a breaking wave, rolling clouds, whirling dust, or only a mass of tangled hoop iron in a wheelwright's yard. As was said above, these effects may be greatly increased, modified, or even destroyed by associations connected with the things represented. If in painting the timber yard the artist is thinking more about making it look like a stack of real wood with its commercial associations and less about using the artistic material its appearance presents for the making of a picture, he may miss the harmonic impression the long lines of the stacks of wood present. If real wood is the first thing you are led to think of in looking at his work, he will obviously have missed the expression of any artistic feeling the subject was capable of producing. And the same may be said of the scaffold poles or the hoop iron in the wheelwright's yard. This structure of abstract lines at the basis of a picture will be more or less overlaid with the truths of nature, and all the rich variety of natural forms, according to the requirements of the subject. Thus, in large decorative work, where the painting has to take its place as part of an architectural scheme, the severity of this skeleton will be necessary to unite the work to the architectural forms around it, of which it has to form a part; and very little indulgence in the realisation of natural truth should be permitted to obscure it. But in the painting of a small cabinet picture that exists for close inspection, the supporting power of this line basis is not nearly so essential, and a full indulgence in all the rich variety of natural detail is permissible. And this is how it happens that painters who have gloried in rich details have always painted small pictures, and painters who have preferred larger truths pictures of bigger dimensions. It sounds rather paradoxical to say the smaller the picture the more detail it should contain, and the larger the less, but it is nevertheless true. For although a large picture has not of necessity got to be part of an architectural scheme, it has to be looked at from a distance at which small detail could not be seen, and where such detail would greatly weaken its expressive power. And further, the small picture easily comes within the field of vision, and the whole impression can be readily grasped without the main lines being, as it were, underlined. But in a big picture one of the greatest difficulties is to get it to read simply, to strike the eye as one impression. Its size making it difficult for it to be got comfortably within the field of vision, every artifice has to be used to give it "breadth of treatment," as it is called, and nothing interferes with this like detail. XIII VARIETY OF MASS The masses that go to make up a picture have variety in their #shape#, their #tone values#, their #edges#, in #texture# _or_ #quality#, and in #gradation#. Quite a formidable list, but each of these particulars has some rhythmic quality of its own about which it will be necessary to say a word. [Sidenote: Variety of Shape.] As to variety of shape, many things that were said about lines apply equally to the spaces enclosed by them. It is impossible to write of the rhythmic possibilities that the infinite variety of shapes possessed by natural objects contain, except to point out how necessary the study of nature is for this. Variety of shape is one of the most difficult things to invent, and one of the commonest things in nature. However imaginative your conception, and no matter how far you may carry your design, working from imagination, there will come a time when studies from nature will be necessary if your work is to have the variety that will give life and interest. Try and draw from imagination a row of elm trees of about the same height and distance apart, and get the variety of nature into them; and you will see how difficult it is to invent. On examining your work you will probably discover two or three pet forms repeated, or there may be only one. Or try and draw some cumulus clouds from imagination, several groups of them across a sky, and you will find how often again you have repeated unconsciously the same forms. How tired one gets of the pet cloud or tree of a painter who does not often consult nature in his pictures. Nature is the great storehouse of variety; even a piece of coal will suggest more interesting rock-forms than you can invent. And it is fascinating to watch the infinite variety of graceful forms assumed by the curling smoke from a cigarette, full of suggestions for beautiful line arrangements. If this variety of form in your work is allowed to become excessive it will overpower the unity of your conception. It is in the larger unity of your composition that the imaginative faculty will be wanted, and variety in your forms should always be subordinated to this idea. Nature does not so readily suggest a scheme of unity, for the simple reason that the first condition of your picture, the four bounding lines, does not exist in nature. You may get infinite suggestions for arrangements, and should always be on the look out for them, but your imagination will have to relate them to the rigorous conditions of your four bounding lines, and nature does not help you much here. But when variety in the forms is wanted, she is pre-eminent, and it is never advisable to waste inventive power where it is so unnecessary. But although nature does not readily suggest a design fitting the conditions of a panel her tendency is always towards unity of arrangement. If you take a bunch of flowers or leaves and haphazard stuff them into a vase of water, you will probably get a very chaotic arrangement. But if you leave it for some time and let nature have a chance you will find that the leaves and flowers have arranged themselves much more harmoniously. And if you cut down one of a group of trees, what a harsh discordant gap is usually left; but in time nature will, by throwing a bough here and filling up a gap there, as far as possible rectify matters and bring all into unity again. I am prepared to be told this has nothing to do with beauty but is only the result of nature's attempts to seek for light and air. But whatever be the physical cause, the fact is the same, that nature's laws tend to pictorial unity of arrangement. [Sidenote: Variety of Tone Values] It will be as well to try and explain what is meant by tone values. All the masses or tones (for the terms are often used interchangeably) that go to the making of a visual impression can be considered in relation to an imagined scale from white, to represent the lightest, to black, to represent the darkest tones. This scale of values does not refer to light and shade only, but light and shade, colour, and the whole visual impression are considered as one mosaic of masses of different degrees of darkness or lightness. A dark object in strong light may be lighter than a white object in shadow, or the reverse: it will depend on the amount of reflected light. Colour only matters in so far as it affects the position of the mass in this imagined scale of black and white. The correct observation of these tone values is a most important matter, and one of no little difficulty. The word tone is used in two senses, in the first place when referring to the individual masses as to their relations in the scale of "tone values"; and secondly when referring to the musical relationship of these values to a oneness of tone idea governing the whole impression. In very much the same way you might refer to a single note in music as a tone, and also to the tone of the whole orchestra. The word values always refers to the relationship of the individual masses or tones in our imagined scale from black to white. We say a picture is out of value or out of tone when some of the values are darker or lighter than our sense of harmony feels they should be, in the same way as we should say an instrument in an orchestra was out of tone or tune when it was higher or lower than our sense of harmony allowed. Tone is so intimately associated with the colour of a picture that it is a little difficult to treat of it apart, and it is often used in a sense to include colour in speaking of the general tone. We say it has a warm tone or a cold tone. There is a particular rhythmic beauty about a well-ordered arrangement of tone values that is a very important part of pictorial design. This music of tone has been present in art in a rudimentary way since the earliest time, but has recently received a much greater amount of attention, and much new light on the subject has been given by the impressionist movement and the study of the art of China and Japan, which is nearly always very beautiful in this respect. #This quality of tone music is most dominant when the masses are large and simple#, when the contemplation of them is not disturbed by much variety, and they have little variation of texture and gradation. A slight mist will often improve the tone of a landscape for this reason. It simplifies the tones, masses them together, obliterating many smaller varieties. I have even heard of the tone of a picture being improved by such a mist scrambled or glazed over it. [Illustration: Plate XLIII. MONTE SOLARO CAPRI Study on brown paper in charcoal and white chalk.] The powder on a lady's face, when not over-done, is an improvement for the same reason. It simplifies the tones by destroying the distressing shining lights that were cutting up the masses; and it also destroys a large amount of half tone, broadening the lights almost up to the commencement of the shadows. #Tone relationships are most sympathetic when the middle values of your scale only are used, that is to say, when the lights are low in tone and the darks high.# #They are most dramatic and intense when the contrasts are great and the jumps from dark to light sudden.# The sympathetic charm of half-light effects is due largely to the tones being of this middle range only; whereas the striking dramatic effect of a storm clearing, in which you may get a landscape brilliantly lit by the sudden appearance of the sun, seen against the dark clouds of the retreating storm, owes much of its dramatic quality to contrast. The strong contrasts of tone values coupled with the strong colour contrast between the warm sunlit land and the cold angry blue of the storm, gives such a scene much dramatic effect and power. The subject of values will be further treated in dealing with unity of tone. [Sidenote: Variety in Quality and Texture] Variety in quality and nature is almost too subtle to write about with any prospect of being understood. The play of different qualities and textures in the masses that go to form a picture must be appreciated at first hand, and little can be written about it. Oil paint is capable of almost unlimited variety in this way. But it is better to leave the study of such qualities until you have mastered the medium in its more simple aspects. The particular tone music of which we were speaking is not helped by any great use of this variety. A oneness of quality throughout the work is best suited to exhibit it. Masters of tone, like Whistler, preserve this oneness of quality very carefully in their work, relying chiefly on the grain of a rough canvas to give the necessary variety and prevent a deadness in the quality of the tones. But when more force and brilliancy are wanted, some use of your paint in a crumbling, broken manner is necessary, as it catches more light, thus increasing the force of the impression. Claude Monet and his followers in their search for brilliancy used this quality throughout many of their paintings, with new and striking results. But it is at the sacrifice of many beautiful qualities of form, as this roughness of surface does not lend itself readily to any finesse of modelling. In the case of Claude Monet's work, however, this does not matter, as form with all its subtleties is not a thing he made any attempt at exploiting. Nature is sufficiently vast for beautiful work to be done in separate departments of vision, although one cannot place such work on the same plane with successful pictures of wider scope. And the particular visual beauty of sparkling light and atmosphere, of which he was one of the first to make a separate study, could hardly exist in a work that aimed also at the significance of beautiful form, the appeal of form, as was explained in an earlier chapter, not being entirely due to a visual but to a mental perception, into which the sense of touch enters by association. The scintillation and glitter of light destroys this touch idea, which is better preserved in quieter lightings. There is another point in connection with the use of thick paint, that I don't think is sufficiently well known, and that is, its greater readiness to be discoloured by the oil in its composition coming to the surface. Fifteen years ago I did what it would be advisable for every student to do as soon as possible, namely, make a chart of the colours he is likely to use. Get a good white canvas, and set upon it in columns the different colours, very much as you would do on your palette, writing the names in ink beside them. Then take a palette-knife, an ivory one by preference, and drag it from the individual masses of paint so as to get a gradation of different thicknesses, from the thinnest possible layer where your knife ends to the thick mass where it was squeezed out of the tube. It is also advisable to have previously ruled some pencil lines with a hard point down the canvas in such a manner that the strips of paint will cross the lines. This chart will be of the greatest value to you in noting the effect of time on paint. To make it more complete, the colours of several makers should be put down, and at any rate the whites of several different makes should be on it. As white enters so largely into your painting it is highly necessary to use one that does not change. The two things that I have noticed are that the thin ends of the strips of white have invariably kept whiter than the thick end, and that all the paints have become a little more transparent with time. The pencil lines here come in useful, as they can be seen through the thinner portion, and show to what extent this transparency has occurred. But the point I wish to emphasise is that at the thick end the larger body of oil in the paint, which always comes to the surface as it dries, has darkened and yellowed the surface greatly; while the small amount of oil at the thin end has not darkened it to any extent. Claude Monet evidently knew this, and got over the difficulty by painting on an absorbent canvas, which sucks the surplus oil out from below and thus prevents its coming to the surface and discolouring the work in time. When this thick manner of painting is adopted, an absorbent canvas should always be used. It also has the advantage of giving a dull dry surface of more brilliancy than a shiny one. Although not so much as with painting, varieties of texture enter into drawings done with any of the mediums that lend themselves to mass drawing; charcoal, conté crayon, lithographic chalk, and even red chalk and lead pencil are capable of giving a variety of textures, governed largely by the surface of the paper used. But this is more the province of painting than of drawing proper, and charcoal, which is more painting than drawing, is the only medium in which it can be used with much effect. [Sidenote: Variety of Edges.] There is a very beautiful rhythmic quality in the play from softness to sharpness on the edges of masses. A monotonous sharpness of edge is hard, stern, and unsympathetic. This is a useful quality at times, particularly in decorative work, where the more intimate sympathetic qualities are not so much wanted, and where the harder forms go better with the architectural surroundings of which your painted decoration should form a part. On the other hand, a monotonous softness of edge is very weak and feeble-looking, and too entirely lacking in power to be desirable. If you find any successful work done with this quality of edge unrelieved by any sharpnesses, it will depend on colour, and not form, for any qualities it may possess. Some amount of softness makes for charm, and is extremely popular: "#I do# like that because it's so nice and soft" is a regular show-day remark in the studio, and is always meant as a great compliment, but is seldom taken as such by the suffering painter. But a balance of these two qualities playing about your contours produces the most delightful results, and the artist is always on the look out for such variations. He seldom lets a sharpness of edge run far without losing it occasionally. It may be necessary for the hang of the composition that some leading edges should be much insisted on. But even here a monotonous sharpness is too dead a thing, and although a firmness of run will be allowed to be felt, subtle variations will be introduced to prevent deadness. The Venetians from Giorgione's time were great masters of this music of edges. The structure of lines surrounding the masses on which their compositions are built were fused in the most mysterious and delightful way. But although melting into the surrounding mass, they are always firm and never soft and feeble. Study the edge in such a good example of the Venetian manner as the "Bacchus and Ariadne" at the National Gallery, and note where they are hard and where lost. There is one rather remarkable fact to be observed in this picture and many Venetian works, and this is that the #most accented edges are reserved for unessential parts#, like the piece of white drapery on the lower arm of the girl with the cymbals, and the little white flower on the boy's head in front. The edges on the flesh are everywhere fused and soft, the draperies being much sharper. You may notice the same thing in many pictures of the later Venetian schools. The greatest accents on the edges are rarely in the head, except it may be occasionally in the eyes. But they love to get some strongly-accented feature, such as a crisply-painted shirt coming against the soft modelling of the neck, to balance the fused edges in the flesh. In the head of Philip IV in our National Gallery the only place where Velazquez has allowed himself anything like a sharp edge is in the high lights on the chain hanging round the neck. The softer edges of the principal features in these compositions lend a largeness and mystery to these parts, and to restore the balance, sharpnesses are introduced in non-essential accessories. In the figure with the white tunic from Velazquez's "Surrender of Breda," here reproduced, note the wonderful variety on the edges of the white masses of the coat and the horse's nose, and also that the sharpest accents are reserved for such non-essentials as the bows on the tunic and the loose hair on the horse's forehead. Velazquez's edges are wonderful, and cannot be too carefully studied. He worked largely in flat tones or planes; but this richness and variety of his edges keeps his work from looking flat and dull, like that of some of his followers. I am sorry to say this variety does not come out so well in the reproduction on page 194 [Transcribers Note: Plate XLIV] as I could have wished, the half-tone process having a tendency to sharpen edges rather monotonously. This quality is everywhere to be found in nature. If you regard any scene pictorially, looking at it as a whole and not letting your eye focus on individual objects wandering from one to another while being but dimly conscious of the whole, but regarding it as a beautiful ensemble; you will find that the boundaries of the masses are not hard continuous edges but play continually along their course, here melting imperceptibly into the surrounding mass, and there accentuated more sharply. Even a long continuous line, like the horizon at sea, has some amount of this play, which you should always be on the look out for. But when the parts only of nature are regarded and each is separately focussed, hard edges will be found to exist almost everywhere, unless there is a positive mist enveloping the objects. And this is the usual way of looking at things. But a picture that is a catalogue of many little parts separately focussed will not hang together as one visual impression. [Illustration: Plate XLIV. PART OF THE SURRENDER OF BREDA. BY VELAZQUEZ Note the varied quantity of the edge in white mass of tunic. (The reproduction does not unfortunately show this as well as the original.) _Photo Anderson_] In naturalistic work the necessity for painting to one focal impression is as great as the necessity of painting in true perspective. What perspective has done for drawing, the impressionist system of painting to one all-embracing focus has done for tone. Before perspective was introduced, each individual object in a picture was drawn with a separate centre of vision fixed on each object in turn. What perspective did was to insist that all objects in a picture should be drawn in relation to one fixed centre of vision. And whereas formerly each object was painted to a hard focus, whether it was in the foreground or the distance, impressionism teaches that you cannot have the focus in a picture at the same time on the foreground and the distance. Of course there are many manners of painting with more primitive conventions in which the consideration of focus does not enter. But in all painting that aims at reproducing the impressions directly produced in us by natural appearances, this question of focus and its influence on the quality of your edges is of great importance. Something should be said about the serrated edges of masses, like those of trees seen against the sky. These are very difficult to treat, and almost every landscape painter has a different formula. The hard, fussy, cut-out, photographic appearance of trees misses all their beauty and sublimity. There are three principal types of treatment that may serve as examples. In the first place there are the trees of the early Italian painters, three examples of which are illustrated on page 197 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XXIII]. A thin tree is always selected, and a rhythmic pattern of leaves against the sky painted. This treatment of a dark pattern on a light ground is very useful as a contrast to the softer tones of flesh. But the treatment is more often applied nowadays to a spray of foliage in the foreground, the pattern of which gives a very rich effect. The poplar trees in Millais' "Vale of Rest" are painted in much the same manner as that employed by the Italians, and are exceptional among modern tree paintings, the trees being treated as a pattern of leaves against the sky. Millais has also got a raised quality of paint in his darks very similar to that of Bellini and many early painters. Giorgione added another tree to landscape art: the rich, full, solidly-massed forms that occur in his "Concert Champêtre" of the Louvre, reproduced on page 151 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXIII]. In this picture you may see both types of treatment. There are the patterns of leaves variety on the left and the solidly-massed treatment on the right. [Illustration: Diagram XXIII. EXAMPLES OF EARLY ITALIAN TREATMENT OF TREES A. From pictures in Oratorio di S. Ansano. "Il trionfo dell' Amore," attributed to Botticelli. B. From "L'Annunziazione," by Botticelli, Uffizi, Florence. C. From "La Vergine," by Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia, Venice.] Corot in his later work developed a treatment that has been largely followed since. Looking at trees with a very wide focus, he ignored individual leaves, and resolved them into masses of tone, here lost and here found more sharply against the sky. The subordinate masses of foliage within these main boundaries are treated in the same way, resolved into masses of infinitely varying edges. This play, this lost-and-foundness at his edges is one of the great distinguishing charms of Corot's trees. When they have been painted from this mass point of view, a suggestion of a few leaves here and a bough there may be indicated, coming sharply against the sky, but you will find this basis of tone music, this crescendo and diminuendo throughout all his later work (see illustration, page 215 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XXVI]). These are three of the more extreme types of trees to be met with in art, but the variations on these types are very numerous. Whatever treatment you adopt, the tree must be considered as a whole, and some rhythmic form related to this large impression selected. And this applies to all forms with serrated edges: some large order must be found to which the fussiness of the edges must conform. The subject of edges generally is a very important one, and one much more worried over by a master than by the average student. It is interesting to note how all the great painters have begun with a hard manner, with edges of little variety, from which they have gradually developed a looser manner, learning to master the difficulties of design that hard contours insist on your facing, and only when this is thoroughly mastered letting themselves develop freely this play on the edges, this looser handling. For under the freest painting, if it be good, there will be found a bed-rock structure of well-constructed masses and lines. They may never be insisted on, but their steadying influence will always be felt. So err in your student work on the side of hardness rather than looseness, if you would discipline yourself to design your work well. Occasionally only let yourself go at a looser handling. [Sidenote: Variety of Gradiation.] Variety of gradation will naturally be governed largely by the form and light and shade of the objects in your composition. But while studying the gradations of tone that express form and give the modelling, you should never neglect to keep the mind fixed upon the relation the part you are painting bears to the whole picture. And nothing should be done that is out of harmony with this large conception. It is one of the most difficult things to decide the amount of variety and emphasis allowable for the smaller parts of a picture, so as to bring all in harmony with that oneness of impression that should dominate the whole; how much of your scale of values it is permissible to use for the modelling of each individual part. In the best work the greatest economy is exercised in this respect, so that as much power may be kept in reserve as possible. You have only the one scale from black to white to work with, only one octave within the limits of which to compose your tone symphonies. There are no higher and lower octaves as in music to extend your effect. So be very sparing with your tone values when modelling the different parts. XIV UNITY OF MASS What has been said about unity of line applies obviously to the outlines bounding the masses, so that we need not say anything further on that subject. The particular quality of which something should be said, is the unity that is given to a picture by means of a well-arranged and rhythmically considered scheme of tone values. The modifications in the relative tone values of objects seen under different aspects of light and atmosphere are infinite and ever varying; and this is quite a special study in itself. Nature is the great teacher here, her tone arrangements always possessing unity. How kind to the eye is her attempt to cover the ugliness of our great towns in an envelope of atmosphere, giving the most wonderful tone symphonies; thus using man's desecration of her air by smoke to cover up his other desecration of her country-side, a manufacturing town. This study of values is a distinguishing feature of modern art. But schemes taken from nature are not the only harmonious ones. The older masters were content with one or two well-tried arrangements of tone in their pictures, which were often not at all true to natural appearances but nevertheless harmonious. The chief instance of this is the low-toned sky. The painting of flesh higher in tone than the sky was almost universal at many periods of art, and in portraits is still often seen. Yet it is only in strong sunlight that this is ever so in nature, as you can easily see by holding your hand up against a sky background. The possible exception to this rule is a dark storm-cloud, in which case your hand would have to be strongly lit by some bright light in another part of the sky to appear light against it. This high tone of the sky is a considerable difficulty when one wishes the interest centred on the figures. The eye instinctively goes to the light masses in a picture, and if these masses are sky, the figures lose some importance. The fashion of lowering its tone has much to be said for it on the score of the added interest it gives to the figures. But it is apt to bring a heavy stuffy look into the atmosphere, and is only really admissible in frankly conventional treatment, in which one has not been led to expect implicit truth to natural effect. If truth to natural appearances is carried far in the figures, the same truth will be expected in the background; but if only certain truths are selected in the figures, and the treatment does not approach the naturalistic, much more liberty can be taken with the background without loss of verisimilitude. But there is a unity about nature's tone arrangements that it is very difficult to improve upon; and it is usually advisable, if you can, to base the scheme of tone in your picture on a good study of values from nature. Such effects as twilight, moonlight, or even sunlight were seldom attempted by the older painters, at any rate in their figure subjects. All the lovely tone arrangements that nature presents in these more unusual aspects are a new study, and offer unlimited new material to the artist. Many artists are content to use this simply for itself, the beauty of a rare tone effect being sufficient with the simplest accessories to make a picture. But in figure composition, what new and wonderful things can be imagined in which some rare aspect of nature's tone-music is combined with a fine figure design. These values are not easily perceived with accuracy, although their influence may be felt by many. A true eye for the accurate perception of subtle tone arrangements is a thing you should study very diligently to acquire. How then is this to be done? It is very difficult, if not impossible, to teach anybody to see. Little more can be said than has already been written about this subject in the chapter on variety in mass. Every mass has to be considered in relation to an imagined tone scale, taking black for your darkest and white for your highest light as we have seen. A black glass, by reducing the light, enables you to observe these relationships more accurately; the dazzling quality of strong light making it difficult to judge them. But this should only be used to correct one's eye, and the comparison should be made between nature seen in the glass and your work seen also in the glass. To look in a black glass and then compare what you saw with your work looked at direct is not a fair comparison, and will result in low-toned work with little brilliancy. Now, to represent this scale of tones in painting we have white paint as our highest and black paint as our lowest notes. It is never advisable to play either of these extremes, although you may go very near to them. That is to say, there should never be pure white or pure black masses in a picture. There is a kind of screaminess set up when one goes the whole gamut of tone, that gives a look of unrestraint and weakness; somewhat like the feeling experienced when a vocalist sings his or her very highest or very lowest note. In a good singer one always feels he could have gone still higher or still lower, as the case may be, and this gives an added power to the impression of his singing. And in art, likewise, it is always advisable to keep something of this reserve power. Also, the highest lights in nature are never without colour, and this will lower the tone; neither are the deepest darks colourless, and this will raise their tone. But perhaps this is dogmatising, and it may be that beautiful work is to be done with all the extremes you can "clap on," though I think it very unlikely. In all the quieter aspects of lighting this range from black to white paint is sufficient. But where strong, brilliantly lit effects are wanted, something has to be sacrificed, if this look of brilliancy is to be made telling. In order to increase the relationship between some of the tones others must be sacrificed. There are two ways of doing this. The first, which was the method earliest adopted, is to begin from the light end of the scale, and, taking something very near pure white as your highest light, to get the relationships between this and the next most brilliant tone, and to proceed thus, tone by tone, from the lightest to the darkest. But working in this way you will find that you arrive at the greatest dark you can make in paint before you have completed the scale of relationships as in nature, if the subject happens to be brilliantly lit. Another method is to put down the highest light and the darkest dark, and then work your scale of tone relatively between them. But it will be found that working in this way, unless the subject in nature is very quietly lit, you will not get anything like the forceful impression of tone that nature gives. The third way, and this is the more modern, is to begin from the dark end of the scale, getting the true relationship felt between the greatest dark and the next darkest tone to it, and so on, proceeding towards the light. By this method you will arrive at your highest light in paint before the highest light in nature has been reached. All variety of tone at the light end of the scale will have to be modified in this case, instead of at the dark end as in the other case. In the painting of sunlight the latter method is much the more effective, a look of great brilliancy and light being produced, whereas in the earlier method, the scale being commenced from the light end, so much of the picture was dark that the impression of light and air was lost and a dark gloomy land took its place, a gloom accentuated rather than dispelled by the streaks of lurid light where the sun struck. Rembrandt is an example of beginning the tone relationships from the light side of the scale, and a large part of his canvas is in consequence always dark. Bastien Lepage is an example of the second method, that of fixing upon two extremes and working-relatively between them. And it will be noticed that he confined himself chiefly to quiet grey day effects of lighting, the rendering of which was well within the range of his palette. The method of beginning from the dark side, getting the true relations of tones on this side of the scale, and letting the lights take care of themselves, was perhaps first used by Turner. But it is largely used now whenever a strong impression of light is desired. The light masses instead of the dark masses dominate the pictures, which have great brilliancy. These tone values are only to be perceived in their true relationship by the eye contemplating a wide field of vision. With the ordinary habit of looking only at individual parts of nature, the general impression being but dimly felt, they are not observed. The artist has to acquire the habit of generalising his visual attention over a wide field if he would perceive the true relation of the parts to this scale of values. Half closing the eyes, which is the usual method of doing this, destroys the perception of a great deal of colour. Another method of throwing the eyes out of focus and enabling one to judge of large relationships, is to dilate them widely. This rather increases than diminishes the colour, but is not so safe a method of judging subtle tone relationships. It is easier in approaching this study out of doors to begin with quiet effects of light. Some of those soft grey days in this country are very beautiful in tone, and change so little that careful studies can be made. And with indoor work, place your subject rather away from the direct light and avoid much light and shade; let the light come from behind you. If very strong light effects, such as sunlight, or a dark interior lit by one brilliant window, are attempted, the values will be found to be much simpler and more harsh, often resolving themselves into two masses, a brilliant light contrasted with a dark shadow. This tone arrangement of strong light in contrast with dark shadow was a favourite formula with many schools of the past, since Leonardo da Vinci first used it. Great breadth and splendour is given by it to design, and it is one of the most impressive of tone arrangements. Leonardo da Vinci's "Our Lady of the Rocks," in the National Gallery, is an early example of this treatment. And Correggio's "Venus, Mercury, and Cupid," here reproduced, is another particularly fine example. Reynolds and many of the eighteenth-century men used this scheme in their work almost entirely. This strong light and shade, by eliminating to a large extent the half tones, helps to preserve in highly complete work a simplicity and directness of statement that is very powerful. For certain impressions it probably will never be bettered, but it is a very well-worn convention. Manet among the moderns has given new life to this formula, although he did not derive his inspiration directly from Correggio but through the Spanish school. By working in a strong, rather glaring, direct light, he eliminated still further the half tones, and got rid to a great extent of light and shade. Coming at a time when the realistic and plain air movements were destroying simple directness, his work was of great value, bringing back, as it did with its insistence on large, simple masses, a sense of frank design. His influence has been very great in recent years, as artists have felt that it offered a new formula for design and colour. Light and shade and half tone are the great enemies of colour, sullying, as they do, its purity; and to some extent to design also, destroying, as they do, the flatness of the picture. But with the strong direct light, the masses are cut out as simply as possible, and their colour is little sullied by light and shade. The picture of Manet's reproduced is a typical example of his manner. The aggressive shape of the pattern made by the light mass against the dark background is typical of his revolutionary attitude towards all accepted canons of beauty. But even here it is interesting to note that many principles of composition are conformed to. The design is united to its boundaries by the horizontal line of the couch and the vertical line of the screen at the back, while the whole swing hangs on the diagonal from top left-hand corner to right; lower corner, to which the strongly marked edge of the bed-clothes and pillow at the bottom of the picture is parallel. [Illustration: Plate XLV. CORREGGIO. VENUS. MERCURY, AND CUPID (NATIONAL GALLERY) A fine example of one of the most effective tone arrangements; a brilliantly-lit, richly-modelled light mass on a dark background. _Photo Hanfstaengl_] Large flat tones give a power and simplicity to a design, and a largeness and breadth of expression that are very valuable, besides showing up every little variety in the values used for your modelling; and thus enabling you to model with the least expenditure of tones. Whatever richness of variation you may ultimately desire to add to your values, see to it that in planning your picture you get a good basic structure of simply designed, and as far as possible flat, tones. In speaking of variety in mass we saw how the #nearer these tones are in the scale of values, the more reserved and quiet the impression created#, and the #further apart or greater the contrast, the more dramatic and intense the effect#. And the sentiment of tone in a picture, like the sentiment of line and colour, should be in harmony with the nature of your subject. Generally speaking #more variety of tone and shape in the masses of your composition is permissible when a smaller range of values is used than when your subject demands strong contrasts#. When strong contrasts of tone or what are called black and white effects are desired, the masses must be very simply designed. Were this not so, and were the composition patterned all over with smaller masses in strong contrast, the breadth and unity of the effect would be lost. While when the difference of relative values between one tone and another is slight, the oneness of effect is not so much interfered with by there being a large number of them. Effects of strong contrasts are therefore far the most difficult to manage, as it is not easy to reduce a composition of any complexity to a simple expressive pattern of large masses. This principle applies also in the matter of colour. Greater contrasts and variety of colour may be indulged in where the middle range only of tones is used, and where there is little tone contrast, than where there is great contrast. In other words, you cannot with much hope of success have strong contrasts of colour and strong contrasts of tone in the same picture: it is too violent. If you have strong contrasts of colour, the contrasts of tone between them must be small. The Japanese and Chinese often make the most successful use of violent contrasts of colour by being careful that they shall be of the same tone value. And again, where you have strong contrasts of tone, such as Rembrandt was fond of, you cannot successfully have strong contrasts of colour as well. Reynolds, who was fond both of colour and strong tone contrast, had to compromise, as he tells us in his lectures, by making the shadows all the same brown colour, to keep a harmony in his work. [Illustration: Plate XLVI. OLYMPIA. MANET (Louvre) A further development of the composition formula illustrated by Correggio's "Venus". Added force is given by lighting with low direct light elimination half-tones. _Photo Neurdein_] There is some analogy between straight lines and flat tones, and curved lines and gradated tones. And a great deal that was said about the rhythmic significance of these lines will apply equally well here. What was said about long vertical and horizontal lines conveying a look of repose and touching the serious emotional notes, can be said of large flat tones. The feeling of infinity suggested by a wide blue sky without a cloud, seen above a wide bare plain, is an obvious instance of this. And for the same harmonic cause, a calm evening has so peaceful and infinite an expression. The waning light darkens the land and increases the contrast between it and the sky, with the result that all the landscape towards the west is reduced to practically one dark tone, cutting sharply against the wide light of the sky. And the graceful charm of curved lines swinging in harmonious rhythm through a composition has its analogy in gradated tones. Watteau and Gainsborough, those masters of charm, knew this, and in their most alluring compositions the tone-music is founded on a principle of tone-gradations, swinging and interlacing with each other in harmonious rhythm throughout the composition. Large, flat tones, with their more thoughtful associations are out of place here, and are seldom if ever used. In their work we see a world where the saddening influences of profound thought and its expression are far away. No deeper notes are allowed to mar the gaiety of this holiday world. Watteau created a dream country of his own, in which a tired humanity has delighted ever since, in which all serious thoughts are far away and the mind takes refreshment in the contemplation of delightful things. And a great deal of this charm is due to the pretty play from a crescendo to a diminuendo in the tone values on which his compositions are based--so far removed from the simple structure of flat masses to which more primitive and austere art owes its power. [Illustration: Diagram XXIV. SHOWING THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH THE MASS OR TONE RHYTHM OF THE COMPOSITION REPRODUCED ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE IS ARRANGED] [Illustration: Plate XLVII. L'EMBARQUEMENT POUR CYTHÈRE. WATTEAU (LOUVRE) A typical example of composition founded on gradated tones. (See analysis on opposite page.) _Photo Hanfstaengl_] But Watteau's great accomplishment was in doing this without degenerating into feeble prettiness, and this he did by an insistence on character in his figures, particularly his men. His draperies also are always beautifully drawn and full of variety, never feeble and characterless. The landscape backgrounds are much more lacking in this respect, nothing ever happened there, no storms have ever bent his graceful tree-trunks, and the incessant gradations might easily become wearisome. But possibly the charm in which we delight would be lost, did the landscape possess more character. At any rate there is enough in the figures to prevent any sickly prettiness, although I think if you removed the figures the landscape would not be tolerable. But the followers of Watteau seized upon the prettiness and gradually got out of touch with the character, and if you compare Boucher's heads, particularly his men's heads, with Watteau's you may see how much has been lost. The following are three examples of this gradated tone composition (see pages 210 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XXIV], 213 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XXV], 215 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XXVI]): Watteau: "Embarquement pour L'Île de Cythère." This is a typical Watteau composition, founded on a rhythmic play of gradated tones and gradated edges. Flat tones and hard edges are avoided. Beginning at the centre of the top with a strongly accented note of contrast, the dark tone of the mass of trees gradates into the ground and on past the lower right-hand corner across the front of the picture, until, when nearing the lower left-hand corner, it reverses the process and from dark to light begins gradating light to dark, ending somewhat sharply against the sky in the rock form to the left. The rich play of tone that is introduced in the trees and ground, &c., blinds one at first to the perception of this larger tone motive, but without it the rich variety would not hold together. Roughly speaking the whole of this dark frame of tones from the accented point of the trees at the top to the mass of the rock on the left, may be said to gradate away into the distance; cut into by the wedge-shaped middle tone of the hills leading to the horizon. Breaking across this is a graceful line of figures, beginning on the left where the mass of rock is broken by the little flight of cupids, and continuing across the picture until it is brought up sharply by the light figure under the trees on the right. Note the pretty clatter of spots this line of figures brings across the picture, introducing light spots into the darker masses, ending up with the strongly accented light spot of the figure on the right; and dark spots into the lighter masses, ending up with the figures of the cupids dark against the sky. Steadying influences in all this flux of tone are introduced by the vertical accent of the tree-stem and statue in the dark mass on the right, by the horizontal line of the distance on the left, the outline of the ground in the front, and the straight staffs held by some of the figures. In the charcoal scribble illustrating this composition I have tried carefully to avoid any drawing in the figures or trees to show how the tone-music depends not so much on truth to natural appearances as on the abstract arrangement of tone values and their rhythmic play. [Illustration: Diagram XXV. SHOWING THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH THE MASS OR TONE RHYTHM IS ARRANGED IN TURNER'S PICTURE IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF BRITISH ART, "ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS"] Of course nature contains every conceivable variety of tone-music, but it is not to be found by unintelligent copying except in rare accidents. Emerson says, "Although you search the whole world for the beautiful you'll not find it unless you take it with you," and this is true to a greater extent of rhythmic tone arrangements. Turner: "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus." Turner was very fond of these gradated tone compositions, and carried them to a lyrical height to which they had never before attained. His "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus," in the National Gallery of British Art, is a splendid example of his use of this principle. A great unity of expression is given by bringing the greatest dark and light together in sharp contrast, as is done in this picture by the dark rocks and ships' prows coming against the rising sun. From this point the dark and light masses gradate in different directions until they merge above the ships' sails. These sails cut sharply into the dark mass as the rocks and ship on the extreme right cut sharply into the light mass. Note also the edges where they are accented and come sharply against the neighbouring mass, and where they are lost, and the pleasing quality this play of edges gives. Stability is given by the line of the horizon and waves in front, and the masts of the ships, the oars, and, in the original picture, a feeling of radiating lines from the rising sun. Without these steadying influences these compositions of gradated masses would be sickly and weak. Corot: 2470 Collection Chauchard, Louvre. This is a typical example of Corot's tone scheme, and little need be added to the description already given. Infinite play is got with the simplest means. A dark silhouetted mass is seen against a light sky, the perfect balance of the shapes and the infinite play of lost-and-foundness in the edges giving to this simple structure a richness and beauty effect that is very satisfying. Note how Corot, like Turner, brings his greatest light and dark together in sharp contrast where the rock on the right cuts the sky. [Illustration: Diagram XXVI. TYPICAL EXAMPLE OF COROT'S SYSTEM OF MASS RHYTHM, AFTER THE PICTURE IN THE LOUVRE, PARIS] Stability is given by the vertical feeling in the central group of trees and the suggestion of horizontal distance behind the figure. It is not only in the larger disposition of the masses in a composition that this principle of gradated masses and lost and found edges can be used. Wherever grace and charm are your motive they should be looked for in the working out of the smallest details. * * * * * In concluding this chapter I must again insist that knowledge of these matters will not make you compose a good picture. A composition may be perfect as far as any rules or principles of composition go, and yet be of no account whatever. The life-giving quality in art always defies analysis and refuses to be tabulated in any formula. This vital quality in drawing and composition must come from the individual artist himself, and nobody can help him much here. He must ever be on the look out for those visions his imagination stirs within him, and endeavour, however haltingly at first, to give them some sincere expression. Try always when your mind is filled with some pictorial idea to get something put down, a mere fumbled expression possibly, but it may contain the germ. Later on the same idea may occur to you again, only it will be less vague this time, and a process of development will have taken place. It may be years before it takes sufficiently definite shape to justify a picture; the process of germination in the mind is a slow one. But try and acquire the habit of making some record of what pictorial ideas pass in the mind, and don't wait until you can draw and paint well to begin. Qualities of drawing and painting don't matter a bit here, it is the sensation, the feeling for the picture, that is everything. If knowledge of the rhythmic properties of lines and masses will not enable you to compose a fine picture, you may well ask what is their use? There may be those to whom they are of no use. Their artistic instincts are sufficiently strong to need no direction. But such natures are rare, and it is doubtful if they ever go far, while many a painter might be saved a lot of worry over something in his picture that "won't come" did he but know more of the principle of pictorial design his work is transgressing. I feel certain that the old painters, like the Venetians, were far more systematic and had far more hard and fast principles of design than ourselves. They knew the science of their craft so well that they did not so often have to call upon their artistic instinct to get them out of difficulties. Their artistic instinct was free to attend to higher things, their knowledge of the science of picture-making keeping them from many petty mistakes that a modern artist falls into. The desire of so many artists in these days to cut loose from tradition and start all over again puts a very severe strain upon their intuitive faculties, and keeps them occupied correcting things that more knowledge of some of the fundamental principles that don't really alter and that are the same in all schools would have saved them. Knowledge in art is like a railway built behind the pioneers who have gone before; it offers a point of departure for those who come after, further on into the unknown country of nature's secrets--a help not lightly to be discarded. But all artifice in art must be concealed, #a picture obviously composed is badly composed#. In a good composition it is as though the parts had been carefully placed in rhythmic relation and then the picture jarred a little, so that everything is slightly shifted out of place, thus introducing our "dither" or play of life between the parts. Of course no mechanical jogging will introduce the vital quality referred to, which must come from the vitality of the artist's intuition; although I have heard of photographers jogging the camera in an endeavour to introduce some artistic "play" in its mechanical renderings. But one must say something to show how in all good composition the mechanical principles at the basis of the matter are subordinate to a vital principle on which the life in the work depends. This concealment of all artifice, this artlessness and spontaneity of appearance, is one of the greatest qualities in a composition, any analysis of which is futile. It is what occasionally gives to the work of the unlettered genius so great a charm. But the artist in whom the true spark has not been quenched by worldly success or other enervating influence, keeps the secret of this freshness right on, the culture of his student days being used only to give it splendour of expression, but never to stifle or suppress its native charm. XV BALANCE There seems to be a strife between opposing forces at the basis of all things, a strife in which a perfect balance is never attained, or life would cease. The worlds are kept on their courses by such opposing forces, the perfect equilibrium never being found, and so the vitalising movement is kept up. States are held together on the same principle, no State seeming able to preserve a balance for long; new forces arise, the balance is upset, and the State totters until a new equilibrium has been found. It would seem, however, to be the aim of life to strive after balance, any violent deviation from which is accompanied by calamity. And in art we have the same play of opposing factors, straight lines and curves, light and dark, warm and cold colour oppose each other. Were the balance between them perfect, the result would be dull and dead. But if the balance is very much out, the eye is disturbed and the effect too disquieting. It will naturally be in pictures that aim at repose that this balance will be most perfect. In more exciting subjects less will be necessary, but some amount should exist in every picture, no matter how turbulent its motive; as in good tragedy the horror of the situation is never allowed to overbalance the beauty of the treatment. [Sidenote: Between Straight Lines and Curves] Let us consider in the first place the balance between straight lines and curves. The richer and fuller the curves, the more severe should be the straight lines that balance them, if perfect repose is desired. But if the subject demands excess of movement and life, of course there will be less necessity for the balancing influence of straight lines. And on the other hand, if the subject demands an excess of repose and contemplation, the bias will be on the side of straight lines. But a picture composed entirely of rich, rolling curves is too disquieting a thing to contemplate, and would become very irritating. Of the two extremes, one composed entirely of straight lines would be preferable to one with no squareness to relieve the richness of the curves. For straight lines are significant of the deeper and more permanent things of life, of the powers that govern and restrain, and of infinity; while the rich curves (that is, curves the farthest removed from the straight line) seem to be expressive of uncontrolled energy and the more exuberant joys of life. Vice may be excess in any direction, but asceticism has generally been accepted as a nobler vice than voluptuousness. The rococo art of the eighteenth century is an instance of the excessive use of curved forms, and, like all excesses in the joys of life, it is vicious and is the favourite style of decoration in vulgar places of entertainment. The excessive use of straight lines and square forms may be seen in some ancient Egyptian architecture, but this severity was originally, no doubt, softened by the use of colour, and in any case it is nobler and finer than the vicious cleverness of rococo art. We have seen how the Greeks balanced the straight lines of their architectural forms with the rich lines of the sculpture which they used so lavishly on their temples. But the balance was always kept on the side of the square forms and never on the side of undue roundness. And it is on this side that the balance would seem to be in the finest art. Even the finest curves are those that approach the straight line rather than the circle, that err on the side of flatnesses rather than roundnesses. [Sidenote: Between Flat and Gradated Tones] What has been said about the balance of straight lines and curves applies equally well to tones, if for straight lines you substitute flat tones, and for curved lines gradated tones. The deeper, more permanent things find expression in the wider, flatter tones, while an excess of gradations makes for prettiness, if not for the gross roundnesses of vicious modelling. Often when a picture is hopelessly out of gear and "mucked up," as they say in the studio, it can be got on the right road again by reducing it to a basis of flat tones, going over it and painting out the gradations, getting it back to a simpler equation from which the right road to completion can be more readily seen. Overmuch concern with the gradations of the smaller modelling is a very common reason of pictures and drawings getting out of gear. The less expenditure of tone values you can express your modelling with, the better, as a general rule. The balance in the finest work is usually on the side of flat tones rather than on the side of gradated tones. Work that errs on the side of gradations, like that of Greuze, however popular its appeal, is much poorer stuff than work that errs on the side of flatness in tone, like Giotto and the Italian primitives, or Puvis de Chavannes among the moderns. [Sidenote: Between Light and Dark Tones.] There is a balance of tone set up also between light and dark, between black and white in the scale of tone. Pictures that do not go far in the direction of light, starting from a middle tone, should not go far in the direction of dark either. In this respect note the pictures of Whistler, a great master in matters of tone; his lights seldom approach anywhere near white, and, on the other hand, his darks never approach black in tone. When the highest lights are low in tone, the darkest darks should be high in tone. Painters like Rembrandt, whose pictures when fresh must have approached very near white in the high lights, also approach black in the darks, and nearer our own time, Frank Holl forced the whites of his pictures very high and correspondingly the darks were very heavy. And when this balance is kept there is a rightness about it that is instinctively felt. We do not mean that the #amount# of light tones in a picture should be balanced by the #amount# of dark tones, but that there should be some balance between the extremes of light and dark used in the tone scheme of a picture. The old rule was, I believe, that a picture should be two-thirds light and one-third dark. But I do not think there is any rule to be observed here: there are too many exceptions, and no mention is made of half tones. Like all so-called laws in art, this rule is capable of many apparent exceptions. There is the white picture in which all the tones are high. But in some of the most successful of these you will generally find spots of intensely dark pigment. Turner was fond of these light pictures in his later manner, but he usually put in some dark spot, such as the black gondolas in some of his Venetian pictures, that illustrate the law of balance we are speaking of, and are usually put in excessively dark in proportion as the rest of the picture is excessively light. The successful one-tone pictures are generally painted in the middle tones, and thus do not in any way contradict our principle of balance. [Sidenote: Between Warm and Cold Colours.] One is tempted at this point to wander a little into the province of colour, where the principle of balance of which we are speaking is much felt, the scale here being between warm and cold colours. If you divide the solar spectrum roughly into half, you will have the reds, oranges, and yellows on one side, and the purples, blues, and greens on the other, the former being roughly the warm and the latter the cold colours. The clever manipulation of the opposition between these warm and cold colours is one of the chief means used in giving vitality to colouring. But the point to notice here is that the further your colouring goes in the direction of warmth, the further it will be necessary to go in the opposite direction, to right the balance. That is how it comes about that painters like Titian, who loved a warm, glowing, golden colouring, so often had to put a mass of the coldest blue in their pictures. Gainsborough's "Blue Boy," although done in defiance of Reynolds' principle, is no contradiction of our rule, for although the boy has a blue dress all the rest of the picture is warm brown and so the balance is kept. It is the failure to observe this balance that makes so many of the red-coated huntsmen and soldiers' portraits in our exhibitions so objectionable. They are too often painted on a dark, hot, burnt sienna and black background, with nothing but warm colours in the flesh, &c., with the result that the screaming heat is intolerable. With a hot mass of red like a huntsman's coat in your picture, the coolest colour should be looked for everywhere else. Seen in a November landscape, how well a huntsman's coat looks, but then, how cold and grey is the colouring of the landscape. The right thing to do is to support your red with as many cool and neutral tones as possible and avoid hot shadows. With so strong a red, blue might be too much of a contrast, unless your canvas was large enough to admit of its being introduced at some distance from the red. Most painters, of course, are content to keep to middle courses, never going very far in the warm or cold directions. And, undoubtedly, much more freedom of action is possible here, although the results may not be so powerful. But when beauty and refinement of sentiment rather than force are desired, the middle range of colouring (that is to say, all colours partly neutralised by admixture with their opposites) is much safer. [Sidenote: Between Interest and Mass.] There is another form of balance that must be although it is connected more with the subject matter of art, as it concerns the mental significance of objects rather than rhythmic qualities possessed by lines and masses; I refer to the balance there is between interest and mass. The all-absorbing interest of the human figure makes it often when quite minute in scale balance the weight and interest of a great mass. Diagram XXVII is a rough instance of what is meant. Without the little figure the composition would be out of balance. But the weight of interest centred upon that lonely little person is enough to right the balance occasioned by the great mass of trees on the left. Figures are largely used by landscape painters in this way, and are of great use in restoring balance in a picture. [Illustration: Diagram XXVII. ILLUSTRATING HOW INTEREST MAY BALANCE MASS] [Sidenote: Between Variety and Unity.] And lastly, there must be a balance struck between variety and unity. A great deal has already been said about this, and it will only be necessary to recapitulate here that to variety is due all the expression or the picturesque, of the joyous energy of life, and all that makes the world such a delightful place, but that to unity belongs the relating of this variety to the underlying bed-rock principles that support it in nature and in all good art. It will depend on the nature of the artist and on the nature of his theme how far this underlying unity will dominate the expression in his work; and how far it will be overlaid and hidden behind a rich garment of variety. But both ideas must be considered in his work. If the unity of his conception is allowed to exclude variety entirely, it will result in a dead abstraction, and if the variety is to be allowed none of the restraining influences of unity, it will develop into a riotous extravagance. XVI RHYTHM: PROPORTION Rules and canons of proportion designed to reduce to a mathematical formula the things that move us in beautiful objects, have not been a great success; the beautiful will always defy such clumsy analysis. But however true it is that beauty of proportion must ever be the result of the finer senses of the artist, it is possible that canons of proportion, such as those of the human body, may be of service to the artist by offering some standard from which he can depart at the dictates of his artistic instinct. There appears to be no doubt that the ancient sculptors used some such system. And many of the renaissance painters were interested in the subject, Leonardo da Vinci having much to say about it in his book. Like all scientific knowledge in art, it fails to trap the elusive something that is the vital essence of the whole matter, but such scientific knowledge does help to bring one's work up to a high point of mechanical perfection, from which one's artistic instinct can soar with a better chance of success than if no scientific scaffolding had been used in the initial building up. Yet, however perfect your system, don't forget that the life, the "dither," will still have to be accounted for, and no science will help you here. The idea that certain mathematical proportions or relationships underlie the phenomena we call beauty is very ancient, and too abstruse to trouble us here. But undoubtedly proportion, the quantitative relation of the parts to each other and to the whole, forms a very important part in the impression works of art and objects give us, and should be a subject of the greatest consideration in planning your work. The mathematical relationship of these quantities is a subject that has always fascinated scholars, who have measured the antique statues accurately and painstakingly to find the secret of their charm. Science, by showing that different sounds and different colours are produced by waves of different lengths, and that therefore different colours and sounds can be expressed in terms of numbers, has certainly opened the door to a new consideration of this subject of beauty in relation to mathematics. And the result of such an inquiry, if it is being or has been carried on, will be of much interest. But there is something chilling to the artist in an array of dead figures, for he has a consciousness that the life of the whole matter will never be captured by such mechanical means. The question we are interested to ask here is: are there particular sentiments connected with the different relations of quantities, their proportions, as we found there were in connection with different arrangements of lines and masses? Have abstract proportions any significance in art, as we found abstract line and mass arrangements had? It is a difficult thing to be definite about, and I can only give my own feeling on the matter; but I think in some degree they have. Proportion can be considered from our two points of view of unity and variety. In so far as the proportions of any picture or object resolve themselves into a simple, easily grasped unity of relationship, a sense of repose and sublimity is produced. In so far as the variety of proportion in the different parts is assertive and prevents the eye grasping the arrangement as a simple whole, a sense of the lively restlessness of life and activity is produced. In other words, as we found in line arrangements, unity makes for sublimity, while variety makes for the expression of life. Of course the scale of the object will have something to do with this. That is to say, the most sublimely proportioned dog-kennel could never give us the impression of sublimity produced by a great temple. In pictures the scale of the work is not of so great importance, a painting or drawing having the power of giving the impression of great size on a small scale. The proportion that is most easily grasped is the half--two equal parts. This is the most devoid of variety, and therefore of life, and is only used when an effect of great repose and aloofness from life is wanted; and even then, never without some variety in the minor parts to give vitality. The third and the quarter, and in fact any equal proportions, are others that are easily grasped and partake in a lesser degree of the same qualities as the half. So that equality of proportion should be avoided except on those rare occasions when effects remote from nature and life are desired. Nature seems to abhor equalities, never making two things alike or the same proportion if she can help it. All systems founded on equalities, as are so many modern systems of social reform, are man's work, the products of a machine-made age. For this is the difference between nature and the machine: nature never produces two things alike, the machine never produces two things different. Man could solve the social problem to-morrow if you could produce him equal units. But if all men were alike and equal, where would be the life and fun of existence? it would depart with the variety. And in proportion, as in life, variety is the secret of vitality, only to be suppressed where a static effect is wanted. In architecture equality of proportion is more often met with, as the static qualities of repose are of more importance here than in painting. One meets it on all fine buildings in such things as rows of columns and windows of equal size and distances apart, or the continual repetition of the same forms in mouldings, &c. But even here, in the best work, some variety is allowed to keep the effect from being quite dead, the columns on the outside of a Greek pediment being nearer together and leaning slightly inwards, and the repeated forms of windows, columns, and mouldings being infinitely varied in themselves. But although you often find repetitions of the same forms equidistant in architecture, it is seldom that equality of proportion is observable in the main distribution of the large masses. Let us take our simple type of composition, and in Diagram XXVIII, A, put the horizon across the centre and an upright post cutting it in the middle of the picture. And let us introduce two spots that may indicate the position of birds in the upper spaces on either side of this. Here we have a maximum of equality and the deadest and most static of results. To see these diagrams properly it is necessary to cover over with some pieces of notepaper all but the one being considered, as they affect each other when seen together, and the quality of their proportion is not so readily observed. [Illustration: Plate XLVIII. THE ANSIDEI MADONNA. BY RAPHAEL (NATIONAL GALLERY) A typical example of static balance in composition. _Photo Hanfstaengl_] In many pictures of the Madonna, when a hush and reverence are desired rather than exuberant life, the figure is put in the centre of the canvas, equality of proportion existing between the spaces on either side of her. But having got the repose this centralisation gives, everything is done to conceal this equality, and variety in the contours on either side, and in any figures there may be, is carefully sought. Raphael's "Ansidei Madonna," in the National Gallery, is an instance of this (p. 230). You have first the centralisation of the figure of the Madonna with the throne on which she sits, exactly in the middle of the picture. Not only is the throne in the centre of the picture, but its width is exactly that of the spaces on either side of it, giving us three equal proportions across the picture. Then you have the circular lines of the arches behind, curves possessed of the least possible amount of variety and therefore the calmest and most reposeful; while the horizontal lines of the steps and the vertical lines of the throne and architecture, and also the rows of hanging beads give further emphasis to this infinity of calm. But when we come to the figures this symmetry has been varied everywhere. All the heads swing towards the right, while the lines of the draperies swing freely in many directions. The swing of the heads towards the right is balanced and the eye brought back to equilibrium by the strongly-insisted-upon staff of St. Nicholas on the right. The staff of St. John necessary to balance this line somewhat, is very slightly insisted on, being represented transparent as if made of glass, so as not to increase the swing to the right occasioned by the heads. It is interesting to note the fruit introduced at the last moment in the right-hand lower corner, dragged in, as it were, to restore the balance occasioned by the figure of the Christ being on the left. In the writer's humble opinion the extremely obvious artifice with which the lines have been balanced, and the severity of the convention of this composition generally, are out of harmony with the amount of naturalistic detail and particularly of solidity allowed in the treatment of the figures and accessories. The small amount of truth to visual nature in the work of earlier men went better with the formality of such compositions. With so little of the variety of life in their treatment of natural appearances, one was not led to demand so much of the variety of life in the arrangement. It is the simplicity and remoteness from the full effect of natural appearances in the work of the early Italian schools that made their painting such a ready medium for the expression of religious subjects. This atmosphere of other-worldliness where the music of line and colour was uninterrupted by any aggressive look of real things is a better convention for the expression of such ideas and emotions. [Illustration: Diagram XXVIII(1). A, D, G] [Illustration: Diagram XXVIII(2). B, E, H] [Illustration: Diagram XXVIII(3). C, F, I] In B and C the proportions of the third and the quarter are shown, producing the same static effect as the half, although not so completely. At D, E, F the same number of lines and spots as we have at A, B, C have been used, but varied as to size and position, so that they have no obvious mechanical relationship. The result is an expression of much more life and character. At G, H, I more lines and spots have been added. At G they are equidistant and dead from lack of variety, while at H and I they are varied to a degree that prevents the eye grasping any obvious relationship between them. They have consequently a look of liveliness and life very different from A, B, C, or G. It will be observed that as the amount of variety increases so does the life and liveliness of the impression. In these diagrams a certain static effect is kept up throughout, on account of our lines being vertical and horizontal only, which lines, as we saw in an earlier chapter, are the calmest we have. But despite this, I think the added life due to the variety in the proportions is sufficiently apparent in the diagrams to prove the point we wish to make. As a contrast to the infinite calm of Raphael's "Madonna," we have reproduced Tintoretto's "Finding of the Body of St. Mark," in the Brera Gallery, Milan. Here all is life and movement. The proportions are infinitely varied, nowhere does the eye grasp any obvious mathematical relationship. We have the same semi-circular arches as in the Raphael, but not symmetrically placed, and their lines everywhere varied, and their calm effect destroyed by the flickering lights playing about them. Note the great emphasis given to the outstretched hand of the powerful figure of the Apostle on the left by the lines of the architecture and the line of arm of the kneeling figure in the centre of the picture converging on this hand and leading the eye immediately to it. There is here no static symmetry, all is energy and force. Starting with this arresting arm, the eye is led down the majestic figure of St. Mark, past the recumbent figure, and across the picture by means of the band of light on the ground, to the important group of frightened figures on the right. And from them on to the figures engaged in lowering a corpse from its tomb. Or, following the direction of the outstretched arm of St. Mark, we are led by the lines of the architecture to this group straight away, and back again by means of the group on the right and the band of light on the ground. The quantities are not placed in reposeful symmetry about the canvas, as was the case in the Raphael, but are thrown off apparently haphazard from lines leading the eye round the picture. Note also the dramatic intensity given by the strongly contrasted light and shade, and how Tintoretto has enjoyed the weird effect of the two figures looking into a tomb with a light, their shadows being thrown on the lid they hold open, at the far end of the room. This must have been an amazingly new piece of realism at the time, and is wonderfully used, to give an eerie effect to the darkened end of the room. With his boundless energy and full enjoyment of life, Tintoretto's work naturally shows a strong leaning towards variety, and his amazing compositions are a liberal education in the innumerable and unexpected ways in which a panel can be filled, and should be carefully studied by students. [Illustration: Plate XLIX. THE FINDING OF THE BODY OF ST. MARK TINTORETTO (BREDA, MILAN) Compare with Raphael's Ansidei Madonna, and note how energy and movement take the place of static calm in the balance of this composition. _Photo Anderson_] A pleasing proportion that often occurs in nature and art is one that may be roughly stated in figures as that between 5 and 8. In such a proportion the eye sees no mathematical relationship. Were it less than 5, it would be too near the proportion of 4 to 8 (or one-third the total length), a dull proportion; or were it more, it would be approaching too near equality of proportion to be quite satisfactory. I have seen a proportional compass, imported from Germany, giving a relationship similar to this and said to contain the secret of good proportion. There is certainly something remarkable about it, and in the Appendix, page 289 [Transcribers Note: APPENDIX], you will find some further interesting facts about this. The variety of proportions in a building, a picture, or a piece of sculpture should always be under the control of a few simple, dominant quantities that simplify the appearance and give it a unity which is readily grasped except where violence and lack of repose are wanted. The simpler the proportion is, the more sublime will be the impression, and the more complicated, the livelier and more vivacious the effect. From a few well-chosen large proportions the eye may be led on to enjoy the smaller varieties. But in good proportion the lesser parts are not allowed to obtrude, but are kept in subordination to the main dispositions on which the unity of the effect depends. XVII PORTRAIT DRAWING There is something in every individual that is likely for a long time to defy the analysis of science. When you have summed up the total of atoms or electrons or whatever it is that goes to the making of the tissues and also the innumerable complex functions performed by the different parts, you have not yet got on the track of the individual that governs the whole performance. The effect of this personality on the outward form, and the influence it has in modifying the aspect of body and features, are the things that concern the portrait draughtsman: the seizing on and expressing forcefully the individual character of the sitter, as expressed by his outward appearance. This character expression in form has been thought to be somewhat antagonistic to beauty, and many sitters are shy of the particular characteristics of their own features. The fashionable photographer, knowing this, carefully stipples out of his negative any #striking# characteristics in the form of his sitter the negative may show. But judging by the result, it is doubtful whether any beauty has been gained, and certain that interest and vitality have been lost in the process. Whatever may be the nature of beauty, it is obvious that what makes one object more beautiful than another is something that is characteristic of the appearance of the one and not of the other: so that some close study of individual characteristics must be the aim of the artist who would seek to express beauty, as well as the artist who seeks the expression of character and professes no interest in beauty. Catching the likeness, as it is called, is simply seizing on the essential things that belong only to a particular individual and differentiate that individual from others, and expressing them in a forceful manner. There are certain things that are common to the whole species, likeness to a common type; the individual likeness is not in this direction but at the opposite pole to it. It is one of the most remarkable things connected with the amazing subtlety of appreciation possessed by the human eye, that of the millions of heads in the world, and probably of all that have ever existed in the world, no two look exactly alike. When one considers how alike they are, and how very restricted is the range of difference between them, is it not remarkable how quickly the eye recognises one person from another? It is more remarkable still how one sometimes recognises a friend not seen for many years, and whose appearance has changed considerably in the meantime. And this likeness that we recognise is not so much as is generally thought a matter of the individual features. If one sees the eye alone, the remainder of the face being covered, it is almost impossible to recognise even a well-known friend, or tell whether the expression is that of laughing or crying. And again, how difficult it is to recognise anybody when the eyes are masked and only the lower part of the face visible. [Illustration: Plate L. FROM A DRAWING IN RED CHALK BY HOLBEIN IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM PRINT ROOM Note how every bit of variety is sought for, the difference in the eyes and on either side of the mouth, etc.] If you try and recall a well-known head it will not be the shape of the features that will be recollected so much as an impression, the result of all these combined, a sort of chord of which the features will be but the component elements. It is the relation of the different parts to this chord, this impression of the personality of a head, that is the all-important thing in what is popularly called "catching the likeness." In drawing a portrait the mind must be centred on this, and all the individual parts drawn in relation to it. The moment the eye gets interested solely in some individual part and forgets the consideration of its relationship to this whole impression, the likeness suffers. Where there is so much that is similar in heads, it is obvious that what differences there are must be searched out and seized upon forcefully, if the individuality of the head is to be made telling. The drawing of portraits should therefore be approached from the direction of these differences; that is to say, the things in general disposition and proportion in which your subject differs from a common type, should be first sought for, the things common to all heads being left to take care of themselves for a bit. The reason for this is that the eye, when fresh, sees these differences much more readily than after it has been working for some time. The tendency of a tired eye is to see less differentiation, and to hark back to a dull uniformity; so get in touch at once with the vital differences while your eye is fresh and your vision keen. Look out first for the character of the disposition of the features, note the proportions down an imagined centre line, of the brows, the base of the nose, the mouth and chin, and get the character of the shape of the enclosing line of the face blocked out in square lines. The great importance of getting these proportions right early cannot be over-emphasised, as any mistake may later on necessitate completely shifting a carefully drawn feature. And the importance of this may be judged from the fact that you recognise a head a long way off, before anything but the general disposition of the masses surrounding the features can be seen. The shape of the skull, too, is another thing of which to get an early idea, and its relation to the face should be carefully noted. But it is impossible to lay down hard and fast rules for these things. Some artists begin in point drawing with the eyes, and some leave the eyes until the very last. Some draughtsmen are never happy until they have an eye to adjust the head round, treating it as the centre of interest and drawing the parts relatively to it. While others say, with some truth, that there is a mesmeric effect produced when the eye is drawn that blinds one to the cold-blooded technical consideration of a head as line and tone in certain relationships; that it is as well to postpone until the last that moment when the shapes and tones that represent form in your drawing shall be lit up by the introduction of the eye to the look of a live person. One is freer to consider the accuracy of one's form before this disturbing influence is introduced. And there is a good deal to be said for this. Although in point drawing you can, without serious effect, begin at any part that interests you, in setting out a painting I think there can be no two opinions as to the right way to go about it. The character of the general disposition of the masses must be first constructed. And if this general blocking in has been well done, the character of the sitter will be apparent from the first even in this early stage; and you will be able to judge of the accuracy of your blocking out by whether or not it does suggest the original. If it does not, correct it before going any further, working, as it were, from the general impression of the masses of the head as seen a long way off, adding more and more detail, and gradually bringing the impression nearer, until the completed head is arrived at, thus getting in touch from the very first with the likeness which should dominate the work all along. [Illustration: Plate LI. SIR CHARLES DILKE, BART. From the drawing in the collection of Sir Robert Essex, M.P., in red conté chalk rubbed, the high lights being picked out with rubber.] There are many points of view from which a portrait can be drawn--I mean, mental points of view. And, as in a biography, the value of the work will depend on the insight and distinction of the author or artist. The valet of a great man might write a biography of his master that could be quite true to his point of view; but, assuming him to be an average valet, it would not be a great work. I believe the gardener of Darwin when asked how his master was, said, "Not at all well. You see, he moons about all day. I've seen him staring at a flower for five or ten minutes at a time. Now, if he had some work to do, he would be much better." A really great biography cannot be written except by a man who can comprehend his subject and take a wide view of his position among men, sorting what is trivial from what is essential, what is common to all men from what is particular to the subject of his work. And it is very much the same in portraiture. It is only the painter who possesses the intuitive faculty for seizing on the significant things in the form expression of his subject, of disentangling what is trivial from what is important; and who can convey this forcibly to the beholder on his canvas, more forcibly than a casual sight of the real person could do--it is only this painter who can hope to paint a really fine portrait. It is true, the honest and sincere expression of any painter will be of some interest, just as the biography written by Darwin's gardener might be; but there is a vast difference between this point of view and that of the man who thoroughly comprehends his subject. Not that it is necessary for the artist to grasp the mind of his sitter, although that is no disadvantage. But this is not his point of view, his business is with the effect of this inner man on his outward appearance. And it is necessary for him to have that intuitive power that seizes instinctively on those variations of form that are expressive of this inner man. The habitual cast of thought in any individual affects the shape and moulds the form of the features, and, to the discerning, the head is expressive of the person; both the bigger and the smaller person, both the larger and the petty characteristics everybody possesses. And the fine portrait will express the larger and subordinate the petty individualities, will give you what is of value, and subordinate what is trivial in a person's appearance. The pose of the head is a characteristic feature about people that is not always given enough attention in portraits. The habitual cast of thought affects its carriage to a very large degree. The two extreme types of what we mean are the strongly emotional man who carries his head high, drinking in impressions as he goes through the world; and the man of deep thought who carries his head bent forward, his back bent in sympathy with it. Everybody has some characteristic action in the way that should be looked out for and that is usually absent when a sitter first appears before a painter on the studio throne. A little diplomacy and conversational humouring is necessary to produce that unconsciousness that will betray the man in his appearance. How the power to discover these things can be acquired, it is, of course, impossible to teach. All the student can do is to familiarise himself with the best examples of portraiture, in the hope that he may be stimulated by this means to observe finer qualities in nature and develop the best that is in him. But he must never be insincere in his work. If he does not appreciate fine things in the work of recognised masters, let him stick to the honest portrayal of what he does see in nature. The only distinction of which he is capable lies in this direction. It is not until he awakens to the sight in nature of qualities he may have admired in others' work that he is in a position honestly to introduce them into his own performances. * * * * * Probably the most popular point of view in portraiture at present is the one that can be described as a "striking presentment of the live person." This is the portrait that arrests the crowd in an exhibition. You cannot ignore it, vitality bursts from it, and everything seems sacrificed to this quality of striking lifelikeness. And some very wonderful modern portraits have been painted from this point of view. But have we not sacrificed too much to this quality of vitality? Here is a lady hurriedly getting up from a couch, there a gentleman stepping out of the frame to greet you, violence and vitality everywhere. But what of repose, harmony of colour and form, and the wise ordering and selecting of the materials of vision that one has been used to in the great portraiture of the past? While the craftsman in one is staggered and amazed at the brilliant virtuosity of the thing, the artist in one resents the sacrifice of so much for what is, after all, but a short-lived excitement. Age may, no doubt, improve some of the portraits of this class by quieting them in colour and tone. And those that are good in design and arrangement will stand this without loss of distinction, but those in which everything has been sacrificed to this striking lifelike quality will suffer considerably. This particular quality depends so much on the freshness of the paint that when this is mellowed and its vividness is lost, nothing will remain of value, if the quieter qualities of design and arrangement have been sacrificed for it. Frans Hals is the only old master I can think of with whom this form of portrait can be compared. But it will be noticed that besides designing his canvases carefully, he usually balanced the vigour and vitality of his form with a great sobriety of colour. In fact, in some of his later work, where this restless vitality is most in evidence, the colour is little more than black and white, with a little yellow ochre and Venetian red. It is this extreme reposefulness of colour that opposes the unrest in the form and helps to restore the balance and necessary repose in the picture. It is interesting to note the restless variety of the edges in Frans Hal's work, how he never, if he can help it, lets an edge run smoothly, but keeps it constantly on the move, often leaving it quite jagged, and to compare this with what was said about vitality depending on variety. [Illustration: Plate LII. JOHN REDMOND, M.P. From the drawing in the collection of Sir Robert Essex, M.P., in red conté chalk rubbed, the high lights being picked out with rubber.] * * * * * Another point of view is that of the artist who seeks to give a significant and calm view of the exterior forms of the sitter, an expressive map of the individuality of those forms, leaving you to form your own intellectual judgments. A simple, rather formal, attitude is usually chosen, and the sitter is drawn with searching honesty. There is a great deal to be said for this point of view in the hands of a painter with a large appreciation of form and design. But without these more inspiring qualities it is apt to have the dulness that attends most literal transcriptions. There are many instances of this point of view among early portrait painters, one of the best of which is the work of Holbein. But then, to a very distinguished appreciation of the subtleties of form characterisation he added a fine sense of design and colour arrangement, qualities by no means always at the command of some of the lesser men of this school. Every portrait draughtsman should make a pilgrimage to Windsor, armed with the necessary permission to view the wonderful series of portrait drawings by this master in the library of the castle. They are a liberal education in portrait drawing. It is necessary to see the originals, for it is only after having seen them that one can properly understand the numerous and well-known reproductions. A study of these drawings will, I think, reveal the fact that they are not so literal as is usually thought. Unflinchingly and unaffectedly honest they are, but honest not to a cold, mechanically accurate record of the sitter's appearance, but honest and accurate to the vital impression of the live sitter made on the mind of the live artist. This is the difference we were trying to explain that exists between the academic and the vital drawing, and it is a very subtle and elusive quality, like all artistic qualities, to talk about. The record of a vital impression done with unflinching accuracy, but under the guidance of intense mental activity, is a very different thing from a drawing done with the cold, mechanical accuracy of a machine. The one will instantly grip the attention and give one a vivid sensation in a way that no mechanically accurate drawing could do, and in a way that possibly the sight of the real person would not always do. We see numbers of faces during a day, but only a few with the vividness of which I am speaking. How many faces in a crowd are passed indifferently--there is no vitality in the impression they make on our mind; but suddenly a face will rivet our attention, and although it is gone in a flash, the memory of the impression will remain for some time. The best of Holbein's portrait drawings give one the impression of having been seen in one of these flashes and rivet the attention in consequence. Drawings done under this mental stimulus present subtle differences from drawings done with cold accuracy. The drawing of the Lady Audley, here reproduced, bears evidence of some of this subtle variation on what are called the facts, in the left eye of the sitter. It will be noticed that the pupil of this eye is larger than the other. Now I do not suppose that as a matter of mechanical accuracy this was so, but the impression of the eyes seen as part of a vivid impression of the head is seldom that they are the same size. Holbein had in the first instance in this very carefully wrought drawing made them so, but when at the last he was vitalising the impression, "pulling it together" as artists say, he has deliberately put a line outside the original one, making this pupil larger. This is not at all clearly seen in the reproduction, but #is distinctly visible in the original#. And to my thinking it was done at the dictates of the vivid mental impression he wished his drawing to convey. Few can fail to be struck in turning over this wonderful series of drawings by the vividness of their portraiture, and the vividness is due to their being severely accurate to the vital impression on the mind of Holbein, not merely to the facts coldly observed. [Illustration: Plate LIII. THE LADY AUDLEY. HOLBEIN (WINDSOR) Note the different sizes of pupils in the eyes, and see letterpress on the opposite page. _Copyright photo Braun & Co._] * * * * * Another point of view is that of seeking in the face a symbol of the person within, and selecting those things about a head that express this. As has already been said, the habitual attitude of mind has in the course of time a marked influence on the form of the face, and in fact of the whole body, so that--to those who can see--the man or woman is a visible symbol of themselves. But this is by no means apparent to all. The striking example of this class is the splendid series of portraits by the late G.F. Watts. Looking at these heads one is made conscious of the people in a fuller, deeper sense than if they were before one in the flesh. For Watts sought to discover the person in their appearance and to paint a picture that should be a living symbol of them. He took pains to find out all he could about the mind of his sitters before he painted them, and sought in the appearance the expression of this inner man. So that whereas with Holbein it was the vivid presentation of the impression as one might see a head that struck one in a crowd, with Watts it is the spirit one is first conscious of. The thunders of war appear in the powerful head of Lord Lawrence, the music of poetry in the head of Swinburne, and the dry atmosphere of the higher regions of thought in the John Stuart Mill, &c. In the National Portrait Gallery there are two paintings of the poet Robert Browning, one by Rudolph Lehmann and one by Watts. Now the former portrait is probably much more "like" the poet as the people who met him casually saw him. But Watts's portrait is like the man who wrote the poetry, and Lehmann's is not. Browning was a particularly difficult subject in this respect, in that to a casual observer there was much more about his external appearance to suggest a prosperous man of business, than the fiery zeal of the poet. These portraits by Watts will repay the closest study by the student of portraiture. They are full of that wise selection by a great mind that lifts such work above the triviality of the commonplace to the level of great imaginative painting. * * * * * Another point of view is that of treating the sitter as part of a symphony of form and colour, and subordinating everything to this artistic consideration. This is very fashionable at the present time, and much beautiful work is being done with this motive. And with many ladies who would not, I hope, object to one's saying that their principal characteristic was the charm of their appearance, this point of view offers, perhaps, one of the best opportunities of a successful painting. A pose is selected that makes a good design of line and colour--a good pattern--and the character of the sitter is not allowed to obtrude or mar the symmetry of the whole considered as a beautiful panel. The portraits of J. McNeill Whistler are examples of this treatment, a point of view that has very largely influenced modern portrait painting in England. * * * * * Then there is the official portrait in which the dignity of an office held by the sitter, of which occasion the portrait is a memorial, has to be considered. The more intimate interest in the personal character of the sitter is here subordinated to the interest of his public character and attitude of mind towards his office. Thus it happens that much more decorative pageantry symbolic of these things is permissible in this kind of portraiture than in that of plain Mr. Smith; a greater stateliness of design as befitting official occasions. It is not contended that this forms anything like a complete list of the numerous aspects from which a portrait can be considered, but they are some of the more extreme of those prevalent at the present time. Neither is it contended that they are incompatible with each other: the qualities of two or more of these points of view are often found in the same work. And it is not inconceivable that a single portrait might contain all and be a striking lifelike presentment, a faithful catalogue of all the features, a symbol of the person and a symphony of form and colour. But the chances are against such a composite affair being a success. One or other quality will dominate in a successful work; and it is not advisable to try and combine too many different points of view as, in the confusion of ideas, directness of expression is lost. But no good portrait is without some of the qualities of all these points of view, whichever may dominate the artist's intention. [Sidenote: Expression.] The camera, and more particularly the instantaneous camera, has habituated people to expect in a portrait a momentary expression, and of these momentary expressions the faint smile, as we all know, is an easy first in the matter of popularity. It is no uncommon thing for the painter to be asked in the early stages of his work when he is going to put in the smile, it never being questioned that this is the artist's aim in the matter of expression. The giving of lifelike expression to a painting is not so simple a matter as it might appear to be. Could one set the real person behind the frame and suddenly fix them for ever with one of those passing expressions on their faces, however natural it might have been at the moment, fixed for ever it is terrible, and most unlifelike. As we have already said, a few lines scribbled on a piece of paper by a consummate artist would give a greater sense of life than this fixed actuality. It is not ultimately by the pursuit of the actual realisation that expression and life are conveyed in a portrait. Every face has expression of a far more interesting and enduring kind than these momentary disturbances of its form occasioned by laughter or some passing thought, &c. And it must never be forgotten that a portrait is a panel painted to remain for centuries without movement. So that a large amount of the quality of repose must enter into its composition. Portraits in which this has not been borne in mind, however entertaining at a picture exhibition, when they are seen for a few moments only, pall on one if constantly seen, and are finally very irritating. But the real expression in a head is something more enduring than these passing movements: one that belongs to the forms of a head, and the marks left on that form by the life and character of the person. This is of far more interest than those passing expressions, the results of the contraction of certain muscles under the skin, the effect of which is very similar in most people. It is for the portrait painter to find this more enduring expression and give it noble expression in his work. [Sidenote: Treatment of Clothes.] It is a common idea among sitters that if they are painted in modern clothes the picture will look old-fashioned in a few years. If the sitter's appearance were fixed upon the canvas exactly as they stood before the artist in his studio, without any selection on the part of the painter, this might be the result, and _is_ the result in the case of painters who have no higher aim than this. But there are qualities in dress that do not belong exclusively to the particular period of their fashion. Qualities that are the same in all ages. And when these are insisted upon, and the frivolities of the moment in dress not troubled about so much, the portrait has a permanent quality, and will never in consequence look old-fashioned in the offensive way that is usually meant. In the first place, the drapery and stuffs of which clothes are made follow laws in the manner in which they fold and drape over the figure, that are the same in all times. If the expression of the figure through the draperies is sought by the painter, a permanent quality will be given in his work, whatever fantastic shapes the cut of the garments may assume. And further, the artist does not take whatever comes to hand in the appearance of his sitter, but works to a thought-out arrangement of colour and form, to a design. This he selects from the moving and varied appearance of his sitter, trying one thing after another, until he sees a suggestive arrangement, from the impression of which he makes his design. It is true that the extremes of fashion do not always lend themselves so readily as more reasonable modes to the making of a good pictorial pattern. But this is not always so, some extreme fashions giving opportunities of very piquant and interesting portrait designs. So that, however extreme the fashion, if the artist is able to select some aspect of it that will result in a good arrangement for his portrait, the work will never have the offensive old-fashioned look. The principles governing good designs are the same in all times; and if material for such arrangement has been discovered in the most modish of fashions, it has been lifted into a sphere where nothing is ever out of date. It is only when the painter is concerned with the trivial details of fashion for their own sake, for the making his picture look like the real thing, and has not been concerned with transmuting the appearance of fashionable clothes by selection into the permanent realms of form and colour design, that his work will justify one in saying that it will look stale in a few years. The fashion of dressing sitters in meaningless, so-called classical draperies is a feeble one, and usually argues a lack of capacity for selecting a good arrangement from the clothes of the period in the artist who adopts it. Modern women's clothes are full of suggestions for new arrangements and designs quite as good as anything that has been done in the past. The range of subtle colours and varieties of texture in materials is amazing, and the subtlety of invention displayed in some of the designs for costumes leads one to wonder whether there is not something in the remark attributed to an eminent sculptor that "designing ladies' fashions is one of the few arts that is thoroughly vital to-day." XVIII THE VISUAL MEMORY The memory is the great storehouse of artistic material, the treasures of which the artist may know little about until a chance association lights up some of its dark recesses. From early years the mind of the young artist has been storing up impressions in these mysterious chambers, collected from nature's aspects, works of art, and anything that comes within the field of vision. It is from this store that the imagination draws its material, however fantastic and remote from natural appearances the forms it may assume. How much our memory of pictures colours the impressions of nature we receive is probably not suspected by us, but who could say how a scene would appear to him, had he never looked at a picture? So sensitive is the vision to the influence of memory that, after seeing the pictures of some painter whose work has deeply impressed us, we are apt, while the memory of it is still fresh in our minds, to see things as he would paint them. On different occasions after leaving the National Gallery I can remember having seen Trafalgar Square as Paolo Veronese, Turner, or whatever painter may have impressed me in the Gallery, would have painted it, the memory of their work colouring the impression the scene produced. But, putting aside the memory of pictures, let us consider the place of direct visual memory from nature in our work, pictures being indirect or second-hand impressions. We have seen in an earlier chapter how certain painters in the nineteenth century, feeling how very second-hand and far removed from nature painting had become, started a movement to discard studio traditions and study nature with a single eye, taking their pictures out of doors, and endeavouring to wrest nature's secrets from her on the spot. The Pre-Raphaelite movement in England and the Impressionist movement in France were the results of this impulse. And it is interesting, by the way, to contrast the different manner in which this desire for more truth to nature affected the French and English temperaments. The intense individualism of the English sought out every detail, every leaf and flower for itself, painting them with a passion and intensity that made their painting a vivid medium for the expression of poetic ideas; while the more synthetic mind of the Frenchman approached this search for visual truth from the opposite point of view of the whole effect, finding in the large, generalised impression a new world of beauty. And his more logical mind led him to inquire into the nature of light, and so to invent a technique founded on scientific principles. But now the first blush of freshness has worn off the new movement, painters have begun to see that if anything but very ordinary effects are to be attempted, this painting on the spot must give place to more reliance on the memory. Memory has this great advantage over direct vision: it retains more vividly the essential things, and has a habit of losing what is unessential to the pictorial impression. But what is the essential in a painting? What is it makes one want to paint at all? Ah! Here we approach very debatable and shadowy ground, and we can do little but ask questions, the answer to which will vary with each individual temperament. What is it that these rays of light striking our retina convey to our brain, and from our brain to whatever is ourselves, in the seat of consciousness above this? What is this mysterious correspondence set up between something within and something without, that at times sends such a clamour of harmony through our whole being? Why do certain combinations of sound in music and of form and colour in art affect us so profoundly? What are the laws governing harmony in the universe, and whence do they come? It is hardly trees and sky, earth, or flesh and blood, #as such#, that interest the artist; but rather that through these things in memorable moments he is permitted a consciousness of deeper things, and impelled to seek utterance for what is moving him. It is the record of these rare moments in which one apprehends truth in things seen that the artist wishes to convey to others. But these moments, these flashes of inspiration which are at the inception of every vital picture, occur but seldom. What the painter has to do is to fix them vividly in his memory, to snapshot them, as it were, so that they may stand by him during the toilsome procedure of the painting, and guide the work. This initial inspiration, this initial flash in the mind, need not be the result of a scene in nature, but may of course be purely the work of the imagination; a composition, the sense of which flashes across the mind. But in either case the difficulty is to preserve vividly the sensation of this original artistic impulse. And in the case of its having been derived from nature direct, as is so often the case in modern art, the system of painting continually on the spot is apt to lose touch with it very soon. For in the continual observation of anything you have set your easel before day after day, comes a series of impressions, more and more commonplace, as the eye becomes more and more familiar with the details of the subject. And ere long the original emotion that was the reason of the whole work is lost sight of, and one of those pictures or drawings giving a catalogue of tired objects more or less ingeniously arranged (that we all know so well) is the result--work utterly lacking in the freshness and charm of true inspiration. For however commonplace the subject seen by the artist in one of his "flashes," it is clothed in a newness and surprise that charm us, be it only an orange on a plate. Now a picture is a thing of paint upon a flat surface, and a drawing is a matter of certain marks upon a paper, and how to translate the intricacies of a visual or imagined impression to the prosaic terms of masses of coloured pigment or lines and tones is the business with which our technique is concerned. The ease, therefore, with which a painter will be able to remember an impression in a form from which he can work, will depend upon his power to analyse vision in this technical sense. The more one knows about what may be called the anatomy of picture-making--how certain forms produce certain effects, certain colours or arrangements other effects, &c.--the easier will it be for him to carry away a visual memory of his subject that will stand by him during the long hours of his labours at the picture. The more he knows of the expressive powers of lines and tones, the more easily will he be able to observe the vital things in nature that convey the impression he wishes to memorise. It is not enough to drink in and remember the emotional side of the matter, although this must be done fully, but if a memory of the subject is to be carried away that will be of service technically, the scene must be committed to memory in terms of whatever medium you intend to employ for reproducing it--in the case of a drawing, lines and tones. And the impression will have to be analysed into these terms as if you were actually drawing the scene on some imagined piece of paper in your mind. The faculty of doing this is not to be acquired all at once, but it is amazing of how much development it is capable. Just as the faculty of committing to memory long poems or plays can be developed, so can the faculty of remembering visual things. This subject has received little attention in art schools until just recently. But it is not yet so systematically done as it might be. Monsieur Lecoq de Boisbaudran in France experimented with pupils in this memory training, beginning with very simple things like the outline of a nose, and going on to more complex subjects by easy stages, with the most surprising results. And there is no doubt that a great deal more can and should be done in this direction than is at present attempted. What students should do is to form a habit of making every day in their sketch-book a drawing of something they have seen that has interested them, and that they have made some attempt at memorising. Don't be discouraged if the results are poor and disappointing at first--you will find that by persevering your power of memory will develop and be of the greatest service to you in your after work. Try particularly to remember the spirit of the subject, and in this memory-drawing some scribbling and fumbling will necessarily have to be done. You cannot expect to be able to draw definitely and clearly from memory, at least at first, although your aim should always be to draw as frankly and clearly as you can. [Illustration: Plate LIV. STUDY ON BROWN PAPER IN BLACK AND WHITE CONTÉ CHALK Illustrating a simple method of studying drapery forms.] Let us assume that you have found a subject that moves you and that, being too fleeting to draw on the spot, you wish to commit to memory. Drink a full enjoyment of it, let it soak in, for the recollection of this will be of the utmost use to you afterwards in guiding your memory-drawing. This mental impression is not difficult to recall; it is the visual impression in terms of line and tone that is difficult to remember. Having experienced your full enjoyment of the artistic matter in the subject, you must next consider it from the material side, as a flat, visual impression, as this is the only form in which it can be expressed on a flat sheet of paper. Note the proportions of the main lines, their shapes and disposition, as if you were drawing it, in fact do the whole drawing in your mind, memorising the forms and proportions of the different parts, and fix it in your memory to the smallest detail. If only the emotional side of the matter has been remembered, when you come to draw it you will be hopelessly at sea, as it is remarkable how little the memory retains of the appearance of things constantly seen, if no attempt has been made to memorise their visual appearance. The true artist, even when working from nature, works from memory very largely. That is to say, he works to a scheme in tune to some emotional enthusiasm with which the subject has inspired him in the first instance. Nature is always changing, but he does not change the intention of his picture. He always keeps before him the initial impression he sets out to paint, and only selects from nature those things that play up to it. He is a feeble artist, who copies individually the parts of a scene with whatever effect they may have at the moment he is doing them, and then expects the sum total to make a picture. If circumstances permit, it is always as well to make in the first instance a rapid sketch that shall, whatever it may lack, at least contain the main disposition of the masses and lines of your composition seen under the influence of the enthusiasm that has inspired the work. This will be of great value afterwards in freshening your memory when in the labour of the work the original impulse gets dulled. It is seldom that the vitality of this first sketch is surpassed by the completed work, and often, alas! it is far from equalled. In portrait painting and drawing the memory must be used also. A sitter varies very much in the impression he gives on different days, and the artist must in the early sittings, when his mind is fresh, select the aspect he means to paint and afterwards work largely to the memory of this. Always work to a scheme on which you have decided, and do not flounder on in the hope of something turning up as you go along. Your faculties are never so active and prone to see something interesting and fine as when the subject is first presented to them. This is the time to decide your scheme; this is the time to take your fill of the impression you mean to convey. This is the time to learn your subject thoroughly and decide on what you wish the picture to be. And having decided this, work straight on, using nature to support your original impression, but don't be led off by a fresh scheme because others strike you as you go along. New schemes will do so, of course, and every new one has a knack of looking better than your original one. But it is not often that this is so; the fact that they are new makes them appear to greater advantage than the original scheme to which you have got accustomed. So that it is not only in working away from nature that the memory is of use, but actually when working directly in front of nature. To sum up, there are two aspects of a subject, the one luxuriating in the sensuous pleasure of it, with all of spiritual significance it may consciously or unconsciously convey, and the other concerned with the lines, tones, shapes, &c., and their rhythmic ordering, by means of which it is to be expressed--the matter and manner, as they may be called. And, if the artist's memory is to be of use to him in his work, both these aspects must be memorised, and of the two the second will need the most attention. But although there are these two aspects of the subject, and each must receive separate attention when memorising it, they are in reality only two aspects of the same thing, which in the act of painting or drawing must be united if a work of art is to result. When a subject first flashes upon an artist he delights in it as a painted or drawn thing, and feels instinctively the treatment it will require. In good draughtsmanship the thing felt will guide and govern everything, every touch will be instinct with the thrill of that first impression. The craftsman mind, so laboriously built up, should by now have become an instinct, a second nature, at the direction of a higher consciousness. At such times the right strokes, the right tones come naturally and go on the right place, the artist being only conscious of a fierce joy and a feeling that things are in tune and going well for once. It is the thirst for this glorious enthusiasm, this fusing of matter and manner, this act of giving the spirit within outward form, that spurs the artist on at all times, and it is this that is the wonderful thing about art. XIX PROCEDURE In commencing a drawing, don't, as so many students do, start carelessly floundering about with your chalk or charcoal in the hope that something will turn up. It is seldom if ever that an artist puts on paper anything better than he has in his mind before he starts, and usually it is not nearly so good. Don't spoil the beauty of a clean sheet of paper by a lot of scribble. Try and see in your mind's eye the drawing you mean to do, and then try and make your hand realise it, making the paper more beautiful by every touch you give instead of spoiling it by a slovenly manner of procedure. To know what you want to do and then to do it is the secret of good style and technique. This sounds very commonplace, but it is surprising how few students make it their aim. You may often observe them come in, pin a piece of paper on their board, draw a line down the middle, make a few measurements, and start blocking in the drawing without having given the subject to be drawn a thought, as if it were all there done before them, and only needed copying, as a clerk would copy a letter already drafted for him. Now, nothing is being said against the practice of drawing guide lines and taking measurements and blocking in your work. This is very necessary in academic work, if rather fettering to expressive drawing; but even in the most academic drawing the artistic intelligence must be used, although that is not the kind of drawing this chapter is particularly referring to. Look well at the model first; try and be moved by something in the form that you feel is fine or interesting, and try and see in your mind's eye what sort of drawing you mean to do before touching your paper. In school studies be always unflinchingly honest to the impression the model gives you, but dismiss the camera idea of truth from your mind. Instead of converting yourself into a mechanical instrument for the copying of what is before you, let your drawing be an expression of truth perceived intelligently. Be extremely careful about the first few strokes you put on your paper: the quality of your drawing is often decided in these early stages. If they are vital and expressive, you have started along lines you can develop, and have some hope of doing a good drawing. If they are feeble and poor, the chances are greatly against your getting anything good built upon them. If your start has been bad, pull yourself together, turn your paper over and start afresh, trying to seize upon the big, significant lines and swings in your subject at once. Remember it is much easier to put down a statement correctly than to correct a wrong one; so out with the whole part if you are convinced it is wrong. Train yourself to make direct, accurate statements in your drawings, and don't waste time trying to manoeuvre a bad drawing into a good one. Stop as soon as you feel you have gone wrong and correct the work in its early stages, instead of rushing on upon a wrong foundation in the vague hope that it will all come right in the end. When out walking, if you find you have taken a wrong road you do not, if you are wise, go on in the hope that the wrong way will lead to the right one, but you turn round and go back to the point at which you left the right road. It is very much the same in drawing and painting. As soon as you become aware that you have got upon the wrong track, stop and rub out your work until an earlier stage that was right is reached, and start along again from this point. As your eye gets trained you will more quickly perceive when you have done a wrong stroke, and be able to correct it before having gone very far along the wrong road. Do not work too long without giving your eye a little rest; a few moments will be quite sufficient. If things won't come, stop a minute; the eye often gets fatigued very quickly and refuses to see truly, but soon revives if rested a minute or two. Do not go labouring at a drawing when your mind is not working; you are not doing any good, and probably are spoiling any good you have already done. Pull yourself together, and ask what it is you are trying to express, and having got this idea firmly fixed in your mind, go for your drawing with the determination that it shall express it. All this will sound very trite to students of any mettle, but there are large numbers who waste no end of time working in a purely mechanical, lifeless way, and with their minds anywhere but concentrated upon the work before them. And if the mind is not working, the work of the hand will be of no account. My own experience is that one has constantly to be making fresh effort during the procedure of the work. The mind is apt to tire and needs rousing continually, otherwise the work will lack the impulse that shall make it vital. Particularly is this so in the final stages of a drawing or painting, when, in adding details and small refinements, it is doubly necessary for the mind to be on fire with the initial impulse, or the main qualities will be obscured and the result enfeebled by these smaller matters. Do not rub out, if you can possibly help it, in drawings that aim at artistic expression. In academic work, where artistic feeling is less important than the discipline of your faculties, you may, of course, do so, but even here as little as possible. In beautiful drawing of any facility it has a weakening effect, somewhat similar to that produced by a person stopping in the middle of a witty or brilliant remark to correct a word. If a wrong line is made, it is left in by the side of the right one in the drawing of many of the masters. But the great aim of the draughtsman should be to train himself to draw cleanly and fearlessly, hand and eye going together. But this state of things cannot be expected for some time. Let painstaking accuracy be your aim for a long time. When your eye and hand have acquired the power of seeing and expressing on paper with some degree of accuracy what you see, you will find facility and quickness of execution will come of their own accord. In drawing of any expressive power this quickness and facility of execution are absolutely essential. The waves of emotion, under the influence of which the eye really sees in any artistic sense, do not last long enough to allow of a slow, painstaking manner of execution. There must be no hitch in the machinery of expression when the consciousness is alive to the realisation of something fine. Fluency of hand and accuracy of eye are the things your academic studies should have taught you, and these powers will be needed if you are to catch the expression of any of the finer things in form that constitute good drawing. Try and express yourself in as simple, not as complicated a manner as possible. Let every touch mean something, and if you don't see what to do next, don't fill in the time by meaningless shading and scribbling until you do. Wait awhile, rest your eye by looking away, and then see if you cannot find something right that needs doing. Before beginning a drawing, it is not a bad idea to study carefully the work of some master draughtsman whom the subject to be drawn may suggest. If you do this carefully and thoughtfully, and take in a full enjoyment, your eye will unconsciously be led to see in nature some of the qualities of the master's work. And you will see the subject to be drawn as a much finer thing than would have been the case had you come to it with your eye unprepared in any way. Reproductions are now so good and cheap that the best drawings in the world can be had for a few pence, and every student should begin collecting reproductions of the things that interest him. This is not the place to discuss questions of health, but perhaps it will not be thought grandmotherly to mention the extreme importance of nervous vitality in a fine draughtsman, and how his life should be ordered on such healthy lines that he has at his command the maximum instead of the minimum of this faculty. After a certain point, it is a question of vitality how far an artist is likely to go in art. Given two men of equal ability, the one leading a careless life and the other a healthy one, as far as a healthy one is possible to such a supersensitive creature as an artist, there can be no doubt as to the result. It is because there is still a lingering idea in the minds of many that an artist must lead a dissipated life or he is not really an artist, that one feels it necessary to mention the subject. This idea has evidently arisen from the inability of the average person to associate an unconventional mode of life with anything but riotous dissipation. A conventional life is not the only wholesome form of existence, and is certainly a most unwholesome and deadening form to the artist; and neither is a dissipated life the only unconventional one open to him. It is as well that the young student should know this, and be led early to take great care of that most valuable of studio properties, vigorous health. XX MATERIALS The materials in which the artist works are of the greatest importance in determining what qualities in the infinite complexity of nature he selects for expression. And the good draughtsman will find out the particular ones that belong to whatever medium he selects for his drawing, and be careful never to attempt more than it is capable of doing. Every material he works with possesses certain vital qualities peculiar to itself, and it is his business to find out what these are and use them to the advantage of his drawing. When one is working with, say, pen and ink, the necessity for selecting only certain things is obvious enough. But when a medium with the vast capacity of oil paint is being used, the principle of its governing the nature of the work is more often lost sight of. So near can oil paint approach an actual illusion of natural appearances, that much misdirected effort has been wasted on this object, all enjoyment of the medium being subordinated to a meretricious attempt to deceive the eye. And I believe a popular idea of the art of painting is that it exists chiefly to produce this deception. No vital expression of nature can be achieved without the aid of the particular vitality possessed by the medium with which one is working. If this is lost sight of and the eye is tricked into thinking that it is looking at real nature, it is not a fine picture. Art is not a substitute for nature, but an expression of feeling produced in the consciousness of the artist, and intimately associated with the material through which it is expressed in his work--inspired, it may be, in the first instance, by something seen, and expressed by him in painted symbols as true to nature as he can make them while keeping in tune to the emotional idea that prompted the work; but never regarded by the fine artist as anything but painted symbols nevertheless. Never for one moment does he intend you to forget that it is a painted picture you are looking at, however naturalistic the treatment his theme may demand. In the earlier history of art it was not so necessary to insist on the limitations imposed by different mediums. With their more limited knowledge of the phenomena of vision, the early masters had not the same opportunities of going astray in this respect. But now that the whole field of vision has been discovered, and that the subtlest effects of light and atmosphere are capable of being represented, it has become necessary to decide how far complete accuracy of representation will help the particular impression you may intend your picture or drawing to create. The danger is that in producing a complete illusion of representation, the particular vitality of your medium, with all the expressive power it is capable of yielding, may be lost. Perhaps the chief difference between the great masters of the past and many modern painters is the neglect of this principle. #They represented nature in terms of whatever medium they worked in, and never overstepped this limitation#. Modern artists, particularly in the nineteenth century, often attempted to #copy nature#, the medium being subordinated to the attempt to make it look like the real thing. In the same way, the drawings of the great masters were drawings. They did not attempt anything with a point that a point was not capable of expressing. The drawings of many modern artists are full of attempts to express tone and colour effects, things entirely outside the true province of drawing. The small but infinitely important part of nature that pure drawing is capable of conveying has been neglected, and line work, until recently, went out of fashion in our schools. There is something that makes for power in the limitations your materials impose. Many artists whose work in some of the more limited mediums is fine, are utterly feeble when they attempt one with so few restrictions as oil paint. If students could only be induced to impose more restraint upon themselves when they attempt so difficult a medium as paint, it would be greatly to the advantage of their work. Beginning first with monochrome in three tones, as explained in a former chapter, they might then take for figure work ivory black and Venetian red. It is surprising what an amount of colour effect can be got with this simple means, and how much can be learned about the relative positions of the warm and cold colours. Do not attempt the full range of tone at first, but keep the darks rather lighter and the lights darker than nature. Attempt the full scale of tone only when you have acquired sufficient experience with the simpler range, and gradually add more colours as you learn to master a few. But restraints are not so fashionable just now as unbridled licence. Art students start in with a palette full of the most amazing colours, producing results that it were better not to discuss. It is a wise man who can discover his limitations and select a medium the capacities of which just tally with his own. To discover this, it is advisable to try many, and below is a short description of the chief ones used by the draughtsman. But very little can be said about them, and very little idea of their capacities given in a written description; they must be handled by the student, and are no doubt capable of many more qualities than have yet been got out of them. [Sidenote: Lead Pencil] This well-known medium is one of the most beautiful for pure line work, and its use is an excellent training to the eye and hand in precision of observation. Perhaps this is why it has not been so popular in our art schools lately, when the charms of severe discipline are not so much in favour as they should be. It is the first medium we are given to draw with, and as the handiest and most convenient is unrivalled for sketch-book use. It is made in a large variety of degrees, from the hardest and greyest to the softest and blackest, and is too well known to need much description. It does not need fixing. For pure line drawing nothing equals it, except silver point, and great draughtsmen, like Ingres, have always loved it. It does not lend itself so readily to any form of mass drawing. Although it is sometimes used for this purpose, the offensive shine that occurs if dark masses are introduced is against its use in any but very lightly shaded work. [Illustration: Plate LV. FROM A SILVER-POINT DRAWING] Its charm is the extreme delicacy of its grey-black lines. [Sidenote: Silver and Gold Point.] Similar to lead pencil, and of even greater delicacy, is silver-point drawing. A more ancient method, it consists in drawing with a silver point on paper the surface of which has been treated with a faint wash of Chinese white. Without this wash the point will not make a mark. For extreme delicacy and purity of line no medium can surpass this method. And for the expression of a beautiful line, such as a profile, nothing could be more suitable than a silver point. As a training to the eye and hand also, it is of great value, as no rubbing out of any sort is possible, and eye and hand must work together with great exactness. The discipline of silver-point drawing is to be recommended as a corrective to the picturesque vagaries of charcoal work. A gold point, giving a warmer line, can also be used in the same way as a silver point, the paper first having been treated with Chinese white. [Sidenote: Charcoal.] Two extreme points of view from which the rendering of form can be approached have been explained, and it has been suggested that students should study them both separately in the first instance, as they each have different things to teach. Of the mediums that are best suited to a drawing combining both points of view, the first and most popular is charcoal. Charcoal is made in many different degrees of hardness and softness, the harder varieties being capable of quite a fine point. A chisel-shaped point is the most convenient, as it does not wear away so quickly. And if the broad side of the chisel point is used when a dark mass is wanted, the edge can constantly be kept sharp. With this edge a very fine line can be drawn. Charcoal works with great freedom, and answers readily when forceful expression is wanted. It is much more like painting than any other form of drawing, a wide piece of charcoal making a wide mark similar to a brush. The delicacy and lightness with which it has to be handled is also much more like the handling of a brush than any other point drawing. When rubbed with the finger, it sheds a soft grey tone over the whole work. With a piece of bread pressed by thumb and finger into a pellet, high lights can be taken out with the precision of white chalk; or rubber can be used. Bread is, perhaps, the best, as it does not smudge the charcoal but lifts it readily off. When rubbed with the finger, the darks, of course, are lightened in tone. It is therefore useful to draw in the general proportions roughly and rub down in this way. You then have a middle tone over the work, with the rough drawing showing through. Now proceed carefully to draw your lights with bread or rubber, and your shadows with charcoal, in much the same manner as you did in the monochrome exercises already described. All preliminary setting out of your work on canvas is usually done with charcoal, which must of course be fixed with a spray diffuser. For large work, such as a full-length portrait, sticks of charcoal nearly an inch in diameter are made, and a long swinging line can be done without their breaking. For drawings that are intended as things of beauty in themselves, and are not merely done as a preparatory study for a painting, charcoal is perhaps not so refined a medium as a great many others. It is too much like painting to have the particular beauties of a drawing, and too much like drawing to have the qualities of a painting. However, some beautiful things have been done with it. It is useful in doing studies where much finish is desired, to fix the work slightly when drawn in and carried some way on. You can work over this again without continually rubbing out with your hand what you have already drawn. If necessary you can rub out with a hard piece of rubber any parts that have already been fixed, or even scrape with a pen-knife. But this is not advisable for anything but an academic study, or working drawings, as it spoils the beauty and freshness of charcoal work. Studies done in this medium can also be finished with Conté chalk. There is also an artificial charcoal put up in sticks, that is very good for refined work. It has some advantages over natural charcoal, in that there are no knots and it works much more evenly. The best natural charcoal I have used is the French make known as "Fusain Rouget." It is made in three degrees, No. 3 being the softest, and, of course, the blackest. But some of the ordinary Venetian and vine charcoals sold are good. But don't get the cheaper varieties: a bad piece of charcoal is worse than useless. Charcoal is fixed by means of a solution of white shellac dissolved in spirits of wine, blown on with a spray diffuser. This is sold by the artists' colourmen, or can be easily made by the student. It lightly deposits a thin film of shellac over the work, acting as a varnish and preventing its rubbing off. Charcoal is not on the whole the medium an artist with a pure love of form selects, but rather that of the painter, who uses it when his brushes and paints are not handy. [Sidenote: Red Chalk (Sanguine).] A delightful medium that can be used for either pure line work or a mixed method of drawing, is red chalk. This natural red earth is one of the most ancient materials for drawing. It is a lovely Venetian red in colour, and works well in the natural state, if you get a good piece. It is sold by the ounce, and it is advisable to try the pieces as they vary very much, some being hard and gritty and some more soft and smooth. It is also made by Messrs. Conté of Paris in sticks artificially prepared. These work well and are never gritty, but are not so hard as the natural chalk, and consequently wear away quickly and do not make fine lines as well. Red chalk when rubbed with the finger or a rag spreads evenly on paper, and produces a middle tone on which lights can be drawn with rubber or bread. Sticks of hard, pointed rubber are everywhere sold, which, cut in a chisel shape, work beautifully on red chalk drawings. Bread is also excellent when a softer light is wanted. You can continually correct and redraw in this medium by rubbing it with the finger or a rag, thus destroying the lights and shadows to a large extent, and enabling you to draw them again more carefully. For this reason red chalk is greatly to be recommended for making drawings for a picture where much fumbling may be necessary before you find what you want. Unlike charcoal, it hardly needs fixing, and much more intimate study of the forms can be got into it. Most of the drawings by the author reproduced in this book are done in this medium. For drawings intended to have a separate existence it is one of the prettiest mediums. In fact, this is the danger to the student while studying: your drawing looks so much at its best that you are apt to be satisfied too soon. But for portrait drawings there is no medium to equal it. Additional quality of dark is occasionally got by mixing a little of this red chalk in a powdered state with water and a very little gum-arabic. This can be applied with a sable brush as in water-colour painting, and makes a rich velvety dark. It is necessary to select your paper with some care. The ordinary paper has too much size on it. This is picked up by the chalk, and will prevent its marking. A paper with little size is best, or old paper where the size has perished. I find an O.W. paper, made for printing etchings, as good as any for ordinary work. It is not perfect, but works very well. What one wants is the smoothest paper without a faced and hot-pressed surface, and it is difficult to find. Occasionally black chalk is used with the red to add strength to it. And some draughtsmen use it with the red in such a manner as to produce almost a full colour effect. Holbein, who used this medium largely, tinted the paper in most of his portrait drawings, varying the tint very much, and sometimes using zinc white as a wash, which enabled him to supplement his work with a silver-point line here and there, and also got over any difficulty the size in the paper might cause. His aim seems to have been to select the few essential things in a head and draw them with great finality and exactness. In many of the drawings the earlier work has been done with red or black chalk and then rubbed down and the drawing redone with either a brush and some of the chalk rubbed up with water and gum or a silver-point line of great purity, while in others he has tinted the paper with water-colour and rubbed this away to the white paper where he wanted a light, or Chinese white has been used for the same purpose. [Sidenote: Black Conté and Carbon Pencil.] Black Conté is a hard black chalk made in small sticks of different degrees. It is also put up in cedar pencils. Rather more gritty than red chalk or charcoal, it is a favourite medium with some, and can be used with advantage to supplement charcoal when more precision and definition are wanted. It has very much the same quality of line and so does not show as a different medium. It can be rubbed like charcoal and red chalk and will spread a tone over the paper in very much the same way. Carbon pencils are similar to Conté, but smoother in working and do not rub. [Sidenote: White chalk.] White chalk is sometimes used on toned paper to draw the lights, the paper serving as a half tone while the shadows and outlines are drawn in black or red. In this kind of drawing the chalk should never be allowed to come in contact with the black or red chalk of the shadows, the half tone of the paper should always be between them. For rubbed work white pastel is better than the ordinary white chalk sold for drawing, as it is not so hard. A drawing done in this method with white pastel and red chalk is reproduced on page 46 [Transcribers Note: Plate IV], and one with the hard white chalk, on page 260 [Transcribers Note: Plate LIV]. This is the method commonly used for making studies of drapery, the extreme rapidity with which the position of the lights and shadows can be expressed being of great importance when so unstable a subject as an arrangement of drapery is being drawn. [Sidenote: Lithography.] Lithography as a means of artistic reproduction has suffered much in public esteem by being put to all manner of inartistic trade uses. It is really one of the most wonderful means of reproducing an artist's actual work, the result being, in most cases, so identical with the original that, seen together, if the original drawing has been done on paper, it is almost impossible to distinguish any difference. And of course, as in etching, it is the prints that are really the originals. The initial work is only done as a means of producing these. A drawing is made on a lithographic stone, that is, a piece of limestone that has been prepared with an almost perfectly smooth surface. The chalk used is a special kind of a greasy nature, and is made in several degrees of hardness and softness. No rubbing out is possible, but lines can be scratched out with a knife, or parts made lighter by white lines being drawn by a knife over them. A great range of freedom and variety is possible in these initial drawings on stone. The chalk can be rubbed up with a little water, like a cake of water-colour, and applied with a brush. And every variety of tone can be made with the side of the chalk. Some care should be taken not to let the warm finger touch the stone, or it may make a greasy mark that will print. When this initial drawing is done to the artist's satisfaction, the most usual method is to treat the stone with a solution of gum-arabic and a little nitric acid. After this is dry, the gum is washed off as far as may be with water; some of the gum is left in the porous stone, but it is rejected where the greasy lines and tones of the drawing come. Prints may now be obtained by rolling up the stone with an inked roller. The ink is composed of a varnish of boiled linseed oil and any of the lithographic colours to be commercially obtained. The ink does not take on the damp gummed stone, but only where the lithographic chalk has made a greasy mark, so that a perfect facsimile of the drawing on stone is obtained, when a sheet of paper is placed on the stone and the whole put through the press. The medium deserves to be much more popular with draughtsmen than it is, as no more perfect means of reproduction could be devised. The lithographic stone is rather a cumbersome thing to handle, but the initial drawing can be done on paper and afterwards transferred to the stone. In the case of line work the result is practically identical, but where much tone and playing about with the chalk is indulged in, the stone is much better. Lithographic papers of different textures are made for this purpose, but almost any paper will do, provided the drawing is done with the special lithographic chalk. [Sidenote: Pen and Ink.] Pen and ink was a favourite means of making studies with many old masters, notably Rembrandt. Often heightening the effect with a wash, he conveyed marvellous suggestions with the simplest scribbles. But it is a difficult medium for the young student to hope to do much with in his studies, although for training the eye and hand to quick definite statement of impressions, there is much to be said for it. No hugging of half tones is possible, things must be reduced to a statement of clear darks--which would be a useful corrective to the tendency so many students have of seeing chiefly the half tones in their work. [Illustration: Plate LVI. STUDY IN PEN AND INK AND WASH FOR TREE IN "THE BOAR HUNT" RUBENS (LOUVRE) _Photo Giraudon_] The kind of pen used will depend on the kind of drawing you wish to make. In steel pens there are innumerable varieties, from the fine crow-quills to the thick "J" nibs. The natural crow-quill is a much more sympathetic tool than a steel pen, although not quite so certain in its line. But more play and variety is to be got out of it, and when a free pen drawing is wanted it is preferable. Reed pens are also made, and are useful when thick lines are wanted. They sometimes have a steel spring underneath to hold the ink somewhat in the same manner as some fountain pens. There is even a glass pen, consisting of a sharp-pointed cone of glass with grooves running down to the point. The ink is held in these grooves, and runs down and is deposited freely as the pen is used. A line of only one thickness can be drawn with it, but this can be drawn in any direction, an advantage over most other shapes. [Sidenote: Etching.] Etching is a process of reproduction that consists in drawing with a steel point on a waxed plate of copper or zinc, and then putting it in a bath of diluted nitric acid to bite in the lines. The longer the plate remains in the bath the deeper and darker the lines become, so that variety in thickness is got by stopping out with a varnish the light lines when they are sufficiently strong, and letting the darker ones have a longer exposure to the acid. Many wonderful and beautiful things have been done with this simple means. The printing consists in inking the plate all over and wiping off until only the lines retain any ink, when the plate is put in a press and an impression taken. Or some slight amount of ink may be left on the plate in certain places where a tint is wanted, and a little may be smudged out of the lines themselves to give them a softer quality. In fact there are no end of tricks a clever etching printer will adopt to give quality to his print. [Sidenote: Paper.] The varieties of paper on the market at the service of the artist are innumerable, and nothing need be said here except that the texture of your paper will have a considerable influence on your drawing. But try every sort of paper so as to find what suits the particular things you want to express. I make a point of buying every new paper I see, and a new paper is often a stimulant to some new quality in drawing. Avoid the wood-pulp papers, as they turn dark after a time. Linen rag is the only safe substance for good papers, and artists now have in the O.W. papers a large series that they can rely on being made of linen only. It is sometimes advisable, when you are not drawing a subject that demands a clear hard line, but where more sympathetic qualities are wanted, to have a wad of several sheets of paper under the one you are working on, pinned on the drawing-board. This gives you a more sympathetic surface to work upon and improves the quality of your work. In redrawing a study with which you are not quite satisfied, it is a good plan to use a thin paper, pinning it over the first study so that it can be seen through. One can by this means start as it were from the point where one left off. Good papers of this description are now on the market. I fancy they are called "bank-note" papers. XXI CONCLUSION Mechanical invention, mechanical knowledge, and even a mechanical theory of the universe, have so influenced the average modern mind, that it has been thought necessary in the foregoing pages to speak out strongly against the idea of a mechanical standard of accuracy in artistic drawing. If there were such a standard, the photographic camera would serve our purpose well enough. And, considering how largely this idea is held, one need not be surprised that some painters use the camera; indeed, the wonder is that they do not use it more, as it gives in some perfection the mechanical accuracy which is all they seem to aim at in their work. There may be times when the camera can be of use to artists, but only to those who are thoroughly competent to do without it--to those who can look, as it were, through the photograph and draw from it with the same freedom and spontaneity with which they would draw from nature, thus avoiding its dead mechanical accuracy, which is a very difficult thing to do. But the camera is a convenience to be avoided by the student. Now, although it has been necessary to insist strongly on the difference between phenomena mechanically recorded and the records of a living individual consciousness, I should be very sorry if anything said should lead students to assume that a loose and careless manner of study was in any way advocated. The training of his eye and hand to the most painstaking accuracy of observation and record must be the student's aim for many years. The variations on mechanical accuracy in the work of a fine draughtsman need not be, and seldom are, conscious variations. Mechanical accuracy is a much easier thing to accomplish than accuracy to the subtle perceptions of the artist. And he who cannot draw with great precision the ordinary cold aspect of things cannot hope to catch the fleeting aspect of his finer vision. Those artists who can only draw in some weird fashion remote from nature may produce work of some interest; but they are too much at the mercy of a natural trick of hand to hope to be more than interesting curiosities in art. The object of your training in drawing should be to develop to the uttermost the observation of form and all that it signifies, and your powers of accurately portraying this on paper. #Unflinching honesty# must be observed in all your studies. It is only then that the "you" in you will eventually find expression in your work. And it is this personal quality, this recording of the impressions of life as felt by a conscious individual that is the very essence of distinction in art. The "seeking after originality" so much advocated would be better put "seeking for sincerity." Seeking for originality usually resolves itself into running after any peculiarity in manner that the changing fashions of a restless age may throw up. One of the most original men who ever lived did not trouble to invent the plots of more than three or four of his plays, but was content to take the hackneyed work of his time as the vehicle through which to pour the rich treasures of his vision of life. And wrote: "What custom wills in all things do you do it." Individual style will come to you naturally as you become more conscious of what it is you wish to express. There are two kinds of insincerity in style, the employment of a ready-made conventional manner that is not understood and that does not fit the matter; and the running after and laboriously seeking an original manner when no original matter exists. Good style depends on a clear idea of what it is you wish to do; it is the shortest means to the end aimed at, the most apt manner of conveying that personal "something" that is in all good work. "The style is the man," as Flaubert says. The splendour and value of your style will depend on the splendour and value of the mental vision inspired in you, that you seek to convey; on the quality of the man, in other words. And this is not a matter where direct teaching can help you, but rests between your own consciousness and those higher powers that move it. APPENDIX If you add a line of 5 inches to one of 8 inches you produce one 13 inches long, and if you proceed by always adding the last two you arrive at a series of lengths, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 inches, &c. Mr. William Schooling tells me that any two of these lines adjoining one another are practically in the same proportion to each other; that is to say, one 8 inches is 1.600 times the size of one 5 inches, and the 13-inch line is 1.625 the size of the 8-inch, and the 21-inch line being 1.615 times the 13-inch line, and so on. With the mathematician's love of accuracy, Mr. Schooling has worked out the exact proportion that should exist between a series of quantities for them to be in the same proportion to their neighbours, and in which any two added together would produce the next. There is only one proportion that will do this, and although very formidable, stated exactly, for practical purposes, it is that between 5 and a fraction over 8. Stated accurately to eleven places of decimals it is (1 + sqrt(5))/2 = 1.61803398875 (nearly). We have evidently here a very unique proportion. Mr. Schooling has called this the Phi proportion, and it will be convenient to refer to it by this name. [Illustration: THE PHI PROPORTION EC is 1.618033, &c., times size of AB, CD " " " " BC, DE " " " " CD, &c., AC=CD BD=DE, &c.] Testing this proportion on the reproductions of pictures in this book in the order of their appearing, we find the following remarkable results: "Los Meninas," Velazquez, page 60 [Transcribers Note: Plate IX].--The right-hand side of light opening of door at the end of the room is exactly Phi proportion with the two sides of picture; and further, the bottom of this opening is exactly Phi proportion with the top and bottom of canvas. It will be noticed that this is a very important point in the "placing" of the composition. "Fête Champêtre," Giorgione, page 151 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXIII].--Lower end of flute held by seated female figure exactly Phi proportion with sides of picture, and lower side of hand holding it (a point slightly above the end of flute) exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of canvas. This is also an important centre in the construction of the composition. "Bacchus and Ariadne," Titian, page 154 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXIV].--The proportion in this picture both with top and bottom and sides of canvas comes in the shadow under chin of Bacchus; the most important point in the composition being the placing of this head. "Love and Death," by Watts, page 158 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXV].--Point from which drapery radiates on figure of Death exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. Point where right-hand side of right leg of Love cuts dark edge of steps exactly Phi proportion with sides of picture. "Surrender of Breda," by Velazquez, page 161 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXVI].--First spear in upright row on the right top of picture, exactly Phi proportion with sides of canvas. Height of gun carried horizontally by man in middle distance above central group, exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. This line gives height of group of figures on left, and is the most important horizontal line in the picture. "Birth of Venus," Botticelli, page 166 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXVII].--Height of horizon line Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. Height of shell on which Venus stands Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture, the smaller quantity being below this time. Laterally the extreme edge of dark drapery held by figure on right that blows towards Venus is Phi proportion with sides of picture. "The Rape of Europa," by Paolo Veronese, page 168 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXVIII].--Top of head of Europa exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. Right-hand side of same head slightly to left of Phi proportion with sides of picture (unless in the reproduction a part of the picture on the left has been trimmed away, as is likely, in which case it would be exactly Phi proportion). I have taken the first seven pictures reproduced in this book that were not selected with any idea of illustrating this point, and I think you will admit that in each some very important quantity has been placed in this proportion. One could go on through all the illustrations were it not for the fear of becoming wearisome; and also, one could go on through some of the minor relationships, and point out how often this proportion turns up in compositions. But enough has been said to show that the eye evidently takes some especial pleasure in it, whatever may eventually be found to be the physiological reason underlying it. * * * * * INDEX Absorbent canvas Academic drawing Academic and conventional Academic students Accuracy, scientific and artistic Anatomy, study of, its importance "Ansidei Madonna," Raphael's Apelles and his colours Architecture, proportion in Art, some definitions of Artist, the Atmosphere indicated by shading Atmospheric colours Audley, Lady, Holbein's portrait of "Bacchus and Ariadne," Titian's Backgrounds Balance Balance between straight lines and curves Balance between flat and gradated tones Balance between light and dark tones Balance between warm and cold colours Balance between interest and mass Balance between variety and unity "Bank-note" papers Bastien Lepage Bath for etching Beauty, definition of Beauty and prettiness Beauty and truth "Birth of Venus, the," Botticelli's Black chalk Black Conté Black glass, the use of a Blake, example of parallelism Blake's designs Blake's use of the vertical Blocking in the drawing Blocking out with square lines "Blue Boy," Gainsborough's Botany, the study of Botticelli's work Boucher's heads compared with Watteau's Boundaries of forms Boundaries of masses in Nature Bread, use of, in charcoal drawing Browning, R., portraits of Brush, manipulation of the Brush strokes Brushes, various kinds of Burke on "The Sublime and the Beautiful" Burne-Jones Camera, use of the Carbon pencils Carlyle Circle, perfect curve of, to be avoided Chalks, drawing in Charcoal drawing; fixing solution Chavannes, Peuvis de Chiaroscuro Chinese art China and Japan, the art of Colour, contrasts of Colours for figure work Colours, a useful chart of Classic architecture Claude Monet Clothes, the treatment of Composition of a picture, the Constable Conté crayon "Contrasts in Harmony" Conventional art Conventional life, deadness of the Corners of the panel or canvas, the Corot, his masses of foliage Correggio Crow-quill pen, the Curves, how to observe the shape of Curves and straight lines Darwin, anecdote of Deadness, to avoid Decorative work Degas "Dither" Diagonal lines Discord and harmony Discordant lines Draperies of Watteau, the Drapery studies in chalks Drapery in portrait-drawing Draughtsmanship and impressionism Drawing, academic Drawing, definition of East, arts of the Edges, variety of Edges, the importance of the subject of Egg and dart moulding Egyptian sculpture Egyptian wall paintings El Greco Elgin Marbles, the Ellipse, the "Embarquement pour l'Île de Cythère," Watteau's Emerson on the beautiful Emotional power of the arts Emotional significance of objects Erechtheum, moulding from the Etching Exercises in mass drawing Exhibitions Expression in portrait-drawing Eye, anatomy of the Eye, the, in portrait-drawing Eyebrow, the Eyelashes, the Eyelids, the "Fête Champêtre," Giorgioni's Figure work, colours for "Finding of the Body of St. Mark" Fixing positions of salient points Flaubert Foliage, treatment of Foreshortenings Form and colour Form, the influence of Form, the study of Frans Hals _French Revolution_, Carlyle's French schools Fripp, Sir Alfred Fromentin's definition of art Fulness of form indicated by shading Gainsborough, the charm of Genius and talent Geology, the study of Giorgioni "Giorgioni, The School of," Walter Pater's Giotto Glass pens Goethe Gold point Gold and silver paint for shading Gothic architecture Gradation, variety of Greek architecture Greek art in the Middle Ages Greek art, variety in Greek vivacity of moulding Greek and Gothic sculpture Greek type of profile Greuze Hair, the treatment of Hair, effect of style upon the face Half tones "Hannibal crossing the Alps," Turner's Hardness indicated by shading Harsh contrasts, effect of Hatching Health, questions of Henner, the work of High lights Hogarth's definition Holbein's drawings Holl, Frank Horizontal, calm and repose of the Horizontal and vertical, the _Human Anatomy for Art Students_ Human figure, the outline of the Impressionism Impressionist vision Ingres, studies of Ink used in lithography Intellect and feeling Intuitions Italian Renaissance, the Italian work in the fifteenth century Japanese art Japanese method, a Japanese and Chinese use of contrasts of colour Keats' definition of beauty Landscapes of Watteau, the Lang, Andrew, his definition of art Lawrence, Lord, portrait of Lead pencil Lecoq de Boisbaudran, M. Lehmann, R., portraits by Leonardo da Vinci Light Light and shade, principles of Lighting and light effects Likeness, catching the Line and the circle, the Line drawing and mass drawing Lines expressing repose or energy Line, the power of the Lines, value of, in portrait-painting Lines of shading, different Lithographic chalk Lithography "Love and Death," Watts' Manet Mass drawing Masters, past and modern Materials Mathematical proportions Measuring comparative distances Measurements, vertical and horizontal Medium, the use of Michael Angelo, the figures of Michael Angelo and Degas Millais Mist, effect of a, on the tone of a picture Model, the Monet, Claude Morris's definition of art Nature, variety of forms in Nature's tendency to pictorial unity of arrangement Newspaper as a background Norman architecture Oil, surplus in paint Originality "Our Lady of the Rocks," L. da Vinci's Outline drawing Outline studies and models Paint, the vitality of Paint, the consistency of Paint, effect of oil in thick "Painted Poetry" Painter's training, the object of the Painting and drawing Panel or canvas, the Paolo Uccello Paolo Veronese Paper for drawing Parallel shading Parallelism of lines Parthenon, the Pater, Walter Pen-and-ink drawing Pens for pen-and-ink drawing Perspective, the study of Philip IV, Velazquez' portrait of Photograph, failure of the Picture galleries, the influence of Pictures, small and large, treatment of Planes of tone, painting in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Preparatory drawings, disadvantage of Primitive art Primitive emotions Procedure, in commencing a drawing Profiles, beauty of Proportions Poppy oil and turpentine, the use of Portrait-drawing "Portrait of the Artist's Daughter," Sir E. Burne-Jones's Pose, the Peuvis de Chavannes Quality and texture, variety in Radiating lines "Rape of Europa, The," Paul Veronese's Raphael Red rays Reed pens Rembrandt and his colours Reproduction, advantages of up-to-date Retina, effect of light on the Reynolds' contrasts of colour Rhythm, definition of Right angle, power of the Roman sculpture, lack of vitality in Rossetti Royal Academy Schools Rubens Ruskin Schools of Art Scientific and artistic accuracy Scientific study, necessity for Scumbling Shading Shape, variety of Silhouette, the Silver-point Silver-point work, shading in Sitter, the Softness indicated by shading Solar spectrum, the Solids as flat copy Spanish school, the Straight lines indicative of strength Straight lines and flat tones, analogy between Strong light in contrast with dark shadow Study of drawing, the Stump, the Style "Sublime and the Beautiful, The," Burke's "Surrender of Breda, The," Velazquez' Sympathetic lines Talent and genius Teachers in Art Schools Technical side of an art, the Thickness and accent, variety of Tintoretto Titian Tolstoy's definition of art Tone, meaning of the word Tone values, variety of Toned paper, drawing on Tones, large flat, the effect of Touch, the sense of Trafalgar Square lions, the Trees, the masses of Turner Types, lifelessness of "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus," Turner's Unity and variety Unity of line "Vale of Best," Millais' Value, meaning of the word as applied to a picture Values of tone drawing, the Van Dyck, his use of the straight line Variety in symmetry "Variety in Unity" "Varying well" Velazquez Venetian painters, and the music of edges Venetians, the, their use of straight lines Venetians, system and principles of design of the "Venus, Mercury, and Cupid," Correggio's Vertical, the, associated with the sublime Vertical lines, feeling associated with Vision Visual blindness Visual memory, the Ward, the animal painter Warm colours Watteau, the charm of Watts, G.F., portraits by Watts' use of the right angle Windsor, Holbein's portraits at Whistler, a master of tone White casts, drawing from White chalk White paint White pastel 
30325	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 30325-h.htm or 30325-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30325/30325-h/30325-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30325/30325-h.zip) Transcriber's note: One typographical error has been corrected: it is listed at the end of the text. Illustrations occurring in the middle of a paragraph were moved to the nearest paragraph's begining. Library Edition THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOHN RUSKIN ELEMENTS OF DRAWING AND PERSPECTIVE THE TWO PATHS UNTO THIS LAST MUNERA PULVERIS SESAME AND LILIES ETHICS OF THE DUST National Library Association New York Chicago THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING IN THREE LETTERS TO BEGINNERS. CONTENTS. PAGE PREFACE ix LETTER I. ON FIRST PRACTICE 1 LETTER II. SKETCHING FROM NATURE 65 LETTER III. ON COLOR AND COMPOSITION 106 APPENDIX I. ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 183 APPENDIX II. THINGS TO BE STUDIED 188 ["The Elements of Drawing" was written during the winter of 1856. The First Edition was published in 1857; the Second followed in the same year, with some additions and slight alterations. The Third Edition consisted of sixth thousand, 1859; seventh thousand, 1860; and eighth thousand, 1861. The work was partly reproduced in "Our Sketching Club," by the Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt, M.A., 1874; with new editions in 1875, 1882, and 1886. Mr. Ruskin meant, during his tenure of the Slade Professorship at Oxford, to recast his teaching, and to write a systematic manual for the use of his Drawing School, under the title of "The Laws of Fésole." Of this only vol. i. was completed, 1879; second edition, 1882. As, therefore, "The Elements of Drawing" has never been completely superseded, and as many readers of Mr. Ruskin's works have expressed a desire to possess the book in its old form, it is now reprinted as it stood in 1859.] ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. As one or two questions, asked of me since the publication of this work, have indicated points requiring elucidation, I have added a few short notes in the first Appendix. It is not, I think, desirable otherwise to modify the form or add to the matter of a book as it passes through successive editions; I have, therefore, only mended the wording of some obscure sentences; with which exception the text remains, and will remain, in its original form, which I had carefully considered. Should the public find the book useful, and call for further editions of it, such additional notes as may be necessary will be always placed in the first Appendix, where they can be at once referred to, in any library, by the possessors of the earlier editions; and I will take care they shall not be numerous. _August 3, 1857._ PREFACE. i. It may perhaps be thought, that in prefacing a manual of drawing, I ought to expatiate on the reasons why drawing should be learned; but those reasons appear to me so many and so weighty, that I cannot quickly state or enforce them. With the reader's permission, as this volume is too large already, I will waive all discussion respecting the importance of the subject, and touch only on those points which may appear questionable in the method of its treatment. ii. In the first place, the book is not calculated for the use of children under the age of twelve or fourteen. I do not think it advisable to engage a child in any but the most voluntary practice of art. If it has talent for drawing, it will be continually scrawling on what paper it can get; and should be allowed to scrawl at its own free will, due praise being given for every appearance of care, or truth, in its efforts. It should be allowed to amuse itself with cheap colors almost as soon as it has sense enough to wish for them. If it merely daubs the paper with shapeless stains, the color-box may be taken away till it knows better: but as soon as it begins painting red coats on soldiers, striped flags to ships, etc., it should have colors at command; and, without restraining its choice of subject in that imaginative and historical art, of a military tendency, which children delight in, (generally quite as valuable, by the way, as any historical art delighted in by their elders,) it should be gently led by the parents to try to draw, in such childish fashion as may be, the things it can see and likes,--birds, or butterflies, or flowers, or fruit. iii. In later years, the indulgence of using the color should only be granted as a reward, after it has shown care and progress in its drawings with pencil. A limited number of good and amusing prints should always be within a boy's reach: in these days of cheap illustration he can hardly possess a volume of nursery tales without good wood-cuts in it, and should be encouraged to copy what he likes best of this kind; but should be firmly restricted to a _few_ prints and to a few books. If a child has many toys, it will get tired of them and break them; if a boy has many prints he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure in them is perfected, and his attention concentrated. The parents need give themselves no trouble in instructing him, as far as drawing is concerned, beyond insisting upon economical and neat habits with his colors and paper, showing him the best way of holding pencil and rule, and, so far as they take notice of his work, pointing out where a line is too short or too long, or too crooked, when compared with the copy; _accuracy_ being the first and last thing they look for. If the child shows talent for inventing or grouping figures, the parents should neither check, nor praise it. They may laugh with it frankly, or show pleasure in what it has done, just as they show pleasure in seeing it well, or cheerful; but they must not praise it for being clever, any more than they would praise it for being stout. They should praise it only for what costs it self-denial, namely attention and hard work; otherwise they will make it work for vanity's sake, and always badly. The best books to put into its hands are those illustrated by George Cruikshank or by Richter. (See Appendix.) At about the age of twelve or fourteen, it is quite time enough to set youth or girl to serious work; and then this book will, I think, be useful to them; and I have good hope it may be so, likewise, to persons of more advanced age wishing to know something of the first principles of art. iv. Yet observe, that the method of study recommended is not brought forward as absolutely the best, but only as the best which I can at present devise for an isolated student. It is very likely that farther experience in teaching may enable me to modify it with advantage in several important respects; but I am sure the main principles of it are sound, and most of the exercises as useful as they can be rendered without a master's superintendence. The method differs, however, so materially from that generally adopted by drawing-masters, that a word or two of explanation may be needed to justify what might otherwise be thought willful eccentricity. v. The manuals at present published on the subject of drawing are all directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil or water-color, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the second is the object kept chiefly in view at Marlborough House, and in the branch Government Schools of Design. vi. Of the fitness of the modes of study adopted in those schools, to the end specially intended, judgment is hardly yet possible; only, it seems to me, that we are all too much in the habit of confusing art as _applied_ to manufacture, with manufacture itself. For instance, the skill by which an inventive workman designs and molds a beautiful cup, is skill of true art; but the skill by which that cup is copied and afterwards multiplied a thousandfold, is skill of manufacture: and the faculties which enable one workman to design and elaborate his original piece, are not to be developed by the same system of instruction as those which enable another to produce a maximum number of approximate copies of it in a given time. Farther: it is surely inexpedient that any reference to purposes of manufacture should interfere with the education of the artist himself. Try first to manufacture a Raphael; then let Raphael direct your manufacture. He will design you a plate, or cup, or a house, or a palace, whenever you want it, and design them in the most convenient and rational way; but do not let your anxiety to reach the platter and the cup interfere with your education of the Raphael. Obtain first the best work you can, and the ablest hands, irrespective of any consideration of economy or facility of production. Then leave your trained artist to determine how far art can be popularized, or manufacture ennobled. vii. Now, I believe that (irrespective of differences in individual temper and character) the excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a master or a school can teach; so that while powers of invention distinguish man from man, powers of perception distinguish school from school. All great schools enforce delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight: and the only rule which I have, as yet, found to be without exception respecting art, is that all great art is delicate. viii. Therefore, the chief aim and bent of the following system is to obtain, first, a perfectly patient, and, to the utmost of the pupil's power, a delicate method of work, such as may insure his seeing truly. For I am nearly convinced, that when once we see keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even supposing that this difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw. It is surely also a more important thing, for young people and unprofessional students, to know how to appreciate the art of others, than to gain much power in art themselves. Now the modes of sketching ordinarily taught are inconsistent with this power of judgment. No person trained to the superficial execution of modern water-color painting, can understand the work of Titian or Leonardo; they must forever remain blind to the refinement of such men's penciling, and the precision of their thinking. But, however slight a degree of manipulative power the student may reach by pursuing the mode recommended to him in these letters, I will answer for it that he cannot go once through the advised exercises without beginning to understand what masterly work means; and, by the time he has gained some proficiency in them, he will have a pleasure in looking at the painting of the great schools, and a new perception of the exquisiteness of natural scenery, such as would repay him for much more labor than I have asked him to undergo. ix. That labor is, nevertheless, sufficiently irksome, nor is it possible that it should be otherwise, so long as the pupil works unassisted by a master. For the smooth and straight road which admits unembarrassed progress must, I fear, be dull as well as smooth; and the hedges need to be close and trim when there is no guide to warn or bring back the erring traveler. The system followed in this work will, therefore, at first, surprise somewhat sorrowfully those who are familiar with the practice of our class at the Working Men's College; for there, the pupil, having the master at his side to extricate him from such embarrassments as his first efforts may lead into, is _at once_ set to draw from a solid object, and soon finds entertainment in his efforts and interest in his difficulties. Of course the simplest object which it is possible to set before the eye is a sphere; and, practically, I find a child's toy, a white leather ball, better than anything else; as the gradations on balls of plaster of Paris, which I use sometimes to try the strength of pupils who have had previous practice, are a little too delicate for a beginner to perceive. It has been objected that a circle, or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines to draw. It is so;[A] but I do not want it to be drawn. All that his study of the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective; but in the sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle, becomes, merely by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is just as striking to the learner, whether his circular outline be true or false. He is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in due time, care of itself. I call it outline, for the sake of immediate intelligibility,--strictly speaking, it is merely the edge of the shade; no pupil in my class being ever allowed to draw an outline, in the ordinary sense. It is pointed out to him, from the first, that Nature relieves one mass, or one tint, against another; but outlines none. The outline exercise, the second suggested in this letter, is recommended, not to enable the pupil to draw outlines, but as the only means by which, unassisted, he can test his accuracy of eye, and discipline his hand. When the master is by, errors in the form and extent of shadows can be pointed out as easily as in outline, and the handling can be gradually corrected in details of the work. But the solitary student can only find out his own mistakes by help of the traced limit, and can only test the firmness of his hand by an exercise in which nothing but firmness is required; and during which all other considerations (as of softness, complexity, etc.) are entirely excluded. x. Both the system adopted at the Working Men's College, and that recommended here, agree, however, in one principle, which I consider the most important and special of all that are involved in my teaching: namely, the attaching its full importance, from the first, to local color. I believe that the endeavor to separate, in the course of instruction, the observation of light and shade from that of local color, has always been, and must always be, destructive of the student's power of accurate sight, and that it corrupts his taste as much as it retards his progress. I will not occupy the reader's time by any discussion of the principle here, but I wish him to note it as the only distinctive one in my system, so far as it _is_ a system. For the recommendation to the pupil to copy faithfully, and without alteration, whatever natural object he chooses to study, is serviceable, among other reasons, just because it gets rid of systematic rules altogether, and teaches people to draw, as country lads learn to ride, without saddle or stirrups; my main object being, at first, not to get my pupils to hold their reins prettily, but to "sit like a jackanapes, never off." xi. In these written instructions, therefore, it has always been with regret that I have seen myself forced to advise anything like monotonous or formal discipline. But, to the unassisted student, such formalities are indispensable, and I am not without hope that the sense of secure advancement, and the pleasure of independent effort, may render the following out of even the more tedious exercises here proposed, possible to the solitary learner, without weariness. But if it should be otherwise, and he finds the first steps painfully irksome, I can only desire him to consider whether the acquirement of so great a power as that of pictorial expression of thought be not worth some toil; or whether it is likely, in the natural order of matters in this working world, that so great a gift should be attainable by those who will give no price for it. xii. One task, however, of some difficulty, the student will find I have not imposed upon him: namely, learning the laws of perspective. It would be worth while to learn them, if he could do so easily; but without a master's help, and in the way perspective is at present explained in treatises, the difficulty is greater than the gain. For perspective is not of the slightest use, except in rudimentary work. You can draw the rounding line of a table in perspective, but you cannot draw the sweep of a sea bay; you can foreshorten a log of wood by it, but you cannot foreshorten an arm. Its laws are too gross and few to be applied to any subtle form; therefore, as you must learn to draw the subtle forms by the eye, certainly you may draw the simple ones. No great painters ever trouble themselves about perspective, and very few of them know its laws; they draw everything by the eye, and, naturally enough, disdain in the easy parts of their work rules which cannot help them in difficult ones. It would take about a month's labor to draw imperfectly, by laws of perspective, what any great Venetian will draw perfectly in five minutes, when he is throwing a wreath of leaves round a head, or bending the curves of a pattern in and out among the folds of drapery. It is true that when perspective was first discovered, everybody amused themselves with it; and all the great painters put fine saloons and arcades behind their Madonnas, merely to show that they could draw in perspective: but even this was generally done by them only to catch the public eye, and they disdained the perspective so much, that though they took the greatest pains with the circlet of a crown, or the rim of a crystal cup, in the heart of their picture, they would twist their capitals of columns and towers of churches about in the background in the most wanton way, wherever they liked the lines to go, provided only they left just perspective enough to please the public. xiii. In modern days, I doubt if any artist among us, except David Roberts, knows so much perspective as would enable him to draw a Gothic arch to scale at a given angle and distance. Turner, though he was professor of perspective to the Royal Academy, did not know what he professed, and never, as far as I remember, drew a single building in true perspective in his life; he drew them only with as much perspective as suited him. Prout also knew nothing of perspective, and twisted his buildings, as Turner did, into whatever shapes he liked. I do not justify this; and would recommend the student at least to treat perspective with common civility, but to pay no court to it. The best way he can learn it, by himself, is by taking a pane of glass, fixed in a frame, so that it can be set upright before the eye, at the distance at which the proposed sketch is intended to be seen. Let the eye be placed at some fixed point, opposite the middle of the pane of glass, but as high or as low as the student likes; then with a brush at the end of a stick, and a little body-color that will adhere to the glass, the lines of the landscape may be traced on the glass, as you see them through it. When so traced they are all in true perspective. If the glass be sloped in any direction, the lines are still in true perspective, only it is perspective calculated for a sloping plane, while common perspective always supposes the plane of the picture to be vertical. It is good, in early practice, to accustom yourself to inclose your subject, before sketching it, with a light frame of wood held upright before you; it will show you what you may legitimately take into your picture, and what choice there is between a narrow foreground near you, and a wide one farther off; also, what height of tree or building you can properly take in, etc.[B] xiv. Of figure drawing, nothing is said in the following pages, because I do not think figures, as chief subjects, can be drawn to any good purpose by an amateur. As accessaries in landscape, they are just to be drawn on the same principles as anything else. xv. Lastly: If any of the directions given subsequently to the student should be found obscure by him, or if at any stage of the recommended practice he find himself in difficulties which I have not enough provided against, he may apply by letter to Mr. Ward, who is my under drawing-master at the Working Men's College (45 Great Ormond Street), and who will give any required assistance, on the lowest terms that can remunerate him for the occupation of his time. I have not leisure myself in general to answer letters of inquiry, however much I may desire to do so; but Mr. Ward has always the power of referring any question to me when he thinks it necessary. I have good hope, however, that enough guidance is given in this work to prevent the occurrence of any serious embarrassment; and I believe that the student who obeys its directions will find, on the whole, that the best answerer of questions is perseverance; and the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills. [1857.] FOOTNOTES: [A] Or, more accurately, appears to be so, because any one can see an error in a circle. [B] If the student is fond of architecture, and wishes to know more of perspective than he can learn in this rough way, Mr. Runciman (of 49 Acacia Road, St. John's Wood), who was my first drawing-master, and to whom I owe many happy hours, can teach it him quickly, easily, and rightly. [Mr. Runciman has died since this was written: Mr. Ward's present address is Bedford Chambers, 28 Southampton Street, Strand, London, W.C.] THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING. LETTER I. ON FIRST PRACTICE. 1. MY DEAR READER,--Whether this book is to be of use to you or not, depends wholly on your reason for wishing to learn to draw. If you desire only to possess a graceful accomplishment, to be able to converse in a fluent manner about drawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in listless hours, I cannot help you: but if you wish to learn drawing that you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot be described in words, either to assist your own memory of them, or to convey distinct ideas of them to other people; if you wish to obtain quicker perceptions of the beauty of the natural world, and to preserve something like a true image of beautiful things that pass away, or which you must yourself leave; if, also, you wish to understand the minds of great painters, and to be able to appreciate their work sincerely, seeing it for yourself, and loving it, not merely taking up the thoughts of other people about it; then I _can_ help you, or, which is better, show you how to help yourself. 2. Only you must understand, first of all, that these powers, which indeed are noble and desirable, cannot be got without work. It is much easier to learn to draw well, than it is to learn to play well on any musical instrument; but you know that it takes three or four years of practice, giving three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary command over the keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly command of your pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it, can be acquired without painstaking, or in a _very_ short time. The kind of drawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil; profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person, after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will try to copy the commonest piece of real work--suppose a lithograph on the titlepage of a new opera air, or a wood-cut in the cheapest illustrated newspaper of the day,--they will find themselves entirely beaten. And yet that common lithograph was drawn with coarse chalk, much more difficult to manage than the pencil of which an accomplished young lady is supposed to have command; and that wood-cut was drawn in urgent haste, and half spoiled in the cutting afterwards; and both were done by people whom nobody thinks of as artists, or praises for their power; both were done for daily bread, with no more artist's pride than any simple handicraftsmen feel in the work they live by. 3. Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a new language, without some hard and disagreeable labor. But do not, on the other hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear that you may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is indeed true that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, draw instinctively, and get on almost without teaching; though never without toil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there are many degrees: it will take one person a much longer time than another to attain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained are never quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when the faculties are naturally adapted to the study. But I have never yet, in the experiments I have made, met with a person who could not learn to draw at all; and, in general, there is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin, or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree, if their lot in life requires them to possess such knowledge. 4. Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: of which hours if you have one to spare at present, we may as well begin at once. EXERCISE I. 5. Everything that you can see in the world around you, presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors variously shaded.[1] Some of these patches of color have an appearance of lines or texture within them, as a piece of cloth or silk has of threads, or an animal's skin shows texture of hairs: but whether this be the case or not, the first broad aspect of the thing is that of a patch of some definite color; and the first thing to be learned is, how to produce extents of smooth color, without texture. 6. This can only be done properly with a brush; but a brush, being soft at the point, causes so much uncertainty in the touch of an unpracticed hand, that it is hardly possible to learn to draw first with it, and it is better to take, in early practice, some instrument with a hard and fine point, both that we may give some support to the hand, and that by working over the subject with so delicate a point, the attention may be properly directed to all the most minute parts of it. Even the best artists need occasionally to study subjects with a pointed instrument, in order thus to discipline their attention: and a beginner must be content to do so for a considerable period. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] 7. Also, observe that before we trouble ourselves about differences of color, we must be able to lay on _one_ color properly, in whatever gradations of depth and whatever shapes we want. We will try, therefore, first to lay on tints or patches of gray, of whatever depth we want, with a pointed instrument. Take any finely pointed steel pen (one of Gillott's lithographic crowquills is best), and a piece of quite smooth, but not shining, note-paper, cream laid, and get some ink that has stood already some time in the inkstand, so as to be quite black, and as thick as it can be without clogging the pen. Take a rule, and draw four straight lines, so as to inclose a square, or nearly a square, about as large as _a_, Fig. 1. I say nearly a square, because it does not in the least matter whether it is quite square or not, the object being merely to get a space inclosed by straight lines. 8. Now, try to fill in that square space with crossed lines, so completely and evenly that it shall look like a square patch of gray silk or cloth, cut out and laid on the white paper, as at _b_. Cover it quickly, first with straightish lines, in any direction you like, not troubling yourself to draw them much closer or neater than those in the square _a_. Let them quite dry before retouching them. (If you draw three or four squares side by side, you may always be going on with one while the others are drying.) Then cover these lines with others in a different direction, and let those dry; then in another direction still, and let those dry. Always wait long enough to run no risk of blotting, and then draw the lines as quickly as you can. Each ought to be laid on as swiftly as the dash of the pen of a good writer; but if you try to reach this great speed at first, you will go over the edge of the square, which is a fault in this exercise. Yet it is better to do so now and then than to draw the lines very slowly; for if you do, the pen leaves a little dot of ink at the end of each line, and these dots spoil your work. So draw each line quickly, stopping always as nearly as you can at the edge of the square. The ends of lines which go over the edge are afterwards to be removed with the penknife, but not till you have done the whole work, otherwise you roughen the paper, and the next line that goes over the edge makes a blot. 9. When you have gone over the whole three or four times, you will find some parts of the square look darker than other parts. Now try to make the lighter parts as dark as the rest, so that the whole may be of equal depth or darkness. You will find, on examining the work, that where it looks darkest the lines are closest, or there are some much darker lines than elsewhere; therefore you must put in other lines, or little scratches and dots, _between_ the lines in the paler parts; and where there are any very conspicuous dark lines, scratch them out lightly with the penknife, for the eye must not be attracted by any line in particular. The more carefully and delicately you fill in the little gaps and holes the better; you will get on faster by doing two or three squares perfectly than a great many badly. As the tint gets closer and begins to look even, work with very little ink in your pen, so as hardly to make any mark on the paper; and at last, where it is too dark, use the edge of your penknife very lightly, and for some time, to wear it softly into an even tone. You will find that the greatest difficulty consists in getting evenness: one bit will always look darker than another bit of your square; or there will be a granulated and sandy look over the whole. When you find your paper quite rough and in a mess, give it up and begin another square, but do not rest satisfied till you have done your best with every square. The tint at last ought at least to be as close and even as that in _b_, Fig. 1. You will find, however, that it is very difficult to get a pale tint; because, naturally, the ink lines necessary to produce a close tint at all, blacken the paper more than you want. You must get over this difficulty not so much by leaving the lines wide apart as by trying to draw them excessively fine, lightly and swiftly; being very cautious in filling in; and, at last, passing the penknife over the whole. By keeping several squares in progress at one time, and reserving your pen for the light one just when the ink is nearly exhausted, you may get on better. The paper ought, at last, to look lightly and evenly toned all over, with no lines distinctly visible. EXERCISE II. 10. As this exercise in shading is very tiresome, it will be well to vary it by proceeding with another at the same time. The power of shading rightly depends mainly on lightness of hand and keenness of sight; but there are other qualities required in drawing, dependent not merely on lightness, but steadiness of hand; and the eye, to be perfect in its power, must be made accurate as well as keen, and not only see shrewdly, but measure justly. 11. Possess yourself therefore of any cheap work on botany containing _outline_ plates of leaves and flowers, it does not matter whether bad or good: Baxter's British Flowering Plants is quite good enough. Copy any of the simplest outlines, first with a soft pencil, following it, by the eye, as nearly as you can; if it does not look right in proportions, rub out and correct it, always by the eye, till you think it is right: when you have got it to your mind, lay tracing-paper on the book; on this paper trace the outline you have been copying, and apply it to your own; and having thus ascertained the faults, correct them all patiently, till you have got it as nearly accurate as may be. Work with a very soft pencil, and do not rub out so hard[2] as to spoil the surface of your paper; never mind how dirty the paper gets, but do not roughen it; and let the false outlines alone where they do not really interfere with the true one. It is a good thing to accustom yourself to hew and shape your drawing out of a dirty piece of paper. When you have got it as right as you can, take a quill pen, not very fine at the point; rest your hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to hold the pen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising your pen point as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on one part of the line than on another. In most outline drawings of the present day, parts of the curves are thickened to give an effect of shade; all such outlines are bad, but they will serve well enough for your exercises, provided you do not imitate this character: it is better, however, if you can, to choose a book of pure outlines. It does not in the least matter whether your pen outline be thin or thick; but it matters greatly that it should be _equal_, not heavier in one place than in another. The power to be obtained is that of drawing an even line slowly and in any direction; all dashing lines, or approximations to penmanship, are bad. The pen should, as it were, walk slowly over the ground, and you should be able at any moment to stop it, or to turn it in any other direction, like a well-managed horse. 12. As soon as you can copy every curve _slowly_ and accurately, you have made satisfactory progress; but you will find the difficulty is in the slowness. It is easy to draw what appears to be a good line with a sweep of the hand, or with what is called freedom;[3] the real difficulty and masterliness is in never letting the hand _be_ free, but keeping it under entire control at every part of the line. EXERCISE III. 13. Meantime, you are always to be going on with your shaded squares, and chiefly with these, the outline exercises being taken up only for rest. [Illustration: FIG. 2.] As soon as you find you have some command of the pen as a shading instrument, and can lay a pale or dark tint as you choose, try to produce gradated spaces like Fig. 2, the dark tint passing gradually into the lighter ones. Nearly all expression of form, in drawing, depends on your power of gradating delicately; and the gradation is always most skillful which passes from one tint into another very little paler. Draw, therefore, two parallel lines for limits to your work, as in Fig. 2, and try to gradate the shade evenly from white to black, passing over the greatest possible distance, yet so that every part of the band may have visible change in it. The perception of gradation is very deficient in all beginners (not to say, in many artists), and you will probably, for some time, think your gradation skillful enough, when it is quite patchy and imperfect. By getting a piece of gray shaded ribbon, and comparing it with your drawing, you may arrive, in early stages of your work, at a wholesome dissatisfaction with it. Widen your band little by little as you get more skillful, so as to give the gradation more lateral space, and accustom yourself at the same time to look for gradated spaces in Nature. The sky is the largest and the most beautiful; watch it at twilight, after the sun is down, and try to consider each pane of glass in the window you look through as a piece of paper colored blue, or gray, or purple, as it happens to be, and observe how quietly and continuously the gradation extends over the space in the window, of one or two feet square. Observe the shades on the outside and inside of a common white cup or bowl, which make it look round and hollow;[4] and then on folds of white drapery; and thus gradually you will be led to observe the more subtle transitions of the light as it increases or declines on flat surfaces. At last, when your eye gets keen and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature. 14. But it will not be in your power yet awhile to draw from any objects in which the gradations are varied and complicated; nor will it be a bad omen for your future progress, and for the use that art is to be made of by you, if the first thing at which you aim should be a little bit of sky. So take any narrow space of evening sky, that you can usually see, between the boughs of a tree, or between two chimneys, or through the corner of a pane in the window you like best to sit at, and try to gradate a little space of white paper as evenly as that is gradated--as _tenderly_ you cannot gradate it without color, no, nor with color either; but you may do it as evenly; or, if you get impatient with your spots and lines of ink, when you look at the beauty of the sky, the sense you will have gained of that beauty is something to be thankful for. But you ought not to be impatient with your pen and ink; for all great painters, however delicate their perception of color, are fond of the peculiar effect of light which may be got in a pen-and-ink sketch, and in a wood-cut, by the gleaming of the white paper between the black lines; and if you cannot gradate well with pure black lines, you will never gradate well with pale ones. By looking at any common wood-cuts, in the cheap publications of the day, you may see how gradation is given to the sky by leaving the lines farther and farther apart; but you must make your lines as fine as you can, as well as far apart, towards the light; and do not try to make them long or straight, but let them cross irregularly in any directions easy to your hand, depending on nothing but their gradation for your effect. On this point of direction of lines, however, I shall have to tell you more, presently; in the meantime, do not trouble yourself about it. EXERCISE IV. 15. As soon as you find you can gradate tolerably with the pen, take an H. or HH. pencil, using its point to produce shade, from the darkest possible to the palest, in exactly the same manner as the pen, lightening, however, now with india-rubber instead of the penknife. You will find that all _pale_ tints of shade are thus easily producible with great precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same dark power as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is apt to become glossy and metallic, or dirty-looking, or sandy. Persevere, however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removing any single speck or line that may be too black, with the _point_ of the knife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink. If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over with india-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively fine touches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale to perfect evenness with the darker spots. You cannot use the point too delicately or cunningly in doing this; work with it as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly's wing. 16. At this stage of your progress, if not before, you may be assured that some clever friend will come in, and hold up his hands in mocking amazement, and ask you who could set you to that "niggling;" and if you persevere in it, you will have to sustain considerable persecution from your artistical acquaintances generally, who will tell you that all good drawing depends on "boldness." But never mind them. You do not hear them tell a child, beginning music, to lay its little hand with a crash among the keys, in imitation of the great masters: yet they might, as reasonably as they may tell you to be bold in the present state of your knowledge. Bold, in the sense of being undaunted, yes; but bold in the sense of being careless, confident, or exhibitory,--no,--no, and a thousand times no; for, even if you were not a beginner, it would be bad advice that made you bold. Mischief may easily be done quickly, but good and beautiful work is generally done slowly; you will find no boldness in the way a flower or a bird's wing is painted; and if Nature is not bold at her work, do you think you ought to be at yours? So never mind what people say, but work with your pencil point very patiently; and if you can trust me in anything, trust me when I tell you, that though there are all kinds and ways of art,--large work for large places, small work for narrow places, slow work for people who can wait, and quick work for people who cannot,--there is one quality, and, I think, only one, in which all great and good art agrees;--it is all delicate art. Coarse art is always bad art. You cannot understand this at present, because you do not know yet how much tender thought, and subtle care, the great painters put into touches that at first look coarse; but, believe me, it is true, and you will find it is so in due time. 17. You will be perhaps also troubled, in these first essays at pencil drawing, by noticing that more delicate gradations are got in an instant by a chance touch of the india-rubber, than by an hour's labor with the point; and you may wonder why I tell you to produce tints so painfully, which might, it appears, be obtained with ease. But there are two reasons: the first, that when you come to draw forms, you must be able to gradate with absolute precision, in whatever place and direction you wish; not in any wise vaguely, as the india-rubber does it: and, secondly, that all natural shadows are more or less mingled with gleams of light. In the darkness of ground there is the light of the little pebbles or dust; in the darkness of foliage, the glitter of the leaves; in the darkness of flesh, transparency; in that of a stone, granulation: in every case there is some mingling of light, which cannot be represented by the leaden tone which you get by rubbing, or by an instrument known to artists as the "stump." When you can manage the point properly, you will indeed be able to do much also with this instrument, or with your fingers; but then you will have to retouch the flat tints afterwards, so as to put life and light into them, and that can only be done with the point. Labor on, therefore, courageously, with that only. EXERCISE V. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] 18. When you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point, get a good large alphabet, and try to _tint_ the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as _a b_, _a c_, Fig. 3, and then scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter A, inclosed within the lines, being in what Turner would have called a "state of forwardness." Then, when you are satisfied with the shape of the letter, draw pen-and-ink lines firmly round the tint, as at _d_, and remove any touches outside the limit, first with the india-rubber, and then with the penknife, so that all may look clear and right. If you rub out any of the pencil inside the outline of the letter, retouch it, closing it up to the inked line. The straight lines of the outline are all to be ruled,[5] but the curved lines are to be drawn by the eye and hand; and you will soon find what good practice there is in getting the curved letters, such as Bs, Cs, etc., to stand quite straight, and come into accurate form. 19. All these exercises are very irksome, and they are not to be persisted in alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in any of them. An entire master of the pencil or brush ought, indeed, to be able to draw any form at once, as Giotto his circle; but such skill as this is only to be expected of the consummate master, having pencil in hand all his life, and all day long,--hence the force of Giotto's proof of his skill; and it is quite possible to draw very beautifully, without attaining even an approximation to such a power; the main point being, not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish, but that the line which we intended or wished to draw should be right. If we always see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the hand may stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it does not matter how firm the hand is. Do not therefore torment yourself because you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently, sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase of power; and as soon as you can draw your letters pretty well, here is a more amusing exercise for you. EXERCISE VI. 20. Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of leaves, and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or other light ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will find the looking at it hurt your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you will be puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in shade; and the sky blue, or gray, or dull white. A wholly gray or rainy day is the best for this practice. 21. You will see that all the boughs of the tree are dark against the sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the roundness of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with pencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct and alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in curvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between them with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave the hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy the whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do not take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused network or mist; leave them all out,[6] drawing only the main branches as far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being not to draw a tree, but to learn how to do so. When you have got the thing as nearly right as you can,--and it is better to make one good study, than twenty left unnecessarily inaccurate,--take your pen, and put a fine outline to all the boughs, as you did to your letter, taking care, as far as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so as not to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to affirm the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental roughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross, or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement in this kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It may perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to mark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly and careless, and the outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolence into attention and precision. The outline should be about the thickness of that in Fig. 4, which represents the ramification of a small stone pine, only I have not endeavored to represent the pencil shading within the outline, as I could not easily express it in a wood-cut; and you have nothing to do at present with the indication of foliage above, of which in another place. You may also draw your trees as much larger than this figure as you like; only, however large they may be, keep the outline as delicate, and draw the branches far enough into their outer sprays to give quite as slender ramification as you have in this figure, otherwise you do not get good enough practice out of them. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] 22. You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give you some new notion about trees. But when you are tired of tree boughs, take any forms whatever which are drawn in flat color, one upon another; as patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance), executed in two colors only; and practice drawing them of the right shape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depth required. In doing this, you will first have to meet the difficulty of representing depth of color by depth of shade. Thus a pattern of ultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of gray than a pattern of yellow. 23. And now it is both time for you to begin to learn the mechanical use of the brush; and necessary for you to do so in order to provide yourself with the gradated scale of color which you will want. If you can, by any means, get acquainted with any ordinary skillful water-color painter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with a brush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long while yet, to begin to color, but because the brush is often more convenient than the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooner you know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, you have no opportunity of seeing how water-color is laid on by a workman of any kind, the following directions will help you:-- EXERCISE VII. 24. Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so as to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub much more, and the color gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two teaspoonfuls of water to the color you have rubbed down, and mix it well up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long. 25. Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your brush into the color you have mixed, and taking up as much of the liquid as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay a pond or runlet of color along the top edge. Lead this pond of color gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the color as full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only that it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should, never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all in. When you get to the bottom, the color will lodge there in a great wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and with the dry brush take up the superfluous color as you would with a sponge, till it all looks even. 26. In leading the color down, you will find your brush continually go over the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not endeavor to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great thing is to get the color to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in alternate blots and pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the square as fast as possible, with such attention to your limit as you are able to give. The use of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally to strike the color up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first thing is to get it even,--the power of rightly striking the edge comes only by time and practice: even the greatest artists rarely can do this quite perfectly. 27. When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does not communicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares, as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again with the first, and put another coat over it, and so on over all the others. The use of turning the paper upside down is to neutralize the increase of darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwise take place from the ponding of the color. 28. Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of your lips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will save you from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw the brush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even wipe it as you would a pen when you want it very dry, without doing harm, provided you do not crush it upwards. Get a good brush at first, and cherish it; it will serve you longer and better than many bad ones. 29. When you have done the squares all over again, do them a third time, always trying to keep your edges as neat as possible. When your color is exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to as much as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternate squares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, and dry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to the same tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which then will mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of your unskillfulness. 30. As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and then draw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the spaces so produced between the straight line and the circumference; and then draw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No. II., and fill up those, until you can lay on color quite evenly in any shape you want. 31. You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always put exactly the same quantity of water to the color, that the darker the color is, the more difficult it becomes to lay it on evenly. Therefore, when you have gained some definite degree of power, try to fill in the forms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead of laying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint, however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much of it is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as it dries. A little experience will teach you how apt the color is to do this, and how to prevent it; not that it needs always to be prevented, for a great master in water-colors will sometimes draw a firm outline, when he _wants_ one, simply by letting the color dry in this way at the edge. 32. When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darker color, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as it is led on from part to part. You will then find the following method useful. Lay in the color very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, that you can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all the outlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly wet everywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker color, and lay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid color. It will spread gradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to the outlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fills its place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as a single dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately. 33. Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint, you must try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the color with three or four teaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away about two-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale color. Sloping your paper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a space between them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at the top of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the first brushful of color, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep in water, and mix up the color on the plate quickly with as much more water as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this paler color, lead the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the color again, and thus lead down the tint, always dipping in water once between each replenishing of the brush, and stirring the color on the plate well, but as quickly as you can. Go on until the color has become so pale that you cannot see it; then wash your brush thoroughly in water, and carry the wave down a little farther with that, and then absorb it with the dry brush, and leave it to dry. 34. If you get to the bottom of your paper before your color gets pale, you may either take longer paper, or begin, with the tint as it was when you left off, on another sheet; but be sure to exhaust it to pure whiteness at last. When all is quite dry, recommence at the top with another similar mixture of color, and go down in the same way. Then again, and then again, and so continually until the color at the top of the paper is as dark as your cake of Prussian blue, and passes down into pure white paper at the end of your column, with a perfectly smooth gradation from one into the other. 35. You will find at first that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead of evenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up more water in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on the plate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next. Practice only will enable you to do it well; the best artists cannot always get gradations of this kind quite to their minds; nor do they ever leave them on their pictures without after-touching. 36. As you get more power, and can strike the color more quickly down, you will be able to gradate in less compass;[7] beginning with a small quantity of color, and adding a drop of water, instead of a brushful; with finer brushes, also, you may gradate to a less scale. But slight skill will enable you to test the relations of color to shade as far as is necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:-- 37. Take cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[8] Cut a narrow slip, all the way down, of each gradated color, and set the three slips side by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across all the three, so as to divide them into fifty degrees, and number the degrees of each, from light to dark, 1, 2, 3, etc. If you have gradated them rightly, the darkest part either of the red or blue will be nearly equal in power to the darkest part of the blue-black, and any degree of the black slip will also, accurately enough for our purpose, balance in weight the degree similarly numbered in the red or the blue slip. Then, when you are drawing from objects of a crimson or blue color, if you can match their color by any compartment of the crimson or blue in your scales, the gray in the compartment of the gray scale marked with the same number is the gray which must represent that crimson or blue in your light and shade drawing. 38. Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will find that you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[9] for yellow and scarlet, so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot approach to black; we cannot have, properly speaking, a dark yellow or dark scarlet. Make your scales of full yellow, blue, and scarlet, half-way down; passing _then_ gradually to white. Afterwards use lake to darken the upper half of the vermilion and gamboge; and Prussian blue to darken the cobalt. You will thus have three more scales, passing from white nearly to black, through yellow and orange, through sky-blue, and through scarlet. By mixing the gamboge and Prussian blue you may make another with green; mixing the cobalt and lake, another with violet; the sepia alone will make a forcible brown one; and so on, until you have as many scales as you like, passing from black to white through different colors. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equally divided, the compartment or degree No. 1 of the gray will represent in chiaroscuro the No. 1 of all the other colors; No. 2 of gray the No. 2 of the other colors, and so on. 39. It is only necessary, however, in this matter that you should understand the principle; for it would never be possible for you to gradate your scales so truly as to make them practically accurate and serviceable; and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, and were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, you could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of a frost-bitten apple. But when once you fully understand the principle, and see how all colors contain as it were a certain quantity of darkness, or power of dark relief from white--some more, some less; and how this pitch or power of each may be represented by equivalent values of gray, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an approximation by a glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at all. 40. You must now go on, again with the pen, drawing patterns, and any shapes of shade that you think pretty, as veinings in marble or tortoiseshell, spots in surfaces of shells, etc., as tenderly as you can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colors; and when you find you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding. EXERCISE VIII. 41. Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first round or oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and the smoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your table near the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about the size of _a_ in Fig. 5 (it had better not be much larger), on a piece of not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fall on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much consequence. 42. Now if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything; I mean, anything that is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if you can draw the stone _rightly_, everything within reach of art is also within yours. For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing _Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be able to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses; not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces. Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds are rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself is round, and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work, which is often very flat indeed. [Illustration: FIG. 5.] Therefore, set yourself steadily to conquer that round stone, and you have won the battle. 43. Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that the side of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper; that the side of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and that the light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown to the right on the paper itself by the stone: the general appearance of things being more or less as in _a_, Fig. 5, the spots on the stone excepted, of which more presently. 44. Now, remember always what was stated in the outset, that everything you can see in Nature is seen only so far as it is lighter or darker than the things about it, or of a different color from them. It is either seen as a patch of one color on a ground of another; or as a pale thing relieved from a dark thing, or a dark thing from a pale thing. And if you can put on patches of color or shade of exactly the same size, shape, and gradations as those on the object and its ground, you will produce the appearance of the object and its ground. The best draughtsman--Titian and Paul Veronese themselves--could do no more than this; and you will soon be able to get some power of doing it in an inferior way, if you once understand the exceeding simplicity of what is to be done. Suppose you have a brown book on a white sheet of paper, on a red tablecloth. You have nothing to do but to put on spaces of red, white, and brown, in the same shape, and gradated from dark to light in the same degrees, and your drawing is done. If you will not look at what you see, if you try to put on brighter or duller colors than are there, if you try to put them on with a dash or a blot, or to cover your paper with "vigorous" lines, or to produce anything, in fact, but the plain, unaffected, and finished tranquillity of the thing before you, you need not hope to get on. Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself up for her master. But forget yourself, and try to obey her, and you will find obedience easier and happier than you think. 45. The real difficulties are to get the refinement of the forms and the evenness of the gradations. You may depend upon it, when you are dissatisfied with your work, it is always too coarse or too uneven. It may not be wrong--in all probability is not wrong, in any (so-called) great point. But its edges are not true enough in outline; and its shades are in blotches, or scratches, or full of white holes. Get it more tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful. 46. Do not, therefore, think your drawing must be weak because you have a finely pointed pen in your hand. Till you can draw with that, you can draw with nothing; when you can draw with that, you can draw with a log of wood charred at the end. True boldness and power are only to be gained by care. Even in fencing and dancing, all ultimate ease depends on early precision in the commencement; much more in singing or drawing. 47. Now I do not want you to copy my sketch in Fig. 5, but to copy the stone before you in the way that my sketch is done. To which end, first measure the extreme length of the stone with compasses, and mark that length on your paper; then, between the points marked, leave something like the form of the stone in light, scrawling the paper all over, round it; _b_, in Fig. 5, is a beginning of this kind. Rather leave too much room for the high light, than too little; and then more cautiously fill in the shade, shutting the light gradually up, and putting in the dark slowly on the dark side. You need not plague yourself about accuracy of shape, because, till you have practiced a great deal, it is impossible for you to draw the shape of the stone quite truly, and you must gradually gain correctness by means of these various exercises: what you have mainly to do at present is, to get the stone to look solid and round, not much minding what its exact contour is--only draw it as nearly right as you can without vexation; and you will get it more right by thus feeling your way to it in shade, than if you tried to draw the outline at first. For you can _see_ no outline; what you see is only a certain space of gradated shade, with other such spaces about it; and those pieces of shade you are to imitate as nearly as you can, by scrawling the paper over till you get them to the right shape, with the same gradations which they have in Nature. And this is really more likely to be done well, if you have to fight your way through a little confusion in the sketch, than if you have an accurately traced outline. For instance, having sketched the fossil sea-urchin at _a_, in Fig. 5, whose form, though irregular, required more care in following than that of a common stone, I was going to draw it also under another effect; reflected light bringing its dark side out from the background: but when I had laid on the first few touches I thought it would be better to stop, and let you see how I had begun it, at _b_. In which beginning it will be observed that nothing is so determined but that I can more or less modify, and add to or diminish the contour as I work on, the lines which suggest the outline being blended with the others if I do not want them; and the having to fill up the vacancies and conquer the irregularities of such a sketch will probably secure a higher completion at last, than if half an hour had been spent in getting a true outline before beginning. 48. In doing this, however, take care not to get the drawing too dark. In order to ascertain what the shades of it really are, cut a round hole, about half the size of a pea, in a piece of white paper the color of that you use to draw on. Hold this bit of paper with the hole in it, between you and your stone; and pass the paper backwards and forwards, so as to see the different portions of the stone (or other subject) through the hole. You will find that, thus, the circular hole looks like one of the patches of color you have been accustomed to match, only changing in depth as it lets different pieces of the stone be seen through it. You will be able thus actually to _match_ the color of the stone at any part of it, by tinting the paper beside the circular opening. And you will find that this opening never looks quite _black_, but that all the roundings of the stone are given by subdued grays.[10] 49. You will probably find, also, that some parts of the stone, or of the paper it lies on, look luminous through the opening; so that the little circle then tells as a light spot instead of a dark spot. When this is so, you cannot imitate it, for you have no means of getting light brighter than white paper: but by holding the paper more sloped towards the light, you will find that many parts of the stone, which before looked light through the hole, then look dark through it; and if you can place the paper in such a position that every part of the stone looks slightly dark, the little hole will tell always as a spot of shade, and if your drawing is put in the same light, you can imitate or match every gradation. You will be amazed to find, under these circumstances, how slight the differences of tint are, by which, through infinite delicacy of gradation, Nature can express form. If any part of your subject will obstinately show itself as a light through the hole, that part you need not hope to imitate. Leave it white; you can do no more. 50. When you have done the best you can to get the general form, proceed to finish, by imitating the texture and all the cracks and stains of the stone as closely as you can; and note, in doing this, that cracks or fissures of any kind, whether between stones in walls, or in the grain of timber or rocks, or in any of the thousand other conditions they present, are never expressible by single black lines, or lines of simple shadow. A crack must always have its complete system of light and shade, however small its scale. It is in reality a little ravine, with a dark or shady side, and light or sunny side, and, usually, shadow in the bottom. This is one of the instances in which it may be as well to understand the reason of the appearance; it is not often so in drawing, for the aspects of things are so subtle and confused that they cannot in general be explained; and in the endeavor to explain some, we are sure to lose sight of others, while the natural overestimate of the importance of those on which the attention is fixed causes us to exaggerate them, so that merely scientific draughtsmen caricature a third part of Nature, and miss two-thirds. The best scholar is he whose eye is so keen as to see at once how the thing looks, and who need not therefore trouble himself with any reasons why it looks so: but few people have this acuteness of perception; and to those who are destitute of it, a little pointing out of rule and reason will be a help, especially when a master is not near them. I never allow my own pupils to ask the reason of anything, because, as I watch their work, I can always show them how the thing is, and what appearance they are missing in it; but when a master is not by to direct the sight, science may, here and there, be allowed to do so in his stead. 51. Generally, then, every solid illumined object--for instance, the stone you are drawing--has a light side turned towards the light, a dark side turned away from the light, and a shadow, which is cast on something else (as by the stone on the paper it is set upon). You may sometimes be placed so as to see only the light side and shadow, sometimes only the dark side and shadow, and sometimes both or either without the shadow; but in most positions solid objects will show all the three, as the stone does here. 52. Hold up your hand with the edge of it towards you, as you sit now with your side to the window, so that the flat of your hand is turned to the window. You will see one side of your hand distinctly lighted, the other distinctly in shade. Here are light side and dark side, with no seen shadow; the shadow being detached, perhaps on the table, perhaps on the other side of the room; you need not look for it at present. 53. Take a sheet of note-paper, and holding it edgewise, as you hold your hand, wave it up and down past the side of your hand which is turned from the light, the paper being of course farther from the window. You will see, as it passes, a strong gleam of light strike on your hand, and light it considerably on its dark side. This light is _reflected_ light. It is thrown back from the paper (on which it strikes first in coming from the window) to the surface of your hand, just as a ball would be if somebody threw it through the window at the wall and you caught it at the rebound. Next, instead of the note-paper, take a red book, or a piece of scarlet cloth. You will see that the gleam of light falling on your hand, as you wave the book, is now reddened. Take a blue book, and you will find the gleam is blue. Thus every object will cast some of its own color back in the light that it reflects. 54. Now it is not only these books or papers that reflect light to your hand: every object in the room on that side of it reflects some, but more feebly, and the colors mixing all together form a neutral[11] light, which lets the color of your hand itself be more distinctly seen than that of any object which reflects light to it; but if there were no reflected light, that side of your hand would look as black as a coal. 55. Objects are seen therefore, in general, partly by direct light, and partly by light reflected from the objects around them, or from the atmosphere and clouds. The color of their light sides depends much on that of the direct light, and that of the dark sides on the colors of the objects near them. It is therefore impossible to say beforehand what color an object will have at any point of its surface, that color depending partly on its own tint, and partly on infinite combinations of rays reflected from other things. The only certain fact about dark sides is, that their color will be changeful, and that a picture which gives them merely darker shades of the color of the light sides must assuredly be bad. 56. Now, lay your hand flat on the white paper you are drawing on. You will see one side of each finger lighted, one side dark, and the shadow of your hand on the paper. Here, therefore, are the three divisions of shade seen at once. And although the paper is white, and your hand of a rosy color somewhat darker than white, yet you will see that the shadow all along, just under the finger which casts it, is darker than the flesh, and is of a very deep gray. The reason of this is, that much light is reflected from the paper to the dark side of your finger, but very little is reflected from other things to the paper itself in that chink under your finger. 57. In general, for this reason, a shadow, or, at any rate, the part of the shadow nearest the object, is darker than the dark side of the object. I say in general, because a thousand accidents may interfere to prevent its being so. Take a little bit of glass, as a wine-glass, or the ink-bottle, and play it about a little on the side of your hand farthest from the window; you will presently find you are throwing gleams of light all over the dark side of your hand, and in some positions of the glass the reflection from it will annihilate the shadow altogether, and you will see your hand dark on the white paper. Now a stupid painter would represent, for instance, a drinking-glass beside the hand of one of his figures, and because he had been taught by rule that "shadow was darker than the dark side," he would never think of the reflection from the glass, but paint a dark gray under the hand, just as if no glass were there. But a great painter would be sure to think of the true effect, and paint it; and then comes the stupid critic, and wonders why the hand is so light on its dark side. 58. Thus it is always dangerous to assert anything as a _rule_ in matters of art; yet it is useful for you to remember that, in a general way, a shadow is darker than the dark side of the thing that casts it, supposing the colors otherwise the same; that is to say, when a white object casts a shadow on a white surface, or a dark object on a dark surface: the rule will not hold if the colors are different, the shadow of a black object on a white surface being, of course, not so dark, usually, as the black thing casting it. The only way to ascertain the ultimate truth in such matters is to _look_ for it; but, in the meantime, you will be helped by noticing that the cracks in the stone are little ravines, on one side of which the light strikes sharply, while the other is in shade. This dark side usually casts a little darker shadow at the bottom of the crack; and the general tone of the stone surface is not so bright as the light bank of the ravine. And, therefore, if you get the surface of the object of a uniform tint, more or less indicative of shade, and then scratch out a white spot or streak in it of any shape; by putting a dark touch beside this white one, you may turn it, as you choose, into either a ridge or an incision, into either a boss or a cavity. If you put the dark touch on the side of it nearest the sun, or rather, nearest the place that the light comes from, you will make it a cut or cavity; if you put it on the opposite side, you will make it a ridge or mound; and the complete success of the effect depends less on depth of shade than on the rightness of the drawing; that is to say, on the evident correspondence of the form of the shadow with the form that casts it. In drawing rocks, or wood, or anything irregularly shaped, you will gain far more by a little patience in following the forms carefully, though with slight touches, than by labored finishing of texture of surface and transparencies of shadow. 59. When you have got the whole well into shape, proceed to lay on the stains and spots with great care, quite as much as you gave to the forms. Very often, spots or bars of local color do more to express form than even the light and shade, and they are always interesting as the means by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into her lights; an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speaking of composition. _a_, in Fig. 5, is a rough sketch of a fossil sea-urchin, in which the projections of the shell are of black flint, coming through a chalky surface. These projections form dark spots in the light; and their sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller whiter spots in the dark. You may take such scattered lights as these out with the penknife, provided you are just as careful to place them rightly as if you got them by a more laborious process. 60. When you have once got the feeling of the way in which gradation expresses roundness and projection, you may try your strength on anything natural or artificial that happens to take your fancy, provided it be not too complicated in form. I have asked you to draw a stone first, because any irregularities and failures in your shading will be less offensive to you, as being partly characteristic of the rough stone surface, than they would be in a more delicate subject; and you may as well go on drawing rounded stones of different shapes for a little while, till you find you can really shade delicately. You may then take up folds of thick white drapery, a napkin or towel thrown carelessly on the table is as good as anything, and try to express them in the same way; only now you will find that your shades must be wrought with perfect unity and tenderness, or you will lose the flow of the folds. Always remember that a little bit perfected is worth more than many scrawls; whenever you feel yourself inclined to scrawl, give up work resolutely, and do not go back to it till next day. Of course your towel or napkin must be put on something that may be locked up, so that its folds shall not be disturbed till you have finished. If you find that the folds will not look right, get a photograph of a piece of drapery (there are plenty now to be bought, taken from the sculpture of the cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres, which will at once educate your hand and your taste), and copy some piece of that; you will then ascertain what it is that is wanting in your studies from Nature, whether more gradation, or greater watchfulness of the disposition of the folds. Probably for some time you will find yourself failing painfully in both, for drapery is very difficult to follow in its sweeps; but do not lose courage, for the greater the difficulty, the greater the gain in the effort. If your eye is more just in measurement of form than delicate in perception of tint, a pattern on the folded surface will help you. Try whether it does or not: and if the patterned drapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if it helps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans and simple checkered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and even though it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a pattern occasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modifications of it among the folds with scrupulous care. 61. Neither must you suppose yourself condescending in doing this. The greatest masters are always fond of drawing patterns; and the greater they are, the more pains they take to do it truly.[12] Nor can there be better practice at any time, as introductory to the nobler complication of natural detail. For when you can draw the spots which follow the folds of a printed stuff, you will have some chance of following the spots which fall into the folds of the skin of a leopard as he leaps; but if you cannot draw the manufacture, assuredly you will never be able to draw the creature. So the cloudings on a piece of wood, carefully drawn, will be the best introduction to the drawing of the clouds of the sky, or the waves of the sea; and the dead leaf-patterns on a damask drapery, well rendered, will enable you to disentangle masterfully the living leaf-patterns of a thorn thicket or a violet bank. 62. Observe, however, in drawing any stuffs, or bindings of books, or other finely textured substances, do not trouble yourself, as yet, much about the wooliness or gauziness of the thing; but get it right in shade and fold, and true in pattern. We shall see, in the course of after-practice, how the penned lines may be made indicative of texture; but at present attend only to the light and shade and pattern. You will be puzzled at first by _lustrous_ surfaces, but a little attention will show you that the expression of these depends merely on the right drawing of their light and shade, and reflections. Put a small black japanned tray on the table in front of some books; and you will see it reflects the objects beyond it as in a little black rippled pond; its own color mingling always with that of the reflected objects. Draw these reflections of the books properly, making them dark and distorted, as you will see that they are, and you will find that this gives the luster to your tray. It is not well, however, to draw polished objects in general practice; only you should do one or two in order to understand the aspect of any lustrous portion of other things, such as you cannot avoid; the gold, for instance, on the edges of books, or the shining of silk and damask, in which lies a great part of the expression of their folds. Observe also that there are very few things which are totally without luster; you will frequently find a light which puzzles you, on some apparently dull surface, to be the dim image of another object. 63. And now, as soon as you can conscientiously assure me that with the point of the pen or pencil you can lay on any form and shade you like, I give you leave to use the brush with one color,--sepia, or blue black, or mixed cobalt and blue black, or neutral tint; and this will much facilitate your study, and refresh you. But, preliminary, you must do one or two more exercises in tinting. EXERCISE IX. 64. Prepare your color as directed for Exercise VII. Take a brush full of it, and strike it on the paper in any irregular shape; as the brush gets dry, sweep the surface of the paper with it as if you were dusting the paper very lightly; every such sweep of the brush will leave a number of more or less minute interstices in the color. The lighter and faster every dash the better. Then leave the whole to dry; and, as soon as it is dry, with little color in your brush, so that you can bring it to a fine point, fill up all the little interstices one by one, so as to make the whole as even as you can, and fill in the larger gaps with more color, always trying to let the edges of the first and of the newly applied color exactly meet, and not lap over each other. When your new color dries, you will find it in places a little paler than the first. Retouch it therefore, trying to get the whole to look quite one piece. A very small bit of color thus filled up with your very best care, and brought to look as if it had been quite even from the first, will give you better practice and more skill than a great deal filled in carelessly; so do it with your best patience, not leaving the most minute spot of white; and do not fill in the large pieces first and then go to the small, but quietly and steadily cover in the whole up to a marked limit; then advance a little farther, and so on; thus always seeing distinctly what is done and what undone. EXERCISE X. 65. Lay a coat of the blue, prepared as usual, over a whole square of paper. Let it dry. Then another coat over four fifths of the square, or thereabouts, leaving the edge rather irregular than straight, and let it dry. Then another coat over three fifths; another over two fifths; and the last over one fifth; so that the square may present the appearance of gradual increase in darkness in five bands, each darker than the one beyond it. Then, with the brush rather dry (as in the former exercise, when filling up the interstices), try, with small touches, like those used in the pen etching, only a little broader, to add shade delicately beyond each edge, so as to lead the darker tints into the paler ones imperceptibly. By touching the paper very lightly, and putting a multitude of little touches, crossing and recrossing in every direction, you will gradually be able to work up to the darker tints, outside of each, so as quite to efface their edges, and unite them tenderly with the next tint. The whole square, when done, should look evenly shaded from dark to pale, with no bars, only a crossing texture of touches, something like chopped straw, over the whole.[13] 66. Next, take your rounded pebble; arrange it in any light and shade you like; outline it very loosely with the pencil. Put on a wash of color, prepared _very_ pale, quite flat over all of it, except the highest light, leaving the edge of your color quite sharp. Then another wash, extending only over the darker parts, leaving the edge of that sharp also, as in tinting the square. Then another wash over the still darker parts, and another over the darkest, leaving each edge to dry sharp. Then, with the small touches, efface the edges, reinforce the darks, and work the whole delicately together as you would with the pen, till you have got it to the likeness of the true light and shade. You will find that the tint underneath is a great help, and that you can now get effects much more subtle and complete than with the pen merely. 67. The use of leaving the edges always sharp is that you may not trouble or vex the color, but let it lie as it falls suddenly on the paper: color looks much more lovely when it has been laid on with a dash of the brush, and left to dry in its own way, than when it has been dragged about and disturbed; so that it is always better to let the edges and forms be a little wrong, even if one cannot correct them afterwards, than to lose this fresh quality of the tint. Very great masters in water color can lay on the true forms at once with a dash, and bad masters in water color lay on grossly false forms with a dash, and leave them false; for people in general, not knowing false from true, are as much pleased with the appearance of power in the irregular blot as with the presence of power in the determined one; but _we_, in our beginnings, must do as much as we can with the broad dash, and then correct with the point, till we are quite right. We must take care to be right, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find we can be right with freedom. 68. I have hitherto limited you to color mixed with two or three teaspoonfuls of water; but, in finishing your light and shade from the stone, you may, as you efface the edge of the palest coat towards the light, use the color for the small touches with more and more water, till it is so pale as not to be perceptible. Thus you may obtain a perfect gradation to the light. And in reinforcing the darks, when they are very dark, you may use less and less water. If you take the color tolerably dark on your brush, only always liquid (not pasty), and dash away the superfluous color on blotting paper, you will find that, touching the paper very lightly with the dry brush, you can, by repeated touches, produce a dusty kind of bloom, very valuable in giving depth to shadow; but it requires great patience and delicacy of hand to do this properly. You will find much of this kind of work in the grounds and shadows of William Hunt's drawings.[14] 69. As you get used to the brush and color, you will gradually find out their ways for yourself, and get the management of them. And you will often save yourself much discouragement by remembering what I have so often asserted,--that if anything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be refinement that is wanting, not force; and connection, not alteration. If you dislike the state your drawing is in, do not lose patience with it, nor dash at it, nor alter its plan, nor rub it desperately out, at the place you think wrong; but look if there are no shadows you can gradate more perfectly; no little gaps and rents you can fill; no forms you can more delicately define: and do not _rush_ at any of the errors or incompletions thus discerned, but efface or supply slowly, and you will soon find your drawing take another look. A very useful expedient in producing some effects, is to wet the paper, and then lay the color on it, more or less wet, according to the effect you want. You will soon see how prettily it gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can reinforce it with delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also, while the color is still damp on the paper, by drying your brush thoroughly, and touching the color with the brush so dried, you may take out soft lights with great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of experiments of this kind, noticing how the color behaves; but remembering always that your final results must be obtained, and can only be obtained, by pure work with the point, as much as in the pen drawing. 70. You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated subjects, that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer than yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything like all, the gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case, determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black inkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass, the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass; and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so as to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a dark-colored object with little light, and in a light-colored object with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of the great masses. And this, observe, not because masses are grand or desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a fact that things do so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper, book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles, or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, therefore, at once, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is in reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minor markings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature; you are sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this find that you cannot get the projection of things sufficiently shown; but never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project, but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more or less bad: a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a slight tendency towards flatness. 71. Observe, on the other hand, that, however white an object may be, there is always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You must therefore have a slight tone of gray over everything in your picture except on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, in your subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are thousand chances against its being so) it should all be turned so as fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the white objects in any pictures accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian, you will soon understand this.[15] 72. As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing with the brush the undulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed to draw more complicated and beautiful things.[16] And first, the boughs of trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take the first bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cut off the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole only about a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bit of branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and draw it thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, above all things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the fork of the branch. When once you have mastered the tree at its _armpits_, you will have little more trouble with it. 73. Always draw whatever the background happens to be, exactly as you see it. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever is behind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light and shade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want of the background. And this general law is to be observed in all your studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which you may not get useful practice. 74. Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with four or five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of light-colored or white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be relieved in dark from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape carefully with pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be sure that all their masses and interstices are right in shape before you begin shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the manner of Fig. 6, which is a young shoot of lilac. 75. You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at first puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or color in the nearer parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not attempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves, shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the point of one of the leaves against; and so sketch the whole bough as you see it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never can be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with _both_ eyes,[17] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen with one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these terms. 76. In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take a single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as you can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted to know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each position, and you will soon find out how it must be. [Illustration: FIG. 6.] 77. Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters; and practice, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements, not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you do this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures, that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of the great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied, brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too intricate, to be thus dealt with. [Illustration: FIG. 7.] 78. You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of execution, capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first, you must understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards' distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see, mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the edge turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for, supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7, this, when removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at _b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the wood-cut, that the stalk and point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye, have yet some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they exist, and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which remains visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by two layers of color, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next drawing the broken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully indicating the greater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the under side of the leaf is. [Illustration: FIG. 8.] This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reach such accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of the foliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice. 79. Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long. Fix it firmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put it about eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put a sheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw very carefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up with ink, every leaf-mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as you see them against the paper: Fig. 8 is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Do not be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they come together; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes of such masses are when seen against the sky. 80. Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common tree,--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for this reason,--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and the side view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organization of branches from that seen in the view from above. They are generally seen more or less in profile, as you look at the whole tree, and Nature puts her best composition into the profile arrangement. But the view from above or below occurs not unfrequently, also, and it is quite necessary you should draw it if you wish to understand the anatomy of the tree. The difference between the two views is often far greater than you could easily conceive. For instance, in Fig. 9, _a_ is the upper view and _b_ the profile, of a single spray of Phillyrea. Fig. 8 is an intermediate view of a larger bough; seen from beneath, but at some lateral distance also. 81. When you have done a few branches in this manner, take one of the drawings you have made, and put it first a yard away from you, then a yard and a half, then two yards; observe how the thinner stalks and leaves gradually disappear, leaving only a vague and slight darkness where they were; and make another study of the effect at each distance, taking care to draw nothing more than you really see, for in this consists all the difference between what would be merely a miniature drawing of the leaves seen near, and a full-size drawing of the same leaves at a distance. By full size, I mean the size which they would really appear of if their outline were traced through a pane of glass held at the same distance from the eye at which you mean to hold your drawing. You can always ascertain this full size of any object by holding your paper upright before you, at the distance from your eye at which you wish your drawing to be seen. Bring its edge across the object you have to draw, and mark upon this edge the points where the outline of the object crosses, or goes behind, the edge of the paper. You will always find it, thus measured, smaller than you supposed. [Illustration: FIG. 9.] 82. When you have made a few careful experiments of this kind on your own drawings, (which are better for practice, at first, than the real trees, because the black profile in the drawing is quite stable, and does not shake, and is not confused by sparkles of luster on the leaves,) you may try the extremities of the real trees, only not doing much at a time, for the brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex your sight. And this brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the outline itself; at least the chemical action of the light in a photograph extends much within the edges of the leaves, and, as it were, eats them away, so that no tree extremity, stand it ever so still, nor any other form coming against bright sky, is truly drawn by a photograph; and if you once succeed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you will find the result much more lovely and interesting than any photograph can be. 83. All this difficulty, however, attaches to the rendering merely the dark form of the sprays as they come against the sky. Within those sprays, and in the heart of the tree, there is a complexity of a much more embarrassing kind; for nearly all leaves have some luster, and all are more or less translucent (letting light through them); therefore, in any given leaf, besides the intricacies of its own proper shadows and foreshortenings, there are three series of circumstances which alter or hide its forms. First, shadows cast on it by other leaves,--often very forcibly. Secondly, light reflected from its lustrous surface, sometimes the blue of the sky, sometimes the white of clouds, or the sun itself flashing like a star. Thirdly, forms and shadows of other leaves, seen as darknesses through the translucent parts of the leaf; a most important element of foliage effect, but wholly neglected by landscape artists in general. 84. The consequence of all this is, that except now and then by chance, the form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvelous and quaint confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable, part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out in facsimile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or less imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and mystery of Nature, without absolute delineation of detail. 85. Now I have led you to this conclusion by observation of tree form only, because in that the thing to be proved is clearest. But no natural object exists which does not involve in some part or parts of it this inimitableness, this mystery of quantity, which needs peculiarity of handling and trick of touch to express it completely. If leaves are intricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur and hair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds. And although methods and dexterities of handling are wholly useless if you have not gained first the thorough knowledge of the form of the thing; so that if you cannot draw a branch perfectly, then much less a tree; and if not a wreath of mist perfectly, much less a flock of clouds; and if not a single grass blade perfectly, much less a grass bank; yet having once got this power over decisive form, you may safely--and must, in order to perfection of work--carry out your knowledge by every aid of method and dexterity of hand. 86. But, in order to find out what method can do, you must now look at Art as well as at Nature, and see what means painters and engravers have actually employed for the expression of these subtleties. Whereupon arises the question, what opportunity you have to obtain engravings? You ought, if it is at all in your power, to possess yourself of a certain number of good examples of Turner's engraved works: if this be not in your power, you must just make the best use you can of the shop windows, or of any plates of which you can obtain a loan. Very possibly, the difficulty of getting sight of them may stimulate you to put them to better use. But, supposing your means admit of your doing so, possess yourself, first, of the illustrated edition either of Rogers's Italy or Rogers's Poems, and then of about a dozen of the plates named in the annexed lists. The prefixed letters indicate the particular points deserving your study in each engraving.[18] Be sure, therefore, that your selection includes, at all events, one plate marked with each letter. Do not get more than twelve of these plates, nor even all the twelve at first; for the more engravings you have, the less attention you will pay to them. It is a general truth, that the enjoyment derivable from art cannot be increased in quantity, beyond a certain point, by quantity of possession; it is only spread, as it were, over a larger surface, and very often dulled by finding ideas repeated in different works. Now, for a beginner, it is always better that his attention should be concentrated on one or two good things, and all his enjoyment founded on them, than that he should look at many, with divided thoughts. He has much to discover; and his best way of discovering it is to think long over few things, and watch them earnestly. It is one of the worst errors of this age to try to know and to see too much: the men who seem to know everything, never in reality know anything rightly. Beware of _handbook_ knowledge. 87. These engravings are, in general, more for you to look at than to copy; and they will be of more use to you when we come to talk of composition, than they are at present; still, it will do you a great deal of good, sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate texture, or gradations of tone: as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt to incline too much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For instance, the texture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its tiled roof, in the vignette at p. 227 of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite as work can possibly be; and it will be a great and profitable achievement if you can at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at all imitate the dark distant country at p. 7, or the sky at p. 80, of the same volume, or the foliage at pp. 12 and 144, it will be good gain; and if you can once draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9 of the Italy, or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25, or the moonlight at p. 223, you will find that even Nature herself cannot afterwards very terribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or moonlight. 88. You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect. And if you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to think that engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you to draw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by the difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless habit of thinking that engraving is a mere business, easy enough when one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it at certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less a habit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are trying to copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--that is, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made is white instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge of what you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good for you, because it will awaken you to the real labor and skill of the engraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, in this world, who have really to _do_ anything in it. 89. Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a model--far from it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as well[19] before you think of doing better, and you will find many little helps and hints in the various work of it. Only remember that _all_ engravers' foregrounds are bad; whenever you see the peculiar wriggling parallel lines of modern engravings become distinct, you must not copy; nor admire: it is only the softer masses, and distances, and portions of the foliage in the plates marked _f_, which you may copy. The best for this purpose, if you can get it, is the "Chain bridge over the Tees," of the England series; the thicket on the right is very beautiful and instructive, and very like Turner. The foliage in the "Ludlow" and "Powis" is also remarkably good. 90. Besides these line engravings, and to protect you from what harm there is in their influence, you are to provide yourself, if possible, with a Rembrandt etching, or a photograph of one (of figures, not landscape). It does not matter of what subject, or whether a sketchy or finished one, but the sketchy ones are generally cheapest, and will teach you most. Copy it as well as you can, noticing especially that Rembrandt's most rapid lines have steady purpose; and that they are laid with almost inconceivable precision when the object becomes at all interesting. The "Prodigal Son," "Death of the Virgin," "Abraham and Isaac," and such others, containing incident and character rather than chiaroscuro, will be the most instructive. You can buy one; copy it well; then exchange it, at little loss, for another; and so, gradually, obtain a good knowledge of his system. Whenever you have an opportunity of examining his work at museums, etc., do so with the greatest care, not looking at _many_ things, but a long time at each. You must also provide yourself, if possible, with an engraving of Albert Dürer's. This you will not be able to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer to it as a standard of precision in line. If you can get one with a _wing_ in it, it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the skull and satyr, and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but any will do. Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two masters, Rembrandt and Dürer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague; and Dürer has little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If you can see anywhere a drawing by Leonardo, you will find it balanced between the two characters; but there are no engravings which present this perfection, and your style will be best formed, therefore, by alternate study of Rembrandt and Dürer. Lean rather to Dürer; it is better, for amateurs, to err on the side of precision than on that of vagueness: and though, as I have just said, you cannot copy a Dürer, yet try every now and then a quarter of an inch square or so, and see how much nearer you can come; you cannot possibly try to draw the leafy crown of the "Melancholia" too often. 91. If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Dürer, you may still learn much by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, or Leech's wood-cuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's and Richter's[20] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need to notice the following points: 92. When either the material (as the copper or wood) or the time of an artist does not permit him to make a perfect drawing,--that is to say, one in which no lines shall be prominently visible,--and he is reduced to show the black lines, either drawn by the pen, or on the wood, it is better to make these lines help, as far as may be, the expression of texture and form. You will thus find many textures, as of cloth or grass or flesh, and many subtle effects of light, expressed by Leech with zigzag or crossed or curiously broken lines; and you will see that Alfred Rethel and Richter constantly express the direction and rounding of surfaces by the direction of the lines which shade them. All these various means of expression will be useful to you, as far as you can learn them, provided you remember that they are merely a kind of shorthand; telling certain facts not in quite the right way, but in the only possible way under the conditions: and provided in any after use of such means, you never try to show your own dexterity; but only to get as much record of the object as you can in a given time; and that you continually make efforts to go beyond such shorthand, and draw portions of the objects rightly. 93. And touching this question of direction of lines as indicating that of surface, observe these few points: [Illustration: FIG. 10.] If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they _can_ indicate anything by their direction, they should explain rather than oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece of wood-cut from Titian, Fig. 10, the lines are serviceable by expressing, not only the shade of the trunk, but partly also its roundness, and the flow of its grain. And Albert Dürer, whose work was chiefly engraving, sets himself always thus to make his lines as _valuable_ as possible; telling much by them, both of shade and direction of surface: and if you were always to be limited to engraving on copper (and did not want to express effects of mist or darkness, as well as delicate forms), Albert Dürer's way of work would be the best example for you. But, inasmuch as the perfect way of drawing is by shade without lines, and the great painters always conceive their subject as complete, even when they are sketching it most rapidly, you will find that, when they are not limited in means, they do not much trust to direction of line, but will often scratch in the shade of a rounded surface with nearly straight lines, that is to say, with the easiest and quickest lines possible to themselves. When the hand is free, the easiest line for it to draw is one inclining from the left upwards to the right, or vice versâ, from the right downwards to the left; and when done very quickly, the line is hooked a little at the end by the effort at return to the next. Hence, you will always find the pencil, chalk, or pen sketch of a _very_ great master full of these kind of lines; and even if he draws carefully, you will find him using simple straight lines from left to right, when an inferior master would have used curved ones. Fig. 11 is a fair facsimile of part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters very distinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shaded most commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as a point increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master if you find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or lips, shaded with straight lines. [Illustration: FIG. 11.] 94. But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonest dealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Fig. 11, and pass them for the work of great masters; and how the power of determining the genuineness of a drawing depends entirely on your knowing the facts of the objects drawn, and perceiving whether the hasty handling is _all_ conducive to the expression of those truths. In a great man's work, at its fastest, no line is thrown away, and it is not by the rapidity, but the _economy_ of the execution that you know him to be great. Now to judge of this economy, you must know exactly what he meant to do, otherwise you cannot of course discern how far he has done it; that is, you must know the beauty and nature of the thing he was drawing. All judgment of art thus finally founds itself on knowledge of Nature. 95. But farther observe, that this scrawled, or economic, or impetuous execution is never affectedly impetuous. If a great man is not in a hurry, he never pretends to be; if he has no eagerness in his heart, he puts none into his hand; if he thinks his effect would be better got with _two_ lines, he never, to show his dexterity, tries to do it with one. Be assured, therefore (and this is a matter of great importance), that you will never produce a great drawing by imitating the execution of a great master. Acquire his knowledge and share his feelings, and the easy execution will fall from your hand as it did from his: but if you merely scrawl because he scrawled, or blot because he blotted, you will not only never advance in power, but every able draughtsman, and every judge whose opinion is worth having, will know you for a cheat, and despise you accordingly. 96. Again, observe respecting the use of outline: All merely outlined drawings are bad, for the simple reason, that an artist of any power can always do more, and tell more, by quitting his outlines occasionally, and scratching in a few lines for shade, than he can by restricting himself to outline only. Hence the fact of his so restricting himself, whatever may be the occasion, shows him to be a bad draughtsman, and not to know how to apply his power economically. This hard law, however, bears only on drawings meant to remain in the state in which you see them; not on those which were meant to be proceeded with, or for some mechanical use. It is sometimes necessary to draw pure outlines, as an incipient arrangement of a composition, to be filled up afterwards with color, or to be pricked through and used as patterns or tracings; but if, with no such ultimate object, making the drawing wholly for its own sake, and meaning it to remain in the state he leaves it, an artist restricts himself to outline, he is a bad draughtsman, and his work is bad. There is no exception to this law. A good artist habitually sees masses, not edges, and can in every case make his drawing more expressive (with any given quantity of work) by rapid shade than by contours; so that all good work whatever is more or less touched with shade, and more or less interrupted as outline. [Illustration: FIG. 12.] 97. Hence, the published works of Retzsch, and all the English imitations of them, and all outline engravings from pictures, are bad work, and only serve to corrupt the public taste. And of such outlines, the worst are those which are darkened in some part of their course by way of expressing the dark side, as Flaxman's from Dante, and such others; because an outline can only be true so long as it accurately represents the form of the given object with _one_ of its edges. Thus, the outline _a_ and the outline _b_, Fig. 12, are both _true_ outlines of a ball; because, however thick the line may be, whether we take the interior or exterior edge of it, that edge of it always draws a true circle. But _c_ is a false outline of a ball, because either the inner or outer edge of the black line must be an untrue circle, else the line could not be thicker in one place than another. Hence all "force," as it is called, is gained by falsification of the contours; so that no artist whose eye is true and fine could endure to look at it. It does indeed often happen that a painter, sketching rapidly, and trying again and again for some line which he cannot quite strike, blackens or loads the first line by setting others beside and across it; and then a careless observer supposes it has been thickened on purpose: or, sometimes also, at a place where shade is afterwards to inclose the form, the painter will strike a broad dash of this shade beside his outline at once, looking as if he meant to thicken the outline; whereas this broad line is only the first installment of the future shadow, and the outline is really drawn with its inner edge.[21] And thus, far from good draughtsmen darkening the lines which turn away from the light, the _tendency_ with them is rather to darken them towards the light, for it is there in general that shade will ultimately inclose them. The best example of this treatment that I know is Raphael's sketch, in the Louvre, of the head of the angel pursuing Heliodorus, the one that shows part of the left eye; where the dark strong lines which terminate the nose and forehead towards the light are opposed to tender and light ones behind the ear, and in other places towards the shade. You will see in Fig. 11 the same principle variously exemplified; the principal dark lines, in the head and drapery of the arms, being on the side turned to the light. [Illustration: FIG. 13.] 98. All these refinements and ultimate principles, however, do not affect your drawing for the present. You must try to make your outlines as _equal_ as possible; and employ pure outline only for the two following purposes: either (1.) to steady your hand, as in Exercise II., for if you cannot draw the line itself, you will never be able to terminate your shadow in the precise shape required, when the line is absent; or (2.) to give you shorthand memoranda of forms, when you are pressed for time. Thus the forms of distant trees in groups are defined, for the most part, by the light edge of the rounded mass of the nearer one being shown against the darker part of the rounded mass of a more distant one; and to draw this properly, nearly as much work is required to round each tree as to round the stone in Fig. 5. Of course you cannot often get time to do this; but if you mark the terminal line of each tree as is done by Dürer in Fig. 13, you will get a most useful memorandum of their arrangement, and a very interesting drawing. Only observe in doing this, you must not, because the procedure is a quick one, hurry that procedure itself. You will find, on copying that bit of Dürer, that every one of his lines is firm, deliberate, and accurately descriptive as far as it goes. It means a bush of such a size and such a shape, definitely observed and set down; it contains a true "signalement" of every nut-tree, and apple-tree, and higher bit of hedge, all round that village. If you have not time to draw thus carefully, do not draw at all--you are merely wasting your work and spoiling your taste. When you have had four or five years' practice you may be able to make useful memoranda at a rapid rate, but not yet; except sometimes of light and shade, in a way of which I will tell you presently. And this use of outline, note farther, is wholly confined to objects which have edges or limits. You can outline a tree or a stone, when it rises against another tree or stone; but you cannot outline folds in drapery, or waves in water; if these are to be expressed at all, it must be by some sort of shade, and therefore the rule that no good drawing can consist throughout of pure outline remains absolute. You see, in that wood-cut of Dürer's, his reason for even limiting himself so much to outline as he has, in those distant woods and plains, is that he may leave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more by the dark sky and the dark village spire: and the scene becomes real and sunny only by the addition of these shades. [Illustration: FIG. 14.] 99. Understanding, then, thus much of the use of outline, we will go back to our question about tree-drawing left unanswered at page 48. [Illustration: FIG. 15.] We were, you remember, in pursuit of mystery among the leaves. Now, it is quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder, to any extent; but the difficulty is to keep organization in the midst of mystery. And you will never succeed in doing this unless you lean always to the definite side, and allow yourself rarely to become quite vague, at least through all your early practice. So, after your single groups of leaves, your first step must be to conditions like Figs. 14 and 15, which are careful facsimiles of two portions of a beautiful wood-cut of Dürer's, the "Flight into Egypt." Copy these carefully,--never mind how little at a time, but thoroughly; then trace the Dürer, and apply it to your drawing, and do not be content till the one fits the other, else your eye is not true enough to carry you safely through meshes of real leaves. And in the course of doing this, you will find that not a line nor dot of Dürer's can be displaced without harm; that all add to the effect, and either express something, or illumine something, or relieve something. If, afterwards, you copy any of the pieces of modern tree drawing, of which so many rich examples are given constantly in our cheap illustrated periodicals (any of the Christmas numbers of last year's _Illustrated News_ or others are full of them), you will see that, though good and forcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in by thousands without special intention, and might just as well go one way as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all together a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a little careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near the same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, will imitate so much as one leaf of Dürer's. Yet there is considerable intricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vine leaves of his, as well as of the grass. [Illustration: FIG. 16.] 100. When you have got familiarized to his firm manner, you may draw from Nature as much as you like in the same way; and when you are tired of the intense care required for this, you may fall into a little more easy massing of the leaves, as in Fig. 10 (p. 55). This is facsimilëd from an engraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in manner, the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough model for your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even so far as this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig. 16,[22] taking care always to have thorough command over your hand; that is, not to let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran glibly over the paper, but because in Nature it has actually a free and noble shape, and you have faithfully followed the same. 101. And now that we have come to questions of noble shape, as well as true shape, and that we are going to draw from Nature at our pleasure, other considerations enter into the business, which are by no means confined to first practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this letter is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting of correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only to excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable from directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me, even though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work, Very faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: [1] (_N.B._--This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous or curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are willing to take the statement in the text on trust.) The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or gray indicates the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the _innocence of the eye_; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,--as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight. For instance: when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a dusty yellow (very nearly of the color of primroses); and, if there were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow color. We should try to gather some of them, and then find that the color went away from the grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses; and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was really the cause of the color in the one,--not in the other. We go through such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; and having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain colors, we always suppose that we _see_ what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret. Very few people have any idea that sunlighted grass is yellow. Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the colors of nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at once in the sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colors that form its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish green barred with gold. Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great fact about sight. This, in your hand, which you know by experience and touch to be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch of white, variously gradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by experience you know to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of brown, variously darkened and veined; and so on: and the whole art of Painting consists merely in perceiving the shape and depth of these patches of color, and putting patches of the same size, depth, and shape on canvas. The only obstacle to the success of painting is, that many of the real colors are brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas: we must put darker ones to represent them. [2] Stale crumb of bread is better, if you are making a delicate drawing, than india-rubber, for it disturbs the surface of the paper less: but it crumbles about the room and makes a mess; and, besides, you waste the good bread, which is wrong; and your drawing will not for a long while be worth the crumbs. So use india-rubber very lightly; or, if heavily, pressing it only, not passing it over the paper, and leave what pencil marks will not come away so, without minding them. In a finished drawing the uneffaced penciling is often serviceable, helping the general tone, and enabling you to take out little bright lights. [3] What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom" is the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand is so thoroughly disciplined, that when pressed for time he can let it fly as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great master at real _work_ is _never_ free: its swiftest dash is under perfect government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret could pause within a hair's breadth of any appointed mark, in their fastest touches; and follow, within a hair's breadth, the previously intended curve. You must never, therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that it should be free, but that it should be right; in time you will be able to do right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense; but there is no merit in doing wrong easily. These remarks, however, do not apply to the lines used in shading, which, it will be remembered, are to be made as quickly as possible. The reason of this is, that the quicker a line is drawn, the lighter it is at the ends, and therefore the more easily joined with other lines, and concealed by them; the object in perfect shading being to conceal the lines as much as possible. And observe, in this exercise, the object is more to get firmness of hand than accuracy of eye for outline; for there are no outlines in Nature, and the ordinary student is sure to draw them falsely if he draws them at all. Do not, therefore, be discouraged if you find mistakes continue to occur in your outlines; be content at present if you find your hand gaining command over the curves. [4] If you can get any pieces of dead white porcelain, not glazed, they will be useful models. [5] Artists who glance at this book may be surprised at this permission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that the pupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the relations of curve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely true, than that he should practice drawing straight lines. But also, I believe, though I am not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_ to be able to draw a straight line. I do not believe a perfectly trained hand ever can draw a line without some curvature in it, or some variety of direction. Prout could draw a straight line, but I do not believe Raphael could, nor Tintoret. A great draughtsman can, as far as I have observed, draw every line _but_ a straight one. [6] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused quick touches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of twigs round the main branches; but do not take much trouble about them. [7] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in color, a narrow gradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as with the pen, to make the gradation go _far_. [8] Of course, all the columns of color are to be of equal length. [9] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given color is always indicated by the color of the solid cake in the box. [10] The figure _a_, Fig. 5, is very dark, but this is to give an example of all kinds of depths of tint, without repeated figures. [11] Nearly neutral in ordinary circumstances, but yet with quite different tones in its neutrality, according to the colors of the various reflected rays that compose it. [12] If we had any business with the reasons of this, I might perhaps be able to show you some metaphysical ones for the enjoyment, by truly artistical minds, of the changes wrought by light and shade and perspective in patterned surfaces; but this is at present not to the point; and all that you need to know is that the drawing of such things is good exercise, and moreover a kind of exercise which Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, and Turner, all enjoyed, and strove to excel in. [13] The use of acquiring this habit of execution is that you may be able, when you begin to color, to let one hue be seen in minute portions, gleaming between the touches of another. [14] William Hunt, of the Old Water-color Society. [15] At Marlborough House, [in 1857] among the four principal examples of Turner's later water-color drawing, perhaps the most neglected was that of fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of his most wonderful works, though unfinished. If you examine the larger white fishing-boat sail, you will find it has a little spark of pure white in its right-hand upper corner, about as large as a minute pin's head, and that all the surface of the sail is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this sail once or twice, and you will begin to understand Turner's work. Similarly, the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the National Gallery is focused to two little grains of white at the top of it. The points of light on the white flower in the wreath round the head of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplify the same thing. [16] I shall not henceforward number the exercises recommended; as they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty of subject, not by difference of method. [17] If you understand the principle of the stereoscope you will know why; if not, it does not matter; trust me for the truth of the statement, as I cannot explain the principle without diagrams and much loss of time. See, however, Note 1, in Appendix I. [18] The plates marked with a star are peculiarly desirable. See note at the end of Appendix I. The letters mean as follows:-- _a_ stands for architecture, including distant grouping of towns, cottages, etc. _c_ clouds, including mist and aërial effects. _f_ foliage. _g_ ground, including low hills, when not rocky. _l_ effects of light. _m_ mountains, or bold rocky ground. _p_ power of general arrangement and effect. _q_ quiet water. _r_ running or rough water; or rivers, even if calm, when their line of flow is beautifully marked. _From the England Series._ _a c f r._ Arundel. _a f p._ Lancaster. _a f l._ Ashby de la Zouche. _c l m r._ Lancaster Sands.* _a l q r._ Barnard Castle.* _a g f._ Launceston.* _f m r._ Bolton Abbey. _c f l r._ Leicester Abbey. _f g r._ Buckfastleigh.* _f r._ Ludlow. _a l p._ Caernarvon. _a f l._ Margate. _c l q._ Castle Upnor. _a l q._ Orford. _a f l._ Colchester. _c p._ Plymouth. _l q._ Cowes. _f._ Powis Castle. _c f p._ Dartmouth Cove.* _l m q._ Prudhoe Castle. _c l q._ Flint Castle.* _f l m r._ Chain Bridge over _a f g l._ Knaresborough.* Tees.* _m r._ High Force of Tees.* _m q._ Ulleswater. _a f q._ Trematon. _f m._ Valle Crucis. _From the Keepsake._ _m p q._ Arona. _p._ St. Germain en Laye. _l m._ Drachenfels.* _l p q._ Florence. _f l._ Marly.* _l m._ Ballyburgh Ness.* _From the Bible Series._ _f m._ Mount Lebanon. _a c g._ Joppa. _m._ Rock of Moses at _c l p q._ Solomon's Pools.* Sinai. _a l._ Santa Saba. _a l m._ Jericho. _a l._ Pool of Bethesda. _From Scott's Works._ _p r._ Melrose.* _c m._ Glencoe. _f r._ Dryburgh.* _c m._ Loch Coriskin.* _a l._ Caerlaverock. _From the Rivers of France._ _a q._ Château of Amboise, with _a p._ Rouen Cathedral. large bridge on right. _f p._ Pont de l'Arche. _l p r._ Rouen, looking down the _f l p._ View on the Seine, river, poplars on right.* with avenue. _a l p._ Rouen, with cathedral _a c p._ Bridge of Meulan. and rainbow, avenue _c g p r._ Caudebec.* on left. [19] As _well_;--not as minutely: the diamond cuts finer lines on the steel than you can draw on paper with your pen; but you must be able to get tones as even, and touches as firm. [20] See, for account of these plates, the Appendix on "Works to be studied." [21] See Note 2 in Appendix I. [22] This sketch is not of a tree standing on its head, though it looks like it. You will find it explained presently. LETTER II. SKETCHING FROM NATURE. 102. MY DEAR READER,--The work we have already gone through together has, I hope, enabled you to draw with fair success either rounded and simple masses, like stones, or complicated arrangements of form, like those of leaves; provided only these masses or complexities will stay quiet for you to copy, and do not extend into quantity so great as to baffle your patience. But if we are now to go out to the fields, and to draw anything like a complete landscape, neither of these conditions will any more be observed for us. The clouds will not wait while we copy their heaps or clefts; the shadows will escape from us as we try to shape them, each, in its stealthy minute march, still leaving light where its tremulous edge had rested the moment before, and involving in eclipse objects that had seemed safe from its influence; and instead of the small clusters of leaves which we could reckon point by point, embarrassing enough even though numerable, we have now leaves as little to be counted as the sands of the sea, and restless, perhaps, as its foam. 103. In all that we have to do now, therefore, direct imitation becomes more or less impossible. It is always to be aimed at so far as it _is_ possible; and when you have time and opportunity, some portions of a landscape may, as you gain greater skill, be rendered with an approximation almost to mirrored portraiture. Still, whatever skill you may reach, there will always be need of judgment to choose, and of speed to seize, certain things that are principal or fugitive; and you must give more and more effort daily to the observance of characteristic points, and the attainment of concise methods. 104. I have directed your attention early to foliage for two reasons. First, that it is always accessible as a study; and secondly, that its modes of growth present simple examples of the importance of leading or governing lines. It is by seizing these leading lines, when we cannot seize all, that likeness and expression are given to a portrait, and grace and a kind of vital truth to the rendering of every natural form. I call it vital truth, because these chief lines are always expressive of the past history and present action of the thing. They show in a mountain, first, how it was built or heaped up; and secondly, how it is now being worn away, and from what quarter the wildest storms strike it. In a tree, they show what kind of fortune it has had to endure from its childhood: how troublesome trees have come in its way, and pushed it aside, and tried to strangle or starve it; where and when kind trees have sheltered it, and grown up lovingly together with it, bending as it bent; what winds torment it most; what boughs of it behave best, and bear most fruit; and so on. In a wave or cloud, these leading lines show the run of the tide and of the wind, and the sort of change which the water or vapor is at any moment enduring in its form, as it meets shore, or counter-wave, or melting sunshine. Now remember, nothing distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their always, whether in life or in art, _knowing the way things are going_. Your dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so,--the animal in its motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course, the mountain in its wearing away. Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its _awful_ lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss. Thus, the leafage in Fig. 16 (p. 63) grew round the root of a stone pine, on the brow of a crag at Sestri near Genoa, and all the sprays of it are thrust away in their first budding by the great rude root, and spring out in every direction round it, as water splashes when a heavy stone is thrown into it. Then, when they have got clear of the root, they begin to bend up again; some of them, being little stone pines themselves, have a great notion of growing upright, if they can; and this struggle of theirs to recover their straight road towards the sky, after being obliged to grow sideways in their early years, is the effort that will mainly influence their future destiny, and determine if they are to be crabbed, forky pines, striking from that rock of Sestri, whose clefts nourish them, with bared red lightning of angry arms towards the sea; or if they are to be goodly and solemn pines, with trunks like pillars of temples, and the purple burning of their branches sheathed in deep globes of cloudy green. Those, then, are their fateful lines; see that you give that spring and resilience, whatever you leave ungiven: depend upon it, their chief beauty is in these. [Illustration: FIG. 17.] 105. So in trees in general, and bushes, large or small, you will notice that, though the boughs spring irregularly and at various angles, there is a tendency in all to stoop less and less as they near the top of the tree. This structure, typified in the simplest possible terms at _c_, Fig. 17, is common to all trees that I know of, and it gives them a certain plumy character, and aspect of unity in the hearts of their branches which are essential to their beauty. The stem does not merely send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches share in one great fountain-like impulse; each has a curve and a path to take, which fills a definite place, and each terminates all its minor branches at its outer extremity, so as to form a greater outer curve, whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species. That is to say, the general type or idea of a tree is not as _a_, Fig. 17, but as _b_, in which, observe, the boughs all carry their minor divisions right out to the bounding curve; not but that smaller branches, by thousands, terminate in the heart of the tree, but the idea and main purpose in every branch are to carry all its child branches well out to the air and light, and let each of them, however small, take its part in filling the united flow of the bounding curve, so that the type of each separate bough is again not _a_, but _b_, Fig. 18; approximating, that is to say, so far to the structure of a plant of broccoli as to throw the great mass of spray and leafage out to a rounded surface. Therefore beware of getting into a careless habit of drawing boughs with successive sweeps of the pen or brush, one hanging to the other, as in Fig. 19. If you look at the tree-boughs in any painting of Wilson's you will see this structure, and nearly every other that is to be avoided, in their intensest types. You will also notice that Wilson never conceives a tree as a round mass, but flat, as if it had been pressed and dried. Most people in drawing pines seem to fancy, in the same way, that the boughs come out only on two sides of the trunk, instead of all round it: always, therefore, take more pains in trying to draw the boughs of trees that grow _towards_ you than those that go off to the sides; anybody can draw the latter, but the foreshortened ones are not so easy. It will help you in drawing them to observe that in most trees the ramification of each branch, though not of the tree itself, is more or less flattened, and approximates, in its position, to the look of a hand held out to receive something, or shelter something. If you take a looking-glass, and hold your hand before it slightly hollowed, with the palm upwards, and the fingers open, as if you were going to support the base of some great bowl, larger than you could easily hold; and sketch your hand as you see it in the glass with the points of the fingers towards you; it will materially help you in understanding the way trees generally hold out their hands: and if then you will turn yours with its palm downwards, as if you were going to try to hide something, but with the fingers expanded, you will get a good type of the action of the lower boughs in cedars and such other spreading trees. [Illustration: FIG. 18.] [Illustration: FIG. 19.] 106. Fig. 20 will give you a good idea of the simplest way in which these and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy it carefully, you will be surprised to find how the touches all group together, in expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the springing of the bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the ground: note the careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers of the little mound on the left.[23] It is facsimilëd from an etching of Turner's, and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure and firm lines; it will also show you how the particular action in foliage, or anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may be intensified by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look more tall and upright still, because their line is continued below by the figure of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the bank are made to look more rounded because their line is continued in one broad sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the wall. These figures are placed entirely with this object, as we shall see more fully hereafter when we come to talk about composition; but, if you please, we will not talk about that yet awhile. What I have been telling you about the beautiful lines and action of foliage has nothing to do with composition, but only with fact, and the brief and expressive representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your looking forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III. of the "Law of Radiation," and reading what is said there about tree growth: indeed it would in some respects have been better to have said it here than there, only it would have broken up the account of the principles of composition somewhat awkwardly. [Illustration: FIG. 20.] 107. Now, although the lines indicative of action are not always quite so manifest in other things as in trees, a little attention will soon enable you to see that there are such lines in everything. In an old house roof, a bad observer and bad draughtsman will only see and draw the spotty irregularity of tiles or slates all over; but a good draughtsman will see all the bends of the under timbers, where they are weakest and the weight is telling on them most, and the tracks of the run of the water in time of rain, where it runs off fastest, and where it lies long and feeds the moss; and he will be careful, however few slates he draws, to mark the way they bend together towards those hollows (which have the future fate of the roof in them), and crowd gradually together at the top of the gable, partly diminishing in perspective, partly, perhaps, diminished on purpose (they are so in most English old houses) by the slate-layer. So in ground, there is always the direction of the run of the water to be noticed, which rounds the earth and cuts it into hollows; and, generally, in any bank or height worth drawing, a trace of bedded or other internal structure besides. Figure 20 will give you some idea of the way in which such facts may be expressed by a few lines. Do you not feel the depression in the ground all down the hill where the footsteps are, and how the people always turn to the left at the top, losing breath a little, and then how the water runs down in that other hollow towards the valley, behind the roots of the trees? 108. Now, I want you in your first sketches from Nature to aim exclusively at understanding and representing these vital facts of form; using the pen--not now the steel, but the quill--firmly and steadily, never scrawling with it, but saying to yourself before you lay on a single touch,--"_that_ leaf is the main one, _that_ bough is the guiding one, and this touch, _so_ long, _so_ broad, means that part of it,"--point or side or knot, as the case may be. Resolve always, as you look at the thing, what you will take, and what miss of it, and never let your hand run away with you, or get into any habit or method of touch. If you want a continuous line, your hand should pass calmly from one end of it to the other without a tremor; if you want a shaking and broken line, your hand should shake, or break off, as easily as a musician's finger shakes or stops on a note: only remember this, that there is no general way of doing _any_ thing; no recipe can be given you for so much as the drawing of a cluster of grass. The grass may be ragged and stiff, or tender and flowing; sunburnt and sheep-bitten, or rank and languid; fresh or dry; lustrous or dull: look at it, and try to draw it as it is, and don't think how somebody "told you to _do_ grass." So a stone may be round or angular, polished or rough, cracked all over like an ill-glazed teacup, or as united and broad as the breast of Hercules. It may be as flaky as a wafer, as powdery as a field puff-ball; it may be knotted like a ship's hawser, or kneaded like hammered iron, or knit like a Damascus saber, or fused like a glass bottle, or crystallized like hoar-frost, or veined like a forest leaf: look at it, and don't try to remember how anybody told you to "do a stone." 109. As soon as you find that your hand obeys you thoroughly, and that you can render any form with a firmness and truth approaching that of Turner's or Dürer's work,[24] you must add a simple but equally careful light and shade to your pen drawing, so as to make each study as complete as possible; for which you must prepare yourself thus. Get, if you have the means, a good impression of one plate of Turner's Liber Studiorum; if possible, one of the subjects named in the note below.[25] If you cannot obtain, or even borrow for a little while, any of these engravings, you must use a photograph instead (how, I will tell you presently); but, if you can get the Turner, it will be best. You will see that it is composed of a firm etching in line, with mezzotint shadow laid over it. You must first copy the etched part of it accurately; to which end put the print against the window, and trace slowly with the greatest care every black line; retrace this on smooth drawing-paper; and, finally, go over the whole with your pen, looking at the original plate always, so that if you err at all, it may be on the right side, not making a line which is too curved or too straight already in the tracing, more curved or more straight, as you go over it. And in doing this, never work after you are tired, nor to "get the thing done," for if it is badly done, it will be of no use to you. The true zeal and patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and inattentive labor of a whole day. If you have not made the touches right at the first going over with the pen, retouch them delicately, with little ink in your pen, thickening or reinforcing them as they need: you cannot give too much care to the facsimile. Then keep this etched outline by you in order to study at your ease the way in which Turner uses his line as preparatory for the subsequent shadow;[26] it is only in getting the two separate that you will be able to reason on this. Next, copy once more, though for the fourth time, any part of this etching which you like, and put on the light and shade with the brush, and any brown color that matches that of the plate;[27] working it with the point of the brush as delicately as if you were drawing with pencil, and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the paper, till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving. 110. In this exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked to close resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject carelessly done. Not that in drawing afterwards from Nature you are to be obliged to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having fully accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will thenceforward feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could otherwise have conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out quickly and clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which it would have wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work. Nothing is more strange in art than the way that chance and materials seem to favor you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make yourself quite independent of chance, get your result in spite of it, and from that day forward all things will somehow fall as you would have them. Show the camel's hair, and the color in it, that no bending nor blotting is of any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade _shall_ finally be right, if it costs you a year's toil; and from that hour of corrective conviction, said camel's hair will bend itself to all your wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border. If you cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a photograph[28] of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a village or picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water of varied character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy any part of it you like, in this same brown color, working, as I have just directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of the brush. You are under a twofold disadvantage here, however; first, there are portions in every photograph too delicately done for you at present to be at all able to copy; and, secondly, there are portions always more obscure or dark than there would be in the real scene, and involved in a mystery which you will not be able, as yet, to decipher. Both these characters will be advantageous to you for future study, after you have gained experience, but they are a little against you in early attempts at tinting; still you must fight through the difficulty, and get the power of producing delicate gradations with brown or gray, like those of the photograph. 111. Now observe; the perfection of work would be tinted shadow, like photography, without any obscurity or exaggerated darkness; and as long as your effect depends in anywise on visible lines, your art is not perfect, though it may be first-rate of its kind. But to get complete results in tints merely, requires both long time and consummate skill; and you will find that a few well-put pen lines, with a tint dashed over or under them, get more expression of facts than you could reach in any other way, by the same expenditure of time. The use of the Liber Studiorum print to you is chiefly as an example of the simplest shorthand of this kind, a shorthand which is yet capable of dealing with the most subtle natural effects; for the firm etching gets at the expression of complicated details, as leaves, masonry, textures of ground, etc., while the overlaid tint enables you to express the most tender distances of sky, and forms of playing light, mist, or cloud. Most of the best drawings by the old masters are executed on this principle, the touches of the pen being useful also to give a look of transparency to shadows, which could not otherwise be attained but by great finish of tinting; and if you have access to any ordinarily good public gallery, or can make friends of any printsellers who have folios either of old drawings, or facsimiles of them, you will not be at a loss to find some example of this unity of pen with tinting. Multitudes of photographs also are now taken from the best drawings by the old masters, and I hope that our Mechanics' Institutes and other societies organized with a view to public instruction, will not fail to possess themselves of examples of these, and to make them accessible to students of drawing in the vicinity; a single print from Turner's Liber, to show the unison of tint with pen etching, and the "St. Catherine," photographed by Thurston Thompson from Raphael's drawing in the Louvre, to show the unity of the soft tinting of the stump with chalk, would be all that is necessary, and would, I believe, be in many cases more serviceable than a larger collection, and certainly than a whole gallery of second-rate prints. Two such examples are peculiarly desirable, because all other modes of drawing, with pen separately, or chalk separately, or color separately, may be seen by the poorest student in any cheap illustrated book, or in shop windows. But this unity of tinting with line he cannot generally see but by some special inquiry, and in some out of the way places he could not find a single example of it. Supposing that this should be so in your own case, and that you cannot meet with any example of this kind, try to make the matter out alone, thus: 112. Take a small and simple photograph; allow yourself half an hour to express its subjects with the pen only, using some permanent liquid color instead of ink, outlining its buildings or trees firmly, and laying in the deeper shadows, as you have been accustomed to do in your bolder pen drawings; then, when this etching is dry, take your sepia or gray, and tint it over, getting now the finer gradations of the photograph; and, finally taking out the higher lights with penknife or blotting paper. You will soon find what can be done in this way; and by a series of experiments you may ascertain for yourself how far the pen may be made serviceable to reinforce shadows, mark characters of texture, outline unintelligible masses, and so on. The more time you have, the more delicate you may make the pen drawing, blending it with the tint; the less you have, the more distinct you must keep the two. Practice in this way from one photograph, allowing yourself sometimes only a quarter of an hour for the whole thing, sometimes an hour, sometimes two or three hours; in each case drawing the whole subject in full depth of light and shade, but with such degree of finish in the parts as is possible in the given time. And this exercise, observe, you will do well to repeat frequently, whether you can get prints and drawings as well as photographs, or not. 113. And now at last, when you can copy a piece of Liber Studiorum, or its photographic substitute, faithfully, you have the complete means in your power of working from Nature on all subjects that interest you, which you should do in four different ways. First. When you have full time, and your subject is one that will stay quiet for you, make perfect light and shade studies, or as nearly perfect as you can, with gray or brown color of any kind, reinforced and defined with the pen. 114. Secondly. When your time is short, or the subject is so rich in detail that you feel you cannot complete it intelligibly in light and shade, make a hasty study of the effect, and give the rest of the time to a Düreresque expression of the details. If the subject seems to you interesting, and there are points about it which you cannot understand, try to get five spare minutes to go close up to it, and make a nearer memorandum; not that you are ever to bring the details of this nearer sketch into the farther one, but that you may thus perfect your experience of the aspect of things, and know that such and such a look of a tower or cottage at five hundred yards off means _that_ sort of tower or cottage near; while, also, this nearer sketch will be useful to prevent any future misinterpretation of your own work. If you have time, however far your light and shade study in the distance may have been carried, it is always well, for these reasons, to make also your Düreresque and your near memoranda; for if your light and shade drawing be good, much of the interesting detail must be lost in it, or disguised. 115. Your hasty study of effect may be made most easily and quickly with a soft pencil, dashed over when done with one tolerably deep tone of gray, which will fix the pencil. While this fixing color is wet, take out the higher lights with the dry brush; and, when it is quite dry, scratch out the highest lights with the penknife. Five minutes, carefully applied, will do much by these means. Of course the paper is to be white. I do not like studies on gray paper so well; for you can get more gradation by the taking off your wet tint, and laying it on cunningly a little darker here and there, than you can with body-color white, unless you are consummately skillful. There is no objection to your making your Düreresque memoranda on gray or yellow paper, and touching or relieving them with white; only, do not depend much on your white touches, nor make the sketch for their sake. 116. Thirdly. When you have neither time for careful study nor for Düreresque detail, sketch the outline with pencil, then dash in the shadows with the brush boldly, trying to do as much as you possibly can at once, and to get a habit of expedition and decision; laying more color again and again into the tints as they dry, using every expedient which your practice has suggested to you of carrying out your chiaroscuro in the manageable and moist material, taking the color off here with the dry brush, scratching out lights in it there with the wooden handle of the brush, rubbing it in with your fingers, drying it off with your sponge, etc. Then, when the color is in, take your pen and mark the outline characters vigorously, in the manner of the Liber Studiorum. This kind of study is very convenient for carrying away pieces of effect which depend not so much on refinement as on complexity, strange shapes of involved shadows, sudden effects of sky, etc.; and it is most useful as a safeguard against any too servile or slow habits which the minute copying may induce in you; for although the endeavor to obtain velocity merely for velocity's sake, and dash for display's sake, is as baneful as it is despicable; there are a velocity and a dash which not only are compatible with perfect drawing, but obtain certain results which cannot be had otherwise. And it is perfectly safe for you to study occasionally for speed and decision, while your continual course of practice is such as to insure your retaining an accurate judgment and a tender touch. Speed, under such circumstances, is rather fatiguing than tempting; and you will find yourself always beguiled rather into elaboration than negligence. [Illustration: FIG. 21.] 117. Fourthly. You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making memoranda of the shapes of shadows. You will find that many objects of no essential interest in themselves, and neither deserving a finished study, nor a Düreresque one, may yet become of singular value in consequence of the fantastic shapes of their shadows; for it happens often, in distant effect, that the shadow is by much a more important element than the substance. Thus, in the Alpine bridge, Fig. 21, seen within a few yards of it, as in the figure, the arrangement of timbers to which the shadows are owing is perceptible; but at half a mile's distance, in bright sunlight, the timbers would not be seen; and a good painter's expression of the bridge would be merely the large spot, and the crossed bars, of pure gray; wholly without indication of their cause, as in Fig. 22 _a_; and if we saw it at still greater distances, it would appear, as in Fig. 22 _b_ and _c_, diminishing at last to a strange, unintelligible, spider-like spot of gray on the light hill-side. A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances, continually reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts; and the singular, and to many persons unaccountable, effect of the confused touches in Turner's distances, is owing chiefly to this thorough accuracy and intense meaning of the shadow abstracts. [Illustration: FIG. 22.] 118. Studies of this kind are easily made, when you are in haste, with an F. or HB. pencil: it requires some hardness of the point to insure your drawing delicately enough when the forms of the shadows are very subtle; they are sure to be so somewhere, and are generally so everywhere. The pencil is indeed a very precious instrument after you are master of the pen and brush, for the pencil, cunningly used, is both, and will draw a line with the precision of the one and the gradation of the other; nevertheless, it is so unsatisfactory to see the sharp touches, on which the best of the detail depends, getting gradually deadened by time, or to find the places where force was wanted look shiny, and like a fire-grate, that I should recommend rather the steady use of the pen, or brush, and color, whenever time admits of it; keeping only a small memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut, sheathed pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being without this. 119. Thus much, then, respecting the manner in which you are at first to draw from Nature. But it may perhaps be serviceable to you, if I also note one or two points respecting your choice of subjects for study, and the best special methods of treating some of them; for one of by no means the least difficulties which you have at first to encounter is a peculiar instinct, common, as far as I have noticed, to all beginners, to fix on exactly the most unmanageable feature in the given scene. There are many things in every landscape which can be drawn, if at all, only by the most accomplished artists; and I have noticed that it is nearly always these which a beginner will dash at; or, if not these, it will be something which, though pleasing to him in itself, is unfit for a picture, and in which, when he has drawn it, he will have little pleasure. As some slight protection against this evil genius of beginners, the following general warnings may be useful: 120. (1.) Do not draw things that you love, on account of their associations; or at least do not draw them because you love them; but merely when you cannot get anything else to draw. If you try to draw places that you love, you are sure to be always entangled amongst neat brick walls, iron railings, gravel walks, greenhouses, and quickset hedges; besides that you will be continually led into some endeavor to make your drawing pretty, or complete, which will be fatal to your progress. You need never hope to get on, if you are the least anxious that the drawing you are actually at work upon should look nice when it is done. All you have to care about is to make it _right_, and to learn as much in doing it as possible. So then, though when you are sitting in your friend's parlor, or in your own, and have nothing else to do, you may draw anything that is there, for practice; even the fire-irons or the pattern on the carpet: be sure that it _is_ for practice, and not because it is a beloved carpet, or a friendly poker and tongs, nor because you wish to please your friend by drawing her room. 121. Also, never make presents of your drawings. Of course I am addressing you as a beginner--a time may come when your work will be precious to everybody; but be resolute not to give it away till you know that it is worth something (as soon as it is worth anything you will know that it is so). If any one asks you for a present of a drawing, send them a couple of cakes of color and a piece of Bristol board: those materials are, for the present, of more value in that form than if you had spread the one over the other. The main reason for this rule is, however, that its observance will much protect you from the great danger of trying to make your drawings pretty. 122. (2.) Never, by choice, draw anything polished; especially if complicated in form. Avoid all brass rods and curtain ornaments, chandeliers, plate, glass, and fine steel. A shining knob of a piece of furniture does not matter if it comes in your way; but do not fret yourself if it will not look right, and choose only things that do not shine. (3.) Avoid all very neat things. They are exceedingly difficult to draw, and very ugly when drawn. Choose rough, worn, and clumsy-looking things as much as possible; for instance, you cannot have a more difficult or profitless study than a newly painted Thames wherry, nor a better study than an old empty coal-barge, lying ashore at low tide: in general, everything that you think very ugly will be good for you to draw. (4.) Avoid, as much as possible, studies in which one thing is seen through another. You will constantly find a thin tree standing before your chosen cottage, or between you and the turn of the river; its near branches all entangled with the distance. It is intensely difficult to represent this; and though, when the tree _is_ there, you must not imaginarily cut it down, but do it as well as you can, yet always look for subjects that fall into definite masses, not into network; that is, rather for a cottage with a dark tree beside it, than for one with a thin tree in front of it, rather for a mass of wood, soft, blue, and rounded, than for a ragged copse, or confusion of intricate stems. (5.) Avoid, as far as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps nothing in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque and unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge, with trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed straight at the cattle line. Still, do not be discouraged if you find you have chosen ill, and that the subject overmasters you. It is much better that it should, than that you should think you had entirely mastered _it_. But at first, and even for some time, you must be prepared for very discomfortable failure; which, nevertheless, will not be without some wholesome result. 123. As, however, I have told you what most definitely to avoid, I may, perhaps, help you a little by saying what to seek. In general, all banks are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes. If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy mill-dams, etc. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; better in form and color than high chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with the flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study: a not very thick trunk, say nine inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy running up it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject. 124. Large nests of buildings in the middle distance are always beautiful, when drawn carefully, provided they are not modern rows of pattern cottages, or villas with Ionic and Doric porticoes. Any old English village, or cluster of farmhouses, drawn with all its ins and outs, and haystacks, and palings, is sure to be lovely; much more a French one. French landscape is generally as much superior to English as Swiss landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty of component lines. In drawing villages, take great pains with the gardens; a rustic garden is in every way beautiful. If you have time, draw all the rows of cabbages, and hollyhocks, and broken fences, and wandering eglantines, and bossy roses; you cannot have better practice, nor be kept by anything in purer thoughts. Make intimate friends with all the brooks in your neighborhood, and study them ripple by ripple. Village churches in England are not often good subjects; there is a peculiar meanness about most of them and awkwardness of line. Old manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in England from which it is possible to obtain _one_ subject for an impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring vergerism about them. 125. If you live in a mountain or hill country, your only danger is redundance of subject. Be resolved, in the first place, to draw a piece of rounded rock, with its variegated lichens, quite rightly, getting its complete roundings, and all the patterns of the lichen in true local color. Till you can do this, it is of no use your thinking of sketching among hills; but when once you have done this, the forms of distant hills will be comparatively easy. 126. When you have practiced for a little time from such of these subjects as may be accessible to you, you will certainly find difficulties arising which will make you wish more than ever for a master's help: these difficulties will vary according to the character of your own mind (one question occurring to one person, and one to another), so that it is impossible to anticipate them all; and it would make this too large a book if I answered all that I _can_ anticipate; you must be content to work on, in good hope that Nature will, in her own time, interpret to you much for herself; that farther experience on your own part will make some difficulties disappear; and that others will be removed by the occasional observation of such artists' work as may come in your way. Nevertheless, I will not close this letter without a few general remarks, such as may be useful to you after you are somewhat advanced in power; and these remarks may, I think, be conveniently arranged under three heads, having reference to the drawing of vegetation, water, and skies. 127. And, first, of vegetation. You may think, perhaps, we have said enough about trees already; yet if you have done as you were bid, and tried to draw them frequently enough, and carefully enough, you will be ready by this time to hear a little more of them. You will also recollect that we left our question, respecting the mode of expressing intricacy of leafage, partly unsettled in the first letter. I left it so because I wanted you to learn the real structure of leaves, by drawing them for yourself, before I troubled you with the most subtle considerations as to method in drawing them. And by this time, I imagine, you must have found out two principal things, universal facts, about leaves; namely, that they always, in the main tendencies of their lines, indicate a beautiful divergence of growth, according to the law of radiation, already referred to;[29] and the second, that this divergence is never formal, but carried out with endless variety of individual line. I must now press both these facts on your attention a little farther. 128. You may, perhaps, have been surprised that I have not yet spoken of the works of J. D. Harding, especially if you happen to have met with the passages referring to them in Modern Painters, in which they are highly praised. They are deservedly praised, for they are the only works by a modern[30] draughtsman which express in any wise the energy of trees, and the laws of growth, of which we have been speaking. There are no lithographic sketches which, for truth of general character, obtained with little cost of time, at all rival Harding's. Calame, Robert, and the other lithographic landscape sketchers are altogether inferior in power, though sometimes a little deeper in meaning. But you must not take even Harding for a model, though you may use his works for occasional reference; and if you can afford to buy his Lessons on Trees,[31] it will be serviceable to you in various ways, and will at present help me to explain the point under consideration. And it is well that I should illustrate this point by reference to Harding's works, because their great influence on young students renders it desirable that their real character should be thoroughly understood. 129. You will find, first, in the titlepage of the Lessons on Trees, a pretty wood-cut, in which the tree stems are drawn with great truth, and in a very interesting arrangement of lines. Plate 1 is not quite worthy of Mr. Harding, tending too much to make his pupil, at starting, think everything depends on black dots; still, the main lines are good, and very characteristic of tree growth. Then, in Plate 2, we come to the point at issue. The first examples in that plate are given to the pupil that he may practice from them till his hand gets into the habit of arranging lines freely in a similar manner; and they are stated by Mr. Harding to be universal in application; "all outlines expressive of foliage," he says, "are but modifications of them." They consist of groups of lines, more or less resembling our Fig. 23 below; and the characters especially insisted upon are, that they "tend at their inner ends to a common center;" that "their ends terminate in [are inclosed by] ovoid curves;" and that "the outer ends are most emphatic." [Illustration: FIG. 23.] 130. Now, as thus expressive of the great laws of radiation and inclosure, the main principle of this method of execution confirms, in a very interesting way, our conclusions respecting foliage composition. The reason of the last rule, that the outer end of the line is to be most emphatic, does not indeed at first appear; for the line at one end of a natural leaf is not more emphatic than the line at the other: but ultimately, in Harding's method, this darker part of the touch stands more or less for the shade at the outer extremity of the leaf mass; and, as Harding uses these touches, they express as much of tree character as any mere habit of touch _can_ express. But, unfortunately, there is another law of tree growth, quite as fixed as the law of radiation, which this and all other conventional modes of execution wholly lose sight of. This second law is, that the radiating tendency shall be carried out only as a ruling spirit in reconcilement with perpetual individual caprice on the part of the separate leaves. So that the moment a touch is monotonous, it must be also false, the liberty of the leaf individually being just as essential a truth, as its unity of growth with its companions in the radiating group. 131. It does not matter how small or apparently symmetrical the cluster may be, nor how large or vague. You can hardly have a more formal one than _b_ in Fig. 9, p. 47, nor a less formal one than this shoot of Spanish chestnut, shedding its leaves, Fig. 24; but in either of them, even the general reader, unpracticed in any of the previously recommended exercises, must see that there are wandering lines mixed with the radiating ones, and radiating lines with the wild ones: and if he takes the pen, and tries to copy either of these examples, he will find that neither play of hand to left nor to right, neither a free touch nor a firm touch, nor any learnable or describable touch whatsoever, will enable him to produce, currently, a resemblance of it; but that he must either draw it slowly or give it up. And (which makes the matter worse still) though gathering the bough, and putting it close to you, or seeing a piece of near foliage against the sky, you may draw the entire outline of the leaves, yet if the spray has light upon it, and is ever so little a way off, you will miss, as we have seen, a point of a leaf here, and an edge there; some of the surfaces will be confused by glitter, and some spotted with shade; and if you look carefully through this confusion for the edges or dark stems which you really _can_ see and put only those down, the result will be neither like Fig. 9 nor Fig. 24, but such an interrupted and puzzling piece of work as Fig. 25.[32] [Illustration: FIG. 25.] [Illustration: FIG. 24.] 132. Now, it is in the perfect acknowledgment and expression of these _three_ laws that all good drawing of landscape consists. There is, first, the organic unity; the law, whether of radiation, or parallelism, or concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees, of rocks, and clouds, and waves; secondly, the individual liberty of the members subjected to these laws of unity; and, lastly, the mystery under which the separate character of each is more or less concealed. I say, first, there must be observance of the ruling organic law. This is the first distinction between good artists and bad artists. Your common sketcher or bad painter puts his leaves on the trees as if they were moss tied to sticks; he cannot see the lines of action or growth; he scatters the shapeless clouds over his sky, not perceiving the sweeps of associated curves which the real clouds are following as they fly; and he breaks his mountain side into rugged fragments, wholly unconscious of the lines of force with which the real rocks have risen, or of the lines of couch in which they repose. On the contrary, it is the main delight of the great draughtsman to trace these laws of government; and his tendency to error is always in the exaggeration of their authority rather than in its denial. 133. Secondly, I say, we have to show the individual character and liberty of the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks. And herein the great masters separate themselves finally from the inferior ones; for if the men of inferior genius ever express law at all, it is by the sacrifice of individuality. Thus, Salvator Rosa has great perception of the sweep of foliage and rolling of clouds, but never draws a single leaflet or mist wreath accurately. Similarly, Gainsborough, in his landscape, has great feeling for masses of form and harmony of color; but in the detail gives nothing but meaningless touches; not even so much as the species of tree, much less the variety of its leafage, being ever discernible. Now, although both these expressions of government and individuality are essential to masterly work, the individuality is the _more_ essential, and the more difficult of attainment; and, therefore, that attainment separates the great masters _finally_ from the inferior ones. It is the more essential, because, in these matters of beautiful arrangement in visible things, the same rules hold that hold in moral things. It is a lamentable and unnatural thing to see a number of men subject to no government, actuated by no ruling principle, and associated by no common affection: but it would be a more lamentable thing still, were it possible, to see a number of men so oppressed into assimilation as to have no more any individual hope or character, no differences in aim, no dissimilarities of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in which no man could help another, since none would be feebler than himself; no man admire another, since none would be stronger than himself; no man be grateful to another, since by none he could be relieved; no man reverence another, since by none he could be instructed; a society in which every soul would be as the syllable of a stammerer instead of the word of a speaker, in which every man would walk as in a frightful dream, seeing specters of himself, in everlasting multiplication, gliding helplessly around him in a speechless darkness. Therefore it is that perpetual difference, play, and change in groups of form are more essential to them even than their being subdued by some great gathering law: the law is needful to them for their perfection and their power, but the difference is needful to them for their life. 134. And here it may be noted in passing, that, if you enjoy the pursuit of analogies and types, and have any ingenuity of judgment in discerning them, you may always accurately ascertain what are the noble characters in a piece of painting by merely considering what are the noble characters of man in his association with his fellows. What grace of manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial composition. What power is in liberty or relaxation to strengthen or relieve human souls; that power precisely in the same relative degree, play and laxity of line have to strengthen or refresh the expression of a picture. And what goodness or greatness we can conceive to arise in companies of men, from chastity of thought, regularity of life, simplicity of custom, and balance of authority; precisely that kind of goodness and greatness may be given to a picture by the purity of its color, the severity of its forms, and the symmetry of its masses. 135. You need not be in the least afraid of pushing these analogies too far. They cannot be pushed too far; they are so precise and complete, that the farther you pursue them, the clearer, the more certain, the more useful you will find them. They will not fail you in one particular, or in any direction of inquiry. There is no moral vice, no moral virtue, which has not its _precise_ prototype in the art of painting; so that you may at your will illustrate the moral habit by the art, or the art by the moral habit. Affection and discord, fretfulness, and quietness, feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and modesty, and all other such habits, and every conceivable modification and mingling of them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness, by conditions of line and color; and not merely these definable vices and virtues, but also every conceivable shade of human character and passion, from the righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king to the innocent or faultful simplicity of the shepherd boy. 136. The pursuit of this subject belongs properly, however, to the investigation of the higher branches of composition, matters which it would be quite useless to treat of in this book; and I only allude to them here, in order that you may understand how the utmost noblenesses of art are concerned in this minute work, to which I have set you in your beginning of it. For it is only by the closest attention, and the most noble execution, that it is possible to express these varieties of individual character, on which all excellence of portraiture depends, whether of masses of mankind, or of groups of leaves. 137. Now you will be able to understand, among other matters, wherein consists the excellence, and wherein the shortcoming, of the tree-drawing of Harding. It is excellent in so far as it fondly observes, with more truth than any other work of the kind, the great laws of growth and action in trees: it fails,--and observe, not in a minor, but in the principal point,--because it cannot rightly render any one individual detail or incident of foliage. And in this it fails, not from mere carelessness or incompletion, but of necessity; the true drawing of detail being for evermore impossible to a hand which has contracted a _habit_ of execution. The noble draughtsman draws a leaf, and stops, and says calmly,--That leaf is of such and such a character; I will give him a friend who will entirely suit him: then he considers what his friend ought to be, and having determined, he draws his friend. This process may be as quick as lightning when the master is great--one of the sons of the giants; or it may be slow and timid: but the process is always gone through; no touch or form is ever added to another by a good painter without a mental determination and affirmation. But when the hand has got into a habit, leaf No. 1 necessitates leaf No. 2; you cannot stop, your hand is as a horse with the bit in its teeth; or rather is, for the time, a machine, throwing out leaves to order and pattern, all alike. You must stop that hand of yours, however painfully; make it understand that it is not to have its own way any more, that it shall never more slip from one touch to another without orders; otherwise it is not you who are the master, but your fingers. You may therefore study Harding's drawing, and take pleasure in it;[33] and you may properly admire the dexterity which applies the habit of the hand so well, and produces results on the whole so satisfactory: but you must never copy it; otherwise your progress will be at once arrested. The utmost you can ever hope to do would be a sketch in Harding's manner, but of far inferior dexterity; for he has given his life's toil to gain his dexterity, and you, I suppose, have other things to work at besides drawing. You would also incapacitate yourself from ever understanding what truly great work was, or what Nature was; but, by the earnest and complete study of facts, you will gradually come to understand the one and love the other more and more, whether you can draw well yourself or not. 138. I have yet to say a few words respecting the third law above stated, that of mystery; the law, namely, that nothing is ever seen perfectly, but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity.[34] This last fact renders the visible objects of Nature complete as a type of the human nature. We have, observe, first, Subordination; secondly, Individuality; lastly, and this not the least essential character, Incomprehensibility; a perpetual lesson, in every serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight among the forest leaves, how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, the rents and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men's actions or spirits, which we at first think we understand, a closer and more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be either fathomed or withdrawn. [Illustration: FIG. 26.] 139. The expression of this final character in landscape has never been completely reached by any except Turner; nor can you hope to reach it at all until you have given much time to the practice of art. Only try always when you are sketching any object with a view to completion in light and shade, to draw only those parts of it which you really see definitely; preparing for the after development of the forms by chiaroscuro. It is this preparation by isolated touches for a future arrangement of superimposed light and shade which renders the etchings of the Liber Studiorum so inestimable as examples, and so peculiar. The character exists more or less in them exactly in proportion to the pains that Turner has taken. Thus the Æsacus and Hesperie was wrought out with the greatest possible care; and the principal branch on the near tree is etched as in Fig. 26. The work looks at first like a scholar's instead of a master's; but when the light and shade are added, every touch falls into its place, and a perfect expression of grace and complexity results. Nay, even before the light and shade are added, you ought to be able to see that these irregular and broken lines, especially where the expression is given of the way the stem loses itself in the leaves, are more true than the monotonous though graceful leaf-drawing which, before Turner's time, had been employed, even by the best masters, in their distant masses. Fig. 27 is sufficiently characteristic of the manner of the old wood-cuts after Titian; in which, you see, the leaves are too much of one shape, like bunches of fruit; and the boughs too completely seen, besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawings of the Carracci and other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28, about the worst which it is possible to get into the habit of using, though an ignorant person might perhaps suppose it more "free," and therefore better than Fig. 26. Note also, that in noble outline drawing, it does not follow that a bough is wrongly drawn, because it looks contracted unnaturally somewhere, as in Fig. 26, just above the foliage. Very often the muscular action which is to be expressed by the line runs into the middle of the branch, and the actual outline of the branch at that place may be dimly seen, or not at all; and it is then only by the future shade that its actual shape, or the cause of its disappearance, will be indicated. [Illustration: FIG. 27.] 140. One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In the minds of our ordinary water-color artists a distant tree seems only to be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other masses, and giving cool color to the landscape, but differing no wise, in texture, from the blots of other shapes which these painters use to express stones, or water, or figures. But as soon as you have drawn trees carefully a little while, you will be impressed, and impressed more strongly the better you draw them, with the idea of their _softness_ of surface. A distant tree is not a flat and even piece of color, but a more or less globular mass of a downy or bloomy texture, partly passing into a misty vagueness. I find, practically, this lovely softness of far-away trees the most difficult of all characters to reach, because it cannot be got by mere scratching or roughening the surface, but is always associated with such delicate expressions of form and growth as are only imitable by very careful drawing. The penknife passed lightly _over_ this careful drawing will do a good deal; but you must accustom yourself, from the beginning, to aim much at this softness in the lines of the drawing itself, by crossing them delicately, and more or less effacing and confusing the edges. You must invent, according to the character of tree, various modes of execution adapted to express its texture; but always keep this character of softness in your mind, and in your scope of aim; for in most landscapes it is the intention of Nature that the tenderness and transparent infinitude of her foliage should be felt, even at the far distance, in the most distinct opposition to the solid masses and flat surfaces of rocks or buildings. [Illustration: FIG. 28.] 141. II. We were, in the second place, to consider a little the modes of representing water, of which important feature of landscape I have hardly said anything yet. Water is expressed, in common drawings, by conventional lines, whose horizontality is supposed to convey the idea of its surface. In paintings, white dashes or bars of light are used for the same purpose. But these and all other such expedients are vain and absurd. A piece of calm water always contains a picture in itself, an exquisite reflection of the objects above it. If you give the time necessary to draw these reflections, disturbing them here and there as you see the breeze or current disturb them, you will get the effect of the water; but if you have not patience to draw the reflections, no expedient will give you a true effect. The picture in the pool needs nearly as much delicate drawing as the picture above the pool; except only that if there be the least motion on the water, the horizontal lines of the images will be diffused and broken, while the vertical ones will remain decisive, and the oblique ones decisive in proportion to their steepness. 142. A few close studies will soon teach you this: the only thing you need to be told is to watch carefully the lines of disturbance on the surface, as when a bird swims across it, or a fish rises, or the current plays round a stone, reed, or other obstacle. Take the greatest pains to get the _curves_ of these lines true; the whole value of your careful drawing of the reflections may be lost by your admitting a single false curve of ripple from a wild duck's breast. And (as in other subjects) if you are dissatisfied with your result, always try for more unity and delicacy: if your reflections are only soft and gradated enough, they are nearly sure to give you a pleasant effect.[35] When you are taking pains, work the softer reflections, where they are drawn out by motion in the water, with touches as nearly horizontal as may be; but when you are in a hurry, indicate the place and play of the images with vertical lines. The actual construction of a calm elongated reflection is with horizontal lines: but it is often impossible to draw the descending shades delicately enough with a horizontal touch; and it is best always when you are in a hurry, and sometimes when you are not, to use the vertical touch. When the ripples are large, the reflections become shaken, and must be drawn with bold undulatory descending lines. 143. I need not, I should think, tell you that it is of the greatest possible importance to draw the curves of the shore rightly. Their perspective is, if not more subtle, at least more stringent than that of any other lines in Nature. It will not be detected by the general observer, if you miss the curve of a branch, or the sweep of a cloud, or the perspective of a building;[36] but every intelligent spectator will feel the difference between a rightly-drawn bend of shore or shingle, and a false one. _Absolutely_ right, in difficult river perspectives seen from heights, I believe no one but Turner ever has been yet; and observe, there is NO rule for them. To develop the curve mathematically would require a knowledge of the exact quantity of water in the river, the shape of its bed, and the hardness of the rock or shore; and even with these data, the problem would be one which no mathematician could solve but approximatively. The instinct of the eye can do it; nothing else. 144. If, after a little study from Nature, you get puzzled by the great differences between the aspect of the reflected image and that of the object casting it; and if you wish to know the law of reflection, it is simply this: Suppose all the objects above the water _actually_ reversed (not in appearance, but in fact) beneath the water, and precisely the same in form and in relative position, only all topsy-turvy. Then, whatever you could see, from the place in which you stand, of the solid objects so reversed under the water, you will see in the reflection, always in the true perspective of the solid objects so reversed. If you cannot quite understand this in looking at water, take a mirror, lay it horizontally on the table, put some books and papers upon it, and draw them and their reflections; moving them about, and watching how their reflections alter, and chiefly how their reflected colors and shades differ from their own colors and shades, by being brought into other oppositions. This difference in chiaroscuro is a more important character in water-painting than mere difference in form. 145. When you are drawing shallow or muddy water, you will see shadows on the bottom, or on the surface, continually modifying the reflections; and in a clear mountain stream, the most wonderful complications of effect resulting from the shadows and reflections of the stones in it, mingling with the aspect of the stones themselves seen through the water. Do not be frightened at the complexity; but, on the other hand, do not hope to render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see, and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be, first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by refraction, so that, if the general structure of the stone shows straight parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the water crosses and interferes with the part that is seen through it, so that you can hardly tell which is which; and wherever the reflection is darkest, you will see through the water best,[37] and _vice versâ_. Then the real shadow of the stone crosses both these images, and where that shadow falls, it makes the water more reflective, and where the sunshine falls, you will see more of the surface of the water, and of any dust or motes that may be floating on it: but whether you are to see, at the same spot, most of the bottom of the water, or of the reflection of the objects above, depends on the position of the eye. The more you look down into the water, the better you see objects through it; the more you look along it, the eye being low, the more you see the reflection of objects above it. Hence the color of a given space of surface in a stream will entirely change while you stand still in the same spot, merely as you stoop or raise your head; and thus the colors with which water is painted are an indication of the position of the spectator, and connected inseparably with the perspective of the shores. The most beautiful of all results that I know in mountain streams is when the water is shallow, and the stones at the bottom are rich reddish-orange and black, and the water is seen at an angle which exactly divides the visible colors between those of the stones and that of the sky, and the sky is of clear, full blue. The resulting purple, obtained by the blending of the blue and the orange-red, broken by the play of innumerable gradations in the stones, is indescribably lovely. 146. All this seems complicated enough already; but if there be a strong color in the clear water itself, as of green or blue in the Swiss lakes, all these phenomena are doubly involved; for the darker reflections now become of the color of the water. The reflection of a black gondola, for instance, at Venice, is never black, but pure dark green. And, farther, the color of the water itself is of three kinds: one, seen on the surface, is a kind of milky bloom; the next is seen where the waves let light through them, at their edges; and the third, shown as a change of color on the objects seen through the water. Thus, the same wave that makes a white object look of a clear blue, when seen through it, will take a red or violet-colored bloom on its surface, and will be made pure emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its edges. With all this, however, you are not much concerned at present, but I tell it you partly as a preparation for what we have afterwards to say about color, and partly that you may approach lakes and streams with reverence,[38] and study them as carefully as other things, not hoping to express them by a few horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous blots.[39] Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots, when you know precisely what you mean by them, as you will see by many of the Turner sketches, which are now framed at the National Gallery; but you must have painted water many and many a day--yes, and all day long--before you can hope to do anything like those. 147. III. Lastly. You may perhaps wonder why, before passing to the clouds, I say nothing special about _ground_.[40] But there is too much to be said about that to admit of my saying it here. You will find the principal laws of its structure examined at length in the fourth volume of Modern Painters; and if you can get that volume, and copy carefully Plate 21, which I have etched after Turner with great pains, it will give you as much help as you need in the linear expression of ground-surface. Strive to get the retirement and succession of masses in irregular ground: much may be done in this way by careful watching of the perspective diminutions of its herbage, as well as by contour; and much also by shadows. If you draw the shadows of leaves and tree trunks on any undulating ground with entire carefulness, you will be surprised to find how much they explain of the form and distance of the earth on which they fall. 148. Passing then to skies, note that there is this great peculiarity about sky subject, as distinguished from earth subject;--that the clouds, not being much liable to man's interference, are always beautifully arranged. You cannot be sure of this in any other features of landscape. The rock on which the effect of a mountain scene especially depends is always precisely that which the roadmaker blasts or the landlord quarries; and the spot of green which Nature left with a special purpose by her dark forest sides, and finished with her most delicate grasses, is always that which the farmer plows or builds upon. But the clouds, though we can hide them with smoke, and mix them with poison, cannot be quarried nor built over, and they are always therefore gloriously arranged; so gloriously, that unless you have notable powers of memory you need not hope to approach the effect of any sky that interests you. For both its grace and its glow depend upon the united influence of every cloud within its compass: they all move and burn together in a marvelous harmony; not a cloud of them is out of its appointed place, or fails of its part in the choir: and if you are not able to recollect (which in the case of a complicated sky it is impossible you should) precisely the form and position of all the clouds at a given moment, you cannot draw the sky at all; for the clouds will not fit if you draw one part of them three or four minutes before another. 149. You must try therefore to help what memory you have, by sketching at the utmost possible speed the whole range of the clouds; marking, by any shorthand or symbolic work you can hit upon, the peculiar character of each, as transparent, or fleecy, or linear, or undulatory; giving afterwards such completion to the parts as your recollection will enable you to do. This, however, only when the sky is interesting from its general aspect; at other times, do not try to draw all the sky, but a single cloud: sometimes a round cumulus will stay five or six minutes quite steady enough to let you mark out his principal masses; and one or two white or crimson lines which cross the sunrise will often stay without serious change for as long. And in order to be the readier in drawing them, practice occasionally drawing lumps of cotton, which will teach you better than any other stable thing the kind of softness there is in clouds. For you will find when you have made a few genuine studies of sky, and then look at any ancient or modern painting, that ordinary artists have always fallen into one of two faults: either, in rounding the clouds, they make them as solid and hard-edged as a heap of stones tied up in a sack, or they represent them not as rounded at all, but as vague wreaths of mist or flat lights in the sky; and think they have done enough in leaving a little white paper between dashes of blue, or in taking an irregular space out with the sponge. Now clouds are not as solid as flour-sacks; but, on the other hand, they are neither spongy nor flat. They are definite and very beautiful forms of sculptured mist; sculptured is a perfectly accurate word; they are not more _drifted_ into form than they are _carved_ into form, the warm air around them cutting them into shape by absorbing the visible vapor beyond certain limits; hence their angular and fantastic outlines, as different from a swollen, spherical, or globular formation, on the one hand, as from that of flat films or shapeless mists on the other. And the worst of all is, that while these forms are difficult enough to draw on any terms, especially considering that they never stay quiet, they must be drawn also at greater disadvantage of light and shade than any others, the force of light in clouds being wholly unattainable by art; so that if we put shade enough to express their form as positively as it is expressed in reality, we must make them painfully too dark on the dark sides. Nevertheless, they are so beautiful, if you in the least succeed with them, that you will hardly, I think, lose courage. 150. Outline them often with the pen, as you can catch them here and there; one of the chief uses of doing this will be, not so much the memorandum so obtained, as the lesson you will get respecting the softness of the cloud-outlines. You will always find yourself at a loss to see where the outline really is; and when drawn it will always look hard and false, and will assuredly be either too round or too square, however often you alter it, merely passing from the one fault to the other and back again, the real cloud striking an inexpressible mean between roundness and squareness in all its coils or battlements. I speak at present, of course, only of the cumulus cloud: the lighter wreaths and flakes of the upper sky cannot be outlined;--they can only be sketched, like locks of hair, by many lines of the pen. Firmly developed bars of cloud on the horizon are in general easy enough, and may be drawn with decision. When you have thus accustomed yourself a little to the placing and action of clouds, try to work out their light and shade, just as carefully as you do that of other things, looking exclusively for examples of treatment to the vignettes in Rogers's Italy and Poems, and to the Liber Studiorum, unless you have access to some examples of Turner's own work. No other artist ever yet drew the sky: even Titian's clouds, and Tintoret's, are conventional. The clouds in the "Ben Arthur," "Source of Arveron," and "Calais Pier," are among the best of Turner's storm studies; and of the upper clouds, the vignettes to Rogers's Poems furnish as many examples as you need. 151. And now, as our first lesson was taken from the sky, so, for the present, let our last be. I do not advise you to be in any haste to master the contents of my next letter. If you have any real talent for drawing, you will take delight in the discoveries of natural loveliness, which the studies I have already proposed will lead you into, among the fields and hills; and be assured that the more quietly and single-heartedly you take each step in the art, the quicker, on the whole, will your progress be. I would rather, indeed, have discussed the subjects of the following letter at greater length, and in a separate work addressed to more advanced students; but as there are one or two things to be said on composition which may set the young artist's mind somewhat more at rest, or furnish him with defense from the urgency of ill-advisers, I will glance over the main heads of the matter here; trusting that my doing so may not beguile you, my dear reader, from your serious work, or lead you to think me, in occupying part of this book with talk not altogether relevant to it, less entirely or Faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: [23] It is meant, I believe, for "Salt Hill." [24] I do not mean that you can approach Turner or Dürer in their strength, that is to say, in their imagination or power of design. But you may approach them, by perseverance, in truth of manner. [25] The following are the most desirable plates:-- Grande Chartreuse. Little Devil's Bridge. Æsacus and Hesperie. River Wye (_not_ Wye and Severn). Cephalus and Procris. Holy Island. Source of Arveron. Clyde. Ben Arthur. Lauffenburg. Watermill. Blair Athol. Hindhead Hill. Alps from Grenoble. Hedging and Ditching. Raglan. (Subject with quiet brook, Dumblane Abbey. trees, and castle on the right.) Morpeth. Calais Pier. Pembury Mill. If you cannot get one of these, any of the others will be serviceable, except only the twelve following, which are quite useless:-- 1. Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above. 2. Interior of church. 3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing a pipe. 4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine. 5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church seen through them. 6. Fifth Plague of Egypt. 7. Tenth Plague of Egypt. 8. Rivaulx Abbey. 9. Wye and Severn. 10. Scene with castle in center, cows under trees on the left. 11. Martello Towers. 12. Calm. It is very unlikely that you should meet with one of the original etchings; if you should, it will be a drawing-master in itself alone, for it is not only equivalent to a pen-and-ink drawing by Turner, but to a very careful one; only observe, the Source of Arveron, Raglan, and Dumblane were not etched by Turner; and the etchings of those three are not good for separate study, though it is deeply interesting to see how Turner, apparently provoked at the failure of the beginnings in the Arveron and Raglan, took the plates up himself, and either conquered or brought into use the bad etching by his marvelous engraving. The Dumblane was, however, well etched by Mr. Lupton, and beautifully engraved by him. The finest Turner etching is of an aqueduct with a stork standing in a mountain stream, not in the published series; and next to it, are the unpublished etchings of the Via Mala and Crowhurst. Turner seems to have been so fond of these plates that he kept retouching and finishing them, and never made up his mind to let them go. The Via Mala is certainly, in the state in which Turner left it, the finest of the whole series: its etching is, as I said, the best after that of the aqueduct. Figure 20, above, is part of another fine unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, Æsacus, Cephalus, and Stone Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the more generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth, are also very desirable. [26] You will find more notice of this point in the account of Harding's tree-drawing, a little farther on. [27] The impressions vary so much in color that no brown can be specified. [28] You had better get such a photograph, even though you have a Liber print as well. [29] See the closing letter in this volume. [30] [In 1857.] [31] If you are not acquainted with Harding's works, (an unlikely supposition, considering their popularity,) and cannot meet with the one in question, the diagrams given here will enable you to understand all that is needful for our purposes. [32] I draw this figure (a young shoot of oak) in outline only, it being impossible to express the refinements of shade in distant foliage in a wood-cut. [33] His lithographic sketches, those for instance in the Park and the Forest, and his various lessons on foliage, possess greater merit than the more ambitious engravings in his Principles and Practice of Art. There are many useful remarks, however, dispersed through this latter work. [34] On this law you do well, if you can get access to it, to look at the fourth chapter of the fourth volume of Modern Painters. [35] See Note 3 in Appendix I. [36] The student may hardly at first believe that the perspective of buildings is of little consequence; but he will find it so ultimately. See the remarks on this point in the Preface. [37] See Note 4 in Appendix I. [38] See Note 5 in Appendix I. [39] It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue in water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue: fill a large white basin with the solution, and put anything you like to float on it, or lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of flowers, etc. Then study the effects of the reflections, and of the stems of the flowers or submerged portions of the floating objects, as they appear through the blue liquid; noting especially how, as you lower your head and look along the surface, you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you raise your head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems clearly. [40] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of Prout in the Appendix. LETTER III. ON COLOR AND COMPOSITION. 152. MY DEAR READER,--If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in color, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or blue, or gray. You _ought_ to love color, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are not merely desirous to color because you think painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may color well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in color, unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and masterly drawings in light and shade. But to color well, requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by the addition of color to your work. For the chances are more than a thousand to one against your being right both in form and color with a given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely increased,--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that, while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, color is wholly _relative_. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put a hotter color in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colors beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and great genius besides, can make a colorist. 153. But though you cannot produce finished colored drawings of any value, you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other people, by occasionally sketching with a view to color only; and preserving distinct statements of certain color facts--as that the harvest moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by clouds of such and such a rosy gray; that the mountains at evening were in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for color; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy color. 154. And, though of course you should always give as much form to your subject as your attention to its color will admit of, remember that the whole value of what you are about depends, in a colored sketch, on the color merely. If the color is wrong, everything is wrong: just as, if you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true the words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you color at all, you must color rightly. Give up all the form, rather than the slightest part of the color: just as, if you felt yourself in danger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never mind though your houses are all tumbling down,--though your clouds are mere blots, and your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like crooked sixpences,--so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon, are of the right colors. Of course, the discipline you have gone through will enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest sweep of the brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when you begin to make colored memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its color, take its color, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous, half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colors all wrong, and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit of considering the colored work merely as supplementary to your other studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a colored memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however, bears chiefly on large and distant subjects: in foregrounds and near studies, the color cannot be had without a good deal of definition of form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you will not have the right quantity of color in each bit of moss pattern, and then none of the colors will look right; but it always simplifies the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied, when necessary, to fail of all but that. 155. Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting coloring, which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope, at present, to set you pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely. 156. And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colors, not moist colors: grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning, keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colors to be used in broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be able always to get good and pure color when you need it; and force yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colors. The two best colorists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[41] afford us, I am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice. Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colors have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result of it with Rossetti is, that though his colors are safe, he has sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again. William Hunt, of the Old Water-color, is very neat in his practice; so, I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the more particular you are about your colors the more you will get into a deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true speed in coloring comes of this deliberation. 157. Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colors in order to pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to shape your masses more quietly, and play the colors about with more ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time. 158. This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque, constitutes body-color drawing as opposed to transparent-color drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this body-color is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting, being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of atmosphere without tenfold labor. And if you hear it said that the body-color looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent color, those glows and glooms are _not_ the noblest aim of art. After many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in Italy, and of body-color and transparent color in England, I am now entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colors amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[42] and to enjoy, in general, quality of color more than grandeur of composition, and confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been reached in dead color, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and Veronese are those which are likest frescoes. 159. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and coarse-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker Nature than transparent color: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_ accurately, I think, by nothing else); and for ground, rocks, and buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can ever be. 160. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of color are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle or method of color which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good color in oil, water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one, perhaps: you may have to ground with one color; to touch it with fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and to re-enforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down to the white ground, and beginning again. 161. The drawing in body-color will tend to teach you all this, more than any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly ruined our modern water-color school of art. There are sometimes places in which a skillful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain conditions of dusty color with more ease than he could otherwise; and sometimes a skillfully rased piece of paper will, in the midst of transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky body-color in representing the surfaces of rocks or building. But artifices of this kind are always treacherous in a tyro's hands, tempting him to trust in them: and you had better always work on white or gray paper as smooth as silk;[43] and never disturb the surface of your color or paper, except finally to scratch out the very highest lights if you are using transparent colors. 162. I have said above that body-color drawing will teach you the use of color better than working with merely transparent tints; but this is not because the process is an easier one, but because it is a more complete one, and also because it involves some working with transparent tints in the best way. You are not to think that because you use body-color you may make any kind of mess that you like, and yet get out of it. But you are to avail yourself of the characters of your material, which enable you most nearly to imitate the processes of Nature. Thus, suppose you have a red rocky cliff to sketch, with blue clouds floating over it. You paint your cliff first firmly, then take your blue, mixing it to such a tint (and here is a great part of the skill needed) that when it is laid over the red, in the thickness required for the effect of the mist, the warm rock-color showing through the blue cloud-color, may bring it to exactly the hue you want (your upper tint, therefore, must be mixed colder than you want it); then you lay it on, varying it as you strike it, getting the forms of the mist at once, and, if it be rightly done, with exquisite quality of color, from the warm tint's showing through and between the particles of the other. When it is dry, you may add a little color to retouch the edges where they want shape, or heighten the lights where they want roundness, or put another tone over the whole: but you can take none away. If you touch or disturb the surface, or by any untoward accident mix the under and upper colors together, all is lost irrecoverably. Begin your drawing from the ground again if you like, or throw it into the fire if you like. But do not waste time in trying to mend it.[44] 163. This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque color has, however, led us a little beyond the point where we should have begun; we must go back to our palette, if you please. Get a cake of each of the hard colors named in the note below[45] and try experiments on their simple combinations, by mixing each color with every other. If you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of pasteboard, and put the pure colors in columns at the top and side; the mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters standing for colors): b c d e f etc. a a b a c a d a e a f b -- b c b d b e b f c -- -- c d c e c f d -- -- -- d e d f e -- -- -- -- e f etc. This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints of two colors only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colors, either by putting the third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the third into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you the effects that colors have on each other when thus put over, or beside, each other. 164. When you have got a little used to the principal combinations, place yourself at a window which the sun does not shine in at, commanding some simple piece of landscape: outline this landscape roughly; then take a piece of white cardboard, cut out a hole in it about the size of a large pea; and supposing R is the room, _a d_ the window, and you are sitting at _a_, Fig. 29, hold this cardboard a little outside of the window, upright, and in the direction _b d_, parallel to the side of the window, or a little turned, so as to catch more light, as at _a d_, never turned as at _c d_, or the paper will be dark. Then you will see the landscape, bit by bit, through the circular hole. Match the colors of each important bit as nearly as you can, mixing your tints with white, beside the aperture. When matched, put a touch of the same tint at the top of your paper, writing under it: "dark tree color," "hill color," "field color," as the case may be. Then wash the tint away from beside the opening, and the cardboard will be ready to match another piece of the landscape.[46] When you have got the colors of the principal masses thus indicated, lay on a piece of each in your sketch in its right place, and then proceed to complete the sketch in harmony with them, by your eye. [Illustration: FIG. 29.] 165. In the course of your early experiments, you will be much struck by two things: the first, the inimitable brilliancy of light in sky and in sunlighted things; and the second, that among the tints which you can imitate, those which you thought the darkest will continually turn out to be in reality the lightest. Darkness of objects is estimated by us, under ordinary circumstances, much more by knowledge than by sight; thus, a cedar or Scotch fir, at 200 yards off, will be thought of darker green than an elm or oak near us; because we know by experience that the peculiar color they exhibit, at that distance, is the _sign_ of darkness of foliage. But when we try them through the cardboard, the near oak will be found, indeed, rather dark green, and the distant cedar, perhaps, pale gray-purple. The quantity of purple and gray in Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery. 166. Well, having ascertained thus your principal tints, you may proceed to fill up your sketch; in doing which observe these following particulars: (1.) Many portions of your subject appeared through the aperture in the paper brighter than the paper, as sky, sunlighted grass, etc. Leave these portions, for the present, white; and proceed with the parts of which you can match the tints. (2.) As you tried your subject with the cardboard, you must have observed how many changes of hue took place over small spaces. In filling up your work, try to educate your eye to perceive these differences of hue without the help of the cardboard, and lay them deliberately, like a mosaic-worker, as separate colors, preparing each carefully on your palette, and laying it as if it were a patch of colored cloth, cut out, to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next patch; so that the _fault_ of your work may be, not a slurred or misty look, but a patched bed-cover look, as if it had all been cut out with scissors. For instance, in drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there will be probably white high lights, then a pale rosy gray round them on the light side, then a (probably greenish) deeper gray on the dark side, varied by reflected colors, and, over all, rich black strips of bark and brown spots of moss. Lay first the rosy gray, leaving white for the high lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then lay the gray for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy gray of the light, leaving also in this darker gray the white paper in the places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colors separately for each spot, and lay each in the white place left for it. Not one grain of white, except that purposely left for the high lights, must be visible when the work is done, even through a magnifying-glass, so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your background colors, and put them on each side of the tree trunk, fitting them carefully to its edge. 167. Fine work you would make of this, wouldn't you, if you had not learned to draw first, and could not now draw a good outline for the stem, much less terminate a color mass in the outline you wanted? Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first begin to paint in this way, and before you can modify it, as I shall tell you presently how; but never mind; it is of the greatest possible importance that you should practice this separate laying on of the hues, for all good coloring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary, and sometimes desirable, to lay one color and form boldly over another: thus, in laying leaves on blue sky, it is impossible always in large pictures, or when pressed for time, to fill in the blue through the interstices of the leaves; and the great Venetians constantly lay their blue ground first, and then, having let it dry, strike the golden brown over it in the form of the leaf, leaving the under blue to shine through the gold, and subdue it to the olive-green they want. But in the most precious and perfect work each leaf is inlaid, and the blue worked round it; and, whether you use one or other mode of getting your result, it is equally necessary to be absolute and decisive in your laying the color. Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper color struck upon it in perfect form, forever, thenceforward, unalterable; or else the two colors must be individually put in their places, and led up to each other till they meet at their appointed border, equally, thenceforward, unchangeable. Either process, you see, involves absolute decision. If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or try this way and that with your color, it is all over with it and with you. You will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the Venetians, by daubing their colors about, and retouching, and finishing, and softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead them farther into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a Veronese in the Louvre, which gives the copyists much employment. He has a dark ground behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then when it was dry, or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair over it with some half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once, and forever. Had one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been wrong forever; no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists daub in first some background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch the background, then the hair; work for hours at it, expecting it always to come right to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for centuries at it, and they will never do it. If they can do it with Veronese's allowance of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the dark background, well; if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it will ever come right, and get true answer from him--on Launce's conditions: "If he say 'ay,' it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing, it will." 168. (3.) Whenever you lay on a mass of color, be sure that however large it may be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No color exists in Nature under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not see this, it is the fault of your inexperience: you will see it in due time, if you practice enough. But in general you may see it at once. In the birch trunk, for instance, the rosy gray _must_ be gradated by the roundness of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the shaded side is gradated by reflected light. Accordingly, whether by adding water, or white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you will do at pleasure, according to the texture you wish to produce), you must, in every tint you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than another, and get an even gradation between the two depths. This is very like laying down a formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is merely the assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically impossible to meet with an ungradated piece of color, but it is so supremely improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking yourself invariably, when you are going to copy a tint--not "Is that gradated?" but "Which way is that gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of color may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not merely because the natural fact is so, that your color should be gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the color itself depends more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to colors just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types, expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and ungradated color, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of rose-color on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the delicacy and quantity of its color gradations, all other flowers being either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed. 169. (4.) But observe, it is not enough in general that color should be gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another. Generally color changes as it diminishes, and is not merely darker at one spot, but also purer at one spot than anywhere else. It does not in the least follow that the darkest spots should be the purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them, however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of color until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a large spot; and must be gradated from that into less pure blue,--grayish blue, or greenish blue, or purplish blue,--over all the rest of the space it occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while the color is wet, mix with it the color which is to subdue it, adding gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the color is quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another color over it, leaving only a point of the first tint visible; or else, lay the subduing tints on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of each of these methods I have something to tell you separately; but that is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without once more pressing upon you the preëminent necessity of introducing it everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like habit of hand, and yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to get into a habit of never touching paper with color, without securing a gradation. You will not, in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six or seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of color as large as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that brilliancy of hue, and vigor of light, and even the aspect of transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from _equality_ of color than from nature of color. Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ocher out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of those colors unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth. 170. (5.) Next, note the three processes by which gradation and other characters are to be obtained: A. Mixing while the color is wet. You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colors distinctly oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though, in reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light, gradually one into the other; and, after being laid separately on, will need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk, and it is easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it often happens that the whole beauty of two colors will depend on the one being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of it: blue and green often do so in water; blue and gray, or purple and scarlet, in sky: in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and truthful results may be obtained by laying one color into the other while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-color; only observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the color you lay into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint. 171. B. Laying one color over another. If you lay on a solid touch of vermilion, and after it is quite dry, strike a little very wet carmine quickly over it, you will obtain a much more brilliant red than by mixing the carmine and vermilion. Similarly, if you lay a dark color first, and strike a little blue or white body-color lightly over it, you will get a more beautiful gray than by mixing the color and the blue or white. In very perfect painting, artifices of this kind are continually used; but I would not have you trust much to them: they are apt to make you think too much of quality of color. I should like you to depend on little more than the dead colors, simply laid on, only observe always this, that the _less_ color you do the work with, the better it will always be:[47] so that if you had laid a red color, and you want a purple one above, do not mix the purple on your palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower the red, but take a little thin blue from your palette, and lay it lightly over the red, so as to let the red be seen through, and thus produce the required purple; and if you want a green hue over a blue one, do not lay a quantity of green on the blue, but a _little_ yellow, and so on, always bringing the under color into service as far as you possibly can. If, however, the color beneath is wholly opposed to the one you have to lay on, as, suppose, if green is to be laid over scarlet, you must either remove the required parts of the under color daintily first with your knife, or with water; or else, lay solid white over it massively, and leave that to dry, and then glaze the white with the upper color. This is better, in general, than laying the upper color itself so thick as to conquer the ground, which, in fact, if it be a transparent color, you cannot do. Thus, if you have to strike warm boughs and leaves of trees over blue sky, and they are too intricate to have their places left for them in laying the blue, it is better to lay them first in solid white, and then glaze with sienna and ocher, than to mix the sienna and white; though, of course, the process is longer and more troublesome. Nevertheless, if the forms of touches required are very delicate, the after glazing is impossible. You must then mix the warm color thick at once, and so use it: and this is often necessary for delicate grasses, and such other fine threads of light in foreground work. 172. C. Breaking one color in small points through or over another. This is the most important of all processes in good modern[48] oil and water-color painting, but you need not hope to attain very great skill in it. To do it well is very laborious, and requires such skill and delicacy of hand as can only be acquired by unceasing practice. But you will find advantage in noting the following points: 173. (_a._) In distant effects of rich subject, wood, or rippled water, or broken clouds, much may be done by touches or crumbling dashes of rather dry color, with other colors afterwards put cunningly into the interstices. The more you practice this, when the subject evidently calls for it, the more your eye will enjoy the higher qualities of color. The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the principle of separate colors to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of color in juxtaposition, instead of large spaces. And note, in filling up minute interstices of this kind, that if you want the color you fill them with to show brightly, it is better to put a rather positive point of it, with a little white left beside or round it in the interstice, than to put a pale tint of the color over the whole interstice. Yellow or orange will hardly show, if pale, in small spaces; but they show brightly in firm touches, however small, with white beside them. 174. (_b._) If a color is to be darkened by superimposed portions of another, it is, in many cases, better to lay the uppermost color in rather vigorous small touches, like finely chopped straw, over the under one, than to lay it on as a tint, for two reasons: the first, that the play of the two colors together is pleasant to the eye; the second, that much expression of form may be got by wise administration of the upper dark touches. In distant mountains they may be made pines of, or broken crags, or villages, or stones, or whatever you choose; in clouds they may indicate the direction of the rain, the roll and outline of the cloud masses; and in water, the minor waves. All noble effects of dark atmosphere are got in good water-color drawing by these two expedients, interlacing the colors, or retouching the lower one with fine darker drawing in an upper. Sponging and washing for dark atmospheric effect is barbarous, and mere tyro's work, though it is often useful for passages of delicate atmospheric light. 175. (_c._) When you have time, practice the production of mixed tints by interlaced touches of the pure colors out of which they are formed, and use the process at the parts of your sketches where you wish to get rich and luscious effects. Study the works of William Hunt, of the Old Water-color Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower completely, but laying the ground color of one petal, and painting the spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of lilies, geraniums, tulips, etc., numbered with proper reference to their position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds besides those of art. Be careful to get the gradated distribution of the spots well followed in the calceolarias, foxgloves, and the like; and work out the odd, indefinite hues of the spots themselves with minute grains of pure interlaced color, otherwise you will never get their richness or bloom. You will be surprised to find as you do this, first, the universality of the law of gradation we have so much insisted upon; secondly, that Nature is just as economical of _her_ fine colors as I have told you to be of yours. You would think, by the way she paints, that her colors cost her something enormous; she will only give you a single pure touch, just where the petal turns into light; but down in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in the showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look close, only dusty gray, or green, or purple, or every color in the world at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the center of it. And so with all her colors. Sometimes I have really thought her miserliness intolerable: in a gentian, for instance, the way she economizes her ultramarine down in the bell is a little too bad.[49] 176. Next, respecting general tone. I said, just now, that, for the sake of students, my tax should not be laid on black or on white pigments; but if you mean to be a colorist, you must lay a tax on them yourself when you begin to use true color; that is to say, you must use them little, and make of them much. There is no better test of your color tones being good, than your having made the white in your picture precious, and the black conspicuous. 177. I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or brilliant: it is easy to scratch white seagulls out of black clouds, and dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but when white is well managed, it ought to be strangely delicious,--tender as well as bright,--like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colors. This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by gray, except at a few points of chief luster. 178. Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some _color_,--never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among them; never occurring except in a black object, or in small points indicative of intense shade in the very center of masses of shadow. Shadows of absolutely negative gray, however, may be beautifully used with white, or with gold; but still though the black thus, in subdued strength, becomes spacious, it should always be conspicuous; the spectator should notice this gray neutrality with some wonder, and enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold color and the white which it relieves. Of all the great colorists Velasquez is the greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than most other people's crimson. 179. It is not, however, only white and black which you must make valuable; you must give rare worth to every color you use; but the white and black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the other colors should be continually passing one into the other, being all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black, and neutral gray should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You may melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue, and your blue into green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should, however, try, as I said, to give preciousness to all your colors; and this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work, and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine coloring, like fine drawing, is delicate; and so delicate that if, at last, you _see_ the color you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of color which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of any color in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom hurts it. 180. Notice also that nearly all good compound colors are _odd_ colors. You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently you feel that it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will always find your color too warm or too cold--no color in the box will seem to have an affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it were laid at a single touch with a single color. 181. As to the choice and harmony of colors in general, if you cannot choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible color, you may find plenty given in treatises upon coloring, to illustrate the laws of harmony; and if you want to color beautifully, color as best pleases yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor look as if it were clever or difficult to color in that way, but so that the color may be pleasant to you when you are happy or thoughtful. Look much at the morning and evening sky, and much at simple flowers--dog-roses, wood-hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather, and such like,--as Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever any scientific person tells you that two colors are "discordant," make a note of the two colors, and put them together whenever you can. I have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the two colors which Nature seems to intend never to be separated, and never to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a peacock's neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green lights through it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds at sunrise, in this colored world of ours. If you have a good eye for colors, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts purple and green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow and neutral gray, and the like; and how she strikes these color-concords for general tones, and then works into them with innumerable subordinate ones; and you will gradually come to like what she does, and find out new and beautiful chords of color in her work every day. If you enjoy them, depend upon it you will paint them to a certain point right: or, at least, if you do not enjoy them, you are certain to paint them wrong. If color does not give you intense pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it, you are only tormenting the eyes and senses of people who feel color, whenever you touch it; and that is unkind and improper. 182. You will find, also, your power of coloring depend much on your state of health and right balance of mind; when you are fatigued or ill you will not see colors well, and when you are ill-tempered you will not choose them well: thus, though not infallibly a test of character in individuals, color power is a great sign of mental health in nations; when they are in a state of intellectual decline, their coloring always gets dull.[50] You must also take great care not to be misled by affected talk about colors from people who have not the gift of it: numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably never in all their lives received one genuine color-sensation. The modern religionists of the school of Overbeck are just like people who eat slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and purer than strawberries and plums. 183. Take care also never to be misled into any idea that color can help or display _form_; color[51] always disguises form, and is meant to do so. 184. It is a favorite dogma among modern writers on color that "warm colors" (reds and yellows) "approach," or express nearness, and "cold colors" (blue and gray) "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. Colors, as such, are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their quality (as depth, delicacy, etc.) 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 color, but because the mist in the air is blue, and therefore any warm color 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 color," than brown is a retiring color, because, when stones are seen through brown water, the deeper they lie the browner they look; or than yellow is a retiring color, 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 color will not look so bright; but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because you cannot get the color 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 gray. It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale color will more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark color 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 color 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 colors 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 "aërial perspective." Look for the natural effects, and set them down as fully as you can, and as faithfully, and _never_ alter a color because it won't look in its right place. Put the color 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 coloring, 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 "aërial perspective." 185. 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 color are more or less indicative of nearness. All distant color is _pure_ color: 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 color, purify or harmonize it; hence a bad colorist is peculiarly incapable of expressing distance. I do not of course mean that you are to use bad colors in your foreground by way of making it come forward; but only that a failure in color, there, will not put it out of its place; while a failure in color in the distance will at once do away with its remoteness; your dull-colored 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. 186. I have only one thing more to advise you, namely, never to color petulantly or hurriedly. You will not, indeed, be able, if you attend properly to your coloring, 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 color 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 colors. 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 gray, 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.] 187. Here, then, for I cannot without colored 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-color drawings accessible to you; or from any of the little treatises on their art which have been published lately by our water-color painters.[52] But do not trust much to works of this kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to mixture of colors; 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 generalization, when all the foundations of power must be laid in knowledge of speciality. * * * * * 188. 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 colors in pleasant order. In all these cases, observe, an intended unity must be the result of composition. A pavior 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. 189. Composition, understood in this pure sense, is the type, in the arts of mankind, of the Providential government of the world.[53] It is an exhibition, in the order given to notes, or colors, 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 sympathize 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. 190. 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 recognize it. Much more in a great picture; every line and color 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 colors 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. 191. 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 meter, 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. 192. 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. 193. 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. [Illustration: FIG. 31.] 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. 194. Thus, also, good pictures have always one light larger and brighter than the other lights, or one figure more prominent than the other figures, or one mass of color 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 they are vulgar pictures in which the law is strikingly manifest. 195. 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 slightly 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 Raphaels 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 center 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. 196. 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 analyze 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. [Illustration: FIG. 32.] Fig. 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 color, 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 aërial perspective of color 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 preëminence. 2. THE LAW OF REPETITION. 197. 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.[54] It is quite curious to see the pains that Turner sometimes takes to echo an important passage of color; 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 Harbors of England, I have already had occasion to dwell on this point; and I extract in the note[55] 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 the 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.[56] 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. 198. 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. 199. 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, etc., 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. 200. 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 like, from the law that rules them, and yet submitting to it. [Illustration: FIG. 33.] 201. 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 wood-cut; 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 that 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. 202. 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 wherever he could find them; but especially, observe, unequal bridges, having the highest arch at one side rather than at the center. 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. 203. 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 scooping 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 stone-mason 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, sympathizing, 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 endeavors 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.[57] [Illustration: FIG. 34.] 204. 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 Fig. 32, but in the larger diagram, Fig. 34, over leaf, 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. 205. 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 color 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 color, or other interfering elements of beauty. [Illustration: FIG. 35.] 206. Well, as curves are more beautiful than straight lines, it is necessary to a good composition that its continuities of object, mass, or color 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 hack from it here and there to keep the eye from discovering it too easily. [Illustration: FIG. 36.] 207. And it is not only always possible to obtain continuities of this kind: it is, in drawing large forests 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 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), is 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 in its moderation, that is to say, its close approach to straightness in some part of its course;[58] and, secondly, by its variation, that is to say, its never remaining equal in degree at different parts of its course. 208. This variation is itself twofold in all good curves. [Illustration: FIG. 37.] 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. 38.] 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.[59] [Illustration: FIG. 39.] [Illustration: FIG. 40.] 209. 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. 210. 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_. [Illustration: FIG. 41.] [Illustration: FIG. 42.] 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 connection 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. 67); 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 center. 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. 68), 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 center 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 anything like a representative number of types, I should have to give several hundreds of figures such as Fig. 44.[60] [Illustration: FIG. 43.] [Illustration: FIG. 44.] [Illustration: FIG. 45.] 211. 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,[61] as in Fig. 45, the lines which its ribs will take, supposing them outside of its timbers instead of inside, and the general contour of it, as seen in different directions, from above and below, will give you the closest approximation to the perspectives and foreshortenings of a well-grown branch-flake. Fig. 25 above, p. 89, 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. Fig. 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. 46.] 212. 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, p. 149. 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. 213. 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 inclose, 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. 214. 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, in _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. [Illustration: FIG. 47.] 215. 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[62] 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 connection 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. 216. 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 meaning 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 connection 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;[63] 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. 217. 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. 218. 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, p. 145, compared with Fig. 32, p. 137, 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. 219. 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 centralized by the long reflection which continues the vertical lines. 220. 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,[64] 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 a 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. Nicholas, at Prague, and the white group of figures under the tower in the sketch of Augsburg[65]); 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. 221. Of course the character of everything is best manifested by Contrast. Rest can only be enjoyed after labor; 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 color has an opponent color, 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 color or form would have uncombined, is given to each by contrast.[66] In this case again, however, a too manifest use of the artifice vulgarizes 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.[67] 222. 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 skillful 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 laboring or discordant verse, that the full ring may be felt in his main sentence, and the finished sweetness in his chosen rhythm.[68] 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 color, then passes away into slight, and pale, and simple color; 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.] 223. 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 fourteenth 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 center 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_![69] 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 was 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. 224. 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. 225. There are in this figure several other simple illustrations of the laws we have been tracing. Thus the whole shape of the walls' 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 center, 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 angled 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. 226. 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 colors, 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. 227. 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 color, 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 color, since, in all ornamentation whatever, the practice is continual, in the ages of good design. 228. 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 color 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 color, 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 artificially and unnaturally delightful interchanges of shadow that could possibly be devised by human wit. 229. 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 reflection, or imparted power, from the other. 8. THE LAW OF CONSISTENCY. 230. It is to be remembered, in the next place, that while contrast exhibits the _characters_ of things, it very often neutralizes or paralyzes their _power_. A number of white things may be shown to be clearly white by opposition of a black thing, but if we 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 perseverance strengthened. 231. Hence many compositions address themselves to the spectator by aggregate force of color or line, more than by contrasts of either; many noble pictures are painted almost exclusively in various tones of red, or gray, 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. 232. 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, gray color set against somber, and sharp forms against soft, and loud passages against low: but we have the bright picture, with its delicate sadness; the somber 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 colors 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 color to color. If, however, this be done by introducing false lights or false colors, 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 colors 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. 233. The opposite quality to breadth, that of division or scattering of light and color, has a certain contrasting charm, and is occasionally introduced with exquisite effect by good composers.[70] 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. 234. 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 color in the scene, and that you are obliged to paint it paler. If you paint all the colors 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 colors 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 colors 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. 235. It will happen, however, much more frequently, that you have to darken the whole system of colors, than to make them paler. You remember, in your first studies of color 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 color into them; and then the other colors 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. 236. It is not, indeed, possible to deepen _all_ the colors so much as to relieve the lights in their natural degree, you would merely sink most of your colors, 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-harmonized 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 gray or brown; and easy to see the effect of the landscape, when its colors 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.[71] For the thing required is not to darken pale yellow by mixing gray 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 color of every object in your landscape, and of every minor hue that made up those colors, 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.[72] 237. Supposing those scales of color, which I told you to prepare in order to show you the relations of color to gray, 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 color, 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 wanted 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 colors out of your scale, arranging them prettily, and then washing them all over with gray: that represents the treatment of Nature by the black mirror. Then arrange the same group of colors, with the tints five or six degrees deeper in the scale; and that will represent the treatment of Nature by Titian. 238. 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 colors carefully first by your old method; then deepening each color with its own tint, and being careful, above all things, to keep truth of equal change when the colors 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 colors in dark sides and light sides, and the influence of modifying reflections, than by mere accuracy of added depth in independent colors. 239. 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 gray 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 color, 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 unrivaled, 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 color hardly felt anywhere. All German work is apt to be out of harmony, in consequence of its too frequent conditions of affectation, and its willful 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. * * * * * 240. 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. I hope, when I have thought of them more, to be able to explain some of 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. Others I never hope to explain, laws of expression, 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 show, finally, why one succession of musical notes[73] shall be lofty 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. 241. 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 colors, but in every sort nobler, because addressed to deeper feelings. 242. For instance, in the "Datur Hora Quieti," the last vignette to Rogers's Poems, the plow 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 labor 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. 243. 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 sea-gull 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 plow told us of the ceased labor of the day. 244. 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 color 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 inclosures which surround the village; they can hardly be called gardens: but a decayed fragment or two of fencing fill the gaps in the bank; 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 pig-sty 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 cottages only by its low two-arched belfry, a little neater than one would expect in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite incumbent:[74] 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, bare-footed, 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 trousers 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 seawards: 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 fisher-boat 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. 245. 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. 246. 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 traveler's duty to see, or pride to do. Never force yourself to admire anything when you are not in the humor; 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 fullness 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 colors 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: [41] I give Rossetti this pre-eminence, because, though the leading Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over color in the abstract, Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering color 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-color, never in oil. [42] 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 color. Any color will do for some people, if it is browned and shining; but fallacy in dead color 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 luster. Translucency, though, as I have said above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but luster 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 that luster 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 generalize too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question that luster is destructive of loveliness in color, 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? [43] But not shiny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed imperial, or gray 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. [44] I insist upon this unalterability of color 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. [45] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few colors: 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 color-box in the order I have set them down, you will always easily put your finger on the one you want. Cobalt Smalt Antwerb blue Prussian blue Black Gamboge Emerald green Hooker's green Lemon yellow Cadmium yellow Yellow ocher Roman ocher Raw sienna Burnt sienna Light red Indian red Mars orange Extract of vermilion Carmine Violet carmine Brown madder Burnt umber Vandyke brown Sepia Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colors, but you need not care much about permanence in your 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 color, 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 color for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other colors. If you wish to take up coloring seriously you had better get Field's "Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about principles or harmonies of color; but only to its statements of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each other when mixed, etc. [46] 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 color beside one of the circular openings. You will thus have no occasion to wash any of the colors 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. [47] If colors 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 colors 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. [48] I say _modern_, because Titian's quiet way of blending colors, which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any artist. The best color we reach is got by stippling; but this is not quite right. [49] See Note 6 in Appendix I. [50] The worst general character that color can possibly have is a prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a decaying heap of vegetables; this color is _accurately_ indicative of decline or paralysis in missal-painting. [51] That is to say, local color inherent in the object. The gradations of color in the various shadows belonging to various lights exhibit form, and therefore no one but a colorist can ever draw _forms_ perfectly (see Modern Painters, vol. iv. chap. iii. at the end); but all notions of explaining form by superimposed color, as in architectural moldings, are absurd. Color 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. Color 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 colors are of equal depth. The blue ground will not retire the hundredth part of an inch more than the red one. [52] See, however, at the close of this letter, the notice of one more point connected with the management of color, under the head "Law of Harmony." [53] See farther, on this subject, Modern Painters, vol. iv. chap. viii. § 6. [54] See Note 7 in Appendix I. [55] "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." [56] This is obscure in the rude wood-cut, 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. [57] 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. [58] 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 xvii.; and Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. i. § 8. [59] 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, p. 17, and examine the curves of its boughs one by one, trying them by the conditions here stated under the heads A and B. [60] The reader, I hope, observes always that every line in these figures is itself one of varying curvature, and cannot be drawn by compasses. [61] I hope the reader understands that these wood-cuts 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. [62] 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. [63] 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. [64] 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. [65] Both in the Sketches in Flanders and Germany. [66] If you happen to meet with the plate of Dürer'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. [67] 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. [68] "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._ [69] I am describing from an MS., _circa_ 1300, of Gregory's Decretalia, in my own possession. [70] 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 divisions; order being marked through this division. [71] I fully believe that the strange gray 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. [72] 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. [73] In all the best arrangements of color, 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. [74] "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. I. ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. NOTE 1, p. 42.--"_Principle of the stereoscope._" 247. I am sorry to find a notion current among artists, that they can, in some degree, imitate in a picture the effect of the stereoscope, by confusion of lines. There are indeed one or two artifices by which, as stated in the text, an appearance of retirement or projection may be obtained, so that they partly supply the place of the stereoscopic effect, but they do not imitate that effect. The principle of the human sight is simply this:--by means of our two eyes we literally see everything from two places at once; and, by calculated combination, in the brain, of the facts of form so seen, we arrive at conclusions respecting the distance and shape of the object, which we could not otherwise have reached. But it is just as vain to hope to paint at once the two views of the object as seen from these two places, though only an inch and a half distant from each other, as it would be if they were a mile and a half distant from each other. With the right eye you see one view of a given object, relieved against one part of the distance; with the left eye you see another view of it, relieved against another part of the distance. You may paint whichever of those views you please; you cannot paint both. Hold your finger upright, between you and this page of the book, about six inches from your eyes, and three from the book; shut the right eye, and hide the words "inches from," in the second line above this, with your finger; you will then see "six" on one side of it, and "your," on the other. Now shut the left eye and open the right without moving your finger, and you will see "inches," but not "six." You may paint the finger with "inches" beyond it, or with "six" beyond it, but not with both. And this principle holds for any object and any distance. You might just as well try to paint St. Paul's at once from both ends of London Bridge as to realize any stereoscopic effect in a picture. NOTE 2, p. 59.--"_Dark lines turned to the light._" 248. It ought to have been farther observed, that the inclosure of the light by future shadow is by no means the only reason for the dark lines which great masters often thus introduce. It constantly happens that a local color will show its own darkness most on the light side, by projecting into and against masses of light in that direction; and then the painter will indicate this future force of the mass by his dark touch. Both the monk's head in Fig. 11 and dog in Fig. 20 are dark towards the light for this reason. NOTE 3, p. 98.--"_Softness of reflections._" 249. I have not quite insisted enough on the extreme care which is necessary in giving the tender evanescence of the edges of the reflections, when the water is in the least agitated; nor on the decision with which you may reverse the object, when the water is quite calm. Most drawing of reflections is at once confused and hard; but Nature's is at once intelligible and tender. Generally, at the edge of the water, you ought not to see where reality ceases and reflection begins; as the image loses itself you ought to keep all its subtle and varied veracities, with the most exquisite softening of its edge. Practice as much as you can from the reflections of ships in calm water, following out all the reversed rigging, and taking, if anything, more pains with the reflection than with the ship. NOTE 4, p. 100.--"_Where the reflection is darkest, you will see through the water best._" 250. For this reason it often happens that if the water be shallow, and you are looking steeply down into it, the reflection of objects on the bank will consist simply of pieces of the bottom seen clearly through the water, and relieved by flashes of light, which are the reflection of the sky. Thus you may have to draw the reflected dark shape of a bush: but, inside of that shape, you must not draw the leaves of the bush, but the stones under the water; and, outside of this dark reflection, the blue or white of the sky, with no stones visible. NOTE 5, p. 101.--"_Approach streams with reverence._" 251. I have hardly said anything about waves of torrents or waterfalls, as I do not consider them subjects for beginners to practice upon; but, as many of our younger artists are almost breaking their hearts over them, it may be well to state at once that it is physically impossible to draw a running torrent quite rightly, the luster of its currents and whiteness of its foam being dependent on intensities of light which art has not at its command. This also is to be observed, that most young painters make their defeat certain by attempting to draw running water, which is a lustrous object in rapid motion, without ever trying their strength on a lustrous object standing still. Let them break a coarse green-glass bottle into a great many bits, and try to paint those, with all their undulations and edges of fracture, as they lie still on the table; if they cannot, of course they need not try the rushing crystal and foaming fracture of the stream. If they can manage the glass bottle, let them next buy a fragment or two of yellow fire-opal; it is quite a common and cheap mineral, and presents, as closely as anything can, the milky bloom and color of a torrent wave: and if they can conquer the opal, they may at last have some chance with the stream, as far as the stream is in any wise possible. But, as I have just said, the bright parts of it are _not_ possible, and ought, as much as may be, to be avoided in choosing subjects. A great deal more may, however, be done than any artist has done yet, in painting the gradual disappearance and lovely coloring of stones seen through clear and calm water. Students living in towns may make great progress in rock-drawing by frequently and faithfully drawing broken edges of common roofing slates, of their real size. NOTE 6, p. 125.--"_Nature's economy of color._" 252. I heard it wisely objected to this statement, the other day, by a young lady, that it was not through economy that Nature did not color deep down in the flower bells, but because "she had not light enough there to see to paint with." This may be true; but it is certainly not for want of light that, when she is laying the dark spots on a foxglove, she will not use any more purple than she has got already on the bell, but takes out the color all round the spot, and concentrates it in the middle. NOTE 7, p. 138.--"_The law of repetition._" 253. The reader may perhaps recollect a very beautiful picture of Vandyck's in the Manchester Exhibition, representing three children in court dresses of rich black and red. The law in question was amusingly illustrated, in the lower corner of that picture, by the introduction of two crows, in a similar color of court dress, having jet black feathers and bright red beaks. 254. Since the first edition of this work was published, I have ascertained that there are two series of engravings from the Bible drawings mentioned in the list at p. 50. One of these is inferior to the other, and in many respects false to the drawing; the "Jericho," for instance, in the false series, has common bushes instead of palm trees in the middle distance. The original plates may be had at almost any respectable printseller's; and ordinary impressions, whether of these or any other plates mentioned in the list at p. 50, will be quite as useful as proofs: but, in buying Liber Studiorum, it is always well to get the best impressions that can be had, and if possible impressions of the original plates, published by Turner. In case these are not to be had, the copies which are in course of publication by Mr. Lupton (4 Keppel Street, Russell Square) are good and serviceable; but no others are of any use.--[Note of 1857.] I have placed in the hands of Mr. Ward (Working Men's College) some photographs from the etchings made by Turner for the Liber; the original etchings being now unobtainable, except by fortunate accident. I have selected the subjects carefully from my own collection of the etchings; and though some of the more subtle qualities of line are lost in the photographs, the student will find these proofs the best lessons in pen-drawing accessible to him.--[Note of 1859] II. THINGS TO BE STUDIED. 255. 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 enjoyment of it will never be made more acute by feeding on ashes; though it may be well sometimes to taste the ashes, in order to know the bitterness of them. 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 loves mountains, and dwells 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 like heaven, that is the right way for her to begin the study of religious art. 256. 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 look, with even partial admiration, 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,[75] at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern Pre-Raphaelites.[76] 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, Gaspar 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 Carracci, 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 color; 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. 257. 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 Dürers, which I have asked you to get first: 1. Samuel Prout.[77] All his published lithographic sketches are of the greatest value, wholly unrivaled 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, etc., 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 Proutize 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 colored 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 color 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 Bean-stalk," and "Tom Thumb," which are much overlabored, 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 worked just 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 equaled in illustrations of this simple kind; the bitter intensity of the feeling being just like that which characterizes 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 imaginations in them are so lovely 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; but his most beautiful work, as far as I know, is his series of Illustrations to the Lord's Prayer. 8. Rossetti. An edition of Tennyson, lately published, contains wood-cuts 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;[78] still they are full of instruction, and cannot be studied too closely. But observe, respecting these wood-cuts, 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 "Maud" or "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.[79] Retzsch'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.[80] 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, etc., 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. 258. 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 little 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,[81] Plato, Æschylus, Herodotus, Dante,[82] 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 abridgment 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, Thomas Hood, 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. 259. 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 in familiar things, the objects for hopeful labor, and for humble love. FOOTNOTES: [75] 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. [76] Including, under this term, John Lewis, and William Hunt of the Old Water-color, who, take him all in all, is the best painter of still life, I believe, that ever existed. [77] The order in which I place these masters does not in the least imply superiority or inferiority. I wrote their names down as they occurred to me; putting Rossetti's last because what I had to say of him was connected with other subjects; and one or another will appear to you great, or be found by you useful, according to the kind of subjects you are studying. [78] 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. [79] 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 trust-worthy, 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. [80] Large line engravings, I mean, in which the lines, as such, are conspicuous. Small vignettes in line are often beautiful in figures no less than landscape; as, for instance, those from Stothard's drawings in Rogers's Italy; and, therefore, I have just recommended the vignettes to Tennyson to be done by line engraving. [81] Chapman's, if not the original. [82] Gary's or Cayley's, if not the original. I do not know which are the best translations of Plato. Herodotus and Æschylus 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. * * * * * CORRECTION MADE TO THE ORIGINAL TEXT. Page 58: 'Thus, the outline a and the outline d.' 'd' replaced by 'b.' 
46915	----	Transcriber's Note: ################### This e-text is based on the 1802 edition. The original spelling has been retained, as well as inconsistencies, such as 'musquetry'/'musketry', 'Du Frêne'/'du Fresne', 'Melzio'/'Meltio'/'Melzi', etc. Uncommon or old-style spelling has not been altered, such as 'opake' (opaque), 'verdegris' (verdigris), 'dutchess' (duchess), etc. Errors due to bad print, as well as minor punctuation errors have been tacitly corrected. In the text, the plates are referenced by using Roman numerals, whereas the captions of the plates show Arabic numerals; the same applies to the Table of Chapters and the chapter headings, respectively. This inconsistency has been retained. Footnotes related to introductory chapters have been prefixed with the letter 'i' ([i1]-[i210]); footnotes in da Vinci's own text, however, are shown in plain Arabic numerals ([1]-[102]). Italic passages in the original version have been placed between underscores (_text_); text in small caps has been symbolised by forward slashes (/small caps/). A superscript character has been denominated by a preceding caret symbol (^). The following typographical errors have been corrected: # p. xviii: 'overspead' --> 'overspread'; 'Vincius ast oculis' --> 'Vincius est oculis' # p. lxxxiii: 'Vasari, 36,' --> 'Vasari, p. 36' # p. lxxxv: 'Maestrodi' --> 'Maestro di' # p. xcii: 'Fontainbleau' --> 'Fontainebleau' # p. 22: Plate 2: original caption points to page 2; corrected to page 22. # p. 37: 'pully' -->'pulley' # p. 117: 'andso' --> 'and so' # p. 156: 'A B E D' --> 'C B E D' # p. 181: 'that that' --> 'than that' # Footnote 62: 'tranferred' --> 'transferred' The Table of Chapters has been moved to the beginning of the text for reasons of clarity and comprehensibility. A TREATISE ON PAINTING, BY LEONARDO DA VINCI. Printed by /S. Gosnell/, Little Queen Street, Holborn, London. [Illustration: LEONARDO DA VINCI, from a Picture In the Florentine Museum. _London, Published by J. Taylor 59 High Holborn_] A TREATISE ON PAINTING, BY _LEONARDO DA VINCI_. FAITHFULLY TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN, AND NOW FIRST DIGESTED UNDER PROPER HEADS, /By/ JOHN FRANCIS RIGAUD, /Esq./ ACADEMICIAN OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF PAINTING AT LONDON, AND ALSO OF THE ACADEMIA CLEMENTINA AT BOLOGNA, AND THE ROYAL ACADEMY AT STOCKHOLM. Illustrated with twenty-three Copper-plates, and other Figures. TO WHICH IS PREFIXED _A NEW LIFE OF THE AUTHOR_, DRAWN UP FROM AUTHENTIC MATERIALS TILL NOW INACCESSIBLE, /By/ JOHN SIDNEY, HAWKINS, /Esq./ F.A.S. Ars est habitus quidam faciendi verâ cum ratione. ARISTOT. ETHIC. LIB. 6. London: PRINTED FOR J. TAYLOR, AT THE ARCHITECTURAL LIBRARY, HIGH HOLBORN. M.DCCC.II. TABLE OF CHAPTERS. _The Number at the End of each Title refers to the corresponding Chapter in the original Edition in Italian._ DRAWING. PROPORTION. Chap. 1. What the young Student in Painting ought in the first Place to learn. Chapter 1. 2. Rule for a young Student in Painting. 3. 3. How to discover a young Man's Disposition for Painting. 4. 4. Of Painting, and its Divisions. 47. 5. Division of the Figure. 48. 6. Proportion of Members. 49. 7. Of Dimensions in general. 173. 8. Motion, Changes, and Proportion of Members. 166. 9. The Difference of Proportion between Children and grown Men. 169. 10. The Alterations in the Proportion of the human Body from Infancy to full Age. 167. 11. Of the Proportion of Members. 175. 12. That every Part be proportioned to its Whole. 250. 13. Of the Proportion of the Members. 185. 14. The Danger of forming an erroneous Judgment in regard to the Proportion and Beauty of the Parts. 42. 15. Another Precept. 12. 16. The Manner of drawing from Relievos, and rendering Paper fit for it. 127. 17. Of drawing from Casts or Nature. 31. 18. To draw Figures from Nature. 38. 19. Of drawing from Nature. 25. 20. Of drawing Academy Figures. 30. 21. Of studying in the Dark, on first waking in the Morning, and before going to sleep. 17. 22. Observations on drawing Portraits. 188. 23. The Method of retaining in the Memory the Likeness of a Man, so as to draw his Portrait, after having seen him only once. 189. 24. How to remember the Form of a Face. 190. 25. That a Painter should take Pleasure in the Opinion of every Body. 19. ANATOMY. 26. What is principally to be observed in Figures. 213. 27. Mode of Studying. 7. 28. Of being universal. 22. 29. A Precept for the Painter. 5. 30. Of the Measures of the human Body, and the bending of Members. 174. 31. Of the small Bones in several Joints of the human Body. 229. 32. Memorandum to be observed by the Painter. 57. 33. The Shoulders. 171. 34. The Difference of Joints between Children and grown Men. 168. 35. Of the Joints of the Fingers. 170. 36. Of the Joint of the Wrist. 176. 37. Of the Joint of the Foot. 177. 38. Of the Knee. 178. 39. Of the Joints. 179. 40. Of the Naked. 220. 41. Of the Thickness of the Muscles. 221. 42. Fat Subjects have small Muscles. 222. 43. Which of the Muscles disappear in the different Motions of the Body. 223. 44. Of the Muscles. 226. 45. Of the Muscles. 224. 46. The Extension and Contraction of the Muscles. 227. 47. Of the Muscle between the Chest and the lower Belly. 230. 48. Of a Man's complex Strength, but first of the Arm. 234. 49. In which of the two Actions, Pulling or Pushing, a Man has the greatest Power, _Plate II._ 235. 50. Of the bending of Members, and of the Flesh round the bending Joint. 236. 51. Of the naked Body. 180. 52. Of a Ligament without Muscles. 228. 53. Of Creases. 238. 54. How near behind the Back one Arm can be brought to the other. _Plate III._ and _IV._ 232. 55. Of the Muscles. 225. 56. Of the Muscles. 194. 57. Of the bending of the Body. 204. 58. The same Subject. 205. 59. The Necessity of anatomical Knowledge. 43. MOTION AND EQUIPOISE OF FIGURES. 60. Of the Equipoise of a Figure standing still. 203. 61. Motion produced by the Loss of Equilibrium. 208. 62. Of the Equipoise of Bodies, _Plate V._ 263. 63. Of Positions. 192. 64. Of balancing the Weight round the Centre of Gravity in Bodies. 214. 65. Of Figures that have to lift up, or carry any Weight. 215. 66. The Equilibrium of a Man standing upon his Feet, _Plate VI._ 201. 67. Of Walking, _Plate VII._ 202. 68. Of the Centre of Gravity in Men and Animals. 199. 69. Of the corresponding Thickness of Parts on each Side of the Body. 269. 70. Of the Motions of Animals. 249. 71. Of Quadrupeds and their Motions. 268. 72. Of the Quickness or Slowness of Motion. 267. 73. Of the Motion of Animals. 299. 74. Of a Figure moving against the Wind, _Plate VIII._ 295. 75. Of the Balance of a Figure resting upon its Feet. 266. 76. A Precept. 350. 77. Of a Man standing, but resting more upon one Foot than the other. 264. 78. Of the Balance of Figures, _Plate IX._ 209. 79. In what Manner extending one Arm alters the Balance. 198. 80. Of a Man bearing a Weight on his Shoulders, _Plate X._ 200. 81. Of Equilibrium. 206. 82. Of Motion. 195. 83. The Level of the Shoulders. 196. 84. Objection to the above answered, _Plate XI._ and _XII._ 197. 85. Of the Position of Figures, _Plate XIII._ 89. 86. Of the Joints. 184. 87. Of the Shoulders. 172. 88. Of the Motions of a Man. 207. 89. Of the Disposition of Members preparing to act with great Force, _Plate XIV._ 233. 90. Of throwing any Thing with Violence, _Plate XV._ 261. 91. On the Motion of driving any Thing into or drawing it out of the Ground. 262. 92. Of forcible Motions, _Plate XVI._ 181. 93. The Action of Jumping. 260. 94. Of the three Motions in jumping upwards. 270. 95. Of the easy Motions of Members. 211. 96. The greatest Twist which a Man can make, in turning to look at himself behind, Plate _XVII._ 231. 97. Of turning the Leg without the Thigh. 237. 98. Postures of Figures. 265. 99. Of the Gracefulness of the Members. 210. 100. That it is impossible for any Memory to retain the Aspects and Changes of the Members. 271. 101. The Motions of Figures. 242. 102. Of common Motions. 248. 103. Of simple Motions. 239. 104. Complex Motions. 240. 105. Motions appropriated to the Subject. 241. 106. Appropriate Motions. 245. 107. Of the Postures of Women and young People. 259. 108. Of the Postures of Children. 258. 109. Of the Motion of the Members. 186. 110. Of mental Motions. 246. 111. Effect of the Mind upon the Motions of the Body, occasioned by some outward Object. 247. LINEAR PERSPECTIVE. 112. Of those who apply themselves to the Practice, without having learnt the Theory of the Art. 23. 113. Precepts in Painting. 349. 114. Of the Boundaries of Objects called Outlines or Contours. 291. 115. Of linear Perspective. 322. 116. What Parts of Objects disappear first by Distance. 318. 117. Of remote Objects. 316. 118. Of the Point of Sight. 281. 119. A Picture is to be viewed from one Point only. 59. 120. Of the Dimensions of the first Figure in an historical Painting. 91. 121. Of Objects that are lost to the Sight, in Proportion to their Distance. 292. 122. Errors not so easily seen in small Objects as in large ones. 52. 123. Historical Subjects one above another on the same Wall to be avoided. 54. 124. Why Objects in Painting can never detach as natural Objects do. 53. 125. How to give the proper Dimension to Objects in Painting. 71. 126. How to draw accurately any particular Spot. 32. 127. Disproportion to be avoided, even in the accessory Parts. 290. INVENTION /or/ COMPOSITION. 128. Precept for avoiding a bad Choice in the Style or Proportion of Figures. 45. 129. Variety in Figures. 21. 130. How a Painter ought to proceed in his Studies. 6. 131. Of sketching Histories and Figures. 13. 132. How to study Composition. 96. 133. Of the Attitudes of Men. 216. 134. Variety of Positions. 217. 135. Of Studies from Nature for History. 37. 136. Of the Variety of Figures in History Painting. 94. 137. Of Variety in History. 97. 138. Of the Age of Figures. 252. 139. Of Variety of Faces. 98. 140. A Fault in Painters. 44. 141. How you may learn to compose Groups for History Painting. 90. 142. How to study the Motions of the human Body. 95. 143. Of Dresses, and of Draperies and Folds. 358. 144. Of the Nature of Folds in Draperies. 359. 145. How the Folds of Draperies ought to be represented, _Plate XVIII._ 360. 146. How the Folds in Draperies ought to be made. 361. 147. Fore-shortening of Folds, _Plate XIX._ 362. 148. Of Folds. 364. 149. Of Decorum. 251. 150. The Character of Figures in Composition. 253. 151. The Motion of the Muscles, when the Figures are in natural Positions. 193. 152. A Precept in Painting. 58. 153. Of the Motion of Man, _Plate XX._ and _XXI._ 182. 154. Of Attitudes, and the Motions of the Members. 183. 155. Of a single Figure separate from an historical Group. 212. 156. On the Attitudes of the human Figure. 218. 157. How to represent a Storm. 66. 158. How to compose a Battle. 67. 159. The Representation of an Orator and his Audience. 254. 160. Of demonstrative Gestures. 243. 161. Of the Attitudes of the By-standers at some remarkable Event. 219. 162. How to represent Night. 65. 163. The Method of awakening the Mind to a Variety of Inventions. 16. 164. Of Composition in History. 93. EXPRESSION /and/ CHARACTER. 165. Of expressive Motions. 50. 166. How to paint Children. 61. 167. How to represent old Men. 62. 168. How to paint old Women. 63. 169. How to paint Women. 64. 170. Of the Variety of Faces. 244. 171. The Parts of the Face, and their Motions. 187. 172. Laughing and Weeping. 257. 173. Of Anger. 255. 174. Despair. 256. LIGHT /and/ SHADOW. 175. The Course of Study to be pursued. 2. 176. Which of the two is the most useful Knowledge, the Outlines of Figures, or that of Light and Shadow. 56. 177. Which is the most important, the Shadow or Outlines in Painting. 277. 178. What is a Painter's first Aim and Object. 305. 179. The Difference of Superficies, in regard to Painting. 278. 180. How a Painter may become universal. 10. 181. Accuracy ought to be learnt before Dispatch in the Execution. 18. 182. How the Painter is to place himself in regard to the Light, and his Model. 40. 183. Of the best Light. 41. 184. Of drawing by Candle-light. 34. 185. Of those Painters who draw at Home from one Light, and afterwards adapt their Studies to another Situation in the Country, and a different Light. 46. 186. How high the Light should be in drawing from Nature. 27. 187. What Light the Painter must make use of to give most Relief to his Figures. 55. 188. Advice to Painters. 26. 189. Of Shadows. 60. 190. Of the Kind of Light proper for drawing from Relievos, or from Nature. 29. 191. Whether the Light should be admitted in Front or sideways; and which is the most pleasing and graceful. 74. 192. Of the Difference of Lights according to the Situation. 289. 193. How to distribute the Light on Figures. 279. 194. Of the Beauty of Faces. 191. 195. How, in drawing a Face, to give it Grace, by the Management of Light and Shade. 35. 196. How to give Grace and Relief to Faces. 287. 197. Of the Termination of Bodies upon each other. 294. 198. Of the Back-grounds of painted Objects. 154. 199. How to detach and bring forward Figures out of their Back-ground. 288. 200. Of proper Back-grounds. 141. 201. Of the general Light diffused over Figures. 303. 202. Of those Parts in Shadows which appear the darkest at a Distance. 327. 203. Of the Eye viewing the Folds of Draperies surrounding a Figure. 363. 204. Of the Relief of Figures remote from the Eye. 336. 205. Of Outlines of Objects on the Side towards the Light. 337. 206. How to make Objects detach from their Ground, that is to say, from the Surface on which they are painted. 342. CONTRASTE AND EFFECT. 207. A Precept. 343. 208. Of the Interposition of transparent Bodies between the Eye and the Object. 357. 209. Of proper Back-grounds for Figures. 283. 210. Of Back-grounds. 160. REFLEXES. 211. Of Objects placed on a light Ground, and why such a Practice is useful in Painting. 159. 212. Of the different Effects of White, according to the Difference of Back-grounds. 139. 213. Of Reverberation. 75. 214. Where there cannot be any Reverberation of Light. 76. 215. In what Part the Reflexes have more or less Brightness. 79. 216. Of the reflected Lights which surround the Shadows. 78. 217. Where Reflexes are to be most apparent. 82. 218. What Part of a Reflex is to be the lightest. 80. 219. Of the Termination of Reflexes on their Grounds. 88. 220. Of double and treble Reflexions of Light. 83. 221. Reflexes in the Water, and particularly those of the Air. 135. COLOURS /and/ COLOURING. COLOURS. 222. What Surface is best calculated to receive most Colours. 123. 223. What Surface will shew most perfectly its true Colour. 125. 224. On what Surface the true Colour is least apparent. 131. 225. What Surfaces shew most of their true and genuine Colour. 132. 226. Of the Mixture of Colours. 121. 227. Of the Colours produced by the Mixture of other Colours, called secondary Colours. 161. 228. Of Verdegris. 119. 229. How to increase the Beauty of Verdegris. 120. 230. How to paint a Picture that will last almost for ever. 352. 231. The Mode of painting on Canvass, or Linen Cloth. 353. 232. Of lively and beautiful Colours. 100. 233. Of transparent Colours. 113. 234. In what Part a Colour will appear in its greatest Beauty. 114. 235. How any Colour without Gloss, is more beautiful in the Lights than in the Shades. 115. 236. Of the Appearance of Colours. 116. 237. What Part of a Colour is to be the most beautiful. 117. 238. That the Beauty of a Colour is to be found in the Lights. 118. 239. Of Colours. 111. 240. No Object appears in its true Colour, unless the Light which strikes upon it be of the same Colour. 150. 241. Of the Colour of Shadows. 147. 242. Of Colours. 153. 243. Whether it be possible for all Colours to appear alike by means of the same Shadow. 109. 244. Why White is not reckoned among the Colours. 155. 245. Of Colours. 156. 246. Of the Colouring of remote Objects. 339. 247. The Surface of all opake Bodies participates of the Colour of the surrounding Objects. 298. 248. General Remarks on Colours. 162. COLOURS IN REGARD TO LIGHT AND SHADOW. 249. Of the Light proper for painting Flesh Colour from Nature. 36. 250. Of the Painter's Window. 296. 251. The Shadows of Colours. 101. 252. Of the Shadows of White. 104. 253. Which of the Colours will produce the darkest Shade. 105. 254. How to manage, when a White terminates upon another White. 138. 255. On the Back-grounds of Figures. 140. 256. The Mode of composing History. 92. 257. Remarks concerning Lights and Shadows. 302. 258. Why the Shadows of Bodies upon a white Wall are blueish towards the Evening. 328. 259. Of the Colour of Faces. 126. 260. A Precept relating to Painting. 284. 261. Of Colours in Shadow. 158. 262. Of the Choice of Lights. 28. COLOURS IN REGARD TO BACK-GROUNDS. 263. Of avoiding hard Outlines. 51. 264. Of Outlines. 338. 265. Of Back-grounds. 334. 266. How to detach Figures from the Ground. 70. 267. Of Uniformity and Variety of Colours upon plain Surfaces. 304. 268. Of Back-grounds suitable both to Shadows and Lights. 137. 269. The apparent Variation of Colours, occasioned by the Contraste of the Ground upon which they are placed. 112. CONTRASTE, HARMONY, AND REFLEXES, IN REGARD TO COLOURS. 270. Gradation in Painting. 144. 271. How to assort Colours in such a Manner as that they may add Beauty to each other. 99. 272. Of detaching the Figures. 73. 273. Of the Colour of Reflexes. 87. 274. What Body will be the most strongly tinged with the Colour of any other Object. 124. 275. Of Reflexes. 77. 276. Of the Surface of all shadowed Bodies. 122. 277. That no reflected Colour is simple, but is mixed with the Nature of the other Colours. 84. 278. Of the Colour of Lights and Reflexes. 157. 279. Why reflected Colours seldom partake of the Colour of the Body where they meet. 85. 280. The Reflexes of Flesh Colours. 81. 281. Of the Nature of Comparison. 146. 282. Where the Reflexes are seen. 86. PERSPECTIVE OF COLOURS. 283. A Precept of Perspective in regard to Painting. 354. 284. Of the Perspective of Colours. 134. 285. The Cause of the Diminution of Colours. 136. 286. Of the Diminution of Colours and Objects. 356. 287. Of the Variety observable in Colours, according to their Distance or Proximity. 102. 288. At what Distance Colours are entirely lost. 103. 289. Of the Change observable in the same Colour, according to its Distance from the Eye. 128. 290. Of the blueish Appearance of remote Objects in a Landscape. 317. 291. Of the Qualities in the Surface which first lose themselves by Distance. 293. 292. From what Cause the Azure of the Air proceeds. 151. 293. Of the Perspective of Colours. 107. 294. Of the Perspective of Colours in dark Places. 148. 295. Of the Perspective of Colours. 149. 296. Of Colours. 152. 297. How it happens that Colours do not change, though placed in different Qualities of Air. 108. 298. Why Colours experience no apparent Change, though placed in different Qualities of Air. 106. 299. Contrary Opinions in regard to Objects seen afar off. 142. 300. Of the Colour of Objects remote from the Eye. 143. 301. Of the Colour of Mountains. 163. 302. Why the Colour and Shape of Objects are lost in some Situations apparently dark, though not so in Reality. 110. 303. Various Precepts in Painting. 340. AERIAL PERSPECTIVE. 304. Aerial Perspective. 165. 305. The Parts of the smallest Objects will first disappear in Painting. 306. 306. Small Figures ought not to be too much finished. 282. 307. Why the Air is to appear whiter as it approaches nearer to the Earth. 69. 308. How to paint the distant Part of a Landscape. 68. 309. Of precise and confused Objects. 72. 310. Of distant Objects. 355. 311. Of Buildings seen in a thick Air. 312. 312. Of Towns and other Objects seen through a thick Air. 309. 313. Of the inferior Extremities of distant Objects. 315. 314. Which Parts of Objects disappear first by being removed farther from the Eye, and which preserve their Appearance. 321. 315. Why Objects are less distinguished in proportion as they are farther removed from the Eye. 319. 316. Why Faces appear dark at a Distance. 320. 317. Of Towns and other Buildings seen through a Fog in the Morning or Evening. 325. 318. Of the Height of Buildings seen in a Fog. 324. 319. Why Objects which are high, appear darker at a Distance than those which are low, though the Fog be uniform, and of equal Thickness. 326. 320. Of Objects seen in a Fog. 323. 321. Of those Objects which the Eye perceives through a Mist or thick Air. 311. 322. Miscellaneous Observations. 308. MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS. LANDSCAPE. 323. Of Objects seen at a Distance. 313. 324. Of a Town seen through a thick Air. 314. 325. How to draw a Landscape. 33. 326. Of the Green of the Country. 129. 327. What Greens will appear most of a blueish Cast. 130. 328. The Colour of the Sea from different Aspects. 145. 329. Why the same Prospect appears larger at some Times than at others. 307. 330. Of Smoke. 331. 331. In what Part Smoke is lightest. 329. 332. Of the Sun-beams passing through the Openings of Clouds. 310. 333. Of the Beginning of Rain. 347. 334. The Seasons are to be observed. 345. 335. The Difference of Climates is to be observed. 344. 336. Of Dust. 330. 337. How to represent the Wind. 346. 338. Of a Wilderness. 285. 339. Of the Horizon seen in the Water. 365. 340. Of the Shadow of Bridges on the Surface of the Water. 348. 341. How a Painter ought to put in Practice the Perspective of Colours. 164. 342. Various Precepts in Painting. 332. 343. The Brilliancy of a Landscape. 133. MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS. 344. Why a painted Object does not appear so far distant as a real one, though they be conveyed to the Eye by equal Angles. 333. 345. How to draw a Figure standing upon its Feet, to appear forty Braccia high, in a Space of twenty Braccia, with proportionate Members. 300. 346. How to draw a Figure twenty-four Braccia high, upon a Wall twelve Braccia high. _Plate XXII._ 301. 347. Why, on measuring a Face, and then painting it of the same Size, it will appear larger than the natural one. 297. 348. Why the most perfect Imitation of Nature will not appear to have the same Relief as Nature itself. 341. 349. Universality of Painting. A Precept. 9. 350. In what Manner the Mirror is the true Master of Painters. 275. 351. Which Painting is to be esteemed the best. 276. 352. Of the Judgment to be made of a Painter's Work. 335. 353. How to make an imaginary Animal appear natural. 286. 354. Painters are not to imitate one another. 24. 355. How to judge of one's own Work. 274. 356. Of correcting Errors which you discover. 14. 357. The best Place for looking at a Picture. 280. 358. Of Judgment. 15. 359. Of Employment anxiously wished for by Painters. 272. 360. Advice to Painters. 8. 361. Of Statuary. 351. 362. On the Measurement and Division of Statues into Parts. 39. 363. A Precept for the Painter. 11. 364. On the Judgment of Painters. 273. 365. That a Man ought not to trust to himself, but ought to consult Nature. 20. PREFACE TO THE PRESENT TRANSLATION. The excellence of the following Treatise is so well known to all in any tolerable degree conversant with the Art of Painting, that it would be almost superfluous to say any thing respecting it, were it not that it here appears under the form of a new translation, of which some account may be expected. Of the original Work, which is in reality a selection from the voluminous manuscript collections of the Author, both in folio and quarto, of all such passages as related to Painting, no edition appeared in print till 1651, though its Author died so long before as the year 1519; and it is owing to the circumstance of a manuscript copy of these extracts in the original Italian, having fallen into the hands of Raphael du Fresne; that in the former of these years it was published at Paris in a thin folio volume in that language, accompanied with a set of cuts from the drawings of Nicolo Poussin, and Alberti; the former having designed the human figures, the latter the geometrical and other representations. This precaution was probably necessary, the sketches in the Author's own collections being so very slight as not to be fit for publication without further assistance. Poussin's drawings were mere outlines, and the shadows and back-grounds behind the figures were added by Errard, after the drawings had been made, and, as Poussin himself says, without his knowledge. In the same year, and size, and printed at the same place, a translation of the original work into French was given to the world by Monsieur de Chambray (well known, under his family name of Freart, as the author of an excellent Parallel of ancient and modern Architecture, in French, which Mr. Evelyn translated into English). The style of this translation by Mons. de Chambray, being thought, some years after, too antiquated, some one was employed to revise and modernise it; and in 1716 a new edition of it, thus polished, came out, of which it may be truly said, as is in general the case on such occasions, that whatever the supposed advantage obtained in purity and refinement of language might be, it was more than counterbalanced by the want of the more valuable qualities of accuracy, and fidelity to the original, from which, by these variations, it became further removed. The first translation of this Treatise into English, appeared in the year 1721. It does not declare by whom it was made; but though it professes to have been done from the original Italian, it is evident, upon a comparison, that more use was made of the revised edition of the French translation. Indifferent, however, as it is, it had become so scarce, and risen to a price so extravagant, that, to supply the demand, it was found necessary, in the year 1796, to reprint it as it stood, with all its errors on its head, no opportunity then offering of procuring a fresh translation. This last impression, however, being now also disposed of, and a new one again called for, the present Translator was induced to step forward, and undertake the office of fresh translating it, on finding, by comparing the former versions both in French and English with the original, many passages which he thought might at once be more concisely and more faithfully rendered. His object, therefore, has been to attain these ends, and as rules and precepts like the present allow but little room for the decorations of style, he has been more solicitous for fidelity, perspicuity, and precision, than for smooth sentences, and well-turned periods. Nor was this the only advantage which it was found the present opportunity would afford; for the original work consisting in fact of a number of entries made at different times, without any regard to their subjects, or attention to method, might rather in that state be considered as a chaos of intelligence, than a well-digested treatise. It has now, therefore, for the first time, been attempted to place each chapter under the proper head or branch of the art to which it belongs; and by so doing, to bring together those which (though related and nearly connected in substance) stood, according to the original arrangement, at such a distance from each other as to make it troublesome to find them even by the assistance of an index; and difficult, when found, to compare them together. The consequence of this plan, it must be confessed, has been, that in a few instances the same precept has been found in substance repeated; but this is so far from being an objection, that it evidently proves the precepts were not the hasty opinions of the moment, but settled and fixed principles in the mind of the Author, and that he was consistent in the expression of his sentiments. But if this mode of arrangement has in the present case disclosed what might have escaped observation, it has also been productive of more material advantages; for, besides facilitating the finding of any particular passage (an object in itself of no small importance), it clearly shews the work to be a much more complete system than those best acquainted with it, had before any idea of, and that many of the references in it apparently to other writings of the same Author, relate in fact only to the present, the chapters referred to having been found in it. These are now pointed out in the notes, and where any obscurity has occurred in the text, the reader will find some assistance at least attempted by the insertion of a note to solve the difficulty. No pains or expense have been spared in preparing the present work for the press. The cuts have been re-engraven with more attention to correctness in the drawing, than those which accompanied the two editions of the former English translation possessed (even though they had been fresh engraven for the impression of 1796); and the diagrams are now inserted in their proper places in the text, instead of being, as before, collected all together in two plates at the end. Besides this, a new Life of the Author has been also added by a Friend of the Translator, the materials for which have been furnished, not from vague reports, or uncertain conjectures, but from memoranda of the Author himself, not before used. Fortunately for this undertaking, the manuscript collections of Leonardo da Vinci, which have lately passed from Italy into France, have, since their removal thither, been carefully inspected, and an abstract of their contents published in a quarto pamphlet, printed at Paris in 1797, and intitled, "Essai sur les Ouvrages physico-mathematiques de Leonard de Vinci;" by J. B. Venturi, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Modena; a Member of the Institute of Bologna, &c. From this pamphlet a great deal of original intelligence respecting the Author has been obtained, which, derived as it is from his own information, could not possibly be founded on better evidence. To this Life we shall refer the reader for a further account of the origin and history of the present Treatise, conceiving we have already effected our purpose, by here giving him a sufficient idea of what he is to expect from the ensuing pages. THE LIFE OF _LEONARDO DA VINCI_. Leonardo da Vinci, the Author of the following Treatise, was the natural son of Pietro da Vinci, a notary of Vinci, in Tuscany[i1], a village situated in the valley of Arno, a little below Florence, and was born in the year 1452[i2]. Having discovered, when a child, a strong inclination and talent for painting, of which he had given proofs by several little drawings and sketches; his father one day accidentally took up some of them, and was induced to shew them to his friend Andrea Verocchio, a painter of some reputation in Florence, who was also a chaser, an architect, a sculptor, and goldsmith, for his advice, as to the propriety of bringing up his son to the profession of painting, and the probability of his becoming eminent in the art. The answer of Verocchio was such as to confirm him in that resolution; and Leonardo, to fit him for that purpose, was accordingly placed under the tuition of Verocchio[i3]. As Verocchio combined in himself a perfect knowledge of the arts of chasing and sculpture, and was a deep proficient in architecture, Leonardo had in this situation the means and opportunity of acquiring a variety of information, which though perhaps not immediately connected with the art to which his principal attention was to be directed, might, with the assistance of such a mind as Leonardo's, be rendered subsidiary to his grand object, tend to promote his knowledge of the theory, and facilitate his practice of the profession for which he was intended. Accordingly we find that he had the good sense to avail himself of these advantages, and that under Verocchio he made great progress, and attracted his master's friendship and confidence, by the talents he discovered, the sweetness of his manners, and the vivacity of his disposition[i4]. Of his proficiency in painting, the following instance is recorded; and the skill he afterwards manifested in other branches of science, on various occasions, evidently demonstrated how solicitous he had been for knowledge of all kinds, and how careful in his youth to lay a good foundation. Verocchio had undertaken for the religious of Vallombrosa, without Florence, a picture of our Saviour's Baptism by St. John, and consigned to Leonardo the office of putting in from the original drawing, the figure of an angel holding up the drapery; but, unfortunately for Verocchio, Leonardo succeeded so well, that, despairing of ever equalling the work of his scholar, Verocchio in disgust abandoned his pencil for ever, confining himself in future solely to the practice of sculpture[i5]. On this success Leonardo became sensible that he no longer stood in need of an instructor; and therefore quitting Verocchio, he now began to work and study for himself. Many of his performances of this period are still, or were lately to be seen at Florence; and besides these, the following have been also mentioned: A cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden, which he did for the King of Portugal[i6]. This is highly commended for the exquisite gracefulness of the two principal figures, the beauty of the landscape, and the incredible exactitude of the shrubs and fruit. At the instance of his father, he made a painting for one of his old neighbours at Vinci[i7]; it consisted wholly of such animals as have naturally an hatred to each other, joined artfully together in a variety of attitudes. Some authors have said that this painting was a shield[i8], and have related the following particulars respecting it. One of Pietro's neighbours meeting him one day at Florence, told him he had been making a shield, and would be glad of his assistance to get it painted; Pietro undertook this office, and applied to his son to make good the promise. When the shield was brought to Leonardo, he found it so ill made, that he was obliged to get a turner to smooth it; and when that was done, he began to consider with what subject he should paint it. For this purpose he got together, in his apartment, a collection of live animals, such as lizards, crickets, serpents, silk-worms, locusts, bats, and other creatures of that kind, from the multitude of which, variously adapted to each other, he formed an horrible and terrific animal, emitting fire and poison from his jaws, flames from his eyes, and smoke from his nostrils; and with so great earnestness did Leonardo apply to this, that though in his apartment the stench of the animals that from time to time died there, was so strong as to be scarcely tolerable, he, through his love to the art, entirely disregarded it. The work being finished, Leonardo told his father he might now see it; and the father one morning coming to his apartment for that purpose, Leonardo, before he admitted him, placed the shield so as to receive from the window its full and proper light, and then opened the door. Not knowing what he was to expect, and little imagining that what he saw was not the creatures themselves, but a mere painted representation of them, the father, on entering and beholding the shield, was at first staggered and shocked; which the son perceiving, told him he might now send the shield to his friend, as, from the effect which the sight of it had then produced, he found he had attained the object at which he aimed. Pietro, however, had too much sagacity not to see that this was by much too great a curiosity for a mere countryman, who would never be sensible of its value; he therefore privately bought for his friend an ordinary shield, rudely painted with the device of an heart with an arrow through it, and sold this for an hundred ducats to some merchants at Florence, by whom it was again sold for three hundred to the Duke of Milan[i9]. He afterwards painted a picture of the Virgin Mary, and by her side a vessel of water, in which were flowers: in this he so contrived it, as that the light reflected from the flowers threw a pale redness on the water. This picture was at one time in the possession of Pope Clement the Seventh[i10]. For his friend Antonio Segni he also made a design, representing Neptune in his car, drawn by sea-horses, and attended by tritons and sea-gods; the heavens overspread with clouds, which were driven in all directions by the violence of the winds; the waves appeared to be rolling, and the whole ocean seemed in an uproar[i11]. This drawing was afterwards given by Fabio the son of Antonio Segni, to Giovanni Gaddi, a great collector of drawings, with this epigram: Pinxit Virgilius Neptunum, pinxit Homerus, Dum maris undisoni per vada flectit equos. Mente quidem vates illum conspexit uterque, Vincius est oculis, jureque vincit eos[i12]. In English thus: Virgil and Homer, when they Neptune shew'd, As he through boist'rous seas his steeds compell'd, In the mind's eye alone his figure view'd; But Vinci _saw_ him, and has both excell'd[i13]. To these must be added the following: A painting representing two horsemen engaged in fight, and struggling to tear a flag from each other: rage and fury are in this admirably expressed in the countenances of the two combatants; their air appears wild, and the drapery is thrown into an unusual though agreeable disorder. A Medusa's head, and a picture of the Adoration of the Magi[i14]. In this last there are some fine heads, but both this and the Medusa's head are said by Du Fresne to have been evidently unfinished. The mind of Leonardo was however too active and capacious to be contented solely with the practical part of his art; nor could it submit to receive as principles, conclusions, though confirmed by experience, without first tracing them to their source, and investigating their causes, and the several circumstances on which they depended. For this purpose he determined to engage in a deep examination into the theory of his art; and the better to effect his intention, he resolved to call in to his aid the assistance of all such other branches of science as could in any degree promote this grand object. Vasari has related[i15], that at a very early age he had, in the short time of a few months only that he applied to it, obtained a deep knowledge of arithmetic; and says, that in literature in general, he would have made great attainments, if he had not been too versatile to apply long to one subject. In music, he adds, he had made some progress; that he then determined to learn to play on the lyre; and that having an uncommonly fine voice, and an extraordinary promptitude of thought and expression, he became a celebrated _improvisatore_: but that his attention to these did not induce him to neglect painting and modelling in which last art he was so great a proficient, that in his youth he modelled in clay some heads of women laughing, and also some boys' heads, which appeared to have come from the hand of a master. In architecture, he made many plans and designs for buildings, and, while he was yet young, proposed conveying the river Arno into the canal at Pisa[i16]. Of his skill in poetry the reader may judge from the following sonnet preserved by Lomazzo[i17], the only one now existing of his composition; and for the translation with which it is accompanied we are indebted to a lady. SONNETTO MORALE. Chi non può quel vuol, quel che può voglia, Che quel che non si può folle è volere. Adunque saggio è l'uomo da tenere, Che da quel che non può suo voler toglia. Però ch'ogni diletto nostro e doglia Sta in sì e nò, saper, voler, potere, Adunque quel sol può, che co 'l dovere Ne trahe la ragion suor di sua soglia. Ne sempre è da voler quel che l'uom puote, Spesso par dolce quel che torna amaro, Piansi gia quel ch'io volsi, poi ch'io l'ebbi. Adunque tu, lettor di queste note, S'a te vuoi esser buono e a' gli altri caro, Vogli sempre poter quel che tu debbi. TRANSLATION. A MORAL SONNET. The man who cannot what he would attain, Within his pow'r his wishes should restrain: The wish of Folly o'er that bound aspires, The wise man by it limits his desires. Since all our joys so close on sorrows run, We know not what to choose or what to shun; Let all our wishes still our duty meet, Nor banish Reason from her awful seat. Nor is it always best for man to will Ev'n what his pow'rs can reach; some latent ill Beneath a fair appearance may delude And make him rue what earnest he pursued. Then, Reader, as you scan this simple page, Let this one care your ev'ry thought engage, (With self-esteem and gen'ral love 't is fraught,) Wish only pow'r to do just what you ought. The course of study which Leonardo had thus undertaken, would, in its most limited extent by any one who should attempt it at this time, be found perhaps almost more than could be successfully accomplished; but yet his curiosity and unbounded thirst for information, induced him rather to enlarge than contract his plan. Accordingly we find, that to the study of geometry, sculpture, anatomy, he added those of architecture, mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, astronomy, and Nature in general, in all her operations[i18]; and the result of his observations and experiments, which were intended not only for present use, but as the basis and foundation of future discoveries, he determined, as he proceeded, to commit to writing. At what time he began these his collections, of which we shall have occasion to speak more particularly hereafter, is no where mentioned; but it is with certainty known, that by the month of April 1490, he had already completely filled two folio volumes[i19]. Notwithstanding Leonardo's propensity and application to study, he was not inattentive to the graces of external accomplishments; he was very skilful in the management of an horse, rode gracefully, and when he afterwards arrived to a state of affluence, took particular pleasure in appearing in public well mounted and handsomely accoutred. He possessed great dexterity in the use of arms: for mien and grace he might contend with any gentleman of his time: his person was remarkably handsome, his behaviour so perfectly polite, and his conversation so charming, that his company was coveted by all who knew him; but the avocations to which this last circumstance subjected him, are one reason why so many of his works remain unfinished[i20]. With such advantages of mind and body as these, it was no wonder that his reputation should spread itself, as we find it soon did, over all Italy. The painting of the shield before mentioned, had already, as has been noticed, come into the possession of the Duke of Milan; and the subsequent accounts which he had from time to time heard of Leonardo's abilities and talents, induced Lodovic Sforza, surnamed the Moor, then Duke of Milan, about, or a little before the year 1489[i21], to invite him to his court, and to settle on him a pension of five hundred crowns, a considerable sum at that time[i22]. Various are the reasons assigned for this invitation: Vasari[i23] attributes it to his skill in music, a science of which the Duke is said to have been fond; others have ascribed it to a design which the Duke entertained of erecting a brazen statue to the memory of his father[i24]; but others conceive it originated from the circumstance, that the Duke had not long before established at Milan an academy for the study of painting, sculpture, and architecture, and was desirous that Leonardo should take the conduct and direction of it[i25]. The second was, however, we find, the true motive; and we are further informed, that the invitation was accepted by Leonardo, that he went to Milan, and was already there in 1489[i26]. Among the collections of Leonardo still existing in manuscript, is a copy of a memorial presented by him to the Duke about 1490, of which Venturi has given an abridgment[i27]. In it he offers to make for the Duke military bridges, which should be at the same time light and very solid, and to teach him the method of placing and defending them with security. When the object is to take any place, he can, he says, empty the ditch of its water; he knows, he adds, the art of constructing a subterraneous gallery under the ditches themselves, and of carrying it to the very spot that shall be wanted. If the fort is not built on a rock, he undertakes to throw it down, and mentions that he has new contrivances for bombarding machines, ordnance, and mortars, some adapted to throw hail shot, fire, and smoke, among the enemy; and for all other machines proper for a siege, and for war, either by sea or land, according to circumstances. In peace also, he says he can be useful in what concerns the erection of buildings, conducting of water-courses, sculpture in bronze or marble, and painting; and remarks, that at the same time that he may be pursuing any of the above objects, the equestrian statue to the memory of the Duke's father, and his illustrious family, may still be going on. If any one doubts the possibility of what he proposes, he offers to prove it by experiment, and ocular demonstration. From this memorial it seems clear, that the casting of the bronze statue was his principal object; painting is only mentioned incidentally, and no notice is taken of the direction or management of the academy for painting, sculpture, and architecture; it is probable, therefore, that at this time there was no such intention, though it is certainly true, that he was afterwards placed at the head of it, and that he banished from it the barbarous style of architecture which till then had prevailed in it, and introduced in its stead a more pure and classical taste. Whatever was the fact with respect to the academy, it is however well known that the statue was cast in bronze, finished, and put up at Milan, but afterwards demolished by the French when they took possession of that place[i28] after the defeat of Lodovic Sforza. Some time after Leonardo's arrival at Milan, a design had been entertained of cutting a canal from Martesana to Milan, for the purpose of opening a communication by water between these two places, and, as it is said, of supplying the last with water. It had been first thought of so early as 1457[i29]; but from the difficulties to be expected in its execution, it seems to have been laid aside, or at least to have proceeded slowly, till Leonardo's arrival. His offers of service as engineer in the above memorial, probably induced Lodovic Sforza, the then Duke, to resume the intention with vigour, and accordingly we find the plan was determined on, and the execution of it intrusted to Leonardo. The object was noble, but the difficulties to be encountered were sufficient to have discouraged any mind but Leonardo's; for the distance was no less than two hundred miles; and before it could be completed, hills were to be levelled, and vallies filled up, to render them navigable with security[i30]. In order to enable him to surmount the obstacles with which he foresaw he should have to contend, he retired to the house of his friend Signior Melzi, at Vaverola, not far distant from Milan, and there applied himself sedulously for some years, as it is said, but at intervals only we must suppose, and according as his undertaking proceeded, to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and every branch of science that could at all further his design; still continuing the method he had before adopted, of entering down in writing promiscuously, whatever he wished to implant in his memory: and at this place, in this and his subsequent visits from time to time, he is supposed to have made the greater part of the collections he has left behind him[i31], of the contents of which we shall hereafter speak more at large. Although engaged in the conduct of so vast an undertaking, and in studies so extensive, the mind of Leonardo does not appear to have been so wholly occupied or absorbed in them as to incapacitate him from attending at the same time to other objects also; and the Duke therefore being desirous of ornamenting Milan with some specimens of his skill as a painter, employed him to paint in the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Gratie, in that city, a picture, the subject of which was to be the Last Supper. Of this picture it is related, that Leonardo was so impressed with the dignity of the subject, and so anxious to answer the high ideas he had formed of it in his own mind, that his progress was very slow, and that he spent much time in meditation and thought, during which the work was apparently at a stand. The Prior of the convent, thinking it therefore neglected, complained to the Duke; but Leonardo assuring the Duke that not less than two hours were every day bestowed on it, he was satisfied. Nevertheless the Prior, after a short time, finding the work very little advanced, once more applied to the Duke, who in some degree of anger, as thinking Leonardo had deceived him, reprimanded him in strong terms for his delay. What Leonardo had scorned to urge to the Prior in his defence, he now thought fit to plead in his excuse to the Duke, to convince him that a painter did not labour solely with his hands, but that his mind might be deeply studying his subject, when his hands were unemployed, and he in appearance perfectly idle. In proof of this, he told the Duke that nothing remained to the completion of the picture but the heads of our Saviour and Judas; that as to the former, he had not yet been able to find a fit model to express its divinity, and found his invention inadequate of itself to represent it: that with respect to that of Judas, he had been in vain for two years searching among the most abandoned and profligate of the species for an head which would convey an idea of his character; but that this difficulty was now at length removed, since he had nothing to do but to introduce the head of the Prior, whose ingratitude for the pains he was taking, rendered him a fit archetype of the perfidy and ingratitude he wished to express. Some persons have said[i32], that the head of Judas in the picture was actually copied from that of the Prior; but Mariette denies it, and says this reply was merely intended as a threat[i33]. A difference of opinion has also prevailed concerning the head of our Saviour in this picture; for some have conceived it left intentionally unfinished[i34], while others think there is a gradation of resemblance, which increasing in beauty in St. John and our Saviour, shews in the dignified countenance of the latter a spark of his divine majesty. In the countenance of the Redeemer, say these last, and in that of Judas, is excellently expressed the extreme idea of God made man, and of the most perfidious of mortals. This is also pursued in the characters nearest to each of them[i35]. Little judgment can now be formed of the original beauty of this picture, which has been, and apparently with very good reason, highly commended. Unfortunately, though it is said to have been in oil, the wall on which it was painted not having been properly prepared, the original colours have been so effectually defaced by the damp, as to be no longer visible[i36]; and the fathers, for whose use it was painted, thinking it entirely destroyed, and some years since wishing to heighten and widen a door under it, leading out of their refectory, have given a decided proof of their own want of taste, and how little they were sensible of its value, by permitting the workmen to break through the wall on which it was painted, and, by so doing, entirely to destroy the lower part of the picture[i37]. The injury done by the damp to the colouring has been, it is true, in some measure repaired by Michael Angelo Bellotti, a painter of Milan, who viewing the picture in 1726, made an offer to the Prior and convent to restore, by means of a secret which he possessed, the original colours. His proposition being accepted, and the experiment succeeding beyond their hopes, the convent made him a present of five hundred pounds for his labour, and he in return communicated to them the secret by which it had been effected[i38]. Deprived, as they certainly are by these events, of the means of judging accurately of the merit of the original, it is still some consolation to the lovers of painting, that several copies of it made by Leonardo's scholars, many of whom were very able artists, and at a time when the picture had not been yet injured, are still in existence. A list of these copies is given by P. M. Guglielmo della Valle, in his edition of Vasari's Lives of the Painters, in Italian, vol. v. p. 34, and from him it is here inserted in the note[i39]. Francis the First was so charmed on viewing the original, that not being able to remove it, he had a copy made, which is now, or was some years since, at St. Germains, and several prints have been published from it; but the best which has yet appeared (and very fine it is) is one not long since engraven by Morghen, at Rome, impressions of which have found their way into this country, and been sold, it is said, for ten or twelve guineas each. In the same refectory of the Dominicans at Milan is, or was, also preserved a painting by Leonardo, representing Duke Lodovic, and Beatrix his duchess, on their knees; done no doubt about this time[i40]. And at or near this period, he also painted for the Duke the Nativity, which was formerly, and may perhaps be still, in the Emperor of Germany's collection[i41]. As Leonardo's principal aim, whenever he was left at liberty to pursue the bent of his own inclination, seems to have been progressive improvement in the art of painting, he appears to have sedulously embraced all opportunities of increasing his information; and wisely perceiving, that without a thorough acquaintance with anatomy, a painter could effect but little, he was particularly desirous of extending his knowledge in that branch. For that purpose he had frequent conferences on the subject with Marc Antonio della Torre, professor of anatomy at Pavia[i42], and not only was present at many dissections performed by him, but made abundance of anatomical drawings from Nature, many of which were afterwards collected into a volume by his scholar Francisco Melzi[i43]. Such perseverance and assiduity as Leonardo's, united as they were with such uncommon powers as his, had already formed many artists at that time of distinguished reputation, but who afterwards became still more famous, and might probably have rendered Milan the repository of some of the most valuable specimens of painting, and raised it to a rank little, if at all, inferior to that which Florence has since held with the admirers of the polite arts, had it not happened that by the disastrous termination of a contest between the Duke of Milan and the French, all hopes of further improvement were entirely cut off; and Milan, at one blow, lost all the advantages of which it was even then in possession. For about this time the troubles in Italy began to break in on Leonardo's quiet, and he found his patron, the Duke, engaged in a war with the French for the possession of his dukedom; which not only endangered the academy, but ultimately deprived him both of his dominions and his liberty; as the Duke was, in 1500, completely defeated, taken prisoner, and carried into France, where, in 1510, he died a prisoner in the castle of Loches[i44]. By this event of the Duke's defeat, and the consequent ruin of the Sforza family, all further progress in the canal of Martesana, of which much still remained to be done[i45], was put a stop to; the academy of architecture and painting was entirely broken up; the professors were turned adrift, and the arts banished from Milan, which at one time had promised to have been their refuge and principal feat[i46]. Italy in general was, it is true, a gainer by the dispersion of so many able and deeply instructed artists as issued from this school, though Milan suffered; for nothing could so much tend to the dissemination of knowledge as the mixing such men among others who needed that information in which these excelled. Among the number thus separated from each other, we find painters, carvers, architects, founders, and engravers in crystal and precious stones, and the names of the following have been given, as the principal: Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Salaino, Gio. Antonio Boltraffio, Bernardino Lovino, Bartolommeo della Porta, Lorenzo Lotto[i47]. To these has been added Gio. Paolo Lomazzo; but Della Valle, in a note in his edition of Vasari, vol. v. p. 34, says this last was a disciple of Gio. Battista della Cerva, and not of Leonardo. Du Fresne mentions besides the above, Francis Melzi, Mark Uggioni Gobbo, an extraordinary painter and carver; Annibal Fontana, a worker in marble and precious stones; and Bernazzano, an excellent painter of landscapes; but omits Della Porta, and Lorenzo Lotto. In 1499, the year before Duke Lodovic's defeat, Leonardo being at Milan, was employed by the principal inhabitants to contrive an automaton for the entertainment of Lewis XII. King of France, who was expected shortly to make a public entry into that city. This Leonardo did, and it consisted of a machine representing a lion, whose inside was so well constructed of clockwork, that it marched out to meet the King, made a stand when it came before him, reared up on its hinder legs, and opening its breast, presented an escutcheon with fleurs de lis quartered on it[i48]. Lomazzo has said that this machine was made for the entry of Francis the First; but he is mistaken, that prince having never been at Milan till the year 1515[i49], at which time Leonardo was at Rome. Compelled by the disorders of Lombardy, the misfortunes of his patron, and the ruin of the Sforza family, to quit Milan, Leonardo betook himself to Florence, and his inducements to this resolution seem to have been the residence there of the Medici family, the great patrons of arts, and the good taste of its principal inhabitants[i50], rather than its vicinity to the place of his birth; for which, under the circumstances that attended that event, it is not probable he could entertain much, if any predilection. The first work which he here undertook was a design for an altar-piece for the chapel of the college of the Annunciati. Its subject was, our Saviour, with his mother, St. Ann, and St. John; but though this drawing is said to have rendered Leonardo very popular among his countrymen, to so great a degree, that numbers of people went to see it, it does not appear that any picture was painted from it, nor that the undertaking ever proceeded farther than a sketch of a design, or rather, perhaps, a finished drawing. When Leonardo some years afterwards went into France[i51], Francis the First was desirous of having a picture from this drawing, and at his desire he then put it into colours; but whether even this last was a regular picture, or, which is more probable, only a coloured drawing, we are not informed. The picture, however, on which he bestowed the most time and labour, and which therefore seems intended by him as the completest specimen of his skill, at least in the branch of portrait-painting, was that which he did of Mona Lisa, better known by the appellation of la Gioconda, a Florentine lady, the wife of Francisco del Giocondo. It was painted for her husband, afterwards purchased by Francis the First, and was till lately to be seen in the King of France's cabinet. Leonardo bestowed four entire years upon it, and after all is said to have left it unfinished[i52]. This has been so repeatedly said of the works of this painter, that we are here induced to inquire into the evidence of the fact. An artist who feels by experience, as every one must, how far short of the ideas of perfection he has formed in his own mind, his best performances always fall, will naturally be led to consider these as but very faint expressions of his own conceptions. Leonardo's disposition to think nothing effected while any thing remained to be done, and a mind like his, continually suggesting successive improvements, might therefore, and most probably did produce in him an opinion that his own most laboured pieces were far from being finished to that extent of beauty which he wished to give them; and these sentiments of them he might in all likelihood be frequently heard to declare. Comparing his productions, however, with those of other masters, they will be found, notwithstanding this assertion to the contrary, as eminent in this particular also, as for the more valuable qualities of composition, drawing, character, expression, and colouring. About the same time with this of la Gioconda, he painted the portraits of a nobleman of Mantua, and of la Ginevra, a daughter of Americus Benci[i53], much celebrated for her beauty; and is said to have finished a picture of Flora some years since remaining at Paris[i54]; but this last Mariette discovered to be the work of Melzio, from the circumstance of finding, on a close inspection, the name of this last master written on it[i55]. In the year 1503, he was elected by the Florentines to paint their council-chamber. The subject he chose for this, was the battle against Attila[i56]; and he had already made some progress in his work, when, to his great mortification, he found his colours peel from the wall[i57]. With Leonardo was joined in this undertaking, Michael Angelo, who painted another side of the room, and who, then a young man of not more than twenty-nine, had risen to such reputation, as not to fear a competition with Leonardo, a man of near sixty[i58]. The productions of two such able masters placed in the same room, begun at the same time, and proceeding gradually step by step together, afforded, no doubt, occasion and opportunity to the admirers and critics in painting to compare and contrast with each other their respective excellencies and defects. Had these persons contented themselves simply with comparing and appreciating the merits of these masters according to justice and truth, it might perhaps have been advantageous to both, as directing their attention to the correction of errors; but as each artist had his admirers, each had also his enemies; the partisans of the one thinking they did not sufficiently value the merit of their favourite if they allowed any to his antagonist, or did not, on the contrary, endeavour to crush by detraction the too formidable reputation of his adversary. From this conduct was produced what might easily have been foreseen; they first became jealous rivals, and at length open and inveterate enemies[i59]. Leonardo's reputation, which had been for many years gradually increasing, was now so firmly established, that he appears to have been looked up to as being, what he really was, the reviver and restorer of the art of painting; and to such an height had the curiosity to view his works been excited, that Raphael, who was at that time young, and studying, thought it worth his while to make a journey to Florence in the month of October 1504[i60], on purpose to see them. Nor was his labour lost, or his time thrown away in so doing; for on first seeing the works of Leonardo's pencil, he was induced to abandon the dry and hard manner of his master Perugino's colouring, and to adopt in its stead the style of Leonardo[i61], to which circumstance is owing no small portion of that esteem in the art, to which Raphael afterwards very justly arrived. His father having died in 1504[i62], he in consequence of that event became engaged with his half-brothers, the legitimate sons of Pietro da Vinci, in a law-suit for the recovery of a share of his father's property, which in a letter from Florence to the Governor of Milan, the date of which does not appear, he speaks of having almost brought to a conclusion[i63]. At Florence he continued from 1503 to 1507[i64], and in the course of that time painted, among other pictures of less note, a Virgin and Child, once in the hands of the Botti family; and a Baptist's head, formerly in those of Camillo Albizzi[i65]; but in 1508, and the succeeding year, he was at Milan, where he received a pension which had been granted him by Lewis XII.[i66]; and in the month of September 1513, he, in company with his scholar Francesco Melzi, quitted Milan[i67], and set out for Rome (which till that time he had never visited), encouraged perhaps to this resolution by the circumstance that his friend Cardinal John de Medicis, who was afterwards known by the assumed name of Leo X. had a few months before been advanced to the papacy[i68]. His known partiality to the arts, and the friendship which had subsisted between him and Leonardo, held out to the latter a well-founded expectation of employment for his pencil at Rome, and we find in this expectation he was not deceived; as, soon after his arrival, the Pope actually signified his intention of setting him to work. Upon this Leonardo began distilling oils for his colours, and preparing varnishes, which the Pope hearing, said pertly and ignorantly enough, that he could expect nothing from a man who thought of finishing his works before he had begun them[i69]. Had the Pope known, as he seems not to have done, that oil was the vehicle in which the colours were to have been worked, or been witness either to the almost annihilation of the colours in Leonardo's famous picture of the Last Supper, owing to the damp of the wall, or to the peeling of the colours from the wall in the council-chamber at Florence, he probably would have spared this ill-natured reflection. If it applied at all, it could only be to a very small part of the pursuit in which Leonardo was occupied, namely, preparing varnish; and if age were necessary to give the varnish strength, or it were the better for keeping, the answer was in an equal degree both silly and impertinent; and it is no wonder it should disgust such a mind as Leonardo's, or produce, as we find it did, such a breach between the Pope and him, that the intended pictures, whatever they might have been, were never begun. Disgusted with his treatment at Rome, where the former antipathy between him and Michael Angelo was again revived by the partisans of each, he the next year quitted it; and accepting an invitation which had been made him by Francis the First, he proceeded into France[i70]. At the time of this journey he is said to have been seventy years old[i71], which cannot be correct, as he did not live to attain that age in the whole. Probably the singularity of his appearance (for in his latter years he permitted his beard to grow long), together with the effect which his intense application to study had produced in his constitution, might have given rise to an opinion that he was older than he really was; and indeed it seems pretty clear, that when he arrived in France he was nearly worn out in body, if not in mind, by the anxiety and application with which he had pursued his former studies and investigations. Although the King's motive to this invitation, which seems to have been a wish to profit by the pencil of Leonardo, was completely disappointed by his ill state of health, which the fatigues of his journey and the change of the climate produced, so that on his arrival in France no hopes could be entertained by the King of enriching his collection with any pictures by Leonardo; yet the French people in general, and the King in particular, are expressly said to have been as favourable to him as those of Rome had been injurious, and he was received by the King in the most affectionate manner. It was however unfortunately too soon evident that these symptoms of decay were only the forerunners of a more fatal distemper under which for several months he languished, but which by degrees was increasing upon him. Of this he was sensible, and therefore in the beginning of the year 1518, he determined to make his will, to which he afterwards added one or more codicils. By these he first describes himself as Leonardo da Vinci, painter to the King, at present residing at the place called Cloux, near Amboise, and then desires to be buried in the church of St. Florentine at Amboise, and that his body should be accompanied from the said place of Cloux to the said church, by the college of the said church, and the chaplains of St. Dennis of Amboise, and the friars minor of the said place; and that before his body is carried to the said church, it should remain three days in the chamber in which he should die, or in some other; he further orders that three great masses and thirty lesser masses of St. Gregory, should be celebrated there, and a like service be performed in the church of St. Dennis, and in that of the said friars minor. He gives and bequeaths to Franco di Melzio, a gentleman of Milan, in return for his services, all and every the books which he the testator has at present, and other instruments and drawings respecting his art: To Baptista de Villanis, his servant, the moiety of the garden which he has without the walls of Milan; and the other moiety of the said garden to Salay his servant. He gives to the said Francesco Meltio the arrears of his pension, and the sum of money owing to him at present, and at the time of his death, by the treasurer M. Johan Sapin; and to the same person all and singular his clothes and vestments. He orders and wills, that the sum of four hundred crowns of the sum which he has in the hands of the chamberlain of Santa Maria Nuova, at Florence, should be given to his brethren residing at Florence, with the profit and emolument thereon. And lastly, he appoints the said Gia. Francesco de Meltio, whole and sole executor[i72]. This Will bears date, and appears to have been executed on the 23d of April 1518. He however survived the making of it more than a year; and on the 23d of April 1519[i73], the day twelvemonth on which it had been originally made, he, though it does not appear for what reason, re-executed it; and the next day added a codicil, by which he gave to his servant, Gio. Battista de Villanis, the right which had been granted him in return for his labours on the canal of Martesana, of exacting a certain portion of all the wood transported on the Ticino[i74]. All this interval of time between the making and re-execution of his will, and indeed the whole period from his arrival in France, he seems to have been struggling under an incurable illness. The King frequently during its continuance honoured him with visits; and it has been said, that in one of these Leonardo exerting himself beyond his strength, to shew his sense of this prince's condescension, was seized with a fainting fit, and that the King stooping forward to support him, Leonardo expired in his arms, on the 2d of May 1519[i75]. Venturi has taken some pains to disprove this fact, by shewing[i76], that though in the interval between the years 1516 and 1519, the French court passed eleven months at different times at Amboise; yet on the 1st of May 1519, it was certainly not here, but at St. Germains. History, however, when incorrect, is more frequently a mixture of true and false, than a total fabrication of falsehood; and it is therefore not impossible, or improbable, that the King might shew such an act of kindness in some of his visits when he was resident at Amboise, and that Leonardo might recover from that fit, and not die till some time after; at which latter time the Court and the King might be absent at St. Germains. This is surely a more rational supposition than to imagine such a fact could have been invented without any foundation for it whatever. It is impossible within the limits that can here be allowed, to do any thing like justice to the merits of this extraordinary man: all that can in this place be effected is to give the principal facts respecting him; and this is all, therefore, that has been attempted. A sufficient account, however, at least for the present purpose, it is presumed has been given above of the Author, and the productions of his pencil, and it now remains therefore only to speak of those of his pen. With what view the Author engaged in this arduous course of study, how eager he was in the pursuit of knowledge, how anxious to avail himself of the best means of obtaining complete information on every subject to which he applied, and how careful to minute down whatever he procured that could be useful, have been already shewn in the course of the foregoing narrative; but in order to prevent the necessity of interrupting there the succession of events, it has been reserved for this place to describe the contents and extent of his collections, and to give a brief idea of the branches to which they relate. On inquiry then we learn, that Leonardo's productions of this kind consist of fourteen manuscript volumes, large and small, now in the library of the National Institute at Paris, whither they have been some few years since removed from the Ambrosian library at Milan; and of one folio volume in manuscript also, in the possession of his Majesty the King of Great Britain. Of those at Paris, J. B. Venturi, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Modena, and of the Institute of Bologna, &c. who was permitted to inspect them, says[i77], that "they contain speculations in those branches of natural philosophy nearest allied to geometry; that they are first sketches and occasional notes, the Author always intending afterwards to compose from them complete treatises." He adds further, "that they are written backwards from right to left, in the manner of the oriental writers, probably with intention that the curious should not rob him of his discoveries. The spirit of geometry guided him throughout, whether it were in the art of analysing a subject in the connexion of the discourse, or the care of always generalizing his ideas. As to natural philosophy, he never was satisfied on any proposition if he had not proved it by experiment." From the extracts given from these manuscripts by Venturi himself, and which he has ranged under the different heads mentioned in the note[i78], the contents of these volumes appear to be extremely miscellaneous; and it is evident, as Venturi has marked by references where each extract is to be found in the original, that from the great distance at which passages on the same subject are placed from each other, they must have been entered without any regard to method or arrangement of any kind whatever. The volume in the possession of his Britannic Majesty is described as consisting "of a variety of elegant heads, some of which are drawn with red and black chalks on blue or red paper, others with a metal pencil on a tinted paper; a few of them are washed and heightened with white, and many are on common paper. The subjects of these drawings are miscellaneous, as portraits, caricatures, single figures, tilting, horses, and other animals; botany, optics, perspective, gunnery, hydraulics, mechanics, and a great number of anatomical subjects, which are drawn with a more spirited pen, and illustrated with a variety of manuscript notes. This volume contains what is of more importance, the very characteristic head of Leonardo, as it was sketched by himself, and now engraved by that eminent artist Mr. Bartolozzi[i79]." Specimens from this volume have been published some years since by Mr. Dalton, and more recently and accurately by Mr. Chamberlaine; and though it must be confessed, that the former are extremely ill drawn, and betray the grossest ignorance of the effect which light and shadow were intended to produce, yet some of the subjects which the volume contains may be ascertained by them; and among them is also a fac simile of a page of the original manuscript, which proves this, like the other volumes, to be in Italian, and written backwards. The latter is a very beautiful work, and is calculated to give an accurate idea of Leonardo's talents as a draughtsman[i80]. From these two publications it appears, that this volume also is of a very miscellaneous nature, and that it consists of manuscript entries, interspersed with finished drawings of heads and figures, and slight sketches of mechanical engines and anatomical subjects, some of which are intermixed with the writing itself. It has been already seen, that these volumes were originally given by the will of Leonardo to Francisco Melzi; and their subsequent history we are enabled to state on the authority of John Ambrose Mazenta, through whose hands they passed. Du Fresne, in the life prefixed to the edition which he published in Italian, of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting, has, in a very loose way, and without citing any authority, given their history; but Venturi has inserted[i81] a translation into French, from the original manuscript memoir of Mazenta; and from him a version of it into English is here given, with the addition of Venturi's notes, rendered also into English. "It is near fifty years[i82] since there fell into my hands thirteen volumes of Leonardo da Vinci in folio and quarto, written backwards. Accident brought them to me in the following manner: I was residing at Pisa, for the purpose of studying the law, in the family of Aldus Manutius the younger, a great lover of books. A person named Lelio Gavardi, of Asola, Prevost of S. Zeno, at Pavia, a very near relation of Aldus, came to our house; he had been a teacher of the _belles lettres_ in the family of the Melzi of Milan, called de Vavero, to distinguish them from other families of the same name in that city. He had, at their country house at Vavero, met with several drawings, instruments, and books of Leonardo. Francisco Melzi[i83] approached nearer than any one to the manner of De Vinci; he worked little, because he was rich; his pictures are very much finished, they are often confounded with those of his master. At his death he left the works of Leonardo in his house at Vavero, to his sons, who having tastes and pursuits of a different kind, neglected these treasures, and soon dispersed them; Lelio Gavardi possessed himself of as many of them as he pleased; he carried thirteen volumes to Florence, in hopes of receiving for them a good price from the Grand Duke Francis, who was eager after works of this sort; and the rather as Leonardo was in great reputation in his own country. But this prince died[i84] as soon as Gavardi was arrived at Florence. He then went to Pisa, to the house of Manutius. I could not approve his proceeding; it was scandalous. My studies being finished, I had occasion to return to Milan. He gave me the volumes of Vinci, desiring me to return them to the Melzi: I acquitted myself faithfully of my commission; I carried them all back to Horatio, the chief of the family of Melzi, who was surprised at my being willing to give myself this trouble. He made me a present of these books, telling me he had still many drawings by the same author, long neglected in the garrets of his house in the country. Thus these books became my property, and afterwards they belonged to my brothers[i85]. These latter having made too much parade of this acquisition, and the ease with which I was brought to it, excited the envy of other amateurs, who beset Horatio, and obtained from him some drawings, some figures, some anatomical pieces, and other valuable remains of the cabinet of Leonardo. One of these spungers for the works of Leonardo, was Pompeo Aretin, son of the Cavalier Leoni, formerly a disciple of Bonaroti, and who was about Philip II. King of Spain, for whom he did all the bronzes which are at the Escurial. Pompeo engaged himself to procure for Melzi an employment to the senate of Milan, if he succeeded in recovering the thirteen books, wishing to offer them to King Philip, a lover of such curiosities. Flattered with this hope, Melzi went to my brother's house: he besought him on his knees to restore him his present; he was a fellow-collegian, a friend, a benefactor: seven volumes were returned to him[i86]. Of the six others which remained to the Mazenta family, one was presented to Cardinal Frederic Borromeo, for the Ambrosian library[i87]. My brother gave a second to Ambrose Figini, a celebrated painter of his time, who left it to his heir Hercole Bianchi, with the rest of his cabinet. Urged by the Duke of Savoy, I procured for him a third; and in conclusion, my brother having died at a distance from Milan[i88], the three remaining volumes came also into the hands of Pompeo Aretin; he re-assembled also others of them, he separated the leaves of them to form a thick volume[i89], which passed to his heir Polidoro Calchi, and was afterwards sold to Galeazzo Arconati. This gentleman keeps it now in his rich library; he has refused it to the Duke of Savoy, and to other princes who were desirous of it." In addition to this memoir, Venturi notices[i90], that Howard Earl of Arundel made ineffectual efforts to obtain this large volume, and offered for it as far as 60,000 francs, in the name of the King of England. Arconati would never part with it; he bought eleven other books of Da Vinci, which came also, according to appearance, from Leoni; in 1637 he made a gift of them all to the Ambrosian library[i91], which already was in possession of the volume E, from Mazenta, and received afterwards the volume K from Horatio Archinto, in 1674[i92]. Venturi says, this is the history of all the manuscripts of Vinci that are come into France; they are in number fourteen, because the volume B contains an appendix of eighteen leaves, which may be separated, and considered as the fourteenth volume[i93]. In the printed catalogue of the library of Turin, one does not see noticed the manuscript which Mazenta gave to the Duke of Savoy: it has then disappeared. Might it not be that which an Englishman got copied by Francis Ducci, library-keeper at Florence, and a copy of which is still remaining in the same city[i94]? The Trivulce family at Milan, according to Venturi[i95], possess also a manuscript of Vinci, which is in great part only a vocabulary. Of the volume in the possession of his Britannic Majesty, the following account is given in the life of Leonardo, prefixed to that number already published from it by Mr. Chamberlaine: "It was one of the three volumes which became the property of Pompeo Leoni, that is now in his Majesty's cabinet. It is rather probable than certain, that this great curiosity was acquired for King Charles I. by the Earl of Arundel, when he went Ambassador to the Emperor Ferdinand II. in 1636, as may indeed be inferred from an instructive inscription over the place where the volumes are kept, which sets forth, that James King of England offered three thousand pistoles for one of the volumes of Leonardo's works. And some documents in the Ambrosian library give colour to this conjecture. This volume was happily preserved during the civil wars of the last century among other specimens of the fine arts, which the munificence of Charles I. had amassed with a diligence equal to his taste. And it was discovered soon after his present Majesty's accession in the same cabinet where Queen Caroline found the fine portraits of the court of Henry VIII. by Hans Holbein, which the King's liberality permitted me lately to lay before the public. On the cover of this volume is written, in gold letters, what ascertains its descent; _Disegni di Leonardo da Vinci, restaurati da Pompeo Leoni_." Although no part of the collections of Leonardo was arranged and prepared by himself, or others under his direction, for publication, some extracts have been made from his writings, and given to the world as separate tracts. The best known, and indeed the principal of these, is the following Treatise on Painting, of which there will be occasion to say more presently; but besides this, Edward Cooper, a London bookseller, about the year 1720, published a fragment of a Treatise by Leonardo da Vinci, on the Motions of the Human Body, and the Manner of drawing Figures, according to geometrical Rules. It contains but ten plates in folio, including the title-page, and was evidently extracted from some of the volumes of his collections, as it consists of slight sketches and verbal descriptions both in Italian and English, to explain such of them as needed it. Mr. Dalton, as has been before noticed, several years since published some engravings from the volume in our King's collection, but they are so badly done as to be of no value. Mr. Chamberlaine therefore, in 1796, took up the intention afresh, and in that year his first number came out, which is all that has yet appeared. Of the Treatise on Painting, Venturi[i96] gives the following particulars: "The Treatise on Painting which we have of Vinci is only a compilation of different fragments extracted from his manuscripts. It was in the Barberini library at Rome, in 1630[i97]: the Cav. del Pozzo obtained a copy from it, and Poussin designed the figures of it in 1640[i98]. This copy, and another derived from the same source, in the possession of Thevenot, served as the basis for the edition published in 1651, by Raphael du Frêne. The manuscript of Pozzo, with the figures of Poussin, is actually at Paris, in the valuable collection of books of Chardin[i99]. It is from this that I have taken the relation of Mazenta; it is at the end of the manuscript under this title: "Some Notices of the Works of Leonardo da Vinci at Milan, and of his Books, by J. Ambrose Mazenta of Milan, of the Congregation of the Priests Regular of St. Paul, called the Barnabites." Mazenta does not announce himself as the author of the compilation; he may however be so; it may also happen, that the compilation was made by the heir himself of Vinci, Francisco Melzo. Vasari, about 1567, says[i100], that a painter of Milan had the manuscripts of Vinci, which were written backwards; that this painter came to him, and afterwards went to Rome, with intention to get them printed, but that he did not know what was the result. However it may be, Du Frêne confesses that this compilation is imperfect in many respects, and ill arranged. It is so, because the compiler has not seized the methodical spirit of Vinci, and that there are mixed with it some pieces which belong to other tracts; besides, one has not seen where many other chapters have been neglected which ought to make part of it. For example, the comparison of painting with sculpture, which has been announced as a separate treatise of the same author, is nothing more than a chapter belonging to the Treatise on Painting, A. 105. All this will be complete, and put in order, in the Treatise on Optics[i101]. In the mean time, however, the following are the different editions of this compilation, such as it is at present: "Trattato della Pittura di Leonardo da Vinci, nuovamente dato in Luce, con la Vita dell' Autore da Raphaele du Frêne, Parigi 1651, in fol.; reprinted at Naples in 1733, in folio; at Bologna, in 1786, in folio; at Florence, in 1792, in 4to. This last edition has been given from a copy in the hand-writing of Stephano della Bella. "----Translated into French by Roland Freart de Chambray, Paris 1651, fol. reprinted ibid. 1716, in 12mo, and 1796, in 8vo. "----Translated into German, in 4to. Nuremberg 1786, Weigel. "----Translated into Greek by Panagiotto, manuscript in the Nani library at Venice. "Another manuscript copy of this compilation was in the possession of P. Orlandi, from whence it passed into the library of Smith[i102]. "Cellini, in a discourse published by Morelli, says[i103], that he possessed a copy of a book of De Vinci on Perspective, which he communicated to Serlio, and that this latter published from it all that he could comprehend. Might not this be the tract which Gori announces to be in the library of the Academy of Cortona[i104]?" The reputation in which the Treatise on Painting ought to be held, is not now for the first time to be settled; its merit has been acknowledged by the best judges, though at that time it laboured under great disadvantage from the want of a proper arrangement. In the present publication that objection is removed, and the attempt has been favourable to the work itself, as it has shewn it, by bringing together the several chapters that related to each other, to be a much more complete and connected treatise than was before supposed. Notwithstanding however the fair estimation in which it has always stood, and which is no more than its due, one person has been found hardy enough to endeavour, though unsuccessfully, to lessen its credit: a circumstance which it would not have been worth while to notice, if it had not been intimated to us, that there are still some persons in France who side with the objector, which, as he was a Frenchman, and Leonardo an Italian, may perhaps be ascribed, in some measure at least, to the desire which in several instances that people have lately shewn of claiming on behalf of their countrymen, a preference over others, to which they are not entitled. Abraham Bosse, of the city of Tours, an engraver in copper, who lived in the last century, is the person here alluded to; and it may not be impertinent in this place to state some of the motives by which he was induced to such a conduct. At the time when this Treatise first made its appearance in France, as well in Italian as in French, Bosse appears to have been resident at Paris, and was a member of the Academy of Painting, where he gave the first lessons on perspective, and, with the assistance of Mons. Desargues, published from time to time several tracts on geometry and perspective, the manner of designing, and the art of engraving, some of which at least are described in the title-page, as printed at Paris for the author[i105]. This man, in his lectures, having, it is said, attacked some of the pictures painted by Le Brun, the then Director of the Academy, had been very deservedly removed from his situation, and forced to quit the Academy, for endeavouring to lessen that authority, which for the instruction and improvement of students it was necessary the Director should possess, and attempting thus to render fruitless the precepts which his situation required him to deliver. As this Treatise of Leonardo had in the translation been adopted by Le Brun, who fully saw its value, and introduced it into the Academy for the advantage of the students, by which means the sale of Bosse's work might be, and probably was, affected; Bosse, at the end of a Treatise on Geometry and Perspective, taught in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, published by him in octavo in 1665, has inserted a paper with this title, which in the original is given in French, but we have preferred translating it: "_What follows is for those who shall have the curiosity to be acquainted with a part of the procedings of Mons. Desargues, and myself, against some of our antagonists, and part of their skill; together with some remarks made on the contents of several chapters of a Treatise attributed to Leonardo de Vinci, translated from Italian into French by Mons. Freart Sieur de Chambray, from a manuscript taken from that which is in the library of the illustrious, virtuous, and curious Mons. le Chevalier Du Puis at Rome_." After the explanation of his motives above given, it is not wonderful to find him asserting, that this Treatise of Leonardo was in a number of circumstances inferior to his own; nor to observe, that in a list of some of the chapters which he has there given, we should be frequently told by him that they are false, absurd, ridiculous, confused, trifling, weak, and, in short, every thing but good. It is true that the estimation of Leonardo da Vinci was in France too high for him to attack without risking his own character for judgment and taste, and he has therefore found it necessary for his purpose insidiously to suggest that these chapters were interpolations; but of this he has produced no proof, which, had it been the fact, might have been easily obtained, by only getting some friend to consult Leonardo's manuscript collections in the Ambrosian library. That he would have taken this step if he had expected any success from it, may fairly be inferred from the circumstance of his writing to Poussin at Rome, apparently in hopes of inducing him to say something to the disadvantage of the work; and his omitting to make this inquiry after the enmity he has shewn against the book, fully justifies an opinion that he forbore to inquire, because he was conscious that such an investigation would have terminated in vindicating his adversaries from his aspersions, and have furnished evidence of their fidelity and accuracy. What the letter which he wrote to Poussin contained, he has not informed us; but he has given us, as he says, Poussin's answer[i106], in which are some passages relating to this Treatise, of which we here give a translation: "As to what concerns the book of Leonard Vinci, it is true that I have designed the human figures which are in that which Mons. le Chevalier du Puis has; but all the others, whether geometrical or otherwise, are of one man, named Gli Alberti, the very same who has drawn the plants which are in the book of subterraneous Rome; and the awkward landscapes which are behind some of the little human figures of the copy which Mons. du Chambray has caused to be printed, have been added to it by one Errard, without my knowing any thing of it. "All that is good in this book may be written on one sheet of paper, in a large character, and those who believe that I approve all that is in it, do not know me; I who profess never to give sanction to things of my profession which I know to be ill done and ill said." Whoever recollects the difference in the course of study pursued and recommended by Leonardo (that of Nature), from that observed by Poussin (that of the antique), and remembers also the different fortunes of Le Brun and Poussin, that the one was at the head of his profession, enjoying all its honours and emoluments, while the other, though conscious of his own great powers, was toiling for a daily subsistence in comparative obscurity, may easily conceive why the latter could not approve a work which so strongly inculcates the adopting Nature as the guide throughout; and which was at the same time patronized by one whom he could not but consider as his more fortunate rival. It may however be truly affirmed, that even the talents of Poussin, great as they certainly were, and his knowledge and correctness in drawing, would have been abundantly improved by an attention to the rules laid down in this Treatise, and that the study of Nature would have freed his pictures from that resemblance to statues which his figures frequently have, and bestowed on them the soft and fleshy appearance for which Leonardo was so remarkable; while a minute investigation of Leonardo's system of colouring would have produced perhaps in him as fortunate a change as we have seen it did in the case of Raphael. Though Bosse tells us[i107], that he had seen in the hands of Mons. Felibien, a manuscript copy of this Tract on Painting, which he said he had taken from the same original mentioned before, for the purpose of translating it into French; and that on Bosse's pointing out to him some of these errors, and informing him that Mons. de Chambray was far advanced in his translation, he abandoned his design, and assigned to the Sieur de Chambray the privilege he had obtained for it; we have no intention here to enumerate or answer Bosse's objections, merely because such an undertaking would greatly exceed the limits which can here be allowed us. Most of them will be found captious and splenetic, and, together with the majority of the rest, might be fully refuted by a deduction of facts; it is however sufficient on the present occasion to say, that wherever opportunity has been afforded of tracing the means by which Leonardo procured his materials for any great composition, he is found to have exactly pursued the path which he recommends to others[i108]; and for the success of his precepts, and what may be effected by them, we need only appeal to his own example. To this enumeration of the productions of Leonardo's pen, and in contradiction to the fact already asserted, that no part of his collections was ever arranged or prepared for publication by himself, it is probable we may be told we should add tracts on Motion; on the Equilibrium of bodies; on the nature, equilibrium, and motion of Water; on Anatomy; on the Anatomy of an horse; on Perspective; and on Light and Shadow: which are either mentioned by himself in the Treatise on Painting, or ascribed to him by others. But as to these, there is great reason for supposing, that, though they might be intended, they were never actually drawn up into form. Certain it is, that no such have been ever given to the world, as those before noticed are the only treatises of this author that have yet appeared in print; and even they have already been shewn to be no more than extracts from the immense mass of his collections of such passages as related to the subjects on which they profess to give intelligence. If any tracts therefore in his name, on any of the above topics, are any where existing in manuscript, and in obscurity, it is probable they are only similar selections. And indeed it will be found on inspection, that his collections consist of a multitude of entries made at different times, without method, order, or arrangement of any kind, so as to form an immense chaos of intelligence, which he, like many other voluminous collectors, intended at some future time to digest and arrange, but unfortunately postponed this task so long, that he did not live to carry that intention into effect. Under these circumstances, should it happen, as perhaps it may, that any volume of the whole is confined exclusively to any one branch of science, such as hydrostatics for instance, it was not the consequence of a designed plan, but only arose from this accident, that he had then made that branch the object of his pursuit, and for a time laid aside the rest. In proof of this assertion it may be observed, that the very treatise of light and shadow above mentioned, is described as in the Ambrosian library at Milan, and as a folio volume covered with red velvet, presented by Signior Mazzenta to Cardinal Borromeo[i109]; from all which circumstances it is evidently proved to be one of the volumes now existing in France[i110], which were inspected and described by Venturi in the tract so often cited in the course of this life. Although the principal of Leonardo's productions have been already mentioned, it has been thought proper, for the satisfaction of the curious, here to subjoin a catalogue of such of them as have come to our knowledge; distinguishing in it such as were only drawings, from such as were finished pictures, and noticing also which of them have been engraven, and by whom. CATALOGUE OF THE WORKS OF _LEONARDO DA VINCI_. ARCHITECTURE. Many _designs for plans and buildings_, made by him in his youth[i111]. _A model_ made by him for raising the roof of the church of St. John, at Florence[i112]. _The house of the family of Melzi at Vaprio_, supposed by Della Valle to be designed by Leonardo[i113]. MODELS /and/ SCULPTURE. Some _heads of laughing women_, modelled by him in clay, in his youth[i114]. Some _boys' heads_ also, which appeared to have come from the hand of a master[i115]. _Three figures in bronze_, over the gate on the north side of the church of St. John, at Florence, made by Gio. Francesco Rustici, but designed with the advice of Leonardo da Vinci[i116]. _A model in clay_, in alto relievo. It is a circle of about two palms in diameter, and represents St. Jerom in a grotto, old, and much worn out by prayer. It was in the possession of Sig. Ignazio Hugford, a painter at Florence, who was induced to buy it in consequence of the great praises which in his youth he had heard bestowed on it by the celebrated Anton. Dominico Gabbiani, his master, who knew it to be of the hand of Leonardo. This model appears to have been much studied in the time of Pontormo and Rosso; and many copies of it, both drawings and pictures, are to be found throughout Florence, well painted in their manner[i117]. The _equestrian statue_ in memory of the Duke of Milan's father, which was not only finished and exposed to view, but broken to pieces by the French when they took possession of Milan. It has been said by some, that the model only was finished, and the statue never cast, and that it was the model only which the French destroyed[i118]. Vasari, p. 36, mentions a little _model_ by Leonardo in wax, but he does not say what was its subject. DRAWINGS. /Vasari/, p. 24, says, that it was Leonardo's practice to model figures from the life, and then to cover them with fine thin lawn or cambric, so as to be able to see through it, and with the point of a fine pencil to trace off the outlines in black and white; and that some such drawings he had in his collection. _A head in chiaro oscuro_, in the possession of Vasari, and mentioned by him as divine, a drawing on paper[i119]. _A carton of Adam and Eve in Paradise_, made by him for the King of Portugal. It is done with a pen in chiaro oscuro, and heightened with white, and was intended to be worked as tapestry in silk and gold; but Vasari says it was never executed, and that in his time the carton remained at Florence, in the house of Ottaviano de Medici. Whether this carton is still existing is unknown[i120]. _Several ridiculous heads of men and women_, formerly in Vasari's collection, drawn in pen and ink[i121]. Aurelio Lovino had, says Lomazzo, a book of sketches by Leonardo, of odd and ridiculous heads. This book appears to have contained about 250 figures of countrymen and countrywomen laughing, drawn by the hand of Leonardo. Card. Silvio Valenti had a similar book, in which were caricature heads drawn with a pen, like that engraven by Count Caylus. Of these caricatures mention is made in the second volume of the Lettere Pittoriche, p. 170[i122]. The passage in the Lettere Pittoriche here referred to, is part of a letter without any name or date, addressed _Al Sig. C. di C._; but a note of the editor's explains these initials, as meaning Sig. Conte di Caylus, and supposes the author to have been the younger Mariette. The letter mentions a collection of heads from Leonardo's drawings, published by the Count; and the editor, in another note, tells us, that they are caricature heads drawn in pen and ink; that the originals were bought in Holland, from Sig. Cardin. Silvio Valenti, and that the prints of which the letter speaks, are in the famous collection of the Corsini library. The author of the Letter supposes these caricatures to have been drawn when Vinci retired to Melzi's house, that he invented them as a new sort of recreation, and intended them as a subject for the academy which he had established at Milan. In another part of the same Letter, p. 173, 174, this collection of drawings of heads is again mentioned, and it is there said, that it might be that which belonged to the Earl of Arundel. This conjecture is founded on there being many such heads engraven formerly by Hollar. In fact, the number of the plates which he has done from drawings of this painter, are near one hundred, which compose different series. The author of the Letter adds, that, if a conjecture might be permitted, we might affirm, that this is the collection of heads of which Paul Lomazzo speaks; at least the description which he gives of a similar collection which was in the hands of Aurelio Lovino, a painter of Milan, corresponds with this as well in the number of the drawings as their subjects. It represents, like this, studies from old men, countrymen, wrinkled old women, which are all laughing. Another part of this Letter says, it is easy to believe that the collection of drawings of heads which occasioned this Letter, might be one of those books in which Leonardo noted the most singular countenances. In p. 198 of the same Letter, Hollar's engravings are said to be about an hundred, and to have been done at Antwerp in 1645, and the following year; and in p. 199, Count Caylus's publication is said to contain 59 plates in aqua fortis, done in 1730, and that this latter is the work so often mentioned in the Letter. _Another collection of the same kind of caricature heads_ mentioned in Mariette's Letter[i123], as existing in the cabinet of either the King of Spain or the King of Sardinia. _Four caricature heads_, mentioned, Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 190, as being in the possession of Sig. Crozat. They are described as drawn with a pen, and are said to have come originally from Vasari's collection of drawings. Of this collection it is said, in a note on the above passage, that it was afterwards carried into France, and fell into the hands of a bookseller, who took the volume to pieces, and disposed of the drawings separately, and that many of them came into the cabinets of the King, and Sig. Crozat. Others say, and it is more credible, that Vasari's collection passed into that of the Grand Dukes of Medici. _A head of Americo Vespucci_, in charcoal, but copied by Vasari in pen and ink[i124]. _A head of an old man_, beautifully drawn in charcoal[i125]. _An head of Scarramuccia, captain of the gypsies_, in chalk; formerly belonging to Pierfrancesco Giambullari, canon of St. Lorenzo, at Florence, and left by him to Donato Valdambrini of Arezzo, canon of St. Lorenzo also[i126]. _Several designs of combatants on horseback_, made by Leonardo for Gentil Borri, a master of defence[i127], to shew the different positions necessary for a horse soldier in defending himself, and attacking his enemy. _A carton of our Saviour, the Virgin, St. Ann, and St. John._ Vasari says of this, that for two days, people of all sorts, men and women, young and old, resorted to Leonardo's house to see this wonderful performance, as if they had been going to a solemn feast; and adds, that this carton was afterwards in France. It seems that this was intended for an altar-piece for the high altar of the church of the Annunziata, but the picture was never painted[i128]. However, when Leonardo afterwards went into France, he, at the desire of Francis the First, put the design into colours. Lomazzo has said, that this carton of St. Ann was carried into France; that in his time it was at Milan, in the possession of Aurelio Lovino, a painter; and that many drawings from it were in existence. What was the fate this carton of St. Ann underwent, may be seen in a letter of P. Resta, printed in the third volume of the Lettere Pittoriche, in which he says, that Leonardo made three of these cartons, and nevertheless did not convert it into a picture, but that it was painted by Salai, and that the picture is still in the sacristy of St. Celsus at Milan[i129]. _A drawing of an old man's head, seen in front_, in red chalk; mentioned Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 191. _A carton_ designed by him _for painting the council-chamber at Florence_. The subject which he chose for this purpose was, the history of Niccolo Piccinino, the Captain of Duke Philip of Milan, in which he drew a group of men on horseback fighting for a standard[i130]. Mariette, in a note, Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 193, mentions this carton, which he says represented two horsemen fighting for a standard; that it was only part of a large history, the subject of which was the rout of Niccolo Piccinino, General of the army of Philip Duke of Milan, and that a print was engraven of it by Edelinck, when young, but the drawing from which he worked was a bad one. In the catalogue of prints from the works of Leonardo, inserted Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 195, this print is again mentioned and described more truly, as representing four horsemen fighting for a standard. It is there supposed to have been engraven from a drawing by Fiammingo, and that this drawing might have been made from the picture which Du Fresne speaks of as being in his time in the possession of Sig. La Maire, an excellent painter of perspective. _A design of Neptune drawn in his car by sea horses, attended by sea gods_; made by him for his friend Antonio Segni[i131]. _Several anatomical drawings_ made from the life, many of which have been since collected into a volume, by his scholar Francesco Melzi[i132]. _A book of the Anatomy of man_, mentioned by Vasari, p. 36, the drawings for which were made with the assistance of Marc Antonio della Torre, before noticed in the present life. It is probably the same with the preceding. A beautiful and well-preserved study in red and black chalk, of the _head of a Virgin_, from which he afterwards painted a picture. This study was at one time in the celebrated Villa de Vecchietti, but afterwards, in consequence of a sale, passed into the hands of Sig. Ignazio Hugford[i133]. _Two heads of women in profile_, little differing from each other, drawn in like manner in black and red chalk, bought at the same sale by Sig. Hugford, but now among the Elector Palatine's collection of drawings[i134]. _A book of the Anatomy of a horse_, mentioned by Vasari, p. 36, as a distinct work; but probably included in Leonardo's manuscript collections. See the account before given of them. Several designs by Leonardo were in the possession of Sig. Jabac, who seems to have been a collector of pictures, and to have bought up for the King of France several excellent pictures particularly by Leonardo da Vinci[i135]. _A drawing of a young man embracing an old woman_, whom he is caressing for the sake of her riches. This is mentioned, Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 198, as engraven by Hollar, in 1646. _A head of a young man seen in profile_, engraven in aqua fortis by Conte di Caylus, from a drawing in the King of France's collection[i136]. _A fragment of a Treatise on the Motions of the Human Body_, already mentioned in the foregoing life. In the Lettere Pittoriche, vol. ii. p. 199, mention is made of a print representing _some intertwisted lines upon a black ground_, in the style of some of Albert Durer's engravings in wood. In the middle of this, in a small compartment, is to be read, "/Academia Leonardi Vin/." Vasari, it is there said, has noticed it as a singularity. In p. 200 of the same work, a similar print is also noticed, which differs only in the inscription from the former. In this last it is /Academia Leonardi Vici/. Both this and the former print are said to be extremely rare, and only to have been seen in the King of France's collection. It does not however appear from any thing in the Lett. Pitt. that they were designed by Leonardo. The Abate di Villeloin, in his Catalogue of Prints published in 1666, speaks, under the article of Leonardo da Vinci, of a print of the taking down from the Cross; but the Lett. Pitt. says it was engraven from Eneas Vico, not from Leonardo[i137]. _Two drawings of monsters_, mentioned by Lomazzo, consisting of a boy's head each, but horribly distorted by the misplacing of the features, and the introduction of other members not in Nature to be found there. These two drawings were in the hands of Francesco Borella, a sculptor[i138]. _A portrait_ by Leonardo, _of Artus, Maestro di Camera to Francis I._ drawn in black lead pencil[i139]. _The head of a Cæsar crowned with oak_, among a valuable collection of drawings in a thick volume in folio, in the possession of Sig. Pagave[i140]. _The proportions of the human body._ The original of this is preserved in the possession of Sig. Pagave. At the head and foot of this drawing is to be read the description which begins thus: _Tanto apre l'Uomo nelle braccia quanto è la sua altezza, &c._ and above all, at the head of the work is the famous Last Supper, which he proposes to his scholars as the rule of the art[i141]. _The Circumcision_, a large drawing mentioned Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 283, as the work of Leonardo, by Nicolo Gabburri, in a letter dated Florence, 4th Oct. 1732, and addressed _Al Sig. Pietro Mariette_. Gabburri says he saw this drawing, and that it was done on white paper a little tinted with Indian ink, and heightened with ceruse. Its owner then was Alessandro Galilei, an architect of Florence. _A drawing consisting of several laughing heads, in the middle of which is another head in profile, crowned with oak leaves._ This drawing was the property of the Earl of Arundel, and was engraven by Hollar in 1646[i142]. _A man sitting, and collecting in a looking-glass the rays of the sun, to dazzle the eyes of a dragon who is fighting with a lion._ A print of this is spoken of, Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 197, as badly engraven by an anonymous artist, but it is there said to have so little of Leonardo's manner as to afford reason for believing it not designed by him, though it might perhaps be found among his drawings in the King of France's collection. Another print of it, of the same size, has been engraven from the drawing by Conte de Caylus. It represents a pensive man, and differs from the former in this respect, that in this the man is naked, whereas in the drawing he is clothed. PAINTINGS. _A Madonna_, formerly in the possession of Pope Clement the Seventh[i143]. _A small Madonna and Child_, painted for Baldassar Turini da Pescia, who was the Datary[i144] at Lyons, the colours of which are much faded[i145]. It is not known where this now is. _A Virgin and Child_, at one time in the hands of the Botti family[i146]. _The Virgin sitting in St. Ann's lap, and holding her little Son_, formerly at Paris[i147]. This has been engraven in wood, in chiaro oscuro, by an unknown artist. The picture was in the King of France's cabinet, and a similar one is in the sacristy of St. Celsus at Milan[i148]. _Another Virgin with her Son, St. John, and an Angel_, mentioned by Du Fresne, as at Paris[i149]. _A Madonna and Child_, in the possession of the Marquis di Surdi[i150]. _A Madonna and Child_, painted on the wall in the church of St. Onofrio at Rome[i151]. _A Madonna kneeling_, in the King's gallery in France[i152]. _An Holy Family, with St. Michael, and another Angel_, in the King of France's collection[i153]. _A Madonna_, in the church of St. Francis at Milan, attributed to Leonardo by Sorman[i154]. _A Virgin and Child_, by Leonardo, in Piacenza, near the church of Our Lady in the Fields. It was bought for 300 chequins by the Principe di Belgioioso[i155]. _A Madonna, half length, holding on her knee the infant Jesus, with a lily in his hand._ A print of this, engraven in aqua fortis by Giuseppe Juster, is mentioned Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 196. The picture is there said to have been in the possession of Charles Patin, and was supposed by some to have been painted for Francis I. _An Herodiade_, some time in Cardinal Richelieu's possession[i156]. _The daughter of Herodias, with an executioner holding out to her the head of St. John_, in the Barberini palace[i157]. _An Herodiade with a basket, in which is the head of John the Baptist._ A print of this in aqua fortis, by Gio. Troven, under the direction of Teniers, is mentioned Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 197, and is there said to have been done from a picture which was then in the cabinet of the Archduke Leopold, but had been before in that of the Emperor. Another picture of the same subject, but differently disposed. It is also an half length. A print from it, in aqua fortis, by Alessio Loyr, is mentioned Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 197; but it is not there said in whose possession the picture ever was. _The angel_ in Verrochio's picture before mentioned[i158]. _The shield_, mentioned by Vasari, p. 26, as painted by him at the request of his father, and consisting of serpents, &c. _A head of Medusa_, in oil, in the palace of Duke Cosmo. It is still in being, and in good preservation[i159]. _A head of an angel raising one arm in the air_, in the collection of Duke Cosmo[i160]. Whether this is a picture, or only a drawing, does not appear; but as Vasari does not notice any difference between that and the head of Medusa, which he decidedly says is in oil, it is probable that this is so also. _The Adoration of the Magi_: it was in the house of Americo Benci, opposite to the Portico of Peruzzi[i161]. _The famous Last Supper_, in the Refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie[i162]. A list of the copies made from this celebrated picture has, together with its history, been given in a former page. A print has been engraven from it under the direction of Pietro Soutman; but he being a scholar of Rubens, has introduced into it so much of Rubens's manner[i163], that it can no longer be known for Leonardo da Vinci's. Besides this, Mariette also mentions two other prints, one of them an engraving, the other an etching, but both by unknown authors. He notices also, that the Count di Caylus had etched it in aqua fortis[i164]. The print lately engraven of it by Morghen has been already noticed in a former page. _A Nativity_, sent as a present from the Duke of Milan to the Emperor[i165]. _The portraits of Lodovic Sforza, Duke of Milan, and Maximilian his eldest son, and on the other side Beatrix his dutchess, and Francesco his other son_, all in one picture, in the same Refectory with the Last Supper[i166]. _The portraits of two of the handsomest women at Florence_, painted by him as a present to Lewis XII[i167]. _The painting in the council-chamber at Florence_[i168]. The subject of this is the battle of Attila[i169]. _A portrait of Ginevra_, daughter of Americo Benci[i170]. _The portrait of Mona Lisa_, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, painted for her husband[i171]. Lomazzo has said, she was a Neapolitan, but this is supposed a mistake, and that she was a Florentine[i172]. In a note of Mariette's, Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 175, this picture is said to have been in the collection of Francis I. King of France, who gave for it 4000 crowns. _A small picture of a child_, which was at Pescia, in the possession of Baldassar Turini. It is not known where this now is[i173]. _A painting of two horsemen struggling for a flag_, in the Palais Royal at Paris[i174]. _A nobleman of Mantua_[i175]. _A picture of Flora_, which Du Fresne mentions as being in his time at Paris. This is said to have been once in the cabinet of Mary de Medicis[i176], and though for some time supposed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, was discovered by Mariette to have been the work of Francisco Melzi, whose name is upon it[i177]. In the supplement to the life of Leonardo, inserted in Della Valle's edition of Vasari, this picture is said to have been painted for the Duke de S. Simone. _A head of John the Baptist_, in the hands of Camillo Albizzo[i178]. _The Conception of the blessed Virgin_, for the church of St. Francis at Milan[i179]. This was esteemed a copy, and not worth more than 30 chequins, till an Englishman came there, who thought a large sum of money well employed in the purchase of it[i180]. _St. John in the Wilderness_, said to be at Paris[i181]. In Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 197, mention is made of a print of St. John the Baptist, half length, by Sig. Jabac, who had the original picture, which was formerly in the King of France's cabinet. _Joseph and Potiphar's wife_, which Mons. de Charmois, secretary to the Duke of Schomberg, had[i182]. _A portrait of Raphael_, in oil, in the Medici gallery. This is mentioned in Vasari, p. 47; and though not expressly there said to be by Leonardo, is so placed as to make it doubtful whether it was or not. _A Nun, half length_, by Leonardo, in the possession of Abbate Nicolini[i183]. _Two fine heads_, painted in oil by Leonardo, bought at Florence by Sig. Bali di Breteuil, ambassador from Malta to Rome. One of these, representing a woman, was in his first manner. The other, a Virgin, in his last[i184]. _A Leda_, which Lomazzo says was at Fontainebleau, and did not yield in colouring to the portrait of Joconda in the Duke's gallery. Richardson says it was in the palace Mattei[i185]. _The head of a dead man_, with all its minute parts, painted by Leonardo, formerly in the Mattei palace, but no longer there[i186]. A picture containing a study of _two most delicate female heads_, in the Barberini palace at Rome[i187]. _A portrait of a girl with a book in her hand_, in the Strozzi palace in Rome[i188]. _The Dispute of Jesus with the Doctors_, half length, in the Panfili palace[i189]. Five pictures in the Ambrosian library at Milan, the subjects not mentioned[i190]. Some in the gallery of the archbishopric at Milan, the number and subjects equally unnoticed[i191]. One picture in the sacristy of Santa Maria, near St. Celsus at Milan[i192]. _A small head of Christ_, while a youth, mentioned by Lomazzo. Probably this may be the study for the picture of Jesus disputing with the Doctors, at the Panfili palace[i193]. _St. Michael with a man kneeling_, in the King of France's collection[i194]. _A Bacchus_, in the same collection[i195]. _The fair Ferraia_, in the same collection[i196]. _A portrait of a lady_, there also[i197]. _A Christ with a globe in his hand_[i198]. A very fine picture, half length, now in the possession of Richard Troward, Esq. of Pall Mall. This was engraven by Hollar in 1650, in aqua fortis[i199]. _The Fall of Phaeton_, in the gallery of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, of which Scannelli speaks, but it is mentioned by no one else[i200]. _St. Catherine with a palm-branch_, in the gallery of the Duke of Modena[i201]. _The head of a young man armed_, in the same collection, very graceful, but inferior to the St. Catherine[i202]. _A portrait of the Queen of Naples_, which was in the Aldobrandini gallery, but afterwards to be found in a chamber of portraits in the Panfili palace. It is not equal in colouring to the Dispute of Jesus with the Doctors[i203]. _A portrait in profile of the Dutchess of Milan_, mentioned by Richardson as being in a chamber leading to the Ambrosian library[i204]. _A beautiful figure of the Virgin, half length_, in the palace of Vaprio. It is of a gigantic size, for the head of the Virgin is six common palms in size, and that of the Divine Infant four in circumference. Della Valle speaks of having seen this in the year 1791, and says he is not ignorant that tradition ascribes this Madonna to Bramante, notwithstanding which he gives it to Leonardo[i205]. _A laughing Pomona with three veils_, commended by Lomazzo. It was done for Francis I. King of France[i206]. _The portrait of Cecilia Gallarani_, mentioned by Bellincione in one of his sonnets, as painted by Leonardo[i207]. _Another of Lucrezia Cavelli_, a celebrated performer on the lute, ascribed to him on the same authority. Copies of both this and the former may be seen at Milan[i208]. _Our Saviour before Pilate_, in the church of S. Florentino, at Amboise. It is thought that the carton only of this was Leonardo's, and that the picture was painted by Andrea Salai, or Melzi[i209]. _A portrait of Leonardo_ by himself, half length, in the Ambrosian library at Milan[i210]. Della Valle has inserted a copy of this before the Supplement to Leonardo's Life, in his edition of Vasari, for which purpose Sig. Pagave transmitted him a drawing from the original picture. But Leonardo's own drawing for the picture itself, is in the possession of his Britannic Majesty, and from that Mr. Chamberlaine has prefixed to his publication before mentioned, a plate engraven by Bartolozzi. A TREATISE, _&c._ DRAWING. PROPORTION. /Chap. I./--_What the young Student in Painting ought in the first Place to learn._ /The/ young student should, in the first place, acquire a knowledge of perspective, to enable him to give to every object its proper dimensions: after which, it is requisite that he be under the care of an able master, to accustom him, by degrees, to a good style of drawing the parts. Next, he must study Nature, in order to confirm and fix in his mind the reason of those precepts which he has learnt. He must also bestow some time in viewing the works of various old masters, to form his eye and judgment, in order that he may be able to put in practice all that he has been taught[1]. /Chap. II./--_Rule for a young Student in Painting._ /The/ organ of sight is one of the quickest, and takes in at a single glance an infinite variety of forms; notwithstanding which, it cannot perfectly comprehend more than one object at a time. For example, the reader, at one look over this page, immediately perceives it full of different characters; but he cannot at the same moment distinguish each letter, much less can he comprehend their meaning. He must consider it word by word, and line by line, if he be desirous of forming a just notion of these characters. In like manner, if we wish to ascend to the top of an edifice, we must be content to advance step by step, otherwise we shall never be able to attain it. A young man, who has a natural inclination to the study of this art, I would advise to act thus: In order to acquire a true notion of the form of things, he must begin by studying the parts which compose them, and not pass to a second till he has well stored his memory, and sufficiently practised the first; otherwise he loses his time, and will most certainly protract his studies. And let him remember to acquire accuracy before he attempts quickness. /Chap. III./--_How to discover a young Man's Disposition for Painting._ /Many/ are very desirous of learning to draw, and are very fond of it, who are, notwithstanding, void of a proper disposition for it. This may be known by their want of perseverance; like boys, who draw every thing in a hurry, never finishing, or shadowing. /Chap. IV./--_Of Painting, and its Divisions._ /Painting/ is divided into two principal parts. The first is the figure, that is, the lines which distinguish the forms of bodies, and their component parts. The second is the colour contained within those limits. /Chap. V./--_Division of the Figure._ /The/ form of bodies is divided into two parts; that is, the proportion of the members to each other, which must correspond with the whole; and the motion, expressive of what passes in the mind of the living figure. /Chap. VI./--_Proportion of Members._ /The/ proportion of members is again divided into two parts, viz. equality, and motion. By equality is meant (besides the measure corresponding with the whole), that you do not confound the members of a young subject with those of old age, nor plump ones with those that are lean; and that, moreover, you do not blend the robust and firm muscles of man with feminine softness: that the attitudes and motions of old age be not expressed with the quickness and alacrity of youth; nor those of a female figure like those of a vigorous young man. The motions and members of a strong man should be such as to express his perfect state of health. /Chap. VII./--_Of Dimensions in general._ /In/ general, the dimensions of the human body are to be considered in the length, and not in the breadth; because in the wonderful works of Nature, which we endeavour to imitate, we cannot in any species find any one part in one model precisely similar to the same part in another. Let us be attentive, therefore, to the variation of forms, and avoid all monstrosities of proportion; such as long legs united to short bodies, and narrow chests with long arms. Observe also attentively the measure of joints, in which Nature is apt to vary considerably; and imitate her example by doing the same. /Chap. VIII./--_Motion, Changes, and Proportion of Members._ /The/ measures of the human body vary in each member, according as it is more or less bent, or seen in different views, increasing on one side as much as they diminish on the other. /Chap. IX./--_The Difference of Proportion between Children and grown Men._ /In/ men and children I find a great difference between the joints of the one and the other in the length of the bones. A man has the length of two heads from the extremity of one shoulder to the other, the same from the shoulder to the elbow, and from the elbow to the fingers; but the child has only one, because Nature gives the proper size first to the seat of the intellect, and afterwards to the other parts. /Chap. X./--_The Alterations in the Proportion of the human Body from Infancy to full Age._ /A man/, in his infancy, has the breadth of his shoulders equal to the length of the face, and to the length of the arm from the shoulder to the elbow, when the arm is bent[2]. It is the same again from the lower belly to the knee, and from the knee to the foot. But, when a man is arrived at the period of his full growth, every one of these dimensions becomes double in length, except the face, which, with the top of the head, undergoes but very little alteration in length. A well-proportioned and full-grown man, therefore, is ten times the length of his face; the breadth of his shoulders will be two faces, and in like manner all the above lengths will be double. The rest will be explained in the general measurement of the human body[3]. /Chap. XI./--_Of the Proportion of Members._ /All/ the parts of any animal whatever must be correspondent with the whole. So that, if the body be short and thick, all the members belonging to it must be the same. One that is long and thin must have its parts of the same kind; and so of the middle size. Something of the same may be observed in plants, when uninjured by men or tempests; for when thus injured they bud and grow again, making young shoots from old plants, and by those means destroying their natural symmetry. /Chap. XII./--_That every Part be proportioned to its Whole._ /If/ a man be short and thick, be careful that all his members be of the same nature, viz. short arms and thick, large hands, short fingers, with broad joints; and so of the rest. /Chap. XIII./--_Of the Proportion of the Members._ /Measure/ upon yourself the proportion of the parts, and, if you find any of them defective, note it down, and be very careful to avoid it in drawing your own compositions. For this is reckoned a common fault in painters, to delight in the imitation of themselves. /Chap. XIV./--_The Danger of forming an erroneous Judgment in regard to the Proportion and Beauty of the Parts._ /If/ the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other. /Chap. XV./--_Another Precept._ /The/ young painter must, in the first instance, accustom his hand to copying the drawings of good masters; and when his hand is thus formed, and ready, he should, with the advice of his director, use himself also to draw from relievos; according to the rules we shall point out in the treatise on drawing from relievos[4]. /Chap. XVI./--_The Manner of drawing from Relievos, and rendering Paper fit for it._ /When/ you draw from relievos, tinge your paper of some darkish demi-tint. And after you have made your outline, put in the darkest shadows, and, last of all, the principal lights, but sparingly, especially the smaller ones; because those are easily lost to the eye at a very moderate distance[5]. /Chap. XVII./--_Of drawing from Casts or Nature._ /In/ drawing from relievo, the draftsman must place himself in such a manner, as that the eye of the figure to be drawn be level with his own[6]. /Chap. XVIII./--_To draw Figures from Nature._ /Accustom/ yourself to hold a plummet in your hand, that you may judge of the bearing of the parts. /Chap. XIX./--_Of drawing from Nature._ /When/ you draw from Nature, you must be at the distance of three times the height of the object; and when you begin to draw, form in your own mind a certain principal line (suppose a perpendicular); observe well the bearing of the parts towards that line; whether they intersect, are parallel to it, or oblique. /Chap. XX./--_Of drawing Academy Figures._ /When/ you draw from a naked model, always sketch in the whole of the figure, suiting all the members well to each other; and though you finish only that part which appears the best, have a regard to the rest, that, whenever you make use of such studies, all the parts may hang together. In composing your attitudes, take care not to turn the head on the same side as the breast, nor let the arm go in a line with the leg[7]. If the head turn towards the right shoulder, the parts must be lower on the left side than on the other; but if the chest come forward, and the head turn towards the left, the parts on the right side are to be the highest. /Chap. XXI./--_Of studying in the Dark, on first waking in the Morning, and before going to sleep._ /I have/ experienced no small benefit, when in the dark and in bed, by retracing in my mind the outlines of those forms which I had previously studied, particularly such as had appeared the most difficult to comprehend and retain; by this method they will be confirmed and treasured up in the memory. /Chap. XXII./--_Observations on drawing Portraits._ /The/ cartilage, which raises the nose in the middle of the face, varies in eight different ways. It is equally straight, equally concave, or equally convex, which is the first sort. Or, secondly, unequally straight, concave, or convex. Or, thirdly, straight in the upper part, and concave in the under. Or, fourthly, straight again in the upper part, and convex in those below. Or, fifthly, it may be concave and straight beneath. Or, sixthly, concave above, and convex below. Or, seventhly, it may be convex in the upper part, and straight in the lower. And in the eighth and last place, convex above, and concave beneath. The uniting of the nose with the brows is in two ways, either it is straight or concave. The forehead has three different forms. It is straight, concave, or round. The first is divided into two parts, viz. it is either convex in the upper part, or in the lower, sometimes both; or else flat above and below. /Chap. XXIII./--_The Method of retaining in the Memory the Likeness of a Man, so as to draw his Profile, after having seen him only once._ /You/ must observe and remember well the variations of the four principal features in the profile; the nose, mouth, chin, and forehead. And first of the nose, of which there are three different sorts[8], straight, concave, and convex. Of the straight there are but four variations, short or long, high at the end, or low. Of the concave there are three sorts; some have the concavity above, some in the middle, and some at the end. The convex noses also vary three ways; some project in the upper part, some in the middle, and others at the bottom. Nature, which seems to delight in infinite variety, gives again three changes to those noses which have a projection in the middle; for some have it straight, some concave, and some convex. /Chap. XXIV./--_How to remember the Form of a Face._ /If/ you wish to retain with facility the general look of a face, you must first learn how to draw well several faces, mouths, eyes, noses, chins, throats, necks, and shoulders; in short, all those principal parts which distinguish one man from another. For instance, noses are often different sorts[9]. Straight, bunched, concave, some raised above, some below the middle, aquiline, flat, round, and sharp. These affect the profile. In the front view there are eleven different sorts. Even, thick in the middle, thin in the middle, thick at the tip, thin at the beginning, thin at the tip, and thick at the beginning. Broad, narrow, high, and low nostrils; some with a large opening, and some more shut towards the tip. The same variety will be found in the other parts of the face, which must be drawn from Nature, and retained in the memory. Or else, when you mean to draw a likeness from memory, take with you a pocket-book, in which you have marked all these variations of features, and after having given a look at the face you mean to draw, retire a little aside, and note down in your book which of the features are similar to it; that you may put it all together at home. /Chap. XXV./--_That a Painter should take Pleasure in the Opinion of every body._ /A painter/ ought not certainly to refuse listening to the opinion of any one; for we know that, although a man be not a painter, he may have just notions of the forms of men; whether a man has a hump on his back, a thick leg, or a large hand; whether he be lame, or have any other defect. Now, if we know that men are able to judge of the works of Nature, should we not think them more able to detect our errors? ANATOMY. /Chap. XXVI./--_What is principally to be observed in Figures._ /The/ principal and most important consideration required in drawing figures, is to set the head well upon the shoulders, the chest upon the hips, the hips and shoulders upon the feet. /Chap. XXVII./--_Mode of Studying._ /Study/ the science first, and then follow the practice which results from that science. Pursue method in your study, and do not quit one part till it be perfectly engraven in the memory; and observe what difference there is between the members of animals and their joints[10]. /Chap. XXVIII./--_Of being universal._ /It/ is an easy matter for a man who is well versed in the principles of his art, to become universal in the practice of it, since all animals have a similarity of members, that is, muscles, tendons, bones, &c. These only vary in length or thickness, as will be demonstrated in the Anatomy[11]. As for aquatic animals, of which there is great variety, I shall not persuade the painter to take them as a rule, having no connexion with our purpose. /Chap. XXIX./--_A Precept for the Painter._ /It/ reflects no great honour on a painter to be able to execute only one thing well, such as a head, an academy figure, or draperies, animals, landscape, or the like, confining himself to some particular object of study; because there is scarcely a person so void of genius as to fail of success, if he apply earnestly to one branch of study, and practise it continually. /Chap. XXX./--_Of the Measures of the human Body, and the bending of Members._ /It/ is very necessary that painters should have a knowledge of the bones which support the flesh by which they are covered, but particularly of the joints, which increase and diminish the length of them in their appearance. As in the arm, which does not measure the same when bent, as when extended; its difference between the greatest extension and bending, is about one eighth of its length. The increase and diminution of the arm is effected by the bone projecting out of its socket at the elbow; which, as is seen in figure A B, Plate I. is lengthened from the shoulder to the elbow; the angle it forms being less than a right angle. It will appear longer as that angle becomes more acute, and will shorten in proportion as it becomes more open or obtuse. [Illustration: _Page 15_. _Chap. 37_. _Plate 1_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. XXXI./--_Of the small Bones in several Joints of the human Body._ /There/ are in the joints of the human body certain small bones, fixed in the middle of the tendons which connect several of the joints. Such are the patellas of the knees, and the joints of the shoulders, and those of the feet. They are eight in number, one at each shoulder, one at each knee, and two at each foot under the first joint of the great toe towards the heel. These grow extremely hard as a man advances in years. /Chap. XXXII./--_Memorandum to be observed by the Painter._ /Note/ down which muscles and tendons are brought into action by the motion of any member, and when they are hidden. Remember that these remarks are of the greatest importance to painters and sculptors, who profess to study anatomy, and the science of the muscles. Do the same with children, following the different gradations of age from their birth even to decrepitude, describing the changes which the members, and particularly the joints, undergo; which of them grow fat, and which lean. /Chap. XXXIII./--_The Shoulders._ /The/ joints of the shoulders, and other parts which bend, shall be noticed in their places in the Treatise on Anatomy, where the cause of the motions of all the parts which compose the human body shall be explained[12]. /Chap. XXXIV./--_The Difference of Joints between Children and grown Men._ /Young/ children have all their joints small, but they are thick and plump in the spaces between them; because there is nothing upon the bones at the joints, but some tendons to bind the bones together. The soft flesh, which is full of fluids, is enclosed under the skin in the space between the joints; and as the bones are bigger at the joints than in the space between them, the skin throws off in the progress to manhood that superfluity, and draws nearer to the bones, thinning the whole part together. But upon the joints it does not lessen, as there is nothing but cartilages and tendons. For these reasons children are small in the joints, and plump in the space between, as may be observed in their fingers, arms, and narrow shoulders. Men, on the contrary, are large and full in the joints, in the arms and legs; and where children have hollows, men are knotty and prominent. /Chap. XXXV./--_Of the Joints of the Fingers._ /The/ joints of the fingers appear larger on all sides when they bend; the more they bend the larger they appear. The contrary is the case when straight. It is the same in the toes, and it will be more perceptible in proportion to their fleshiness. /Chap. XXXVI./--_Of the Joint of the Wrist._ /The/ wrist or joint between the hand and arm lessens on closing the hand, and grows larger when it opens. The contrary happens in the arm, in the space between the elbow and the hand, on all sides; because in opening the hand the muscles are extended and thinned in the arm, from the elbow to the wrist; but when the hand is shut, the same muscles swell and shorten. The tendons alone start, being stretched by the clenching of the hand. /Chap. XXXVII./--_Of the Joint of the Foot._ /The/ increase and diminution in the joint of the foot is produced on that side where the tendons are seen, as D E F, _Plate I._ which increases when the angle is acute, and diminishes when it becomes obtuse. It must be understood of the joint in the front part of the foot A B C. /Chap. XXXVIII./--_Of the Knee._ /Of/ all the members which have pliable joints, the knee is the only one that lessens in the bending, and becomes larger by extension. /Chap. XXXIX./--_Of the Joints._ /All/ the joints of the human body become larger by bending, except that of the leg. /Chap. XL./--_Of the Naked._ /When/ a figure is to appear nimble and delicate, its muscles must never be too much marked, nor are any of them to be much swelled. Because such figures are expressive of activity and swiftness, and are never loaded with much flesh upon the bones. They are made light by the want of flesh, and where there is but little flesh there cannot be any thickness of muscles. /Chap. XLI./--_Of the Thickness of the Muscles._ /Muscular/ men have large bones, and are in general thick and short, with very little fat; because the fleshy muscles in their growth contract closer together, and the fat, which in other instances lodges between them, has no room. The muscles in such thin subjects, not being able to extend, grow in thickness, particularly towards their middle, in the parts most removed from the extremities. /Chap. XLII./--_Fat Subjects have small Muscles._ /Though/ fat people have this in common with muscular men, that they are frequently short and thick, they have thin muscles; but their skin contains a great deal of spongy and soft flesh full of air; for that reason they are lighter upon the water, and swim better than muscular people. /Chap. XLIII./--_Which of the Muscles disappear in the different Motions of the Body._ /In/ raising or lowering the arm, the pectoral muscles disappear, or acquire a greater relievo. A similar effect is produced by the hips, when they bend either inwards or outwards. It is to be observed, that there is more variety of appearances in the shoulders, hips, and neck, than in any other joint, because they are susceptible of the greatest variety of motions. But of this subject I shall make a separate treatise[13]. /Chap. XLIV./--_Of the Muscles._ /The/ muscles are not to be scrupulously marked all the way, because it would be disagreeable to the sight, and of very difficult execution. But on that side only where the members are in action, they should be pronounced more strongly; for muscles that are at work naturally collect all their parts together, to gain increase of strength, so that some small parts of those muscles will appear, that were not seen before. /Chap. XLV./--_Of the Muscles._ /The/ muscles of young men are not to be marked strongly, nor too much swelled, because that would indicate full strength and vigour of age, which they have not yet attained. Nevertheless they must be more or less expressed, as they are more or less employed. For those which are in motion are always more swelled and thicker than those which remain at rest. The intrinsic and central line of the members which are bent, never retains its natural length. /Chap. XLVI./--_The Extension and Contraction of the Muscles._ /The/ muscle at the back part of the thigh shows more variety in its extension and contraction, than any other in the human body; the second, in that respect, are those which compose the buttocks; the third, those of the back; the fourth, those of the neck; the fifth, those of the shoulders; and the sixth, those of the Abdomen, which, taking their rise under the breast, terminate under the lower belly; as I shall explain when I speak of each. /Chap. XLVII./--_Of the Muscle between the Chest and the lower Belly._ /There/ is a muscle which begins under the breast at the Sternum, and is inserted into, or terminates at the Os pubis, under the lower belly. It is called the Rectus of the Abdomen; it is divided, lengthways, into three principal portions, by transverse tendinous intersections or ligaments, viz. the superior part, and a ligament; the second part, with its ligaments; and the third part, with the third ligament; which last unites by tendons to the Os pubis. These divisions and intersections of the same muscle are intended by nature to facilitate the motion when the body is bent or distended. If it were made of one piece, it would produce too much variety when extended, or contracted, and also would be considerably weaker. When this muscle has but little variety in the motion of the body, it is more beautiful[14]. /Chap. XLVIII./--_Of a Man's complex Strength, but first of the Arm._ /The/ muscles which serve either to straighten or bend the arm, arise from the different processes of the Scapula; some of them from the protuberances of the Humerus, and others about the middle of the Os humeri. The extensors of the arm arise from behind, and the flexors from before. That a man has more power in pulling than in pushing, has been proved by the ninth proposition De Ponderibus[15], where it is said, that of two equal weights, that will have the greatest power which is farthest removed from the pole or centre of its balance. It follows then of course, that the muscle N B, _Plate II._ and the muscle N C, being of equal power, the inner muscle N C, will nevertheless be stronger than the outward one N B, because it is inserted into the arm at C, a point farther removed from the centre of the elbow A, than B, which is on the other side of such centre, so that that question is determined. But this is a simple power, and I thought it best to explain it before I mentioned the complex power of the muscles, of which I must now take notice. The complex power, or strength, is, for instance, this, when the arm is going to act, a second power is added to it (such as the weight of the body and the strength of the legs, in pulling or pushing), consisting in the extension of the parts, as when two men attempt to throw down a column; the one by pushing, and the other by pulling[16]. /Chap. XLIX./--_In which of the two Actions, Pulling or Pushing, a Man has the greatest Power_, Plate II. /A man/ has the greatest power in pulling, for in that action he has the united exertion of all the muscles of the arm, while some of them must be inactive when he is pushing; because when the arm is extended for that purpose, the muscles which move the elbow cannot act, any more than if he pushed with his shoulders against the column he means to throw down; in which case only the muscles that extend the back, the legs under the thigh, and the calves of the legs, would be active. From which we conclude, that in pulling there is added to the power of extension the strength of the arms, of the legs, of the back, and even of the chest, if the oblique motion of the body require it. But in pushing, though all the parts were employed, yet the strength of the muscles of the arms is wanting; for to push with an extended arm without motion does not help more than if a piece of wood were placed from the shoulder to the column meant to be pushed down. [Illustration: _Page 22_. _Chap. 48, 49_. _Plate 2_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. L./--_Of the bending of Members, and of the Flesh round the bending Joint._ /The/ flesh which covers the bones near and at the joints, swells or diminishes in thickness according to their bending or extension; that is, it increases at the inside of the angle formed by the bending, and grows narrow and lengthened on the outward side of the exterior angle. The middle between the convex and concave angle participates of this increase or diminution, but in a greater or less degree as the parts are nearer to, or farther from, the angles of the bending joints. /Chap. LI./--_Of the naked Body._ /The/ members of naked men who work hard in different attitudes, will shew the muscles more strongly on that side where they act forcibly to bring the part into action; and the other muscles will be more or less marked, in proportion as they co-operate in the same motion. /Chap. LII./--_Of a Ligament without Muscles._ /Where/ the arm joins with the hand, there is a ligament, the largest in the human body, which is without muscles, and is called the strong ligament of the Carpus; it has a square shape, and serves to bind and keep close together the bones of the arm, and the tendons of the fingers, and prevent their dilating, or starting out. /Chap. LIII./--_Of Creases._ /In/ bending the joints the flesh will always form a crease on the opposite side to that where it is tight. /Chap. LIV./--_How near behind the Back one Arm can be brought to the other_, Plate III. and IV. /When/ the arms are carried behind the back, the elbows can never be brought nearer than the length from the elbow to the end of the longest finger; so that the fingers will not be seen beyond the elbows, and in that situation, the arms with the shoulders form a perfect square. The greatest extension of the arm across the chest is, when the elbow comes over the pit of the stomach; the elbow and the shoulder in this position, will form an equilateral triangle. /Chap. LV./--_Of the Muscles._ /A naked/ figure being strongly marked, so as to give a distinct view of all the muscles, will not express any motion; because it cannot move, if some of its muscles do not relax while the others are pulling. Those which relax cease to appear in proportion as the others pull strongly and become apparent. [Illustration: _Page 24_. _Chap. 54_. _Plate 3_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 24_. _Chap. 53_. _Plate 4_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LVI./--_Of the Muscles._ /The/ muscles of the human body are to be more or less marked according to their degree of action. Those only which act are to be shewn, and the more forcibly they act, the stronger they should be pronounced. Those that do not act at all must remain soft and flat. /Chap. LVII./--_Of the Bending of the Body._ /The/ bodies of men diminish as much on the side which bends, as they increase on the opposite side. That diminution may at last become double, in proportion to the extension on the other side. But of this I shall make a separate treatise[17]. /Chap. LVIII./--_The same Subject._ /The/ body which bends, lengthens as much on one side as it shortens on the other; but the central line between them will never lessen or increase. /Chap. LIX./--_The Necessity of anatomical Knowledge._ /The/ painter who has obtained a perfect knowledge of the nature of the tendons and muscles, and of those parts which contain the most of them, will know to a certainty, in giving a particular motion to any part of the body, which, and how many of the muscles give rise and contribute to it; which of them, by swelling, occasion their shortening, and which of the cartilages they surround. He will not imitate those who, in all the different attitudes they adopt, or invent, make use of the same muscles, in the arms, back, or chest, or any other parts. MOTION AND EQUIPOISE OF FIGURES. /Chap. LX./--_Of the Equipoise of a Figure standing still._ /The/ non-existence of motion in any animal resting on its feet, is owing to the equality of weight distributed on each side of the line of gravity. /Chap. LXI./--_Motion produced by the Loss of Equilibrium._ /Motion/ is created by the loss of due equipoise, that is, by inequality of weight; for nothing can move of itself, without losing its centre of gravity, and the farther that is removed, the quicker and stronger will be the motion. [Illustration: _Page 27_. _Chap. 62_. _Plate 5_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LXII./--_Of the Equipoise of Bodies_, Plate V. /The/ balance or equipoise of parts in the human body is of two sorts, viz. simple, and complex. Simple, when a man stands upon his feet without motion: in that situation, if he extends his arms at different distances from the middle, or stoop, the centre of his weight will always be in a perpendicular line upon the centre of that foot which supports the body; and if he rests equally upon both feet, then the middle of the chest will be perpendicular to the middle of the line which measures the space between the centres of his feet. The complex balance is, when a man carries a weight not his own, which he bears by different motions; as in the figure of Hercules stifling Anteus, by pressing him against his breast with his arms, after he has lifted him from the ground. He must have as much of his own weight thrown behind the central line of his feet, as the weight of Anteus adds before. /Chap. LXIII./--_Of Positions._ /The/ pit of the neck, between the two Clavicles, falls perpendicularly with the foot which bears the weight of the body. If one of the arms be thrown forwards, this pit will quit that perpendicular; and if one of the legs goes back, that pit is brought forwards, and so changes its situation at every change of posture. /Chap. LXIV./--_Of balancing the Weight round the Centre of Gravity in Bodies._ /A figure/ standing upon its feet without motion, will form an equipoise of all its members round the centre of its support. If this figure without motion, and resting upon its feet, happens to move one of its arms forwards, it must necessarily throw as much of its weight on the opposite side, as is equal to that of the extended arm and the accidental weight. And the same I say of every part, which is brought out beyond its usual balance. /Chap. LXV./--_Of Figures that have to lift up, or carry any Weight._ /A weight/ can never be lifted up or carried by any man, if he do not throw more than an equal weight of his own on the opposite side. /Chap. LXVI./--_The Equilibrium of a Man standing upon his Feet_, Plate VI. /The/ weight of a man resting upon one leg will always be equally divided on each side of the central or perpendicular line of gravity, which supports him. /Chap. LXVII./--_Of Walking_, Plate VII. /A man/ walking will always have the centre of gravity over the centre of the leg which rests upon the ground. [Illustration: _Page 28_. _Chap. 66_. _Plate 6_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 28_. _Chap. 67_. _Plate 7_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LXVIII./--_Of the Centre of Gravity in Men and Animals._ /The/ legs, or centre of support, in men and animals, will approach nearer to the centre of gravity, in proportion to the slowness of their motion; and, on the contrary, when the motion is quicker, they will be farther removed from that perpendicular line. /Chap. LXIX./--_Of the corresponding Thickness of Parts on each Side of the Body._ /The/ thickness or breadth of the parts in the human body will never be equal on each side, if the corresponding members do not move equally and alike. /Chap. LXX./--_Of the Motions of Animals._ /All/ bipeds in their motions lower the part immediately over the foot that is raised, more than over that resting on the ground, and the highest parts do just the contrary. This is observable in the hips and shoulders of a man when he walks; and also in birds in the head and rump. /Chap. LXXI./--_Of Quadrupeds and their Motions._ /The/ highest parts of quadrupeds are susceptible of more variation when they walk, than when they are still, in a greater or less degree, in proportion to their size. This proceeds from the oblique position of their legs when they touch the ground, which raise the animal when they become straight and perpendicular upon the ground. /Chap. LXXII./--_Of the Quickness or Slowness of Motion._ /The/ motion performed by a man, or any other animal whatever, in walking, will have more or less velocity as the centre of their weight is more or less removed from the centre of that foot upon which they are supported. /Chap. LXXIII./--_Of the Motion of Animals._ /That/ figure will appear the swiftest in its course which leans the most forwards. Any body, moving of itself, will do it with more or less velocity in proportion as the centre of its gravity is more or less removed from the centre of its support. This is mentioned chiefly in regard to the motion of birds, which, without any clapping of their wings, or assistance of wind, move themselves. This happens when the centre of their gravity is out of the centre of their support, viz. out of its usual residence, the middle between the two wings. Because, if the middle of the wings be more backward than the centre of the whole weight, the bird will move forwards and downwards, in a greater or less degree as the centre of its weight is more or less removed from the middle of its wings. From which it follows, that if the centre of gravity be far removed from the other centre, the descent of the bird will be very oblique; but if that centre be near the middle of the wings, the descent will have very little obliquity. [Illustration: _Page 31_. _Chap. 74_. _Plate 8_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LXXIV./--_Of a Figure moving against the Wind_, Plate VIII. /A man/ moving against the wind in any direction does not keep his centre of gravity duly disposed upon the centre of support[18]. /Chap. LXXV./--_Of the Balance of a Figure resting upon its Feet._ /The/ man who rests upon his feet, either bears the weight of his body upon them equally, or unequally. If equally, it will be with some accidental weight, or simply with his own; if it be with an additional weight, the opposite extremities of his members will not be equally distant from the perpendicular of his feet. But if he simply carries his own weight, the opposite extremities will be equally distant from the perpendicular of his feet: and on this subject of gravity I shall write a separate book[19]. /Chap. LXXVI./--_A Precept._ /The/ navel is always in the central or middle line of the body, which passes through the pit of the stomach to that of the neck, and must have as much weight, either accidental or natural, on one side of the human figure as on the other. This is demonstrated by extending the arm, the wrist of which performs the office of a weight at the end of a steelyard; and will require some weight to be thrown on the other side of the navel, to counterbalance that of the wrist. It is on that account that the heel is often raised. /Chap. LXXVII./--_Of a Man standing, but resting more upon one Foot than the other._ /After/ a man, by standing long, has tired the leg upon which he rests, he sends part of his weight upon the other leg. But this kind of posture is to be employed only for old age, infancy, or extreme lassitude, because it expresses weariness, or very little power in the limbs. For that reason, a young man, strong and healthy, will always rest upon one of his legs, and if he removes a little of his weight upon the other, it is only a necessary preparative to motion, without which it is impossible to move; as we have proved before, that motion proceeds from inequality[20]. /Chap. LXXVIII./--_Of the Balance of Figures_, Plate IX. /If/ the figure rests upon one foot, the shoulder on that side will always be lower than the other; and the pit of the neck will fall perpendicularly over the middle of that leg which supports the body. The same will happen in whatever other view we see that figure, when it has not the arm much extended, nor any weight on its back, in its hand, or on its shoulder, and when it does not, either behind or before, throw out that leg which does not support the body. [Illustration: _Page 32_. _Chap. 78_. _Plate 9_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 33_. _Chap. 80_. _Plate 10_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LXXIX./--_In what Manner extending one Arm alters the Balance._ /The/ extending of the arm, which was bent, removes the weight of the figure upon the foot which bears the weight of the whole body: as is observable in rope-dancers, who dance upon the rope with their arms open, without any pole. /Chap. LXXX./--_Of a Man bearing a Weight on his Shoulders_, Plate X. /The/ shoulder which bears the weight is always higher than the other. This is seen in the figure opposite, in which the centre line passes through the whole, with an equal weight on each side, to the leg on which it rests. If the weight were not equally divided on each side of this central line of gravity, the whole would fall to the ground. But Nature has provided, that as much of the natural weight of the man should be thrown on one side, as of accidental weight on the other, to form a counterpoise. This is effected by the man's bending, and leaning on the side not loaded, so as to form an equilibrium to the accidental weight he carries; and this cannot be done, unless the loaded shoulder be raised, and the other lowered. This is the resource with which Nature has furnished a man on such occasions. /Chap. LXXXI./--_Of Equilibrium._ /Any/ figure bearing an additional weight out of the central line, must throw as much natural or accidental weight on the opposite side as is sufficient to form a counterpoise round that line, which passes from the pit of the neck, through the whole mass of weight, to that part of the foot which rests upon the ground. We observe, that when a man lifts a weight with one arm, he naturally throws out the opposite arm; and if that be not enough to form an equipoise, he will add as much of his own weight, by bending his body, as will enable him to resist such accidental load. We see also, that a man ready to fall sideways and backwards at the same time, always throws out the arm on the opposite side. /Chap. LXXXII./--_Of Motion._ /Whether/ a man moves with velocity or slowness, the parts above the leg which sustains the weight, will always be lower than the others on the opposite side. /Chap. LXXXIII./--_The Level of the Shoulders._ /The/ shoulders or sides of a man, or any other animal, will preserve less of their level, in proportion to the slowness of their motion; and, _vice versâ_, those parts will lose less of their level when the motion is quicker. This is proved by the ninth proposition, treating of local motions, where it is said, any weight will press in the direction of the line of its motion; therefore the whole moving towards any one point, the parts belonging to it will follow the shortest line of the motion of its whole, without giving any of its weight to the collateral parts of the whole. [Illustration: _Page 35_. _Chap. 84_. _Plate 11_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 35_. _Chap. 84_. _Plate 12_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 35_. _Chap. 85_. _Plate 13_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LXXXIV./--_Objection to the above answered_, Plate XI. and XII. /It/ has been objected, in regard to the first part of the above proposition, that it does not follow that a man standing still, or moving slowly, has his members always in perfect balance upon the centre of gravity; because we do not find that Nature always follows that rule, but, on the contrary, the figure will sometimes bend sideways, standing upon one foot; sometimes it will rest part of its weight upon that leg which is bent at the knee, as is seen in the figures B C. But I shall reply thus, that what is not performed by the shoulders in the figure C, is done by the hip, as is demonstrated in another place. /Chap. LXXXV./--_Of the Position of Figures_, Plate XIII. /In/ the same proportion as that part of the naked figure marked D A, lessens in height from the shoulder to the hip, on account of its position the opposite side increases. And this is the reason: the figure resting upon one (suppose the left) foot, that foot becomes the centre of all the weight above; and the pit of the neck, formed by the junction of the two Clavicles, quits also its natural situation at the upper extremity of the perpendicular line (which passes through the middle surface of the body), to bend over the same foot; and as this line bends with it, it forces the transverse lines, which are always at right angles, to lower their extremities on that side where the foot rests, as appears in A B C. The navel and middle parts always preserve their natural height. /Chap. LXXXVI./--_Of the Joints._ /In/ the bending of the joints it is particularly useful to observe the difference and variety of shape they assume; how the muscles swell on one side, while they flatten on the other; and this is more apparent in the neck, because the motion of it is of three sorts, two of which are simple motions, and the other complex, participating also of the other two. The simple motions are, first, when the neck bends towards the shoulder, either to the right or left, and when it raises or lowers the head. The second is, when it twists to the right or left, without rising or bending, but straight, with the head turned towards one of the shoulders. The third motion, which is called complex, is, when to the bending of it is added the twisting, as when the ear leans towards one of the shoulders, the head turning the same way, and the face turned upwards. /Chap. LXXXVII./--_Of the Shoulders._ /Of/ those which the shoulders can perform, simple motions are the principal, such as moving the arm upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards. Though one might almost call those motions infinite, for if the arm can trace a circle upon a wall, it will have performed all the motions belonging to the shoulders. Every continued quantity being divisible _ad infinitum_, and this circle being a continued quantity, produced by the motion of the arm going through every part of the circumference, it follows, that the motions of the shoulders may also be said to be infinite. [Illustration: _Page 37_. _Chap. 89_. _Plate 14_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. LXXXVIII./--_Of the Motions of a Man._ /When/ you mean to represent a man removing a weight, consider that the motions are various, viz. either a simple motion, by bending himself to raise the weight from the ground upwards, or when he drags the weight after him, or pushes it before him, or pulls it down with a rope passing through a pulley. It is to be observed, that the weight of the man's body pulls the more in proportion as the centre of his gravity is removed from the centre of his support. To this must be added the strength of the effort that the legs and back make when they are bent, to return to their natural straight situation. A man never ascends or descends, nor walks at all in any direction, without raising the heel of the back foot. /Chap. LXXXIX./--_Of the Disposition of Members preparing to act with great Force_, Plate XIV. /When/ a man prepares himself to strike a violent blow, he bends and twists his body as far as he can to the side contrary to that which he means to strike, and collecting all his strength, he, by a complex motion, returns and falls upon the point he has in view[21]. /Chap. XC./--_Of throwing any Thing with Violence_, Plate XV. /A man/ throwing a dart, a stone, or any thing else with violence, may be represented, chiefly, two different ways; that is, he may be preparing to do it, or the act may be already performed. If you mean to place him in the act of preparation, the inside of the foot upon which he rests will be under the perpendicular line of the pit of the neck; and if it be the right foot, the left shoulder will be perpendicular over the toes of the same foot. /Chap. XCI./--_On the Motion of driving any Thing into or drawing it out of the Ground._ /He/ who wishes to pitch a pole into the ground, or draw one out of it, will raise the leg and bend the knee opposite to the arm which acts, in order to balance himself upon the foot that rests, without which he could neither drive in, nor pull out any thing. /Chap. XCII./--_Of forcible Motions_, Plate XVI. /Of/ the two arms, that will be most powerful in its effort, which, having been farthest removed from its natural situation, is assisted more strongly by the other parts to bring it to the place where it means to go. As the man A, who moves the arm with a club E, and brings it to the opposite side B, assisted by the motion of the whole body. [Illustration: _Page 38_. _Chap. 90_. _Plate 15_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 39_. _Chap. 92_. _Plate 16_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. XCIII./--_The Action of Jumping._ /Nature/ will of itself, and without any reasoning in the mind of a man going to jump, prompt him to raise his arms and shoulders by a sudden motion, together with a great part of his body, and to lift them up high, till the power of the effort subsides. This impetuous motion is accompanied by an instantaneous extension of the body which had bent itself, like a spring or bow, along the back, the joints of the thighs, knees, and feet, and is let off obliquely, that is, upwards and forwards; so that the disposition of the body tending forwards and upwards, makes it describe a great arch when it springs up, which increases the leap. /Chap. XCIV./--_Of the three Motions in jumping upwards._ /When/ a man jumps upwards, the motion of the head is three times quicker than that of the heel, before the extremity of the foot quits the ground, and twice as quick as that of the hips; because three angles are opened and extended at the same time: the superior one is that formed by the body at its joint with the thigh before, the second is at the joint of the thighs and legs behind, and the third is at the instep before[22]. /Chap. XCV./--_Of the easy Motions of Members._ /In/ regard to the freedom and ease of motions, it is very necessary to observe, that when you mean to represent a figure which has to turn itself a little round, the feet and all the other members are not to move in the same direction as the head. But you will divide that motion among four joints, viz. the feet, the knees, the hips, and the neck. If it rests upon the right leg, the left knee should be a little bent inward, with its foot somewhat raised outward. The left shoulder should be lower than the other, and the nape of the neck turned on the same side as the outward ankle of the left foot, and the left shoulder perpendicular over the great toe of the right foot. And take it as a general maxim, that figures do not turn their heads straight with the chest, Nature having for our convenience formed the neck so as to turn with ease on every side, when the eyes want to look round; and to this the other joints are in some measure subservient. If the figure be sitting, and the arms have some employment across the body, the breast will turn over the joint of the hip. [Illustration: _Page 41_. _Chap. 96_. _Plate 17_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. XCVI./--_The greatest Twist which a Man can make, in turning to look at himself behind._ Plate XVII. /The/ greatest twist that the body can perform is when the back of the heels and the front of the face are seen at the same time. It is not done without difficulty, and is effected by bending the leg and lowering the shoulder on that side towards which the head turns. The cause of this motion, and also which of the muscles move first and which last, I shall explain in my treatise on anatomy[23]. /Chap. XCVII./--_Of turning the Leg without the Thigh._ /It/ is impossible to turn the leg inwards or outwards without turning the thigh by the same motion, because the setting in of the bones at the knee is such, that they have no motion but backwards and forwards, and no more than is necessary for walking or kneeling; never sideways, because the form of the bones at the joint of the knee does not allow it. If this joint had been made pliable on all sides, as that of the shoulder, or that of the thigh bone with the hip, a man would have had his legs bent on each side as often as backwards and forwards, and seldom or never straight with the thigh. Besides, this joint can bend only one way, so that in walking it can never go beyond the straight line of the leg; it bends only forwards, for if it could bend backwards, a man could never get up again upon his feet, if once he were kneeling; as when he means to get up from the kneeling posture (on both knees), he gives the whole weight of his body to one of the knees to support, unloading the other, which at that time feels no other weight than its own, and therefore is lifted up with ease, and rests his foot flat upon the ground; then returning the whole weight upon that foot, and leaning his hand upon his knee, he at once extends the other arm, raises his head, and straightening the thigh with the body, he springs up, and rests upon the same foot, while he brings up the other. /Chap. XCVIII./--_Postures of Figures._ /Figures/ that are set in a fixed attitude, are nevertheless to have some contrast of parts. If one arm come before, the other remains still or goes behind. If the figure rest upon one leg, the shoulder on that side will be lower than the other. This is observed by artists of judgment, who always take care to balance the figure well upon its feet, for fear it should appear to fall. Because by resting upon one foot, the other leg, being a little bent, does not support the body any more than if it were dead; therefore it is necessary that the parts above that leg should transfer the centre of their weight upon the leg which supports the body. /Chap. XCIX./--_Of the Gracefulness of the Members._ /The/ members are to be suited to the body in graceful motions, expressive of the meaning which the figure is intended to convey. If it had to give the idea of genteel and agreeable carriage, the members must be slender and well turned, but not lean; the muscles very slightly marked, indicating in a soft manner such as must necessarily appear; the arms, particularly, pliant, and no member in a straight line with any other adjoining member. If it happen, on account of the motion of the figure, that the right hip be higher than the left, make the joint of the shoulder fall perpendicularly on the highest part of that hip; and let that right shoulder be lower than the left. The pit of the neck will always be perpendicular over the middle of the instep of the foot that supports the body. The leg that does not bear will have its knee a little lower than the other, and near the other leg. In regard to the positions of the head and arms, they are infinite, and for that reason I shall not enter into any detailed rule concerning them; suffice it to say, that they are to be easy and free, graceful, and varied in their bendings, so that they may not appear stiff like pieces of wood. /Chap. C./--_That it is impossible for any Memory to retain the Aspects and Changes of the Members._ /It/ is impossible that any memory can be able to retain all the aspects or motions of any member of any animal whatever. This case we shall exemplify by the appearance of the hand. And because any continued quantity is divisible _ad infinitum_, the motion of the eye which looks at the hand, and moves from A to B, moves by a space A B, which is also a continued quantity, and consequently divisible _ad infinitum_, and in every part of the motion varies to its view the aspect and figure of the hand; and so it will do if it move round the whole circle. The same will the hand do which is raised in its motion, that is, it will pass over a space, which is a continued quantity[24]. [Illustration] /Chap. CI./--_The Motions of Figures._ /Never/ put the head straight upon the shoulders, but a little turned sideways to the right or left, even though the figures should be looking up or down, or straight, because it is necessary to give them some motion of life and spirit. Nor ever compose a figure in such a manner, either in a front or back view, as that every part falls straight upon another from the top to the bottom. But if you wish to introduce such a figure, use it for old age. Never repeat the same motion of arms, or of legs, not only not in the same figure, but in those which are standing by, or near; if the necessity of the case, or the expression of the subject you represent, do not oblige you to it[25]. /Chap. CII./--_Of common Motions._ /The/ variety of motions in man are equal to the variety of accidents or thoughts affecting the mind, and each of these thoughts, or accidents, will operate more or less, according to the temper and age of the subject; for the same cause will in the actions of youth, or of old age, produce very different effects. /Chap. CIII./--_Of simple Motions._ /Simple/ motion is that which a man performs in merely bending backwards or forwards. /Chap. CIV./--_Complex Motion._ /Complex/ motion is that which, to produce some particular action, requires the body to bend downwards and sideways at the same time. The painter must be careful in his compositions to apply these complex motions according to the nature of the subject, and not to weaken or destroy the effect of it by introducing figures with simple motions, without any connexion with the subject. /Chap. CV./--_Motions appropriated to the Subject._ /The/ motions of your figures are to be expressive of the quantity of strength requisite to the force of the action. Let not the same effort be used to take up a stick as would easily raise a piece of timber. Therefore shew great variety in the expression of strength, according to the quality of the load to be managed. /Chap. CVI./--_Appropriate Motions._ /There/ are some emotions of the mind which are not expressed by any particular motion of the body, while in others, the expression cannot be shewn without it. In the first, the arms fall down, the hands and all the other parts, which in general are the most active, remain at rest. But such emotions of the soul as produce bodily action, must put the members into such motions as are appropriated to the intention of the mind. This, however, is an ample subject, and we have a great deal to say upon it. There is a third kind of motion, which participates of the two already described; and a fourth, which depends neither on the one nor the other. This last belongs to insensibility, or fury, and should be ranked with madness or stupidity; and so adapted only to grotesque or Moresco work. /Chap. CVII./--_Of the Postures of Women and young People._ /It/ is not becoming in women and young people to have their legs too much asunder, because it denotes boldness; while the legs close together shew modesty. /Chap. CVIII./--_Of the Postures of Children._ /Children/ and old people are not to express quick motions, in what concerns their legs. /Chap. CIX./--_Of the Motion of the Members._ /Let/ every member be employed in performing its proper functions. For instance, in a dead body, or one asleep, no member should appear alive or awake. A foot bearing the weight of the whole body, should not be playing its toes up and down, but flat upon the ground; except when it rests entirely upon the heel. /Chap. CX./--_Of mental Motions._ /A mere/ thought, or operation of the mind, excites only simple and easy motions of the body; not this way, and that way, because its object is in the mind, which does not affect the senses when it is collected within itself. /Chap. CXI./--_Effect of the Mind upon the Motions of the Body, occasioned by some outward Object._ /When/ the motion is produced by the presence of some object, either the cause is immediate or not. If it be immediate, the figure will first turn towards it the organs most necessary, the eyes; leaving its feet in the same place; and will only move the thighs, hips, and knees a little towards the same side, to which the eyes are directed. LINEAR PERSPECTIVE. /Chap. CXII./--_Of those who apply themselves to the Practice, without having learnt the Theory of the Art._ /Those/ who become enamoured of the practice of the art, without having previously applied to the diligent study of the scientific part of it, may be compared to mariners, who put to sea in a ship without rudder or compass, and therefore cannot be certain of arriving at the wished-for port. Practice must always be founded on good theory; to this, Perspective is the guide and entrance, without which nothing can be well done. /Chap. CXIII./--_Precepts in Painting._ /Perspective/ is to Painting what the bridle is to a horse, and the rudder to a ship. The size of a figure should denote the distance at which it is situated. If a figure be seen of the natural size, remember that it denotes its being near to the eye. /Chap. CXIV./--_Of the Boundaries of Objects called Outlines or Contours._ /The/ outlines or contours of bodies are so little perceivable, that at any small distance between that and the object, the eye will not be able to recognise the features of a friend or relation, if it were not for their clothes and general appearance. So that by the knowledge of the whole it comes to know the parts. /Chap. CXV./--_Of linear Perspective._ /Linear/ Perspective consists in giving, by established rules, the true dimensions of objects, according to their respective distances; so that the second object be less than the first, the third than the second, and by degrees at last they become invisible. I find by experience, that, if the second object be at the same distance from the first, as the first is from the eye, though they be of the same size, the second will appear half the size of the first; and, if the third be at the same distance behind the second, it will diminish two thirds; and so on, by degrees, they will, at equal distances, diminish in proportion; provided that the interval be not more than twenty cubits[26]; at which distance it will lose two fourths of its size: at forty it will diminish three fourths; and at sixty it will lose five sixths, and so on progressively. But you must be distant from your picture twice the size of it; for, if you be only once the size, it will make a great difference in the measure from the first to the second. /Chap. CXVI./--_What Parts of Objects disappear first by Distance._ /Those/ parts which are of less magnitude will first vanish from the sight[27]. This happens, because the shape of small objects, at an equal distance, comes to the eye under a more acute angle than the large ones, and the perception of them is less, in proportion as they are less in magnitude. It follows then, that if the large objects, by being removed to a great distance, and consequently coming to the eye by a small angle, are almost lost to the sight, the small objects will entirely disappear. /Chap. CXVII./--_Of remote Objects._ /The/ outlines of objects will be less seen, in proportion as they are more distant from the eye. /Chap. CXVIII./--_Of the Point of Sight._ /The/ point of sight must be on a level with the eyes of a common-sized man, and placed upon the horizon, which is the line formed by a flat country terminating with the sky. An exception must be made as to mountains, which are above that line. /Chap. CXIX./--_A Picture is to be viewed from one Point only._ /This/ will be proved by one single example. If you mean to represent a round ball very high up, on a flat and perpendicular wall, it will be necessary to make it oblong, like the shape of an egg, and to place yourself (that is, the eye, or point of view) so far back, as that its outline or circumference may appear round. /Chap. CXX./--_Of the Dimensions of the first Figure in an historical Painting._ /The/ first figure in your picture will be less than Nature, in proportion as it recedes from the front of the picture, or the bottom line; and by the same rule the others behind it will go on lessening in an equal degree[28]. /Chap. CXXI./--_Of Objects that are lost to the Sight in Proportion to their Distance._ /The/ first things that disappear, by being removed to some distance, are the outlines or boundaries of objects. The second, as they remove farther, are the shadows which divide contiguous bodies. The third are the thickness of legs and feet; and so in succession the small parts are lost to the sight, till nothing remains but a confused mass, without any distinct parts. /Chap. CXXII./--_Errors not so easily seen in small Objects as in large ones._ /Supposing/ this small object to represent a man, or any other animal, although the parts, by being so much diminished or reduced, cannot be executed with the same exactness of proportion, nor finished with the same accuracy, as if on a larger scale, yet on that very account the faults will be less conspicuous. For example, if you look at a man at the distance of two hundred yards, and with all due attention mean to form a judgment, whether he be handsome or ugly, deformed or well made, you will find that, with all your endeavours, you can hardly venture to decide. The reason is, that the man diminishes so much by the distance, that it is impossible to distinguish the parts minutely. If you wish to know by demonstration the diminution of the above figure, hold your finger up before your eye at about nine inches distance, so that the top of your finger corresponds with the top of the head of the distant figure: you will perceive that your finger covers, not only its head, but part of its body; which is an evident proof of the apparent diminution of that object. Hence it often happens, that we are doubtful, and can scarcely, at some distance, distinguish the form of even a friend. /Chap. CXXIII./--_Historical Subjects one above another on the same Wall to be avoided._ /This/ custom, which has been generally adopted by painters, on the front and sides of chapels, is much to be condemned. They begin with an historical picture, its landscape and buildings, in one compartment. After which, they raise another compartment, and execute another history with other buildings upon another level; and from thence they proceed to a third and fourth, varying the point of sight, as if the beholder was going up steps, while, in fact, he must look at them all from below, which is very ill judged in those matters. We know that the point of sight is the eye of the spectator; and if you ask, how is a series of subjects, such as the life of a saint, to be represented, in different compartments on the same wall? I answer, that you are to place the principal event in the largest compartment, and make the point of sight as high as the eye of the spectator. Begin that subject with large figures; and as you go up, lessen the objects, as well the figures, as buildings, varying the plans according to the effect of perspective; but never varying the point of sight: and so complete the series of subjects, till you come to a certain height, where terrestrial objects can be seen no more, except the tops of trees, or clouds and birds; or if you introduce figures, they must be aerial, such as angels, or saints in glory, or the like, if they suit the purpose of your history. If not, do not undertake this kind of painting, for your work will be faulty, and justly reprehensible[29]. /Chap. CXXIV./--_Why Objects in Painting can never detach, as natural Objects do._ /Painters/ often despair of being able to imitate Nature, from observing, that their pictures have not the same relief, nor the same life, as natural objects have in a looking-glass, though they both appear upon a plain surface. They say, they have colours which surpass in brightness the quality of the lights, and in darkness the quality of the shades of the objects seen in the looking-glass; but attribute this circumstance to their own ignorance, and not to the true cause, because they do not know it. It is impossible that objects in painting should appear with the same relief as those in the looking-glass, unless we look at them with only one eye. The reason is this. The two eyes A B looking at objects one behind another, as M and N, see them both; because M cannot entirely occupy the space of N, by reason that the base of the visual rays is so broad, that the second object is seen behind the first. But if one eye be shut, and you look with the other S, the body F will entirely cover the body R, because the visual rays beginning at one point, form a triangle, of which the body F is the base, and being prolonged, they form two diverging tangents at the two extremities of F, which cannot touch the body R behind it, therefore can never see it[30]. [Illustration] /Chap. CXXV./--_How to give the proper Dimension to Objects in Painting._ [Illustration] /In/ order to give the appearance of the natural size, if the piece be small (as miniatures), the figures on the fore-ground are to be finished with as much precision as those of any large painting, because being small they are to be brought up close to the eye. But large paintings are seen at some distance; whence it happens, that though the figures in each are so different in size, in appearance they will be the same. This proceeds from the eye receiving those objects under the same angle; and it is proved thus. Let the large painting be B C, the eye A, and D E a pane of glass, through which are seen the figures situated at B C. I say that the eye being fixed, the figures in the copy of the paintings B C are to be smaller, in proportion as the glass D E is nearer the eye A, and are to be as precise and finished. But if you will execute the picture B C upon the glass D E, this ought to be less finished than the picture B C, and more so than the figure M N transferred upon the glass F G; because, supposing the figure P O to be as much finished as the natural one in B C, the perspective of O P would be false, since, though in regard to the diminution of the figure it would be right, B C being diminished in P O, the finishing would not agree with the distance, because in giving it the perfection of the natural B C, B C would appear as near as O P; but, if you search for the diminution of O P, O P will be found at the distance B C, and the diminution of the finishing as at F G. /Chap. CXXVI./--_How to draw accurately any particular Spot._ /Take/ a glass as large as your paper, fasten it well between your eye and the object you mean to draw, and fixing your head in a frame (in such a manner as not to be able to move it) at the distance of two feet from the glass; shut one eye, and draw with a pencil accurately upon the glass all that you see through it. After that, trace upon paper what you have drawn on the glass, which tracing you may paint at pleasure, observing the aerial perspective. /Chap. CXXVII./--_Disproportion to be avoided, even in the accessory Parts._ /A great/ fault is committed by many painters, which is highly to be blamed, that is, to represent the habitations of men, and other parts of their compositions, so low, that the doors do not reach as high as the knees of their inhabitants, though, according to their situation, they are nearer to the eye of the spectator, than the men who seem willing to enter them. I have seen some pictures with porticos, supported by columns loaded with figures; one grasping a column against which it leans, as if it were a walking-stick, and other similar errors, which are to be avoided with the greatest care. INVENTION, /or/ COMPOSITION. /Chap. CXXVIII./--_Precept for avoiding a bad Choice in the Style or Proportion of Figures._ /The/ painter ought to form his style upon the most proportionate model in Nature; and after having measured that, he ought to measure himself also, and be perfectly acquainted with his own defects or deficiencies; and having acquired this knowledge, his constant care should be to avoid conveying into his work those defects which he has found in his own person; for these defects, becoming habitual to his observation, mislead his judgment, and he perceives them no longer. We ought, therefore, to struggle against such a prejudice, which grows up with us; for the mind, being fond of its own habitation, is apt to represent it to our imagination as beautiful. From the same motive it may be, that there is not a woman, however plain in her person, who may not find her admirer, if she be not a monster. Against this bent of the mind you ought very cautiously to be on your guard. /Chap. CXXIX./--_Variety in Figures._ /A painter/ ought to aim at universal excellence; for he will be greatly wanting in dignity, if he do one thing well and another badly, as many do, who study only the naked figure, measured and proportioned by a pair of compasses in their hands, and do not seek for variety. A man may be well proportioned, and yet be tall or short, large or lean, or of a middle size; and whoever does not make great use of these varieties, which are all existing in Nature in its most perfect state, will produce figures as if cast in one and the same mould, which is highly reprehensible. /Chap. CXXX./--_How a Painter ought to proceed in his Studies._ /The/ painter ought always to form in his mind a kind of system of reasoning or discussion within himself on any remarkable object before him. He should stop, take notes, and form some rule upon it; considering the place, the circumstances, the lights and shadows. /Chap. CXXXI./--_Of sketching Histories and Figures._ /Sketches/ of historical subjects must be slight, attending only to the situation of the figures, without regard to the finishing of particular members, which may be done afterwards at leisure, when the mind is so disposed. /Chap. CXXXII./--_How to study Composition._ /The/ young student should begin by sketching slightly some single figure, and turn that on all sides, knowing already how to contract, and how to extend the members; after which, he may put two together in various attitudes, we will suppose in the act of fighting boldly. This composition also he must try on all sides, and in a variety of ways, tending to the same expression. Then he may imagine one of them very courageous, while the other is a coward. Let these attitudes, and many other accidental affections of the mind, be with great care studied, examined, and dwelt upon. /Chap. CXXXIII./--_Of the Attitudes of Men._ /The/ attitudes and all the members are to be disposed in such a manner, that by them the intentions of the mind may be easily discovered. /Chap. CXXXIV./--_Variety of Positions._ /The/ positions of the human figure are to be adapted to the age and rank; and to be varied according to the difference of the sexes, men or women. /Chap. CXXXV./--_Of Studies from Nature for History._ /It/ is necessary to consider well the situation for which the history is to be painted, particularly the height; and let the painter place accordingly the model, from which he means to make his studies for that historical picture; and set himself as much below the object, as the picture is to be above the eye of the spectator, otherwise the work will be faulty. /Chap. CXXXVI./--_Of the Variety of Figures in History Painting._ /History/ painting must exhibit variety in its fullest extent. In temper, size, complexion, actions, plumpness, leanness, thick, thin, large, small, rough, smooth, old age and youth, strong and muscular, weak, with little appearance of muscles, cheerfulness and melancholy. Some should be with curled hair, and some with straight; some short, some long, some quick in their motions, and some slow, with a variety of dresses and colours, according as the subject may require. /Chap. CXXXVII./--_Of Variety in History._ /A painter/ should delight in introducing great variety into his compositions, avoiding repetition, that by this fertility of invention he may attract and charm the eye of the beholder. If it be requisite according to the subject meant to be represented, that there should be a mixture of men differing in their faces, ages, and dress, grouped with women, children, dogs, and horses, buildings, hills and flat country; observe dignity and decorum in the principal figure; such as a king, magistrate, or philosopher, separating them from the low classes of the people. Mix not afflicted or weeping figures with joyful and laughing ones; for Nature dictates that the cheerful be attended by others of the same disposition of mind. Laughter is productive of laughter, and _vice versâ_. /Chap. CXXXVIII./--_Of the Age of Figures._ /Do/ not bring together a number of boys with as many old men, nor young men with infants, nor women with men; if the subject you mean to represent does not oblige you to it. /Chap. CXXXIX./--_Of Variety of Faces._ /The/ Italian painters have been accused of a common fault, that is, of introducing into their compositions the faces, and even the whole figures, of Roman emperors, which they take from the antique. To avoid such an error, let no repetition take place, either in parts, or the whole of a figure; nor let there be even the same face in another composition: and the more the figures are contrasted, viz. the deformed opposed to the beautiful, the old to the young, the strong to the feeble, the more the picture will please and be admired. These different characters, contrasted with each other, will increase the beauty of the whole. It frequently happens that a painter, while he is composing, will use any little sketch or scrap of drawing he has by him, and endeavour to make it serve his purpose; but this is extremely injudicious, because he may very often find that the members he has drawn have not the motion suited to what he means to express; and after he has adopted, accurately drawn, and even well finished them, he will be loth to rub out and change them for others. /Chap. CXL./--_A Fault in Painters._ /It/ is a very great fault in a painter to repeat the same motions in figures, and the same folds in draperies in the same composition, as also to make all the faces alike. /Chap. CXLI./--_How you may learn to compose Groups for History Painting._ /When/ you are well instructed in perspective, and know perfectly how to draw the anatomy and forms of different bodies or objects, it should be your delight to observe and consider in your walks the different actions of men, when they are talking, or quarrelling; when they laugh, and when they fight. Attend to their positions, and to those of the spectators; whether they are attempting to separate those who fight, or merely lookers-on. Be quick in sketching these with slight strokes in your pocket-book, which should always be about you, and made of stained paper, as you ought not to rub out. When it is full, take another, for these are not things to be rubbed out, but kept with the greatest care; because forms and motions of bodies are so infinitely various, that the memory is not able to retain them; therefore preserve these sketches as your assistants and masters. /Chap. CXLII./--_How to study the Motions of the human Body._ /The/ first requisite towards a perfect acquaintance with the various motions of the human body, is the knowledge of all the parts, particularly the joints, in all the attitudes in which it may be placed. Then make slight sketches in your pocket-book, as opportunities occur, of the actions of men, as they happen to meet your eye, without being perceived by them; because, if they were to observe you, they would be disturbed from that freedom of action, which is prompted by inward feeling; as when two men are quarrelling and angry, each of them seeming to be in the right, and with great vehemence move their eyebrows, arms, and all the other members, using motions appropriated to their words and feelings. This they could not do, if you wanted them to imitate anger, or any other accidental emotion; such as laughter, weeping, pain, admiration, fear, and the like. For that reason, take care never to be without a little book, for the purpose of sketching those various motions, and also groups of people standing by. This will teach you how to compose history. Two things demand the principal attention of a good painter. One is the exact outline and shape of the figure; the other, the true expression of what passes in the mind of that figure, which he must feel, and that is very important. /Chap. CXLIII./--_Of Dresses, and of Draperies and Folds._ /The/ draperies with which you dress figures ought to have their folds so accommodated as to surround the parts they are intended to cover; that in the mass of light there be not any dark fold, and in the mass of shadows none receiving too great a light. They must go gently over, describing the parts; but not with lines across, cutting the members with hard notches, deeper than the part can possibly be; at the same time, it must fit the body, and not appear like an empty bundle of cloth; a fault of many painters, who, enamoured of the quantity and variety of folds, have encumbered their figures, forgetting the intention of clothes, which is to dress and surround the parts gracefully wherever they touch; and not to be filled with wind, like bladders, puffed up where the parts project. I do not deny that we ought not to neglect introducing some handsome folds among these draperies, but it must be done with great judgment, and suited to the parts, where, by the actions of the limbs and position of the whole body, they gather together. Above all, be careful to vary the quality and quantity of your folds in compositions of many figures; so that, if some have large folds, produced by thick woollen cloth; others, being dressed in thinner stuff, may have them narrower; some sharp and straight, others soft and undulating. /Chap. CXLIV./--_Of the Nature of Folds in Draperies._ /Many/ painters prefer making the folds of their draperies with acute angles, deep and precise; others with angles hardly perceptible; and some with none at all; but instead of them, certain curved lines. /Chap. CXLV./--_How the Folds of Draperies ought to be represented_, Plate XVIII. /That/ part of the drapery, which is the farthest from the place where it is gathered, will appear more approaching its natural state. Every thing naturally inclines to preserve its primitive form. Therefore a stuff or cloth, which is of equal thickness on both sides, will always incline to remain flat. For that reason, when it is constrained by some fold to relinquish its flat situation, it is observed that, at the part of its greatest restraint, it is continually making efforts to return to its natural shape; and the parts most distant from it reassume more of their primitive state by ample and distended folds. For example, let A B C be the drapery mentioned above; A B the place where it is folded or restrained. I have said that the part, which is farthest from the place of its restraint, would return more towards its primitive shape. Therefore C being the farthest, will be broader and more extended than any other part. [Illustration: _Page 68_. _Chap. 145_. _Plate 18_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 69_. _Chap. 147_. _Plate 19_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. CXLVI./--_How the Folds in Draperies ought to be made._ /Draperies/ are not to be encumbered with many folds: on the contrary, there ought to be some only where they are held up with the hands or arms of the figures, and the rest left to fall with natural simplicity. They ought to be studied from Nature; that is to say, if a woollen cloth be intended, the folds ought to be drawn after such cloth; if it be of silk, or thin stuff, or else very thick for labourers, let it be distinguished by the nature of the folds. But never copy them, as some do, after models dressed in paper, or thin leather, for it greatly misleads. /Chap. CXLVII./--_Fore-shortening of Folds_, Plate XIX. /Where/ the figure is fore-shortened, there ought to appear a greater number of folds, than on the other parts, all surrounding it in a circular manner. Let E be the situation of the eye. M N will have the middle of every circular fold successively removed farther from its outline, in proportion as it is more distant from the eye. In M O of the other figure the outlines of these circular folds will appear almost straight, because it is situated opposite the eye; but in P and Q quite the contrary, as in N and M. /Chap. CXLVIII./--_Of Folds._ /The/ folds of draperies, whatever be the motion of the figure, ought always to shew, by the form of their outlines, the attitude of such figure; so as to leave, in the mind of the beholder, no doubt or confusion in regard to the true position of the body; and let there be no fold, which, by its shadow, breaks through any of the members; that is to say, appearing to go in deeper than the surface of the part it covers. And if you represent the figure clothed with several garments, one over the other, let it not appear as if the upper one covered only a mere skeleton; but let it express that it is also well furnished with flesh, and a thickness of folds, suitable to the number of its under garments. The folds surrounding the members ought to diminish in thickness near the extremities of the part they surround. The length of the folds, which are close to the members, ought to produce other folds on that side where the member is diminished by fore-shortening, and be more extended on the opposite side. /Chap. CXLIX./--_Of Decorum._ /Observe/ decorum in every thing you represent, that is, fitness of action, dress, and situation, according to the dignity or meanness of the subject to be represented. Be careful that a king, for instance, be grave and majestic in his countenance and dress; that the place be well decorated; and that his attendants, or the by-standers, express reverence and admiration, and appear as noble, in dresses suitable to a royal court. On the contrary, in the representation of a mean subject, let the figures appear low and despicable; those about them with similar countenances, and actions, denoting base and presumptuous minds, and meanly clad. In short, in both cases, the parts must correspond with the general sentiment of the composition. The motions of old age should not be similar to those of youth; those of a woman to those of a man; nor should the latter be the same as those of a boy. /Chap. CL./--_The Character of Figures in Composition._ /In/ general, the painter ought to introduce very few old men, in the ordinary course of historical subjects, and those few separated from young people; because old people are few, and their habits do not agree with those of youth. Where there is no conformity of custom, there can be no intimacy, and, without it, a company is soon separated. But if the subject require an appearance of gravity, a meeting on important business, as a council, for instance, let there be few young men introduced, for youth willingly avoids such meetings. /Chap. CLI./--_The Motion of the Muscles, when the Figures are in natural Positions._ /A figure/, which does not express by its position the sentiments and passions, by which we suppose it animated, will appear to indicate that its muscles are not obedient to its will, and the painter very deficient in judgment. For that reason, a figure is to shew great eagerness and meaning; and its position is to be so well appropriated to that meaning, that it cannot be mistaken, nor made use of for any other. /Chap. CLII./--_A Precept in Painting._ /The/ painter ought to notice those quick motions, which men are apt to make without thinking, when impelled by strong and powerful affections of the mind. He ought to take memorandums of them, and sketch them in his pocket-book, in order to make use of them when they may answer his purpose; and then to put a living model in the same position, to see the quality and aspect of the muscles which are in action. /Chap. CLIII./--_Of the Motion of Man_, Plates XX. and XXI. /The/ first and principal part of the art is composition of any sort, or putting things together. The second relates to the expression and motion of the figures, and requires that they be well appropriated, and seeming attentive to what they are about; appearing to move with alacrity and spirit, according to the degree of expression suitable to the occasion; expressing slow and tardy motions, as well as those of eagerness in pursuit: and that quickness and ferocity be expressed with such force as to give an idea of the sensations of the actors. When a figure is to throw a dart, stones, or the like, let it be seen evidently by the attitude and disposition of all the members, that such is its intention; of which there are two examples in the opposite plates, varied both in action and power. The first in point of vigour is A. The second is B. But A will throw his weapon farther than B, because, though they seem desirous of throwing it to the same point, A having turned his feet towards the object, while his body is twisted and bent back the contrary way, to increase his power, returns with more velocity and force to the point to which he means to throw. But the figure B having turned his feet the same way as his body, it returns to its place with great inconvenience, and consequently with weakened powers. For in the expression of great efforts, the preparatory motions of the body must be strong and violent, twisting and bending, so that it may return with convenient ease, and by that means have a great effect. In the same manner, if a cross-bow be not strung with force, the motion of whatever it shoots will be short and without effect; because, where there is no impulse, there can be no motion; and if the impulse be not violent, the motion is but tardy and feeble. So a bow, which is not strong, has no motion; and, if it be strung, it will remain in that state till the impulse be given by another power which puts it in motion, and it will shoot with a violence equal to that which was employed in bending it. In the same manner, the man who does not twist and bend his body will have acquired no power. Therefore, after A has thrown his dart, he will find himself twisted the contrary way, viz. on the side where he has thrown; and he will have acquired only power sufficient to serve him to return to where he was at first. [Illustration: _Page 72_. _Chap. 153_. _Plate 20_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] [Illustration: _Page 72_. _Chap. 153_. _Plate 21_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. CLIV./--_Of Attitudes, and the Motions of the Members._ /The/ same attitude is not to be repeated in the same picture, nor the same motion of members in the same figure, nay, not even in the hands or fingers. And if the history requires a great number of figures, such as a battle, or a massacre of soldiers, in which there are but three ways of striking, viz. thrusting, cutting, or back-handed; in that case you must take care, that all those who are cutting be expressed in different views; some turning their backs, some their sides, and others be seen in front; varying in the same manner the three different ways of fighting, so that all the actions may have a relation to those three principles. In battles, complex motions display great art, giving spirit and animation to the whole. By complex motion is meant, for instance, that of a single figure shewing the front of the legs, and at the same time the profile of the shoulder. But of this I shall treat in another place[31]. /Chap. CLV./--_Of a single Figure separate from an historical Group._ /The/ same motion of members should not be repeated in a figure which you mean to be alone; for instance, if the figure be represented running, it must not throw both hands forward; but one forward and the other backward, or else it cannot run. If the right foot come forward, the right arm must go backward and the left forward, because, without such disposition and contraste of parts, it is impossible to run well. If another figure be supposed to follow this, one of its legs should be brought somewhat forward, and the other be perpendicular under the head; the arm on the same side should pass forward. But of this we shall treat more fully in the book on motion[32]. /Chap. CLVI./--_On the Attitudes of the human Figure._ /A painter/ is to be attentive to the motions and actions of men, occasioned by some sudden accident. He must observe them on the spot, take sketches, and not wait till he wants such expression, and then have it counterfeited for him; for instance, setting a model to weep when there is no cause; such an expression without a cause will be neither quick nor natural. But it will be of great use to have observed every action from nature, as it occurs, and then to have a model set in the same attitude to help the recollection, and find out something to the purpose, according to the subject in hand. /Chap. CLVII./--_How to represent a Storm._ /To/ form a just idea of a storm, you must consider it attentively in its effects. When the wind blows violently over the sea or land, it removes and carries off with it every thing that is not firmly fixed to the general mass. The clouds must appear straggling and broken, carried according to the direction and the force of the wind, and blended with clouds of dust raised from the sandy shore. Branches and leaves of trees must be represented as carried along by the violence of the storm, and, together with numberless other light substances, scattered in the air. Trees and grass must be bent to the ground, as if yielding to the course of the wind. Boughs must be twisted out of their natural form, with their leaves reversed and entangled. Of the figures dispersed in the picture, some should appear thrown on the ground, so wrapped up in their cloaks and covered with dust, as to be scarcely distinguishable. Of those who remain on their feet, some should be sheltered by and holding fast behind some great trees, to avoid the same fate: others bending to the ground, their hands over their faces to ward off the dust; their hair and their clothes flying straight up at the mercy of the wind. The high tremendous waves of the stormy sea will be covered with foaming froth; the most subtle parts of which, being raised by the wind, like a thick mist, mix with the air. What vessels are seen should appear with broken cordage, and torn sails, fluttering in the wind; some with broken masts fallen across the hulk, already on its side amidst the tempestuous waves. Some of the crew should be represented as if crying aloud for help, and clinging to the remains of the shattered vessel. Let the clouds appear as driven by tempestuous winds against the summits of lofty mountains, enveloping those mountains, and breaking and recoiling with redoubled force, like waves against a rocky shore. The air should be rendered awfully dark, by the mist, dust, and thick clouds. /Chap. CLVIII./--_How to compose a Battle._ /First/, let the air exhibit a confused mixture of smoke, arising from the discharge of artillery and musquetry, and the dust raised by the horses of the combatants; and observe, that dust being of an earthy nature, is heavy; but yet, by reason of its minute particles, it is easily impelled upwards, and mixes with the air; nevertheless, it naturally falls downwards again, the most subtle parts of it alone gaining any considerable degree of elevation, and at its utmost height it is so thin and transparent, as to appear nearly of the colour of the air. The smoke, thus mixing with the dusty air, forms a kind of dark cloud, at the top of which it is distinguished from the dust by a blueish cast, the dust retaining more of its natural colour. On that part from which the light proceeds, this mixture of air, smoke, and dust, will appear much brighter than on the opposite side. The more the combatants are involved in this turbulent mist, the less distinctly they will be seen, and the more confused will they be in their lights and shades. Let the faces of the musketeers, their bodies, and every object near them, be tinged with a reddish hue, even the air or cloud of dust; in short, all that surrounds them. This red tinge you will diminish, in proportion to their distance, from the primary cause. The groups of figures, which appear at a distance between the spectator and the light, will form a dark mass upon a light ground; and their legs will be more undetermined and lost as they approach nearer to the ground; because there the dust is heavier and thicker. If you mean to represent some straggling horses, running out of the main body, introduce also some small clouds of dust, as far distant from each other as the leap of the horse, and these little clouds will become fainter, more scanty, and diffused, in proportion to their distance from the horse. That nearest to his feet will consequently be the most determined, smallest, and the thickest of all. Let the air be full of arrows, in all directions; some ascending, some falling down, and some darting straight forwards. The bullets of the musketry, though not seen, will be marked in their course by a train of smoke, which breaks through the general confusion. The figures in the fore-ground should have their hair covered with dust, as also their eyebrows, and all parts liable to receive it. The victorious party will be running forwards, their hair and other light parts flying in the wind, their eyebrows lowered, and the motion of every member properly contrasted; for instance, in moving the right foot forwards, the left arm must be brought forwards also. If you make any of them fallen down, mark the trace of his fall on the slippery, gore-stained dust; and where the ground is less impregnated with blood, let the print of men's feet and of horses, that have passed that way, be marked. Let there be some horses dragging the bodies of their riders, and leaving behind them a furrow, made by the body thus trailed along. The countenances of the vanquished will appear pale and dejected. Their eyebrows raised, and much wrinkled about the forehead and cheeks. The tip of their noses somewhat divided from the nostrils by arched wrinkles terminating at the corner of the eyes, those wrinkles being occasioned by the opening and raising of the nostrils; the upper lips turned up, discovering the teeth. Their mouths wide open, and expressive of violent lamentation. One may be seen fallen wounded on the ground, endeavouring with one hand to support his body, and covering his eyes with the other, the palm of which is turned towards the enemy. Others running away, and with open mouths seeming to cry aloud. Between the legs of the combatants let the ground be strewed with all sorts of arms; as broken shields, spears, swords, and the like. Many dead bodies should be introduced, some entirely covered with dust, others in part only; let the blood, which seems to issue immediately from the wound, appear of its natural colour, and running in a winding course, till, mixing with the dust, it forms a reddish kind of mud. Some should be in the agonies of death; their teeth shut, their eyes wildly staring, their fists clenched, and their legs in a distorted position. Some may appear disarmed, and beaten down by the enemy, still fighting with their fists and teeth, and endeavouring to take a passionate, though unavailing revenge. There may be also a straggling horse without a rider, running in wild disorder; his mane flying in the wind, beating down with his feet all before him, and doing a deal of damage. A wounded soldier may also be seen falling to the ground, and attempting to cover himself with his shield, while an enemy bending over him endeavours to give him the finishing stroke. Several dead bodies should be heaped together under a dead horse. Some of the conquerors, as having ceased fighting, may be wiping their faces from the dirt, collected on them by the mixture of dust with the water from their eyes. The _corps de reserve_ will be seen advancing gaily, but cautiously, their eyebrows directed forwards, shading their eyes with their hands to observe the motions of the enemy, amidst clouds of dust and smoke, and seeming attentive to the orders of their chief. You may also make their commander holding up his staff, pushing forwards, and pointing towards the place where they are wanted. A river may likewise be introduced, with horses fording it, dashing the water about between their legs, and in the air, covering all the adjacent ground with water and foam. Not a spot is to be left without some marks of blood and carnage. /Chap. CLIX./--_The Representation of an Orator and his Audience._ /If/ you have to represent a man who is speaking to a large assembly of people, you are to consider the subject matter of his discourse, and to adapt his attitude to such subject. If he means to persuade, let it be known by his gesture. If he is giving an explanation, deduced from several reasons, let him put two fingers of the right hand within one of the left, having the other two bent close, his face turned towards the audience, with the mouth half open, seeming to speak. If he is sitting, let him appear as going to raise himself up a little, and his head be forward. But if he is represented standing, let him bend his chest and his head forward towards the people. The auditory are to appear silent and attentive, with their eyes upon the speaker, in the act of admiration. There should be some old men, with their mouths close shut, in token of approbation, and their lips pressed together, so as to form wrinkles at the corners of the mouth, and about the cheeks, and forming others about the forehead, by raising the eyebrows, as if struck with astonishment. Some others of those sitting by, should be seated with their hands within each other, round one of their knees; some with one knee upon the other, and upon that, one hand receiving the elbow, the other supporting the chin, covered with a venerable beard. /Chap. CLX./--_Of demonstrative Gestures._ /The/ action by which a figure points at any thing near, either in regard to time or situation, is to be expressed by the hand very little removed from the body. But if the same thing is far distant, the hand must also be far removed from the body, and the face of the figure pointing, must be turned towards those to whom he is pointing it out. /Chap. CLXI./--_Of the Attitudes of the By-standers at some remarkable Event._ /All/ those who are present at some event deserving notice, express their admiration, but in various manners. As when the hand of justice punishes some malefactor. If the subject be an act of devotion, the eyes of all present should be directed towards the object of their adoration, aided by a variety of pious actions with the other members; as at the elevation of the host at mass, and other similar ceremonies. If it be a laughable subject, or one exciting compassion and moving to tears, in those cases it will not be necessary for all to have their eyes turned towards the object, but they will express their feelings by different actions; and let there be several assembled in groups, to rejoice or lament together. If the event be terrific, let the faces of those who run away from the fight, be strongly expressive of fright, with various motions; as shall be described in the tract on Motion. /Chap. CLXII./--_How to represent Night._ /Those/ objects which are entirely deprived of light, are lost to the sight, as in the night; therefore if you mean to paint a history under those circumstances, you must suppose a large fire, and those objects that are near it to be tinged with its colour, and the nearer they are the more they will partake of it. The fire being red, all those objects which receive light from it will appear of a reddish colour, and those that are most distant from it will partake of the darkness that surrounds them. The figures which are represented before the fire will appear dark in proportion to the brightness of the fire, because those parts of them which we see, are tinged by that darkness of the night, and not by the light of the fire, which they intercept. Those that are on either side of the fire, will be half in the shade of night, and half in the red light. Those seen beyond the extent of the flames, will be all of a reddish light upon a black ground. In regard to their attitudes, let those who are nearest the fire, make screens of their hands and cloaks, against the scorching heat, with their faces turned on the contrary side, as if ready to run away from it. The most remote will only be shading their eyes with their hands, as if hurt by the too great glare. /Chap. CLXIII./--_The Method of awakening the Mind to a Variety of Inventions._ /I will/ not omit to introduce among these precepts a new kind of speculative invention, which though apparently trifling, and almost laughable, is nevertheless of great utility in assisting the genius to find variety for composition. By looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colours, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects. By these confused lines the inventive genius is excited to new exertions. /Chap. CLXIV./--_Of Composition in History._ /When/ the painter has only a single figure to represent, he must avoid any shortening whatever, as well of any particular member, as of the whole figure, because he would have to contend with the prejudices of those who have no knowledge in that branch of the art. But in subjects of history, composed of many figures, shortenings may be introduced with great propriety, nay, they are indispensable, and ought to be used without reserve, as the subject may require; particularly in battles, where of course many shortenings and contortions of figures happen, amongst such an enraged multitude of actors, possessed, as it were, of a brutal madness. EXPRESSION /and/ CHARACTER. /Chap. CLXV./--_Of expressive Motions._ /Let/ your figures have actions appropriated to what they are intended to think or say, and these will be well learnt by imitating the deaf, who by the motion of their hands, eyes, eyebrows, and the whole body, endeavour to express the sentiments of their mind. Do not ridicule the thought of a master without a tongue teaching you an art he does not understand; he will do it better by his expressive motions, than all the rest by their words and examples. Let then the painter, of whatever school, attend well to this maxim, and apply it to the different qualities of the figures he represents, and to the nature of the subject in which they are actors. /Chap. CLXVI./--_How to paint Children._ /Children/ are to be represented with quick and contorted motions, when they are sitting; but when standing, with fearful and timid motions. /Chap. CLXVII./--_How to represent old Men._ /Old/ men must have slow and heavy motions; their legs and knees must be bent when they are standing, and their feet placed parallel and wide asunder. Let them be bowed downwards, the head leaning much forward, and their arms very little extended. /Chap. CLXVIII./--_How to paint old Women._ /Old/ women, on the contrary, are to be represented bold and quick, with passionate motions, like furies[33]. But the motions are to appear a great deal quicker in their arms than in their legs. /Chap. CLXIX./--_How to paint Women._ /Women/ are to be represented in modest and reserved attitudes, with their knees rather close, their arms drawing near each other, or folded about the body; their heads looking downwards, and leaning a little on one side. /Chap. CLXX./--_Of the Variety of Faces._ /The/ countenances of your figures should be expressive of their different situations: men at work, at rest, weeping, laughing, crying out, in fear, or joy, and the like. The attitudes also, and all the members, ought to correspond with the sentiment expressed in the faces. /Chap. CLXXI./--_The Parts of the Face, and their Motions._ /The/ motions of the different parts of the face, occasioned by sudden agitations of the mind, are many. The principal of these are, Laughter, Weeping, Calling out, Singing, either in a high or low pitch, Admiration, Anger, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Pain, and others, of which I propose to treat. First, of Laughing and Weeping, which are very similar in the motion of the mouth, the cheeks, the shutting of the eyebrows, and the space between them; as we shall explain in its place, in treating of the changes which happen in the face, hands, fingers, and all the other parts of the body, as they are affected by the different emotions of the soul; the knowledge of which is absolutely necessary to a painter, or else his figures may be said to be twice dead. But it is very necessary also that he be careful not to fall into the contrary extreme; giving extraordinary motions to his figures, so that in a quiet and peaceable subject, he does not seem to represent a battle, or the revellings of drunken men: but, above all, the actors in any point of history must be attentive to what they are about, or to what is going forward; with actions that denote admiration, respect, pain, suspicion, fear, and joy, according as the occasion, for which they are brought together, may require. Endeavour that different points of history be not placed one above the other on the same canvass, nor walls with different horizons[34], as if it were a jeweller's shop, shewing the goods in different square caskets. /Chap. CLXXII./--_Laughing and Weeping._ /Between/ the expression of laughter and that of weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features either in the eyes, mouth, or cheeks; only in the ruffling of the brows, which is added when weeping, but more elevated and extended in laughing. One may represent the figure weeping as tearing his clothes, or some other expression, as various as the cause of his feeling may be; because some weep for anger, some through fear, others for tenderness and joy, or for suspicion; some for real pain and torment; whilst others weep through compassion, or regret at the loss of some friend and near relation. These different feelings will be expressed by some with marks of despair, by others with moderation; some only shed tears, others cry aloud, while another has his face turned towards heaven, with his hand depressed, and his fingers twisted. Some again will be full of apprehension, with their shoulders raised up to their ears, and so on, according to the above causes. Those who weep, raise the brows, and bring them close together above the nose, forming many wrinkles on the forehead, and the corners of the mouth are turned downwards. Those who laugh have them turned upwards, and the brows open and extended. /Chap. CLXXIII./--_Of Anger._ /If/ you represent a man in a violent fit of anger, make him seize another by the hair, holding his head writhed down against the ground, with his knee fixed upon the ribs of his antagonist; his right arm up, and his fist ready to strike; his hair standing on end, his eyebrows low and straight; his teeth close, and seen at the corner of the mouth; his neck swelled, and his body covered in the Abdomen with creases, occasioned by his bending over his enemy, and the excess of his passion. /Chap. CLXXIV./--_Despair._ /The/ last act of despondency is, when a man is in the act of putting a period to his own existence. He should be represented with a knife in one hand, with which he has already inflicted the wound, and tearing it open with the other. His garments and hair should be already torn. He will be standing with his feet asunder, his knees a little bent, and his body leaning forward, as if ready to fall to the ground. LIGHT /and/ SHADOW. /Chap. CLXXV./--_The Course of Study to be pursued._ /The/ student who is desirous of making great proficiency in the art of imitating the works of Nature, should not only learn the shape of figures or other objects, and be able to delineate them with truth and precision, but he must also accompany them with their proper lights and shadows, according to the situation in which those objects appear. /Chap. CLXXVI./--_Which of the two is the most useful Knowledge, the Outlines of Figures, or that of Light and Shadow._ /The/ knowledge of the outline is of most consequence, and yet may be acquired to great certainty by dint of study; as the outlines of the different parts of the human figure, particularly those which do not bend, are invariably the same. But the knowledge of the situation, quality, and quantity of shadows, being infinite, requires the most extensive study. /Chap. CLXXVII./--_Which is the most important, the Shadows or Outlines in Painting._ /It/ requires much more observation and study to arrive at perfection in the shadowing of a picture, than in merely drawing the lines of it. The proof of this is, that the lines may be traced upon a veil or a flat glass placed between the eye and the object to be imitated. But that cannot be of any use in shadowing, on account of the infinite gradation of shades, and the blending of them, which does not allow of any precise termination; and most frequently they are confused, as will be demonstrated in another place[35]. /Chap. CLXXVIII./--_What is a Painter's first Aim, and Object._ /The/ first object of a painter is to make a simple flat surface appear like a relievo, and some of its parts detached from the ground; he who excels all others in that part of the art, deserves the greatest praise. This perfection of the art depends on the correct distribution of lights and shades, called _Chiaro-scuro_. If the painter then avoids shadows, he may be said to avoid the glory of the art, and to render his work despicable to real connoisseurs, for the sake of acquiring the esteem of vulgar and ignorant admirers of fine colours, who never have any knowledge of relievo. /Chap. CLXXIX./--_The Difference of Superficies, in regard to Painting._ /Solid/ bodies are of two sorts: the one has the surface curvilinear, oval, or spherical; the other has several surfaces, or sides producing angles, either regular or irregular. Spherical, or oval bodies, will always appear detached from their ground, though they are exactly of the same colour. Bodies also of different sides and angles will always detach, because they are always disposed so as to produce shades on some of their sides, which cannot happen to a plain superficies[36]. /Chap. CLXXX./--_How a Painter may become universal._ /The/ painter who wishes to be universal, and please a variety of judges, must unite in the same composition, objects susceptible of great force in the shadows, and great sweetness in the management of them; accounting, however, in every instance, for such boldness and softenings. /Chap. CLXXXI./--_Accuracy ought to be learnt before Dispatch in the Execution._ /If/ you wish to make good and useful studies, use great deliberation in your drawings, observe well among the lights which, and how many, hold the first rank in point of brightness; and so among the shadows, which are darker than others, and in what manner they blend together; compare the quality and quantity of one with the other, and observe to what part they are directed. Be careful also in your outlines, or divisions of the members. Remark well what quantity of parts are to be on one side, and what on the other; and where they are more or less apparent, or broad, or slender. Lastly, take care that the shadows and lights be united, or lost in each other; without any hard strokes, or lines: as smoke loses itself in the air, so are your lights and shadows to pass from the one to the other, without any apparent separation. When you have acquired the habit, and formed your hand to accuracy, quickness of execution will come of itself[37]. /Chap. CLXXXII./--_How the Painter is to place himself in regard to the Light, and his Model._ /Let/ A B be the window, M the centre of it, C the model. The best situation for the painter will be a little sideways, between the window and his model, as D, so that he may see his object partly in the light and partly in the shadow. [Illustration] /Chap. CLXXXIII./--_Of the best Light._ /The/ light from on high, and not too powerful, will be found the best calculated to shew the parts to advantage. /Chap. CLXXXIV./--_Of Drawing by Candle-light._ /To/ this artificial light apply a paper blind, and you will see the shadows undetermined and soft. /Chap. CLXXXV./--_Of those Painters who draw at Home from one Light, and afterwards adapt their Studies to another Situation in the Country, and a different Light._ /It/ is a great error in some painters who draw a figure from Nature at home, by any particular light, and afterwards make use of that drawing in a picture representing an open country, which receives the general light of the sky, where the surrounding air gives light on all sides. This painter would put dark shadows, where Nature would either produce none, or, if any, so very faint as to be almost imperceptible; and he would throw reflected lights where it is impossible there should be any. /Chap. CLXXXVI./--_How high the Light should be in drawing from Nature._ /To/ paint well from Nature, your window should be to the North, that the lights may not vary. If it be to the South, you must have paper blinds, that the sun, in going round, may not alter the shadows. The situation of the light should be such as to produce upon the ground a shadow from your model as long as that is high. /Chap. CLXXXVII./--_What Light the Painter must make use of to give most Relief to his Figures._ /The/ figures which receive a particular light shew more relief than those which receive an universal one; because the particular light occasions some reflexes, which proceed from the light of one object upon the shadows of another, and helps to detach it from the dark ground. But a figure placed in front of a dark and large space, and receiving a particular light, can receive no reflexion from any other objects, and nothing is seen of the figure but what the light strikes on, the rest being blended and lost in the darkness of the back ground. This is to be applied only to the imitation of night subjects with very little light. /Chap. CLXXXVIII./--_Advice to Painters._ /Be/ very careful, in painting, to observe, that between the shadows there are other shadows, almost imperceptible, both for darkness and shape; and this is proved by the third proposition[38], which says, that the surfaces of globular or convex bodies have as great a variety of lights and shadows as the bodies that surround them have. /Chap. CLXXXIX./--_Of Shadows._ /Those/ shadows which in Nature are undetermined, and the extremities of which can hardly be perceived, are to be copied in your painting in the same manner, never to be precisely finished, but left confused and blended. This apparent neglect will shew great judgment, and be the ingenious result of your observation of Nature. /Chap. CXC./--_Of the Kind of Light proper for drawing from Relievos, or from Nature._ /Lights/ separated from the shadows with too much precision, have a very bad effect. In order, therefore, to avoid this inconvenience, if the object be in the open country, you need not let your figures be illumined by the sun; but may suppose some transparent clouds interposed, so that the sun not being visible, the termination of the shadows will be also imperceptible and soft. /Chap. CXCI./--_Whether the Light should be admitted in Front or sideways; and which is most pleasing and graceful._ /The/ light admitted in front of heads situated opposite to side walls that are dark, will cause them to have great relievo, particularly if the light be placed high; and the reason is, that the most prominent parts of those faces are illumined by the general light striking them in front, which light produces very faint shadows on the part where it strikes; but as it turns towards the sides, it begins to participate of the dark shadows of the room, which grow darker in proportion as it sinks into them. Besides, when the light comes from on high, it does not strike on every part of the face alike, but one part produces great shadows upon another; as the eyebrows, which deprive the whole sockets of the eyes of light. The nose keeps it off from great part of the mouth, and the chin from the neck, and such other parts. This, by concentrating the light upon the most projecting parts, produces a very great relief. /Chap. CXCII./--_Of the Difference of Lights according to the Situation._ /A small/ light will cast large and determined shadows upon the surrounding bodies. A large light, on the contrary, will cast small shadows on them, and they will be much confused in their termination. When a small but strong light is surrounded by a broad but weaker light, the latter will appear like a demi-tint to the other, as the sky round the sun. And the bodies which receive the light from the one, will serve as demi-tints to those which receive the light from the other. /Chap. CXCIII./--_How to distribute the Light on Figures._ /The/ lights are to be distributed according to the natural situation you mean your figures should occupy. If you suppose them in sunshine, the shades must be dark, the lights broad and extended, and the shadows of all the surrounding objects distinctly marked upon the ground. If seen in a gloomy day, there will be very little difference between the lights and shades, and no shadows at the feet. If the figures be represented within doors, the lights and shadows will again be distinctly divided, and produce shadows on the ground. But if you suppose a paper blind at the window, and the walls painted white, the effect will be the same as in a gloomy day, when the lights and shadows have little difference. If the figures are enlightened by the fire, the lights must be red and powerful, the shadows dark, and the shadows upon the ground and upon the walls must be precise; observing that they spread wider as they go off from the body. If the figures be enlightened, partly by the sky and partly by the fire, that side which receives the light from the sky will be the brightest, and on the other side it will be reddish, somewhat of the colour of the fire. Above all, contrive, that your figures receive a broad light, and that from above; particularly in portraits, because the people we see in the street receive all the light from above; and it is curious to observe, that there is not a face ever so well known amongst your acquaintance, but would be recognised with difficulty, if it were enlightened from beneath. /Chap. CXCIV./--_Of the Beauty of Faces._ /You/ must not mark any muscles with hardness of line, but let the soft light glide upon them, and terminate imperceptibly in delightful shadows: from this will arise grace and beauty to the face. /Chap. CXCV./--_How, in drawing a Face, to give it Grace, by the Management of Light and Shade._ /A face/ placed in the dark part of a room, acquires great additional grace by means of light and shadow. The shadowed part of the face blends with the darkness of the ground, and the light part receives an increase of brightness from the open air, the shadows on this side becoming almost insensible; and from this augmentation of light and shadow, the face has much relief, and acquires great beauty. /Chap. CXCVI./--_How to give Grace and Relief to Faces._ /In/ streets running towards the west, when the sun is in the meridian, and the walls on each side so high that they cast no reflexions on that side of the bodies which is in shade, and the sky is not too bright, we find the most advantageous situation for giving relief and grace to figures, particularly to faces; because both sides of the face will participate of the shadows of the walls. The sides of the nose and the face towards the west, will be light, and the man whom we suppose placed at the entrance, and in the middle of the street, will see all the parts of that face, which are before him, perfectly illumined, while both sides of it, towards the walls, will be in shadow. What gives additional grace is, that these shades do not appear cutting, hard, or dry, but softly blended and lost in each other. The reason of it is, that the light which is spread all over in the air, strikes also the pavement of the street, and reflecting upon the shady part of the face, it tinges that slightly with the same hue: while the great light which comes from above being confined by the tops of houses, strikes on the face from different points, almost to the very beginning of the shadows under the projecting parts of the face. It diminishes by degrees the strength of them, increasing the light till it comes upon the chin, where it terminates, and loses itself, blending softly into the shades on all sides. For instance, if such light were A E, the line F E would give light even to the bottom of the nose. The line C F will give light only to the under lip; but the line A H would extend the shadow to all the under parts of the face, and under the chin. In this situation the nose receives a very strong light from all the points A B C D E. [Illustration] /Chap. CXCVII./--_Of the Termination of Bodies upon each other._ /When/ a body, of a cylindrical or convex surface, terminates upon another body of the same colour, it will appear darker on the edge, than the body upon which it terminates. And any flat body, adjacent to a white surface, will appear very dark; but upon a dark ground it will appear lighter than any other part, though the lights be equal. /Chap. CXCVIII./--_Of the Back-grounds of painted Objects._ /The/ ground which surrounds the figures in any painting, ought to be darker than the light part of those figures, and lighter than the shadowed part. /Chap. CXCIX./--_How to detach and bring forward Figures out of their Back-ground._ /If/ your figure be dark, place it on a light ground; if it be light, upon a dark ground; and if it be partly light and partly dark, as is generally the case, contrive that the dark part of the figure be upon the light part of the ground, and the light side of it against the dark[39]. /Chap. CC./--_Of proper Back-grounds._ /It/ is of the greatest importance to consider well the nature of back-grounds, upon which any opake body is to be placed. In order to detach it properly, you should place the light part of such opake body against the dark part of the back-ground, and the dark parts on a light ground[40]; as in the cut[41]. [Illustration] /Chap. CCI./--_Of the general Light diffused over Figures._ /In/ compositions of many figures and animals, observe, that the parts of these different objects ought to be darker in proportion as they are lower, and as they are nearer the middle of the groups, though they are all of an uniform colour. This is necessary, because a smaller portion of the sky (from which all bodies are illuminated) can give light to the lower spaces between these different figures, than to the upper parts of the spaces. It is proved thus: A B C D is that portion of the sky which gives light to all the objects beneath; M and N are the bodies which occupy the space S T R H, in which it is evidently perceived, that the point F, receiving the light only from the portion of the sky C D, has a smaller quantity of it than the point E which receives it from the whole space A B (a larger portion than C D); therefore it will be lighter in E than in F. [Illustration] /Chap. CCII./--_Of those Parts in Shadows which appear the darkest at a Distance._ [Illustration] /The/ neck, or any other part which is raised straight upwards, and has a projection over it, will be darker than the perpendicular front of that projection; and this projecting part will be lighter, in proportion as it presents a larger surface to the light. For instance, the recess A receives no light from any part of the sky G K, but B begins to receive the light from the part of the sky H K, and C from G K; and the point D receives the whole of F K. Therefore the chest will be as light as the forehead, nose, and chin. But what I have particularly to recommend, in regard to faces, is, that you observe well those different qualities of shades which are lost at different distances (while there remain only the first and principal spots or strokes of shades, such as those of the sockets of the eyes, and other similar recesses, which are always dark), and at last the whole face becomes obscured; because the greatest lights (being small in proportion to the demi-tints) are lost. The quality, therefore, and quantity of the principal lights and shades are by means of great distance blended together into a general half-tint; and this is the reason why trees and other objects are found to be in appearance darker at some distance than they are in reality, when nearer to the eye. But then the air, which interposes between the objects and the eye, will render them light again by tinging them with azure, rather in the shades than in the lights; for the lights will preserve the truth of the different colours much longer. /Chap. CCIII./--_Of the Eye viewing the Folds of Draperies surrounding a Figure._ /The/ shadows between the folds of a drapery surrounding the parts of the human body will be darker as the deep hollows where the shadows are generated are more directly opposite the eye. This is to be observed only when the eye is placed between the light and the shady part of the figure. /Chap. CCIV./--_Of the Relief of Figures remote from the Eye._ /Any/ opake body appears less relieved in proportion as it is farther distant from the eye; because the air, interposed between the eye and such body, being lighter than the shadow of it, it tarnishes and weakens that shadow, lessens its power, and consequently lessens also its relief. /Chap. CCV./--_Of Outlines of Objects on the Side towards the Light._ /The/ extremities of any object on the side which receives the light, will appear darker if upon a lighter ground, and lighter if seen upon a darker ground. But if such body be flat, and seen upon a ground equal in point of light with itself, and of the same colour, such boundaries, or outlines, will be entirely lost to the sight[42]. /Chap. CCVI./--_How to make Objects detach from their Ground, that is to say, from the Surface on which they are painted._ /Objects/ contrasted with a light ground will appear much more detached than those which are placed against a dark one. The reason is, that if you wish to give relief to your figures, you will make those parts which are the farthest from the light, participate the least of it; therefore they will remain the darkest, and every distinction of outline would be lost in the general mass of shadows. But to give it grace, roundness, and effect, those dark shades are always attended by reflexes, or else they would either cut too hard upon the ground, or stick to it, by the similarity of shade, and relieve the less as the ground is darker; for at some distance nothing would be seen but the light parts, therefore your figures would appear mutilated of all that remains lost in the back-ground. CONTRASTE AND EFFECT. /Chap. CCVII./--_A Precept._ /Figures/ will have more grace, placed in the open and general light, than in any particular or small one; because the powerful and extended light will surround and embrace the objects: and works done in that kind of light appear pleasant and graceful when placed at a distance[43], while those which are drawn in a narrow light, will receive great force of shadow, but will never appear at a great distance, but as painted objects. /Chap. CCVIII./--_Of the Interposition of transparent Bodies between the Eye and the Object._ /The/ greater the transparent interposition is between the eye and the object, the more the colour of that object will participate of, or be changed into that of the transparent medium[44]. When an opake body is situated between the eye and the luminary, so that the central line of the one passes also through the centre of the other, that object will be entirely deprived of light. /Chap. CCIX./--_Of proper Back-grounds for Figures._ /As/ we find by experience, that all bodies are surrounded by lights and shadows, I would have the painter to accommodate that part which is enlightened, so as to terminate upon something dark; and to manage the dark parts so that they may terminate on a light ground. This will be of great assistance in detaching and bringing out his figures[45]. /Chap. CCX./--_Of Back-grounds._ /To/ give a great effect to figures, you must oppose to a light one a dark ground, and to a dark figure a light ground, contrasting white with black, and black with white. In general, all contraries give a particular force and brilliancy of effect by their opposition[46]. REFLEXES. /Chap. CCXI./--_Of Objects placed on a light Ground, and why such a Practice is useful in Painting._ /When/ a darkish body terminates upon a light ground, it will appear detached from that ground; because all opake bodies of a curved surface are not only dark on that side which receives no light, and consequently very different from the ground; but even that side of the curved surface which is enlightened, will not carry its principal light to the extremities, but have between the ground and the principal light a certain demi-tint, darker than either the ground or that light. /Chap. CCXII./--_Of the different Effects of White, according to the Difference of Back-grounds._ /Any/ thing white will appear whiter, by being opposed to a dark ground; and, on the contrary, darker upon a light ground. This we learn from observing snow as it falls; while it is descending it appears darker against the sky, than when we see it against an open window, which (owing to the darkness of the inside of the house) makes it appear very white. Observe also, that snow appears to fall very quick and in a great quantity when near the eye; but when at some distance, it seems to come down slowly, and in a smaller quantity[47]. /Chap. CCXIII./--_Of Reverberation._ /Reverberations/ are produced by all bodies of a bright nature, that have a smooth and tolerably hard surface, which, repelling the light it receives, makes it rebound like a foot-ball against the first object opposed to it. /Chap. CCXIV./--_Where there cannot be any Reverberation of Light._ /The/ surfaces of hard bodies are surrounded by various qualities of light and shadow. The lights are of two sorts; one is called original, the other derivative. The original light is that which comes from the sun, or the brightness of fire, or else from the air. The derivative is a reflected light. But to return to our definition, I say, there can be no reflexion on that side which is turned towards any dark body; such as roofs, either high or low, shrubs, grass, wood, either dry or green; because, though every individual part of those objects be turned towards the original light, and struck by it; yet the quantity of shadow which every one of these parts produces upon the others, is so great, that, upon the whole, the light, not forming a compact mass, loses its effect, so that those objects cannot reflect any light upon the opposite bodies. /Chap. CCXV./--_In what Part the Reflexes have more or less Brightness._ /The/ reflected lights will be more or less apparent or bright, in proportion as they are seen against a darker or fainter ground; because if the ground be darker than the reflex, then this reflex will appear stronger on account of the great difference of colour. But, on the contrary, if this reflexion has behind it a ground lighter than itself, it will appear dark, in comparison to the brightness which is close to it, and therefore it will be hardly perceptible[48]. /Chap. CCXVI./--_Of the reflected Lights which surround the Shadows._ /The/ reflected lights which strike upon the midst of shadows, will brighten up or lessen their obscurity in proportion to the strength of those lights, and their proximity to those shadows. Many painters neglect this observation, while others attend to and deduce their practice from it. This difference of opinion and practice divides the sentiments of artists, so that they blame each other for not thinking and acting as they themselves do. The best way is to steer a middle course, and not to admit of any reflected light, but when the cause of it is evident to every eye; and _vice versâ_, if you introduce none at all, let it appear evident that there was no reasonable cause for it. In doing so, you will neither be totally blamed nor praised by the variety of opinion, which, if not proceeding from entire ignorance, will ensure to you the approbation of both parties. /Chap. CCXVII./--_Where Reflexes are to be most apparent._ /Of/ all reflected lights, that is to be the most apparent, bold, and precise, which detaches from the darkest ground; and, on the contrary, that which is upon a lighter ground will be less apparent. And this proceeds from the contraste of shades, by which the faintest makes the dark ones appear still darker; so in contrasted lights, the brightest cause the others to appear less bright than they really are[49]. /Chap. CCXVIII./--_What Part of a Reflex is to be the lightest._ /That/ part will be the brightest which receives the reflected light between angles the most nearly equal. For example, let N be the luminary, and A B the illuminated part of the object, reflecting the light over all the shady part of the concavity opposite to it. The light which reflects upon F will be placed between equal angles. But E at the base will not be reflected by equal angles, as it is evident that the angle E A B is more obtuse than the angle E B A. The angle A F B however, though it is between angles of less quality than the angle E, and has a common base B A, is between angles more nearly equal than E, therefore it will be lighter in F than in E; and it will also be brighter, because it is nearer to the part which gives them light. According to the 6th rule[50], which says, that part of the body is to be the lightest, which is nearest to the luminary. [Illustration] /Chap. CCXIX./--_Of the Termination of Reflexes on their Grounds._ /The/ termination of a reflected light on a ground lighter than that reflex, will not be perceivable; but if such a reflex terminates upon a ground darker than itself, it will be plainly seen; and the more so in proportion as that ground is darker, and _vice versa_[51]. /Chap. CCXX./--_Of double and treble Reflexions of Light._ /Double/ reflexes are stronger than single ones, and the shadows which interpose between the common light and these reflexes are very faint. For instance, let A be the luminous body, A N, A S, are the direct rays, and S N the parts which receive the light from them. O and E are the places enlightened by the reflexion of that light in those parts. A N E is a single reflex, but A N O, A S O is the double reflex. The single reflex is that which proceeds from a single light, but the double reflexion is produced by two different lights. The single one E is produced by the light striking on B D, while the double one O proceeds from the enlightened bodies B D and D R co-operating together; and the shadows which are between N O and S O will be very faint. [Illustration] /Chap. CCXXI./--_Reflexes in the Water, and particularly those of the Air._ /The/ only portion of air that will be seen reflected in the water, will be that which is reflected by the surface of the water to the eye between equal angles; that is to say, the angle of incidence must be equal to the angle of reflexion. COLOURS /and/ COLOURING. COLOURS. /Chap. CCXXII./--_What Surface is best calculated to receive most Colours._ /White/ is more capable of receiving all sorts of colours, than the surface of any body whatever, that is not transparent. To prove it, we shall say, that any void space is capable of receiving what another space, not void, cannot receive. In the same manner, a white surface, like a void space, being destitute of any colour, will be fittest to receive such as are conveyed to it from any other enlightened body, and will participate more of the colour than black can do; which latter, like a broken vessel, is not able to contain any thing. /Chap. CCXXIII./--_What Surface will shew most perfectly its true Colour._ /That/ opake body will shew its colour more perfect and beautiful, which has near it another body of the same colour. /Chap. CCXXIV./--_On what Surfaces the true Colour is least apparent._ /Polished/ and glossy surfaces shew least of their genuine colour. This is exemplified in the grass of the fields, and the leaves of trees, which, being smooth and glossy, will reflect the colour of the sun, and the air, where they strike, so that the parts which receive the light do not shew their natural colour. /Chap. CCXXV./--_What Surfaces shew most of their true and genuine Colour._ /Those/ objects that are the least smooth and polished shew their natural colours best; as we see in cloth, and in the leaves of such grass or trees as are of a woolly nature; which, having no lustre, are exhibited to the eye in their true natural colour; unless that colour happen to be confused by that of another body casting on them reflexions of an opposite colour, such as the redness of the setting sun, when all the clouds are tinged with its colour. /Chap. CCXXVI./--_Of the Mixture of Colours._ /Although/ the mixture of colours may be extended to an infinite variety, almost impossible to be described, I will not omit touching slightly upon it, setting down at first a certain number of simple colours to serve as a foundation, and with each of these mixing one of the others; one with one, then two with two, and three with three, proceeding in this manner to the full mixture of all the colors together: then I would begin again, mixing two of these colours with two others, and three with three, four with four, and so on to the end. To these two colours we shall put three; to these three add three more, and then six, increasing always in the same proportion. I call those simple colours, which are not composed, and cannot be made or supplied by any mixture of other colours. Black and White are not reckoned among colours; the one is the representative of darkness, the other of light: that is, one is a simple privation of light, the other is light itself. Yet I will not omit mentioning them, because there is nothing in painting more useful and necessary; since painting is but an effect produced by lights and shadows, viz. _chiaro-scuro_. After Black and White come Blue and Yellow, then Green, and Tawny or Umber, and then Purple and Red. These eight colours are all that Nature produces. With these I begin my mixtures, first Black and White, Black and Yellow, Black and Red; then Yellow and Red: but I shall treat more at length of these mixtures in a separate work[52], which will be of great utility, nay very necessary. I shall place this subject between theory and practice. /Chap. CCXXVII./--_Of the Colours produced by the Mixture of other Colours, called secondary Colours._ /The/ first of all simple colours is White, though philosophers will not acknowledge either White or Black to be colours; because the first is the cause, or the receiver of colours, the other totally deprived of them. But as painters cannot do without either, we shall place them among the others; and according to this order of things, White will be the first, Yellow the second, Green the third, Blue the fourth, Red the fifth, and Black the sixth. We shall set down White for the representative of light, without which no colour can be seen; Yellow for the earth; Green for water; Blue for air; Red for fire; and Black for total darkness. If you wish to see by a short process the variety of all the mixed, or composed colours, take some coloured glasses, and, through them, look at all the country round: you will find that the colour of each object will be altered and mixed with the colour of the glass through which it is seen; observe which colour is made better, and which is hurt by the mixture. If the glass be yellow, the colour of the objects may either be improved, or greatly impaired by it. Black and White will be most altered, while Green and Yellow will be meliorated. In the same manner you may go through all the mixtures of colours, which are infinite. Select those which are new and agreeable to the sight; and following the same method you may go on with two glasses, or three, till you have found what will best answer your purpose. /Chap. CCXXVIII./--_Of Verdegris._ /This/ green, which is made of copper, though it be mixed with oil, will lose its beauty, if it be not varnished immediately. It not only fades, but, if washed with a sponge and pure water only, it will detach from the ground upon which it is painted, particularly in damp weather; because verdegris is produced by the strength of salts, which easily dissolve in rainy weather, but still more if washed with a wet sponge. /Chap. CCXXIX./--_How to increase the Beauty of Verdegris._ /If/ you mix with the Verdegris some Caballine Aloe, it will add to it a great degree of beauty. It would acquire still more from Saffron, if it did not fade. The quality and goodness of this Aloe will be proved by dissolving it in warm Brandy. Supposing the Verdegris has already been used, and the part finished, you may then glaze it thinly with this dissolved Aloe, and it will produce a very fine colour. This Aloe may be ground also in oil by itself, or with the Verdegris, or any other colour, at pleasure. /Chap. CCXXX./--_How to paint a Picture that will last almost for ever._ /After/ you have made a drawing of your intended picture, prepare a good and thick priming with pitch and brickdust well pounded; after which give it a second coat of white lead and Naples yellow; then, having traced your drawing upon it, and painted your picture, varnish it with clear and thick old oil, and stick it to a flat glass, or crystal, with a clear varnish. Another method, which may be better, is, instead of the priming of pitch and brickdust, take a flat tile well vitrified, then apply the coat of white and Naples yellow, and all the rest as before. But before the glass is applied to it, the painting must be perfectly dried in a stove, and varnished with nut oil and amber, or else with purified nut oil alone, thickened in the sun[53]. /Chap. CCXXXI./--_The Mode of painting on Canvass, or Linen Cloth_[54]. /Stretch/ your canvass upon a frame, then give it a coat of weak size, let it dry, and draw your outlines upon it. Paint the flesh colours first; and while it is still fresh or moist, paint also the shadows, well softened and blended together. The flesh colour may be made with white, lake, and Naples yellow. The shades with black, umber, and a little lake; you may, if you please, use black chalk. After you have softened this first coat, or dead colour, and let it dry, you may retouch over it with lake and other colours, and gum water that has been a long while made and kept liquid, because in that state it becomes better, and does not leave any gloss. Again, to make the shades darker, take the lake and gum as above, and ink[55]; and with this you may shade or glaze many colours, because it is transparent; such as azure, lake, and several others. As for the lights, you may retouch or glaze them slightly with gum water and pure lake, particularly vermilion. /Chap. CCXXXII./--_Of lively and beautiful Colours._ /For/ those colours which you mean should appear beautiful, prepare a ground of pure white. This is meant only for transparent colours: as for those that have a body, and are opake, it matters not what ground they have, and a white one is of no use. This is exemplified by painted glasses; when placed between the eye and clear air, they exhibit most excellent and beautiful colours, which is not the case, when they have thick air, or some opake body behind them. /Chap. CCXXXIII./--_Of transparent Colours._ /When/ a transparent colour is laid upon another of a different nature, it produces a mixed colour, different from either of the simple ones which compose it. This is observed in the smoke coming out of a chimney, which, when passing before the black soot, appears blueish, but as it ascends against the blue of the sky, it changes its appearance into a reddish brown. So the colour lake laid on blue will turn it to a violet colour; yellow upon blue turns to green; saffron upon white becomes yellow; white scumbled upon a dark ground appears blue, and is more or less beautiful, as the white and the ground are more or less pure. /Chap. CCXXXIV./--_In what Part a Colour will appear in its greatest Beauty._ /We/ are to consider here in what part any colour will shew itself in its most perfect purity; whether in the strongest light or deepest shadow, in the demi-tint, or in the reflex. It would be necessary to determine first, of what colour we mean to treat, because different colours differ materially in that respect. Black is most beautiful in the shades; white in the strongest light; blue and green in the half-tint; yellow and red in the principal light; gold in the reflexes; and lake in the half-tint. /Chap. CCXXXV./--_How any Colour without Gloss, is more beautiful in the Lights than in the Shades._ /All/ objects which have no gloss, shew their colours better in the light than in the shadow, because the light vivifies and gives a true knowledge of the nature of the colour, while the shadows lower, and destroy its beauty, preventing the discovery of its nature. If, on the contrary, black be more beautiful in the shadows, it is because black is not a colour. /Chap. CCXXXVI./--_Of the Appearance of Colours._ /The/ lighter a colour is in its nature, the more so it will appear when removed to some distance; but with dark colours it is quite the reverse. /Chap. CCXXXVII./--_What Part of a Colour is to be the most beautiful._ /If/ A be the light, and B the object receiving it in a direct line, E cannot receive that light, but only the reflexion from B, which we shall suppose to be red. In that case, the light it produces being red, it will tinge with red the object E; and if E happen to be also red before, you will see that colour increase in beauty, and appear redder than B; but if E were yellow, you will see a new colour, participating of the red and the yellow. [Illustration] /Chap. CCXXXVIII./--_That the Beauty of a Colour is to be found in the Lights._ /As/ the quality of colours is discovered to the eye by the light, it is natural to conclude, that where there is most light, there also the true quality of the colour is to be seen; and where there is most shadow the colour will participate of, and be tinged with the colour of that shadow. Remember then to shew the true quality of the colour in the light parts only[56]. /Chap. CCXXXIX./--_Of Colours._ /The/ colour which is between the light and the shadow will not be so beautiful as that which is in the full light. Therefore the chief beauty of colours will be found in the principal lights[57]. /Chap. CCXL./--_No Object appears in its true Colour, unless the Light which strikes upon it be of the same Colour._ /This/ is very observable in draperies, where the light folds casting a reflexion, and throwing a light on other folds opposite to them, make them appear in their natural colour. The same effect is produced by gold leaves casting their light reciprocally on each other. The effect is quite contrary if the light be received from an object of a different colour[58]. /Chap. CCXLI./--_Of the Colour of Shadows._ /The/ colour of the shadows of an object can never be pure if the body which is opposed to these shadows be not of the same colour as that on which they are produced. For instance, if in a room, the walls of which are green, I place a figure clothed in blue, and receiving the light from another blue object, the light part of that figure will be of a beautiful blue, but the shadows of it will become dingy, and not like a true shade of that beautiful blue, because it will be corrupted by the reflexions from the green wall; and it would be still worse if the walls were of a darkish brown. /Chap. CCXLII./--_Of Colours._ /Colours/ placed in shadow will preserve more or less of their original beauty, as they are more or less immersed in the shade. But colours situated in a light space will shew their natural beauty in proportion to the brightness of that light. Some say, that there is as great variety in the colours of shadows, as in the colours of objects shaded by them. It may be answered, that colours placed in shadow will shew less variety amongst themselves as the shadows are darker. We shall soon convince ourselves of this truth, if, from a large square, we look through the open door of a church, where pictures, though enriched with a variety of colours, appear all clothed in darkness. /Chap. CCXLIII./--_Whether it be possible for all Colours to appear alike by means of the same Shadow._ /It/ is very possible that all the different colours may be changed into that of a general shadow; as is manifest in the darkness of a cloudy night, in which neither the shape nor colour of bodies is distinguished. Total darkness being nothing but a privation of the primitive and reflected lights, by which the form and colour of bodies are seen; it is evident, that the cause being removed the effect ceases, and the objects are entirely lost to the sight. /Chap. CCXLIV./--_Why White is not reckoned among the Colours._ /White/ is not a colour, but has the power of receiving all the other colours. When it is placed in a high situation in the country, all its shades are azure; according to the fourth proposition[59], which says, that the surface of any opake body participates of the colour of any other body sending the light to it. Therefore white being deprived of the light of the sun by the interposition of any other body, will remain white; if exposed to the sun on one side, and to the open air on the other, it will participate both of the colour of the sun and of the air. That side which is not opposed to the sun, will be shaded of the colour of the air. And if this white were not surrounded by green fields all the way to the horizon, nor could receive any light from that horizon, without doubt it would appear of one simple and uniform colour, viz. that of the air. /Chap. CCXLV./--_Of Colours._ /The/ light of the fire tinges every thing of a reddish yellow; but this will hardly appear evident, if we do not make the comparison with the daylight. Towards the close of the evening this is easily done; but more certainly after the morning twilight; and the difference will be clearly distinguished in a dark room, when a little glimpse of daylight strikes upon any part of the room, and there still remains a candle burning. Without such a trial the difference is hardly perceivable, particularly in those colours which have most similarity; such as white and yellow, light green and light blue; because the light which strikes the blue, being yellow, will naturally turn it green; as we have said in another place[60], that a mixture of blue and yellow produces green. And if to a green colour you add some yellow, it will make it of a more beautiful green. /Chap. CCXLVI./--_Of the Colouring of remote Objects._ /The/ painter, who is to represent objects at some distance from the eye, ought merely to convey the idea of general undetermined masses, making choice, for that purpose, of cloudy weather, or towards the evening, and avoiding, as was said before, to mark the lights and shadows too strong on the extremities; because they would in that case appear like spots of difficult execution, and without grace. He ought to remember, that the shadows are never to be of such a quality, as to obliterate the proper colour, in which they originated; if the situation of the coloured body be not in total darkness. He ought to mark no outline, not to make the hair stringy, and not to touch with pure white, any but those things which in themselves are white; in short, the lightest touch upon any particular object ought to denote the beauty of its proper and natural colour. /Chap. CCXLVII./--_The Surface of all opake Bodies participates of the Colour of the surrounding Objects._ /The/ painter ought to know, that if any white object is placed between two walls, one of which is also white, and the other black, there will be found between the shady side of that object and the light side, a similar proportion to that of the two walls; and if that object be blue, the effect will be the same. Having therefore to paint this object, take some black, similar to that of the wall from which the reflexes come; and to proceed by a certain and scientific method, do as follows. When you paint the wall, take a small spoon to measure exactly the quantity of colour you mean to employ in mixing your tints; for instance, if you have put in the shading of this wall three spoonfuls of pure black, and one of white, you have, without any doubt, a mixture of a certain and precise quality. Now having painted one of the walls white, and the other dark, if you mean to place a blue object between them with shades suitable to that colour, place first on your pallet the light blue, such as you mean it to be, without any mixture of shade, and it will do for the lightest part of your object. After which take three spoonfuls of black, and one of this light blue, for your darkest shades. Then observe whether your object be round or square: if it be square, these two extreme tints of light and shade will be close to each other, cutting sharply at the angle; but if it be round, draw lines from the extremities of the walls to the centre of the object, and put the darkest shade between equal angles, where the lines intersect upon the superficies of it; then begin to make them lighter and lighter gradually to the point N O, lessening the strength of the shadows as much as that place participates of the light A D, and mixing that colour with the darkest shade A B, in the same proportion. [Illustration] /Chap. CCXLVIII./--_General Remarks on Colours._ /Blue/ and green are not simple colours in their nature, for blue is composed of light and darkness; such is the azure of the sky, viz. perfect black and perfect white. Green is composed of a simple and a mixed colour, being produced by blue and yellow. Any object seen in a mirror, will participate of the colour of that body which serves as a mirror; and the mirror in its turn is tinged in part by the colour of the object it represents; they partake more or less of each other as the colour of the object seen is more or less strong than the colour of the mirror. That object will appear of the strongest and most lively colour in the mirror, which has the most affinity to the colour of the mirror itself. Of coloured bodies, the purest white will be seen at the greatest distance, therefore the darker the colour, the less it will bear distance. Of different bodies equal in whiteness, and in distance from the eye, that which is surrounded by the greatest darkness will appear the whitest; and on the contrary, that shadow will appear the darkest that has the brightest white round it. Of different colours, equally perfect, that will appear most excellent, which is seen near its direct contrary. A pale colour against red, a black upon white (though neither the one nor the other are colours), blue near a yellow; green near red; because each colour is more distinctly seen, when opposed to its contrary, than to any other similar to it. Any thing white seen in a dense air full of vapours, will appear larger than it is in reality. The air, between the eye and the object seen, will change the colour of that object into its own; so will the azure of the air change the distant mountains into blue masses. Through a red glass every thing appears red; the light round the stars is dimmed by the darkness of the air, which fills the space between the eye and the planets. The true colour of any object whatever will be seen in those parts which are not occupied by any kind of shade, and have not any gloss (if it be a polished surface). I say, that white terminating abruptly upon a dark ground, will cause that part where it terminates to appear darker, and the white whiter. COLOURS IN REGARD TO LIGHT AND SHADOW. /Chap. CCXLIX./--_Of the Light proper for painting Flesh Colour from Nature._ /Your/ window must be open to the sky, and the walls painted of a reddish colour. The summertime is the best, when the clouds conceal the sun, or else your walls on the south side of the room must be so high, as that the sun-beams cannot strike on the opposite side, in order that the reflexion of those beams may not destroy the shadows. /Chap. CCL./--_Of the Painter's Window._ /The/ window which gives light to a painting-room, ought to be made of oiled paper, without any cross bar, or projecting edge at the opening, or any sharp angle in the inside of the wall, but should be slanting by degrees the whole thickness of it; and the sides be painted black. /Chap. CCLI./--_The Shadows of Colours._ /The/ shadows of any colour whatever must participate of that colour more or less, as it is nearer to, or more remote from the mass of shadows; and also in proportion to its distance from, or proximity to the mass of light. /Chap. CCLII./--_Of the Shadows of White._ /To/ any white body receiving the light from the sun, or the air, the shadows should be of a blueish cast; because white is no colour, but a receiver of all colours; and as by the fourth proposition[61] we learn, that the surface of any object participates of the colours of other objects near it, it is evident that a white surface will participate of the colour of the air by which it is surrounded. /Chap. CCLIII./--_Which of the Colours will produce the darkest Shade._ /That/ shade will be the darkest which is produced by the whitest surface; this also will have a greater propensity to variety than any other surface; because white is not properly a colour, but a receiver of colours, and its surface will participate strongly of the colour of surrounding objects, but principally of black or any other dark colour, which being the most opposite to its nature, produces the most sensible difference between the shadows and the lights. /Chap. CCLIV./--_How to manage, when a White terminates upon another White._ /When/ one white body terminates on another of the same colour, the white of these two bodies will be either alike or not. If they be alike, that object which of the two is nearest to the eye, should be made a little darker than the other, upon the rounding of the outline; but if the object which serves as a ground to the other be not quite so white, the latter will detach of itself, without the help of any darker termination. /Chap. CCLV./--_On the Back-grounds of Figures._ /Of/ two objects equally light, one will appear less so if seen upon a whiter ground; and, on the contrary, it will appear a great deal lighter if upon a space of a darker shade. So flesh colour will appear pale upon a red ground, and a pale colour will appear redder upon a yellow ground. In short, colours will appear what they are not, according to the ground which surrounds them. /Chap. CCLVI./--_The Mode of composing History._ /Amongst/ the figures which compose an historical picture, those which are meant to appear the nearest to the eye, must have the greatest force; according to the second proposition[62] of the third book, which says, that colour will be seen in the greatest perfection which has less air interposed between it and the eye of the beholder; and for that reason the shadows (by which we express the relievo of bodies) appear darker when near than when at a distance, being then deadened by the air which interposes. This does not happen to those shadows which are near the eye, where they will produce the greatest relievo when they are darkest. /Chap. CCLVII./--_Remarks concerning Lights and Shadows._ /Observe/, that where the shadows end, there be always a kind of half-shadow to blend them with the lights. The shadow derived from any object will mix more with the light at its termination, in proportion as it is more distant from that object. But the colour of the shadow will never be simple: this is proved by the ninth proposition[63], which says, that the superficies of any object participates of the colours of other bodies, by which it is surrounded, although it were transparent, such as water, air, and the like: because the air receives its light from the sun, and darkness is produced by the privation of it. But as the air has no colour in itself any more than water, it receives all the colours that are between the object and the eye. The vapours mixing with the air in the lower regions near the earth, render it thick, and apt to reflect the sun's rays on all sides, while the air above remains dark; and because light (that is, white) and darkness (that is, black), mixed together, compose the azure that becomes the colour of the sky, which is lighter or darker in proportion as the air is more or less mixed with damp vapours. /Chap. CCLVIII./--_Why the Shadows of Bodies upon a white Wall are blueish towards Evening._ [Illustration] /The/ shadows of bodies produced by the redness of the setting sun, will always be blueish. This is accounted for by the eleventh proposition[64], which says, that the superficies of any opake body participates of the colour of the object from which it receives the light; therefore the white wall being deprived entirely of colour, is tinged by the colour of those bodies from which it receives the light, which in this case are the sun and the sky. But because the sun is red towards the evening, and the sky is blue, the shadow on the wall not being enlightened by the sun, receives only the reflexion of the sky, and therefore will appear blue; and the rest of the wall, receiving light immediately from the sun, will participate of its red colour. /Chap. CCLIX./--_Of the Colour of Faces._ /The/ colour of any object will appear more or less distinct in proportion to the extent of its surface. This proportion is proved, by observing that a face appears dark at a small distance, because, being composed of many small parts, it produces a great number of shadows; and the lights being the smallest part of it, are soonest lost to the sight, leaving only the shadows, which being in a greater quantity, the whole of the face appears dark, and the more so if that face has on the head, or at the back, something whiter. /Chap. CCLX./--_A Precept relating to Painting._ /Where/ the shadows terminate upon the lights, observe well what parts of them are lighter than the others, and where they are more or less softened and blended; but above all remember, that young people have no sharp shadings: their flesh is transparent, something like what we observe when we put our hand between the sun and eyes; it appears reddish, and of a transparent brightness. If you wish to know what kind of shadow will suit the flesh colour you are painting, place one of your fingers close to your picture, so as to cast a shadow upon it, and according as you wish it either lighter or darker, put it nearer or farther from it, and imitate it. /Chap. CCLXI./--_Of Colours in Shadow._ /It/ happens very often that the shadows of an opake body do not retain the same colour as the lights. Sometimes they will be greenish, while the lights are reddish, although this opake body be all over of one uniform colour. This happens when the light falls upon the object (we will suppose from the East), and tinges that side with its own colour. In the West we will suppose another opake body of a colour different from the first, but receiving the same light. This last will reflect its colour towards the East, and strike the first with its rays on the opposite side, where they will be stopped, and remain with their full colour and brightness. We often see a white object with red lights, and the shades of a blueish cast; this we observe particularly in mountains covered with snow, at sun-set, when the effulgence of its rays makes the horizon appear all on fire. /Chap. CCLXII./--_Of the Choice of Lights._ /Whatever/ object you intend to represent is to be supposed situated in a particular light, and that entirely of your own choosing. If you imagine such objects to be in the country, and the sun be overcast, they will be surrounded by a great quantity of general light. If the sun strikes upon those objects, then the shadows will be very dark, in proportion to the lights, and will be determined and sharp; the primitive as well as the secondary ones. These shadows will vary from the lights in colour, because on that side the object receives a reflected light hue from the azure of the air, which tinges that part; and this is particularly observable in white objects. That side which receives the light from the sun, participates also of the colour of that. This may be particularly observed in the evening, when the sun is setting between the clouds, which it reddens; those clouds being tinged with the colour of the body illuminating them, the red colour of the clouds, with that of the sun, casts a hue on those parts which receive the light from them. On the contrary, those parts which are not turned towards that side of the sky, remain of the colour of the air, so that the former and the latter are of two different colours. This we must not lose sight of, that, knowing the cause of those lights and shades, it be made apparent in the effect, or else the work will be false and absurd. But if a figure be situated within a house, and seen from without, such figure will have its shadows very soft; and if the beholder stands in the line of the light, it will acquire grace, and do credit to the painter, as it will have great relief in the lights, and soft and well-blended shadows, particularly in those parts where the inside of the room appears less obscure, because there the shadows are almost imperceptible: the cause of which we shall explain in its proper place. COLOURS IN REGARD TO BACK-GROUNDS. /Chap. CCLXIII./--_Of avoiding hard Outlines._ /Do/ not make the boundaries of your figures with any other colour than that of the back-ground, on which they are placed; that is, avoid making dark outlines. /Chap. CCLXIV./--_Of Outlines._ /The/ extremities of objects which are at some distance, are not seen so distinctly as if they were nearer. Therefore the painter ought to regulate the strength of his outlines, or extremities, according to the distance. The boundaries which separate one body from another, are of the nature of mathematical lines, but not of real lines. The end of any colour is only the beginning of another, and it ought not to be called a line, for nothing interposes between them, except the termination of the one against the other, which being nothing in itself, cannot be perceivable; therefore the painter ought not to pronounce it in distant objects. /Chap. CCLXV./--_Of Back-grounds._ /One/ of the principal parts of painting is the nature and quality of back-grounds, upon which the extremities of any convex or solid body will always detach and be distinguished in nature, though the colour of such objects, and that of the ground, be exactly the same. This happens, because the convex sides of solid bodies do not receive the light in the same manner with the ground, for such sides or extremities are often lighter or darker than the ground. But if such extremities were to be of the same colour as the ground, and in the same degree of light, they certainly could not be distinguished. Therefore such a choice in painting ought to be avoided by all intelligent and judicious painters; since the intention is to make the objects appear as it were out of the ground. The above case would produce the contrary effect, not only in painting, but also in objects of real relievo. /Chap. CCLXVI./--_How to detach Figures from the Ground._ /All/ solid bodies will appear to have a greater relief, and to come more out of the canvass, on a ground of an undetermined colour, with the greatest variety of lights and shades against the confines of such bodies (as will be demonstrated in its place), provided a proper diminution of lights in the white tints, and of darkness in the shades, be judiciously observed. /Chap. CCLXVII./--_Of Uniformity and Variety of Colours upon plain Surfaces._ /The/ back-grounds of any flat surfaces which are uniform in colour and quantity of light, will never appear separated from each other; _vice versâ_, they will appear separated if they are of different colours or lights. /Chap. CCLXVIII./--_Of Back-grounds suitable both to Shadows and Lights._ /The/ shadows or lights which surround figures, or any other objects, will help the more to detach them the more they differ from the objects; that is, if a dark colour does not terminate upon another dark colour, but upon a very different one; as white, or partaking of white, but lowered, and approximated to the dark shade. /Chap. CCLXIX./--_The apparent Variation of Colours, occasioned by the Contraste of the Ground upon which they are placed._ /No/ colour appears uniform and equal in all its parts unless it terminate on a ground of the same colour. This is very apparent when a black terminates on a white ground, where the contraste of colour gives more strength and richness to the extremities than to the middle. CONTRASTE, HARMONY, AND REFLEXES, IN REGARD TO COLOURS. /Chap. CCLXX./--_Gradation in Painting._ /What/ is fine is not always beautiful and good: I address this to such painters as are so attached to the beauty of colours, that they regret being obliged to give them almost imperceptible shadows, not considering the beautiful relief which figures acquire by a proper gradation and strength of shadows. Such persons may be compared to those speakers who in conversation make use of many fine words without meaning, which altogether scarcely form one good sentence. /Chap. CCLXXI./--_How to assort Colours in such a Manner as that they may add Beauty to each other._ /If/ you mean that the proximity of one colour should give beauty to another that terminates near it, observe the rays of the sun in the composition of the rainbow, the colours of which are generated by the falling rain, when each drop in its descent takes every colour of that bow, as is demonstrated in its place[65]. If you mean to represent great darkness, it must be done by contrasting it with great light; on the contrary, if you want to produce great brightness, you must oppose to it a very dark shade: so a pale yellow will cause red to appear more beautiful than if opposed to a purple colour. There is another rule, by observing which, though you do not increase the natural beauty of the colours, yet by bringing them together they may give additional grace to each other, as green placed near red, while the effect would be quite the reverse, if placed near blue. Harmony and grace are also produced by a judicious arrangement of colours, such as blue with pale yellow or white, and the like; as will be noticed in its place. /Chap. CCLXXII./--_Of detaching the Figures._ /Let/ the colours of which the draperies of your figures are composed, be such as to form a pleasing variety, to distinguish one from the other; and although, for the sake of harmony, they should be of the same nature[66], they must not stick together, but vary in point of light, according to the distance and interposition of the air between them. By the same rule, the outlines are to be more precise, or lost, in proportion to their distance or proximity. /Chap. CCLXXIII./--_Of the Colour of Reflexes._ /All/ reflected colours are less brilliant and strong, than those which receive a direct light, in the same proportion as there is between the light of a body and the cause of that light. /Chap. CCLXXIV./--_What Body will be the most strongly tinged with the Colour of any other Object._ /An/ opake surface will partake most of the genuine colour of the body nearest to it, because a great quantity of the species of colour will be conveyed to it; whereas such colour would be broken and disturbed if coming from a more distant object. /Chap. CCLXXV./--_Of Reflexes._ /Reflexes/ will partake, more or less, both of the colour of the object which produces them, and of the colour of that object on which they are produced, in proportion as this latter body is of a smoother or more polished surface, than that by which they are produced. /Chap. CCLXXVI./--_Of the Surface of all shadowed Bodies._ /The/ surface of any opake body placed in shadow, will participate of the colour of any other object which reflects the light upon it. This is very evident; for if such bodies were deprived of light in the space between them and the other bodies, they could not shew either shape or colour. We shall conclude then, that if the opake body be yellow, and that which reflects the light blue, the part reflected will be green, because green is composed of blue and yellow. /Chap. CCLXXVII./--_That no reflected Colour is simple, but is mixed with the Nature of the other Colours._ /No/ colour reflected upon the surface of another body, will tinge that surface with its own colour alone, but will be mixed by the concurrence of other colours also reflected on the same spot. Let us suppose A to be of a yellow colour, which is reflected on the convex C O E, and that the blue colour B be reflected on the same place. I say that a mixture of the blue and yellow colours will tinge the convex surface; and that, if the ground be white, it will produce a green reflexion, because it is proved that a mixture of blue and yellow produces a very fine green. [Illustration] /Chap. CCLXXVIII./--_Of the Colour of Lights and Reflexes._ /When/ two lights strike upon an opake body, they can vary only in two ways; either they are equal in strength, or they are not. If they be equal, they may still vary in two other ways, that is, by the equality or inequality of their brightness; they will be equal, if their distance be the same; and unequal, if it be otherwise. The object placed at an equal distance, between two equal lights, in point both of colour and brightness, may still be enlightened by them in two different ways, either equally on each side, or unequally. It will be equally enlightened by them, when the space which remains round the lights shall be equal in colour, in degree of shade, and in brightness. It will be unequally enlightened by them when the spaces happen to be of different degrees of darkness. /Chap. CCLXXIX./--_Why reflected Colours seldom partake of the Colour of the Body where they meet._ /It/ happens very seldom that the reflexes are of the same colour with the body from which they proceed, or with that upon which they meet. To exemplify this, let the convex body D F G E be of a yellow colour, and the body B C, which reflects its colour on it, blue; the part of the convex surface which is struck by that reflected light, will take a green tinge, being B C, acted on by the natural light of the air, or the sun. [Illustration] /Chap. CCLXXX./--_The Reflexes of Flesh Colours._ /The/ lights upon the flesh colours, which are reflected by the light striking upon another flesh-coloured body, are redder and more lively than any other part of the human figure; and that happens according to the third proposition of the second book[67], which says, the surface of any opake body participates of the colour of the object which reflects the light, in proportion as it is near to or remote from it, and also in proportion to the size of it; because, being large, it prevents the variety of colours in smaller objects round it, from interfering with, and discomposing the principal colour, which is nearer. Nevertheless it does not prevent its participating more of the colour of a small object near it, than of a large one more remote. See the sixth proposition[68] of perspective, which says, that large objects may be situated at such a distance as to appear less than small ones that are near. /Chap. CCLXXXI./--_Of the Nature of Comparison._ /Black/ draperies will make the flesh of the human figure appear whiter than in reality it is[69]; and white draperies, on the contrary, will make it appear darker. Yellow will render it higher coloured, while red will make it pale. /Chap. CCLXXXII./--_Where the Reflexes are seen._ /Of/ all reflexions of the same shape, size, and strength, that will be more or less strong, which terminates on a ground more or less dark. The surface of those bodies will partake most of the colour of the object that reflects it, which receive that reflexion by the most nearly equal angles. Of the colours of objects reflected upon any opposite surface by equal angles, that will be the most distinct which has its reflecting ray the shortest. Of all colours, reflected under equal angles, and at equal distance upon the opposite body, those will be the strongest, which come reflected by the lightest coloured body. That object will reflect its own colour most precisely on the opposite object, which has not round it any colour that clashes with its own; and consequently that reflected colour will be most confused which takes its origin from a variety of bodies of different colours. That colour which is nearest the opposed object, will tinge it the most strongly; and _vice versâ_: let the painter, therefore, in his reflexes on the human body, particularly on the flesh colour, mix some of the colour of the drapery which comes nearest to it; but not pronounce it too distinctly, if there be not good reason for it. PERSPECTIVE OF COLOURS. /Chap. CCLXXXIII./--_A Precept of Perspective in regard to Painting._ /When/, on account of some particular quality of the air, you can no longer distinguish the difference between the lights and shadows of objects, you may reject the perspective of shadows, and make use only of the linear perspective, and the diminution of colours, to lessen the knowledge of the objects opposed to the eye; and this, that is to say, the loss of the knowledge of the figure of each object, will make the same object appear more remote. The eye can never arrive at a perfect knowledge of the interval between two objects variously distant, by means of the linear perspective alone, if not assisted by the perspective of colours. /Chap. CCLXXXIV./--_Of the Perspective of Colours._ /The/ air will participate less of the azure of the sky, in proportion as it comes nearer to the horizon, as it is proved by the third and ninth proposition[70], that pure and subtile bodies (such as compose the air) will be less illuminated by the sun than those of thicker and grosser substance: and as it is certain that the air which is remote from the earth, is thinner than that which is near it, it will follow, that the latter will be more impregnated with the rays of the sun, which giving light at the same time to an infinity of atoms floating in this air, renders it more sensible to the eye. So that the air will appear lighter towards the horizon, and darker as well as bluer in looking up to the sky; because there is more of the thick air between our eyes and the horizon, than between our eyes and that part of the sky above our heads. [Illustration] For instance: if the eye placed in P, looks through the air along the line P R, and then lowers itself a little along P S, the air will begin to appear a little whiter, because there is more of the thick air in this space than in the first. And if it be still removed lower, so as to look straight at the horizon, no more of that blue sky will be perceived which was observable along the first line P R, because there is a much greater quantity of thick air along the horizontal line P D, than along the oblique P S, or the perpendicular P R. /Chap. CCLXXXV./--_The Cause of the Diminution of Colours._ /The/ natural colour of any visible object will be diminished in proportion to the density of any other substance which interposes between that object and the eye. /Chap. CCLXXXVI./--_Of the Diminution of Colours and Objects._ /Let/ the colours vanish in proportion as the objects diminish in size, according to the distance. /Chap. CCLXXXVII./--_Of the Variety observable in Colours, according to their Distance, or Proximity._ /The/ local colour of such objects as are darker than the air, will appear less dark as they are more remote; and, on the contrary, objects lighter than the air will lose their brightness in proportion to their distance from the eye. In general, all objects that are darker or lighter than the air, are discoloured by distance, which changes their quality, so that the lighter appears darker, and the darker lighter. /Chap. CCLXXXVIII./--_At what Distance Colours are entirely lost._ /Local/ colours are entirely lost at a greater or less distance, according as the eye and the object are more or less elevated from the earth. This is proved by the seventh proposition[71], which says, the air is more or less pure, as it is near to, or remote from the earth. If the eye then, and the object are near the earth, the thickness of the air which interposes, will in a great measure confuse the colour of that object to the eye. But if the eye and the object are placed high above the earth, the air will disturb the natural colour of that object very little. In short, the various gradations of colour depend not only on the various distances, in which they may be lost; but also on the variety of lights, which change according to the different hours of the day, and the thickness or purity of the air, through which the colour of the object is conveyed to the eye. /Chap. CCLXXXIX./--_Of the Change observable in the same Colour, according to its Distance from the Eye._ /Among/ several colours of the same nature, that which is the nearest to the eye will alter the least; because the air which interposes between the eye and the object seen, envelopes, in some measure, that object. If the air, which interposes, be in great quantity, the object seen will be strongly tinged with the colour of that air; but if the air be thin, then the view of that object, and its colour, will be very little obstructed. /Chap. CCXC./--_Of the blueish Appearance of remote Objects in a Landscape._ /Whatever/ be the colour of distant objects, the darkest, whether natural or accidental, will appear the most tinged with azure. By the natural darkness is meant the proper colour of the object; the accidental one is produced by the shadow of some other body. /Chap. CCXCI./--_Of the Qualities in the Surface which first lose themselves by Distance._ /The/ first part of any colour which is lost by the distance, is the gloss, being the smallest part of it, as a light within a light. The second that diminishes by being farther removed, is the light, because it is less in quantity than the shadow. The third is the principal shadows, nothing remaining at last but a kind of middling obscurity. /Chap. CCXCII./--_From what Cause the Azure of the Air proceeds._ /The/ azure of the sky is produced by the transparent body of the air, illumined by the sun, and interposed between the darkness of the expanse above, and the earth below. The air in itself has no quality of smell, taste, or colour, but is easily impregnated with the quality of other matter surrounding it; and will appear bluer in proportion to the darkness of the space behind it, as may be observed against the shady sides of mountains, which are darker than any other object. In this instance the air appears of the most beautiful azure, while on the other side that receives the light, it shews through that more of the natural colour of the mountain. /Chap. CCXCIII./--_Of the Perspective of Colours._ /The/ same colour being placed at various distances and equal elevation, the force and effect of its colouring will be according to the proportion of the distance which there is from each of these colours to the eye. It is proved thus: let C B E D be one and the same colour. The first, E, is placed at two degrees of distance from the eye A; the second, B, shall be four degrees, the third, C, six degrees, and the fourth, D, eight degrees; as appears by the circles which terminate upon and intersect the line A R. Let us suppose that the space A R, S P, is one degree of thin air, and S P E T another degree of thicker air. It will follow, that the first colour, E, will pass to the eye through one degree of thick air, E S, and through another degree, S A, of thinner air. And B will send its colour to the eye in A, through two degrees of thick air, and through two others of the thinner sort. C will send it through three degrees of the thin, and three of the thick sort, while D goes through four degrees of the one, and four of the other. This demonstrates, that the gradation of colours is in proportion to their distance from the eye[72]. But this happens only to those colours which are on a level with the eye; as for those which happen to be at unequal elevations, we cannot observe the same rule, because they are in that case situated in different qualities of air, which alter and diminish these colours in various manners. [Illustration] /Chap. CCXCIV./--_Of the Perspective of Colours in dark Places._ /In/ any place where the light diminishes in a gradual proportion till it terminates in total darkness, the colours also will lose themselves and be dissolved in proportion as they recede from the eye. /Chap. CCXCV./--_Of the Perspective of Colours._ /The/ principal colours, or those nearest to the eye, should be pure and simple; and the degree of their diminution should be in proportion to their distance, viz. the nearer they are to the principal point, the more they will possess of the purity of those colours, and they will partake of the colour of the horizon in proportion as they approach to it. /Chap. CCXCVI./--_Of Colours._ /Of/ all the colours which are not blue, those that are nearest to black will, when distant, partake most of the azure; and, on the contrary, those will preserve their proper colour at the greatest distance, that are most dissimilar to black. The green therefore of the fields will change sooner into blue than yellow, or white, which will preserve their natural colour at a greater distance than that, or even red. /Chap. CCXCVII./--_How it happens that Colours do not change, though placed in different Qualities of Air._ /The/ colour will not be subject to any alteration when the distance and the quality of air have a reciprocal proportion. What it loses by the distance it regains by the purity of the air, viz. if we suppose the first or lowest air to have four degrees of thickness, and the colour to be at one degree from the eye, and the second air above to have three degrees. The air having lost one degree of thickness, the colour will acquire one degree upon the distance. And when the air still higher shall have lost two degrees of thickness, the colour will acquire as many upon the distance; and in that case the colour will be the same at three degrees as at one. But to be brief, if the colour be raised so high as to enter that quality of air which has lost three degrees of thickness, and acquired three degrees of distance, then you may be certain that that colour which is high and remote, has lost no more than the colour which is below and nearer; because in rising it has acquired those three degrees which it was losing by the same distance from the eye; and this is what was meant to be proved. /Chap. CCXCVIII./--_Why Colours experience no apparent Change, though placed in different Qualities of Air._ [Illustration] /It/ may happen that a colour does not alter, though placed at different distances, when the thickness of the air and the distance are in the same inverse proportion. It is proved thus: let A be the eye, and H any colour whatever, placed at one degree of distance from the eye, in a quality of air of four degrees of thickness; but because the second degree above, A M N L, contains a thinner air by one half, which air conveys this colour, it follows that this colour will appear as if removed double the distance it was at before, viz. at two degrees of distance, A F and F G, from the eye; and it will be placed in G. If that is raised to the second degree of air A M N L, and to the degree O M, P N, it will necessarily be placed at E, and will be removed from the eye the whole length of the line A E, which will be proved in this manner to be equal in thickness to the distance A G. If in the same quality of air the distance A G interposed between the eye and the colour occupies two degrees, and A E occupies two degrees and a half, it is sufficient to preserve the colour G, when raised to E, from any change, because the degree A C and the degree A F being the same in thickness, are equal and alike, and the degree C D, though equal in length to the degree F G, is not alike in point of thickness of air; because half of it is situated in a degree of air of double the thickness of the air above: this half degree of distance occupies as much of the colour as one whole degree of the air above would, which air above is twice as thin as the air below, with which it terminates; so that by calculating the thickness of the air, and the distances, you will find that the colours have changed places without undergoing any alteration in their beauty. And we shall prove it thus: reckoning first the thickness of air, the colour H is placed in four degrees of thickness, the colour G in two degrees, and E at one degree. Now let us see whether the distances are in an equal inverse proportion; the colour E is at two degrees and a half of distance, G at two degrees, and H at one degree. But as this distance has not an exact proportion with the thickness of air, it is necessary to make a third calculation in this manner: A C is perfectly like and equal to A F; the half degree, C B, is like but not equal to A F, because it is only half a degree in length, which is equal to a whole degree of the quality of the air above; so that by this calculation we shall solve the question. For A C is equal to two degrees of thickness of the air above, and the half degree C B is equal to a whole degree of the same air above; and one degree more is to be taken in, viz. B E, which makes the fourth. A H has four degrees of thickness of air, A G also four, viz. A F two in value, and F G also two, which taken together make four. A E has also four, because A C contains two, and C D one, which is the half of A C, and in the same quality of air; and there is a whole degree above in the thin air, which all together make four. So that if A E is not double the distance A G, nor four times the distance A H, it is made equivalent by the half degree C B of thick air, which is equal to a whole degree of thin air above. This proves the truth of the proposition, that the colour H G E does not undergo any alteration by these different distances. /Chap. CCXCIX./--_Contrary Opinions in regard to Objects seen afar off._ /Many/ painters will represent the objects darker, in proportion as they are removed from the eye; but this cannot be true, unless the objects seen be white; as shall be examined in the next chapter. /Chap. CCC./--_Of the Colour of Objects remote from the Eye._ /The/ air tinges objects with its own colour more or less in proportion to the quantity of intervening air between it and the eye, so that a dark object at the distance of two miles (or a density of air equal to such distance), will be more tinged with its colour than if only one mile distant. It is said, that, in a landscape, trees of the same species appear darker in the distance than near; this cannot be true, if they be of equal size, and divided by equal spaces. But it will be so if the first trees are scattered, and the light of the fields is seen through and between them, while the others which are farther off, are thick together, as is often the case near some river or other piece of water: in this case no space of light fields can be perceived, but the trees appear thick together, accumulating the shadow on each other. It also happens, that as the shady parts of plants are much broader than the light ones, the colour of the plants becoming darker by the multiplied shadows, is preserved, and conveyed to the eye more strongly than that of the other parts; these masses, therefore, will carry the strongest parts of their colour to a greater distance. /Chap. CCCI./--_Of the Colour of Mountains._ /The/ darker the mountain is in itself, the bluer it will appear at a great distance. The highest part will be the darkest, as being more woody; because woods cover a great many shrubs, and other plants, which never receive any light. The wild plants of those woods are also naturally of a darker hue than cultivated plants; for oak, beech, fir, cypress, and pine trees are much darker than olive and other domestic plants. Near the top of these mountains, where the air is thinner and purer, the darkness of the woods will make it appear of a deeper azure, than at the bottom, where the air is thicker. A plant will detach very little from the ground it stands upon, if that ground be of a colour something similar to its own; and, _vice versâ_, that part of any white object which is nearest to a dark one, will appear the whitest, and the less so as it is removed from it; and any dark object will appear darker, the nearer it is to a white one; and less so, if removed from it. /Chap. CCCII./--_Why the Colour and Shape of Objects are lost in some Situations apparently dark, though not so in Reality._ /There/ are some situations which, though light, appear dark, and in which objects are deprived both of form and colour. This is caused by the great light which pervades the intervening air; as is observable by looking in through a window at some distance from the eye, when nothing is seen but an uniform darkish shade; but if we enter the house, we shall find that room to be full of light, and soon distinguish every small object contained within that window. This difference of effect is produced by the great brightness of the air, which contracts considerably the pupil of the eye, and by so doing diminishes its power. But in dark places the pupil is enlarged, and acquires as much in strength, as it increases in size. This is proved in my second proposition of perspective[73]. /Chap. CCCIII./--_Various Precepts in Painting._ /The/ termination and shape of the parts in general are very little seen, either in great masses of light, or of shadows; but those which are situated between the extremes of light and shade are the most distinct. Perspective, as far as it extends in regard to painting, is divided into three principal parts; the first consists in the diminution of size, according to distance; the second concerns the diminution of colours in such objects; and the third treats of the diminution of the perception altogether of those objects, and of the degree of precision they ought to exhibit at various distances. The azure of the sky is produced by a mixture composed of light and darkness[74]; I say of light, because of the moist particles floating in the air, which reflect the light. By darkness, I mean the pure air, which has none of these extraneous particles to stop and reflect the rays. Of this we see an example in the air interposed between the eye and some dark mountains, rendered so by the shadows of an innumerable quantity of trees; or else shaded on one side by the natural privation of the rays of the sun; this air becomes azure, but not so on the side of the mountain which is light, particularly when it is covered with snow. Among objects of equal darkness and equal distance, those will appear darker that terminate upon a lighter ground, and _vice versâ_[75]. That object which is painted with the most white and the most black, will shew greater relief than any other; for that reason I would recommend to painters to colour and dress their figures with the brightest and most lively colours; for if they are painted of a dull or obscure colour, they will detach but little, and not be much seen, when the picture is placed at some distance; because the colour of every object is obscured in the shades; and if it be represented as originally so all over, there will be but little difference between the lights and the shades, while lively colours will shew a striking difference. AERIAL PERSPECTIVE. /Chap. CCCIV./--_Aerial Perspective._ /There/ is another kind of perspective called aerial, because by the difference of the air it is easy to determine the distance of different objects, though seen on the same line; such, for instance, as buildings behind a wall, and appearing all of the same height above it. If in your picture you want to have one appear more distant than another, you must first suppose the air somewhat thick, because, as we have said before, in such a kind of air the objects seen at a great distance, as mountains are, appear blueish like the air, by means of the great quantity of air that interposes between the eye and such mountains. You will then paint the first building behind that wall of its proper colour; the next in point of distance, less distinct in the outline, and participating, in a greater degree, of the blueish colour of the air; another which you wish to send off as much farther, should be painted as much bluer; and if you wish one of them to appear five times farther removed beyond the wall, it must have five times more of the azure. By this rule these buildings which appeared all of the same size, and upon the same line, will be distinctly perceived to be of different dimensions, and at different distances. /Chap. CCCV./--_The Parts of the Smallest Objects will first disappear in Painting._ /Of/ objects receding from the eye the smallest will be the first lost to the sight; from which it follows, that the largest will be the last to disappear. The painter, therefore, ought not to finish the parts of those objects which are very far off, but follow the rule given in the sixth book[76]. How many, in the representation of towns, and other objects remote from the eye, express every part of the buildings in the same manner as if they were very near. It is not so in nature, because there is no sight so powerful as to perceive distinctly at any great distance the precise form of parts or extremities of objects. The painter therefore who pronounces the outlines, and the minute distinction of parts, as several have done, will not give the representation of distant objects, but by this error will make them appear exceedingly near. Again, the angles of buildings in distant towns are not to be expressed (for they cannot be seen), considering that angles are formed by the concurrence of two lines into one point, and that a point has no parts; it is therefore invisible. /Chap. CCCVI./--_Small Figures ought not to be too much finished._ /Objects/ appear smaller than they really are when they are distant from the eye, and because there is a great deal of air interposed, which weakens the appearance of forms, and, by a natural consequence, prevents our seeing distinctly the minute parts of such objects. It behoves the painter therefore to touch those parts slightly, in an unfinished manner; otherwise it would be against the effect of Nature, whom he has chosen for his guide. For, as we said before, objects appear small on account of their great distance from the eye; that distance includes a great quantity of air, which, forming a dense body, obstructs the light, and prevents our seeing the minute parts of the objects. /Chap. CCCVII./--_Why the Air is to appear whiter as it approaches nearer to the Earth._ /As/ the air is thicker nearer the earth, and becomes thinner as it rises, look, when the sun is in the east, towards the west, between the north and south, and you will perceive that the thickest and lowest air will receive more light from the sun than the thinner air, because its beams meet with more resistance. If the sky terminate low, at the end of a plain, that part of it nearest to the horizon, being seen only through the thick air, will alter and break its natural colour, and will appear whiter than over your head, where the visual ray does not pass through so much of that gross air, corrupted by earthy vapours. But if you turn towards the east, the air will be darker the nearer it approaches the earth; for the air being thicker, does not admit the light of the sun to pass so freely. /Chap. CCCVIII./--_How to paint the distant Part of a Landscape._ /It/ is evident that the air is in some parts thicker and grosser than in others, particularly that nearest to the earth; and as it rises higher, it becomes thinner and more transparent. The objects which are high and large, from which you are at some distance, will be less apparent in the lower parts; because the visual ray which perceives them, passes through a long space of dense air; and it is easy to prove that the upper parts are seen by a line, which, though on the side of the eye it originates in a thick air, nevertheless, as it ascends to the highest summit of its object, terminates in an air much thinner than that of the lower parts; and for that reason the more that line or visual ray advances from the eye, it becomes, in its progress from one point to another, thinner and thinner, passing from a pure air into another which is purer; so that a painter who has mountains to represent in a landscape, ought to observe, that from one hill to another, the tops will appear always clearer than the bases. In proportion as the distance from one to another is greater, the top will be clearer; and the higher they are, the more they will shew their variety of form and colour. /Chap. CCCIX./--_Of precise and confused Objects._ /The/ parts that are near in the fore-ground should be finished in a bold determined manner; but those in the distance must be unfinished, and confused in their outlines. /Chap. CCCX./--_Of distant Objects._ /That/ part of any object which is nearest to the luminary from which it receives the light, will be the lightest. The representation of an object in every degree of distance, loses degrees of its strength; that is, in proportion as the object is more remote from the eye it will be less perceivable through the air in its representation. /Chap. CCCXI./--_Of Buildings seen in a thick Air._ [Illustration] /That/ part of a building seen through a thick air, will appear less distinct than another part seen through a thinner air. Therefore the eye, N, looking at the tower A D, will see it more confusedly in the lower degrees, but at the same time lighter; and as it ascends to the other degrees it will appear more distinct, but somewhat darker. /Chap. CCCXII./--_Of Towns and other Objects seen through a thick Air._ [Illustration] /Buildings/ or towns seen through a fog, or the air made thick by smoke or other vapours, will appear less distinct the lower they are; and, _vice versâ_, they will be sharper and more visible in proportion as they are higher. We have said, in Chapter cccxxi. that the air is thicker the lower it is, and thinner as it is higher. It is demonstrated also by the cut, where the tower, A F, is seen by the eye N, in a thick air, from B to F, which is divided into four degrees, growing thicker as they are nearer the bottom. The less the quantity of air interposed between the eye and its object is, the less also will the colour of the object participate of the colour of that air. It follows, that the greater the quantity of the air interposed between the eye and the object seen, is, the more this object will participate of the colour of the air. It is demonstrated thus: N being the eye looking at the five parts of the tower A F, viz. A B C D E, I say, that if the air were of the same thickness, there would be the same proportion between the colour of the air at the bottom of the tower and the colour of the air that the same tower has at the place B, as there is in length between the line M and F. As, however, we have supposed that the air is not of equal thickness, but, on the contrary, thicker as it is lower, it follows, that the proportion by which the air tinges the different elevations of the tower B C F, exceeds the proportion of the lines; because the line M F, besides its being longer than the line S B, passes by unequal degrees through a quality of air which is unequal in thickness. /Chap. CCCXIII./--_Of the inferior Extremities of distant Objects._ /The/ inferior or lower extremities of distant objects are not so apparent as the upper extremities. This is observable in mountains and hills, the tops of which detach from the sides of other mountains behind. We see the tops of these more determined and distinctly than their bases; because the upper extremities are darker, being less encompassed by thick air, which always remains in the lower regions, and makes them appear dim and confused. It is the same with trees, buildings, and other objects high up. From this effect it often happens that a high tower, seen at a great distance, will appear broad at top, and narrow at bottom; because the thin air towards the top does not prevent the angles on the sides and other different parts of the tower from being seen, as the thick air does at bottom. This is demonstrated by the seventh proposition[77], which says, that the thick air interposed between the eye and the sun, is lighter below than above, and where the air is whiteish, it confuses the dark objects more than if such air were blueish or thinner, as it is higher up. The battlements of a fortress have the spaces between equal to the breadth of the battlement, and yet the space will appear wider; at a great distance the battlements will appear very much diminished, and being removed still farther, will disappear entirely, and the fort shew only the straight wall, as if there were no battlements. /Chap. CCCXIV./--_Which Parts of Objects disappear first by being removed farther from the Eye, and which preserve their Appearance._ /The/ smallest parts are those which, by being removed, lose their appearance first; this may be observed in the gloss upon spherical bodies, or columns, and the slender parts of animals; as in a stag, the first sight of which does not discover its legs and horns so soon as its body, which, being broader, will be perceived from a greater distance. But the parts which disappear the very first, are the lines which describe the members, and terminate the surface and shape of bodies. /Chap. CCCXV./--_Why Objects are less distinguished in proportion as they are farther removed from the Eye._ /This/ happens because the smallest parts are lost first; the second, in point of size, are also lost at a somewhat greater distance, and so on successively; the parts by degrees melting away, the perception of the object is diminished; and at last all the parts, and the whole, are entirely lost to the sight[78]. Colours also disappear on account of the density of the air interposed between the eye and the object. /Chap. CCCXVI./--_Why Faces appear dark at a Distance._ /It/ is evident that the similitude of all objects placed before us, large as well as small, is perceptible to our senses through the iris of the eye. If through so small an entrance the immensity of the sky and of the earth is admitted, the faces of men (which are scarcely any thing in comparison of such large objects), being still diminished by the distance, will occupy so little of the eye, that they become almost imperceptible. Besides, having to pass through a dark medium from the surface to the _Retina_ in the inside, where the impression is made, the colour of faces (not being very strong, and rendered still more obscure by the darkness of the tube) when arrived at the focus appears dark. No other reason can be given on that point, except that the speck in the middle of the apple of the eye is black, and, being full of a transparent fluid like air, performs the same office as a hole in a board, which on looking into it appears black; and that those things which are seen through both a light and dark air, become confused and obscure. /Chap. CCCXVII./--_Of Towns and other Buildings seen through a Fog in the Morning or Evening._ /Buildings/ seen afar off in the morning or in the evening, when there is a fog, or thick air, shew only those parts distinctly which are enlightened by the sun towards the horizon; and the parts of those buildings which are not turned towards the sun remain confused and almost of the colour of the fog. /Chap. CCCXVIII./--_Of the Height of Buildings seen in a Fog._ /Of/ a building near the eye the top parts will appear more confused than the bottom, because there is more fog between the eye and the top than at the base. And a square tower, seen at a great distance through a fog, will appear narrower at the base than at the summit. This is accounted for in Chapter cccxiii. which says, that the fog will appear whiter and thicker as it approaches the ground; and as it is said before[79], that a dark object will appear smaller in proportion as it is placed on a whiter ground. Therefore the fog being whiter at bottom than at top, it follows that the tower (being darkish) will appear narrower at the base than at the summit. /Chap. CCCXIX./--_Why Objects which are high, appear darker at a Distance than those which are low, though the Fog be uniform, and of equal Thickness._ /Amongst/ objects situated in a fog, thick air, vapour, smoke, or at a distance, the highest will be the most distinctly seen: and amongst objects equal in height, that placed in the darkest fog, will be most confused and dark. As it happens to the eye H, looking at A B C, three towers of equal height; it sees the top C as low as R, in two degrees of thickness; and the top B, in one degree only; therefore the top C will appear darker than the top of the tower B. [Illustration] /Chap. CCCXX./--_Of Objects seen in a Fog._ /Objects/ seen through a fog will appear larger than they are in reality, because the aerial perspective does not agree with the linear, viz. the colour does not agree with the magnitude of the object[80]; such a fog being similar to the thickness of air interposed between the eye and the horizon in fine weather. But in this case the fog is near the eye, and though the object be also near, it makes it appear as if it were as far off as the horizon; where a great tower would appear no bigger than a man placed near the eye. /Chap. CCCXXI./--_Of those Objects which the Eyes perceive through a Mist or thick Air._ /The/ nearer the air is to water, or to the ground, the thicker it becomes. It is proved by the nineteenth proposition of the second book[81], that bodies rise in proportion to their weight; and it follows, that a light body will rise higher than another which is heavy. /Chap. CCCXXII./--_Miscellaneous Observations._ /Of/ different objects equal in magnitude, form, shade, and distance from the eye, those will appear the smaller that are placed on the lighter ground. This is exemplified by observing the sun when seen behind a tree without leaves; all the ramifications seen against that great light are so diminished that they remain almost invisible. The same may be observed of a pole placed between the sun and the eye. Parallel bodies placed upright, and seen through a fog, will appear larger at top than at bottom. This is proved by the ninth proposition[82], which says, that a fog, or thick air, penetrated by the rays of the sun, will appear whiter the lower they are. Things seen afar off will appear out of proportion, because the parts which are the lightest will send their image with stronger rays than the parts which are darkest. I have seen a woman dressed in black, with a white veil over her head, which appeared twice as large as her shoulders covered with black. MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS. LANDSCAPE. /Chap. CCCXXIII./--_Of Objects seen at a Distance._ /Any/ dark object will appear lighter when removed to some distance from the eye. It follows, by the contrary reason, that a dark object will appear still darker when brought nearer to the eye. Therefore the inferior parts of any object whatever, placed in thick air, will appear farther from the eye at the bottom than at the top; for that reason the lower parts of a mountain appear farther off than its top, which is in reality the farthest. /Chap. CCCXXIV./--_Of a Town seen through a thick Air._ /The/ eye which, looking downwards, sees a town immersed in very thick air, will perceive the top of the buildings darker, but more distinct than the bottom. The tops detach against a light ground, because they are seen against the low and thick air which is beyond them. This is a consequence of what has been explained in the preceding chapter. /Chap. CCCXXV./--_How to draw a Landscape._ /Contrive/ that the trees in your landscape be half in shadow and half in the light. It is better to represent them as when the sun is veiled with thin clouds, because in that case the trees receive a general light from the sky, and are darkest in those parts which are nearest to the earth. /Chap. CCCXXVI./--_Of the Green of the Country._ /Of/ the greens seen in the country, that of trees and other plants will appear darker than that of fields and meadows, though they may happen to be of the same quality. /Chap. CCCXXVII./--_What Greens will appear most of a blueish Cast._ /Those/ greens will appear to approach nearest to blue which are of the darkest shade when remote. This is proved by the seventh proposition[83], which says, that blue is composed of black and white seen at a great distance. /Chap. CCCXXVIII./--_The Colour of the Sea from different Aspects._ /When/ the sea is a little ruffled it has no sameness of colour; for whoever looks at it from the shore, will see it of a dark colour, in a greater degree as it approaches towards the horizon, and will perceive also certain lights moving slowly on the surface like a flock of sheep. Whoever looks at the sea from on board a ship, at a distance from the land, sees it blue. Near the shore it appears darkish, on account of the colour of the earth reflected by the water, as in a looking-glass; but at sea the azure of the air is reflected to the eye by the waves in the same manner. /Chap. CCCXXIX./--_Why the same Prospect appears larger at some Times than at others._ /Objects/ in the country appear sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than they actually are, from the circumstance of the air interposed between the eye and the horizon, happening to be either thicker or thinner than usual. Of two horizons equally distant from the eye, that which is seen through the thicker air will appear farther removed; and the other will seem nearer, being seen through a thinner air. Objects of unequal size, but equally distant, will appear equal if the air which is between them and the eye be of proportionable inequality of thickness, viz. if the thickest air be interposed between the eye and the smallest of the objects. This is proved by the perspective of colours[84], which is so deceitful that a mountain which would appear small by the compasses, will seem larger than a small hill near the eye; as a finger placed near the eye will cover a large mountain far off. /Chap. CCCXXX./--_Of Smoke._ /Smoke/ is more transparent, though darker towards the extremities of its waves than in the middle. It moves in a more oblique direction in proportion to the force of the wind which impels it. Different kinds of smoke vary in colour, as the causes that produce them are various. Smoke never produces determined shadows, and the extremities are lost as they recede from their primary cause. Objects behind it are less apparent in proportion to the thickness of the smoke. It is whiter nearer its origin, and bluer towards its termination. Fire appears darker, the more smoke there is interposed between it and the eye. Where smoke is farther distant, the objects are less confused by it. It encumbers and dims all the landscape like a fog. Smoke is seen to issue from different places, with flames at the origin, and the most dense part of it. The tops of mountains will be more seen than the lower parts, as in a fog. /Chap. CCCXXXI./--_In what Part Smoke is lightest._ /Smoke/ which is seen between the sun and the eye will be lighter and more transparent than any other in the landscape. The same is observed of dust, and of fog; while, if you place yourself between the sun and those objects, they will appear dark. /Chap. CCCXXXII./--_Of the Sun-beams passing through the Openings of Clouds._ /The/ sun-beams which penetrate the openings interposed between clouds of various density and form, illuminate all the places over which they pass, and tinge with their own colour all the dark places that are behind: which dark places are only seen in the intervals between the rays. /Chap. CCCXXXIII./--_Of the Beginning of Rain._ /When/ the rain begins to fall, it tarnishes and darkens the air, giving it a dull colour, but receives still on one side a faint light from the sun, and is shaded on the other side, as we observe in clouds; till at last it darkens also the earth, depriving it entirely of the light of the sun. Objects seen through the rain appear confused and of undetermined shape, but those which are near will be more distinct. It is observable, that on the side where the rain is shaded, objects will be more clearly distinguished than where it receives the light; because on the shady side they lose only their principal lights, whilst on the other they lose both their lights and shadows, the lights mixing with the light part of the rain, and the shadows are also considerably weakened by it. /Chap. CCCXXXIV./--_The Seasons are to be observed._ /In/ Autumn you will represent the objects according as it is more or less advanced. At the beginning of it the leaves of the oldest branches only begin to fade, more or less, however, according as the plant is situated in a fertile or barren country; and do not imitate those who represent trees of every kind (though at equal distance) with the same quality of green. Endeavour to vary the colour of meadows, stones, trunks of trees, and all other objects, as much as possible, for Nature abounds in variety _ad infinitum_. /Chap. CCCXXXV./--_The Difference of Climates to be observed._ /Near/ the sea-shore, and in southern parts, you will be careful not to represent the Winter season by the appearance of trees and fields, as you would do in places more inland, and in northern countries, except when these are covered with ever-greens, which shoot afresh all the year round. /Chap. CCCXXXVI./--_Of Dust._ /Dust/ becomes lighter the higher it rises, and appears darker the less it is raised, when it is seen between the eye and the sun. /Chap. CCCXXXVII./--_How to represent the Wind._ /In/ representing the effect of the wind, besides the bending of trees, and leaves twisting the wrong side upwards, you will also express the small dust whirling upwards till it mixes in a confused manner with the air. /Chap. CCCXXXVIII./--_Of a Wilderness._ /Those/ trees and shrubs which are by their nature more loaded with small branches, ought to be touched smartly in the shadows, but those which have larger foliage, will cause broader shadows. /Chap. CCCXXXIX./--_Of the Horizon seen in the Water._ /By/ the sixth proposition[85], the horizon will be seen in the water as in a looking-glass, on that side which is opposite the eye. And if the painter has to represent a spot covered with water, let him remember that the colour of it cannot be either lighter or darker than that of the neighbouring objects. /Chap. CCCXL./--_Of the Shadow of Bridges on the Surface of the Water._ /The/ shadows of bridges can never be seen on the surface of the water, unless it should have lost its transparent and reflecting quality, and become troubled and muddy; because clear water being polished and smooth on its surface, the image of the bridge is formed in it as in a looking-glass, and reflected in all the points situated between the eye and the bridge at equal angles; and even the air is seen under the arches. These circumstances cannot happen when the water is muddy, because it does not reflect the objects any longer, but receives the shadow of the bridge in the same manner as a dusty road would receive it. /Chap. CCCXLI./--_How a Painter ought to put in Practice the Perspective of Colours._ /To/ put in practice that perspective which teaches the alteration, the lessening, and even the entire loss of the very essence of colours, you must take some points in the country at the distance of about sixty-five yards[86] from each other; as trees, men, or some other remarkable objects. In regard to the first tree, you will take a glass, and having fixed that well, and also your eye, draw upon it, with the greatest accuracy, the tree you see through it; then put it a little on one side, and compare it closely with the natural one, and colour it, so that in shape and colour it may resemble the original, and that by shutting one eye they may both appear painted, and at the same distance. The same rule may be applied to the second and third tree at the distance you have fixed. These studies will be very useful if managed with judgment, where they may be wanted in the offscape of a picture. I have observed that the second tree is less by four fifths than the first, at the distance of thirteen yards. /Chap. CCCXLII./--_Various Precepts in Painting._ /The/ superficies of any opake body participates of the colour of the transparent medium interposed between the eye and such body, in a greater or less degree, in proportion to the density of such medium and the space it occupies. The outlines of opake bodies will be less apparent in proportion as those bodies are farther distant from the eye. That part of the opake body will be the most shaded, or lightest, which is nearest to the body that shades it, or gives it light. The surface of any opake body participates more or less of the colour of that body which gives it light, in proportion as the latter is more or less remote, or more or less strong. Objects seen between lights and shadows will appear to have greater relievo than those which are placed wholly in the light, or wholly in shadow. When you give strength and precision to objects seen at a great distance, they will appear as if they were very near. Endeavour that your imitation be such as to give a just idea of distances. If the object in nature appear confused in the outlines, let the same be observed in your picture. The outlines of distant objects appear undetermined and confused, for two reasons: the first is, that they come to the eye by so small an angle, and are therefore so much diminished, that they strike the sight no more than small objects do, which though near can hardly be distinguished, such as the nails of the fingers, insects, and other similar things: the second is, that between the eye and the distant objects there is so much air interposed, that it becomes thick; and, like a veil, tinges the shadows with its own whiteness, and turns them from a dark colour to another between black and white, such as azure. Although, by reason of the great distance, the appearance of many things is lost, yet those things which receive the light from the sun will be more discernible, while the rest remain enveloped in confused shadows. And because the air is thicker near the ground, the things which are lower will appear confused; and _vice versâ_. When the sun tinges the clouds on the horizon with red, those objects which, on account of their distance, appear blueish, will participate of that redness, and will produce a mixture between the azure and red, which renders the prospect lively and pleasant; all the opake bodies which receive that light will appear distinct, and of a reddish colour, and the air, being transparent, will be impregnated with it, and appear of the colour of lilies[87]. The air which is between the earth and the sun when it rises or sets, will always dim the objects it surrounds, more than the air any where else, because it is whiter. It is not necessary to mark strongly the outlines of any object which is placed upon another. It ought to detach of itself. If the outline or extremity of a white and curved surface terminate upon another white body, it will have a shade at that extremity, darker than any part of the light; but if against a dark object, such outline, or extremity, will be lighter than any part of the light. Those objects which are most different in colour, will appear the most detached from each other. Those parts of objects which first disappear in the distance, are extremities similar in colour, and ending one upon the other, as the extremities of an oak tree upon another oak similar to it. The next to disappear at a greater distance are, objects of mixed colours, when they terminate one upon the other, as trees, ploughed fields, walls, heaps of rubbish, or of stones. The last extremities of bodies that vanish are those which, being light, terminate upon a dark ground; or being dark, upon a light ground. Of objects situated above the eye, at equal heights, the farthest removed from the eye will appear the lowest; and if situated below the eye, the nearest to it will appear the lowest. The parallel lines situated sidewise will concur to one point[88]. Those objects which are near a river, or a lake, in the distant part of a landscape, are less apparent and distinct than those that are remote from them. Of bodies of equal density, those that are nearest to the eye will appear thinnest, and the most remote thickest. A large eye-ball will see objects larger than a small one. The experiment may be made by looking at any of the celestial bodies, through a pin-hole, which being capable of admitting but a portion of its light, it seems to diminish and lose of its size in the same proportion as the pin-hole is smaller than the usual apparent size of the object. A thick air interposed between the eye and any object, will render the outlines of such object undetermined and confused, and make it appear of a larger size than it is in reality; because the linear perspective does not diminish the angle which conveys the object to the eye. The aerial perspective carries it farther off, so that the one removes it from the eye, while the other preserves its magnitude[89]. When the sun is in the West the vapours of the earth fall down again and thicken the air, so that objects not enlightened by the sun remain dark and confused, but those which receive its light will be tinged yellow and red, according to the sun's appearance on the horizon. Again, those that receive its light are very distinct, particularly public buildings and houses in towns and villages, because their shadows are dark, and it seems as if those parts which are plainly seen were coming out of confused and undetermined foundations, because at that time every thing is of one and the same colour, except what is enlightened by the sun[90]. Any object receiving the light from the sun, receives also the general light; so that two kinds of shadows are produced: the darkest of the two is that which happens to have its central line directed towards the centre of the sun. The central lines of the primitive and secondary lights are the same as the central lines of the primitive and secondary shadows. The setting sun is a beautiful and magnificent object when it tinges with its colour all the great buildings of towns, villages, and the top of high trees in the country. All below is confused and almost lost in a tender and general mass; for, being only enlightened by the air, the difference between the shadows and the lights is small, and for that reason it is not much detached. But those that are high are touched by the rays of the sun, and, as was said before, are tinged with its colour; the painter therefore ought to take the same colour with which he has painted the sun, and employ it in all those parts of his work which receive its light. It also happens very often, that a cloud will appear dark without receiving any shadow from a separate cloud, according to the situation of the eye; because it will see only the shady part of the one, while it sees both the enlightened and shady parts of the other. Of two objects at equal height, that which is the farthest off will appear the lowest. Observe the first cloud in the cut, though it is lower than the second, it appears as if it were higher. This is demonstrated by the section of the pyramidical rays of the low cloud at M A, and the second (which is higher) at N M, below M A. This happens also when, on account of the rays of the setting or rising sun, a dark cloud appears higher than another which is light. [Illustration] /Chap. CCCXLIII./--_The Brilliancy of a Landscape._ /The/ vivacity and brightness of colours in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when illumined by the sun, unless the picture be placed so as to receive the same light from the sun itself. MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS. /Chap. CCCXLIV./--_Why a painted Object does not appear so far distant as a real one, though they be conveyed to the Eye by equal Angles._ [Illustration] /If/ a house be painted on the pannel B C, at the apparent distance of one mile, and by the side of it a real one be perceived at the true distance of one mile also; which objects are so disposed, that the pannel, or picture, A C, intersects the pyramidical rays with the same opening of angles; yet these two objects will never appear of the same size, nor at the same distance, if seen with both eyes[91]. /Chap. CCCXLV./--_How to draw a Figure standing upon its Feet, to appear forty Braccia_[92] _high, in a Space of twenty Braccia, with proportionate Members._ /In/ this, as in any other case, the painter is not to mind what kind of surface he has to work upon; particularly if his painting is to be seen from a determined point, such as a window, or any other opening. Because the eye is not to attend to the evenness or roughness of the wall, but only to what is to be represented as beyond that wall; such as a landscape, or any thing else. Nevertheless a curved surface, such as F R G, would be the best, because it has no angles. [Illustration] /Chap. CCCXLVI./--_How to draw a Figure twenty-four Braccia high, upon a Wall twelve Braccia high._ Plate XXII. /Draw/ upon part of the wall M N, half the figure you mean to represent; and the other half upon the cove above, M R. But before that, it will be necessary to draw upon a flat board, or a paper, the profile of the wall and cove, of the same shape and dimension, as that upon which you are to paint. Then draw also the profile of your figure, of whatever size you please, by the side of it; draw all the lines to the point F, and where they intersect the profile M R, you will have the dimensions of your figure as they ought to be drawn upon the real spot. You will find, that on the straight part of the wall M N, it will come of its proper form, because the going off perpendicularly will diminish it naturally; but that part which comes upon the curve will be diminished upon your drawing. The whole must be traced afterwards upon the real spot, which is similar to M N. This is a good and safe method. [Illustration: _Page 196_. _Chap. 346_. _Plate 22_. _London, Published by J. Taylor High Holborn._] /Chap. CCCXLVII./--_Why, on measuring a Face, and then painting it of the same Size, it will appear larger than the natural one._ A B is the breadth of the space, or of the head, and it is placed on the paper at the distance C F, where the cheeks are, and it would have to stand back all A C, and then the temples would be carried to the distance O R of the lines A F, B F; so that there is the difference C O and R D. It follows that the line C F, and the line D F, in order to become shorter[93], have to go and find the paper where the whole height is drawn, that is to say, the lines F A, and F B, where the true size is; and so it makes the difference, as I have said, of C O, and R D. [Illustration] /Chap. CCCXLVIII./--_Why the most perfect Imitation of Nature will not appear to have the same Relief as Nature itself._ /If/ nature is seen with two eyes, it will be impossible to imitate it upon a picture so as to appear with the same relief, though the lines, the lights, shades, and colour, be perfectly imitated[94]. It is proved thus: let the eyes A B, look at the object C, with the concurrence of both the central visual rays A C and B C. I say, that the sides of the visual angles (which contain these central rays) will see the space G D, behind the object C. The eye A will see all the space FD, and the eye B all the space G E. Therefore the two eyes will see behind the object C all the space F E; for which reason that object C becomes as it were transparent, according to the definition of transparent bodies, behind which nothing is hidden. This cannot happen if an object were seen with one eye only, provided it be larger than the eye. From all that has been said, we may conclude, that a painted object, occupying all the space it has behind, leaves no possible way to see any part of the ground, which it covers entirely by its own circumference[95]. [Illustration] /Chap. CCCXLIX./--_Universality of Painting; a Precept._ /A painter/ cannot be said to aim at universality in the art, unless he love equally every species of that art. For instance, if he delight only in landscape, his can be esteemed only as a simple investigation; and, as our friend Botticello[96] remarks, is but a vain study; since, by throwing a sponge impregnated with various colours against a wall, it leaves some spots upon it, which may appear like a landscape. It is true also, that a variety of compositions may be seen in such spots, according to the disposition of mind with which they are considered; such as heads of men, various animals, battles, rocky scenes, seas, clouds, woods, and the like. It may be compared to the sound of bells, which may seem to say whatever we choose to imagine. In the same manner also, those spots may furnish hints for compositions, though they do not teach us how to finish any particular part; and the imitators of them are but sorry landscape-painters. /Chap. CCCL./--_In what Manner the Mirror is the true Master of Painters._ /When/ you wish to know if your picture be like the object you mean to represent, have a flat looking-glass, and place it so as to reflect the object you have imitated, and compare carefully the original with the copy. You see upon a flat mirror the representation of things which appear real; Painting is the same. They are both an even superficies, and both give the idea of something beyond their superficies. Since you are persuaded that the looking-glass, by means of lines and shades, gives you the representation of things as if they were real; you being in possession of colours which in their different lights and shades are stronger than those of the looking-glass, may certainly, if you employ the rules with judgment, give to your picture the same appearance of Nature as you admire in the looking-glass. Or rather, your picture will be like Nature itself seen in a large looking-glass. This looking-glass (being your master) will shew you the lights and shades of any object whatever. Amongst your colours there are some lighter than the lightest part of your model, and also some darker than the strongest shades; from which it follows, that you ought to represent Nature as seen in your looking-glass, when you look at it with one eye only; because both eyes surround the objects too much, particularly when they are small[97]. /Chap. CCCLI./--_Which Painting is to be esteemed the best._ /That/ painting is the most commendable which has the greatest conformity to what is meant to be imitated. This kind of comparison will often put to shame a certain description of painters, who pretend they can mend the works of Nature; as they do, for instance, when they pretend to represent a child twelve months old, giving him eight heads in height, when Nature in its best proportion admits but five. The breadth of the shoulders also, which is equal to the head, they make double, giving to a child a year old, the proportions of a man of thirty. They have so often practised, and seen others practise these errors, that they have converted them into habit, which has taken so deep a root in their corrupted judgment, that they persuade themselves that Nature and her imitators are wrong in not following their own practice[98]. /Chap. CCCLII./--_Of the Judgment to be made of a Painter's Work._ /The/ first thing to be considered is, whether the figures have their proper relief, according to their respective situations, and the light they are in: that the shadows be not the same at the extremities of the groups, as in the middle; because being surrounded by shadows, or shaded only on one side, produce very different effects. The groups in the middle are surrounded by shadows from the other figures, which are between them and the light. Those which are at the extremities have the shadows only on one side, and receive the light on the other. The strongest and smartest touches of shadows are to be in the interstice between the figures of the principal group where the light cannot penetrate[99]. Secondly, that by the order and disposition of the figures they appear to be accommodated to the subject, and the true representation of the history in question. Thirdly, that the figures appear alive to the occasion which brought them together, with expressions suited to their attitudes. /Chap. CCCLIII./--_How to make an imaginary Animal appear natural._ /It/ is evident that it will be impossible to invent any animal without giving it members, and these members must individually resemble those of some known animal. If you wish, therefore, to make a chimera, or imaginary animal, appear natural (let us suppose a serpent); take the head of a mastiff, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a porcupine, the mouth of a hare, the brows of a lion, the temples of an old cock, and the neck of a sea tortoise[100]. /Chap. CCCLIV./--_Painters are not to imitate one another._ /One/ painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of Nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to Nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt every thing from her. /Chap. CCCLV./--_How to judge of one's own Work._ /It/ is an acknowledged fact, that we perceive errors in the works of others more readily than in our own. A painter, therefore, ought to be well instructed in perspective, and acquire a perfect knowledge of the dimensions of the human body; he should also be a good architect, at least as far as concerns the outward shape of buildings, with their different parts; and where he is deficient, he ought not to neglect taking drawings from Nature. It will be well also to have a looking-glass by him, when he paints, to look often at his work in it, which being seen the contrary way, will appear as the work of another hand, and will better shew his faults. It will be useful also to quit his work often, and take some relaxation, that his judgment may be clearer at his return; for too great application and sitting still is sometimes the cause of many gross errors. /Chap. CCCLVI./--_Of correcting Errors which you discover._ /Remember/, that when, by the exercise of your own judgment, or the observation of others, you discover any errors in your work, you immediately set about correcting them, lest, in exposing your works to the public, you expose your defects also. Admit not any self-excuse, by persuading yourself that you shall retrieve your character, and that by some succeeding work you shall make amends for your shameful negligence; for your work does not perish as soon as it is out of your hands, like the sound of music, but remains a standing monument of your ignorance. If you excuse yourself by saying that you have not time for the study necessary to form a great painter, having to struggle against necessity, you yourself are only to blame; for the study of what is excellent is food both for mind and body. How many philosophers, born to great riches, have given them away, that they might not be retarded in their pursuits! /Chap. CCCLVII./--_The best Place for looking at a Picture._ /Let/ us suppose, that A B is the picture, receiving the light from D; I say, that whoever is placed between C and E, will see the picture very badly, particularly if it be painted in oil, or varnished; because it will shine, and will appear almost of the nature of a looking-glass. For these reasons, the nearer you go towards C, the less you will be able to see, because of the light from the window upon the picture, sending its reflection to that point. But if you place yourself between E D, you may conveniently see the picture, and the more so as you draw nearer to the point D, because that place is less liable to be struck by the reflected rays. [Illustration] /Chap. CCCLVIII./--_Of Judgment._ /There/ is nothing more apt to deceive us than our own judgment, in deciding on our own works; and we should derive more advantage from having our faults pointed out by our enemies, than by hearing the opinions of our friends, because they are too much like ourselves, and may deceive us as much as our own judgment. /Chap. CCCLIX./--_Of Employment anxiously wished for by Painters._ /And/ you, painter, who are desirous of great practice, understand, that if you do not rest it on the good foundation of Nature, you will labour with little honour and less profit; and if you do it on a good ground your works will be many and good, to your great honour and advantage. /Chap. CCCLX./--_Advice to Painters._ /A painter/ ought to study universal Nature, and reason much within himself on all he sees, making use of the most excellent parts that compose the species of every object before him. His mind will by this method be like a mirror, reflecting truly every object placed before it, and become, as it were, a second Nature. /Chap. CCCLXI./--_Of Statuary._ /To/ execute a figure in marble, you must first make a model of it in clay, or plaster, and when it is finished, place it in a square case, equally capable of receiving the block of marble intended to be shaped like it. Have some peg-like sticks to pass through holes made in the sides, and all round the case; push them in till every one touches the model, marking what remains of the sticks outwards with ink, and making a countermark to every stick and its hole, so that you may at pleasure replace them again. Then having taken out the model, and placed the block of marble in its stead, take so much out of it, till all the pegs go in at the same holes to the marks you had made. To facilitate the work, contrive your frame so that every part of it, separately, or all together, may be lifted up, except the bottom, which must remain under the marble. By this method you may chop it off with great facility[101]. /Chap. CCCLXII./--_On the Measurement and Division of Statues into Parts._ /Divide/ the head into twelve parts, each part into twelve degrees, each degree into twelve minutes, and these minutes into seconds[102]. /Chap. CCCLXIII./--_A Precept for the Painter._ /The/ painter who entertains no doubt of his own ability, will attain very little. When the work succeeds beyond the judgment, the artist acquires nothing; but when the judgment is superior to the work, he never ceases improving, if the love of gain do not retard his progress. /Chap. CCCLXIV./--_On the Judgment of Painters._ /When/ the work is equal to the knowledge and judgment of the painter, it is a bad sign; and when it surpasses the judgment, it is still worse, as is the case with those who wonder at having succeeded so well. But when the judgment surpasses the work, it is a perfectly good sign; and the young painter who possesses that rare disposition, will, no doubt, arrive at great perfection. He will produce few works, but they will be such as to fix the admiration of every beholder. /Chap. CCCLXV./--_That a Man ought not to trust to himself, but ought to consult Nature._ /Whoever/ flatters himself that he can retain in his memory all the effects of Nature, is deceived, for our memory is not so capacious; therefore consult Nature for every thing. THE END. BOOKS _PRINTED FOR J. TAYLOR._ 1. SKETCHES for COUNTRY HOUSES, VILLAS, and RURAL DWELLINGS; calculated for Persons of moderate Income, and for comfortable Retirement. Also some Designs for Cottages, which may be constructed of the simplest Materials; with Plans and general Estimates. By /John Plaw/. Elegantly engraved in Aquatinta on Forty-two Plates. Quarto, 1_l._ 11_s._ 6_d._ in boards. 2. FERME ORNÉE, or RURAL IMPROVEMENTS; a Series of domestic and ornamental Designs, suited to Parks, Plantations, Rides, Walks, Rivers, Farms, &c. consisting of Fences, Paddock-houses, a Bath, Dog-kennels, Pavilions, Farm-yards, Fishing-houses, Sporting-boxes, Shooting-lodges, single and double Cottages, &c. calculated for landscape and picturesque Effects. By /John Plaw/, Architect. Engraved in Aquatinta, on Thirty-eight Plates, with appropriate Scenery, Plans, and Explanations. Quarto; in boards, 1_l._ 11_s._ 6_d._ 3. RURAL ARCHITECTURE, or Designs from the simple Cottage to the decorated Villa, including some which have been executed. By /John Plaw/. On Sixty-two Plates, with Scenery, in Aquatinta. Half-bound, 2_l._ 2_s._ 4. HINTS for DWELLINGS, consisting of original Designs for Cottages, Farm-houses, Villas, &c. Plain and Ornamental; with Plans to each, in which strict Attention is paid, to unite Convenience and Elegance with Economy. Including some Designs for Town-houses. By /D. Laing/, Architect and Surveyor. Elegantly engraved on Thirty-four Plates in Aquatinta, with appropriate Scenery, Quarto, 1_l._ 5_s._ in boards. 5. SKETCHES for COTTAGES, VILLAS, &c. with their Plans and appropriate Scenery. By /John Soane/. To which are added, Six Designs for improving and embellishing Grounds, with Explanations by an Amateur, on Fifty-four Plates, elegantly engraved in Aquatinta; Folio, 2_l._ 12_s._ 6_d._ half-bound. 6. THE ARCHITECT and BUILDER's MISCELLANY, or Pocket Library; containing original picturesque Designs, in Architecture, for Cottages, Farm, Country, and Town Houses, Public Buildings, Temples, Green-houses, Bridges, Lodges, and Gates for Entrances to Parks and Pleasure-grounds, Stables, Monumental Tombs, Garden Seats, &c. By /Charles Middleton/, Architect; on Sixty Plates, Octavo, coloured, 1_l._ 1_s._ bound. 7. DESIGNS for GATES and RAILS, suitable to Parks, Pleasure-grounds, Balconies, &c. Also some Designs for Trellis Work, on Twenty-seven Plates. By /C. Middleton/, 6_s._ Octavo. Printed by /S. Gosnell/, Little Queen Street, Holborn, London. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote i1: Vasari, Vite de Pittori, edit. Della Valle, 8vo. Siena 1792, vol. v. p. 22. Du Fresne, in the life prefixed to the Italian editions of this Treatise on Painting. Venturi, Essai sur les Ouvrages de Leonard de Vinci, 4to. Paris, 1797, p. 3, 36.] [Footnote i2: Venturi, p. 3.] [Footnote i3: Vasari, 23.] [Footnote i4: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i5: Du Fresne. Vasari, 25.] [Footnote i6: Vasari, 26. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i7: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i8: Vasari, 26.] [Footnote i9: Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i10: Du Fresne. Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i11: Du Fresne. Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i12: Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i13: It is impossible in a translation to preserve the jingle between the name Vinci, and the Latin verb _vincit_ which occurs in the original.] [Footnote i14: Du Fresne, Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i15: Vasari, 22.] [Footnote i16: Vasari, 22 and 23.] [Footnote i17: Lomazzo, Trattato della Pittura, p. 282.] [Footnote i18: Vasari, 23. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i19: Venturi, 37.] [Footnote i20: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i21: Venturi, 36.] [Footnote i22: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i23: Vasari, 30. Lettere Pittoriche, vol. ii. p. 184.] [Footnote i24: Venturi, 3.] [Footnote i25: Suppl. to Life of L. da Vinci, in Vasari, 65. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i26: Venturi, 36; who mentions also, that Leonardo at this time constructed a machine for the theatre.] [Footnote i27: Venturi, p. 44.] [Footnote i28: Suppl. in Vasari, 74.] [Footnote i29: Suppl. in Vasari, 63.] [Footnote i30: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i31: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i32: De Piles, in the Life of Leonardo. See Lettere Pittoriche, vol. ii. p. 187.] [Footnote i33: Lettere Pittoriche, vol. ii. p. 187.] [Footnote i34: Du Fresne. Lettere Pitt. vol. ii. p. 186.] [Footnote i35: Vasari, 31, in a note.] [Footnote i36: Let. Pit. vol. ii. 183.] [Footnote i37: Additions to the Life in Vasari, 53. My worthy friend, Mr. Rigaud, who has more than once seen the original picture, gives this account of it: "The cutting of the wall for the sake of opening a door, was no doubt the effect of ignorance and barbarity, but it did not materially injure the painting; it only took away some of the feet under the table, entirely shaded. The true value of this picture consists in what was seen above the table. The door is only four feet wide, and cuts off only about two feet of the lower part of the picture. More damage has been done by subsequent quacks, who, within my own time, have undertaken to repair it."] [Footnote i38: Additions to the Life in Vasari, 53.] [Footnote i39: COPIES EXISTING IN MILAN OR ELSEWHERE. No. 1. That in the refectory of the fathers Osservanti della Pace: it was painted on the wall in 1561, by Gio. Paolo Lomazzo. 2. Another, copied on board, as a picture in the refectory of the Chierici Regolari di S. Paolo, in their college of St. Barnabas. This is perhaps the most beautiful that can be seen, only that it is not finished lower than the knees, and is in size about one eighth of the original. 3. Another on canvas, which was first in the church of S. Fedele, by Agostino S. Agostino, for the refectory of the Jesuits: since their suppression, it exists in that of the Orfani a S. Pietro, in Gessate. 4. Another of the said Lomazzo's, painted on the wall in the monastery Maggiore, very fine, and in good preservation. 5. Another on canvas, by an uncertain artist, with only the heads and half the bodies, in the Ambrosian library. 6. Another in the Certosa di Pavia, done by Marco d'Ogionno, a scholar of Leonardo's, on the wall. 7. Another in the possession of the monks Girolamini di Castellazzo fuori di Porta Lodovica, of the hand of the same Ogionno. 8. Another copy of this Last Supper in the refectory of the fathers of St. Benedict of Mantua. It was painted by Girolamo Monsignori, a Dominican friar, who studied much the works of Leonardo, and copied them excellently. 9. Another in the refectory of the fathers Osservanti di Lugano, of the hand of Bernardino Lovino; a valuable work, and much esteemed as well for its neatness and perfect imitation of the original, as for its own integrity, and being done by a scholar of Leonardo's. 10. A beautiful drawing of this famous picture is, or was lately, in the possession of Sig. Giuseppe Casati, king at arms. Supposed to be either the original design by Leonardo himself, or a sketch by one of his best scholars, to be used in painting some copy on a wall, or on canvas. It is drawn with a pen, on paper larger than usual, with a mere outline heightened with bistre. 11. Another in the refectory of the fathers Girolamini, in the monastery of St. Laurence, in the Escurial in Spain. It was presented to King Philip II. while he was in Valentia; and by his order placed in the said room where the monks dine, and is believed to be by some able scholar of Leonardo. 12. Another in St. Germain d'Auxerre, in France; ordered by King Francis I. when he came to Milan, and found he could not remove the original. There is reason to think this the work of Bernardino Lovino. 13. Another in France, in the castle of Escovens, in the possession of the Constable Montmorency. The original drawing for this picture is in the possession of his Britannic Majesty. See the life prefixed to Mr. Chamberlaine's publication of the Designs of Leonardo da Vinci, p. 5. An engraving from it is among those which Mr. Rogers published from drawings.] [Footnote i40: Vasari, 34. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i41: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i42: Vasari, 36. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i43: Vasari, 37. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i44: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i45: Suppl. in Vasari, 64.] [Footnote i46: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i47: Suppl. in Vasari, 75, 76, 77, 78.] [Footnote i48: Vasari, 38. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i49: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i50: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i51: Vasari, 39. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i52: Vasari, 39. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i53: Vasari, 39. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i54: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i55: Supp. in Vasari, 81.] [Footnote i56: Suppl. in Vasari, 68.] [Footnote i57: Vasari, 42. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i58: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i59: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i60: Venturi, 37.] [Footnote i61: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i62: Venturi, 37.] [Footnote i63: Venturi, 38.] [Footnote i64: Venturi, 37.] [Footnote i65: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i66: Venturi, 38.] [Footnote i67: Venturi, 38.] [Footnote i68: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i69: Vasari, 44. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i70: Vasari, 44. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i71: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i72: Suppl. in Vasari, 79, 80.] [Footnote i73: Suppl. in Vasari, 80.] [Footnote i74: Suppl. in Vasari, 65.] [Footnote i75: Vasari, 45. Du Fresne.] [Footnote i76: Venturi, 39. Suppl. in Vasari, 80.] [Footnote i77: Venturi, p. 4.] [Footnote i78: Sect. 1. Of the Descent of heavy Bodies, combined with the Rotation of the Earth. 2. Of the Earth divided into Particles. 3. Of the Earth and the Moon. 4. Of the Action of the Sun on the Sea. 5. Of the ancient State of the Earth. 6. Of the Flame and the Air. 7. Of Statics. 8. Of the Descent of heavy Bodies by inclined Planes. 9. Of the Water which one draws from a Canal. 10. Of Whirlpools. 11. Of Vision. 12. Of military Architecture. 13. Of some Instruments. 14. Two chymical Processes. 15. Of Method.] [Footnote i79: See the Life prefixed to Mr. Chamberlaine's publication of the Designs of Leonardo da Vinci, p. 11.] [Footnote i80: Fac similes of some of the pages of the original work, are also to be found in this publication.] [Footnote i81: P. 33.] [Footnote i82: "J. A. Mazenta died in 1635. He gave the designs for the fortifications of Livorno in Tuscany; and has written on the method of rendering the Adda navigable. Argelati Script. Mediol. vol. ii." Venturi, 33.] [Footnote i83: "We shall see afterwards that this man was Leonardo's heir: he had carried back these writings and drawings from France to Milan." Venturi, 34.] [Footnote i84: "This was in 1587." Venturi, p. 34.] [Footnote i85: "J. Amb. Mazenta made himself a Barnabite in 1590." Venturi, 34.] [Footnote i86: "The drawings and books of Vinci are come for the most part into the hands of Pompeo Leoni, who has obtained them from the son of Francisco Melzo. There are some also of these books in the possession of Guy Mazenta Lomazzo, Tempio della Pittura, in 4^o, Milano 1590, page 17." Venturi, 35.] [Footnote i87: "It is volume C. There is printed on it in gold, _Vidi Mazenta Patritii Mediolanensis liberalitate An. 1603_." Venturi, 35.] [Footnote i88: "He died in 1613." Venturi, 35.] [Footnote i89: "This is volume N, in the National Library. It is in folio, of a large size, and has 392 leaves: it bears on the cover this title: _Disegni di Macchine delle Arti secreti et altre Cose di Leonardo da Vinci, raccolte da Pompeo Leoni_." Venturi, 35.] [Footnote i90: P. 36.] [Footnote i91: "A memorial is preserved of this liberality by an inscription." Venturi, 36.] [Footnote i92: "This is marked at p. 1 of the same volume." Venturi, 36.] [Footnote i93: Venturi, 36.] [Footnote i94: "Lettere Pittoriche, vol. ii." Venturi, 36.] [Footnote i95: P. 36. His authority is Gerli, Disegni del Vinci, Milano, 1784, fol.] [Footnote i96: P. 42.] [Footnote i97: It is said, that this compilation is now in the Albani library. Venturi, 42.] [Footnote i98: The sketches to illustrate his meaning, were probably in Leonardo's original manuscripts so slight as to require that more perfect drawings should be made from them before they could be fit for publication.] [Footnote i99: The identical manuscript of this Treatise, formerly belonging to Mons. Chardin, one of the two copies from which the edition in Italian was printed, is now the property of Mr. Edwards of Pall Mall. Judging by the chapters as there numbered, it would appear to contain more than the printed edition; but this is merely owing to the circumstance that some of those which in the manuscript stand as distinct chapters, are in the printed edition consolidated together.] [Footnote i100: Vasari, p. 37, gives the initials N. N.] [Footnote i101: Which Venturi, p. 6, professes his intention of publishing from the manuscript collections of Leonardo.] [Footnote i102: Bibliotheca Smithiana, 4to. Ven. 1755. Venturi, 44.] [Footnote i103: Libreria Nani, 4to. Ven. 1776. Venturi, 44.] [Footnote i104: Gori Simbolæ literar. Flor. 1751, vol. viii. p. 66. Venturi, 44.] [Footnote i105: See his Traité des Pratiques Geometrales et Perspectives, 8vo. Paris, 1665.] [Footnote i106: P. 128.] [Footnote i107: P. 134.] [Footnote i108: He observed criminals when led to execution (Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 182; on the authority of Lomazzo); noted down any countenance that struck him (Vasari, 29); in forming the animal for the shield, composed it of parts selected from different real animals (Vasari, p. 27); and when he wanted characteristic heads, resorted to Nature (Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 181). All which methods are recommended by him in the course of the Treatise on Painting.] [Footnote i109: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i110: Venturi, 35, in a note.] [Footnote i111: Vasari, 23.] [Footnote i112: Vasari, 24.] [Footnote i113: Suppl. in Vasari, 67.] [Footnote i114: Vasari, 23.] [Footnote i115: Ibid.] [Footnote i116: Vasari, 45.] [Footnote i117: Additions to the life in Vasari, p. 47.] [Footnote i118: Suppl. in Vasari, 74.] [Footnote i119: Vasari, 24.] [Footnote i120: Vasari, 26.] [Footnote i121: Vasari, 29.] [Footnote i122: Additions to the life in Vasari, 61.] [Footnote i123: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 171.] [Footnote i124: Vasari, 29.] [Footnote i125: Ibid.] [Footnote i126: Ibid.] [Footnote i127: Venturi, 42.] [Footnote i128: Vasari, 39. In a note in Lettere Pittoriche, vol. ii. p. 174, on the before cited letter of Mariette, it is said that Bernardino Lovino was a scholar of Leonardo, and had in his possession the carton of St. Ann, which Leonardo had made for a picture which he was to paint in the church della Nunziata, at Florence. Francis I. got possession of it, and was desirous that Leonardo should execute it when he came into France, but without effect. It is known it was not done, as this carton went to Milan. Lomazzo, lib. ii. cap. 17. Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 174, in a note. A carton similar to this is now in the library of the Royal Academy, at London.] [Footnote i129: Vasari, p. 39, in a note.] [Footnote i130: Vasari, 41. In the suppl. to the life, Vasari, 68, the subject painted in the council-chamber at Florence is said to be the wonderful battle against Attila.] [Footnote i131: Du Fresne. Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i132: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i133: Additions to the Life in Vasari, 48.] [Footnote i134: Ibid.] [Footnote i135: Additions to the Life in Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i136: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 198.] [Footnote i137: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. p. 200.] [Footnote i138: Additions to the Life in Vasari, 68.] [Footnote i139: Ibid.] [Footnote i140: Ibid.] [Footnote i141: Ibid.] [Footnote i142: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 198.] [Footnote i143: Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i144: The Datary is the Pope's officer who nominates to vacant benefices.] [Footnote i145: Vasari, 44.] [Footnote i146: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i147: Du Fresne. Additions in Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i148: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 196.] [Footnote i149: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i150: Du Fresne. Additions to Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i151: Additions to Vasari, 59.] [Footnote i152: Additions to Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i153: Additions to Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i154: Additions in Vasari, 61.] [Footnote i155: Suppl. in Vasari, 68.] [Footnote i156: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i157: Additions to Vasari, 59.] [Footnote i158: Vasari, 25.] [Footnote i159: Vasari, 28.] [Footnote i160: Vasari, 29.] [Footnote i161: Vasari, 30. In p. 29, it is said in a note, that there is in the Medici gallery an Adoration of the Magi, by Leonardo, unfinished, which may probably be the picture of which Vasari speaks.] [Footnote i162: Vasari, 30.] [Footnote i163: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 184. The real fact is known to be, that it was engraven from a drawing made by Rubens himself, who, as I am informed, had in it altered the back-ground.] [Footnote i164: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 195.] [Footnote i165: Vasari, 30.] [Footnote i166: Vasari, 33.] [Footnote i167: Venturi, 4.] [Footnote i168: Venturi, 37.] [Footnote i169: Suppl. in Vasari, 68.] [Footnote i170: Vasari, 39.] [Footnote i171: Ibid.] [Footnote i172: Suppl. in Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i173: Vasari, 44.] [Footnote i174: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i175: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i176: Suppl. in Vasari, 61.] [Footnote i177: Ibid. 81.] [Footnote i178: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i179: Du Fresne. Add. to the Life in Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i180: Suppl. in Vasari, 69.] [Footnote i181: Du Fresne. Add. to Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i182: Du Fresne.] [Footnote i183: Add. in Vasari, 47.] [Footnote i184: Add. to Vasari, 48.] [Footnote i185: Add. in Vasari, 57.] [Footnote i186: Add. to Vasari, 58.] [Footnote i187: Add. to Vasari, 59.] [Footnote i188: Ibid.] [Footnote i189: Ibid. This is the picture lately exhibited in Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, and is said to have been purchased by the Earl of Warwick.] [Footnote i190: Add. to Vasari, 59.] [Footnote i191: Ibid.] [Footnote i192: Ibid.] [Footnote i193: Ibid.] [Footnote i194: Ibid. 60.] [Footnote i195: Ibid.] [Footnote i196: Ibid.] [Footnote i197: Ibid.] [Footnote i198: Ibid.] [Footnote i199: Lett. Pitt. vol. ii. 197.] [Footnote i200: Add. in Vasari, 60.] [Footnote i201: Add. in Vasari, 61.] [Footnote i202: Ibid.] [Footnote i203: Ibid.] [Footnote i204: Ibid.] [Footnote i205: Supp. in Vasari, 67.] [Footnote i206: Ibid. 68.] [Footnote i207: Supp. in Vasari, 75.] [Footnote i208: Ibid.] [Footnote i209: Supp. in Vasari, 80.] [Footnote i210: Supp. in Vasari, 81.] [Footnote 1: This passage has been by some persons much misunderstood, and supposed to require, that the student should be a deep proficient in perspective, before he commences the study of painting; but it is a knowledge of the leading principles only of perspective that the author here means, and without such a knowledge, which is easily to be acquired, the student will inevitably fall into errors, as gross as those humorously pointed out by Hogarth, in his Frontispiece to Kirby's Perspective.] [Footnote 2: See Chap. 351.] [Footnote 3: Not to be found in this work.] [Footnote 4: From this, and many other similar passages, it is evident, that the author intended at some future time to arrange his manuscript collections, and to publish them as separate treatises. That he did not do so is well known; but it is also a fact, that, in selecting from the whole mass of his collections the chapters of which the present work consists, great care appears in general to have been taken to extract also those to which there was any reference from any of the chapters intended for this work, or which from their subject were necessarily connected with them. Accordingly, the reader will find, in the notes to this translation, that all such chapters in any other part of the present work are uniformly pointed out, as have any relation to the respective passages in the text. This, which has never before been done, though indispensably necessary, will be found of singular use, and it was thought proper here, once for all, to notice it. In the present instance the chapters, referring to the subject in the text, are Chap. xvi. xvii. xviii. xix. xx. xxvi.; and though these do not afford complete information, yet it is to be remembered, that drawing from relievos is subject to the very same rules as drawing from Nature; and that, therefore, what is elsewhere said on that subject is also equally applicable to this.] [Footnote 5: The meaning of this is, that the last touches of light, such as the shining parts (which are always narrow), must be given sparingly. In short, that the drawing must be kept in broad masses as much as possible.] [Footnote 6: This is not an absolute rule, but it is a very good one for drawing of portraits.] [Footnote 7: See Chap. ci.] [Footnote 8: See the preceding chapter.] [Footnote 9: See the two preceding chapters.] [Footnote 10: Man being the highest of the animal creation, ought to be the chief object of study.] [Footnote 11: An intended Treatise, as it seems, on Anatomy, which however never was published; but there are several chapters in the present work on the subject of Anatomy, most of which will be found under the present head of Anatomy; and of such as could not be placed there, because they also related to some other branch, the following is a list by which they may be found: Chapters vi. vii. x. xi. xxxiv. xxxv. xxxvi. xxxvii. xxxviii. xxxix. xl. xli. xlii. xliii. xliv. xlv. xlvi. xlviii. xlix. l. li. lii. cxxix.] [Footnote 12: See chap. lxxxvii.] [Footnote 13: It does not appear that this intention was ever carried into execution; but there are many chapters in this work on the subject of motion, where all that is necessary for a painter in this branch will be found.] [Footnote 14: Anatomists have divided this muscle into four or five sections; but painters, following the ancient sculptors, shew only the three principal ones; and, in fact, we find that a greater number of them (as may often be observed in nature) gives a disagreeable meagreness to the subject. Beautiful nature does not shew more than three, though there may be more hid under the skin.] [Footnote 15: A treatise on weights, like many others, intended by this author, but never published.] [Footnote 16: See the next chapter.] [Footnote 17: It is believed that this treatise, like many others promised by the author, was never written; and to save the necessity of frequently repeating this fact, the reader is here informed, once for all, that in the life of the author prefixed to this edition, will be found an account of the works promised or projected by him, and how far his intentions have been carried into effect.] [Footnote 18: See chap. lxiv.] [Footnote 19: See in this work from chap. lx. to lxxxi.] [Footnote 20: See chapters lxi. lxiv.] [Footnote 21: See chapters civ. cliv.] [Footnote 22: The author here means to compare the different quickness of the motion of the head and the heel, when employed in the same action of jumping; and he states the proportion of the former to be three times that of the latter. The reason he gives for this is in substance, that as the head has but one motion to make, while in fact the lower part of the figure has three successive operations to perform at the places he mentions, three times the velocity, or, in other words, three times the degree of effort, is necessary in the head, the prime mover, to give the power of influencing the other parts; and the rule deducible from this axiom is, that where two different parts of the body concur in the same action, and one of them has to perform one motion only, while the other is to have several, the proportion of velocity or effort in the former must be regulated by the number of operations necessary in the latter.] [Footnote 23: It is explained in this work, or at least there is something respecting it in the preceding chapter, and in chap. cli.] [Footnote 24: The eyeball moving up and down to look at the hand, describes a part of a circle, from every point of which it sees it in an infinite variety of aspects. The hand also is moveable _ad infinitum_ (for it can go round the whole circle--see chap. lxxxvii.), and consequently shew itself in an infinite variety of aspects, which it is impossible for any memory to retain.] [Footnote 25: See chap. xx. clv.] [Footnote 26: About thirteen yards of our measure, the Florentine braccia, or cubit, by which the author measures, being 1 foot 10 inches 7-8ths English measure.] [Footnote 27: See chap. cxxi. and cccv.] [Footnote 28: It is supposed that the figures are to appear of the natural size, and not bigger. In that case, the measure of the first, to be of the exact dimension, should have its feet resting upon the bottom line; but as you remove it from that, it should diminish. No allusion is here intended to the distance at which a picture is to be placed from the eye.] [Footnote 29: The author does not mean here to say, that one historical picture cannot be hung over another. It certainly may, because, in viewing each, the spectator is at liberty (especially if they are subjects independent of each other) to shift his place so as to stand at the true point of sight for viewing every one of them; but in covering a wall with a succession of subjects from the same history, the author considers the whole as, in fact, but one picture, divided into compartments, and to be seen at one view, and which cannot therefore admit more than one point of sight. In the former case, the pictures are in fact so many distinct subjects unconnected with each other.] [Footnote 30: See chap. cccxlviii. This chapter is obscure, and may probably be made clear by merely stating it in other words. Leonardo objects to the use of both eyes, because, in viewing in that manner the objects here mentioned, two balls, one behind the other, the second is seen, which would not be the case, if the angle of the visual rays were not too big for the first object. Whoever is at all acquainted with optics, need not be told, that the visual rays commence in a single point in the centre, or nearly the centre of each eye, and continue diverging. But, in using both eyes, the visual rays proceed not from one and the same centre, but from a different centre in each eye, and intersecting each other, as they do a little before passing the first object, they become together broader than the extent of the first object, and consequently give a view of part of the second. On the contrary, in using but one eye, the visual rays proceed but from one centre; and as, therefore, there cannot be any intersection, the visual rays, when they reach the first object, are not broader than the first object, and the second is completely hidden. Properly speaking, therefore, in using both eyes we introduce more than one point of sight, which renders the perspective false in the painting; but in using one eye only, there can be, as there ought, but one point of sight. There is, however, this difference between viewing real objects and those represented in painting, that in looking at the former, whether we use one or both eyes, the objects, by being actually detached from the back ground, admit the visual rays to strike on them, so as to form a correct perspective, from whatever point they are viewed, and the eye accordingly forms a perspective of its own; but in viewing the latter, there is no possibility of varying the perspective; and, unless the picture is seen precisely under the same angle as it was painted under, the perspective in all other views must be false. This is observable in the perspective views painted for scenes at the playhouse. If the beholder is seated in the central line of the house, whether in the boxes or pit, the perspective is correct; but, in proportion as he is placed at a greater or less distance to the right or left of that line, the perspective appears to him more or less faulty. And hence arises the necessity of using but one eye in viewing a painting, in order thereby to reduce it to one point of sight.] [Footnote 31: Chap. xcvi. and civ.] [Footnote 32: See the Life of the Author prefixed, and chap. xx. and ci. of the present work.] [Footnote 33: The author here speaks of unpolished Nature; and indeed it is from such subjects only, that the genuine and characteristic operations of Nature are to be learnt. It is the effect of education to correct the natural peculiarities and defects, and, by so doing, to assimilate one person to the rest of the world.] [Footnote 34: See chap. cxxiii.] [Footnote 35: See chap. cclxiv.] [Footnote 36: See chapter cclxvii.] [Footnote 37: Sir Joshua Reynolds frequently inculcated these precepts in his lectures, and indeed they cannot be too often enforced.] [Footnote 38: Probably this would have formed a part of his intended Treatise on Light and Shadow, but no such proposition occurs in the present work.] [Footnote 39: See chapters cc. and ccix.] [Footnote 40: See chap. ccix.] [Footnote 41: This cannot be taken as an absolute rule; it must be left in a great measure to the judgment of the painter. For much graceful softness and grandeur is acquired, sometimes, by blending the lights of the figures with the light part of the ground; and so of the shadows; as Leonardo himself has observed in chapters cxciv. cxcv. and Sir Joshua Reynolds has often put in practice with success.] [Footnote 42: See chap. cclxv.] [Footnote 43: See chap. cxcvi.] [Footnote 44: He means here to say, that in proportion as the body interposed between the eye and the object is more or less transparent, the greater or less quantity of the colour of the body interposed will be communicated to the object.] [Footnote 45: See the note to chap. cc.] [Footnote 46: See the preceding chapter, and chap. cc.] [Footnote 47: The appearance of motion is lessened according to the distance, in the same proportion as objects diminish in size.] [Footnote 48: See chap. ccxvii. and ccxix.] [Footnote 49: See chap. ccxv. and ccxix.] [Footnote 50: This was intended to constitute a part of some book of Perspective, which we have not; but the rule here referred to will be found in chap. cccx. of the present work.] [Footnote 51: See chap. ccxv. and ccxvii.] [Footnote 52: No such work was ever published, nor, for any thing that appears, ever written.] [Footnote 53: The French translation of 1716 has a note on this chapter, saying, that the invention of enamel painting found out since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, would better answer to the title of this chapter, and also be a better method of painting. I must beg leave, however, to dissent from this opinion, as the two kinds of painting are so different, that they cannot be compared. Leonardo treats of oil painting, but the other is vitrification. Leonardo is known to have spent a great deal of time in experiments, of which this is a specimen, and it may appear ridiculous to the practitioners of more modern date, as he does not enter more fully into a minute description of the materials, or the mode of employing them. The principle laid down in the text appears to me to be simply this: to make the oil entirely evaporate from the colours by the action of fire, and afterwards to prevent the action of the air by the means of a glass, which in itself is an excellent principle, but not applicable, any more than enamel painting to large works.] [Footnote 54: It is evident that distemper or size painting is here meant.] [Footnote 55: Indian ink.] [Footnote 56: This rule is not without exception: see chap. ccxxxiv.] [Footnote 57: See chap. ccxxxviii.] [Footnote 58: See chap. ccxxxvii.] [Footnote 59: See chapters ccxlvii. cclxxiv. in the present work. Probably they were intended to form a part of a distinct treatise, and to have been ranged as propositions in that, but at present they are not so placed.] [Footnote 60: See chap. ccxlviii.] [Footnote 61: See chap. cclxxiv.] [Footnote 62: Although the author seems to have designed that this, and many other propositions to which he refers, should have formed a part of some regular work, and he has accordingly referred to them whenever he has mentioned them, by their intended numerical situation in that work, whatever it might be, it does not appear that he ever carried this design into execution. There are, however, several chapters in the present work, viz. ccxciii. cclxxxix. cclxxxv. ccxcv. in which the principle in the text is recognised, and which probably would have been transferred into the projected treatise, if he had ever drawn it up.] [Footnote 63: The note on the preceding chapter is in a great measure applicable to this, and the proposition mentioned in the text is also to be found in chapter ccxlvii. of the present work.] [Footnote 64: See the note on the chapter next but one preceding. The proposition in the text occurs in chap. ccxlvii. of the present work.] [Footnote 65: Not in this work.] [Footnote 66: I do not know a better comment on this passage than Felibien's Examination of Le Brun's Picture of the Tent of Darius. From this (which has been reprinted with an English translation, by Colonel Parsons in 1700, in folio) it will clearly appear, what the chain of connexion is between every colour there used, and its nearest neighbour, and consequently a rule may be formed from it with more certainty and precision than where the student is left to develope it for himself, from the mere inspection of different examples of colouring.] [Footnote 67: See chap. ccxxiii. ccxxxvii. cclxxiv. cclxxxii. of the present work. We have before remarked, that the propositions so frequently referred to by the author, were never reduced into form, though apparently he intended a regular work in which they were to be included.] [Footnote 68: No where in this work.] [Footnote 69: This is evident in many of Vandyke's portraits, particularly of ladies, many of whom are dressed in black velvet; and this remark will in some measure account for the delicate fairness which he frequently gives to the female complexion.] [Footnote 70: These propositions, any more than the others mentioned in different parts of this work, were never digested into a regular treatise, as was evidently intended by the author, and consequently are not to be found, except perhaps in some of the volumes of the author's manuscript collections.] [Footnote 71: See chap. ccxciii. cccvii. cccviii.] [Footnote 72: See chap. cclxxxvii.] [Footnote 73: This book on perspective was never drawn up.] [Footnote 74: See chap. ccxcii.] [Footnote 75: See chap. ccxii. ccxlviii. cclv.] [Footnote 76: There is no work of this author to which this can at present refer, but the principle is laid down in chapters cclxxxiv. cccvi. of the present treatise.] [Footnote 77: See chapters cccvii. cccxxii.] [Footnote 78: See chap. cxvi. cxxi. cccv.] [Footnote 79: See chap. cccxiii. and cccxxiii.] [Footnote 80: To our obtaining a correct idea of the magnitude and distance of any object seen from afar, it is necessary that we consider how much of distinctness an object loses at a distance (from the mere interposition of the air), as well as what it loses in size; and these two considerations must unite before we can decidedly pronounce as to its distance or magnitude. This calculation, as to distinctness, must be made upon the idea that the air is clear, as, if by any accident it is otherwise, we shall (knowing the proportion in which clear air dims a prospect) be led to conclude this farther off than it is, and, to justify that conclusion, shall suppose its real magnitude correspondent with the distance, at which from its degree of distinctness it appears to be. In the circumstance remarked in the text there is, however, a great deception; the fact is, that the colour and the minute parts of the object are lost in the fog, while the size of it is not diminished in proportion; and the eye being accustomed to see objects diminished in size at a great distance, supposes this to be farther off than it is, and consequently imagines it larger.] [Footnote 81: This proposition, though undoubtedly intended to form a part of some future work, which never was drawn up, makes no part of the present.] [Footnote 82: See chap. cccvii.] [Footnote 83: Vide chap. ccxcii. ccciii.] [Footnote 84: See chapter ccxcviii.] [Footnote 85: This was probably to have been a part of some other work, but it does not occur in this.] [Footnote 86: Cento braccia, or cubits. The Florence braccio is one foot ten inches seven eighths, English measure.] [Footnote 87: Probably the Author here means yellow lilies, or fleurs de lis.] [Footnote 88: That point is always found in the horizon, and is called the point of sight, or the vanishing point.] [Footnote 89: See chap. cccxx.] [Footnote 90: See chap. cccxvii.] [Footnote 91: This position has been already laid down in chapter cxxiv. (and will also be found in chapter cccxlviii.); and the reader is referred to the note on that passage, which will also explain that in the text, for further illustration. It may, however, be proper to remark, that though the author has here supposed both objects conveyed to the eye by an angle of the same extent, they cannot, in fact, be so seen, unless one eye be shut; and the reason is this: if viewed with both eyes, there will be two points of sight, one in the centre of each eye; and the rays from each of these to the objects must of course be different, and will consequently form different angles.] [Footnote 92: The braccio is one foot ten inches and seven eighths English measure.] [Footnote 93: i.e. To be abridged according to the rules of perspective.] [Footnote 94: See chap. cxxii.] [Footnote 95: The whole of this chapter, like the next but one preceding, depends on the circumstance of there being in fact two points of sight, one in the centre of each eye, when an object is viewed with both eyes. In natural objects the effect which this circumstance produces is, that the rays from each point of sight, diverging as they extend towards the object, take in not only that, but some part also of the distance behind it, till at length, at a certain distance behind it, they cross each other; whereas, in a painted representation, there being no real distance behind the object, but the whole being a flat surface, it is impossible that the rays from the points of sight should pass beyond that flat surface; and as the object itself is on that flat surface, which is the real extremity of the view, the eyes cannot acquire a sight of any thing beyond.] [Footnote 96: A well-known painter at Florence, contemporary with Leonardo da Vinci, who painted several altar-pieces and other public works.] [Footnote 97: See chap. cxxiv. and cccxlviii.] [Footnote 98: See chap. x.] [Footnote 99: See chap. cci.] [Footnote 100: Leonardo da Vinci was remarkably fond of this kind of invention, and is accused of having lost a great deal of time that way.] [Footnote 101: The method here recommended, was the general and common practice at that time, and continued so with little, if any variation, till lately. But about thirty years ago, the late Mr. Bacon invented an entirely new method, which, as better answering the purpose, he constantly used, and from him others have also adopted it into practice.] [Footnote 102: This may be a good method of dividing the figure for the purpose of reducing from large to small, or _vice versâ_; but it not being the method generally used by the painters for measuring their figures, as being too minute, this chapter was not introduced amongst those of general proportions.] 
26716	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 26716-h.htm or 26716-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/6/7/1/26716/26716-h/26716-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/6/7/1/26716/26716-h.zip) Illustrated Library Edition THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE Also MUNERA PULVERIS PRE-RAPHAELITISM--ARATRA PENTELICI THE ETHICS OF THE DUST FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING by JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. [Illustration: _Portrait of Carlyle_ Etched by E. A. Fowle--From Painting by Samuel Lawrence] [Illustration] Boston and New York Colonial Press Company Publishers CONTENTS. THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. PAGE LECTURE I. WORK, 17 LECTURE II. TRAFFIC, 44 LECTURE III. WAR, 66 MUNERA PULVERIS. PREFACE, 97 CHAP. I. DEFINITIONS, 111 II. STORE-KEEPING, 125 III. COIN-KEEPING, 151 IV. COMMERCE, 170 V. GOVERNMENT, 181 VI. MASTERSHIP, 204 APPENDICES, 222 PRE-RAPHAELITISM. PREFACE, 235 PRE-RAPHAELITISM, 237 ARATRA PENTELICI. PREFACE, 283 LECTURE I. OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS, 287 II. IDOLATRY, 304 III. IMAGINATION, 322 IV. LIKENESS, 350 V. STRUCTURE, 372 VI. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS, 395 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND, 415 NOTES ON POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA, 435 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. ARATRA PENTELICI. PLATES FACING PAGE I. PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA, 300 II. THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE, 302 III. THE WARNING TO THE KINGS, 302 IV. THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA, 308 V. TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO, 333 VI. ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH, 334 VII. ARCHAIC, CENTRAL AND DECLINING ART OF GREECE, 355 VIII. THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE MAN, 366 IX. APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENÆ, 368 X. MARBLE MASONRY IN THE DUOMO OF VERONA, 381 XI. THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE, 382 XII. BRANCH OF PHILLYREA. DARK PURPLE, 390 XIII. GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED INCISION, 392 XIV. APOLLO AND THE PYTHON. HERACLES AND THE NEMEAN LION, 400 XV. HERA OF ARGOS. ZEUS OF SYRACUSE, 401 XVI. DEMETER OF MESSENE. HERA OF CROSSUS, 402 XVII. ATHENA OF THURIUM. SEREIE LIGEIA OF TERINA, 402 XVIII. ARTEMIS OF SYRACUSE. HERA OF LACINIAN CAPE, 404 XIX. ZEUS OF MESSENE. AJAX OF OPUS, 405 XX. GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE, 407 XXI. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY, 409 FIGURE PAGE 1. SPECIMEN OF PLATE, 293 2. WOODCUT, 323 3. FIGURE ON GREEK TYPE OF VASES, 326 4. EARLY DRAWING OF THE MYTH 330 5. CUT, "GIVE IT TO ME," 332 6. ENGRAVING ON COIN, 335 7. DRAWING OF FISH. BY TURNER, 362 8. IRON BAR, 379 9. DIAGRAM OF LEAF, 391 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE THREE LECTURES ON WORK, TRAFFIC AND WAR PREFACE. Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandle, and including the lower moors of Addington, and the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of the hand which 'giveth rain from heaven;' no pastures ever lightened in spring time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness--fain-hidden--yet full-confessed. The place remains, or, until a few months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in its larger features; but, with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning,--not in Pisan Maremma--not by Campagna tomb,--not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore,--as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of that English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety--any frantic saying or godless thought--more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defilings of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes; they having neither energy to cart it away, nor decency enough to dig it into the ground, thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in a little pool, behind some houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria; and brick-layers' refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond; and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men, with one day's work, could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm; and every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels, from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor will be; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of English waters. When I last left them, I walked up slowly through the back streets of Croydon, from the old church to the hospital; and, just on the left, before coming up to the crossing of the High Street, there was a new public-house built. And the front of it was built in so wise manner, that a recess of two feet was left below its front windows, between them and the street-pavement--a recess too narrow for any possible use (for even if it had been occupied by a seat, as in old time it might have been, everybody walking along the street would have fallen over the legs of the reposing wayfarers). But, by way of making this two feet depth of freehold land more expressive of the dignity of an establishment for the sale of spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by an imposing iron railing, having four or five spearheads to the yard of it, and six feet high; containing as much iron and iron-work, indeed as could well be put into the space; and by this stately arrangement, the little piece of dead ground within, between wall and street, became a protective receptacle of refuse; cigar ends, and oyster shells, and the like, such as an open-handed English street-populace habitually scatters from its presence, and was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary methods. Now the iron bars which, uselessly (or in great degree worse than uselessly), enclosed this bit of ground, and made it pestilent, represented a quantity of work which would have cleansed the Carshalton pools three times over;--of work, partly cramped and deadly, in the mine; partly fierce[1] and exhaustive, at the furnace; partly foolish and sedentary, of ill-taught students making bad designs: work from the beginning to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches of it, venomous, deathful, and miserable. Now, how did it come to pass that this work was done instead of the other; that the strength and life of the English operative were spent in defiling ground, instead of redeeming it; and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of medicinal fresh air, and pure water? There is but one reason for it, and at present a conclusive one,--that the capitalist can charge per-centage on the work in the one case, and cannot in the other. If, having certain funds for supporting labour at my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground in order, my money is, in that function, spent once for all; but if I pay them to dig iron out of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for the ground, and per-centage both on the manufacture and the sale, and make my capital profitable in these three bye-ways. The greater part of the profitable investment of capital, in the present day, is in operations of this kind, in which the public is persuaded to buy something of no use to it, on production, or sale, of which, the capitalist may charge per-centage; the said public remaining all the while under the persuasion that the per-centages thus obtained are real national gains, whereas, they are merely filchings out of partially light pockets, to swell heavy ones. Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, to make himself more conspicuous to drunkards. The public-housekeeper on the other side of the way presently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. Both are, as to their _relative_ attractiveness to customers of taste, just where they were before; but they have lost the price of the railings; which they must either themselves finally lose, or make their aforesaid customers of taste pay, by raising the price of their beer, or adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their customers, are thus poorer by precisely what the capitalist has gained; and the value of the work itself, meantime, has been lost to the nation; the iron bars in that form and place being wholly useless. It is this mode of taxation of the poor by the rich which is referred to in the text (page 31), in comparing the modern acquisitive power of capital with that of the lance and sword; the only difference being that the levy of black mail in old times was by force, and is now by cozening. The old rider and reiver frankly quartered himself on the publican for the night; the modern one merely makes his lance into an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy it. One comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating pedlar; but the result, to the injured person's pocket, is absolutely the same. Of course many useful industries mingle with, and disguise the useless ones; and in the habits of energy aroused by the struggle, there is a certain direct good. It is far better to spend four thousand pounds in making a good gun, and then to blow it to pieces, than to pass life in idleness. Only do not let it be called 'political economy.' There is also a confused notion in the minds of many persons, that the gathering of the property of the poor into the hands of the rich does no ultimate harm; since, in whosesoever hands it may be, it must be spent at last, and thus, they think, return to the poor again. This fallacy has been again and again exposed; but grant the plea true, and the same apology may, of course, be made for black mail, or any other form of robbery. It might be (though practically it never is) as advantageous for the nation that the robber should have the spending of the money he extorts, as that the person robbed should have spent it. But this is no excuse for the theft. If I were to put a turnpike on the road where it passes my own gate, and endeavour to exact a shilling from every passenger, the public would soon do away with my gate, without listening to any plea on my part that 'it was as advantageous to them, in the end, that I should spend their shillings, as that they themselves should.' But if, instead of out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only persuade them to come in and buy stones, or old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my ground, I may rob them to the same extent, and be, moreover, thanked as a public benefactor, and promoter of commercial prosperity. And this main question for the poor of England--for the poor of all countries--is wholly omitted in every common treatise on the subject of wealth. Even by the labourers themselves, the operation of capital is regarded only in its effect on their immediate interests; never in the far more terrific power of its appointment of the kind and the object of labour. It matters little, ultimately, how much a labourer is paid for making anything; but it matters fearfully what the thing is, which he is compelled to make. If his labour is so ordered as to produce food, and fresh air, and fresh water, no matter that his wages are low;--the food and fresh air and water will be at last there; and he will at last get them. But if he is paid to destroy food and fresh air or to produce iron bars instead of them,--the food and air will finally _not_ be there, and he will _not_ get them, to his great and final inconvenience. So that, conclusively, in political as in household economy, the great question is, not so much what money you have in your pocket, as what you will buy with it, and do with it. I have been long accustomed, as all men engaged in work of investigation must be, to hear my statements laughed at for years, before they are examined or believed; and I am generally content to wait the public's time. But it has not been without displeased surprise that I have found myself totally unable, as yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to force this plain thought into my readers' heads,--that the wealth of nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers; and that the real good of all work, and of all commerce, depends on the final worth of the thing you make, or get by it. This is a practical enough statement, one would think: but the English public has been so possessed by its modern school of economists with the notion that Business is always good, whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit; and that buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of what you buy or sell,--that it seems impossible to gain so much as a patient hearing for any inquiry respecting the substantial result of our eager modern labours. I have never felt more checked by the sense of this impossibility than in arranging the heads of the following three lectures, which, though delivered at considerable intervals of time, and in different places, were not prepared without reference to each other. Their connection would, however, have been made far more distinct, if I had not been prevented, by what I feel to be another great difficulty in addressing English audiences, from enforcing, with any decision, the common, and to me the most important, part of their subjects. I chiefly desired (as I have just said) to question my hearers--operatives, merchants, and soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the _business_ they had in hand; and to know from them what they expected or intended their manufacture to come to, their selling to come to, and their killing to come to. That appeared the first point needing determination before I could speak to them with any real utility or effect. 'You craftsmen--salesmen--swordsmen,--do but tell me clearly what you want, then, if I can say anything to help you, I will; and if not, I will account to you as I best may for my inability.' But in order to put this question into any terms, one had first of all to face the difficulty just spoken of--to me for the present insuperable,--the difficulty of knowing whether to address one's audience as believing, or not believing, in any other world than this. For if you address any average modern English company as believing in an Eternal life, and endeavour to draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as to their present business, they will forthwith tell you that what you say is very beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on the contrary, you frankly address them as unbelievers in Eternal life, and try to draw any consequences from that unbelief,--they immediately hold you for an accursed person, and shake off the dust from their feet at you. And the more I thought over what I had got to say, the less I found I could say it, without some reference to this intangible or intractable part of the subject. It made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war, whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead down a certain quantity of red clay into a level line, as in a brick field; or whether, out of every separately Christian-named portion of the ruinous heap, there went out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of battle, some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released. It made all the difference, in speaking of the possible range of commerce, whether one assumed that all bargains related only to visible property--or whether property, for the present invisible, but nevertheless real, was elsewhere purchasable on other terms. It made all the difference, in addressing a body of men subject to considerable hardship, and having to find some way out of it--whether one could confidentially say to them, 'My friends,--you have only to die, and all will be right;' or whether one had any secret misgiving that such advice was more blessed to him that gave, than to him that took it. And therefore the deliberate reader will find, throughout these lectures, a hesitation in driving points home, and a pausing short of conclusions which he will feel I would fain have come to; hesitation which arises wholly from this uncertainty of my hearers' temper. For I do not now speak, nor have I ever spoken, since the time of my first forward youth, in any proselyting temper, as desiring to persuade any one of what, in such matters, I thought myself; but, whomsoever I venture to address, I take for the time his creed as I find it; and endeavour to push it into such vital fruit as it seems capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a great part of the existing English people, that they are in possession of a book which tells them, straight from the lips of God all they ought to do, and need to know. I have read that book, with as much care as most of them, for some forty years; and am thankful that, on those who trust it, I can press its pleadings. My endeavour has been uniformly to make them trust it more deeply than they do; trust it, not in their own favourite verses only, but in the sum of all; trust it not as a fetish or talisman, which they are to be saved by daily repetitions of; but as a Captain's order, to be heard and obeyed at their peril. I was always encouraged by supposing my hearers to hold such belief. To these, if to any, I once had hope of addressing, with acceptance, words which insisted on the guilt of pride, and the futility of avarice; from these, if from any, I once expected ratification of a political economy, which asserted that the life was more than the meat, and the body than raiment; and these, it once seemed to me, I might ask without accusation or fanaticism, not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the bestowal of their heart's treasure, to separate themselves from the crowd of whom it is written, 'After all these things do the Gentiles seek.' It cannot, however, be assumed, with any semblance of reason, that a general audience is now wholly, or even in majority, composed of these religious persons. A large portion must always consist of men who admit no such creed; or who, at least, are inaccessible to appeals founded on it. And as, with the so-called Christian, I desired to plead for honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in life,--with the so-called Infidel, I desired to plead for an honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in death. The dilemma is inevitable. Men must either hereafter live, or hereafter die; fate may be bravely met, and conduct wisely ordered, on either expectation; but never in hesitation between ungrasped hope, and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for death; and in mortality, so far as to avoid preparation for anything after death. Whereas, a wise man will at least hold himself prepared for one or other of two events, of which one or other is inevitable; and will have all things in order, for his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening. Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few Christians so convinced of the splendour of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions, than they would have been if the Queen had sent for them to live at Court: nor has the Church's most ardent 'desire to depart, and be with Christ,' ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure. On the contrary, a brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons, and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it assumes that such a belief is inconsistent with either purity of character, or energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him; nor does the anticipation of death to-morrow suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed make the deviceless person more contented in his dulness; but it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising, nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be purer under the conviction that all its evil may in a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a moment redeemed; and that the sigh of repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain,--than it may be under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that 'what a man soweth that shall he also reap'--or others reap,--when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in darkness, but lies down therein. But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bitterness of soul, or the offence given by the conduct of those who claim higher hope, may have rendered this painful creed the only possible one, there is an appeal to be made, more secure in its ground than any which can be addressed to happier persons. I would fain, if I might offencelessly, have spoken to them as if none others heard; and have said thus: Hear me, you dying men, who will soon be deaf for ever. For these others, at your right hand and your left, who look forward to a state of infinite existence, in which all their errors will be overruled, and all their faults forgiven; for these, who, stained and blackened in the battle smoke of mortality, have but to dip themselves for an instant in the font of death, and to rise renewed of plumage, as a dove that is covered with silver, and her feathers like gold; for these, indeed, it may be permissible to waste their numbered moments, through faith in a future of innumerable hours; to these, in their weakness, it may be conceded that they should tamper with sin which can only bring forth fruit of righteousness, and profit by the iniquity which, one day, will be remembered no more. In them, it may be no sign of hardness of heart to neglect the poor, over whom they know their Master is watching; and to leave those to perish temporarily, who cannot perish eternally. But, for you, there is no such hope, and therefore no such excuse. This fate, which you ordain for the wretched, you believe to be all their inheritance; you may crush them, before the moth, and they will never rise to rebuke you;--their breath, which fails for lack of food, once expiring, will never be recalled to whisper against you a word of accusing;--they and you, as you think, shall lie down together in the dust, and the worms cover you;--and for them there shall be no consolation, and on you no vengeance,--only the question murmured above your grave: 'Who shall repay him what he hath done?' Is it therefore easier for you in your heart to inflict the sorrow for which there is no remedy? Will you take, wantonly, this little all of his life from your poor brother, and make his brief hours long to him with pain? Will you be readier to the injustice which can never be redressed; and niggardly of mercy which you _can_ bestow but once, and which, refusing, you refuse for ever? I think better of you, even of the most selfish, than that you would do this, well understood. And for yourselves, it seems to me, the question becomes not less grave, in these curt limits. If your life were but a fever fit,--the madness of a night, whose follies were all to be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how you fretted away the sickly hours,--what toys you snatched at, or let fall,--what visions you followed wistfully with the deceived eyes of sleepless phrenzy. Is the earth only an hospital? Play, if you care to play, on the floor of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into what crowns please you; gather the dust of it for treasure, and die rich in that, clutching at the black motes in the air with your dying hands;--and yet, it may be well with you. But if this life be no dream, and the world no hospital; if all the peace and power and joy you can ever win, must be won now; and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never;--will you still, throughout the puny totality of your life, weary yourselves in the fire for vanity? If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there none you might presently take? was this grass of the earth made green for your shroud only, not for your bed? and can you never lie down _upon_ it, but only _under_ it? The heathen, to whose creed you have returned, thought not so. They knew that life brought its contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all contest: No proud one! no jewelled circlet flaming through Heaven above the height of the unmerited throne; only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, through a few years of peace. It should have been of gold, they thought; but Jupiter was poor; this was the best the god could give them. Seeking a greater than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any happiness to be found for them--only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be of _wild_ olive, mark you:--the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of branch; only with soft snow of blossom, and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thornset stem; no fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp embroidery! But this, such as it is, you may win while yet you live; type of grey honour and sweet rest.[2] Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain;--these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things,--these may yet be here your riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near Wolverhampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as the "keeper" of a blast furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged eighteen, and Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount of cinders, and ought to have been run out at 7.30 P.M. But Snape and his mates, engaged in talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and in the meantime, the iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water was contained. Just as the men had stripped, and were proceeding to tap the furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down its front and let loose on them the molten metal, which instantaneously consumed Gardner; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the threshold, Swift survived to reach the hospital, where he died too. In further illustration of this matter, I beg the reader to look at the article on the 'Decay of the English Race,' in the '_Pall-Mall Gazette_' of April 17, of this year; and at the articles on the 'Report of the Thames Commission,' in any journals of the same date. [2] [Greek: melitoessa, aethlôn g' eneken]. THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. LECTURE I. _WORK._ (_Delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at Camberwell._) My Friends,--I have not come among you to-night to endeavour to give you an entertaining lecture; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you some plain, but necessary questions. I have seen and known too much of the struggle for life among our labouring population, to feel at ease, even under any circumstances, in inviting them to dwell on the trivialities of my own studies; but, much more, as I meet to-night, for the first time, the members of a working Institute established in the district in which I have passed the greater part of my life, I am desirous that we should at once understand each other, on graver matters. I would fain tell you, with what feelings, and with what hope, I regard this Institution, as one of many such, now happily established throughout England, as well as in other countries;--Institutions which are preparing the way for a great change in all the circumstances of industrial life; but of which the success must wholly depend upon our clearly understanding the circumstances and necessary _limits_ of this change. No teacher can truly promote the cause of education, until he knows the conditions of the life for which that education is to prepare his pupil. And the fact that he is called upon to address you nominally, as a 'Working Class,' must compel him, if he is in any wise earnest or thoughtful, to inquire in the outset, on what you yourselves suppose this class distinction has been founded in the past, and must be founded in the future. The manner of the amusement, and the matter of the teaching, which any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on our first understanding from you, whether you think the distinction heretofore drawn between working men and others, is truly or falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands? do you wish it to be modified? or do you think the object of education is to efface it, and make us forget it for ever? Let me make myself more distinctly understood. We call this--you and I--a 'Working Men's' Institute, and our college in London, a 'Working Men's' College. Now, how do you consider that these several institutes differ, or ought to differ, from 'idle men's' institutes and 'idle men's' colleges? Or by what other word than 'idle' shall I distinguish those whom the happiest and wisest of working men do not object to call the 'Upper Classes?' Are there really upper classes,--are there lower? How much should they always be elevated, how much always depressed? And, gentlemen and ladies--I pray those of you who are here to forgive me the offence there may be in what I am going to say. It is not _I_ who wish to say it. Bitter voices say it; voices of battle and of famine through all the world, which must be heard some day, whoever keeps silence. Neither is it to _you_ specially that I say it. I am sure that most now present know their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing your whole class, which errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore the less terribly. Wilful error is limited by the will, but what limit is there to that of which we are unconscious? Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these workmen, and ask them, also as representing a great multitude, what they think the 'upper classes' are, and ought to be, in relation to them. Answer, you workmen who are here, as you would among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how you would have me call those classes. Am I to call them--would _you_ think me right in calling them--the idle classes? I think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as if I were not treating my subject honestly, or speaking from my heart, if I went on under the supposition that all rich people were idle. You would be both unjust and unwise if you allowed me to say that;--not less unjust than the rich people who say that all the poor are idle, and will never work if they can help it, or more than they can help. For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a year; and many a man of large fortune is busier than his errand-boy, and never would think of stopping in the street to play marbles. So that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working class--strong and happy--among both rich and poor; there is an idle class--weak, wicked, and miserable--among both rich and poor. And the worst of the misunderstandings arising between the two orders come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class habitually contemplate the foolish of the other. If the busy rich people watched and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be right; and if the busy poor people watched and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right. But each class has a tendency to look for the faults of the other. A hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an idle beggar; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant of the licentious luxury of the rich. And what is severe judgment in the minds of the just men of either class, becomes fierce enmity in the unjust--but among the unjust _only_. None but the dissolute among the poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage their houses and divide their property. None but the dissolute among the rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the poor. There is, then, no class distinction between idle and industrious people; and I am going to-night to speak only of the industrious. The idle people we will put out of our thoughts at once--they are mere nuisances--what ought to be done with _them_, we'll talk of at another time. But there are class distinctions, among the industrious themselves; tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to every degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain and of human power--distinctions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach of man's soul and body. These separations we will study, and the laws of them, among energetic men only, who, whether they work or whether they play, put their strength into the work, and their strength into the game; being in the full sense of the word 'industrious,' one way or another--with a purpose, or without. And these distinctions are mainly four: I. Between those who work, and those who play. II. Between those who produce the means of life, and those who consume them. III. Between those who work with the head, and those who work with the hand. IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work foolishly. For easier memory, let us say we are going to oppose, in our examination.-- I. Work to play; II. Production to consumption; III. Head to Hand; and, IV. Sense to nonsense. I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who work and the classes who play. Of course we must agree upon a definition of these terms,--work and play,--before going farther. Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety of definition, but for plain use of the words, 'play' is an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no determined end; and work is a thing done because it ought to be done, and with a determined end. You play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance. That is as hard work as anything else; but it amuses you, and it has no result but the amusement. If it were done as an ordered form of exercise, for health's sake, it would become work directly. So, in like manner, whatever we do to please ourselves, and only for the sake of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is 'play,' the 'pleasing thing,' not the useful thing. Play may be useful in a secondary sense (nothing is indeed more useful or necessary); but the use of it depends on its being spontaneous. Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the playing class in England spend their lives in playing at. The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing game; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that than at foot-ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is absolutely without purpose; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money--he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he _may_ get it. 'What will you make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there,--rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,--a ghastly heap of fermenting brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore,--you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's cricket ground without the turf,--a huge billiard table without the cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit; but mainly a billiard table, after all. Well, the first great English game is this playing at counters. It differs from the rest in that it appears always to be producing money, while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce money. There's a great difference between 'winning' money and 'making' it; a great difference between getting it out of another man's pocket into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means the same thing as making it; the tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint; and much of the apparent gain (so called), in commerce, is only a form of taxation on carriage or exchange. Our next great English game, however, hunting and shooting, is costly altogether; and how much we are fined for it annually in land, horses, gamekeepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies that beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now: but note only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For through horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher classes everywhere call 'Play,' in distinction from all other plays; that is--gambling; by no means a beneficial or recreative game: and, through game-preserving, you get also some curious laying out of ground; that beautiful arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse and black-cock--so many brace to the acre, and men and women--so many brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic builders and surveyors--the angelic builders who build the 'many mansions' up above there; and the angelic surveyors, who measured that four-square city with their measuring reeds--I wonder what they think, or are supposed to think, of the laying out of ground by this nation, which has set itself, as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather fact for word, in the persons of those poor whom its Master left to represent him, what that Master said of himself--that foxes and birds had homes, but He none. Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we must put the ladies' game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of games. I saw a brooch at a jeweller's in Bond Street a fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and without any singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000_l._ And I wish I could tell you what this 'play' costs, altogether, in England, France, and Russia annually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, I like it; nay, I don't see it played quite as much as I would fain have it. You ladies like to lead the fashion:--by all means lead it--lead it thoroughly, lead it far enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else nicely. Lead the _fashions for the poor_ first; make _them_ look well, and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time among your peasantry are not pretty ones; their doublets are too irregularly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly through them. Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could show you if I had time. There's playing at literature, and playing at art--very different, both, from working at literature, or working at art, but I've no time to speak of these. I pass to the greatest of all--the play of plays, the great gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best to play at,--the game of War. It is entrancingly pleasant to the imagination; the facts of it, not always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely than for any other sport; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt, but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colours: of course we could fight better in grey, and without feathers; but all nations have agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats and balls are very costly; our English and French bats, with the balls and wickets, even those which we don't make any use of, costing, I suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annually to each nation; all of which, you know is paid for by hard labourer's work in the furrow and furnace. A costly game!--not to speak of its consequences; I will say at present nothing of these. The mere immediate cost of all these plays is what I want you to consider; they all cost deadly work somewhere, as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight fails over the diamonds; the weaver, whose arm fails over the web; the iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace--_they_ know what work is--they, who have all the work, and none of the play, except a kind they have named for themselves down in the black north country, where 'play' means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example for philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense of the word 'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and the red and black country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of England, who think 'one moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble man,' this is what you have brought the word 'play' to mean, in the heart of merry England! You may have your fluting and piping; but there are sad children sitting in the market-place, who indeed cannot say to you, 'We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced:' but eternally shall say to you, 'We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.' This, then, is the first distinction between the 'upper and lower' classes. And this is one which is by no means necessary; which indeed must, in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent abolished. Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish; but not for men: that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing nothing in them: that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may not lose its moments; and the best grace before meat, the consciousness that we have justly earned our dinner. And when we have this much of plain Christianity preached to us again, and enough respect for what we regard as inspiration, as not to think that 'Son, go work to-day in my vineyard,' means 'Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard,' we shall all be workers, in one way or another; and this much at least of the distinction between 'upper' and 'lower' forgotten. II. I pass then to our second distinction; between the rich and poor, between Dives and Lazarus,--distinction which exists more sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever in the world, Pagan or Christian, till now. I will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for fifteen francs,--12_s._ 6_d._,--is nothing for a rich man to give for a couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on the same day are worth putting side by side. 'Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, and, with your permission, we will call him Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime; art is considered in that toilet, the harmony of colour respected, the _chiar' oscuro_ evident in well-selected contrast. In manners he is dignified--nay, perhaps apathetic; nothing disturbs the placid serenity of that calm exterior. One day our friend breakfasted _chez_ Bignon. When the bill came he read, "Two peaches, 15f." He paid. "Peaches scarce, I presume?" was his sole remark. "No, sir," replied the waiter, "but Teufelskines are."' _Telegraph_, November 25, 1864. 'Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, passing a dung heap in the stone yard near the recently-erected alms-houses in Shadwell Gap, High Street, Shadwell, called the attention of a Thames police-constable to a man in a sitting position on the dung heap, and said she was afraid he was dead. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared to have been dead several hours. He had perished of cold and wet, and the rain had been beating down on him all night. The deceased was a bone-picker. He was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and half-starved. The police had frequently driven him away from the stone yard, between sunset and sunrise, and told him to go home. He selected a most desolate spot for his wretched death. A penny and some bones were found in his pockets. The deceased was between fifty and sixty years of age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given directions for inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses respecting the deceased, to ascertain his identity if possible.'--_Morning Post_, November 25, 1864. You have the separation thus in brief compass; and I want you to take notice of the 'a penny and some bones were found in his pockets,' and to compare it with this third statement, from the _Telegraph_ of January 16th of this year:-- 'Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile paupers was drawn up by the most conspicuous political economists in England. It is low in quantity, but it is sufficient to support nature; yet within ten years of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the paupers in the Andover Union gnawing the scraps of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow from the bones of horses which they were employed to crush.' You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of Christianity has some advantage over the Jewish one. Jewish Lazarus expected, or at least prayed, to be fed with crumbs from the rich man's table; but _our_ Lazarus is fed with crumbs from the dog's table. Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on two bases. Within its proper limits, on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly necessary; beyond them, on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly corrupting the framework of society. The lawful basis of wealth is, that a man who works should be paid the fair value of his work; and that if he does not choose to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working daily, and laying by daily, attains at last the possession of an accumulated sum of wealth, to which he has absolute right. The idle person who will not work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, at the end of the same time will be doubly poor--poor in possession, and dissolute in moral habit; and he will then naturally covet the money which the other has saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or any reward for good conduct; and all society is thereupon dissolved, or exists only in systems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the law--that he should keep who has JUSTLY EARNED. That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between rich and poor. But there is also a false basis of distinction; namely, the power held over those who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it. There will be always a number of men who would fain set themselves to the accumulation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Necessarily, that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, and more or less cowardly. It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily minded people like making money--ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it; but the main object of their life is not money; it is something better than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay--very properly so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten years without it--still, his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them. So of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of course; but yet, if they are brave and well educated, the pew-rent is not the sole object of their lives, and the baptismal fee is not the sole purpose of the baptism; the clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of doctors. They like fees no doubt,--ought to like them; yet if they are brave and well educated, the entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the whole, desire to cure the sick; and,--if they are good doctors, and the choice were fairly put to them,--would rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And so with all other brave and rightly trained men; their work is first, their fee second--very important always, but still _second_. But in every nation, as I said, there are a vast class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee is first, and the work second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee second. And this is no small distinction. It is the whole distinction in a man; distinction between life and death _in_ him, between heaven and hell _for_ him. You cannot serve two masters;--you _must_ serve one or other. If your work is first with you, and your fee second, work is your master, and the lord of work, who is God. But if your fee is first with you, and your work second, fee is your master, and the lord of fee, who is the Devil; and not only the Devil, but the lowest of devils--the 'least erected fiend that fell.' So there you have it in brief terms; Work first--you are God's servants; Fee first--you are the Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now and ever, believe me, whether you serve Him who has on His vesture and thigh written, 'King of Kings,' and whose service is perfect freedom; or him on whose vesture and thigh the name is written, 'Slave of Slaves,' and whose service is perfect slavery. However, in every nation there are, and must always be, a certain number of these Fiend's servants, who have it principally for the object of their lives to make money. They are always, as I said, more or less stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn't understand Christ;--couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He didn't want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck when he found that Christ would be killed; threw his money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed? But Judas was a common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fellow; his hand always in the bag of the poor, not caring for them. He didn't understand Christ;--yet believed in Him, much more than most of us do; had seen Him do miracles, thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Himself, and he, Judas, might as well make his own little bye-perquisites out of the affair. Christ would come out of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. Now, that is the money-seeker's idea, all over the world. He doesn't hate Christ, but can't understand Him--doesn't care for him--sees no good in that benevolent business; makes his own little job out of it at all events, come what will. And thus, out of every mass of men, you have a certain number of bag-men--your 'fee-first' men, whose main object is to make money. And they do make it--make it in all sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by the weight and force of money itself, or what is called the power of capital; that is to say, the power which money, once obtained, has over the labour of the poor, so that the capitalist can take all its produce to himself, except the labourer's food. That is the modern Judas's way of 'carrying the bag,' and 'bearing what is put therein.' Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair advantage? Has not the man who has worked for the money a right to use it as he best can? No; in this respect, money is now exactly what mountain promontories over public roads were in old times. The barons fought for them fairly:--the strongest and cunningest got them; then fortified them, and made everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, though it is more than we ought) for their money; but, once having got it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and crags have just the same result on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to show you in how many ways the power of capital is unjust; but this one great principle I have to assert--you will find it quite indisputably true--that whenever money is the principal object of life with either man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in the getting and spending; but when it is not the principal object, it and all other things will be well got, and well spent. And here is the test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him, or not. If in mid-life he could pause and say, "Now I have enough to live upon, I'll live upon it; and having well earned it, I will also well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," then money is not principal with him; but if, having enough to live upon in the manner befitting his character and rank, he still wants to make more, and to _die_ rich, then money is the principal object with him, and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who spend it after him. For you know it _must_ be spent some day; the only question is whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best its value and use. This is the true law of life. And if a man does not choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done, and all unjust war protracted. For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to foreign military governments, and how strange it is. If your little boy came to you to ask for money to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice before you gave it him; and you would have some idea that it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief with it. But the Russian children, and Austrian children, come to you, borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children with; and _that_ you will give at once, because they pay you interest for it. Now, in order to pay you that interest, they must tax every working peasant in their dominions; and on that work you live. You therefore at once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the theft, and the bribe for the assassination! That is the broad fact--that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans, and of most large interest of money; and then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth, as if _he_ denied the Bible, and you believed it! though, wretches as you are, every deliberate act of your lives is a new defiance of its primary orders; and as if, for most of the rich men of England at this moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as the best thing at least for _them_, that the Bible should _not_ be true, since against them these words are written in it: 'The rust of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh, as it were fire.' III. I pass now to our third condition of separation, between the men who work with the hand, and those who work with the head. And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. There _must_ be work done by the arms, or none of us could live. There _must_ be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and the dignity of humanity. That is a grand old proverb of Sancho Panza's, 'Fine words butter no parsnips;' and I can tell you that, all over England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too much butter at that dairy. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot iron at a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or painting pictures. If it is any comfort to you to be told that the rough work is the more honourable of the two, I should be sorry to take that much of consolation from you; and in some sense I need not. The rough work is at all events real, honest, and, generally, though not always, useful; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, foolish and false as well as fine, and therefore dishonourable; but when both kinds are equally well and worthily done, the head's is the noble work, and the hand's the ignoble; and of all hand work whatsoever, necessary for the maintenance of life, those old words, 'In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread,' indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of calamity; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle; so that all nations have held their days honourable, or 'holy,' and constituted them 'holydays' or 'holidays,' by making them days of rest; and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief brightness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the Lord, that 'they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.' And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, who is to do this rough work? and how is the worker of it to be comforted, redeemed, and rewarded? and what kind of play should he have, and what rest, in this world, sometimes, as well as in the next? Well, my good working friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. They must be answered: all good men are occupied with them, and all honest thinkers. There's grand head work doing about them; but much must be discovered, and much attempted in vain, before anything decisive can be told you. Only note these few particulars, which are already sure. As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we think we ought; but because we have chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing: work is only done well when it is done with a will; and no man has a thoroughly sound will unless he knows he is doing what he should, and is in his place. And, depend upon it, all work must be done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, doggish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way--a lawful way. Men are enlisted for the labour that kills--the labour of war: they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds: let them be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough exercise as carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death; and all is done: but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be accomplished--you can't even see your way to it--unless, first of all, both servant and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they will do each other justice. People are perpetually squabbling about what will be best to do, or easiest to do, or adviseablest to do, or profitablest to do; but they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask what it is _just_ to do. And it is the law of heaven that you shall not be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing constantly reiterated by our Master--the order of all others that is given oftenest--'Do justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order; that's the 'Service of God,' not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms when you are merry, and to pray when you need anything; and, by the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying and psalm-singing are 'service.' If a child finds itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks its father for it--does it call that, doing its father a service? If it begs for a toy or a piece of cake--does it call that serving its father? That, with God, is prayer, and He likes to hear it: He likes you to ask Him for cake when you want it; but He doesn't call that 'serving Him.' Begging is not serving: God likes mere beggars as little as you do--He likes honest servants, not beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, and is very happy, it may sing little songs about him; but it doesn't call that serving its father; neither is singing songs about God, serving God. It is enjoying ourselves, if it's anything; most probably it is nothing; but if it's anything, it is serving ourselves, not God. And yet we are impudent enough to call our beggings and chauntings 'Divine Service:' we say 'Divine service will be "performed"' (that's our word--the form of it gone through) 'at eleven o'clock.' Alas!--unless we perform Divine service in every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all. The one Divine work--the one ordered sacrifice--is to do justice; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As much charity as you choose, but no justice. 'Nay,' you will say, 'charity is greater than justice.' Yes, it is greater; it is the summit of justice--it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But you can't have the top without the bottom; you cannot build upon charity. You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. Do justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him, because you don't love him; and you will come to hate him. It is all very fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all you have got to begin with, begins at home, and is essentially love of yourself. You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night, will go to 'Divine service' next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats; and you'll think, complacently and piously, how lovely they look! So they do: and you love them heartily and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right: that _is_ charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also,--it, in its Sunday dress,--the dirtiest rags it has,--that it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian Justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind, decrepit, this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however--quite steadily--doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well as your own child?' Then you may ask Justice, in an amazed manner, 'How she can possibly be so foolish as to think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads?' Then you stoop again, and Justice says--still in her dull, stupid way--'Then, why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?' Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? And you answer, of course, that 'you don't, because every body ought to remain content in the position in which Providence has placed them.' Ah, my friends, that's the gist of the whole question. _Did_ Providence put them in that position, or did _you_? You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in the 'position in which Providence has placed him.' That's modern Christianity. You say--'_We_ did not knock him into the ditch.' How do you know what you have done, or are doing? That's just what we have all got to know, and what we shall never know, until the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the just thing; nor until we are at least so far on the way to being Christian, as to have understood that maxim of the poor half-way Mahometan, 'One hour in the execution of justice is worth seventy years of prayer.' Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate justice, _who_ is to do the hand work, the next questions must be how the hand-workers are to be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they are to have. Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible quantity of pay; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for consideration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, good, useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science, the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died of starvation, driven from his home: it is indeed very clear that God means all thoroughly good work and talk to be done for nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did not get a penny a line for writing Jeremiah's second roll for him, I fancy; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's pay for that long sermon of his to the Pharisees; nothing but stones. For indeed that is the world-father's proper payment. So surely as any of the world's children work for the world's good, honestly, with head and heart; and come to it, saying, 'Give us a little bread, just to keep the life in us,' the world-father answers them, 'No, my children, not bread; a stone, if you like, or as many as you need, to keep you quiet.' But the hand-workers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The worst that can happen to _you_ is to break stones; not be broken by them. And for you there will come a time for better payment; some day, assuredly, more pence will be paid to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope; we shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and doing something; we shall pay our ploughman a little more and our lawyer a little less, and so on: but, at least, we may even now take care that whatever work is done shall be fully paid for; and the man who does it paid for it, not somebody else; and that it shall be done in an orderly, soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under good captains and lieutenants of labour; and that it shall have its appointed times of rest, and enough of them; and that in those times the play shall be wholesome play, not in theatrical gardens, with tin flowers and gas sunshine, and girls dancing because of their misery; but in true gardens, with real flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing because of their gladness; so that truly the streets shall be full (the 'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst thereof. We may take care that working-men shall have at least as good books to read as anybody else, when they've time to read them; and as comfortable fire-sides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to sit at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends, in the good time. IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning ourselves all, as workers. What is wise work, and what is foolish work? What the difference between sense and nonsense, in daily occupation? Well, wise work is, briefly, work _with_ God. Foolish work is work _against_ God. And work done with God, which He will help, may be briefly described as 'Putting in Order'--that is, enforcing God's law of order, spiritual and material, over men and things. The first thing you have to do, essentially; the real 'good work' is, with respect to men, to enforce justice, and with respect to things, to enforce tidiness, and fruitfulness. And against these two great human deeds, justice and order, there are perpetually two great demons contending,--the devil of iniquity, or inequity, and the devil of disorder, or of death; for death is only consummation of disorder. You have to fight these two fiends daily. So far as you don't fight against the fiend of iniquity, you work for him. You 'work iniquity,' and the judgment upon you, for all your 'Lord, Lord's,' will be 'Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' And so far as you do not resist the fiend of disorder, you work disorder, and you yourself do the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its wages, Death himself. Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. I. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more strange than that you recognise honesty in play, and you do not in work. In your lightest games, you have always some one to see what you call 'fair-play.' In boxing, you must hit fair; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword is fair-play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and another hatred also, foul-work? Your prize-fighter has some honour in him yet; and so have the men in the ring round him: they will judge him to lose the match, by foul hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a gambler out of the gambling-room who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in flourishing business, who loads scales! For observe, all dishonest dealing _is_ loading scales. What does it matter whether I get short weight, adulterate substance, or dishonest fabric? The fault in the fabric is incomparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of food, and I only lose by you; but give me adulterate food, and I die by you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen--to be true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. We can do nothing for you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all; without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures, your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your heads together, if you can't put your hearts together. Shoulder to shoulder, right hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand to anybody else, and you'll win the world yet. II. Then, secondly, wise work is USEFUL. No man minds, or ought to mind, its being hard, if only it comes to something; but when it is hard, and comes to nothing; when all our bees' business turns to spiders'; and for honeycomb we have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next breeze--that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to anything or not? We don't care to keep what has been nobly done; still less do we care to do nobly what others would keep; and, least of all, to make the work itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to use his life indeed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had got down before you; and that he and the cat were at play together, and that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with--the devil to play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to lick up--that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, 'to waste the labour of men is not to kill them.' Is it not? I should like to know how you could kill them more utterly--kill them with second deaths, seventh deaths, hundredfold deaths? It is the slightest way of killing to stop a man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little whistling bullets--our love-messengers between nation and nation--have brought pleasant messages from us to many a man before now; orders of sweet release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his life. But if you put him to base labour, if you bind his thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body, and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so much as to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that for yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you have done with him, having, so far as in you lay, made the walls of that grave everlasting (though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of some of our family vaults will hold closer in the resurrection day than the sod over the labourer's head), this you think is no waste, and no sin! III. Then, lastly, wise work is CHEERFUL, as a child's work is. And now I want you to take one thought home with you, and let it stay with you. Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, 'Thy kingdom come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think it very wrong, and say he 'takes God's name in vain.' But there's a twenty times worse way of taking His name in vain, than that. It is to _ask God for what we don't want_. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't want a thing, don't ask for it: such asking is the worst mockery of your King you can mock Him with; the soldiers striking Him on the head with the reed was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it. And, to work for it, you must know what it is: we have all prayed for it many a day without thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that is to come to us; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to come all at once, but quietly; nobody knows how. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.' Also, it is not to come outside of us, but in the hearts of us: 'the kingdom of God is within you.' And, being within us, it is not a thing to be seen, but to be felt; and though it brings all substance of good with it, it does not consist in that: 'the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost:' joy, that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit. Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter into it, there's just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter it as children, or not at all; 'Whosoever will not receive it as a little child shall not enter therein.' And again, 'Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' _Of such_, observe. Not of children themselves, but of such as children. I believe most mothers who read that text think that all heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not so. There will be children there, but the hoary head is the crown. 'Length of days, and long life and peace,' that is the blessing, not to die in babyhood. Children die but for their parents sins; God means them to live, but He can't let them always; then they have their earlier place in heaven: and the little child of David, vainly prayed for;--the little child of Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its own threshold,--they will be there. But weary old David, and weary old Barzillai, having learned children's lessons at last, will be there too: and the one question for us all, young or old, is, have we learned our child's lesson? it is the _character_ of children we want, and must gain at our peril; let us see, briefly, in what it consists. The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest. A well-bred child does not think it can teach its parents, or that it knows everything. It may think its father and mother know everything,--perhaps that all grown-up people know everything; very certainly it is sure that _it_ does not. And it is always asking questions, and wanting to know more. Well, that is the first character of a good and wise man at his work. To know that he knows very little;--to perceive that there are many above him wiser than he; and to be always asking questions, wanting to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I know not if his, first), and as wise as old. Then, the second character of right childhood is to be Faithful. Perceiving that its father knows best what is good for it, and having found always, when it has tried its own way against his, that he was right and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last wholly, gives him its hand, and will walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that is the true character of all good men also, as obedient workers, or soldiers under captains. They must trust their captains;--they are bound for their lives to choose none but those whom they _can_ trust. Then, they are not always to be thinking that what seems strange to them, or wrong in what they are desired to do, _is_ strange or wrong. They know their captain: where he leads they must follow, what he bids, they must do; and without this trust and faith, without this captainship and soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, is possible to man. Among all the nations it is only when this faith is attained by them that they become great: the Jew, the Greek, and the Mahometan, agree at least in testifying to this. It was a deed of this absolute trust which made Abraham the father of the faithful; it was the declaration of the power of God as captain over all men, and the acceptance of a leader appointed by Him as commander of the faithful, which laid the foundation of whatever national power yet exists in the East; and the deed of the Greeks, which has become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to all lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of those who gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so far as I know, or can feel, of all human utterances: 'Oh, stranger, go and tell our people that we are lying here, having _obeyed_ their words.' Then the third character of right childhood is to be Loving and Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back. It loves everything near it, when it is a right kind of child--would hurt nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you need it--does not lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself, and delights in helping people; you cannot please it so much as by giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way. And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, it is careful for nothing--being full of love to every creature, it is happy always, whether in its play or in its duty. Well, that's the great worker's character also. Taking no thought for the morrow; taking thought only for the duty of the day; trusting somebody else to take care of to-morrow; knowing indeed what labour is, but not what sorrow is; and always ready for play--beautiful play,--for lovely human play is like the play of the Sun. There's a worker for you. He, steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, but also, he _rejoiceth_ as a strong man to run his course. See how he plays in the morning, with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere; that's the Sun's play; and great human play is like his--all various--all full of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the morning. So then, you have the child's character in these four things--Humility, Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That's what you have got to be converted to. 'Except ye be converted and become as little children'--You hear much of conversion now-a-days; but people always seem to think they have got to be made wretched by conversion,--to be converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to short ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into delight, and delightsomeness. You can't go into a conventicle but you'll hear plenty of talk of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed! I can tell you, on the ways most of us go, the faster we slide back the better. Slide back into the cradle, if going on is into the grave--back, I tell you; back--out of your long faces, and into your long clothes. It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the counsels of the _men_ of this world; the words they speak are all bitterness, 'the poison of asps is under their lips,' but, 'the sucking child shall play by the hole of the asp.' There is death in the looks of men. 'Their eyes are privily set against the poor;' they are as the uncharmable serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by seeing. But 'the weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice den.' There is death in the steps of men: 'their feet are swift to shed blood; they have compassed us in our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and the young lion lurking in secret places,' but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion, and 'a little child shall lead them.' There is death in the thoughts of men: the world is one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it draws to a close; but the secret of it is known to the child, and the Lord of heaven and earth is most to be thanked in that 'He has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.' Yes, and there is death--infinitude of death in the principalities and powers of men. As far as the east is from the west, so far our sins are--_not_ set from us, but multiplied around us: the Sun himself, think you he _now_ 'rejoices' to run his course, when he plunges westward to the horizon, so widely red, not with clouds, but blood? And it will be red more widely yet. Whatever drought of the early and latter rain may be, there will be none of that red rain. You fortify yourselves, you arm yourselves against it in vain; the enemy and avenger will be upon you also, unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the knitted gun, or the smoothed rifle, but 'out of the mouths of babes and sucklings' that the strength is ordained which shall 'still the enemy and avenger.' LECTURE II. _TRAFFIC._ (_Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford._) My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among your hills that I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to build: but earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little, about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things, though not willingly;--I could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited me to speak on one subject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot speak, to purpose, of anything about which I do not care; and most simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do _not_ care about this Exchange of yours. If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had answered, 'I won't come, I don't care about the Exchange of Bradford,' you would have been justly offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt a carelessness. So I have come down, hoping that you will patiently let me tell you why, on this, and many other such occasions, I now remain silent, when formerly I should have caught at the opportunity of speaking to a gracious audience. In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange,--because _you_ don't; and because you know perfectly well I cannot make you. Look at the essential circumstances of the case, which you, as business men, know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are going to spend 30,000_l._, which to you, collectively, is nothing; the buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter of consideration to me than building a new Exchange is to you. But you think you may as well have the right thing for your money. You know there are a great many odd styles of architecture about; you don't want to do anything ridiculous; you hear of me, among others, as a respectable architectural man-milliner: and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading fashion; and what is, in our shops, for the moment, the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word 'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. 'No,' say many of my antagonists, 'taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.' Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality--it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their 'taste' is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. 'You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do _you_ like?' 'A pipe and a quartern of gin.' I know you. 'You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?' 'A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.' Good, I know you also. 'You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?' 'My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.' 'You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you like?' 'A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch-farthing.' Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask? 'Nay,' perhaps you answer: 'we need rather to ask what these people and children do, than what they like. If they _do_ right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong; and if they _do_ wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.' Indeed, for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they _have_ come to like doing it; and as long as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health of body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make people not merely _do_ the right things, but _enjoy_ the right things--not merely industrious, but to love industry--not merely learned, but to love knowledge--not merely pure, but to love purity--not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. But you may answer or think, 'Is the liking for outside ornaments,--for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture,--a moral quality?' Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for _any_ pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have to define the word 'good.' I don't mean by 'good,' clever--or learned--or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an 'unmannered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is 'bad taste' in the profoundest sense--it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality--it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call 'loveliness'--(we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we _like_ determines what we _are_, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller's window. It was--'On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought to myself, 'my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the Weasel" for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:--he won't like to go back to his costermongering.' And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage. You have at present in England only one art of any consequence--that is, iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance are not written for ever--not merely with an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also your great English vice--European vice--vice of all the world--vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell--the vice of jealousy, which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your councils, and dishonour into your wars--that vice which has rendered for you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in its sheath; so that, at last, you have realised for all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called civilisation of the earth,--you have realised for them all, I say, in person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders of your Cheviot hills-- 'They carved at the meal With gloves of steel, And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;-- do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden separated only by a fruit-wall from his next door neighbour's; and he had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing room. I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think such and such a paper might be desirable--perhaps a little fresco here and there on the ceiling--a damask curtain or so at the windows. 'Ah,' says my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford that kind of thing just now!' 'Yet the world credits you with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, 'but do you know, at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?' 'Steel-traps! for whom?' 'Why, for that fellow on the other side the wall, you know: we're very good friends, capital friends; but we are obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there's never a day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it all together; and I don't see how we're to do with less.' A highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I think. Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that. You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake not. I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner. I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic belfry to the Hôtel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul's. But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, you will find that, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life. For consider what a wide significance this fact has; and remember that it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving thus just now. You have all got into the habit of calling the church 'the house of God.' I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend actually carved, '_This_ is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what place it was first spoken. A boy leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot, to visit his uncle; he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if one of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmoreland, to visit an uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy finds himself somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot go one foot farther that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may, gathering a few of the stones together to put under his head;--so wild the place is, he cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying under the broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are ascending and descending upon it. And when he wakes out of his sleep, he says, 'How dreadful is this place; surely, this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' This PLACE, observe; not this church; not this city; not this stone, even, which he puts up for a memorial--the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But this _place_; this windy slope of Wharnside; this moorland hollow, torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this _any_ place where God lets down the ladder. And how are you to know where that will be? or how are you to determine where it may be, but by being ready for it always? Do you know where the lightning is to fall next? You _do_ know that, partly; you can guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit, which is that lightning when it shines from the east to the west. But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of the thousand instances in which we sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 'temples.' Now, you know, or ought to know, they are _not_ temples. They have never had, never can have, anything whatever to do with temples. They are 'synagogues'--'gathering places'--where you gather yourselves together as an assembly; and by not calling them so, you again miss the force of another mighty text--'Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the _churches_' [we should translate it], 'that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father,'--which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but 'in secret.' Now, you feel, as I say this to you--I know you feel--as if I were trying to take away the honour of your churches. Not so; I am trying to prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; I am trying to show you--not that the Church is not sacred--but that the whole Earth is. I would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what infectious sin there is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your churches only 'holy,' you call your hearths and homes profane; and have separated yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household gods to the ground, instead of recognising, in the place of their many and feeble Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar. 'But what has all this to do with our Exchange?' you ask me, impatiently. My dear friends, it has just everything to do with it; on these inner and great questions depend all the outer and little ones; and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, because you had before been interested in anything I have written, you must know that all I have yet said about architecture was to show this. The book I called 'The Seven Lamps' was to show that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture, without exception, had been produced. 'The Stones of Venice,' had, from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption. And now, you ask me what style is best to build in; and how can I answer, knowing the meaning of the two styles, but by another question--do you mean to build as Christians or as Infidels? And still more--do you mean to build as honest Christians or as honest Infidels? as thoroughly and confessedly either one or the other? You don't like to be asked such rude questions. I cannot help it; they are of much more importance than this Exchange business; and if they can be at once answered, the Exchange business settles itself in a moment. But, before I press them farther, I must ask leave to explain one point clearly. In all my past work, my endeavour has been to show that good architecture is essentially religious--the production of a faithful and virtuous, not of an infidel and corrupted people. But in the course of doing this, I have had also to show that good architecture is not _ecclesiastical_. People are so apt to look upon religion as the business of the clergy, not their own, that the moment they hear of anything depending on 'religion,' they think it must also have depended on the priesthood; and I have had to take what place was to be occupied between these two errors, and fight both, often with seeming contradiction. Good architecture is the work of good and believing men; therefore, you say, at least some people say, 'Good architecture must essentially have been the work of the clergy, not of the laity.' No--a thousand times no; good architecture has always been the work of the commonalty, _not_ of the clergy. What, you say, those glorious cathedrals--the pride of Europe--did their builders not form Gothic architecture? No; they corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic was formed in the baron's castle, and the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts, and hands, and powers of free citizens and soldier kings. By the monk it was used as an instrument for the aid of his superstition; when that superstition became a beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, and vainly raged and perished in the crusade--through that fury of perverted faith and wasted war, the Gothic rose also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, finally, most foolish dreams; and, in those dreams, was lost. I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding me when I come to the gist of what I want to say to-night--when I repeat, that every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a great national religion. You can't have bits of it here, bits there--you must have it everywhere, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a clerical company--it is not the exponent of a theological dogma--it is not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood; it is the manly language of a people inspired by resolute and common purpose, and rendering resolute and common fidelity to the legible laws of an undoubted God. Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of European architecture. I say, European, because Asiatic and African architectures belong so entirely to other races and climates, that there is no question of them here; only, in passing, I will simply assure you that whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the Mediæval, which was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty; these three we have had--they are past,--and now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I want to ask you. But I must explain these three old ones first. I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God of Wisdom; so that whatever contended against their religion,--to the Jews a stumbling block,--was, to the Greeks--_Foolishness_. The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the word, of which we keep the remnant in our words '_Di_-urnal' and '_Di_-vine'--the god of _Day_, Jupiter the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the head. We are only with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may note rapidly, that her ægis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand for better guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge--that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear. This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, and every habit of life, and every form of his art developed themselves from the seeking this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself, as a man, to do things evermore rightly and strongly;[3] not with any ardent affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin there was no remission. And the Greek architecture rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self-contained. Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission of sins; for which cause it happens, too often, in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified, as if, the more you had to be healed of, the more divine was the healing. The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base people build it--of all, the noblest, when built by the noble. And now note that both these religions--Greek and Mediæval--perished by falsehood in their own main purpose. The Greek religion of Wisdom perished in a false philosophy--'Oppositions of science, falsely so called.' The Mediæval religion of Consolation perished in false comfort; in remission of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of absolution that ended the Mediæval faith; and I can tell you more, it is the selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins only by _ending_ them; but false Christianity gets her remission of sins by _compounding for_ them. And there are many ways of compounding for them. We English have beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution, whether in low Church or high, far more cunning than any of Tetzel's trading. Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, _bals masqués_ in every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and built you the Parthenon--the Virgin's temple. The Mediæval worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also--but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you tell me what _we_ worship, and what _we_ build? You know we are speaking always of the real, active, continual, national worship; that by which men act while they live; not that which they talk of when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property, and sevenths of time; but we have also a practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion; but we are all unanimous about this practical one, of which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the 'Goddess of Getting-on,' or 'Britannia of the Market.' The Athenians had an 'Athena Agoraia,' or Minerva of the Market: but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, while our Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. And all your great architectural works, are, of course, built to her. It is long since you built a great cathedral; and how you would laugh at me, if I proposed building a cathedral on the top of one of these hills of yours, taking it for an Acropolis! But your railroad mounds, prolonged masses of Acropolis; your railroad stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and innumerable; your chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than cathedral spires! your harbour-piers; your warehouses; your exchanges!--all these are built to your great Goddess of 'Getting-on;' and she has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to build to _her_; you know far better than I. There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceivably good architecture for Exchanges--that is to say if there were any heroism in the fact or deed of exchange, which might be typically carved on the outside of your building. For, you know, all beautiful architecture must be adorned with sculpture or painting; and for sculpture or painting, you must have a subject. And hitherto it has been a received opinion among the nations of the world that the only right subjects for either, were _heroisms_ of some sort. Even on his pots and his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules slaying lions, or an Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying melancholy giants, and earth-born despondencies. On his temples, the Greek put contests of great warriors in founding states, or of gods with evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the Christian put carvings of angels conquering devils; or of hero-martyrs exchanging this world for another; subject inappropriate, I think, to our manner of exchange here. And the Master of Christians not only left his followers without any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the outside of buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his dislike of affairs of exchange within them. And yet there might surely be a heroism in such affairs; and all commerce become a kind of selling of doves, not impious. The wonder has always been great to me, that heroism has never been supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice of supplying people with food, or clothes; but rather with that of quartering oneself upon them for food, and stripping them of their clothes. Spoiling of armour is an heroic deed in all ages; but the selling of clothes, old, or new, has never taken any colour of magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding the hungry and clothing the naked should ever become base businesses, even when engaged in on a large scale. If one could contrive to attach the notion of conquest to them anyhow? so that, supposing there were anywhere an obstinate race, who refused to be comforted, one might take some pride in giving them compulsory comfort; and as it were, 'occupying a country' with one's gifts, instead of one's armies? If one could only consider it as much a victory to get a barren field sown, as to get an eared field stripped; and contend who should build villages, instead of who should 'carry' them. Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in doing these serviceable deeds? You doubt who is strongest? It might be ascertained by push of spade, as well as push of sword. Who is wisest? There are witty things to be thought of in planning other business than campaigns. Who is bravest? There are always the elements to fight with, stronger than men; and nearly as merciless. The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be--that he is paid little for it--and regularly: while you traffickers, and exchangers, and others occupied in presumably benevolent business, like to be paid much for it--and by chance. I never can make out how it is that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but a pedlar-errant always does;--that people are willing to take hard knocks for nothing, but never to sell ribands cheap;--that they are ready to go on fervent crusades to recover the tomb of a buried God, never on any travels to fulfil the orders of a living God;--that they will go anywhere barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well bribed to practise it, and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but never the loaves and fishes. If you chose to take the matter up on any such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and your feeding of nations, for fixed salaries; and to be as particular about giving people the best food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are about giving them the best gunpowder, I could carve something for you on your exchange worth looking at. But I can only at present suggest decorating its frieze with pendant purses; and making its pillars broad at the base for the sticking of bills. And in the innermost chambers of it there might be a statue of Britannia of the Market, who may have, perhaps advisably, a partridge for her crest, typical at once of her courage in fighting for noble ideas; and of her interest in game; and round its neck the inscription in golden letters, 'Perdix fovit quæ non peperit.'[4] Then, for her spear, she might have a weaver's beam; and on her shield, instead of her Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with the town of Gennesaret proper, in the field and the legend 'In the best market,' and her corslet, of leather, folded over her heart in the shape of a purse, with thirty slits in it for a piece of money to go in at, on each day of the month. And I doubt not but that people would come to see your exchange, and its goddess, with applause. Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain strange characters in this goddess of yours. She differs from the great Greek and Mediæval deities essentially in two things--first, as to the continuance of her presumed power; secondly, as to the extent of it. 1st, as to the Continuance. The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual increase of wisdom, as the Christian Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) continual increase of comfort. There was no question, with these, of any limit or cessation of function. But with your Agora Goddess, that is just the most important question. Getting on--but where to? Gathering together--but how much? Do you mean to gather always--never to spend? If so, I wish you joy of your goddess, for I am just as well off as you, without the trouble of worshipping her at all. But if you do not spend, somebody else will--somebody else must. And it is because of this (among many other such errors) that I have fearlessly declared your so-called science of Political Economy to be no science; because, namely, it has omitted the study of exactly the most important branch of the business--the study of _spending_. For spend you must, and as much as you make, ultimately. You gather corn:--will you bury England under a heap of grain; or will you, when you have gathered, finally eat? You gather gold:--will you make your house-roofs of it, or pave your streets with it? That is still one way of spending it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give you more; I'll give you all the gold you want--all you can imagine--if you can tell me what you'll do with it. You shall have thousands of gold pieces;--thousands of thousands--millions--mountains, of gold: where will you keep them? Will you put an Olympus of silver upon a golden Pelion--make Ossa like a wart? Do you think the rain and dew would then come down to you, in the streams from such mountains, more blessedly than they will down the mountains which God has made for you, of moss and whinstone? But it is not gold that you want to gather! What is it? greenbacks? No; not those neither. What is it then--is it ciphers after a capital I? Cannot you practise writing ciphers, and write as many as you want? Write ciphers for an hour every morning, in a big book, and say every evening, I am worth all those noughts more than I was yesterday. Won't that do? Well, what in the name of Plutus is it you want? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I? You will have to answer, after all, 'No; we want, somehow or other, money's _worth_.' Well, what is that? Let your Goddess of Getting-on discover it, and let her learn to stay therein. II. But there is yet another question to be asked respecting this Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the continuance of her power; the second is of its extent. Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the world's Pallas, and all the world's Madonna. They could teach all men, and they could comfort all men. But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the Goddess--not of everybody's getting on--but only of somebody's getting on. This is a vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own ideal of the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain. I asked you what it was, when I was last here;[5]--you have never told me. Now, shall I try to tell you? Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately sized park; a large garden and hot houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language. Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you propose to yourselves? It is very pretty indeed seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below. For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of _not_ Getting on. 'Nay,' you say, 'they have all their chance.' Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must always be the same number of blanks. 'Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take the lead, but blind chance.' What then! do you think the old practice, that 'they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,' is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not take advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may of a man's foolishness? 'Nay, but finally, work must be done, and some one must be at the top, some one at the bottom.' Granted, my friends. Work must always be, and captains of work must always be; and if you in the least remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know that they are thought unfit for this age, because they are always insisting on need of government, and speaking with scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work. Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing quite the reverse of this,--by their taking the least possible quantity of the nation's work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that. Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely, unostentatiously? probably he _is_ a King. Does he cover his body with jewels, and his table with delicates? in all probability he is _not_ a King. It is possible he may be, as Solomon was; but that is when the nation shares his splendour with him. Solomon made gold, not only to be in his own palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. But even so, for the most part, these splendid kinghoods expire in ruin, and only the true kinghoods live, which are of royal labourers governing loyal labourers; who, both leading rough lives, establish the true dynasties. Conclusively you will find that because you are king of a nation, it does not follow that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of that nation; neither, because you are king of a small part of the nation, and lord over the means of its maintenance--over field, or mill, or mine, are you to take all the produce of that piece of the foundation of national existence for yourself. You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot mend them. No, good friends, I cannot; but you can, and you will; or something else can and will. Do you think these phenomena are to stay always in their present power or aspect? All history shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change _must_ come; but it is ours to determine whether change of growth, or change of death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton priory in its meadow, but these mills of yours be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity? Think you that 'men may come, and men may go,' but--mills--go on forever? Not so; out of these, better or worse shall come; and it is for you to choose which. I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate purpose. I know, on the contrary, that you wish your workmen well; that you do much for them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to it safely. I know that many of you have done, and are every day doing, whatever you feel to be in your power; and that even all this wrong and misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving to do his best, without noticing that this best is essentially and centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the modern economist, that 'To do the best for yourself, is finally to do the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so; and most absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it will not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, perhaps, the last written words of Plato,--if not the last actually written (for this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting words--in which, endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and the words cease, broken off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted themselves, until 'their spot was not the spot of his children.' And this, he says, was the end; that indeed 'through many generations, so long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had kindred with them in divineness; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in every wise great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life; and despising all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day, and _bore lightly the burden_ of gold and of possessions; for they saw that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things would be increased together with them; but to set their esteem and ardent pursuit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and their virtue and affection together with it. And by such reasoning, and what of the divine nature remained in them, they gained all this greatness of which we have already told, but when the God's part of them faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and effaced by the prevalent mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they then became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see, having lost everything that was fairest of their honour; while to the blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession and power. Whereupon, the God of God's, whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus cast into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered together all the gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre overlooks whatever has part in creation; and having assembled them, he said'---- The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of the chief wisdom of the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; this golden image high by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields of England are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura: this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and faith; forbidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age or people, been accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes of God. Continue to make that forbidden deity your principal one, and soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure will be possible. Catastrophe will come; or worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and withering into Hades. But if you can fix some conception of a true human state of life to be striven for--life for all men as for yourselves--if you can determine some honest and simple order of existence; following those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace;--then, and so sanctifying wealth into 'commonwealth,' all your art, your literature, your daily labours, your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to build, well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better; temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal. FOOTNOTES: [3] It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres, the givers of human strength and life: then, for heroic example, Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among the Greek in the great times: and the Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its harmonies. [4] Jerem. xvii. 11 (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). 'As the partridge, fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth riches, not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.' [5] Two Paths, p. 98. LECTURE III. _WAR._ (_Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich._) Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly to-night, and many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war. You may well think within yourselves, that a painter might, perhaps without immodesty, lecture younger painters upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young physicians upon medicine--least of all, it may seem to you, young warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked to address you, I declined at first, and declined long; for I felt that you would not be interested in my special business, and would certainly think there was small need for me to come to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there ought to be _no_ such need, for the great veteran soldiers of England are now men every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so good, that no other teaching than their knightly example, and their few words of grave and tried counsel should be either necessary for you, or even, without assurance of due modesty in the offerer, endured by you. But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not ventured persistently to refuse; and I will try, in very few words, to lay before you some reason why you should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You may imagine that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is no art among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, you must, I imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there is any such good fruit of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the works of peace, but certainly not to found them: nay, the common course of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly, I who tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Hear why: I have given a considerable part of my life to the investigation of Venetian painting and the result of that enquiry was my fixing upon one man as the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all painters whatsoever. I formed this faith, (whether right or wrong matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret, under a roof covered with his pictures; and of those pictures, three of the noblest were then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up with the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. Now it is not every lecturer who _could_ tell you that he had seen three of his favourite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a sight, it is not every lecturer who _would_ tell you that, nevertheless, war was the foundation of all great art. Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful comparison of the states of great historic races at different periods. Merely to show you what I mean, I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of the advance of the best art of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt; and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death, and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works produced by them are sculptures of their kings going out to battle, or receiving the homage of conquered armies. And you must remember also, as one of the great keys to the splendour of the Egyptian nation, that the priests were not occupied in theology only. Their theology was the basis of practical government and law, so that they were not so much priests as religious judges, the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being as nearly as possible correspondent to theirs. All the rudiments of art then, and much more than the rudiments of all science, are laid first by this great warrior-nation, which held in contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life of shepherds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all poetry, and all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise, or dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which prepare for it, in their connection with offices of religion. All Greek institutions had first respect to war; and their conception of it, as one necessary office of all human and divine life, is expressed simply by the images of their guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the intellect; he bears the arrow and the bow, before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is distinguished from other deities. There were, however, two great differences in principle between the Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. In Greece there was no soldier caste; every citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, again, while the Greeks rightly despised mechanical arts as much as the Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural and pastoral life; but perfectly honoured both. These two conditions of truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise manhood that has yet been reached; for all our great arts, and nearly all our great thoughts, have been borrowed or derived from them. Take away from us what they have given; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern European would stand. Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase of history, that though you _must_ have war to produce art--you must also have much more than war; namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people; and that, though all the talent for painting in the world won't make painters of you, unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next great dynasty of soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. I have not yet investigated the Roman character enough to tell you the causes of this; but I believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however truly the Roman might say of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by the wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical; his poetry was in domestic life only, and the object of battle, 'pacis imponere morem.' And the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do not rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind of Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. And then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble employment,--under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain; and under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through which there flows not a single stream, from all their Alps or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle: and it reaches its culminating glory in the city which gave to history the most intense type of soldiership yet seen among men;--the city whose armies were led in their assault by their king, led through it to victory by their king, and so led, though that king of theirs was blind, and in the extremity of his age. And from this time forward, as peace is established or extended in Europe, the arts decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves at last on the side of luxury and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations, wither utterly away; remaining only in partial practice among races who, like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live the lives, of soldiers. 'It may be so,' I can suppose that a philanthropist might exclaim. 'Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost. What worth is there in toys of canvas and stone if compared to the joy and peace of artless domestic life?' And the answer is--truly, in themselves, none. But as expressions of the highest state of the human spirit, their worth is infinite. As results they may be worthless, but, as signs, they are above price. For it is an assured truth that, whenever the faculties of men are at their fulness, they _must_ express themselves by art; and to say that a state is without such expression, is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of manly nature. So that, when I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It was very strange to me to discover this; and very dreadful--but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly untenable. Peace and the _vices_ of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilisation; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse of History coupled together: that on her lips, the words were--peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in war; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace;--in a word, that they were born in war, and expired in peace. Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not _all_ war of which this can be said--nor all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start up into men. It is not the ravage of a barbarian wolf-flock, as under Genseric or Suwarrow; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scotland; nor the occasional struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the Swiss with Austria; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or the just terminated war in America. None of these forms of war build anything but tombs. But the creative or foundational war is that in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful--though it may be fatal--play: in which the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in which the natural instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the institutions, and purity of the households, which they are appointed to defend. To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any man may happily die; and forth from such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity. I shall therefore divide the war of which I would speak to you into three heads. War for exercise or play; war for dominion; and, war for defence. I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it primarily in this light, because, through all past history, manly war has been more an exercise than anything else, among the classes who cause, and proclaim it. It is not a game to the conscript, or the pressed sailor; but neither of these are the causers of it. To the governor who determines that war shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it as their profession, it has always been a grand pastime; and chiefly pursued because they had nothing else to do. And this is true without any exception. No king whose mind was fully occupied with the development of the inner resources of his kingdom, or with any other sufficing subject of thought, ever entered into war but on compulsion. No youth who was earnestly busy with any peaceful subject of study, or set on any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier. Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or business, in science or in literature, and he will never think of war otherwise than as a calamity. But leave him idle; and, the more brave and active and capable he is by nature, the more he will thirst for some appointed field for action; and find, in the passion and peril of battle, the only satisfying fulfilment of his unoccupied being. And from the earliest incipient civilisation until now, the population of the earth divides itself, when you look at it widely, into two races; one of workers, and the other of players--one tilling the ground, manufacturing, building, and otherwise providing for the necessities of life;--the other part proudly idle, and continually therefore needing recreation, in which they use the productive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, and partly as their puppets or pieces in the game of death. Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodliness there may be in this game of war, rightly played, there is none when you thus play it with a multitude of small human pawns. If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, choose to make your pastime of contest, do so, and welcome; but set not up these unhappy peasant-pieces upon the green fielded board. If the wager is to be of death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the Olympic dust, though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose command, all true battle has been, and must ever be; you would perhaps shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. How much more, then, ought you to shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre pit in which even a few condemned slaves were slaying each other only for your delight! And do you _not_ shrink from the _fact_ of sitting above a theatre pit, where,--not condemned slaves,--but the best and bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each other,--not man to man,--as the coupled gladiators; but race to race, in duel of generations? You would tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see this; and it is indeed true, that the women of Europe--those who have no heart-interests of their own at peril in the contest--draw the curtains of their boxes, and muffle the openings; so that from the pit of the circus of slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a half-heard cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire. They shut out the death-cries; and are happy, and talk wittily among themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies do in their pleasant lives. Nay, you might answer, speaking for them--'We do not let these wars come to pass for our play, nor by our carelessness; we cannot help them. How can any final quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by war?' I cannot now delay, to tell you how political quarrels might be otherwise settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them: and that, while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge if it will always be necessary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You would be ashamed to do this in your own private position and power. Why should you not be ashamed also to do it in public place and power? If you quarrel with your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal, you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out; nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their goods. You fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your own danger, if at all. And you do not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of you has a larger household than the other; so that, if the servants or tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the issue of the contest could not be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or you practise it under laws of honour, not of physical force; that so it may be, in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion of the private feud is of little moment, while the just or unjust conclusion of the public feud is of eternal moment: and yet, in this public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their arms to fight for it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it; and the black seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace are the deserted hearth and the fruitless field. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in this, as there is mostly in these wide and universal crimes. Hear the statement of the very fact of it in the most literal words of the greatest of our English thinkers:-- 'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "natural enemies" of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. 'And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. 'Straightway the word "Fire!" is given, and they blow the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must bury, and anon shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.' (Sartor Resartus.) Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must not, and shall not, ultimately be played this way. But should it be played any way? Should it, if not by your servants, be practised by yourselves? I think, yes. Both history and human instinct seem alike to say, yes. All healthy men like fighting, and like the sense of danger; all brave women like to hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed instinct in the fine race of them; and I cannot help fancying that fair fight is the best play for them, and that a tournament was a better game than a steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come in France as well as here, for universal hurdle-races and cricketing: but I do not think universal 'crickets' will bring out the best qualities of the nobles of either country. I use, in such question, the test which I have adopted, of the connection of war with other arts; and I reflect how, as a sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to design a monument for a dead knight, in Westminster abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end, and a ball at the other. It may be the remains in me only of savage Gothic prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference whatever to any story of duty done, or cause defended. Assume the knight merely to have ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbour for exercise; assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword play than any other play; had rather he had made it by thrusting than by batting;--much more, than by betting. Much rather that he should ride war horses, than back race horses; and--I say it sternly and deliberately--much rather would I have him slay his neighbour, than cheat him. But remember, so far as this may be true, the game of war is only that in which the _full personal power of the human creature_ is brought out in management of its weapons. And this for three reasons:-- First, the great justification of this game is that it truly, when well played, determines _who is the best man_;--who is the highest bred, the most self-denying, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and hand. You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless there is a clear possibility of the struggle's ending in death. It is only in the fronting of that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and body, comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or of cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all the while. But if the play may be ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a man will probably make up his accounts a little before he enters it. Whatever is rotten and evil in him will weaken his hand more in holding a sword hilt, than in balancing a billiard cue; and on the whole, the habit of living lightly hearted, in daily presence of death, always has had, and must have, a tendency both to the making and testing of honest men. But for the final testing, observe, you must make the issue of battle strictly dependent on fineness of frame, and firmness of hand. You must not make it the question, which of the combatants has the longest gun, or which has got behind the biggest tree, or which has the wind in his face, or which has gunpowder made by the best chemist, or iron smelted with the best coal, or the angriest mob at his back. Decide your battle, whether of nations, or individuals, on _those_ terms;--and you have only multiplied confusion, and added slaughter to iniquity. But decide your battle by pure trial which has the strongest arm, and steadiest heart,--and you have gone far to decide a great many matters besides, and to decide them rightly. And the other reasons for this mode of decision of cause, are the diminution both of the material destructiveness, or cost, and of the physical distress of war. For you must not think that in speaking to you in this (as you may imagine), fantastic praise of battle, I have overlooked the conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who have not read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. Helps's two essays on War and Government, in the first volume of the last series of 'Friends in Council.' Everything that can be urged against war is there simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated. And all, there urged, is true. But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by that most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern war. If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by the labour of others,--to move them and provide them with destructive machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack,--to destroy for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;--and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the fragments of living creatures countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your work;--What book of judgment sentence the guilt of it? That, I say, is _modern_ war,--scientific war,--chemical and mechanic war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be so; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered than by new facilities of destruction; and the brotherly love of our enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. Yet hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days;--what war might yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, and join the heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read you this from a book which probably most of you know well, and all ought to know--Muller's 'Dorians;'--but I have put the points I wish you to remember in closer connection than in his text. 'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was great composure and subdued strength; the violence [Greek: lyssa] of Aristodemus and Isadas being considered as deserving rather of blame than praise; and these qualities in general distinguished the Greeks from the northern Barbarians, whose boldness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the same reason the Spartans _sacrificed to the Muses_ before an action; these goddesses being expected to produce regularity and order in battle; as they _sacrificed on the same occasion in Crete to the god of love_, as the confirmer of mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal for attack; all the shields of the line glittered with their high polish, and mingled their splendour with the dark red of the purple mantles, which were meant both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood of the wounded; to fall well and decorously being an incentive the more to the most heroic valour. The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high and noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes of brutal rage. The pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed; and after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also interdicted; and the consecration of the spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in general, all rejoicings for victory, were considered as ill-omened. Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who prayed to heathen gods. What Christian war is, preached by Christian ministers, let any one tell you, who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred flute-playing, and was inspired and sanctified by the divinely-measured and musical language, of any North American regiment preparing for its charge. And what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian wars, let this one fact tell you:--the Spartans won the decisive battle of Corinth with the loss of eight men; the victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to the loss of 30,000. II. I pass now to our second order of war, the commonest among men, that undertaken in desire of dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few moments what the real meaning of this desire of dominion is--first in the minds of kings--then in that of nations. Now, mind you this first,--that I speak either about kings, or masses of men, with a fixed conviction that human nature is a noble and beautiful thing; not a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their disease, not their nature; as a folly which may be prevented, not a necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at their worst, is always at the height which this human nature can attain. Thinking it high, I find it always a higher thing than I thought it; while those who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower than they thought it: the fact being, that it is infinite, and capable of infinite height and infinite fall; but the nature of it--and here is the faith which I would have you hold with me--the _nature_ of it is in the nobleness, not in the catastrophe. Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the captain of the 'London' shook hands with his mate, saying 'God speed you! I will go down with my passengers,' _that_ I believe to be 'human nature.' He does not do it from any religious motive--from any hope of reward, or any fear of punishment; he does it because he is a man. But when a mother, living among the fair fields of merry England, gives her two-year-old child to be suffocated under a mattress in her inner room, while the said mother waits and talks outside; _that_ I believe to be _not_ human nature. You have the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and mothers, who are here face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to say which of these is human, and which inhuman--which 'natural' and which 'unnatural?' Choose your creed at once, I beseech you:--choose it with unshaken choice--choose it forever. Will you take, for foundation of act and hope, the faith that this man was such as God made him, or that this woman was such as God made her? Which of them has failed from their nature--from their present, possible, actual nature;--not their nature of long ago, but their nature of now? Which has betrayed it--falsified it? Did the guardian who died in his trust, die inhumanly, and as a fool; and did the murderess of her child fulfil the law of her being? Choose, I say; infinitude of choices hang upon this. You have had false prophets among you--for centuries you have had them--solemnly warned against them though you were; false prophets, who have told you that all men are nothing but fiends or wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe that and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse that, and have faith that God 'made you upright,' though _you_ have sought out many inventions; so, you will strive daily to become more what your Maker meant and means you to be, and daily gives you also the power to be--and you will cling more and more to the nobleness and virtue that is in you, saying, 'My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.' I have put this to you as a choice, as if you might hold either of these creeds you liked best. But there is in reality no choice for you; the facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to _think_ about this matter, or to choose in it. The broad fact is, that a human creature of the highest race, and most perfect as a human thing, is invariably both kind and true; and that as you lower the race, you get cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity: and this so steadily and assuredly, that the two great words which, in their first use, meant only perfection of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both to signify benevolence of disposition. The word generous, and the word gentle, both, in their origin, meant only 'of pure race,' but because charity and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of blood, the words which once stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms for virtue. Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, and seeing that all the aim of education should be to develop this;--and seeing also what magnificent self sacrifice the higher classes of men are capable of, for any cause that they understand or feel,--it is wholly inconceivable to me how well-educated princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose title of royalty means only their function of doing every man '_right_'--how these, I say, throughout history, should so rarely pronounce themselves on the side of the poor and of justice, but continually maintain themselves and their own interests by oppression of the poor, and by wresting of justice; and how this should be accepted as so natural, that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is used as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to their king, and not the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his people. How comes it to pass that a captain will die with his passengers, and lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its course; but that a king will not usually die with, much less _for_, his passengers,--thinks it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die for _him_? Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment;--not a man of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer;--not with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name being ever heard above the wash of the fatal waves;--not with the cause of a nation resting on his act, but helpless to save so much as a child from among the lost crowd with whom he resolves to be lost,--yet goes down quietly to his grave, rather than break his faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by divine right,--your captain with the hues of a hundred shields of kings upon his breast,--your captain whose every deed, brave or base, will be illuminated or branded for ever before unescapable eyes of men,--your captain whose every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, from sunrising to setting, blessing as the sunshine, or shadowing as the night,--this captain, as you find him in history, for the most part thinks only how he may tax his passengers, and sit at most ease in his state cabin! For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of the rulers of great multitudes of men any such conception of work for the good of those under their command, as there is in the good and thoughtful masters of any small company of men, not only wars for the sake of mere increase of power could never take place, but our idea of power itself would be entirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act even for a million of men, to hear their complaints, watch their weaknesses, restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead them, day by day, to purer life, is not enough for one man's work? If any of us were absolute lord only of a district of a hundred miles square, and were resolved on doing our utmost for it; making it feed as large a number of people as possible; making every clod productive, and every rock defensive, and every human being happy; should we not have enough on our hands think you? But if the ruler has any other aim than this; if, careless of the result of his interference, he desire only the authority to interfere; and, regardless of what is ill-done or well-done, cares only that it shall be done at his bidding,--if he would rather do two hundred miles' space of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of good, of course he will try to add to his territory; and to add inimitably. But does he add to his power? Do you call it power in a child, if he is allowed to play with the wheels and bands of some vast engine, pleased with their murmur and whirl, till his unwise touch, wandering where it ought not, scatters beam and wheel into ruin? Yet what machine is so vast, so incognisable, as the working of the mind of a nation what child's touch so wanton, as the word of a selfish king? And yet, how long have we allowed the historian to speak of the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just ground for his pride; and to extol him as the greatest prince, who is only the centre of the widest error. Follow out this thought by yourselves; and you will find that all power, properly so called, is wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship to destroy a fleet; there may be venom enough in a dead body to infect a nation:--but which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a drifting kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre whose touch was mortal? There is no true potency, remember, but that of help; nor true ambition, but ambition to save. And then, observe farther, this true power, the power of saving, depends neither on multitude of men, nor on extent of territory. We are continually assuming that nations become strong according to their numbers. They indeed become so, if those numbers can be made of one mind; but how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep them from having north and south minds? Grant them unanimous, how know you they will be unanimous in right? If they are unanimous in wrong, the more they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they can neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only be of _no_ mind? Suppose they are a more helpless mob; tottering into precipitant catastrophe, like a waggon load of stones when the wheel comes off. Dangerous enough for their neighbours, certainly, but not 'powerful.' Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any more than upon number of population. Take up your maps when you go home this evening,--put the cluster of British Isles beside the mass of South America; and then consider whether any race of men need care how much ground they stand upon. The strength is in the men, and in their unity and virtue, not in their standing room: a little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools; and only that nation gains true territory, which gains itself. And now for the brief practical outcome of all this. Remember, no government is ultimately strong, but in proportion to its kindness and justice; and that a nation does not strengthen, by merely multiplying and diffusing itself. We have not strengthened as yet, by multiplying into America. Nay, even when it has not to encounter the separating conditions of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of multiplying on its own ground, if it multiplies only as flies or locusts do, with the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its strength only by increasing as one great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood. And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit. Austria is not strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp of Lombardy; and whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and exalting. But, as it is at their own peril that any race extends their dominion in mere desire of power, so it is at their own still greater peril, that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, according to their force, whenever they are assured that their authority would be helpful and protective. Nor need you listen to any sophistical objection of the impossibility of knowing when a people's help is needed, or when not. Make your national conscience clean, and your national eyes will soon be clear. No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble quarrel will ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. I hold it my duty to make no political statement of any special bearing in this presence; but I tell you broadly and boldly, that, within these last ten years, we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs: we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain; and we have been passive where we should not have been passive, for fear. I tell you that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only malignant, but dastardly. I know, however, that my opinions on this subject differ too widely from those ordinarily held, to be any farther intruded upon you; and therefore I pass lastly to examine the conditions of the third kind of noble war;--war waged simply for defence of the country in which we were born, and for the maintenance and execution of her laws, by whomsoever threatened or defied. It is to this duty that I suppose most men entering the army consider themselves in reality to be bound, and I want you now to reflect what the laws of mere defence are; and what the soldier's duty, as now understood, or supposed to be understood. You have solemnly devoted yourselves to be English soldiers, for the guardianship of England. I want you to feel what this vow of yours indeed means, or is gradually coming to mean. You take it upon you, first, while you are sentimental schoolboys; you go into your military convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent while she is a sentimental schoolgirl; neither of you then know what you are about, though both the good soldiers and good nuns make the best of it afterwards. You don't understand perhaps why I call you 'sentimental' schoolboys, when you go into the army? Because, on the whole, it is love of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the pride of fame, all which are sentimental motives, which chiefly make a boy like going into the Guards better than into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that there is a severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives? And in the best of you, there is; but do not think that it is principal. If you cared to do your duty to your country in a prosaic and unsentimental way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty to be done in raising harvests than in burning them; more in building houses, than in shelling them--more in winning money by your own work, wherewith to help men, than in taxing other people's work, for money wherewith to slay men; more duty finally, in honest and unselfish living than in honest and unselfish dying, though that seems to your boys' eyes the bravest. So far then, as for your own honour, and the honour of your families, you choose brave death in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you are sentimental; and now see what this passionate vow of yours comes to. For a little while you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you shoot, and are shot; you are happy, and proud, always, and honoured and wept if you die; and you are satisfied with your life, and with the end of it; believing, on the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes to others, and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of duty enters into your forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. You find that you have put yourselves into the hand of your country as a weapon. You have vowed to strike, when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded when she bids you; all that you need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp. And there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand and heart of the Britomart who has braced you to her side, and are assured that when she leaves you sheathed in darkness, there is no need for your flash to the sun. But remember, good and noble as this state may be, it is a state of slavery. There are different kinds of slaves and different masters. Some slaves are scourged to their work by whips, others are scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls: the fact, so far, of slavery, is in being driven to your work without thought, at another's bidding. Again, some slaves are bought with money, and others with praise. It matters not what the purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters not what kind of work you are set on; some slaves are set to forced diggings, others to forced marches; some dig furrows, others field-works, and others graves. Some press the juice of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity is the same whatever work we are set upon, though the fruits of the toil may be different. But, remember, in thus vowing ourselves to be the slaves of any master, it ought to be some subject of forethought with us, what work he is likely to put us upon. You may think that the whole duty of a soldier is to be passive, that it is the country you have left behind who is to command, and you have only to obey. But are you sure that you have left _all_ your country behind, or that the part of it you have so left is indeed the best part of it? Suppose--and, remember, it is quite conceivable--that you yourselves are indeed the best part of England; that you who have become the slaves, ought to have been the masters; and that those who are the masters, ought to have been the slaves! If it is a noble and whole-hearted England, whose bidding you are bound to do, it is well; but if you are yourselves the best of her heart, and the England you have left be but a half-hearted England, how say you of your obedience? You were too proud to become shopkeepers: are you satisfied then to become the servants of shopkeepers? You were too proud to become merchants or farmers yourselves: will you have merchants or farmers then for your field marshals? You had no gifts of special grace for Exeter Hall: will you have some gifted person thereat for your commander-in-chief, to judge of your work, and reward it? You imagine yourselves to be the army of England: how if you should find yourselves, at last, only the police of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of her little Bethels? It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever; but what I want you to see, and to be assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not mere passive obedience and bravery; that, so far from this, no country is in a healthy state which has separated, even in a small degree, her civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great, fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although it is a less instant form of error (because involving no national taint of cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal--it is the error especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the calamitous consequences--to take away the best blood and strength of the nation, all the soul-substance of it that is brave, and careless of reward, and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust; and to cast that into steel, and make a mere sword of it; taking away its voice and will; but to keep the worst part of the nation--whatever is cowardly, avaricious, sensual, and faithless--and to give to this the voice, to this the authority, to this the chief privilege, where there is least capacity, of thought. The fulfilment of your vow for the defence of England will by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You are not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop door, to protect shop-boys who are cheating inside. A soldier's vow to his country is that he will die for the guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her righteous laws, and of her anyway challenged or endangered honour. A state without virtue, without laws, and without honour, he is bound _not_ to defend; nay, bound to redress by his own right hand that which he sees to be base in her. So sternly is this the law of Nature and life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a military despotism--never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the health of any state consists simply in this: that in it, those who are wisest shall also be strongest; its rulers should be also its soldiers; or, rather, by force of intellect more than of sword, its soldiers its rulers. Whatever the hold which the aristocracy of England has on the heart of England, in that they are still always in front of her battles, this hold will not be enough, unless they are also in front of her thoughts. And truly her thoughts need good captain's leading now, if ever! Do you know what, by this beautiful division of labour (her brave men fighting, and her cowards thinking), she has come at last to think? Here is a bit of paper in my hand,[6] a good one too, and an honest one; quite representative of the best common public thought of England at this moment; and it is holding forth in one of its leaders upon our 'social welfare,'--upon our 'vivid life'--upon the 'political supremacy of Great Britain.' And what do you think all these are owing to? To what our English sires have done for us, and taught us, age after age? No: not to that. To our honesty of heart, or coolness of head, or steadiness of will? No: not to these. To our thinkers, or our statesmen, or our poets, or our captains, or our martyrs, or the patient labour of our poor? No: not to these; or at least not to these in any chief measure. Nay, says the journal, 'more than any agency, it is the cheapness and abundance of our coal which have made us what we are.' If it be so, then 'ashes to ashes' be our epitaph! and the sooner the better. I tell you, gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country breathe the pure breath of heaven again, and receive again a soul into her body, instead of rotting into a carcase, blown up in the belly with carbonic acid (and great _that_ way), you must think, and feel, for your England, as well as fight for her: you must teach her that all the true greatness she ever had, or ever can have, she won while her fields were green and her faces ruddy;--that greatness is still possible for Englishmen, even though the ground be not hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over their heads;--and that, when the day comes for their country to lay her honours in the dust, her crest will not rise from it more loftily because it is dust of coal. Gentlemen, I tell you, solemnly, that the day is coming when the soldiers of England must be her tutors and the captains of her army, captains also of her mind. And now, remember, you soldier youths, who are thus in all ways the hope of your country; or must be, if she have any hope: remember that your fitness for all future trust depends upon what you are now. No good soldier in his old age was ever careless or indolent in his youth. Many a giddy and thoughtless boy has become a good bishop, or a good lawyer, or a good merchant; but no such an one ever became a good general. I challenge you, in all history, to find a record of a good soldier who was not grave and earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have no patience with people who talk about 'the thoughtlessness of youth' indulgently, I had infinitely rather hear of thoughtless old age, and the indulgence due to _that_. When a man has done his work, and nothing can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will; but what excuse can you find for wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every crisis of future fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth thoughtless! when all the happiness of his home for ever depends on the chances, or the passions, of an hour! A youth thoughtless! when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless! when his every act is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a fountain of life or death! Be thoughtless in _any_ after years, rather than now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly thoughtless,--his deathbed. No thinking should ever be left to be done there. Having, then, resolved that you will not waste recklessly, but earnestly use, these early days of yours, remember that all the duties of her children to England may be summed in two words--industry, and honour. I say first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are especially tempted to fail. Yet surely, there is no reason because your life may possibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that you should therefore waste more recklessly the portion of it that is granted you; neither do the duties of your profession, which require you to keep your bodies strong, in any wise involve the keeping of your minds weak. So far from that, the experience, the hardship, and the activity of a soldier's life render his powers of thought more accurate than those of other men; and while, for others, all knowledge is often little more than a means of amusement, there is no form of science which a soldier may not at some time or other find bearing on business of life and death. A young mathematician may be excused for langour in studying curves to be described only with a pencil; but not in tracing those which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome herb may involve the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with an obscure point of geography, the success of a campaign. Never waste an instant's time, therefore; the sin of idleness is a thousandfold greater in you than in other youths; for the fates of those who will one day be under your command hang upon your knowledge; lost moments now will be lost lives then, and every instant which you carelessly take for play, you buy with blood. But there is one way of wasting time, of all the vilest, because it wastes, not time only, but the interest and energy of your minds. Of all the ungentlemanly habits into which you can fall, the vilest is betting, or interesting yourselves in the issues of betting. It unites nearly every condition of folly and vice; you concentrate your interest upon a matter of chance, instead of upon a subject of true knowledge; and you back opinions which you have no grounds for forming, merely because they are your own. All the insolence of egotism is in this; and so far as the love of excitement is complicated with the hope of winning money, you turn yourselves into the basest sort of tradesmen--those who live by speculation. Were there no other ground for industry, this would be a sufficient one; that it protected you from the temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and you will put yourselves in possession of a glorious and enlarging happiness: not such as can be won by the speed of a horse, or marred by the obliquity of a ball. First, then, by industry you must fulfil your vow to your country; but all industry and earnestness will be useless unless they are consecrated by your resolution to be in all things men of honour; not honour in the common sense only, but in the highest. Rest on the force of the two main words in the great verse, _integer_ vitæ, scelerisque _purus_. You have vowed your life to England; give it her wholly--a bright, stainless, perfect life--a knightly life. Because you have to fight with machines instead of lances, there may be a necessity for more ghastly danger, but there is none for less worthiness of character, than in olden time. You may be true knights yet, though perhaps not _equites_; you may have to call yourselves 'cannonry' instead of 'chivalry,' but that is no reason why you should not call yourselves true men. So the first thing you have to see to in becoming soldiers is that you make yourselves wholly true. Courage is a mere matter of course among any ordinarily well-born youths; but neither truth nor gentleness is matter of course. You must bind them like shields about your necks; you must write them on the tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all things--for no other memory will be so protective of you--that the highest law of this knightly truth is that under which it is vowed to women. Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the higher phases of manly character begins in this;--in truth and modesty before the face of all maidens; in truth and pity, or truth and reverence, to all womanhood. And now let me turn for a moment to you,--wives and maidens, who are the souls of soldiers; to you,--mothers, who have devoted your children to the great hierarchy of war. Let me ask you to consider what part you have to take for the aid of those who love you; for if you fail in your part they cannot fulfil theirs; such absolute helpmates you are that mo man can stand without that help, nor labour in his own strength. I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never fails when an hour of trial comes which you recognise for such. But you know not when the hour of trial first finds you, nor when it verily finds you. You imagine that you are only called upon to wait and to suffer; to surrender and to mourn. You know that you must not weaken the hearts of your husbands and lovers, even by the one fear of which those hearts are capable,--the fear of parting from you, or of causing you grief. Through weary years of separation, through fearful expectancies of unknown fate; through the tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so easily have been joy, and the tenfold yearning for glorious life struck down in its prime--through all these agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But your trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is little;--you are Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway of fortune is little;--for do you not love? To be patient through the great chasm and pause of loss is little;--for do you not still love in heaven? But to be heroic in happiness; to bear yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling of the sunshine of morning; not to forget the God in whom you trust, when He gives you most; not to fail those who trust you, when they seem to need you least; this is the difficult fortitude. It is not in the pining of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in the wasting of sickness, that your prayer should be most passionate, or your guardianship most tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, for your young soldiers in the bloom of their pride; pray for them, while the only dangers round them are in their own wayward wills; watch you, and pray, when they have to face, not death, but temptation. But it is this fortitude also for which there is the crowning reward. Believe me, the whole course and character of your lovers' lives is in your hands; what you would have them be, they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so; for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged. If you are frivolous, they will be so also; if you have no understanding of the scope of their duty, they also will forget it; they will listen,--they _can_ listen,--to no other interpretation of it than that uttered from your lips. Bid them be brave;--they will be brave for you; bid them be cowards; and how noble soever they be;--they will quail for you. Bid them be wise, and they will be wise for you; mock at their counsel, they will be fools for you: such and so absolute is your rule over them. You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his mind. Ah, no! the true rule is just the reverse of that; a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers to promise; all that is dark in him she must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen into truth: from her, through all the world's clamour, he must win his praise; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace. And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken all this night in praise of war. Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one, would fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords into ploughshares: and that this cannot be, is not the fault of us men. It is _your_ fault. Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by your permission, can any contest take place among us. And the real, final, reason for all the poverty, misery, and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is simply that you women, however good, however religious, however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish and too thoughtless to take pains for any creature out of your own immediate circles. You fancy that you are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just tell you this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke the china upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in civilised countries would last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever moment you chose to put a period to war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any day to go out to dinner. You know, or at least you might know if you would think, that every battle you hear of has made many widows and orphans. We have, none of us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But at least we might put on the outer symbols of mourning with them. Let but every Christian lady who has conscience toward God, vow that she will mourn, at least outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is useless, and your churchgoing mere mockery of God, if you have not plain obedience in you enough for this. Let every lady in the upper classes of civilised Europe simply vow that, while any cruel war proceeds, she will wear _black_;--a mute's black,--with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse for, or evasion into, prettiness.--I tell you again, no war would last a week. And lastly. You women of England are all now shrieking with one voice,--you and your clergymen together,--because you hear of your Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey your Bibles, you will never care who attacks them. It is just because you never fulfil a single downright precept of the Book, that you are so careful for its credit: and just because you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are so particular about the letters of them. The Bible tells you to dress plainly,--and you are mad for finery; the Bible tells you to have pity on the poor,--and you crush them under your carriage-wheels; the Bible tells you to do judgment and justice,--and you do not know, nor care to know, so much as what the Bible word 'justice means.' Do but learn so much of God's truth as that comes to; know what He means when He tells you to be just: and teach your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless they are indeed Just men, and Perfect in the Fear of God;--and you will soon have no more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it is also written, 'In Righteousness He doth judge, and make war.' FOOTNOTES: [6] I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because the article was unworthy of its general tone, though in order to enable the audience to verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on the table, when I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's, quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in the 'Daily Telegraph' of January 11, 1866, summarily digests and presents the maximum folly of modern thought in this respect. 'Civilization,' says the Baron, 'is the economy of power, and English power is coal.' Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is the making of civil persons, which is a kind of distillation of which alembics are incapable, and does not at all imply the turning of a small company of gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers. And English power (what little of it may be left), is by no means coal, but, indeed, of that which, 'when the whole world turns to coal, then chiefly lives.' MUNERA PULVERIS SIX ESSAYS ON THE ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY PREFACE. The following pages contain, I believe, the first accurate analysis of the laws of Political Economy which has been published in England. Many treatises, within their scope, correct, have appeared in contradiction of the views popularly received; but no exhaustive examination of the subject was possible to any person unacquainted with the value of the products of the highest industries, commonly called the "Fine Arts;" and no one acquainted with the nature of those industries has, so far as I know, attempted, or even approached, the task. So that, to the date (1863) when these Essays were published, not only the chief conditions of the production of wealth had remained unstated, but the nature of wealth itself had never been defined. "Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth," wrote Mr. Mill, in the outset of his treatise; and contentedly proceeded, as if a chemist should proceed to investigate the laws of chemistry without endeavouring to ascertain the nature of fire or water, because every one had a notion of them, "sufficiently correct for common purposes." But even that apparently indisputable statement was untrue. There is not one person in ten thousand who has a notion sufficiently correct, even for the commonest purposes, of "what is meant" by wealth; still less of what wealth everlastingly _is_, whether we mean it or not; which it is the business of every student of economy to ascertain. We, indeed, know (either by experience or in imagination) what it is to be able to provide ourselves with luxurious food, and handsome clothes; and if Mr. Mill had thought that wealth consisted only in these, or in the means of obtaining these, it would have been easy for him to have so defined it with perfect scientific accuracy. But he knew better: he knew that some kinds of wealth consisted in the possession, or power of obtaining, other things than these; but, having, in the studies of his life, no clue to the principles of essential value, he was compelled to take public opinion as the ground of his science; and the public, of course, willingly accepted the notion of a science founded on their opinions. I had, on the contrary, a singular advantage, not only in the greater extent of the field of investigation opened to me by my daily pursuits, but in the severity of some lessons I accidentally received in the course of them. When, in the winter of 1851, I was collecting materials for my work on Venetian architecture, three of the pictures of Tintoret on the roof of the School of St. Roch were hanging down in ragged fragments, mixed with lath and plaster, round the apertures made by the fall of three Austrian heavy shot. The city of Venice was not, it appeared, rich enough to repair the damage that winter; and buckets were set on the floor of the upper room of the school to catch the rain, which not only fell directly through the shot holes, but found its way, owing to the generally pervious state of the roof, through many of the canvases of Tintoret's in other parts of the ceiling. It was a lesson to me, as I have just said, no less direct than severe; for I knew already at that time (though I have not ventured to assert, until recently at Oxford,) that the pictures of Tintoret in Venice were accurately the most precious articles of wealth in Europe, being the best existing productions of human industry. Now at the time that three of them were thus fluttering in moist rags from the roof they had adorned, the shops of the Rue Rivoli at Paris were, in obedience to a steadily-increasing public Demand, beginning to show a steadily-increasing Supply of elaborately-finished and coloured lithographs, representing the modern dances of delight, among which the cancan has since taken a distinguished place. The labour employed on the stone of one of these lithographs is very much more than Tintoret was in the habit of giving to a picture of average size. Considering labour as the origin of value, therefore, the stone so highly wrought would be of greater value than the picture; and since also it is capable of producing a large number of immediately saleable or exchangeable impressions, for which the "demand" is constant, the city of Paris naturally supposed itself, and on all hitherto believed or stated principles of political economy, was, infinitely richer in the possession of a large number of these lithographic stones, (not to speak of countless oil pictures and marble carvings of similar character), than Venice in the possession of those rags of mildewed canvas, flaunting in the south wind and its salt rain. And, accordingly, Paris provided (without thought of the expense) lofty arcades of shops, and rich recesses of innumerable private apartments, for the protection of these better treasures of hers from the weather. Yet, all the while, Paris was not the richer for these possessions. Intrinsically, the delightful lithographs were not wealth, but polar contraries of wealth. She was, by the exact quantity of labour she had given to produce these, sunk below, instead of above, absolute Poverty. They not only were false Riches--they were true _Debt_, which had to be paid at last--and the present aspect of the Rue Rivoli shows in what manner. And the faded stains of the Venetian ceiling, all the while, were absolute and inestimable wealth. Useless to their possessors as forgotten treasure in a buried city, they had in them, nevertheless, the intrinsic and eternal nature of wealth; and Venice, still possessing the ruins of them, was a rich city; only, the Venetians had _not_ a notion sufficiently correct even for the very common purpose of inducing them to put slates on a roof, of what was "meant by wealth." The vulgar economist would reply that his science had nothing to do with the qualities of pictures, but with their exchange-value only; and that his business was, exclusively, to consider whether the remains of Tintoret were worth as many ten-and-sixpences as the impressions which might be taken from the lithographic stones. But he would not venture, without reserve, to make such an answer, if the example be taken in horses, instead of pictures. The most dull economist would perceive, and admit, that a gentleman who had a fine stud of horses was absolutely richer than one who had only ill-bred and broken-winded ones. He would instinctively feel, though his pseudo-science had never taught him, that the price paid for the animals, in either case, did not alter the fact of their worth: that the good horse, though it might have been bought by chance for a few guineas, was not therefore less valuable, nor the owner of the galled jade any the richer, because he had given a hundred for it. So that the economist, in saying that his science takes no account of the qualities of pictures, merely signifies that he cannot conceive of any quality of essential badness or goodness existing in pictures; and that he is incapable of investigating the laws of wealth in such articles. Which is the fact. But, being incapable of defining intrinsic value in pictures, it follows that he must be equally helpless to define the nature of intrinsic value in painted glass, or in painted pottery, or in patterned stuffs, or in any other national produce requiring true human ingenuity. Nay, though capable of conceiving the idea of intrinsic value with respect to beasts of burden, no economist has endeavoured to state the general principles of National Economy, even with regard to the horse or the ass. And, in fine, _the modern political economists have been, without exception, incapable of apprehending the nature of intrinsic value at all_. And the first specialty of the following treatise consists in its giving at the outset, and maintaining as the foundation of all subsequent reasoning, a definition of Intrinsic Value, and Intrinsic Contrary-of-Value; the negative power having been left by former writers entirely out of account, and the positive power left entirely undefined. But, secondly: the modern economist, ignoring intrinsic value, and accepting the popular estimate of things as the only ground of his science, has imagined himself to have ascertained the constant laws regulating the relation of this popular demand to its supply; or, at least, to have proved that demand and supply were connected by heavenly balance, over which human foresight had no power. I chanced, by singular coincidence, lately to see this theory of the law of demand and supply brought to as sharp practical issue in another great siege, as I had seen the theories of intrinsic value brought, in the siege of Venice. I had the honour of being on the committee under the presidentship of the Lord Mayor of London, for the victualling of Paris after her surrender. It became, at one period of our sittings, a question of vital importance at what moment the law of demand and supply would come into operation, and what the operation of it would exactly be: the demand, on this occasion, being very urgent indeed; that of several millions of people within a few hours of utter starvation, for any kind of food whatsoever. Nevertheless, it was admitted, in the course of debate, to be probable that the divine principle of demand and supply might find itself at the eleventh hour, and some minutes over, in want of carts and horses; and we ventured so far to interfere with the divine principle as to provide carts and horses, with haste which proved, happily, in time for the need; but not a moment in advance of it. It was farther recognized by the committee that the divine principle of demand and supply would commence its operations by charging the poor of Paris twelve-pence for a penny's worth of whatever they wanted; and would end its operations by offering them twelve-pence worth for a penny, of whatever they didn't want. Whereupon it was concluded by the committee that the tiny knot, on this special occasion, was scarcely "_dignus vindice_," by the divine principle of demand and supply: and that we would venture, for once, in a profane manner, to provide for the poor of Paris what they wanted, when they wanted it. Which, to the value of the sums entrusted to us, it will be remembered we succeeded in doing. But the fact is that the so-called "law," which was felt to be false in this case of extreme exigence, is alike false in cases of less exigence. It is false always, and everywhere. Nay to such an extent is its existence imaginary, that the vulgar economists are not even agreed in their account of it; for some of them mean by it, only that prices are regulated by the relation between demand and supply, which is partly true; and others mean that the relation itself is one with the process of which it is unwise to interfere; a statement which is not only, as in the above instance, untrue; but accurately the reverse of the truth: for all wise economy, political or domestic, consists in the resolved maintenance of a given relation between supply and demand, other than the instinctive, or (directly) natural, one. Similarly, vulgar political economy asserts for a "law" that wages are determined by competition. Now I pay my servants exactly what wages I think necessary to make them comfortable. The sum is not determined at all by competition; but sometimes by my notions of their comfort and deserving, and sometimes by theirs. If I were to become penniless to-morrow, several of them would certainly still serve me for nothing. In both the real and supposed cases the so-called "law" of vulgar political economy is absolutely set at defiance. But I cannot set the law of gravitation at defiance, nor determine that in my house I will not allow ice to melt, when the temperature is above thirty-two degrees. A true law outside of my house, will remain a true one inside of it. It is not, therefore, a law of Nature that wages are determined by competition. Still less is it a law of State, or we should not now be disputing about it publicly, to the loss of many millions of pounds to the country. The fact which vulgar economists have been weak enough to imagine a law, is only that, for the last twenty years a number of very senseless persons have attempted to determine wages in that manner; and have, in a measure, succeeded in occasionally doing so. Both in definition of the elements of wealth, and in statement of the laws which govern its distribution, modern political economy has been thus absolutely incompetent, or absolutely false. And the following treatise is not, as it has been asserted with dull pertinacity, an endeavour to put sentiment in the place of science; but it contains the exposure of what insolently pretended to be a science; and the definition, hitherto unassailed--and I do not fear to assert, unassailable--of the material elements with which political economy has to deal, and the moral principles in which it consists; being not itself a science, but "a system of conduct founded on the sciences, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture." Which is only to say, that industry, frugality, and discretion, the three foundations of economy, are moral qualities, and cannot be attained without moral discipline: a flat truism, the reader may think, thus stated, yet a truism which is denied both vociferously, and in all endeavour, by the entire populace of Europe; who are at present hopeful of obtaining wealth by tricks of trade, without industry; who, possessing wealth, have lost in the use of it even the conception,--how much more the habit?--of frugality; and who, in the choice of the elements of wealth, cannot so much as lose--since they have never hitherto at any time possessed,--the faculty of discretion. Now if the teachers of the pseudo-science of economy had ventured to state distinctly even the poor conclusions they had reached on the subjects respecting which it is most dangerous for a populace to be indiscreet, they would have soon found, by the use made of them, which were true, and which false. But on main and vital questions, no political economist has hitherto ventured to state one guiding principle. I will instance three subjects of universal importance. National Dress. National Rent. National Debt. Now if we are to look in any quarter for a systematic and exhaustive statement of the principles of a given science, it must certainly be from its Professor at Cambridge. Take the last edition of Professor Fawcett's _Manual of Political Economy_, and forming, first clearly in your mind these three following questions, see if you can find an answer to them. I. Does expenditure of capital on the production of luxurious dress and furniture tend to make a nation rich or poor? II. Does the payment, by the nation, of a tax on its land, or on the produce of it, to a certain number of private persons, to be expended by them as they please, tend to make the nation rich or poor? III. Does the payment, by the nation, for an indefinite period, of interest on money borrowed from private persons, tend to make the nation rich or poor? These three questions are, all of them, perfectly simple, and primarily vital. Determine these, and you have at once a basis for national conduct in all important particulars. Leave them undetermined, and there is no limit to the distress which may be brought upon the people by the cunning of its knaves, and the folly of its multitudes. I will take the three in their order. I. Dress. The general impression on the public mind at this day is, that the luxury of the rich in dress and furniture is a benefit to the poor. Probably not even the blindest of our political economists would venture to assert this in so many words. But where do they assert the contrary? During the entire period of the reign of the late Emperor it was assumed in France, as the first principle of fiscal government, that a large portion of the funds received as rent from the provincial labourer should be expended in the manufacture of ladies' dresses in Paris. Where is the political economist in France, or England, who ventured to assert the conclusions of his science as adverse to this system? As early as the year 1857 I had done my best to show the nature of the error, and to give warning of its danger;[7] but not one of the men who had the foolish ears of the people intent on their words, dared to follow me in speaking what would have been an offence to the powers of trade; and the powers of trade in Paris had their full way for fourteen years more,--with this result, to-day,--as told us in precise and curt terms by the Minister of Public Instruction,--[8] "We have replaced glory by gold, work by speculation, faith and honour by scepticism. To absolve or glorify immorality; to make much of loose women; to gratify our eyes with luxury, our ears with the tales of orgies; to aid in the manoeuvres of public robbers, or to applaud them; to laugh at morality, and only believe in success; to love nothing but pleasure, adore nothing but force; to replace work with a fecundity of fancies; to speak without thinking; to prefer noise to glory; to erect sneering into a system, and lying into an institution--is this the spectacle that we have seen?--is this the society that we have been?" Of course, other causes, besides the desire of luxury in furniture and dress, have been at work to produce such consequences; but the most active cause of all has been the passion for these; passion unrebuked by the clergy, and, for the most part, provoked by economists, as advantageous to commerce; nor need we think that such results have been arrived at in France only; we are ourselves following rapidly on the same road. France, in her old wars with us, never was so fatally our enemy as she has been in the fellowship of fashion, and the freedom of trade: nor, to my mind, is any fact recorded of Assyrian or Roman luxury more ominous, or ghastly, than one which came to my knowledge a few weeks ago, in England; a respectable and well-to-do father and mother, in a quiet north country town, being turned into the streets in their old age, at the suit of their only daughter's milliner. II. Rent. The following account of the real nature of rent is given, quite accurately, by Professor Fawcett, at page 112 of the last edition of his _Political Economy_:-- "Every country has probably been subjugated, and grants of vanquished territory were the ordinary rewards which the conquering chief bestowed upon his more distinguished followers. Lands obtained by force had to be defended by force; and before law had asserted her supremacy, and property was made secure, no baron was able to retain his possessions, unless those who lived on his estates were prepared to defend them....[9] As property became secure, and landlords felt that the power of the State would protect them in all the rights of property, every vestige of these feudal tenures was abolished, and the relation between landlord and tenant has thus become purely commercial. A landlord offers his land to any one who is willing to take it; he is anxious to receive the highest rent he can obtain. What are the principles which regulate the rent which may thus be paid?" These principles the Professor goes on contentedly to investigate, never appearing to contemplate for an instant the possibility of the first principle in the whole business--the maintenance, by force, of the possession of land obtained by force, being ever called in question by any human mind. It is, nevertheless, the nearest task of our day to discover how far original theft may be justly encountered by reactionary theft, or whether reactionary theft be indeed theft at all; and farther, what, excluding either original or corrective theft, are the just conditions of the possession of land. III. Debt. Long since, when, a mere boy, I used to sit silently listening to the conversation of the London merchants who, all of them good and sound men of business, were wont occasionally to meet round my father's dining-table; nothing used to surprise me more than the conviction openly expressed by some of the soundest and most cautious of them, that "if there were no National debt they would not know what to do with their money, or where to place it safely." At the 399th page of his Manual, you will find Professor Fawcett giving exactly the same statement. "In our own country, this certainty against risk of loss is provided by the public funds;" and again, as on the question of rent, the Professor proceeds, without appearing for an instant to be troubled by any misgiving that there may be an essential difference between the effects on national prosperity of a Government paying interest on money which it spent in fire works fifty years ago, and of a Government paying interest on money to be employed to-day on productive labour. That difference, which the reader will find stated and examined at length, in §§ 127-129 of this volume, it is the business of economists, before approaching any other question relating to government, fully to explain. And the paragraphs to which I refer, contain, I believe, the only definite statement of it hitherto made. The practical result of the absence of any such statement is, that capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want guns to shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out of the manufacture of which the capitalists get a per-centage, and men of science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other's homes down in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers, arsenals, &c., in ornamental patterns; (and the victorious party put also some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both, annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and gunpowder. And that is what capitalists call "knowing what to do with their money;" and what commercial men in general call "practical" as opposed to "sentimental" Political Economy. Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1860, perceiving then fully, (as Carlyle had done long before), what distress was about to come on the said populace of Europe through these errors of their teachers, I began to do the best I might, to combat them, in the series of papers for the _Cornhill Magazine_, since published under the title of _Unto this Last_. The editor of the Magazine was my friend, and ventured the insertion of the three first essays; but the outcry against them became then too strong for any editor to endure, and he wrote to me, with great discomfort to himself, and many apologies to me, that the Magazine must only admit one Economical Essay more. I made, with his permission, the last one longer than the rest, and gave it blunt conclusion as well as I could--and so the book now stands; but, as I had taken not a little pains with the Essays, and knew that they contained better work than most of my former writings, and more important truths than all of them put together, this violent reprobation of them by the _Cornhill_ public set me still more gravely thinking; and, after turning the matter hither and thither in my mind for two years more, I resolved to make it the central work of my life to write an exhaustive treatise on Political Economy. It would not have been begun, at that time, however, had not the editor of _Fraser's Magazine_ written to me, saying that he believed there was something in my theories, and would risk the admission of what I chose to write on this dangerous subject; whereupon, cautiously, and at intervals, during the winter of 1862-63, I sent him, and he ventured to print, the preface of the intended work, divided into four chapters. Then, though the Editor had not wholly lost courage, the Publisher indignantly interfered; and the readers of _Fraser_, as those of the _Cornhill_, were protected, for that time, from farther disturbance on my part. Subsequently, loss of health, family distress, and various untoward chances, prevented my proceeding with the body of the book;--seven years have passed ineffectually; and I am now fain to reprint the Preface by itself, under the title which I intended for the whole. Not discontentedly; being, at this time of life, resigned to the sense of failure; and also, because the preface is complete in itself as a body of definitions, which I now require for reference in the course of my _Letters to Workmen_; by which also, in time, I trust less formally to accomplish the chief purpose of _Munera Pulveris_, practically summed in the two paragraphs 27 and 28: namely, to examine the moral results and possible rectifications of the laws of distribution of wealth, which have prevailed hitherto without debate among men. Laws which ordinary economists assume to be inviolable, and which ordinary socialists imagine to be on the eve of total abrogation. But they are both alike deceived. The laws which at present regulate the possession of wealth are unjust, because the motives which provoke to its attainment are impure; but no socialism can effect their abrogation, unless it can abrogate also covetousness and pride, which it is by no means yet in the way of doing. Nor can the change be, in any case, to the extent that has been imagined. Extremes of luxury may be forbidden, and agony of penury relieved; but nature intends, and the utmost efforts of socialism will not hinder the fulfilment of her intention, that a provident person shall always be richer than a spendthrift; and an ingenious one more comfortable than a fool. But, indeed, the adjustment of the possession of the products of industry depends more on their nature than their quantity, and on wise determination therefore of the aims of industry. A nation which desires true wealth, desires it moderately, and can therefore distribute it with kindness, and possess it with pleasure; but one which desires false wealth, desires it immoderately, and can neither dispense it with justice, nor enjoy it in peace. Therefore, needing, constantly in my present work, to refer to the definitions of true and false wealth given in the following Essays, I republish them with careful revisal. They were written abroad; partly at Milan, partly during a winter residence on the south-eastern slope of the Mont Saléve, near Geneva; and sent to London in as legible MS. as I could write; but I never revised the press sheets, and have been obliged, accordingly, now to amend the text here and there, or correct it in unimportant particulars. Wherever any modification has involved change in the sense, it is enclosed in square brackets; and what few explanatory comments I have felt it necessary to add, have been indicated in the same manner. No explanatory comments, I regret to perceive, will suffice to remedy the mischief of my affected concentration of language, into the habit of which I fell by thinking too long over particular passages, in many and many a solitary walk towards the mountains of Bonneville or Annecy. But I never intended the book for anything else than a dictionary of reference, and that for earnest readers; who will, I have good hope, if they find what they want in it, forgive the affectedly curt expressions. The Essays, as originally published, were, as I have just stated, four in number. I have now, more conveniently, divided the whole into six chapters; and (as I purpose throughout this edition of my works) numbered the paragraphs. I inscribed the first volume of this series to the friend who aided me in chief sorrow. Let me inscribe the second to the friend and guide who has urged me to all chief labour, THOMAS CARLYLE. * * * * * I would that some better means were in my power of showing reverence to the man who alone, of all our masters of literature, has written, without thought of himself, what he knew it to be needful for the people of his time to hear, if the will to hear were in them: whom, therefore, as the time draws near when his task must be ended, Republican and Free-thoughted England assaults with impatient reproach; and out of the abyss of her cowardice in policy and dishonour in trade, sets the hacks of her literature to speak evil, grateful to her ears, of the Solitary Teacher who has asked her to be brave for the help of Man, and just, for the love of God. _Denmark Hill,_ _25th November, 1871._ FOOTNOTES: [7] _Political Economy of Art._ (Smith and Elder, 1857, pp. 65-76.) [8] See report of speech of M. Jules Simon, in _Pall Mall Gazette_ of October 27, 1871. [9] The omitted sentences merely amplify the statement; they in no wise modify it. MUNERA PULVERIS. "Te maris et terræ numeroque carentis arenæ Mensorem cohibent, Archyta, Pulveris exigui prope litus parva Matinum Munera." CHAPTER I. DEFINITIONS. 1. As domestic economy regulates the acts and habits of a household, Political economy regulates those of a society or State, with reference to the means of its maintenance. Political economy is neither an art nor a science; but a system of conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture. 2. The study which lately in England has been called Political Economy is in reality nothing more than the investigation of some accidental phenomena of modern commercial operations, nor has it been true in its investigation even of these. It has no connection whatever with political economy, as understood and treated of by the great thinkers of past ages; and as long as its unscholarly and undefined statements are allowed to pass under the same name, every word written on the subject by those thinkers--and chiefly the words of Plato, Xenophon, Cicero and Bacon--must be nearly useless to mankind. The reader must not, therefore, be surprised at the care and insistance with which I have retained the literal and earliest sense of all important terms used in these papers; for a word is usually well made at the time it is first wanted; its youngest meaning has in it the full strength of its youth: subsequent senses are commonly warped or weakened; and as all careful thinkers are sure to have used their words accurately, the first condition, in order to be able to avail our selves of their sayings at all, is firm definition of terms. 3. By the "maintenance" of a State is to be understood the support of its population in healthy and happy life; and the increase of their numbers, so far as that increase is consistent with their happiness. It is not the object of political economy to increase the numbers of a nation at the cost of common health or comfort; nor to increase indefinitely the comfort of individuals, by sacrifice of surrounding lives, or possibilities of life. 4. The assumption which lies at the root of nearly all erroneous reasoning on political economy,--namely, that its object is to accumulate money or exchangeable property,--may be shown in a few words to be without foundation. For no economist would admit national economy to be legitimate which proposed to itself only the building of a pyramid of gold. He would declare the gold to be wasted, were it to remain in the monumental form, and would say it ought to be employed. But to what end? Either it must be used only to gain more gold, and build a larger pyramid, or for some purpose other than the gaining of gold. And this other purpose, however at first apprehended, will be found to resolve itself finally into the service of man;--that is to say, the extension, defence, or comfort of his life. The golden pyramid may perhaps be providently built, perhaps improvidently; but the wisdom or folly of the accumulation can only be determined by our having first clearly stated the aim of all economy, namely, the extension of life. If the accumulation of money, or of exchangeable property, were a certain means of extending existence, it would be useless, in discussing economical questions, to fix our attention upon the more distant object--life--instead of the immediate one--money. But it is not so. Money may sometimes be accumulated at the cost of life, or by limitations of it; that is to say, either by hastening the deaths of men, or preventing their births. It is therefore necessary to keep clearly in view the ultimate object of economy; and to determine the expediency of minor operations with reference to that ulterior end. 5. It has been just stated that the object of political economy is the continuance not only of life, but of healthy and happy life. But all true happiness is both a consequence and cause of life: it is a sign of its vigor, and source of its continuance. All true suffering is in like manner a consequence and cause of death. I shall therefore, in future, use the word "Life" singly: but let it be understood to include in its signification the happiness and power of the entire human nature, body and soul. 6. That human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it wherever His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No physical error can be more profound, no moral error more dangerous, than that involved in the monkish doctrine of the opposition of body to soul. No soul can be perfect in an imperfect body: no body perfect without perfect soul. Every right action and true thought sets the seal of its beauty on person and face; every wrong action and foul thought its seal of distortion; and the various aspects of humanity might be read as plainly as a printed history, were it not that the impressions are so complex that it must always in some cases (and, in the present state of our knowledge, in all cases) be impossible to decipher them completely. Nevertheless, the face of a consistently just, and of a consistently unjust person, may always be rightly distinguished at a glance; and if the qualities are continued by descent through a generation or two, there arises a complete distinction of race. Both moral and physical qualities are communicated by descent, far more than they can be developed by education; (though both may be destroyed by want of education), and there is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training. 7. We must therefore yet farther define the aim of political economy to be "The multiplication of human life at the highest standard." It might at first seem questionable whether we should endeavour to maintain a small number of persons of the highest type of beauty and intelligence, or a larger number of an inferior class. But I shall be able to show in the sequel, that the way to maintain the largest number is first to aim at the highest standard. Determine the noblest type of man, and aim simply at maintaining the largest possible number of persons of that class, and it will be found that the largest possible number of every healthy subordinate class must necessarily be produced also. 8. The perfect type of manhood, as just stated, involves the perfections (whatever we may hereafter determine these to be) of his body, affections, and intelligence. The material things, therefore, which it is the object of political economy to produce and use, (or accumulate for use,) are things which serve either to sustain and comfort the body, or exercise rightly the affections and form the intelligence.[10] Whatever truly serves either of these purposes is "useful" to man, wholesome, healthful, helpful, or holy. By seeking such things, man prolongs and increases his life upon the earth. On the other hand, whatever does not serve either of these purposes,--much more whatever counteracts them,--is in like manner useless to man, unwholesome, unhelpful, or unholy; and by seeking such things man shortens and diminishes his life upon the earth. 9. And neither with respect to things useful or useless can man's estimate of them alter their nature. Certain substances being good for his food, and others noxious to him, what he thinks or wishes respecting them can neither change, nor prevent, their power. If he eats corn, he will live; if nightshade, he will die. If he produce or make good and beautiful things, they will _Re-Create_ him; (note the solemnity and weight of the word); if bad and ugly things, they will "corrupt" or "break in pieces"--that is, in the exact degree of their power, Kill him. For every hour of labour, however enthusiastic or well intended, which he spends for that which is not bread, so much possibility of life is lost to him. His fancies, likings, beliefs, however brilliant, eager, or obstinate, are of no avail if they are set on a false object. Of all that he has laboured for, the eternal law of heaven and earth measures out to him for reward, to the utmost atom, that part which he ought to have laboured for, and withdraws from him (or enforces on him, it may be) inexorably, that part which he ought not to have laboured for until, on his summer threshing-floor, stands his heap of corn; little or much, not according to his labour, but to his discretion. No "commercial arrangements," no painting of surfaces, nor alloying of substances, will avail him a pennyweight. Nature asks of him calmly and inevitably, What have you found, or formed--the right thing or the wrong? By the right thing you shall live; by the wrong you shall die. 10. To thoughtless persons it seems otherwise. The world looks to them as if they could cozen it out of some ways and means of life. But they cannot cozen IT: they can only cozen their neighbours. The world is not to be cheated of a grain; not so much as a breath of its air can be drawn surreptitiously. For every piece of wise work done, so much life is granted; for every piece of foolish work, nothing; for every piece of wicked work, so much death is allotted. This is as sure as the courses of day and night. But when the means of life are once produced, men, by their various struggles and industries of accumulation or exchange, may variously gather, waste, restrain, or distribute them; necessitating, in proportion to the waste or restraint, accurately, so much more death. The rate and range of additional death are measured by the rate and range of waste; and are inevitable;--the only question (determined mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how? 11. Such being the everlasting law of human existence, the essential work of the political economist is to determine what are in reality useful or life-giving things, and by what degrees and kinds of labour they are attainable and distributable. This investigation divides itself under three great heads;--the studies, namely, of the phenomena, first, of WEALTH; secondly, of MONEY; and thirdly, of RICHES. These terms are often used as synonymous, but they signify entirely different things. "Wealth" consists of things in themselves valuable; "Money," of documentary claims to the possession of such things; and "Riches" is a relative term, expressing the magnitude of the possessions of one person or society as compared with those of other persons or societies. The study of Wealth is a province of natural science:--it deals with the essential properties of things. The study of Money is a province of commercial science:--it deals with conditions of engagement and exchange. The study of Riches is a province of moral science:--it deals with the due relations of men to each other in regard of material possessions; and with the just laws of their association for purposes of labour. I shall in this first chapter shortly sketch out the range of subjects which will come before us as we follow these three branches of inquiry. 12. And first of WEALTH, which, it has been said, consists of things essentially valuable. We now, therefore, need a definition of "value." "Value" signifies the strength, or "availing" of anything towards the sustaining of life, and is always twofold; that is to say, primarily, INTRINSIC, and secondarily, EFFECTUAL. The reader must, by anticipation, be warned against confusing value with cost, or with price. _Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; price, the quantity of labour which its possessor will take in exchange for it._[11] Cost and price are commercial conditions, to be studied under the head of money. 13. Intrinsic value is the absolute power of anything to support life. A sheaf of wheat of given quality and weight has in it a measurable power of sustaining the substance of the body; a cubic foot of pure air, a fixed power of sustaining its warmth; and a cluster of flowers of given beauty a fixed power of enlivening or animating the senses and heart. It does not in the least affect the intrinsic value of the wheat, the air, or the flowers, that men refuse or despise them. Used or not, their own power is in them, and that particular power is in nothing else. 14. But in order that this value of theirs may become effectual, a certain state is necessary in the recipient of it. The digesting, breathing, and perceiving functions must be perfect in the human creature before the food, air, or flowers can become of their full value to it. _The production of effectual value, therefore, always involves two needs: first, the production of a thing essentially useful; then the production of the capacity to use it._ Where the intrinsic value and acceptant capacity come together there is Effectual value, or wealth; where there is either no intrinsic value, or no acceptant capacity, there is no effectual value; that is to say, no wealth. A horse is no wealth to us if we cannot ride, nor a picture if we cannot see, _nor can any noble thing be wealth, except to a noble person_. As the aptness of the user increases, the effectual value of the thing used increases; and in its entirety can co-exist only with perfect skill of use, and fitness of nature. 15. Valuable material things may be conveniently referred to five heads: (i.) Land, with its associated air, water, and organisms. (ii.) Houses, furniture, and instruments. (iii.) Stored or prepared food, medicine, and articles of bodily luxury, including clothing. (iv.) Books. (v.) Works of art. The conditions of value in these things are briefly as follows:-- 16. (i.) Land. Its value is twofold; first, as producing food and mechanical power; secondly, as an object of sight and thought, producing intellectual power. Its value, as a means of producing food and mechanical power, varies with its form (as mountain or plain), with its substance (in soil or mineral contents), and with its climate. All these conditions of intrinsic value must be known and complied with by the men who have to deal with it, in order to give effectual value; but at any given time and place, the intrinsic value is fixed: such and such a piece of land, with its associated lakes and seas, rightly treated in surface and substance, can produce precisely so much food and power, and no more. The second element of value in land being its beauty, united with such conditions of space and form as are necessary for exercise, and for fullness of animal life, land of the highest value in these respects will be that lying in temperate climates, and boldly varied in form; removed from unhealthy or dangerous influences (as of miasm or volcano); and capable of sustaining a rich fauna and flora. Such land, carefully tended by the hand of man, so far as to remove from it unsightlinesses and evidences of decay, guarded from violence, and inhabited, under man's affectionate protection, by every kind of living creature that can occupy it in peace, is the most precious "property" that human beings can possess. 17. (ii.) Buildings, furniture, and instruments. The value of buildings consists, first, in permanent strength, with convenience of form, of size, and of position; so as to render employment peaceful, social intercourse easy, temperature and air healthy. The advisable or possible magnitude of cities and mode of their distribution in squares, streets, courts, &c.; the relative value of sites of land, and the modes of structure which are healthiest and most permanent, have to be studied under this head. The value of buildings consists secondly in historical association, and architectural beauty, of which we have to examine the influence on manners and life. The value of instruments consists, first, in their power of shortening labour, or otherwise accomplishing what human strength unaided could not. The kinds of work which are severally best accomplished by hand or by machine;--the effect of machinery in gathering and multiplying population, and its influence on the minds and bodies of such population; together with the conceivable uses of machinery on a colossal scale in accomplishing mighty and useful works, hitherto unthought of, such as the deepening of large river channels;--changing the surface of mountainous districts;--irrigating tracts of desert in the torrid zone;--breaking up, and thus rendering capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, &c., so rendering parts of the earth habitable which hitherto have been lifeless, are to be studied under this head. The value of instruments is, secondarily, in their aid to abstract sciences. The degree in which the multiplication of such instruments should be encouraged, so as to make them, if large, easy of access to numbers (as costly telescopes), or so cheap as that they might, in a serviceable form, become a common part of the furniture of households, is to be considered under this head.[12] 18. (iii.) Food, medicine, and articles of luxury. Under this head we shall have to examine the possible methods of obtaining pure food in such security and equality of supply as to avoid both waste and famine: then the economy of medicine and just range of sanitary law: finally the economy of luxury, partly an æsthetic and partly an ethical question. 19. (iv.) Books. The value of these consists, First, in their power of preserving and communicating the knowledge of facts. Secondly, in their power of exciting vital or noble emotion and intellectual action. They have also their corresponding negative powers of disguising and effacing the memory of facts, and killing the noble emotions, or exciting base ones. Under these two heads we have to consider the economical and educational value, positive and negative, of literature;--the means of producing and educating good authors, and the means and advisability of rendering good books generally accessible, and directing the reader's choice to them. 20. (v.) Works of art. The value of these is of the same nature as that of books; but the laws of their production and possible modes of distribution are very different, and require separate examination. 21. II.--MONEY. Under this head, we shall have to examine the laws of currency and exchange; of which I will note here the first principles. Money has been inaccurately spoken of as merely a means of exchange. But it is far more than this. It is a documentary expression of legal claim. It is not wealth, but a documentary claim to wealth, being the sign of the relative quantities of it, or of the labour producing it, to which, at a given time, persons, or societies, are entitled. If all the money in the world, notes and gold, were destroyed in an instant, it would leave the world neither richer nor poorer than it was. But it would leave the individual inhabitants of it in different relations. Money is, therefore, correspondent in its nature to the title-deed of an estate. Though the deed be burned, the estate still exists, but the right to it has become disputable. 22. The real worth of money remains unchanged, as long as the proportion of the quantity of existing money to the quantity of existing wealth or available labour remains unchanged. If the wealth increases, but not the money, the worth of the money increases; if the money increases, but not the wealth, the worth of the money diminishes. 23. Money, therefore, cannot be arbitrarily multiplied, any more than title-deeds can. So long as the existing wealth or available labour is not fully represented by the currency, the currency may be increased without diminution of the assigned worth of its pieces. But when the existing wealth, or available labour is once fully represented, every piece of money thrown into circulation diminishes the worth of every other existing piece, in the proportion it bears to the number of them, provided the new piece be received with equal credit; if not, the depreciation of worth takes place, according to the degree of its credit. 24. When, however, new money, composed of some substance of supposed intrinsic value (as of gold), is brought into the market, or when new notes are issued which are supposed to be deserving of credit, the desire to obtain the money will, under certain circumstances, stimulate industry: an additional quantity of wealth is immediately produced, and if this be in proportion to the new claims advanced, the value of the existing currency is undepreciated. If the stimulus given be so great as to produce more goods than are proportioned to the additional coinage, the worth of the existing currency will be raised. Arbitrary control and issues of currency affect the production of wealth, by acting on the hopes and fears of men, and are, under certain circumstances, wise. But the issue of additional currency to meet the exigencies of immediate expense, is merely one of the disguised forms of borrowing or taxing. It is, however, in the present low state of economical knowledge, often possible for governments to venture on an issue of currency, when they could not venture on an additional loan or tax, because the real operation of such issue is not understood by the people, and the pressure of it is irregularly distributed, and with an unperceived gradation. 25. The use of substances of intrinsic value as the materials of a currency, is a barbarism;--a remnant of the conditions of barter, which alone render commerce possible among savage nations. It is, however, still necessary, partly as a mechanical check on arbitrary issues; partly as a means of exchanges with foreign nations. In proportion to the extension of civilization, and increase of trustworthiness in Governments, it will cease. So long as it exists, the phenomena of the cost and price of the articles used for currency are mingled with those proper to currency itself, in an almost inextricable manner: and the market worth of bullion is affected by multitudinous accidental circumstances, which have been traced, with more or less success, by writers on commercial operations: but with these variations the true political economist has no more to do than an engineer, fortifying a harbour of refuge against Atlantic tide, has to concern himself with the cries or quarrels of children who dig pools with their fingers for its streams among the sand. 26. III.--RICHES. According to the various industry, capacity, good fortune, and desires of men, they obtain greater or smaller share of, and claim upon, the wealth of the world. The inequalities between these shares, always in some degree just and necessary, may be either restrained by law or circumstance within certain limits; or may increase indefinitely. Where no moral or legal restraint is put upon the exercise of the will and intellect of the stronger, shrewder, or more covetous men, these differences become ultimately enormous. But as soon as they become so distinct in their extremes as that, on one side, there shall be manifest redundance of possession, and on the other manifest pressure of need,--the terms "riches" and "poverty" are used to express the opposite states; being contrary only as the terms "warmth" and "cold" are contraries, of which neither implies an actual degree, but only a relation to other degrees, of temperature. 27. Respecting riches, the economist has to inquire, first, into the advisable modes of their collection; secondly, into the advisable modes of their administration. Respecting the collection of national riches, he has to inquire, first, whether he is justified in calling the nation rich, if the quantity of wealth it possesses relatively to the wealth of other nations, be large; irrespectively of the manner of its distribution. Or does the mode of distribution in any wise affect the nature of the riches? Thus, if the king alone be rich--suppose Croesus or Mausolus--are the Lydians or Carians therefore a rich nation? Or if a few slave-masters are rich, and the nation is otherwise composed of slaves, is it to be called a rich nation? For if not, and the ideas of a certain mode of distribution or operation in the riches, and of a certain degree of freedom in the people, enter into our idea of riches as attributed to a people, we shall have to define the degree of fluency, or circulative character which is essential to the nature of common wealth; and the degree of independence of action required in its possessors. Questions which look as if they would take time in answering.[13] 28. And farther. Since the inequality, which is the condition of riches, may be established in two opposite modes--namely, by increase of possession on the one side, and by decrease of it on the other--we have to inquire, with respect to any given state of riches, precisely in what manner the correlative poverty was produced: that is to say, whether by being surpassed only, or being depressed also; and if by being depressed, what are the advantages, or the contrary, conceivable in the depression. For instance, it being one of the commonest advantages of being rich to entertain a number of servants, we have to inquire, on the one side, what economical process produced the riches of the master; and on the other, what economical process produced the poverty of the persons who serve him; and what advantages each, on his own side, derives from the result. 29. These being the main questions touching the collection of riches, the next, or last, part of the inquiry is into their administration. Their possession involves three great economical powers which require separate examination: namely, the powers of selection, direction, and provision. The power of SELECTION relates to things of which the supply is limited (as the supply of best things is always). When it becomes matter of question to whom such things are to belong, the richest person has necessarily the first choice, unless some arbitrary mode of distribution be otherwise determined upon. The business of the economist is to show how this choice may be a wise one. The power of DIRECTION arises out of the necessary relation of rich men to poor, which ultimately, in one way or another, involves the direction of, or authority over, the labour of the poor; and this nearly as much over their mental as their bodily labour. The business of the economist is to show how this direction may be a Just one. The power of PROVISION is dependent upon the redundance of wealth, which may of course by active persons be made available in preparation for future work or future profit; in which function riches have generally received the name of capital; that is to say, of head-, or source-material. The business of the economist is to show how this provision may be a Distant one. 30. The examination of these three functions of riches will embrace every final problem of political economy;--and, above, or before all, this curious and vital problem,--whether, since the wholesome action of riches in these three functions will depend (it appears), on the Wisdom, Justice, and Farsightedness of the holders; and it is by no means to be assumed that persons primarily rich, must therefore be just and wise,--it may not be ultimately possible so, or somewhat so, to arrange matters, as that persons primarily just and wise, should therefore be rich? Such being the general plan of the inquiry before us, I shall not limit myself to any consecutive following of it, having hardly any good hope of being able to complete so laborious a work as it must prove to me; but from time to time, as I have leisure, shall endeavour to carry forward this part or that, as may be immediately possible; indicating always with accuracy the place which the particular essay will or should take in the completed system. FOOTNOTES: [10] _See_ Appendix I. [11] Observe these definitions,--they are of much importance,--and connect with them the sentences in italics on this and the next page. [12] [I cannot now recast these sentences, pedantic in their generalization, and intended more for index than statement, but I must guard the reader from thinking that I ever wish for cheapness by bad quality. A poor boy need not always learn mathematics; but, if you set him to do so, have the farther kindness to give him good compasses, not cheap ones, whose points bend like lead.] [13] [I regret the ironical manner in which this passage, one of great importance in the matter of it, was written. The gist of it is, that the first of all inquiries respecting the wealth of any nation is not, how much it has; but whether it is in a form that can be used, and in the possession of persons who can use it.] CHAPTER II. STORE-KEEPING. 31. The first chapter having consisted of little more than definition of terms, I purpose, in this, to expand and illustrate the given definitions. The view which has here been taken of the nature of wealth, namely, that it consists in an intrinsic value developed by a vital power, is directly opposed to two nearly universal conceptions of wealth. In the assertion that value is primarily intrinsic, it opposes the idea that anything which is an object of desire to numbers, and is limited in quantity, so as to have rated worth in exchange, may be called, or virtually become, wealth. And in the assertion that value is, secondarily, dependent upon power in the possessor, it opposes the idea that the worth of things depends on the demand for them, instead of on the use of them. Before going farther, we will make these two positions clearer. 32. I. First. All wealth is intrinsic, and is not constituted by the judgment of men. This is easily seen in the case of things affecting the body; we know, that no force of fantasy will make stones nourishing, or poison innocent; but it is less apparent in things affecting the mind. We are easily--perhaps willingly--misled by the appearance of beneficial results obtained by industries addressed wholly to the gratification of fanciful desire; and apt to suppose that whatever is widely coveted, dearly bought, and pleasurable in possession, must be included in our definition of wealth. It is the more difficult to quit ourselves of this error because many things which are true wealth in moderate use, become false wealth in immoderate; and many things are mixed of good and evil,--as mostly, books, and works of art,--out of which one person Will get the good, and another the evil; so that it seems as if there were no fixed good or evil in the things themselves, but only in the view taken, and use made of them. But that is not so. The evil and good are fixed; in essence, and in proportion. And in things in which evil depends upon excess, the point of excess, though indefinable, is fixed; and the power of the thing is on the hither side for good, and on the farther side for evil. And in all cases this power is inherent, not dependent on opinion or choice. Our thoughts of things neither make, nor mar their eternal force; nor--which is the most serious point for future consideration--can they prevent the effect of it (within certain limits) upon ourselves. 33. Therefore, the object of any special analysis of wealth will be not so much to enumerate what is serviceable, as to distinguish what is destructive; and to show that it is inevitably destructive; that to receive pleasure from an evil thing is not to escape from, or alter the evil of it, but to be _altered by_ it; that is, to suffer from it to the utmost, having our own nature, in that degree, made evil also. And it may be shown farther, that, through whatever length of time or subtleties of connexion the harm is accomplished, (being also less or more according to the fineness and worth of the humanity on which it is wrought), still, nothing _but_ harm ever comes of a bad thing. 34. So that, in sum, the term wealth is never to be attached to the _accidental object of a morbid_ desire, but only to the _constant object of a legitimate one_.[14] By the fury of ignorance, and fitfulness of caprice, large interests may be continually attached to things unserviceable or hurtful; if their nature could be altered by our passions, the science of Political Economy would remain, what it has been hitherto among us, the weighing of clouds, and the portioning out of shadows. But of ignorance there is no science; and of caprice no law. Their disturbing forces interfere with the operations of faithful Economy, but have nothing in common with them: she, the calm arbiter of national destiny, regards only essential power for good in all that she accumulates, and alike disdains the wanderings[15] of imagination, and the thirsts of disease. 35. II. Secondly. The assertion that wealth is not _only_ intrinsic, but dependent, in order to become effectual, on a given degree of vital power in its possessor, is opposed to another popular view of wealth;--namely, that though it may always be constituted by caprice, it is, when so constituted, a substantial thing, of which given quantities may be counted as existing here, or there, and exchangeable at rated prices. In this view there are three errors. The first and chief is the overlooking the fact that all exchangeableness of commodity, or effective demand for it, depends on the sum of capacity for its use existing, here or elsewhere. The book we cannot read, or picture we take no delight in, may indeed be called part of our wealth, in so far as we have power of exchanging either for something we like better. But our power of effecting such exchange, and yet more, of effecting it to advantage, depends absolutely on the number of accessible persons who can understand the book, or enjoy the painting, and who will dispute the possession of them. Thus the actual worth of either, even to us, depends no more on their essential goodness than on the capacity existing somewhere for the perception of it; and it is vain in any completed system of production to think of obtaining one without the other. So that, though the true political economist knows that co-existence of capacity for use with temporary possession cannot be always secured, the final fact, on which he bases all action and administration, is that, in the whole nation, or group of nations, he has to deal with, for every atom of intrinsic value produced he must with exactest chemistry produce its twin atom of acceptant digestion, or understanding capacity; or, in the degree of his failure, he has no wealth. Nature's challenge to us is, in earnest, as the Assyrians mock; "I will give thee two thousand horses, if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them." Bavieca's paces are brave, if the Cid backs him; but woe to us, if we take the dust of capacity, wearing the armour of it, for capacity itself, for so all procession, however goodly in the show of it, is to the tomb. 36. The second error in this popular view of wealth is, that in giving the name of wealth to things which we cannot use, we in reality confuse wealth with money. The land we have no skill to cultivate, the book which is sealed to us, or dress which is superfluous, may indeed be exchangeable, but as such are nothing more than a cumbrous form of bank-note, of doubtful or slow convertibility. As long as we retain possession of them, we merely keep our bank-notes in the shape of gravel or clay, of book-leaves, or of embroidered tissue. Circumstances may, perhaps, render such forms the safest, or a certain complacency may attach to the exhibition of them; into both these advantages we shall inquire afterwards; I wish the reader only to observe here, that exchangeable property which we cannot use is, to us personally, merely one of the forms of money, not of wealth. 37. The third error in the popular view is the confusion of Guardianship with Possession; the real state of men of property being, too commonly, that of curators, not possessors, of wealth. A man's power over his property is at the widest range of it, fivefold; it is power of Use, for himself, Administration, to others, Ostentation, Destruction, or Bequest: and possession is in use only, which for each man is sternly limited; so that such things, and so much of them as he can use, are, indeed, well for him, or Wealth; and more of them, or any other things, are ill for him, or Illth.[16] Plunged to the lips in Orinoco, he shall drink to his thirst measure; more, at his peril: with a thousand oxen on his lands, he shall eat to his hunger measure; more, at his peril. He cannot live in two houses at once; a few bales of silk or wool will suffice for the fabric of all the clothes he can ever wear, and a few books will probably hold all the furniture good for his brain. Beyond these, in the best of us but narrow, capacities, we have but the power of administering, or _mal_-administering, wealth: (that is to say, distributing, lending, or increasing it);--of exhibiting it (as in magnificence of retinue or furniture),--of destroying, or, finally, of bequeathing it. And with multitudes of rich men, administration degenerates into curatorship; they merely hold their property in charge, as Trustees, for the benefit of some person or persons to whom it is to be delivered upon their death; and the position, explained in clear terms, would hardly seem a covetable one. What would be the probable feelings of a youth, on his entrance into life, to whom the career hoped for him was proposed in terms such as these: "You must work unremittingly, and with your utmost intelligence, during all your available years, you will thus accumulate wealth to a large amount; but you must touch none of it, beyond what is needful for your support. Whatever sums you gain, beyond those required for your decent and moderate maintenance, and whatever beautiful things you may obtain possession of, shall be properly taken care of by servants, for whose maintenance you will be charged, and whom you will have the trouble of superintending, and on your deathbed you shall have the power of determining to whom the accumulated property shall belong, or to what purposes be applied." 38. The labour of life, under such conditions, would probably be neither zealous nor cheerful; yet the only difference between this position and that of the ordinary capitalist is the power which the latter supposes himself to possess, and which is attributed to him by others, of spending his money at any moment. This pleasure, taken _in the imagination of power to part with that with which we have no intention of parting_, is one of the most curious, though commonest forms of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth. But the political economist has nothing to do with this idealism, and looks only to the practical issue of it--namely, that the holder of wealth, in such temper, may be regarded simply as a mechanical means of collection; or as a money-chest with a slit in it, not only receptant but suctional, set in the public thoroughfare;--chest of which only Death has the key, and evil Chance the distribution of the contents. In his function of Lender (which, however, is one of administration, not use, as far as he is himself concerned), the capitalist takes, indeed, a more interesting aspect; but even in that function, his relations with the state are apt to degenerate into a mechanism for the convenient contraction of debt;--a function the more mischievous, because a nation invariably appeases its conscience with respect to an unjustifiable expense, by meeting it with borrowed funds, expresses its repentance of a foolish piece of business, by letting its tradesmen wait for their money, and always leaves its descendants to pay for the work which will be of the least advantage to them.[17] 39. Quit of these three sources of misconception, the reader will have little farther difficulty in apprehending the real nature of Effectual value. He may, however, at first not without surprise, perceive the consequences involved in his acceptance of the definition. For if the actual existence of wealth be dependent on the power of its possessor, it follows that the sum of wealth held by the nation, instead of being constant, or calculable, varies hourly, nay, momentarily, with the number and character of its holders! and that in changing hands, it changes in quantity. And farther, since the worth of the currency is proportioned to the sum of material wealth which it represents, if the sum of the wealth changes, the worth of the currency changes. And thus both the sum of the property, and power of the currency, of the state, vary momentarily as the character and number of the holders. And not only so, but different rates and kinds of variation are caused by the character of the holders of different kinds of wealth. The transitions of value caused by the character of the holders of land differ in mode from those caused by character in holders of works of art; and these again from those caused by character in holders of machinery or other working capital. But we cannot examine these special phenomena of any kind of wealth until we have a clear idea of the way in which true currency expresses them; and of the resulting modes in which the cost and price of any article are related to its value. To obtain this we must approach the subject in its first elements. 40. Let us suppose a national store of wealth, composed of material things either useful, or believed to be so, taken charge of by the Government,[18] and that every workman, having produced any article involving labour in its production, and for which he has no immediate use, brings it to add to this store, receiving from the Government, in exchange, an order either for the return of the thing itself, or of its equivalent in other things, such as he may choose out of the store, at any time when he needs them. The question of equivalence itself (how much wine a man is to receive in return for so much corn, or how much coal in return for so much iron) is a quite separate one, which we will examine presently. For the time, let it be assumed that this equivalence has been determined, and that the Government order, in exchange for a fixed weight of any article (called, suppose _a_), is either for the return of that weight of the article itself, or of another fixed weight of the article _b_, or another of the article _c_, and so on. Now, supposing that the labourer speedily and continually presents these general orders, or, in common language, "spends the money," he has neither changed the circumstances of the nation, nor his own, except in so far as he may have produced useful and consumed useless articles, or _vice versâ_. But if he does not use, or uses in part only, the orders he receives, and lays aside some portion of them; and thus every day bringing his contribution to the national store, lays by some per-centage of the orders received in exchange for it, he increases the national wealth daily by as much as he does not use of the received order, and to the same amount accumulates a monetary claim on the Government. It is, of course, always in his power, as it is his legal right, to bring forward this accumulation of claim, and at once to consume, destroy, or distribute, the sum of his wealth. Supposing he never does so, but dies, leaving his claim to others, he has enriched the State during his life by the quantity of wealth over which that claim extends, or has, in other words, rendered so much additional life possible in the State, of which additional life he bequeaths the immediate possibility to those whom he invests with his claim. Supposing him to cancel the claim, he would distribute this possibility of life among the nation at large. 41. We hitherto consider the Government itself as simply a conservative power, taking charge of the wealth entrusted to it. But a Government may be more or less than a conservative power. It may be either an improving, or destructive one. If it be an improving power, using all the wealth entrusted to it to the best advantage, the nation is enriched in root and branch at once, and the Government is enabled, for every order presented, to return a quantity of wealth greater than the order was written for, according to the fructification obtained in the interim. This ability may be either concealed, in which case the currency does not completely represent the wealth of the country, or it may be manifested by the continual payment of the excess of value on each order, in which case there is (irrespectively, observe, of collateral results afterwards to be examined) a perpetual rise in the worth of the currency, that is to say, a fall in the price of all articles represented by it. 42. But if the Government be destructive, or a consuming power, it becomes unable to return the value received on the presentation of the order. This inability may either be concealed by meeting demands to the full, until it issue in bankruptcy, or in some form of national debt;--or it may be concealed during oscillatory movements between destructiveness and productiveness, which result on the whole in stability;--or it may be manifested by the consistent return of less than value received on each presented order, in which case there is a consistent fall in the worth of the currency, or rise in the price of the things represented by it. 43. Now, if for this conception of a central Government, we substitute that of a body of persons occupied in industrial pursuits, of whom each adds in his private capacity to the common store, we at once obtain an approximation to the actual condition of a civilized mercantile community, from which approximation we might easily proceed into still completer analysis. I purpose, however, to arrive at every result by the gradual expansion of the simpler conception; but I wish the reader to observe, in the meantime, that both the social conditions thus supposed (and I will by anticipation say also, all possible social conditions), agree in two great points; namely, in the primal importance of the supposed national store or stock, and in its destructibility or improveability by the holders of it. 44. I. Observe that in both conditions, that of central Government-holding, and diffused private-holding, the quantity of stock is of the same national moment. In the one case, indeed, its amount may be known by examination of the persons to whom it is confided; in the other it cannot be known but by exposing the private affairs of every individual. But, known or unknown, its significance is the same under each condition. The riches of the nation consist in the abundance, and their wealth depends on the nature, of this store. 45. II. In the second place, both conditions, (and all other possible ones) agree in the destructibility or improveability of the store by its holders. Whether in private hands, or under Government charge, the national store may be daily consumed, or daily enlarged, by its possessors; and while the currency remains apparently unaltered, the property it represents may diminish or increase. 46. The first question, then, which we have to put under our simple conception of central Government, namely, "What store has it?" is one of equal importance, whatever may be the constitution of the State; while the second question--namely, "Who are the holders of the store?" involves the discussion of the constitution of the State itself. The first inquiry resolves itself into three heads: 1. What is the nature of the store? 2. What is its quantity in relation to the population? 3. What is its quantity in relation to the currency? The second inquiry into two: 1. Who are the Holders of the store, and in what proportions? 2. Who are the Claimants of the store, (that is to say, the holders of the currency,) and in what proportions? We will examine the range of the first three questions in the present paper; of the two following, in the sequel. 47. I. QUESTION FIRST. What is the nature of the store? Has the nation hitherto worked for and gathered the right thing or the wrong? On that issue rest the possibilities of its life. For example, let us imagine a society, of no great extent, occupied in procuring and laying up store of corn, wine, wool, silk, and other such preservable materials of food and clothing; and that it has a currency representing them. Imagine farther, that on days of festivity, the society, discovering itself to derive satisfaction from pyrotechnics, gradually turns its attention more and more to the manufacture of gunpowder; so that an increasing number of labourers, giving what time they can spare to this branch of industry, bring increasing quantities of combustibles into the store, and use the general orders received in exchange to obtain such wine, wool, or corn, as they may have need of. The currency remains the same, and represents precisely the same amount of material in the store, and of labour spent in producing it. But the corn and wine gradually vanish, and in their place, as gradually, appear sulphur and saltpetre, till at last the labourers who have consumed corn and supplied nitre, presenting on a festal morning some of their currency to obtain materials for the feast, discover that no amount of currency will command anything Festive, except Fire. The supply of rockets is unlimited, but that of food, limited, in a quite final manner; and the whole currency in the hands of the society represents an infinite power of detonation, but none of existence. 48. This statement, caricatured as it may seem, is only exaggerated in assuming the persistence of the folly to extremity, unchecked, as in reality it would be, by the gradual rise in price of food. But it falls short of the actual facts of human life in expression of the depth and intensity of the folly itself. For a great part (the reader would not believe how great until he saw the statistics in detail) of the most earnest and ingenious industry of the world is spent in producing munitions of war; gathering, that is to say the materials, not of festive, but of consuming fire; filling its stores with all power of the instruments of pain, and all affluence of the ministries of death. It was no true _Trionfo della Morte_[19] which men have seen and feared (sometimes scarcely feared) so long; wherein he brought them rest from their labours. We see, and share, another and higher form of his triumph now. Task-master, instead of Releaser, he rules the dust of the arena no less than of the tomb; and, content once in the grave whither man went, to make his works to cease and his devices to vanish,--now, in the busy city and on the serviceable sea, makes his work to increase, and his devices to multiply. 49. To this doubled loss, or negative power of labour, spent in producing means of destruction, we have to add, in our estimate of the consequences of human folly, whatever more insidious waste of toil there is in production of unnecessary luxury. Such and such an occupation (it is said) supports so many labourers, because so many obtain wages in following it; but it is never considered that unless there be a supporting power in the product of the occupation, the wages given to one man are merely withdrawn from another. We cannot say of any trade that it maintains such and such a number of persons, unless we know how and where the money, now spent in the purchase of its produce, would have been spent, if that produce had not been manufactured. The purchasing funds truly support a number of people in making This; but (probably) leave unsupported an equal number who are making, or could have made That. The manufacturers of small watches thrive at Geneva;--it is well;--but where would the money spent on small watches have gone, had there been no small watches to buy? 50. If the so frequently uttered aphorism of mercantile economy--"labour is limited by capital," were true, this question would be a definite one. But it is untrue; and that widely. Out of a given quantity of funds for wages, more or less labour is to be had, according to the quantity of will with which we can inspire the workman; and the true limit of labour is only in the limit of this moral stimulus of the will, and of the bodily power. In an ultimate, but entirely unpractical sense, labour is limited by capital, as it is by matter--that is to say, where there is no material, there can be no work,--but in the practical sense, labour is limited only by the great original capital of head, heart, and hand. Even in the most artificial relations of commerce, labour is to capital as fire to fuel: out of so much fuel, you _can_ have only so much fire; but out of so much fuel, you _shall_ have so much fire,--not in proportion to the mass of combustible, but to the force of wind that fans and water that quenches; and the appliance of both. And labour is furthered, as conflagration is, not so much by added fuel, as by admitted air.[20] 51. For which reasons, I had to insert, in § 49, the qualifying "probably;" for it can never be said positively that the purchase-money, or wages fund of any trade is withdrawn from some other trade. The object itself may be the stimulus of the production of the money which buys it; that is to say, the work by which the purchaser obtained the means of buying it, would not have been done by him unless he had wanted that particular thing. And the production of any article not intrinsically (nor in the process of manufacture) injurious, is useful, if the desire of it causes productive labour in other directions. 52. In the national store, therefore, the presence of things intrinsically valueless does not imply an entirely correlative absence of things valuable. We cannot be certain that all the labour spent on vanity has been diverted from reality, and that for every bad thing produced, a precious thing has been lost. In great measure, the vain things represent the results of roused indolence; they have been carved, as toys, in extra time; and, if they had not been made, nothing else would have been made. Even to munitions of war this principle applies; they partly represent the work of men who, if they had not made spears, would never have made pruning hooks, and who are incapable of any activities but those of contest. 53. Thus then, finally, the nature of the store has to be considered under two main lights; the one, that of its immediate and actual utility; the other, that of the past national character which it signifies by its production, and future character which it must develop by its use. And the issue of this investigation will be to show us that. Economy does not depend merely on principles of "demand and supply," but primarily on what is demanded, and what is supplied; which I will beg of you to observe, and take to heart. * * * * * 54. II. QUESTION SECOND.--What is the quantity of the store, in relation to the population? It follows from what has been already stated that the accurate form in which this question has to be put is--"What quantity of each article composing the store exists in proportion to the real need for it by the population?" But we shall for the time assume, in order to keep all our terms at the simplest, that the store is wholly composed of useful articles, and accurately proportioned to the several needs for them. Now it cannot be assumed, because the store is large in proportion to the number of the people, that the people must be in comfort; nor because it is small, that they must be in distress. An active and economical race always produces more than it requires, and lives (if it is permitted to do so) in competence on the produce of its daily labour. The quantity of its store, great or small, is therefore in many respects indifferent to it, and cannot be inferred from its aspect. Similarly an inactive and wasteful population, which cannot live by its daily labour, but is dependent, partly or wholly, on consumption of its store, may be (by various difficulties, hereafter to be examined, in realizing or getting at such store) retained in a state of abject distress, though its possessions may be immense. But the results always involved in the magnitude of store are, the commercial power of the nation, its security, and its mental character. Its commercial power, in that according to the quantity of its store, may be the extent of its dealings; its security, in that according to the quantity of its store are its means of sudden exertion or sustained endurance; and its character, in that certain conditions of civilization cannot be attained without permanent and continually accumulating store, of great intrinsic value, and of peculiar nature.[21] 55. Now, seeing that these three advantages arise from largeness of store in proportion to population, the question arises immediately, "Given the store--is the nation enriched by diminution of its numbers? Are a successful national speculation, and a pestilence, economically the same thing?" This is in part a sophistical question; such as it would be to ask whether a man was richer when struck by disease which must limit his life within a predicable period, than he was when in health. He is enabled to enlarge his current expenses, and has for all purposes a larger sum at his immediate disposal (for, given the fortune, the shorter the life, the larger the annuity); yet no man considers himself richer because he is condemned by his physician. 56. The logical reply is that, since Wealth is by definition only the means of life, a nation cannot be enriched by its own mortality. Or in shorter words, the life is more than the meat; and existence itself, more wealth than the means of existence. Whence, of two nations who have equal store, the more numerous is to be considered the richer, provided the type of the inhabitant be as high (for, though the relative bulk of their store be less, its relative efficiency, or the amount of effectual wealth, must be greater). But if the type of the population be deteriorated by increase of its numbers, we have evidence of poverty in its worst influence; and then, to determine whether the nation in its total may still be justifiably esteemed rich, we must set or weigh, the number of the poor against that of the rich. To effect which piece of scale-work, it is of course necessary to determine, first, who are poor and who are rich; nor this only, but also how poor and how rich they are. Which will prove a curious thermometrical investigation; for we shall have to do for gold and for silver, what we have done for quicksilver;--determine, namely, their freezing-point, their zero, their temperate and fever-heat points; finally, their vaporescent point, at which riches, sometimes explosively, as lately in America, "make to themselves wings:"--and correspondently, the number of degrees _below_ zero at which poverty, ceasing to brace with any wholesome cold, burns to the bone.[22] 57. For the performance of these operations, in the strictest sense scientific, we will first look to the existing so-called "science" of Political Economy; we will ask it to define for us the comparatively and superlatively rich, and the comparatively and superlatively poor; and on its own terms--if any terms it can pronounce--examine, in our prosperous England, how many rich and how many poor people there are; and whether the quantity and intensity of the poverty is indeed so overbalanced by the quantity and intensity of wealth, that we may permit ourselves a luxurious blindness to it, and call ourselves, complacently, a rich country. And if we find no clear definition in the existing science, we will endeavour for ourselves to fix the true degrees of the scale, and to apply them.[23] * * * * * 58. QUESTION THIRD. What is the quantity of the store in relation to the Currency? We have seen that the real worth of the currency, so far as dependent on its relation to the magnitude of the store, may vary, within certain limits, without affecting its worth in exchange. The diminution or increase of the represented wealth may be unperceived, and the currency may be taken either for more or less than it is truly worth. Usually it is taken for much more; and its power in exchange, or credit-power, is thus increased up to a given strain upon its relation to existing wealth. This credit-power is of chief importance in the thoughts, because most sharply present to the experience, of a mercantile community: but the conditions of its stability[24] and all other relations of the currency to the material store are entirely simple in principle, if not in action. Far other than simple are the relations of the currency to the available labour which it also represents. For this relation is involved not only with that of the magnitude of the store to the number, but with that of the magnitude of the store to the mind, of the population. Its proportion to their number, and the resulting worth of currency, are calculable; but its proportion to their will for labour is not. The worth of the piece of money which claims a given quantity of the store is, in exchange, less or greater according to the facility of obtaining the same quantity of the same thing without having recourse to the store. In other words it depends on the immediate Cost and Price of the thing. We must now, therefore, complete the definition of these terms. 59. All cost and price are counted in Labour. We must know first, therefore, what is to be counted _as_ Labour. I have already defined labour to be the Contest of the life of man with an opposite. Literally, it is the quantity of "Lapse," loss, or failure of human life, caused by any effort. It is usually confused with effort itself, or the application of power (opera); but there is much effort which is merely a mode of recreation, or of pleasure. The most beautiful actions of the human body, and the highest results of the human intelligence, are conditions, or achievements, of quite unlaborious,--nay, of recreative,--effort. But labour is the _suffering_ in effort. It is the negative quantity, or quantity of de-feat, which has to be counted against every Feat, and of de-fect which has to be counted against every Fact, or Deed of men. In brief, it is "that quantity of our toil which we die in." We might, therefore, _à priori_, conjecture (as we shall ultimately find), that it cannot be bought, nor sold. Everything else is bought and sold for Labour, but labour itself cannot be bought nor sold for anything, being priceless.[25] The idea that it is a commodity to be bought or sold, is the alpha and omega of Politico-Economic fallacy. 60. This being the nature of labour, the "Cost" of anything is the quantity of labour necessary to obtain it;--the quantity for which, or at which, it "stands" (constant). It is literally the "Constancy" of the thing;--you shall win it--move it--come at it, for no less than this. Cost is measured and measurable (using the accurate Latin terms) only in "labour," not in "opera."[26] It does not matter how much _work_ a thing needs to produce it; it matters only how much _distress_. Generally the more the power it requires, the less the distress; so that the noblest works of man cost less than the meanest. True labour, or spending of life, is either of the body, in fatigue or pain; of the temper or heart (as in perseverance of search for things,--patience in waiting for them,--fortitude or degradation in suffering for them, and the like), or of the intellect. All these kinds of labour are supposed to be included in the general term, and the quantity of labour is then expressed by the time it lasts. So that a unit of labour is "an hour's work" or a day's work, as we may determine.[27] 61. Cost, like value, is both intrinsic and effectual. Intrinsic cost is that of getting the thing in the right way; effectual cost is that of getting the thing in the way we set about it. But intrinsic cost cannot be made a subject of analytical investigation, being only partially discoverable, and that by long experience. Effectual cost is all that the political Economist can deal with; that is to say, the cost of the thing under existing circumstances, and by known processes. Cost, being dependent much on application of method, varies with the quantity of the thing wanted, and with the number of persons who work for it. It is easy to get a little of some things, but difficult to get much; it is impossible to get some things with few hands, but easy to get them with many. 62. The cost and value of things, however difficult to determine accurately, are thus both dependent on ascertainable physical circumstances.[28] But their _price_ is dependent on the human will. Such and such a thing is demonstrably good for so much. And it may demonstrably be had for so much. But it remains questionable, and in all manner of ways questionable, whether I choose to give so much.[29] This choice is always a relative one. It is a choice to give a price for this, rather than for that;--a resolution to have the thing, if getting it does not involve the loss of a better thing. Price depends, therefore, not only on the cost of the commodity itself, but on its relation to the cost of every other attainable thing. Farther. The _power_ of choice is also a relative one. It depends not merely on our own estimate of the thing, but on everybody else's estimate; therefore on the number and force of the will of the concurrent buyers, and on the existing quantity of the thing in proportion to that number and force. Hence the price of anything depends on four variables. (1.) Its cost. (2.) Its attainable quantity at that cost. (3.) The number and power of the persons who want it. (4.) The estimate they have formed of its desirableness. Its value only affects its price so far as it is contemplated in this estimate; perhaps, therefore, not at all. 63. Now, in order to show the manner in which price is expressed in terms of a currency, we must assume these four quantities to be known, and the "estimate of desirableness," commonly called the Demand, to be certain. We will take the number of persons at the lowest. Let A and B be two labourers who "demand," that is to say, have resolved to labour for, two articles, _a_ and _b_. Their demand for these articles (if the reader likes better, he may say their need) is to be conceived as absolute, their existence depending on the getting these two things. Suppose, for instance, that they are bread and fuel, in a cold country, and let a represent the least quantity of bread, and _b_ the least quantity of fuel, which will support a man's life for a day. Let _a_ be producible by an hour's labour, but _b_ only by two hours' labour. Then the _cost of a_ is one hour, and of _b_ two (cost, by our definition, being expressible in terms of time). If, therefore, each man worked both for his corn and fuel, each would have to work three hours a day. But they divide the labour for its greater ease.[30] Then if A works three hours, he produces 3 _a_, which is one a more than both the men want. And if B works three hours, he produces only 1-1/2 _b_, or half of _b_ less than both want. But if A work three hours and B six, A has 3 _a_, and B has 3 _b_, a maintenance in the right proportion for both for a day and half; so that each might take half a day's rest. But as B has worked double time, the whole of this day's rest belongs in equity to him. Therefore the just exchange should be, A giving two _a_ for one _b_, has one _a_ and one _b_;--maintenance for a day. B giving one _b_ for two _a_, has two _a_ and two _b_; maintenance for two days. But B cannot rest on the second day, or A would be left without the article which B produces. Nor is there any means of making the exchange just, unless a third labourer is called in. Then one workman, A, produces _a_, and two, B and C, produce _b_:--A, working three hours, has three _a_;--B, three hours, 1-1/2 _b_;--C, three hours, 1-1/2 _b_. B and C each give half of _b_ for _a_, and all have their equal daily maintenance for equal daily work. To carry the example a single step farther, let three articles, _a_, _b_, and _c_ be needed. Let _a_ need one hour's work, _b_ two, and _c_ four; then the day's work must be seven hours, and one man in a day's work can make 7 _a_, or 3-1/2 _b_, or 1-3/4 _c_. Therefore one A works for _a_, producing 7 _a_; two B's work for _b_, producing 7 _b_; four C's work for _c_, producing 7 _c_. A has six _a_ to spare, and gives two _a_ for one _b_, and four _a_ for one _c_. Each B has 2-1/2 _b_ to spare, and gives 1/2 _b_ for one _a_, and two _b_ for one _c_. Each C has 3/4 of _c_ to spare, and gives 1/2 _c_ for one _b_, and 1/4 of _c_ for one _a_. And all have their day's maintenance. Generally, therefore, it follows that if the demand is constant,[31] the relative prices of things are as their costs, or as the quantities of labour involved in production. 64. Then, in order to express their prices in terms of a currency, we have only to put the currency into the form of orders for a certain quantity of any given article (with us it is in the form of orders for gold), and all quantities of other articles are priced by the relation they bear to the article which the currency claims. But the worth of the currency itself is not in the slightest degree founded more on the worth of the article which it either claims or consists in (as gold) than on the worth of every other article for which the gold is exchangeable. It is just as accurate to say, "so many pounds are worth an acre of land," as "an acre of land is worth so many pounds." The worth of gold, of land, of houses, and of food, and of all other things, depends at any moment on the existing quantities and relative demands for all and each; and a change in the worth of, or demand for, any one, involves an instantaneously correspondent change in the worth of, and demand for, all the rest;--a change as inevitable and as accurately balanced (though often in its process as untraceable) as the change in volume of the outflowing river from some vast lake, caused by change in the volume of the inflowing streams, though no eye can trace, nor instrument detect, motion, either on its surface, or in the depth. 65. Thus, then, the real working power or worth of the currency is founded on the entire sum of the relative estimates formed by the population of its possessions; a change in this estimate in any direction (and therefore every change in the national character), instantly alters the value of money, in its second great function of commanding labour. But we must always carefully and sternly distinguish between this worth of currency, dependent on the conceived or appreciated value of what it represents, and the worth of it, dependent on the _existence_ of what it represents. A currency is _true, or false_, in proportion to the security with which it gives claim to the possession of land, house, horse, or picture; but a currency is _strong or weak_,[32] worth much, or worth little, in proportion to the degree of estimate in which the nation holds the house, horse, or picture which is claimed. Thus the power of the English currency has been, till of late, largely based on the national estimate of horses and of wine: so that a man might always give any price to furnish choicely his stable, or his cellar; and receive public approval therefor: but if he gave the same sum to furnish his library, he was called mad or a biblio-maniac. And although he might lose his fortune by his horses, and his health or life by his cellar, and rarely lost either by his books, he was yet never called a Hippo-maniac nor an Oino-maniac; but only Biblio-maniac, because the current worth of money was understood to be legitimately founded on cattle and wine, but not on literature. The prices lately given at sales for pictures and MSS. indicate some tendency to change in the national character in this respect, so that the worth of the currency may even come in time to rest, in an acknowledged manner, somewhat on the state and keeping of the Bedford missal, as well as on the health of Caractacus or Blink Bonny; and old pictures be considered property, no less than old port. They might have been so before now, but that it is more difficult to choose the one than the other. 66. Now, observe, all these sources of variation in the power of the currency exist, wholly irrespective of the influences of vice, indolence, and improvidence. We have hitherto supposed, throughout the analysis, every professing labourer to labour honestly, heartily, and in harmony with his fellows. We have now to bring farther into the calculation the effects of relative industry, honour, and forethought; and thus to follow out the bearings of our second inquiry: Who are the holders of the Store and Currency, and in what proportions? This, however, we must reserve for our next paper--noticing here only that, however distinct the several branches of the subject are, radically, they are so interwoven in their issues that we cannot rightly treat any one, till we have taken cognizance of all. Thus the need of the currency in proportion to number of population is materially influenced by the probable number of the holders in proportion to the non-holders; and this again, by the number of holders of goods, or wealth, in proportion to the non-holders of goods. For as, by definition, the currency is a claim to goods which are not possessed, its quantity indicates the number of claimants in proportion to the number of holders; and the force and complexity of claim. For if the claims be not complex, currency as a means of exchange may be very small in quantity. A sells some corn to B, receiving a promise from B to pay in cattle, which A then hands over to C, to get some wine. C in due time claims the cattle from B; and B takes back his promise. These exchanges have, or might have been, all effected with a single coin or promise; and the proportion of the currency to the store would in such circumstances indicate only the circulating vitality of it--that is to say, the quantity and convenient divisibility of that part of the store which the _habits_ of the nation keep in circulation. If a cattle breeder is content to live with his household chiefly on meat and milk, and does not want rich furniture, or jewels, or books--if a wine and corn grower maintains himself and his men chiefly on grapes and bread;--if the wives and daughters of families weave and spin the clothing of the household, and the nation, as a whole, remains content with the produce of its own soil and the work of its own hands, it has little occasion for circulating media. It pledges and promises little and seldom; exchanges only so far as exchange is necessary for life. The store belongs to the people in whose hands it is found, and money is little needed either as an expression of right, or practical means of division and exchange. 67. But in proportion as the habits of the nation become complex and fantastic (and they may be both, without therefore being civilized), its circulating medium must increase in proportion to its store. If every one wants a little of everything,--if food must be of many kinds, and dress of many fashions,--if multitudes live by work which, ministering to fancy, has its pay measured by fancy, so that large prices will be given by one person for what is valueless to another,--if there are great inequalities of knowledge, causing great inequalities of estimate,--and, finally, and worst of all, if the currency itself, from its largeness, and the power which the possession of it implies, becomes the sole object of desire with large numbers of the nation, so that the holding of it is disputed among them as the main object of life:--in each and all of these cases, the currency necessarily enlarges in proportion to the store; and as a means of exchange and division, as a bond of right, and as an object of passion, has a more and more important and malignant power over the nation's dealings, character, and life. Against which power, when, as a bond of Right, it becomes too conspicuous and too burdensome, the popular voice is apt to be raised in a violent and irrational manner, leading to revolution instead of remedy. Whereas all possibility of Economy depends on the clear assertion and maintenance of this bond of right, however burdensome. The first necessity of all economical government is to secure the unquestioned and unquestionable working of the great law of Property--that a man who works for a thing shall be allowed to get it, keep it, and consume it, in peace; and that he who does not eat his cake to-day, shall be seen, without grudging, to have his cake to-morrow. This, I say, is the first point to be secured by social law; without this, no political advance, nay, no political existence, is in any sort possible. Whatever evil, luxury, iniquity, may seem to result from it, this is nevertheless the first of all Equities; and to the enforcement of this, by law and by police-truncheon, the nation must always primarily set its mind--that the cupboard door may have a firm lock to it, and no man's dinner be carried off by the mob, on its way home from the baker's. Which, thus fearlessly asserting, we shall endeavour in next paper to consider how far it may be practicable for the mob itself, also, in due breadth of dish, to have dinners to carry home. FOOTNOTES: [14] Remember carefully this statement, that Wealth consists only in the things which the nature of humanity has rendered in all ages, and must render in all ages to come, (that is what I meant by "constant") the objects of legitimate desire. And see Appendix II. [15] The _Wanderings_, observe, not the Right goings, of Imagination. She is very far from despising these. [16] _See_ Appendix III. [17] I would beg the reader's very close attention to these 37th and 38th paragraphs. It would be well if a dogged conviction could be enforced on nations, as on individuals, that, with few exceptions, what they cannot at present pay for, they should not at present have. [18] _See_ Appendix IV. [19] I little thought, what _Trionfo della Morte_ would be, for this very cause, and in literal fulfilment of the closing words of the 47th paragraph, over the fields and houses of Europe, and over its fairest city--within seven years from the day I wrote it. [20] The meaning of which is, that you may spend a great deal of money, and get very little work for it, and that little bad; but having good "air" or "spirit," to put life into it, with very little money, you may get a great deal of work, and all good; which, observe, is an arithmetical, not at all a poetical or visionary circumstance. [21] More especially, works of great art. [22] The meaning of that, in plain English, is, that we must find out how far poverty and riches are good or bad for people, and what is the difference between being miserably poor--so as, perhaps, to be driven to crime, or to pass life in suffering--and being blessedly poor, in the sense meant in the Sermon on the Mount. For I suppose the people who believe that sermon, do not think (if they ever honestly ask themselves what they do think), either that Luke vi. 24. is a merely poetical exclamation, or that the Beatitude of Poverty has yet been attained in St. Martin's Lane and other back streets of London. [23] Large plans!--Eight years are gone, and nothing done yet. But I keep my purpose of making one day this balance, or want of balance, visible, in those so seldom used scales of Justice. [24] These are nearly all briefly represented by the image used for the force of money by Dante, of mast and sail:-- Quali dal vento le gonfiate vele Caggiono avvolte, poi che l'alber fiacca Tal cadde a terra la fiera crudele. The image may be followed out, like all of Dante's, into as close detail as the reader chooses. Thus the stress of the sail must be proportioned to the strength of the mast, and it is only in unforeseen danger that a skilful seaman ever carries all the canvas his spars will bear, states of mercantile languor are like the flap of the sail in a calm; of mercantile precaution, like taking in reefs; and mercantile ruin is instant on the breaking of the mast. [I mean by credit-power, the general impression on the national mind that a sovereign, or any other coin, is worth so much bread and cheese--so much wine--so much horse and carriage--or so much fine art: it may be really worth, when tried, less or more than is thought: the thought of it is the credit-power.] [25] The object of Political Economy is not to buy, nor to sell labour, but to spare it. Every attempt to buy or sell it is, in the outcome, ineffectual; so far as successful, it is not sale, but Betrayal; and the purchase-money is a part of that thirty pieces which bought, first the greatest of labours, and afterwards the burial-field of the Stranger; for this purchase-money, being in its very smallness or vileness the exactly measured opposite of the "vilis annona amicorum," makes all men strangers to each other. [26] Cicero's distinction, "sordidi quæstus, quorum operæ, non quorum artes emuntur," admirable in principle, is inaccurate in expression, because Cicero did not practically know how much operative dexterity is necessary in all the higher arts; but the cost of this dexterity is incalculable. Be it great or small, the "cost" of the mere perfectness of touch in a hammer-stroke of Donatello's, or a pencil-touch of Correggio's, is inestimable by any ordinary arithmetic. [Old notes, these, more embarrassing I now perceive, than elucidatory; but right, and worth retaining.] [27] Only observe, as some labour is more destructive of life than other labour, the hour or day of the more destructive toil is supposed to include proportionate rest. Though men do not, or cannot, usually take such rest, except in death. [28] There is, therefore, observe, no such thing as cheapness (in the common use of that term), without some error or injustice. A thing is said to be cheap, not because it is common, but because it is supposed to be sold under its worth. Everything has its proper and true worth at any given time, in relation to everything else; and at that worth should be bought and sold. If sold under it, it is cheap to the buyer by exactly so much as the seller loses, and no more. Putrid meat, at twopence a pound, is not "cheaper" than wholesome meat at sevenpence a pound; it is probably much dearer; but if, by watching your opportunity, you can get the wholesome meat for sixpence a pound, it is cheaper to you by a penny, which you have gained, and the seller has lost. The present rage for cheapness is either, therefore, simply and literally a rage for badness of all commodities, or it is an attempt to find persons whose necessities will force them to let you have more than you should for your money. It is quite easy to produce such persons, and in large numbers; for the more distress there is in a nation, the more cheapness of this sort you can obtain, and your boasted cheapness is thus merely a measure of the extent of your national distress. There is, indeed, a condition of apparent cheapness, which we have some right to be triumphant in; namely, the real reduction in cost of articles by right application of labour. But in this case the article is only cheap with reference to its _former_ price; the so-called cheapness is only our expression for the sensation of contrast between its former and existing prices. So soon as the new methods of producing the article are established, it ceases to be esteemed either cheap or dear, at the new price, as at the old one, and is felt to be cheap only when accident enables it to be purchased beneath this new value. And it is no advantage to produce the article more easily, except as it enables you to multiply your population. Cheapness of this kind is merely the discovery that more men can be maintained on the same ground; and the question how many you will maintain in proportion to your additional means, remains exactly in the same terms that it did before. A form of immediate cheapness results, however, in many cases, without distress, from the labour of a population where food is redundant, or where the labour by which the food is produced leaves much idle time on their hands, which may be applied to the production of "cheap" articles. All such phenomena indicate to the political economist places where the labour is unbalanced. In the first case, the just balance is to be effected by taking labourers from the spot where pressure exists, and sending them to that where food is redundant. In the second, the cheapness is a local accident, advantageous to the local purchaser, disadvantageous to the local producer. It is one of the first duties of commerce to extend the market, and thus give the local producer his full advantage. Cheapness caused by natural accidents of harvest, weather, &c., is always counterbalanced, in due time, by natural scarcity, similarly caused. It is the part of wise government, and healthy commerce, so to provide in times and places of plenty for times and places of dearth, as that there shall never be waste, nor famine. Cheapness caused by gluts of the market is merely a disease of clumsy and wanton commerce. [29] Price has been already defined (p. 9) to be the quantity of labour which the possessor of a thing is willing to take for it. It is best to consider the price to be that fixed by the possessor, because the possessor has absolute power of refusing sale, while the purchaser has no absolute power of compelling it; but the effectual or market price is that at which their estimates coincide. [30] This "greater ease" ought to be allowed for by a diminution in the times of the divided work; but as the proportion of times would remain the same, I do not introduce this unnecessary complexity into the calculation. [31] Compare _Unto this Last_, p. 115, _et seq._ [32] [That is to say, the love of money is founded first on the intenseness of desire for given things; a youth will rob the till, now-a-days, for pantomime tickets and cigars; the "strength" of the currency being irresistible to him, in consequence of his desire for those luxuries.] CHAPTER III. COIN-KEEPING. 68. It will be seen by reference to the last chapter that our present task is to examine the relation of holders of store to holders of currency; and of both to those who hold neither. In order to do this, we must determine on which side we are to place substances such as gold, commonly known as bases of currency. By aid of previous definitions the reader will now be able to understand closer statements than have yet been possible. 69. _The currency of any country consists of every document acknowledging debt, which is transferable in the country._[33] This transferableness depends upon its intelligibility and credit. Its intelligibility depends chiefly on the difficulty of forging anything like it;--its credit much on national character, but ultimately _always on the existence of substantial means of meeting its demand_.[34] As the degrees of transferableness are variable, (some documents passing only in certain places, and others passing, if at all, for less than their inscribed value), both the mass, and, so to speak, fluidity, of the currency, are variable. True or perfect currency flows freely, like a pure stream; it becomes sluggish or stagnant in proportion to the quantity of less transferable matter which mixes with it, adding to its bulk, but diminishing its purity. [Articles of commercial value, on which bills are drawn, increase the currency indefinitely; and substances of intrinsic value if stamped or signed without restriction so as to become acknowledgments of debt, increase it indefinitely also.] Every bit of gold found in Australia, so long as it remains uncoined, is an article offered for sale like any other; but as soon as it is coined into pounds, it diminishes the value of every pound we have now in our pockets. 70. Legally authorized or national currency, in its perfect condition, is a form of public acknowledgment of debt, so regulated and divided that any person presenting a commodity of tried worth in the public market, shall, if he please, receive in exchange for it a document giving him claim to the return of its equivalent, (1) in any place, (2) at any time, and (3) in any kind. When currency is quite healthy and vital, the persons entrusted with its management are always able to give on demand either, A. The assigning document for the assigned quantity of goods. Or, B. The assigned quantity of goods for the assigning document. If they cannot give document for goods, the national exchange is at fault. If they cannot give goods for document, the national credit is at fault. The nature and power of the document are therefore to be examined under the three relations it bears to Place, Time, and Kind. 71. (1.) It gives claim to the return of equivalent wealth in any _Place_. Its use in this function is to save carriage, so that parting with a bushel of corn in London, we may receive an order for a bushel of corn at the Antipodes, or elsewhere. To be perfect in this use, the substance of currency must be to the maximum portable, credible, and intelligible. Its non-acceptance or discredit results always from some form of ignorance or dishonour: so far as such interruptions rise out of differences in denomination, there is no ground for their continuance among civilized nations. It may be convenient in one country to use chiefly copper for coinage, in another silver, and in another gold,--reckoning accordingly in centimes, francs, or zecchins: but that a franc should be different in weight and value from a shilling, and a zwanziger vary from both, is wanton loss of commercial power. 72. (2.) It gives claim to the return of equivalent wealth at any _Time_. In this second use, currency is the exponent of accumulation: it renders the laying-up of store at the command of individuals unlimitedly possible;--whereas, but for its intervention, all gathering would be confined within certain limits by the bulk of property, or by its decay, or the difficulty of its guardianship. "I will pull down my barns and build greater," cannot be a daily saying; and all material investment is enlargement of care. The national currency transfers the guardianship of the store to many; and preserves to the original producer the right of re-entering on its possession at any future period. 73. (3.) It gives claim (practical, though not legal) to the return of equivalent wealth in any _Kind_. It is a transferable right, not merely to this or that, but to anything; and its power in this function is proportioned to the range of choice. If you give a child an apple or a toy, you give him a determinate pleasure, but if you give him a penny, an indeterminate one, proportioned to the range of selection offered by the shops in the village. The power of the world's currency is similarly in proportion to the openness of the world's fair, and, commonly, enhanced by the brilliancy of external aspect, rather than solidity of its wares. 74. We have said that the currency consists of orders for equivalent goods. If equivalent, their quality must be guaranteed. The kinds of goods chosen for specific claim must, therefore, be capable of test, while, also, that a store may be kept in hand to meet the call of the currency, smallness of bulk, with great relative value, is desirable; and indestructibility, over at least a certain period, essential. Such indestructibility, and facility of being tested, are united in gold; its intrinsic value is great, and its imaginary value greater; so that, partly through indolence, partly through necessity and want of organization, most nations have agreed to take gold for the only basis of their currencies;--with this grave disadvantage, that its portability enabling the metal to become an active part of the medium of exchange, the stream of the currency itself becomes opaque with gold--half currency and half commodity, in unison of functions which partly neutralize, partly enhance each other's force. 75. They partly neutralize, since in so far as the gold is commodity, it is bad currency, because liable to sale; and in so far as it is currency, it is bad commodity, because its exchange value interferes with its practical use. Especially its employment in the higher branches of the arts becomes unsafe on account of its liability to be melted down for exchange. Again. They partly enhance, since in so far as the gold has acknowledged intrinsic value, it is good currency, because everywhere acceptable; and in so far as it has legal exchangeable value, its worth as a commodity is increased. We want no gold in the form of dust or crystal; but we seek for it coined, because in that form it will pay baker and butcher. And this worth in exchange not only absorbs a large quantity in that use,[35] but greatly increases the effect on the imagination of the quantity used in the arts. Thus, in brief, the force of the functions is increased, but their precision blunted, by their unison. 76. These inconveniences, however, attach to gold as a basis of currency on account of its portability and preciousness. But a far greater inconvenience attaches to it as the only legal basis of currency. Imagine gold to be only attainable in masses weighing several pounds each, and its value, like that of malachite or marble, proportioned to its largeness of bulk;--it could not then get itself confused with the currency in daily use, but it might still remain as its basis; and this second inconvenience would still affect it, namely, that its significance as an expression of debt varies, as that of every other article would, with the popular estimate of its desirableness, and with the quantity offered in the market. My power of obtaining other goods for gold depends always on the strength of public passion for gold, and on the limitation of its quantity, so that when either of two things happen--that the world esteems gold less, or finds it more easily--_my right of claim is in that degree effaced_; and it has been even gravely maintained that a discovery of a mountain of gold would cancel the National Debt; in other words, that men may be paid for what costs much in what costs nothing. Now, it is true that there is little chance of sudden convulsion in this respect; the world will not so rapidly increase in wisdom as to despise gold on a sudden; and perhaps may [for a little time] desire it more eagerly the more easily it is obtained; nevertheless, the right of debt ought not to rest on a basis of imagination; nor should the frame of a national currency vibrate with every miser's panic, and every merchant's imprudence. 77. There are two methods of avoiding this insecurity, which would have been fallen upon long ago, if, instead of calculating the conditions of the supply of gold, men had only considered how the world might live and manage its affairs without gold at all.[36] One is, to base the currency on substances of truer intrinsic value; the other, to base it on several substances instead of one. If I can only claim gold, the discovery of a golden mountain starves me; but if I can claim bread, the discovery of a continent of corn-fields need not trouble me. If, however, I wish to exchange my bread for other things, a good harvest will for the time limit my power in this respect; but if I can claim either bread, iron, or silk at pleasure, the standard of value has three feet instead of one, and will be proportionately firm. Thus, ultimately, the steadiness of currency depends upon the breadth of its base; but the difficulty of organization increasing with this breadth, the discovery of the condition at once safest and most convenient[37] can only be by long analysis, which must for the present be deferred. Gold or silver[38] may always be retained in limited use, as a luxury of coinage and questionless standard, of one weight and alloy among all nations, varying only in the die. The purity of coinage, when metallic, is closely indicative of the honesty of the system of revenue, and even of the general dignity of the State.[39] 78. Whatever the article or articles may be which the national currency promises to pay, a premium on that article indicates bankruptcy of the government in that proportion, the division of its assets being restrained only by the remaining confidence of the holders of notes in the return of prosperity to the firm. Currencies of forced acceptance, or of unlimited issue, are merely various modes of disguising taxation, and delaying its pressure, until it is too late to interfere with the cause of pressure. To do away with the possibility of such disguise would have been among the first results of a true economical science, had any such existed; but there have been too many motives for the concealment, so long as it could by any artifices be maintained, to permit hitherto even the founding of such a science. 79. And indeed, it is only through evil conduct, wilfully persisted in, that there is any embarrassment, either in the theory or working of currency. No exchequer is ever embarrassed, nor is any financial question difficult of solution, when people keep their practice honest, and their heads cool. But when governments lose all office of pilotage, protection, or scrutiny; and live only in magnificence of authorized larceny, and polished mendacity; or when the people, choosing Speculation (the s usually redundant in the spelling) instead of Toil, visit no dishonesty with chastisement, that each may with impunity take his dishonest turn;--there are no tricks of financial terminology that will save them; all signature and mintage do but magnify the ruin they retard; and even the riches that remain, stagnant or current, change only from the slime of Avernus to the sand of Phlegethon--_quick_sand at the embouchure;--land fluently recommended by recent auctioneers as "eligible for building leases." 80. Finally, then, the power of true currency is fourfold. (1.) Credit power. Its worth in exchange, dependent on public opinion of the stability and honesty of the issuer. (2.) Real worth. Supposing the gold, or whatever else the currency expressly promises, to be required from the issuer, for all his notes; and that the call cannot be met in full. Then the actual worth of the document would be, and its actual worth at any moment is, therefore to be defined as, what the division of the assets of the issuer would produce for it. (3.) The exchange power, of its base. Granting that we can get five pounds in gold for our note, it remains a question how much of other things we can get for five pounds in gold. The more of other things exist, and the less gold, the greater this power. (4.) The power over labour, exercised by the given quantity of the base, or of the things to be got for it. The question in this case is, how much work, and (question of questions!) _whose_ work, is to be had for the food which five pounds will buy. This depends on the number of the population, on their gifts, and on their dispositions, with which, down to their slightest humours, and up to their strongest impulses, the power of the currency varies. 81. Such being the main conditions of national currency, we proceed to examine those of the total currency, under the broad definition, "transferable acknowledgment of debt;"[40] among the many forms of which there are in effect only two, distinctly opposed; namely, the acknowledgments of debts which will be paid, and of debts which will not. Documents, whether in whole or part, of bad debt, being to those of good debt as bad money to bullion, we put for the present these forms of imposture aside (as in analysing a metal we should wash it clear of dross), and then range, in their exact quantities, the true currency of the country on one side, and the store or property of the country on the other. We place gold, and all such substances, on the side of documents, as far as they operate by signature;--on the side of store as far as they operate by value. Then the currency represents the quantity of debt in the country, and the store the quantity of its possession. The ownership of all the property is divided between the holders of currency and holders of store, and whatever the claiming value of the currency is at any moment, that value is to be deducted from the riches of the store-holders. 82. Farther, as true currency represents by definition debts which will be paid, it represents either the debtor's wealth, or his ability and willingness; that is to say, either wealth existing in his hands transferred to him by the creditor, or wealth which, as he is at some time surely to return it, he is either increasing, or, if diminishing, has the will and strength to reproduce. A sound currency therefore, as by its increase it represents enlarging debt, represents also enlarging means; but in this curious way, that a certain quantity of it marks the deficiency of the wealth of the country from what it would have been if that currency had not existed.[41] In this respect it is like the detritus of a mountain; assume that it lies at a fixed angle, and the more the detritus, the larger must be the mountain; but it would have been larger still, had there been none. 83. Farther, though, as above stated, every man possessing money has usually also some property beyond what is necessary for his immediate wants, and men possessing property usually also hold currency beyond what is necessary for their immediate exchanges, it mainly determines the class to which they belong, whether in their eyes the money is an adjunct of the property, or the property of the money. In the first case the holder's pleasure is in his possessions, and in his money subordinately, as the means of bettering or adding to them. In the second, his pleasure is in his money, and in his possessions only as representing it. (In the first case the money is as an atmosphere surrounding the wealth, rising from it and raining back upon it; but in the second, it is as a deluge, with the wealth floating, and for the most part perishing in it.[42]) The shortest distinction between the men is that the one wishes always to buy, and the other to sell. 84. Such being the great relations of the classes, their several characters are of the highest importance to the nation; for on the character of the store-holders chiefly depend the preservation, display, and serviceableness of its wealth; on that of the currency-holders, its distribution; on that of both, its reproduction. We shall, therefore, ultimately find it to be of incomparably greater importance to the nation in whose hands the thing is put, than how much of it is got; and that the character of the holders may be conjectured by the quality of the store; for such and such a man always asks for such and such a thing; nor only asks for it, but if it can be bettered, betters it: so that possession and possessor reciprocally act on each other, through the entire sum of national possession. The base nation, asking for base things, sinks daily to deeper vileness of nature and weakness in use; while the noble nation, asking for noble things, rises daily into diviner eminence in both; the tendency to degradation being surely marked by "[Greek: ataxia];" that is to say, (expanding the Greek thought), by carelessness as to the hands in which things are put, consequent dispute for the acquisition of them, disorderliness in the accumulation of them, inaccuracy in the estimate of them, and bluntness in conception as to the entire nature of possession. 85. The currency-holders always increase in number and influence in proportion to the bluntness of nature and clumsiness of the store-holders; for the less use people can make of things, the more they want of them, and the sooner weary of them, and want to change them for something else; and all frequency of change increases the quantity and power of currency. The large currency-holder himself is essentially a person who never has been able to make up his mind as to what he will have, and proceeds, therefore, in vague collection and aggregation, with more and more infuriate passion, urged by complacency in progress, vacancy in idea, and pride of conquest. While, however, there is this obscurity in the nature of possession of currency, there is a charm in the seclusion of it, which is to some people very enticing. In the enjoyment of real property, others must partly share. The groom has some enjoyment of the stud, and the gardener of the garden; but the money is, or seems, shut up; it is wholly enviable. No one else can have part in any complacencies arising from it. The power of arithmetical comparison is also a great thing to unimaginative people. They know always they are so much better than they were, in money; so much better than others, in money; but wit cannot be so compared, nor character. My neighbour cannot be convinced that I am wiser than he is, but he can, that I am worth so much more; and the universality of the conviction is no less flattering than its clearness. Only a few can understand,--none measure--and few will willingly adore, superiorities in other things; but everybody can understand money, everybody can count it, and most will worship it. 86. Now, these various temptations to accumulation would be politically harmless if what was vainly accumulated had any fair chance of being wisely spent. For as accumulation cannot go on for ever, but must some day end in its reverse--if this reverse were indeed a beneficial distribution and use, as irrigation from reservoir, the fever of gathering, though perilous to the gatherer, might be serviceable to the community. But it constantly happens (so constantly, that it may be stated as a political law having few exceptions), that what is unreasonably gathered is also unreasonably spent by the persons into whose hands it finally falls. Very frequently it is spent in war, or else in a stupefying luxury, twice hurtful, both in being indulged by the rich and witnessed by the poor. So that the _mal tener_ and _mal dare_ are as correlative as complementary colours; and the circulation of wealth, which ought to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and full of warmth, like the Gulf stream, being narrowed into an eddy, and concentrated at a point, changes into the alternate suction and surrender of Charybdis. Which is indeed, I doubt not, the true meaning of that marvellous fable, "infinite," as Bacon said of it, "in matter of meditation."[43] 87. It is a strange habit of wise humanity to speak in enigmas only, so that the highest truths and usefullest laws must be hunted for through whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only. Thus Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and in all the various literature they absorbed and re-embodied, under types which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude. What is worse, the two primal declarers of moral discovery, Homer and Plato, are partly at issue; for Plato's logical power quenched his imagination, and he became incapable of understanding the purely imaginative element either in poetry or painting: he therefore somewhat overrates the pure discipline of passionate art in song and music, and misses that of meditative art. There is, however, a deeper reason for his distrust of Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him dread, as death, every form of fallacy; but chiefly, fallacy respecting the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day discover more clearly how right Plato was in this, and feel ourselves more and more wonderstruck that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior sphere, Milton), not to speak of the great sculptors and painters of every age, have permitted themselves, though full of all nobleness and wisdom, to coin idle imaginations of the mysteries of eternity, and guide the faiths of the families of the earth by the courses of their own vague and visionary arts: while the indisputable truths of human life and duty, respecting which they all have but one voice, lie hidden behind these veils of phantasy, unsought, and often unsuspected. I will gather carefully, out of Dante and Homer, what, in this kind, bears on our subject, in its due place; the first broad intention of their symbols may be sketched at once. 88. The rewards of a worthy use of riches, subordinate to other ends, are shown by Dante in the fifth and sixth orbs of Paradise; for the punishment of their unworthy use, three places are assigned; one for the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are lost, (_Hell_, canto 7); one for the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are capable of purification, (_Purgatory_, canto 19); and one for the usurers, of whom _none_ can be redeemed (_Hell_, canto 17). The first group, the largest in all hell ("gente piu che altrove troppa," compare Virgil's "quæ maxima turba"), meet in contrary currents, _as the_ _waves of Charybdis_, casting weights at each other from opposite sides. This weariness of contention is the chief element of their torture; so marked by the beautiful lines beginning "Or puoi, figliuol," &c.: (but the usurers, who made their money inactively, _sit_ on the sand, equally without rest, however. "Di qua, di la, soccorrien," &c.) For it is not avarice, but _contention_ for riches, leading to this double misuse of them, which, in Dante's light, is the unredeemable sin. The place of its punishment is guarded by Plutus, "the great enemy," and "la fièra crudele," a spirit quite different from the Greek Plutus, who, though old and blind, is not cruel, and is curable, so as to become far-sighted. ([Greek: ou typhlos all' oxy blepôn].--Plato's epithets in first book of the _Laws_.) Still more does this Dantesque type differ from the resplendent Plutus of Goethe in the second part of _Faust_, who is the personified power of wealth for good or evil--not the passion for wealth; and again from the Plutus of Spenser, who is the passion of mere aggregation. Dante's Plutus is specially and definitely the Spirit of Contention and Competition, or Evil Commerce; because, as I showed before, this kind of commerce "makes all men strangers;" his speech is therefore unintelligible, and no single soul of all those ruined by him _has recognizable features_. On the other hand, the redeemable sins of avarice and prodigality are, in Dante's sight, those which are without deliberate or calculated operation. The lust, or lavishness, of riches can be purged, so long as there has been no servile consistency of dispute and competition for them. The sin is spoken of as that of degradation by the love of earth; it is purified by deeper humiliation--the souls crawl on their bellies; their chant is, "my soul cleaveth unto the dust." But the spirits thus condemned are all recognizable, and even the worst examples of the thirst for gold, which they are compelled to tell the histories of during the night, are of men swept by the passion of avarice into violent crime, but not sold to its steady work. 89. The precept given to each of these spirits for its deliverance is--Turn thine eyes to the lucre (lure) which the Eternal King rolls with the mighty wheels. Otherwise, the wheels of the "Greater Fortune," of which the constellation is ascending when Dante's dream begins. Compare George Herbert-- "Lift up thy head; Take stars for money; stars, not to be told By any art, yet to be purchased." And Plato's notable sentence in the third book of the _Polity_.--"Tell them they have divine gold and silver in their souls for ever; that they need no money stamped of men--neither may they otherwise than impiously mingle the gathering of the divine with the mortal treasure, _for through that which the law of the multitude has coined, endless crimes have been done and suffered; but in their's is neither pollution nor sorrow_." 90. At the entrance of this place of punishment an evil spirit is seen by Dante, quite other than the "Gran Nemico." The great enemy is obeyed knowingly and willingly; but this spirit--feminine--and called a Siren--is the "_Deceitfulness_ of riches," [Greek: apatê ploutou] of the Gospels, winning obedience by guile. This is the Idol of riches, made doubly phantasmal by Dante's seeing her in a dream. She is lovely to look upon, and enchants by her sweet singing, but her womb is loathsome. Now, Dante does not call her one of the Sirens carelessly, any more than he speaks of Charybdis carelessly; and though he had got at the meaning of the Homeric fable only through Virgil's obscure tradition of it, the clue he has given us is quite enough. Bacon's interpretation, "the Sirens, _or pleasures_," which has become universal since his time, is opposed alike to Plato's meaning and Homer's. The Sirens are not pleasures, but _Desires_: in the Odyssey they are the phantoms of vain desire; but in Plato's Vision of Destiny, phantoms of divine desire; singing each a different note on the circles of the distaff of Necessity, but forming one harmony, to which the three great Fates put words. Dante, however, adopted the Homeric conception of them, which was that they were demons of the Imagination, not carnal; (desire of the eyes; not lust of the flesh); therefore said to be daughters of the Muses. Yet not of the Muses, heavenly or historical but of the Muse of pleasure; and they are at first winged, because even vain hope excites and helps when first formed; but afterwards, contending for the possession of the imagination with the Muses themselves, they are deprived of their wings. 91. And thus we are to distinguish the Siren power from the power of Circe, who is no daughter of the Muses, but of the strong elements, Sun and Sea; her power is that of frank, and full vital pleasure, which, if governed and watched, nourishes men; but, unwatched, and having no "moly," bitterness or delay, mixed with it, turns men into beasts, but does not slay them,--leaves them, on the contrary, power of revival. She is herself indeed an Enchantress;--pure Animal life; transforming--or degrading--but always wonderful (she puts the stores on board the ship invisibly, and is gone again, like a ghost); even the wild beasts rejoice and are softened around her cave; the transforming poisons she gives to men are mixed with no rich feast, but with pure and right nourishment,--Pramnian wine, cheese, and flour; that is, wine, milk, and corn, the three great sustainers of life--it is their own fault if these make swine of them; (see Appendix V.) and swine are chosen merely as the type of consumption; as Plato's [Greek: hyôn polis], in the second book of the _Polity_, and perhaps chosen by Homer with a deeper knowledge of the likeness in variety of nourishment, and internal form of body. "Et quel est, s'il vous plait, cet audacieux animal qui se permet d'être bâti au dedans comme une jolie petite fille?" "Hélas! chère enfant, j'ai honte de le nommer, et il ne faudra pas m'en vouloir. C'est ... c'est le cochon. Ce n'est pas précisément flatteur pour vous; mais nous en sommes tous là, et si cela vous contrarie par trop, il faut aller vous plaindre au bon Dieu qui a voulu que les choses fussent arrangées ainsi: seulement le cochon, qui ne pense qu'à manger, a l'estomac bien plus vaste que nous et c'est toujours une consolation."--_(Histoire d'une Bouchée de Pain_, Lettre ix.) 92. But the deadly Sirens are in all things opposed to the Circean power. They promise pleasure, but never give it. They nourish in no wise; but slay by slow death. And whereas they corrupt the heart and the head, instead of merely betraying the senses, there is no recovery from their power; they do not tear nor scratch, like Scylla, but the men who have listened to them are poisoned, and waste away. Note that the Sirens' field is covered, not merely with the bones, but with the _skins_, of those who have been consumed there. They address themselves, in the part of the song which Homer gives, not to the passions of Ulysses, but to his vanity, and the only man who ever came within hearing of them, and escaped untempted, was Orpheus, who silenced the vain imaginations by singing the praises of the gods. 93. It is, then, one of these Sirens whom Dante takes as the phantasm or deceitfulness of riches; but note further, that she says it was her song that deceived Ulysses. Look back to Dante's account of Ulysses' death, and we find it was not the love of money, but pride of knowledge, that betrayed him; whence we get the clue to Dante's complete meaning: that the souls whose love of wealth is pardonable have been first deceived into pursuit of it by a dream of its higher uses, or by ambition. His Siren is therefore the Philotimé of Spenser, daughter of Mammon-- "Whom all that folk with such contention Do flock about, my deare, my daughter is-- Honour and dignitie from her alone Derived are." By comparing Spenser's entire account of this Philotimé with Dante's of the Wealth-Siren, we shall get at the full meaning of both poets; but that of Homer lies hidden much more deeply. For his Sirens are indefinite; and they are desires of any evil thing; power of wealth is not specially indicated by him, until, escaping the 'harmonious danger of imagination, Ulysses has to choose between two practical ways of life, indicated by the two _rocks_ of Scylla and Charybdis. The monsters that haunt them are quite distinct from the rocks themselves, which, having many other subordinate significations, are in the main Labour and Idleness, or getting and spending; each with its attendant monster, or betraying demon. The rock of gaining has its summit in the clouds, invisible, and not to be climbed; that of spending is low, but marked by the cursed fig-tree, which has leaves, but no fruit. We know the type elsewhere; and there is a curious lateral allusion to it by Dante when Jacopo di Sant' Andrea, who had ruined himself by profusion and committed suicide, scatters the leaves of the bush of Lotto degli Agli, endeavouring to hide himself among them. We shall hereafter examine the type completely; here I will only give an approximate rendering of Homer's words, which have been obscured more by translation than even by tradition. 94. "They are overhanging rocks. The great waves of blue water break round them; and the blessed Gods call them the Wanderers. "By one of them no winged thing can pass--not even the wild doves that bring ambrosia to their father Jove--but the smooth rock seizes its sacrifice of them." (Not even ambrosia to be had without Labour. The word is peculiar--as a part of anything is offered for Sacrifice; especially used of heave-offering.) "It reaches the wide heaven with its top, and a dark blue cloud rests on it, and never passes; neither does the clear sky hold it, in summer nor in harvest. Nor can any man climb it--not if he had twenty feet and hands, for it is smooth as though it were hewn. "And in the midst of it is a cave which is turned the way of hell. And therein dwells Scylla, whining for prey: her cry, indeed, is no louder than that of a newly-born whelp: but she herself is an awful thing--nor can any creature see her face and be glad; no, though it were a god that rose against her. For she has twelve feet, all fore-feet, and six necks, and terrible heads on them; and each has three rows of teeth, full of black death. "But the opposite rock is lower than this, though but a bow-shot distant; and upon it there is a great fig-tree, full of leaves; and under it the terrible Charybdis sucks down the black water. Thrice in the day she sucks it down, and thrice; casts it up again: be not thou there when she sucks down, for Neptune himself could not save thee." [Thus far went my rambling note, in _Fraser's Magazine_. The Editor sent me a compliment on it--of which I was very proud; what the Publisher thought of it, I am not informed; only I know that eventually he stopped the papers. I think a great deal of it myself, now, and have put it all in large print accordingly, and should like to write more; but will, on the contrary, self-denyingly, and in gratitude to any reader who has got through so much, end my chapter.] FOOTNOTES: [33] Remember this definition: it is of great importance as opposed to the imperfect ones usually given. When first these essays were published, I remember one of their reviewers asking contemptuously, "Is half-a-crown a document?" it never having before occurred to him that a document might be stamped as well as written, and stamped on silver as well as on parchment. [34] I do not mean the demand of the holder of a five-pound note for five pounds, but the demand of the holder of a pound for a pound's worth of something good. [35] [Read and think over, the following note very carefully.] The waste of labour in obtaining the gold, though it cannot be estimated by help of any existing data, may be understood in its bearing on entire economy by supposing it limited to transactions between two persons. If two farmers in Australia have been exchanging corn and cattle with each other for years, keeping their accounts of reciprocal debt in any simple way, the sum of the possessions of either would not be diminished, though the part of it which was lent or borrowed were only reckoned by marks on a stone, or notches on a tree; and the one counted himself accordingly, so many scratches, or so many notches, better than the other. But it would soon be seriously diminished if, discovering gold in their fields, each resolved only to accept golden counters for a reckoning; and accordingly, whenever he wanted a sack of corn or a cow, was obliged to go and wash sand for a week before he could get the means of giving a receipt for them. [36] It is difficult to estimate the curious futility of discussions such as that which lately occupied a section of the British Association, on the absorption of gold, while no one can produce even the simplest of the data necessary for the inquiry. To take the first occurring one,--What means have we of ascertaining the weight of gold employed this year in the toilettes of the women of Europe (not to speak of Asia); and, supposing it known, what means of conjecturing the weight by which, next year, their fancies, and the changes of style among their jewellers, will diminish or increase it? [37] See, in Pope's epistle to Lord Bathurst, his sketch of the difficulties and uses of a currency literally "pecuniary"--(consisting of herds of cattle). "His Grace will game--to White's a bull be led," &c. [38] Perhaps both; perhaps silver only. It may be found expedient ultimately to leave gold free for use in the arts. As a means of reckoning, the standard might be, and in some cases has already been, entirely ideal.--_See_ Mill's _Political Economy_, book iii. chap. VII. at beginning. [39] The purity of the drachma and zecchin were not without significance of the state of intellect, art, and policy, both in Athens and Venice;--a fact first impressed upon me ten years ago, when, in taking daguerreotypes at Venice, I found no purchaseable gold pure enough to gild them with, except that of the old Venetian zecchin. [40] Under which term, observe, we include all documents of debt, which, being honest, might be transferable, though they practically are not transferred; while we exclude all documents which are in reality worthless, though in fact transferred temporarily, as bad money is. The document of honest debt, not transferred, is merely to paper currency as gold withdrawn from circulation is to that of bullion. Much confusion has crept into the reasoning on this subject from the idea that the withdrawal from circulation is a definable state, whereas it is a graduated state, and indefinable. The sovereign in my pocket is withdrawn from circulation as long as I choose to keep it there. It is no otherwise withdrawn if I bury it, nor even if I choose to make it, and others, into a golden cup, and drink out of them; since a rise in the price of the wine, or of other things, may at any time cause me to melt the cup and throw it back into currency; and the bullion operates on the prices of the things in the market as directly, though not as forcibly, while it is in the form of a cup as it does in the form of a sovereign. No calculation can be founded on my humour in either case. If I like to handle rouleaus, and therefore keep a quantity of gold, to play with, in the form of jointed basaltic columns, it is all one in its effect on the market as if I kept it in the form of twisted filigree, or, steadily "amicus lamnæ," beat the narrow gold pieces into broad ones, and dined off them. The probability is greater that I break the rouleau than that I melt the plate; but the increased probability is not calculable. Thus, documents are only withdrawn from the currency when cancelled, and bullion when it is so effectually lost as that the probability of finding it is no greater than of finding new gold in the mine. [41] For example, suppose an active peasant, having got his ground into good order and built himself a comfortable house, finding time still on his hands, sees one of his neighbours little able to work, and ill-lodged, and offers to build him also a house, and to put his land in order, on condition of receiving for a given period rent for the building and tithe of the fruits. The offer is accepted, and a document given promissory of rent and tithe. This note is money. It can only be good money if the man who has incurred the debt so far recovers his strength as to be able to take advantage of the help he has received, and meet the demand of the note; if he lets his house fall to ruin, and his field to waste, his promissory note will soon be valueless: but the existence of the note at all is a consequence of his not having worked so stoutly as the other. Let him gain as much as to be able to pay back the entire debt; the note is cancelled, and we have two rich store-holders and no currency. [42] [You need not trouble yourself to make out the sentence in parenthesis, unless you like, but do not think it is mere metaphor. It states a fact which I could not have stated so shortly, _but_ by metaphor.] [43] [What follows, to the end of the chapter, was a note only, in the first printing; but for after service, it is of more value than any other part of the book, so I have put it into the main text.] CHAPTER IV. COMMERCE. 95. As the currency conveys right of choice out of many things in exchange for one, so Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained; so that countries producing only timber can obtain for their timber silk and gold; or, naturally producing only jewels and frankincense, can obtain for them cattle and corn. In this function, commerce is of more importance to a country in proportion to the limitations of its products, and the restlessness of its fancy;--generally of greater importance towards Northern latitudes. 96. Commerce is necessary, however, not only to exchange local products, but local skill. Labour requiring the agency of fire can only be given abundantly in cold countries; labour requiring suppleness of body and sensitiveness of touch, only in warm ones; labour involving accurate vivacity of thought only in temperate ones; while peculiar imaginative actions are produced by extremes of heat and cold, and of light and darkness. The production of great art is limited to climates warm enough to admit of repose in the open air, and cool enough to render such repose delightful. Minor variations in modes of skill distinguish every locality. The labour which at any place is easiest, is in that place cheapest; and it becomes often desirable that products raised in one country should be wrought in another. Hence have arisen discussions on "International values" which will be one day remembered as highly curious exercises of the human mind. For it will be discovered, in due course of tide and time, that international value is regulated just as inter-provincial or inter-parishional value is. Coals and hops are exchanged between Northumberland and Kent on absolutely the same principles as iron and wine between Lancashire and Spain. The greater breadth of an arm of the sea increases the cost, but does not modify the principle of exchange; and a bargain written in two languages will have no other economical results than a bargain written in one. The distances of nations are measured, not by seas, but by ignorances; and their divisions determined, not by dialects, but by enmities.[44] 97. Of course, a system of international values may always be constructed if we assume a relation of moral law to physical geography; as, for instance, that it is right to cheat or rob across a river, though not across a road; or across a sea, though not across a river, &c.;--again, a system of such values may be constructed by assuming similar relations of taxation to physical geography; as, for instance, that an article should be taxed in crossing a river, but not in crossing a road; or in being carried fifty miles, but not in being carried five, &c.; such positions are indeed not easily maintained when once put in logical form; but _one_ law of international value is maintainable in any form: namely, that the farther your neighbour lives from you, and the less he understands you, _the more you are bound to be true in your dealings with him_; because your power over him is greater in proportion to his ignorance, and his remedy more difficult in proportion to his distance.[45] 98. I have just said the breadth of sea increases the cost of exchange. Now note that exchange, or commerce, _in itself_, is always costly; the sum of the value of the goods being diminished by the cost of their conveyance, and by the maintenance of the persons employed in it; so that it is only when there is advantage to both producers (in getting the one thing for the other) greater than the loss in conveyance, that the exchange is expedient. And it can only be justly conducted when the porters kept by the producers (commonly called merchants) expect _mere_ pay, and not profit.[46] For in just commerce there are but three parties--the two persons or societies exchanging, and the agent or agents of exchange; the value of the things to be exchanged is known by both the exchangers, and each receives equal value, neither gaining nor losing (for whatever one gains the other loses). The intermediate agent is paid a known per-centage by both, partly for labour in conveyance, partly for care, knowledge, and risk; every attempt at concealment of the amount of the pay indicates either effort on the part of the agent to obtain unjust profit, or effort on the part of the exchangers to refuse him just pay. But for the most part it is the first, namely, the effort on the part of the merchant to obtain larger profit (so-called) by buying cheap and selling dear. Some part, indeed, of this larger gain is deserved, and might be openly demanded, because it is the reward of the merchant's knowledge, and foresight of probable necessity; but the greater part of such gain is unjust; and unjust in this most fatal way, that it depends, first, on keeping the exchangers ignorant of the exchange value of the articles; and, secondly, on taking advantage of the buyer's need and the seller's poverty. It is, therefore, one of the essential, and quite the most fatal, forms of usury; for usury means merely taking an exorbitant[47] sum for the use of anything; and it is no matter whether the exorbitance is on loan or exchange, on rent or on price--the essence of the usury being that it is obtained by advantage of opportunity or necessity, and not as due reward for labour. All the great thinkers, therefore, have held it to be unnatural and impious, in so far as it feeds on the distress of others, or their folly.[48] Nevertheless, attempts to repress it by law must for ever be ineffective; though Plato, Bacon, and the First Napoleon--all three of them men who knew somewhat more of humanity than the "British merchant" usually does--tried their hands at it, and have left some (probably) good moderative forms of law, which we will examine in their place. But the only final check upon it must be radical purifying of the national character, for being, as Bacon calls it, "concessum propter duritiem cordis," it is to be done away with by touching the heart only; not, however, without medicinal law--as in the case of the other permission, "propter duritiem." But in this more than in anything (though much in all, and though in this he would not himself allow of their application, for his own laws against usury are sharp enough), Plato's words in the fourth book of the Polity are true, that neither drugs, nor charms, nor burnings, will touch a deep-lying political sore, any more than a deep bodily one; but only right and utter change of constitution: and that "they do but lose their labour who think that by any tricks of law they can get the better of these mischiefs of commerce, and see not that they hew at a Hydra." 99. And indeed this Hydra seems so unslayable, and sin sticks so fast between the joinings of the stones of buying and selling, that "to trade" in things, or literally "cross-give" them, has warped itself, by the instinct of nations, into their worst word for fraud; for, because in trade there cannot but be trust, and it seems also that there cannot but also be injury in answer to it, what is merely fraud between enemies becomes treachery among friends: and "trader," "traditor," and "traitor" are but the same word. For which simplicity of language there is more reason than at first appears: for as in true commerce there is no "profit," so in true commerce there is no "sale." The idea of sale is that of an interchange between enemies respectively endeavouring to get the better one of another; but commerce is an exchange between friends; and there is no desire but that it should be just, any more than there would be between members of the same family.[49] The moment there is a bargain over the pottage, the family relation is dissolved:--typically, "the days of mourning for my father are at hand." Whereupon follows the resolve, "then will I slay my brother." 100. This inhumanity of mercenary commerce is the more notable because it is a fulfilment of the law that the corruption of the best is the worst. For as, taking the body natural for symbol of the body politic, the governing and forming powers may be likened to the brain, and the labouring to the limbs, the mercantile, presiding over circulation and communication of things in changed utilities, is symbolized by the heart; and, if that hardens, all is lost. And this is the ultimate lesson which the leader of English intellect meant for us, (a lesson, indeed, not all his own, but part of the old wisdom of humanity), in the tale of the _Merchant of Venice_; in which the true and incorrupt merchant,--_kind and free beyond every other Shakspearian conception of men_,--is opposed to the corrupted merchant, or usurer; the lesson being deepened by the expression of the strange hatred which the corrupted merchant bears to the pure one, mixed with intense scorn,-- "This is the fool that lent out money gratis; look to him, jailer," (as to lunatic no less than criminal) the enmity, observe, having its symbolism literally carried out by being aimed straight at the heart, and finally foiled by a literal appeal to the great moral law that flesh and blood cannot be weighed, enforced by "Portia"[50] ("Portion"), the type of divine Fortune, found, not in gold, nor in silver, but in lead, that is to say, in endurance and patience, not in splendour; and finally taught by her lips also, declaring, instead of the law and quality of "merces," the greater law and quality of mercy, which is not strained, but drops as the rain, blessing him that gives and him that takes. And observe that this "mercy" is not the mean "Misericordia," but the mighty "Gratia," answered by Gratitude, (observe Shylock's leaning on the, to him detestable, word, _gratis_, and compare the relations of Grace to Equity given in the second chapter of the second book of the _Memorabilia_;) that is to say, it is the gracious or loving, instead of the strained, or competing manner, of doing things, answered, not only with "merces" or pay, but with "merci" or thanks. And this is indeed the meaning of the great benediction "Grace, mercy, and peace," for there can be no peace without grace, (not even by help of rifled cannon), nor even without triplicity of graciousness, for the Greeks, who began but with one Grace, had to open their scheme into three before they had done. 101. With the usual tendency of long repeated thought, to take the surface for the deep, we have conceived these goddesses as if they only gave loveliness to gesture; whereas their true function is to give graciousness to deed, the other loveliness arising naturally out of that. In which function Charis becomes Charitas;[51] and has a name and praise even greater than that of Faith or Truth, for these may be maintained sullenly and proudly; but Charis is in her countenance always gladdening (Aglaia), and in her service instant and humble; and the true wife of Vulcan, or Labour. And it is not until her sincerity of function is lost, and her mere beauty contemplated instead of her patience, that she is born again of the foam flake, and becomes Aphrodite; and it is then only that she becomes capable of joining herself to war and to the enmities of men, instead of to labour and their services. Therefore the fable of Mars and Venus is chosen by Homer, picturing himself as Demodocus, to sing at the games in the court of Alcinous. Phæacia is the Homeric island of Atlantis; an image of noble and wise government, concealed, (how slightly!) merely by the change of a short vowel for a long one in the name of its queen; yet misunderstood by all later writers, (even by Horace, in his "pinguis, Phæaxque"). That fable expresses the perpetual error of men in thinking that grace and dignity can only be reached by the soldier, and never by the artisan; so that commerce and the useful arts have had the honour and beauty taken away, and only the Fraud and Pain left to them, with the lucre. Which is, indeed, one great reason of the continual blundering about the offices of government with respect to commerce. The higher classes are ashamed to employ themselves in it; and though ready enough to fight for (or occasionally against) the people,--to preach to them,--or judge them, will not break bread for them; the refined upper servant who has willingly looked after the burnishing of the armoury and ordering of the library, not liking to set foot in the larder. 102. Farther still. As Charis becomes Charitas on the one side, she becomes--better still--Chara, Joy, on the other; or rather this is her very mother's milk and the beauty of her childhood; for God brings no enduring Love, nor any other good, out of pain; nor out of contention; but out of joy and harmony. And in this sense, human and divine, music and gladness, and the measures of both, come into her name; and Cher becomes full-vowelled Cheer, and Cheerful; and Chara opens into Choir and Choral.[52] 103. And lastly. As Grace passes into Freedom of action, Charis becomes Eleutheria, or Liberality; a form of liberty quite curiously and intensely different from the thing usually understood by "Liberty" in modern language: indeed, much more like what some people would call slavery: for a Greek always understood, primarily, by liberty, deliverance from the law of his own passions (or from what the Christian writers call bondage of corruption), and this a complete liberty: not being merely safe from the Siren, but also unbound from the mast, and not having to resist the passion, but making it fawn upon, and follow him--(this may be again partly the meaning of the fawning beasts about the Circean cave; so, again, George Herbert-- Correct thy passion's spite, Then may the beasts draw thee to happy light)-- And it is only in such generosity that any man becomes capable of so governing others as to take true part in any system of national economy. Nor is there any other eternal distinction between the upper and lower classes than this form of liberty, Eleutheria, or benignity, in the one, and its opposite of slavery, Douleia, or malignity, in the other; the separation of these two orders of men, and the firm government of the lower by the higher, being the first conditions of possible wealth and economy in any state,--the Gods giving it no greater gift than the power to discern its true freemen, and "malignum spernere vulgus." 104. While I have traced the finer and higher laws of this matter for those whom they concern, I have also to note the material law--vulgarly expressed in the proverb, "Honesty is the best policy." That proverb is indeed wholly inapplicable to matters of private interest. It is not true that honesty, as far as material gain is concerned, profits individuals. A clever and cruel knave will in a mixed society always be richer than an honest person can be. But Honesty is the best "policy," if policy mean practice of State. For fraud gains nothing in a State. It only enables the knaves in it to live at the expense of honest people; while there is for every act of fraud, however small, a loss of wealth to the community. Whatever the fraudulent person gains, some other person loses, as fraud produces nothing; and there is, _besides_, the loss of the time and thought spent in accomplishing the fraud, and of the strength otherwise obtainable by mutual help (not to speak of the fevers of anxiety and jealousy in the blood, which are a heavy physical loss, as I will show in due time). Practically, when the nation is deeply corrupt cheat answers to cheat; every one is in turn imposed upon, and there is to the body politic the dead loss of the ingenuity, together with the incalculable mischief of the injury to each defrauded person, producing collateral effect unexpectedly. My neighbour sells me bad meat: I sell him in return flawed iron. We neither of us get one atom of pecuniary advantage on the whole transaction, but we both suffer unexpected inconvenience; my men get scurvy, and his cattle-truck runs off the rails. 105. The examination of this form of Charis must, therefore, lead us into the discussion of the principles of government in general, and especially of that of the poor by the rich, discovering how the Graciousness joined with the Greatness, or Love with Majestas, is the true Dei Gratia, or Divine Right, of every form and manner of King; _i. e._, specifically, of the thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, and powers of the earth:--of the thrones, stable, or "ruling," literally right-doing powers ("rex eris, recte si facies"):--of the dominations--lordly, edifying, dominant and harmonious powers; chiefly domestic, over the "built thing," domus, or house; and inherently twofold, Dominus and Domina; Lord and Lady:--of the Princedoms, pre-eminent, incipient, creative, and demonstrative powers; thus poetic and mercantile, in the "princeps carmen deduxisse" and the merchant-prince:--of the Virtues or Courages; militant, guiding, or Ducal powers:--and finally of the Strengths, or Forces pure; magistral powers, of the More over the less, and the forceful and free over the weak and servile elements of life. Subject enough for the next paper, involving "economical" principles of some importance, of which, for theme, here is a sentence, which I do not care to translate, for it would sound harsh in English,[53] though, truly, it is one of the tenderest ever uttered by man; which may be meditated over, or rather _through_, in the meanwhile, by any one who will take the pains:-- [Greek: Ar oun, hôsper Hippos tô anepistêmoni men encheirounti de chrêsthai zêmia estin, houtô kai adelphos, otan tis autô mê epistamenos encheir chrêsthai, zêmia esti]; FOOTNOTES: [44] I have repeated the substance of this and the next paragraph so often since, that I am ashamed and weary. The thing is too true, and too simple, it seems, for anybody ever to believe. Meantime, the theories of "international values," as explained by Modern Political Economy, have brought about last year's pillage of France by Germany, and the affectionate relations now existing in consequence between the inhabitants of the right and left banks of the Rhine. [45] I wish some one would examine and publish accurately the late dealings of the Governors of the Cape with the Caffirs. [46] By "pay," I mean wages for labour or skill; by "profit," gain dependent on the state of the market. [47] Since I wrote this, I have worked out the question of interest of money, which always, until lately, had embarrassed and defeated me; and I find that the payment of interest of any amount whatever is real "usury," and entirely unjustifiable. I was shown this chiefly by the pamphlets issued by Mr. W. C. Sillar, though I greatly regret the impatience which causes Mr. Sillar to regard usury as the radical crime in political economy. There are others worse, that act with it. [48] Hence Dante's companionship of Cahors, _Inf._, canto xi., supported by the view taken of the matter throughout the middle ages, in common with the Greeks. [49] I do not wonder when I re-read this, that people talk about my "sentiment." But there is no sentiment whatever in the matter. It is a hard and bare commercial fact, that if two people deal together who don't try to cheat each other, they will in a given time, make more money out of each other than if they do. See § 104. [50] Shakspeare would certainly never have chosen this name had he been forced to retain the Roman spelling. Like Perdita, "lost lady," or Cordelia, "heart-lady," Portia is "fortune" lady. The two great relative groups of words, Fortuna, fero, and fors--Portio, porto, and pars (with the lateral branch, op-portune, im-portune, opportunity, &c.), are of deep and intricate significance; their various senses of bringing, abstracting, and sustaining being all centralized by the wheel (which bears and moves at once), or still better, the ball (spera) of Fortune,--"Volve sua spera, e beata si gode:" the motive power of this wheel distinguishing its goddess from the fixed majesty of Necessitas with her iron nails; or [Greek: anankê], with her pillar of fire and iridescent orbits, _fixed_ at the centre. Portus and porta, and gate in its connexion with gain, form another interesting branch group; and Mors, the concentration of delaying, is always to be remembered with Fors, the concentration of bringing and bearing, passing on into Fortis and Fortitude. [This note is literally a mere memorandum for the future work which I am now completing in _Fors Clavigera_; it was printed partly in vanity, but also with real desire to get people to share the interest I found in the careful study of the leading words in noble languages. Compare the next note.] [51] As Charis becomes Charitas, the word "Cher," or "Dear," passes from Shylock's sense of it (to buy cheap and sell dear) into Antonio's sense of it: emphasized with the final _i_ in tender "Cheri," and hushed to English calmness in our noble "Cherish." The reader must not think that any care can be misspent in tracing the connexion and power of the words which we have to use in the sequel. (See Appendix VI.) Much education sums itself in making men economize their words, and understand them. Nor is it possible to estimate the harm which has been done, in matters of higher speculation and conduct, by loose verbiage, though we may guess at it by observing the dislike which people show to having anything about their religion said to them in simple words, because then they understand it. Thus congregations meet weekly to invoke the influence of a Spirit of Life and Truth; yet if any part of that character were intelligibly expressed to them by the formulas of the service, they would be offended. Suppose, for instance, in the closing benediction, the clergyman were to give vital significance to the vague word "Holy," and were to say, "the fellowship of the Helpful and Honest Ghost be with you, and remain with you always," what would be the horror of many, first at the irreverence of so intelligible an expression; and secondly, at the discomfortable occurrence of the suspicion that while throughout the commercial dealings of the week they had denied the propriety of Help, and possibility of Honesty, the Person whose company they had been now asking to be blessed with could have no fellowship with cruel people or knaves. [52] "[Greek: ta men oun alla zôa ouk echein aisthêsin tôn en tais kinêsesi taxeôn oude ataxiôn ois dê rythmos unoma kai haomonia êmin de ous eipomen tous Theous] (Apollo, the Muses, and Bacchus--the grave Bacchus, that is--ruling the choir of age; or Bacchus restraining; 'sæva _tene_, cum Berecyntio cornu tympana,' &c.) [Greek: synchoreutas dedosthai, toutous einai kai tous dedôkotas tên enrythmon te kai enarmonion aisthêsin meth' êdonês ... chorous te ônomakenai para tês charas emphyton onoma]." "Other animals have no perception of order nor of disorder in motion; but for us, Apollo and Bacchus and the Muses are appointed to mingle in our dances; and there are they who have given us the sense of delight in rhythm and harmony. And the name of choir, choral dance, (we may believe,) came from chara (delight)."--Laws, book ii. [53] [My way now, is to say things plainly, if I can, whether they sound harsh or not;--this is the translation--"Is it possible, then, that as a horse is only a mischief to any one who attempts to use him without knowing how, so also our brother, if we attempt to use him without knowing how, may be a mischief to us?"] CHAPTER V. GOVERNMENT. 106. It remains for us, as I stated in the close of the last chapter, to examine first the principles of government in general, and then those of the government of the Poor by the Rich. The government of a state consists in its customs, laws, and councils, and their enforcements. I. CUSTOMS. As one person primarily differs from another by fineness of nature, and, secondarily, by fineness of training, so also, a polite nation differs from a savage one, first, by the refinement of its nature, and secondly by the delicacy of its customs. In the completeness of custom, which is the nation's self-government, there are three stages--first, fineness in method of doing or of being;--called the manner or moral of acts; secondly, firmness in holding such method after adoption, so that it shall become a habit in the character: _i. e._, a constant "having" or "behaving;" and, lastly, ethical power in performance and endurance, which is the skill following on habit, and the ease reached by frequency of right doing. The sensibility of the nation is indicated by the fineness of its customs; its courage, continence, and self-respect by its persistence in them. By sensibility I mean its natural perception of beauty, fitness, and rightness; or of what is lovely, decent, and just: faculties dependent much on race, and the primal signs of fine breeding in man; but cultivable also by education, and necessarily perishing without it. True education has, indeed, no other function than the development of these faculties, and of the relative will. It has been the great error of modern intelligence to mistake science for education. You do not educate a man by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was not. And making him what he will remain for ever: for no wash of weeds will bring back the faded purple. And in that dyeing there are two processes--first, the cleansing and wringing-out, which is the baptism with water; and then the infusing of the blue and scarlet colours, gentleness and justice, which is the baptism with fire. 107.[54] The customs and manners of a sensitive and highly-trained race are always Vital: that is to say, they are orderly manifestations of intense life, like the habitual action of the fingers of a musician. The customs and manners of a vile and rude race, on the contrary, are conditions of decay: they are not, properly speaking, habits, but incrustations; not restraints, or forms, of life; but gangrenes, noisome, and the beginnings of death. And generally, so far as custom attaches itself to indolence instead of action, and to prejudice instead of perception, it takes this deadly character, so that thus Custom hangs upon us with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life. But that weight, if it become impetus, (living instead of dead weight) is just what gives value to custom, when it works _with_ life, instead of against it. 108. The high ethical training of a nation implies perfect Grace, Pitifulness, and Peace; it is irreconcilably inconsistent with filthy or mechanical employments,--with the desire of money,--and with mental states of anxiety, jealousy, or indifference to pain. The present insensibility of the upper classes of Europe to the surrounding aspects of suffering, uncleanness, and crime, binds them not only into one responsibility with the sin, but into one dishonour with the foulness, which rot at their thresholds. The crimes daily recorded in the police-courts of London and Paris (and much more those which are _un_recorded) are a disgrace to the whole body politic;[55] they are, as in the body natural, stains of disease on a face of delicate skin, making the delicacy itself frightful. Similarly, the filth and poverty permitted or ignored in the midst of us are as dishonourable to the whole social body, as in the body natural it is to wash the face, but leave the hands and feet foul. Christ's way is the only true one: begin at the feet; the face will take care of itself. 109. Yet, since necessarily, in the frame of a nation, nothing but the head can be of gold, and the feet, for the work they have to do, must be part of iron, part of clay;--foul or mechanical work is always reduced by a noble race to the minimum in quantity; and, even then, performed and endured, not without sense of degradation, as a fine temper is wounded by the sight of the lower offices of the body. The highest conditions of human society reached hitherto have cast such work to slaves; but supposing slavery of a politically defined kind to be done away with, mechanical and foul employment must, in all highly organized states, take the aspect either of punishment or probation. All criminals should at once be set to the most dangerous and painful forms of it, especially to work in mines and at furnaces,[56] so as to relieve the innocent population as far as possible: of merely rough (not mechanical) manual labour, especially agricultural, _a large portion should be done by the upper classes_;--_bodily health, and sufficient contrast and repose for the mental functions, being unattainable without it_; what necessarily inferior labour remains to be done, as especially in manufactures, should, and always will, when the relations of society are reverent and harmonious, fall to the lot of those who, for the time, are fit for nothing better. For as, whatever the perfectness of the educational system, there must remain infinite differences between the natures and capacities of men; and these differing natures are generally rangeable under the two qualities of lordly, (or tending towards rule, construction, and harmony), and servile (or tending towards misrule, destruction, and discord); and since the lordly part is only in a state of profitableness while ruling, and the servile only in a state of redeemableness while serving, the whole health of the state depends on the manifest separation of these two elements of its mind; for, if the servile part be not separated and rendered visible in service, it mixes with, and corrupts, the entire body of the state; and if the lordly part be not distinguished, and set to rule, it is crushed and lost, being turned to no account, so that the rarest qualities of the nation are all given to it in vain.[57] II. LAWS. 110. These are the definitions and bonds of custom, or of what the nation desires should become custom. Law is either archic,[58] (of direction), meristic, (of division), or critic, (of judgment). Archic law is that of appointment and precept: it defines what is and is not to be _done_. Meristic law is that of balance and distribution: it defines what is and is not to be _possessed_. Critic law is that of discernment and award: it defines what is and is not to be _suffered_. 111. A. ARCHIC LAW. If we choose to unite the laws of precept and distribution under the head of "statutes," all law is simply either of statute or judgment; that is, first the establishment of ordinance, and, secondly, the assignment of the reward, or penalty, due to its observance or violation. To some extent these two forms of law must be associated, and, with every ordinance, the penalty of disobedience to it be also determined. But since the degrees and guilt of disobedience vary, the determination of due reward and punishment must be modified by discernment of special fact, which is peculiarly the office of the judge, as distinguished from that of the lawgiver and law-sustainer, or king; not but that the two offices are always theoretically, and in early stages, or limited numbers, of society, are often practically, united in the same person or persons. 112. Also, it is necessary to keep clearly in view the distinction between these two kinds of law, because the possible range of law is wider in proportion to their separation. There are many points of conduct respecting which the nation may wisely express its will by a written precept or resolve, yet not enforce it by penalty:[59] and the expedient degree of penalty is always quite a separate consideration from the expedience of the statute; for the statute may often be better enforced by mercy than severity, and is also easier in the bearing, and less likely to be abrogated. Farther, laws of precept have reference especially to youth, and concern themselves with training; but laws of judgment to manhood, and concern themselves with remedy and reward. There is a highly curious feeling in the English mind against educational law: we think no man's liberty should be interfered with till he has done irrevocable wrong; whereas it is then just too late for the only gracious and kingly interference, which is to hinder him from doing it. Make your educational laws strict, and your criminal ones may be gentle; but, leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons for age. And it is good for a man that he "wear the yoke in his youth:" for the reins may then be of silken thread; and with sweet chime of silver bells at the bridle; but, for the captivity of age, you must forge the iron fetter, and cast the passing bell. 113. Since no law can be, in a final or true sense, established, but by right, (all unjust laws involving the ultimate necessity of their own abrogation), the law-giving can only become a law-sustaining power in so far as it is Royal, or "right doing;"--in so far, that is, as it rules, not misrules, and orders, not dis-orders, the things submitted to it. Throned on this rock of justice, the kingly power becomes established and establishing; "[Greek: theios]," or divine, and, therefore, it is literally true that no ruler can err, so long as he is a ruler, or [Greek: archôn oudeis amartanei tote hotan archôn ê]; perverted by careless thought, which has cost the world somewhat, into--"the king can do no wrong." 114. B. MERISTIC LAW,[60] or that of the tenure of property, first determines what every individual possesses by right, and secures it to him; and what he possesses by wrong, and deprives him of it. But it has a far higher provisory function: it determines what every man _should_ possess, and puts it within his reach on due conditions; and what he should _not_ possess, and puts this out of his reach, conclusively. 115. Every article of human wealth has certain conditions attached to its merited possession; when these are unobserved, possession becomes rapine. And the object of meristic law is not only to secure to every man his rightful share (the share, that is, which he has worked for, produced, or received by gift from a rightful owner), but to enforce the due conditions of possession, as far as law may conveniently reach; for instance, that land shall not be wantonly allowed to run to waste, that streams shall not be poisoned by the persons through whose properties they pass, nor air be rendered unwholesome beyond given limits. Laws of this kind exist already in rudimentary degree, but need large development; the just laws respecting the possession of works of art have not hitherto been so much as conceived, and the daily loss of national wealth, and of its use, in this respect, is quite incalculable. And these laws need revision quite as much respecting property in national as in private hands. For instance: the public are under a vague impression that, because they have paid for the contents of the British Museum, every one has an equal right to see and to handle them. But the public have similarly paid for the contents of Woolwich arsenal; yet do not expect free access to it, or handling of its contents. The British Museum is neither a free circulating library, nor a free school: it is a place for the safe preservation, and exhibition on due occasion, of unique books, unique objects of natural history, and unique works of art; its books can no more be used by everybody than its coins can be handled, or its statues cast. There ought to be free libraries in every quarter of London, with large and complete reading-rooms attached; so also free educational museums should be open in every quarter of London, all day long, until late at night, well lighted, well catalogued, and rich in contents both of art and natural history. But neither the British Museum nor National Gallery is a school; they are _treasuries_; and both should be severely restricted in access and in use. Unless some order of this kind is made, and that soon, for the MSS. department of the Museum, (its superintendents have sorrowfully told me this, and repeatedly), the best MSS. in the collection will be destroyed, irretrievably, by the careless and continual handling to which they are now subjected. Finally, in certain conditions of a nation's progress, laws limiting accumulation of any kind of property may be found expedient. 116. C. CRITIC LAW determines questions of injury, and assigns due rewards and punishments to conduct. Two curious economical questions arise laterally with respect to this branch of law, namely, the cost of crime, and the cost of judgment. The cost of crime is endured by nations ignorantly, that expense being nowhere stated in their budgets; the cost of judgment, patiently, (provided only it can be had pure for the money), because the science, or perhaps we ought rather to say the art, of law, is felt to found a noble profession and discipline; so that civilized nations are usually glad that a number of persons should be supported by exercise in oratory and analysis. But it has not yet been calculated what the practical value might have been, in other directions, of the intelligence now occupied in deciding, through courses of years, what might have been decided as justly, had the date of judgment been fixed, in as many hours. Imagine one half of the funds which any great nation devotes to dispute by law, applied to the determination of physical questions in medicine, agriculture, and theoretic science; and calculate the probable results within the next ten years! I say nothing yet of the more deadly, more lamentable loss, involved in the use of purchased, instead of personal, justice--[Greek: "epaktô par allôn--aporia oikeiôn."] 117. In order to true analysis of critic law, we must understand the real meaning of the word "injury." We commonly understand by it, any kind of harm done by one man to another; but we do not define the idea of harm: sometimes we limit it to the harm which the sufferer is conscious of; whereas much the worst injuries are those he is unconscious of; and, at other times, we limit the idea to violence, or restraint; whereas much the worse forms of injury are to be accomplished by indolence, and the withdrawal of restraint. 118. "Injury" is then simply the refusal, or violation of, any man's right or claim upon his fellows: which claim, much talked of in modern times, under the term "right," is mainly resolvable into two branches: a man's claim not to be hindered from doing what he should; and his claim to be hindered from doing what he should not; these two forms of hindrance being intensified by reward, help, and fortune, or Fors, on one side, and by punishment, impediment, and even final arrest, or Mors, on the other. 119. Now, in order to a man's obtaining these two rights, it is clearly needful that the _worth_ of him should be approximately known; as well as the _want_ of worth, which has, unhappily, been usually the principal subject of study for critic law, careful hitherto only to mark degrees of de-merit, instead of merit;--assigning, indeed, to the _De_ficiencies (not always, alas! even to these) just estimate, fine, or penalty; but to the _Ef_ficiencies, on the other side, which are by much the more interesting, as well as the only profitable part of its subject, assigning neither estimate nor aid. 120. Now, it is in this higher and perfect function of critic law, _en_abling instead of _dis_abling, that it becomes truly Kingly, instead of Draconic: (what Providence gave the great, wrathful legislator his name?): that is, it becomes the law of man and of life, instead of the law of the worm and of death--both of these laws being set in changeless poise one against another, and the enforcement of both being the eternal function of the lawgiver, and true claim of every living soul: such claim being indeed strong to be mercifully hindered, and even, if need be, abolished, when longer existence means only deeper destruction, but stronger still to be mercifully helped, and recreated, when longer existence and new creation mean nobler life. So that reward and punishment will be found to resolve themselves mainly[61] into help and hindrance; and these again will issue naturally from time recognition of deserving, and the just reverence and just wrath which follow instinctively on such recognition. 121. I say, "follow," but, in reality, they are part of the recognition. Reverence is as instinctive as anger;--both of them instant on true vision: it is sight and understanding that we have to teach, and these _are_ reverence. Make a man perceive worth, and in its reflection he sees his own relative unworth, and worships thereupon inevitably, not with stiff courtesy, but rejoicingly, passionately, and, best of all, _restfully_: for the inner capacity of awe and love is infinite in man, and only in finding these, can we find peace. And the common insolences and petulances of the people, and their talk of equality, are not irreverence in them in the least, but mere blindness, stupefaction, and fog in the brains,[62] the first sign of any cleansing away of which is, that they gain some power of discerning, and some patience in submitting to, their true counsellors and governors. In the mode of such discernment consists the real "constitution" of the state, more than in the titles or offices of the discerned person; for it is no matter, save in degree of mischief, to what office a man is appointed, if he cannot fulfil it. 122. III. GOVERNMENT BY COUNCIL. This is the determination, by living authority, of the national conduct to be observed under existing circumstances; and the modification or enlargement, abrogation or enforcement, of the code of national law according to present needs or purposes. This government is necessarily always by council, for though the authority of it may be vested in one person, that person cannot form any opinion on a matter of public interest but by (voluntarily or involuntarily) submitting himself to the influence of others. This government is always twofold--visible and invisible. The visible government is that which nominally carries on the national business; determines its foreign relations, raises taxes, levies soldiers, orders war or peace, and otherwise becomes the arbiter of the national fortune. The invisible government is that exercised by all energetic and intelligent men, each in his sphere, regulating the inner will and secret ways of the people, essentially forming its character, and preparing its fate. Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of more the necessity of all. Sometimes their career is quite distinct from that of the people, and to write it, as the national history, is as if one should number the accidents which befall a man's weapons and wardrobe, and call the list his biography. Nevertheless, a truly noble and wise nation necessarily has a noble and wise visible government, for its wisdom issues in that conclusively. 123. Visible governments are, in their agencies, capable of three pure forms, and of no more than three. They are either monarchies, where the authority is vested in one person; oligarchies, when it is vested in a minority; or democracies, when vested in a majority. But these three forms are not only, in practice, variously limited and combined, but capable of infinite difference in character and use, receiving specific names according to their variations; which names, being nowise agreed upon, nor consistently used, either in thought or writing, no man can at present tell, in speaking of any kind of government, whether he is understood; nor, in hearing, whether he understands. Thus we usually call a just government by one person a monarchy, and an unjust or cruel one, a tyranny: this might be reasonable if it had reference to the divinity of true government; but to limit the term "oligarchy" to government by a few rich people, and to call government by a few wise or noble people "aristocracy," is evidently absurd, unless it were proved that rich people never could be wise, or noble people rich; and farther absurd, because there are other distinctions in character, as well as riches or wisdom (greater purity of race, or strength of purpose, for instance), which may give the power of government to the few. So that if we had to give names to every group or kind of minority, we should have verbiage enough. But there is only one right name--"oligarchy." 124. So also the terms "republic" and "democracy"[63] are confused, especially in modern use; and both of them are liable to every sort of misconception. A republic means, properly, a polity in which the state, with its all, is at every man's service, and every man, with his all, at the state's service--(people are apt to lose sight of the last condition), but its government may nevertheless be oligarchic (consular, or decemviral, for instance), or monarchic (dictatorial). But a democracy means a state in which the government rests directly with the majority of the citizens. And both these conditions have been judged only by such accidents and aspects of them as each of us has had experience of; and sometimes both have been confused with anarchy, as it is the fashion at present to talk of the "failure of republican institutions in America," when there has never yet been in America any such thing as an institution, but only defiance of institution; neither any such thing as a _res-publica_, but only a multitudinous _res-privata_; every man for himself. It is not republicanism which fails now in America; it is your model science of political economy, brought to its perfect practice. There you may see competition, and the "law of demand and supply" (especially in paper), in beautiful and unhindered operation.[64] Lust of wealth, and trust in it; vulgar faith in magnitude and multitude, instead of nobleness; besides that faith natural to backwoodsmen--"lucum ligna,"[65]--perpetual self-contemplation, issuing in passionate vanity; total ignorance of the finer and higher arts, and of all that they teach and bestow; and the discontent of energetic minds unoccupied, frantic with hope of uncomprehended change, and progress they know not whither;[66]--these are the things that have "failed" in America; and yet not altogether failed--it is not collapse, but collision; the greatest railroad accident on record, with fire caught from the furnace, and Catiline's quenching "non aquâ, sed ruinâ."[67] But I see not, in any of our talk of them, justice enough done to their erratic strength of purpose, nor any estimate taken of the strength of endurance of domestic sorrow, in what their women and children suppose a righteous cause. And out of that endurance and suffering, its own fruit will be born with time; [_not_ abolition of slavery, however. See § 130.] and Carlyle's prophecy of them (June, 1850), as it has now come true in the first clause, will, in the last:-- "America, too, will find that caucuses, divisionalists, stump-oratory, and speeches to Buncombe will not carry men to the immortal gods; that the Washington Congress, and constitutional battle of Kilkenny cats is there, as here, naught for such objects; quite incompetent for such; and, in fine, that said sublime constitutional arrangement will require to be (with terrible throes, and travail such as few expect yet) remodelled, abridged, extended, suppressed, torn asunder, put together again--not without heroic labour and effort, quite other than that of the stump-orator and the revival preacher, one day." 125.[68] Understand, then, once for all, that no form of government, provided it be a government at all, is, as such, to be either condemned or praised, or contested for in anywise, but by fools. But all forms of government are good just so far as they attain this one vital necessity of policy--_that the wise and kind, few or many, shall govern the unwise and unkind_; and they are evil so far as they miss of this, or reverse it. Not does the form, in any case, signify one whit, but its _firmness_, and adaptation to the need; for if there be many foolish persons in a state, and few wise, then it is good that the few govern; and if there be many wise, and few foolish, then it is good that the many govern; and if many be wise, yet one wiser, then it is good that one should govern; and so on. Thus, we may have "the ant's republic, and the realm of bees," both good in their kind; one for groping, and the other for building; and nobler still, for flying;--the Ducal monarchy[69] of those Intelligent of seasons, that set forth The aery caravan, high over seas. 126. Nor need we want examples, among the inferior creatures, of dissoluteness, as well as resoluteness, in government. I once saw democracy finely illustrated by the beetles of North Switzerland, who by universal suffrage, and elytric acclamation, one May twilight, carried it, that they would fly over the Lake of Zug; and flew _short_, to the great disfigurement of the Lake of Zug,--[Greek: Kantharon limên]--over some leagues square, and to the close of the cockchafer democracy for that year. Then, for tyranny, the old fable of the frogs and the stork finely touches one form of it; but truth will image it more closely than fable, for tyranny is not complete when it is only over the idle, but when it is over the laborious and the blind. This description of pelicans and climbing perch, which I find quoted in one of our popular natural histories, out of Sir Emerson Tennant's _Ceylon_, comes as near as may be to the true image of the thing:-- "Heavy rains came on, and as we stood on the high ground, we observed a pelican on the margin of the shallow pool gorging himself; our people went towards him, and raised a cry of 'Fish, fish!' We hurried down, and found numbers of fish struggling upward through the grass, in the rills formed by the trickling of the rain. There was scarcely water to cover them, but nevertheless they made rapid progress up the bank, on which our followers collected about two baskets of them. They were forcing their way up the knoll, and had they not been interrupted, first by the pelican, and afterwards by ourselves, they would in a few minutes have gained the highest point, and descended on the other side into a pool which formed another portion of the tank. In going this distance, however, they must have used muscular exertion enough to have taken them half a mile on level ground; for at these places all the cattle and wild animals of the neighbourhood had latterly come to drink, so that the surface was everywhere indented with footmarks, in addition to the cracks in the surrounding baked mud, into which the fish tumbled in their progress. In those holes, which were deep, and the sides perpendicular, they remained to die, and were carried off by kites and crows."[70] 127. But whether governments be bad or good, one general disadvantage seems to attach to them in modern times--that they are all _costly_.[71] This, however, is not essentially the fault of the governments. If nations choose to play at war, they will always find their governments willing to lead the game, and soon coming under that term of Aristophanes, "[Greek: kapêloi aspidôn]," "shield-sellers." And when ([Greek: pêm epi pêmati])[72] the shields take the form of iron ships, with apparatus "for defence against liquid fire,"--as I see by latest accounts they are now arranging the decks in English dockyards--they become costly biers enough for the grey convoy of chief mourner waves, wreathed with funereal foam, to bear back the dead upon; the massy shoulders of those corpse-bearers being intended for quite other work, and to bear the living, and food for the living, if we would let them. 128. Nor have we the least right to complain of our governments being expensive, so long as we set the government _to do precisely the work which brings no return_. If our present doctrines of political economy be just, let us trust them to the utmost; take that war business out of the government's hands, and test therein the principles of supply and demand. Let our future sieges of Sebastopol be done by contract--no capture, no pay--(I admit that things might sometimes go better so); and let us sell the commands of our prospective battles, with our vicarages, to the lowest bidder; so may we have cheap victories, and divinity. On the other hand, if we have so much suspicion of our science that we dare not trust it on military or spiritual business, would it not be but reasonable to try whether some authoritative handling may not prosper in matters utilitarian? If we were to set our governments to do useful things instead of mischievous, possibly even the apparatus itself might in time come to be less costly. The machine, applied to the building of the house, might perhaps pay, when it seems not to pay, applied to pulling it down. If we made in our dockyards ships to carry timber and coals, instead of cannon, and with provision for the brightening of domestic solid culinary fire, instead of for the scattering of liquid hostile fire, it might have some effect on the taxes. Or suppose that we tried the experiment on land instead of water carriage; already the government, not unapproved, carries letters and parcels for us; larger packages may in time follow;--even general merchandise--why not, at last, ourselves? Had the money spent in local mistakes and vain private litigation, on the railroads of England, been laid out, instead, under proper government restraint, on really useful railroad work, and had no absurd expense been incurred in ornamenting stations, we might already have had,--what ultimately it will be found we must have,--quadruple rails, two for passengers, and two for traffic, on every great line; and we might have been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded by well-paid pointsmen, for half the present fares. [For, of course, a railroad company is merely an association of turnpike-keepers, who make the tolls as high as they can, not to mend the roads with, but to pocket. The public will in time discover this, and do away with turnpikes on railroads, as on all other public-ways.] 129. Suppose it should thus turn out, finally, that a true government set to true work, instead of being a costly engine, was a paying one? that your government, rightly organized, instead of itself subsisting by an income-tax, would produce its subjects some subsistence in the shape of an income dividend?--police, and judges duly paid besides, only with less work than the state at present provides for them. A true government set to true work!--Not easily to be imagined, still less obtained; but not beyond human hope or ingenuity. Only you will have to alter your election systems somewhat, first. Not by universal suffrage, nor by votes purchasable with beer, is such government to be had. That is to say, not by universal _equal_ suffrage. Every man upwards of twenty, who has been convicted of no legal crime, should have his say in this matter; but afterwards a louder voice, as he grows older, and approves himself wiser. If he has one vote at twenty, he should have two at thirty, four at forty, ten at fifty. For every single vote which he has with an income of a hundred a year, he should have ten with an income of a thousand, (provided you first see to it that wealth is, as nature intended it to be, the reward of sagacity and industry--not of good luck in a scramble or a lottery). For every single vote which he had as subordinate in any business, he should have two when he became a master; and every office and authority nationally bestowed, implying trustworthiness and intellect, should have its known proportional number of votes attached to it. But into the detail and working of a true system in these matters we cannot now enter; we are concerned as yet with definitions only, and statements of first principles, which will be established now sufficiently for our purposes when we have examined the nature of that form of government last on the list in § 105,--the purely "Magistral," exciting at present its full share of public notice, under its ambiguous title of "slavery." 130. I have not, however, been able to ascertain in definite terms, from the declaimers against slavery, what they understand by it. If they mean only the imprisonment or compulsion of one person by another, such imprisonment or compulsion being in many cases highly expedient, slavery, so defined, would be no evil in itself, but only in its abuse; that is, when men are slaves, who should not be, or masters, who should not be, or even the fittest characters for either state, placed in it under conditions which should not be. It is not, for instance, a necessary condition of slavery, nor a desirable one, that parents should be separated from children, or husbands from wives; but the institution of war, against which people declaim with less violence, effects such separations,--not unfrequently in a very permanent manner. To press a sailor, seize a white youth by conscription for a soldier, or carry off a black one for a labourer, may all be right acts, or all wrong ones, according to needs and circumstances. It is wrong to scourge a man unnecessarily. So it is to shoot him. Both must be done on occasion; and it is better and kinder to flog a man to his work, than to leave him idle till he robs, and flog him afterwards. The essential thing for all creatures is to be made to do right; how they are made to do it--by pleasant promises, or hard necessities, pathetic oratory, or the whip--is comparatively immaterial.[73] To be deceived is perhaps as incompatible with human dignity as to be whipped; and I suspect the last method to be not the worst, for the help of many individuals. The Jewish nation throve under it, in the hand of a monarch reputed not unwise; it is only the change of whip for scorpion which is inexpedient; and that change is as likely to come to pass on the side of license as of law. For the true scorpion whips are those of the nation's pleasant vices, which are to it as St. John's locusts--crown on the head, ravin in the mouth, and sting in the tail. If it will not bear the rule of Athena and Apollo, who shepherd without smiting ([Greek: ou plêgê nemontes]), Athena at last calls no more in the corners of the streets; and then follows the rule of Tisiphone, who smites without shepherding. 131. If, however, by slavery, instead of absolute compulsion, is meant _the purchase, by money, of the right of compulsion_, such purchase is necessarily made whenever a portion of any territory is transferred, for money, from one monarch to another: which has happened frequently enough in history, without its being supposed that the inhabitants of the districts so transferred became therefore slaves. In this, as in the former case, the dispute seems about the fashion of the thing, rather than the fact of it. There are two rocks in mid-sea, on each of which, neglected equally by instructive and commercial powers, a handful of inhabitants live as they may. Two merchants bid for the two properties, but not in the same terms. One bids for the people, buys _them_, and sets them to work, under pain of scourge; the other bids for the rock, buys _it_, and throws the inhabitants into the sea. The former is the American, the latter the English method, of slavery; much is to be said for, and something against, both, which I hope to say in due time and place.[74] 132. If, however, slavery mean not merely the purchase of the right of compulsion, but _the purchase of the body and soul of the creature itself for money_, it is not, I think, among the black races that purchases of this kind are most extensively made, or that separate souls of a fine make fetch the highest price. This branch of the inquiry we shall have occasion also to follow out at some length, for in the worst instances of the selling of souls, we are apt to get, when we ask if the sale is valid, only Pyrrhon's answer[75]--"None can know." 133. The fact is that slavery is not a political institution at all, _but an inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance_ of a large portion of the human race--to whom, the more you give of their own free will, the more slaves they will make themselves. In common parlance, we idly confuse captivity with slavery, and are always thinking of the difference between pine-trunks (Ariel in the pine), and cowslip-bells ("in the cowslip-bell I lie"), or between carrying wood and drinking (Caliban's slavery and freedom), instead of noting the far more serious differences between Ariel and Caliban themselves, and the means by which, practically, that difference may be brought about or diminished. 134.[76] Plato's slave, in the _Polity_, who, well dressed and washed, aspires to the hand of his master's daughter, corresponds curiously to Caliban attacking Prospero's cell; and there is an undercurrent of meaning throughout, in the _Tempest_ as well as in the _Merchant of Venice_; referring in this case to government, as in that to commerce. Miranda[77] ("the wonderful," so addressed first by Ferdinand, "Oh, you wonder!") corresponds to Homer's Arete: Ariel and Caliban are respectively the spirits of faithful and imaginative labour, opposed to rebellious, hurtful and slavish labour. Prospero ("for hope"), a true governor, is opposed to Sycorax, the mother of slavery, her name "Swine-raven," indicating at once brutality and deathfulness; hence the line-- "As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed, with _raven's feather_,"--&c. For all these dreams of Shakespeare, as those of true and strong men must be, are "[Greek: phantasmata theia, kai skiai tôn ontôn]"--divine phantasms, and shadows of things that are. We hardly tell our children, willingly, a fable with no purport in it; yet we think God sends his best messengers only to sing fairy tales to us, fond and empty. The _Tempest_ is just like a grotesque in a rich missal, "clasped where paynims pray." Ariel is the spirit of generous and free-hearted service, in early stages of human society oppressed by ignorance and wild tyranny: venting groans as fast as mill-wheels strike; in shipwreck of states, dreadful; so that "all but mariners plunge in the brine, and quit the vessel, then all afire with _me_," yet having in itself the will and sweetness of truest peace, whence that is especially called "Ariel's" song, "Come unto these yellow sands, and there, _take hands_," "courtesied when you have, and kissed, the wild waves whist:" (mind, it is "cortesia," not "curtsey,") and read "quiet" for "whist," if you want the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and sweet spirits bear the burden for you--with watch in the night, and call in early morning. The _vis viva_ in elemental transformation follows--"Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made." Then, giving rest _after_ labour, it "fetches dew from the still vext Bermoöthes, and, with a charm joined to their suffered labour, leaves men asleep." Snatching away the feast of the cruel, it seems to them as a harpy; followed by the utterly vile, who cannot see it in any shape, but to whom it is the picture of nobody, it still gives shrill harmony to their false and mocking catch, "Thought is free;" but leads them into briers and foul places, and at last hollas the hounds upon them. Minister of fate against the great criminal, it joins itself with the "incensed seas and shores "--the sword that layeth at it cannot hold, and may "with bemocked-at stabs as soon kill the still-closing waters, as diminish one dowle that is in its plume." As the guide and aid of true love, it is always called by Prospero "fine" (the French "fine," not the English), or "delicate"--another long note would be needed to explain all the meaning in this word. Lastly, its work done, and war, it resolves itself into the elements. The intense significance of the last song, "Where the bee sucks," I will examine in its due place. The types of slavery in Caliban are more palpable, and need not be dwelt on now: though I will notice them also, severally, in their proper places;--the heart of his slavery is in his worship: "That's a brave god, and bears celestial--liquor." But, in illustration of the sense in which the Latin "benignus" and "malignus" are to be coupled with Eleutheria and Douleia, note that Caliban's torment is always the physical reflection of his own nature--"cramps" and "side stiches that shall pen thy breath up; thou shalt be pinched, as thick as honeycombs:" the whole nature of slavery being one cramp and cretinous contraction. Fancy this of Ariel! You may fetter him, but you set no mark on him; you may put him to hard work and far journey, but you cannot give him a cramp. 135. I should dwell, even in these prefatory papers, at more length on this subject of slavery, had not all I would say been said already, in vain, (not, as I hope, ultimately in vain), by Carlyle, in the first of the _Latter-day Pamphlets_, which I commend to the reader's gravest reading; together with that as much neglected, and still more immediately needed, on model prisons, and with the great chapter on "Permanence" (fifth of the last section of "Past and Present"), which sums what is known, and foreshadows, or rather forelights, all that is to be learned of National Discipline. I have only here farther to examine the nature of one world-wide and everlasting form of slavery, wholesome in use, as deadly in abuse;--the service of the rich by the poor. FOOTNOTES: [54] [Think over this paragraph carefully; it should have been much expanded to be quite intelligible; but it contains all that I want it to contain.] [55] "The ordinary brute, who flourishes in the very centre of ornate life, tells us of unknown depths on the verge of which we totter, being bound to thank our stars every day we live that there is not a general outbreak, and a revolt from the yoke of civilization."--_Times_ leader, Dec. 25, 1862. Admitting that our stars are to be thanked for our safety, whom are we to thank for the danger? [56] Our politicians, even the best of them, regard only the distress caused by the _failure_ of mechanical labour. The degradation caused by its excess is a far more serious subject of thought, and of future fear. I shall examine this part of our subject at length hereafter. There can hardly be any doubt, at present, cast on the truth of the above passages, as all the great thinkers are unanimous on the matter. Plato's words are terrific in their scorn and pity whenever he touches on the mechanical arts. He calls the men employed in them not even human, but partially and diminutively human, "[Greek: anthrôpiskoi,]" and opposes such work to noble occupations, not merely as prison is opposed to freedom but as a convict's dishonoured prison is to the temple (escape from them being like that of a criminal to the sanctuary); and the destruction caused by them being of soul no less than body.--_Rep._ vi. 9. Compare _Laws_, v. 11. Xenophon dwells on the evil of occupations at the furnace and especially their "[Greek: ascholia], want of leisure."--_Econ._ i. 4. (Modern England, with all its pride of education, has lost that first sense of the word "school;" and till it recover that, it will find no other rightly.) His word for the harm to the soul is to "break" it, as we say of the heart.--_Econ._ i. 6. And herein, also, is the root of the scorn, otherwise apparently most strange and cruel, with which Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare always speak of the populace; for it is entirely true that, in great states, the lower orders are low by nature as well as by task, being precisely that part of the commonwealth which has been thrust down for its coarseness or unworthiness (by coarseness I mean especially insensibility and irreverence--the "profane" of Horace); and when this ceases to be so, and the corruption and profanity are in the higher instead of the lower orders, there arises, first, helpless confusion, then, if the lower classes deserve power, ensues swift revolution, and they get it; but if neither the populace nor their rulers deserve it, there follows mere darkness and dissolution, till, out of the putrid elements, some new capacity of order rises, like grass on a grave; if not, there is no more hope, nor shadow of turning, for that nation. Atropos has her way with it. So that the law of national health is like that of a great lake or sea, in perfect but slow circulation, letting the dregs fall continually to the lowest place, and the clear water rise; yet so as that there shall be no neglect of the lower orders, but perfect supervision and sympathy, so that if one member suffer, all members shall suffer with it. [57] "[Greek: oligês, kai allôs gignomenês]." (Little, and that little born in vain.) The bitter sentence never was so true as at this day. [58] [This following note is a mere cluster of memoranda, but I keep it for reference.] Thetic, or Thesmic, would perhaps be a better term than archic; but liable to be confused with some which we shall want relating to Theoria. The administrators of the three great divisions of law are severally Archons, Merists, and Dicasts. The Archons are the true princes, or beginners of things; or leaders (as of an orchestra). The Merists are properly the Domini, or Lords of houses and nations. The Dicasts, properly, the judges, and that with Olympian justice, which reaches to heaven and hell. The violation of archic law is [Greek: hamartia] (error), [Greek: ponêria] (failure), or [Greek: plêmmeleia] (discord). The violation of meristic law is [Greek: anomia] (iniquity). The violation of critic law is [Greek: adikia] (injury). Iniquity is the central generic term; for all law is _fatal_; it is the division to men of their fate; as the fold of their pasture, it is [Greek: nomos]; as the assigning of their portion, [Greek: moira]. [59] [This is the only sentence which, in revising these essays, I am now inclined to question; but the point is one of extreme difficulty. There might be a law, for instance, of curfew, that candles should be put out, unless for necessary service, at such and such an hour, the idea of "necessary service" being quite indefinable, and no penalty possible; yet there would be a distinct consciousness of illegal conduct in young ladies' minds who danced by candlelight till dawn.] [60] [Read this and the next paragraph with attention; they contain clear statements, which I cannot mend, of things most necessary.] [61] [Mainly; not altogether. Conclusive reward of high virtue is loving and crowning, not helping; and conclusive punishment of deep vice is hating and crushing, not merely hindering.] [62] Compare Chaucer's "villany" (clownishness). Full foul and chorlishe seemed she, And eke villanous for to be, And little coulde of norture To worship any creature. [63] [I leave this paragraph, in every syllable, as it was written, during the rage of the American war; it was meant to refer, however, chiefly to the Northerns: what modifications its hot and partial terms require I will give in another place: let it stand now as it stood.] [64] Supply and demand! Alas! for what noble work was there ever any audible "demand" in that poor sense (Past and Present)? Nay, the demand is not loud, even for ignoble work. _See_ "Average Earnings of Betty Taylor," in _Times_ of 4th February of this year [1863]: "Worked from Monday morning at 8 A.M. to Friday night at 5.30 P.M. for 1_s._ 5-1/2_d._"--_Laissez faire._ [This kind of slavery finds no Abolitionists that I hear of.] [65] ["That the sacred grove is nothing but logs."] [66] Ames, by report of Waldo Emerson, says "that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in the water." Yes, that is comfortable; and though your raft cannot sink (being too worthless for that), it may go to pieces, I suppose, when the four winds (your only pilots) steer competitively from its four corners, and carry it, [Greek: ôs opôrinos Boreês phoreêsin akanthas], and then more than your feet will be in the water. [67] ["Not with water, but with ruin." The worst ruin being that which the Americans chiefly boast of. They sent all their best and honestest youths, Harvard University men and the like, to that accursed war; got them nearly all shot; wrote pretty biographies (to the ages of 17, 18, 19) and epitaphs for them; and so, having washed all the salt out of the nation in blood, left themselves to putrefaction, and the morality of New York.] [68] [This paragraph contains the gist of all that precede.] [69] [Whenever you are puzzled by any apparently mistaken use of words in these essays, take your dictionary, remembering I had to fix terms, as well as principles. A Duke is a "dux" or "leader;" the flying wedge of cranes is under a "ducal monarch"--a very different personage from a queen bee. The Venetians, with a beautiful instinct, gave the name to their King of the Sea.] [70] [This is a perfect picture of the French under the tyrannies of their Pelican Kings, before the Revolution. But they must find other than Pelican Kings--or rather, Pelican Kings of the Divine brood, that feed their children, and with their best blood.] [71] [Read carefully, from this point; because here begins the statement of things requiring to be done, which I am now re-trying to make definite in _Fors Clavigera_.] [72] ["Evil on the top of Evil." Delphic oracle, meaning iron on the anvil.] [73] [Permit me to enforce and reinforce this statement, with all earnestness. It is the sum of what needs most to be understood in the matter of education.] [74] [A pregnant paragraph, meant against English and Scotch landlords who drive their people off the land.] [75] [In Lucian's dialogue, "The sale of lives."] [76] [I raise this analysis of the _Tempest_ into my text; but it is nothing but a hurried note, which I may never have time to expand. I have retouched it here and there a little, however.] [77] Of Shakspeare's names I will afterwards speak at more length; they are curiously--often barbarously--much by Providence,--but assuredly not without Shakspeare's cunning purpose--mixed out of the various traditions he confusedly adopted, and languages which he imperfectly knew. Three of the clearest in meaning have been already noticed. Desdemona, "[Greek: dysdaimonia]," "miserable fortune," is also plain enough. Othello is, I believe, "the careful;" all the calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw and error in his magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, "serviceableness," the true lost wife of Hamlet, is marked as having a Greek name by that of her brother, Laertes; and its signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that brother's last word of her, where her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churlish clergy--"A _ministering_ angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling." Hamlet is, I believe, connected in some way with "homely" the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal of home duty. Hermione ([Greek: erma]), "pillar-like," ([Greek: hê eidos eche chrysês 'Aphroditês]). Titania ([Greek: titênê]), "the queen;" Benedict and Beatrice, "blessed and blessing;" Valentine and Proteus, enduring (or strong), (valens), and changeful. Iago and Iachimo have evidently the same root--probably the Spanish Iago, Jacob, "the supplanter," Leonatus, and other such names, are interpreted, or played with, in the plays themselves. For the interpretation of Sycorax, and reference to her raven's feather, I am indebted to Mr. John R. Wise. CHAPTER VI. MASTERSHIP. 136. As in all previous discussions of our subject, we must study the relation of the commanding rich to the obeying poor in its simplest elements, in order to reach its first principles. The simplest state of it, then, is this:[78] a wise and provident person works much, consumes little, and lays by a store; an improvident person works little, consumes all his produce, and lays by no store. Accident interrupts the daily work, or renders it less productive; the idle person must then starve, or be supported by the provident one, who, having him thus at his mercy, may either refuse to maintain him altogether, or, which will evidently be more to his own interest, say to him, "I will maintain you, indeed, but you shall now work hard, instead of indolently, and instead of being allowed to lay by what you save, as you might have done, had you remained independent, _I_ will take all the surplus. You would not lay it up for yourself; it is wholly your own fault that has thrown you into my power, and I will force you to work, or starve; yet you shall have no profit of your work, only your daily bread for it; [and competition shall determine how much of that[79]]." This mode of treatment has now become so universal that it is supposed to be the only natural--nay, the only possible one; and the market wages are calmly defined by economists as "the sum which will maintain the labourer." 137. The power of the provident person to do this is only checked by the correlative power of some neighbour of similarly frugal habits, who says to the labourer--"I will give you a little more than this other provident person: come and work for me." The power of the provident over the improvident depends thus, primarily, on their relative numbers; secondarily, on the modes of agreement of the adverse parties with each other. The accidental level of wages is a variable function of the number of provident and idle persons in the world, of the enmity between them as classes, and of the agreement between those of the same class. _It depends, from beginning to end, on moral conditions._ 138. Supposing the rich to be entirely selfish, _it is always for their interest that the poor should be as numerous as they can employ, and restrain_. For, granting that the entire population is no larger than the ground can easily maintain--that the classes are stringently divided--and that there is sense or strength of hand enough with the rich to secure obedience; then, if nine-tenths of a nation are poor, the remaining tenth have the service of nine persons each;[80] but, if eight-tenths are poor, only of four each; if seven-tenths are poor, of two and a third each; if six-tenths are poor, of one and a half each; and if five-tenths are poor, of only one each. But, practically, if the rich strive always to obtain more power over the poor, instead of to raise them--and if, on the other hand, the poor become continually more vicious and numerous, through neglect and oppression,--though the _range_ of the power of the rich increases, its _tenure_ becomes less secure; until, at last the measure of iniquity being full, revolution, civil war, or the subjection of the state to a healthier or stronger one, closes the moral corruption, and industrial disease.[81] 139. It is rarely, however, that things come to this extremity. Kind persons among the rich, and wise among the poor, modify the connexion of the classes: the efforts made to raise and relieve on the one side, and the success of honest toil on the other, bind and blend the orders of society into the confused tissue of half-felt obligation, sullenly-rendered obedience, and variously-directed, or mis-directed toil, which form the warp of daily life. But this great law rules all the wild design: that success (while society is guided by laws of competition) _signifies always so much victory over your neighbour_ as to obtain the direction of his work, and to take the profits of it. _This is the real source of all great riches._ No man can become largely rich by his personal toil.[82] The work of his own hands, wisely directed, will indeed always maintain himself and his family, and make fitting provision for his age. _But it is only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labour of others that he can become opulent._ Every increase of his capital enables him to extend this taxation more widely; that is, to invest larger funds in the maintenance of labourers,--to direct, accordingly, vaster and yet vaster masses of labour, and to appropriate its profits. 140. There is much confusion of idea on the subject of this appropriation. It is, of course, the interest of the employer to disguise it from the persons employed; and, for his own comfort and complacency, he often desires no less to disguise it from himself. And it is matter of much doubt with me, how far the foul and foolish arguments used habitually on this subject are indeed the honest expression of foul and foolish convictions;--or rather (as I am sometimes forced to conclude from the irritation with which they are advanced) are resolutely dishonest, wilful, and malicious sophisms, arranged so as to mask, to the last moment, the real laws of economy, and future duties of men. By taking a simple example, and working it thoroughly out, the subject may be rescued from all but such determined misrepresentation. 141. Let us imagine a society of peasants, living on a rivershore, exposed to destructive inundation at somewhat extended intervals; and that each peasant possesses of this good, but imperilled, ground, more than he needs to cultivate for immediate subsistence. We will assume farther (and with too great probability of justice), that the greater part of them indolently keep in tillage just as much land as supplies them with daily food;--that they leave their children idle, and take no precautions against the rise of the stream. But one of them, (we will say but one, for the sake of greater clearness) cultivates carefully _all_ the ground of his estate; makes his children work hard and healthily; uses his spare time and theirs in building a rampart against the river; and, at the end of some years, has in his storehouses large reserves of food and clothing,--in his stables a well-tended breed of cattle, and around his fields a wedge of wall against flood. The torrent rises at last--sweeps away the harvests, and half the cottages of the careless peasants, and leaves them destitute. They naturally come for help to the provident one, whose fields are unwasted, and whose granaries are full. He has the right to refuse it to them: no one disputes this right.[83] But he will probably _not_ refuse it; it is not his interest to do so, even were he entirely selfish and cruel. The only question with him will be on what terms his aid is to be granted. 142. Clearly, not on terms of mere charity. To maintain his neighbours in idleness would be not only his ruin, but theirs. He will require work from them, in exchange for their maintenance; and, whether in kindness or cruelty, all the work they can give. Not now the three or four hours they were wont to spend on their own land, but the eight or ten hours they ought to have spent.[84] But how will he apply this labour? The men are now his slaves;--nothing less, and nothing more. On pain of starvation, he can force them to work in the manner, and to the end, he chooses. And it is by his wisdom in this choice that the worthiness of his mastership is proved, or its unworthiness. Evidently, he must first set them to bank out the water in some temporary way, and to get their ground cleansed and resown; else, in any case, their continued maintenance will be impossible. That done, and while he has still to feed them, suppose he makes them raise a secure rampart for their own ground against all future flood, and rebuild their houses in safer places, with the best material they can find; being allowed time out of their working hours to fetch such material from a distance. And for the food and clothing advanced, he takes security in land that as much shall be returned at a convenient period. 143. We may conceive this security to be redeemed, and the debt paid at the end of a few years. The prudent peasant has sustained no loss; _but is no richer than he was, and has had all his trouble for nothing_. But he has enriched his neighbours materially; bettered their houses, secured their land, and rendered them, in worldly matters, equal to himself. In all rational and final sense, he has been throughout their true Lord and King. 144. We will next trace his probable line of conduct, presuming his object to be exclusively the increase of his own fortune. After roughly recovering and cleansing the ground, he allows the ruined peasantry only to build huts upon it, such as he thinks protective enough from the weather to keep them in working health. The rest of their time he occupies, first in pulling down, and rebuilding on a magnificent scale, his own house, and in adding large dependencies to it. This done, in exchange for his continued supply of corn, he buys as much of his neighbours' land as he thinks he can superintend the management of; and makes the former owners securely embank and protect the ceded portion. By this arrangement, he leaves to a certain number of the peasantry only as much ground as will just maintain them in their existing numbers; as the population increases, he takes the extra hands, who cannot be maintained on the narrowed estates, for his own servants; employs some to cultivate the ground he has bought, giving them of its produce merely enough for subsistence; with the surplus, which, under his energetic and careful superintendence, will be large, he maintains a train of servants for state, and a body of workmen, whom he educates in ornamental arts. He now can splendidly decorate his house, lay out its grounds magnificently, and richly supply his table, and that of his household and retinue. And thus, without any abuse of right, we should find established all the phenomena of poverty and riches, which (it is supposed necessarily) accompany modern civilization. In one part of the district, we should have unhealthy land, miserable dwellings, and half-starved poor; in another, a well-ordered estate, well-fed servants, and refined conditions of highly educated and luxurious life. 145. I have put the two cases in simplicity, and to some extremity. But though in more complex and qualified operation, all the relations of society are but the expansion of these two typical sequences of conduct and result. I do not say, observe, that the first procedure is entirely recommendable; or even entirely right; still less, that the second is wholly wrong. Servants, and artists, and splendour of habitation and retinue, have all their use, propriety, and office. But I am determined that the reader shall understand clearly what they cost; and see that the condition of having them is the subjection to us of a certain number of imprudent or unfortunate persons (or, it may be, more fortunate than their masters), over whose destinies we exercise a boundless control. "Riches" mean eternally and essentially this; and God send at last a time when those words of our best-reputed economist shall be true, and we _shall_ indeed "all know what it is to be rich;"[85] that it is to be slave-master over farthest earth, and over all ways and thoughts of men. Every operative you employ is your true servant: distant or near, subject to your immediate orders, or ministering to your widely-communicated caprice,--for the pay he stipulates, or the price he tempts,--all are alike under this great dominion of the gold. The milliner who makes the dress is as much a servant (more so, in that she uses more intelligence in the service) as the maid who puts it on; the carpenter who smooths the door, as the footman who opens it; the tradesmen who supply the table, as the labourers and sailors who supply the tradesmen. Why speak of these lower services? Painters and singers (whether of note or rhyme,) jesters and storytellers, moralists, historians, priests,--so far as these, in any degree, paint, or sing, or tell their tale, or charm their charm, or "perform" their rite, _for pay_,--in so far, they are all slaves; abject utterly, if the service be for pay only; abject less and less in proportion to the degrees of love and of wisdom which enter into their duty, or _can_ enter into it, according as their function is to do the bidding and the work of a manly people;--or to amuse, tempt, and deceive, a childish one. 146. There is always, in such amusement and temptation, to a certain extent, a government of the rich by the poor, as of the poor by the rich; but the latter is the prevailing and necessary one, and it consists, when it is honourable, in the collection of the profits of labour from those who would have misused them, and the administration of those profits for the service either of the same persons in future, or of others; and when it is dishonourable, as is more frequently the case in modern times, it consists in the collection of the profits of labour from those who would have rightly used them, and their appropriation to the service of the collector himself. 147. The examination of these various modes of collection and use of riches will form the third branch of our future inquiries; but the key to the whole subject lies in the clear understanding of the difference between selfish and unselfish expenditure. It is not easy, by any course of reasoning, to enforce this on the generally unwilling hearer; yet the definition of unselfish expenditure is brief and simple. It is expenditure which, if you are a capitalist, does not pay _you_, but pays somebody else; and if you are a consumer, does not please _you_, but pleases somebody else. Take one special instance, in further illustration of the general type given above. I did not invent that type, but spoke of a real river, and of real peasantry, the languid and sickly race which inhabits, or haunts--for they are often more like spectres than living men--the thorny desolation of the banks of the Arve in Savoy. Some years ago, a society, formed at Geneva, offered to embank the river for the ground which would have been recovered by the operation; but the offer was refused by the (then Sardinian) government. The capitalists saw that this expenditure would have "paid" if the ground saved from the river was to be theirs. But if, when the offer that had this aspect of profit was refused, they had nevertheless persisted in the plan, and merely taking security for the return of their outlay, lent the funds for the work, and thus saved a whole race of human souls from perishing in a pestiferous fen (as, I presume, some among them would, at personal risk, have dragged any one drowning creature out of the current of the stream, and not expected payment therefor), such expenditure would have precisely corresponded to the use of his power made, in the first instance, by our supposed richer peasant--it would have been the king's, of grace, instead of the usurer's, for gain. 148. "Impossible, absurd, Utopian!" exclaim nine-tenths of the few readers whom these words may find. No, good reader, _this_ is not Utopian: but I will tell you what would have seemed, if we had not seen it, Utopian on the side of evil instead of good; that ever men should have come to value their money so much more than their lives, that if you call upon them to become soldiers, and take chance of a bullet through their heart, and of wife and children being left desolate, for their pride's sake, they will do it gaily, without thinking twice; but if you ask them, for their country's sake, to spend a hundred pounds without security of getting back a hundred-and-five,[86] they will laugh in your face. 149. Not but that also this game of life-giving and taking is, in the end, somewhat more costly than other forms of play might be. Rifle practice is, indeed, a not unhealthy pastime, and a feather on the top of the head is a pleasing appendage; but while learning the stops and fingering of the sweet instrument, does no one ever calculate the cost of an overture? What melody does Tityrus meditate on his tenderly spiral pipe? The leaden seed of it, broadcast, true conical "Dents de Lion" seed--needing less allowance for the wind than is usual with that kind of herb--what crop are you likely to have of it? Suppose, instead of this volunteer marching and countermarching, you were to do a little volunteer ploughing and counter-ploughing? It is more difficult to do it straight: the dust of the earth, so disturbed, is more grateful than for merely rhythmic footsteps. Golden cups, also, given for good ploughing, would be more suitable in colour: (ruby glass, for the wine which "giveth his colour" on the ground, might be fitter for the rifle prize in ladies' hands). Or, conceive a little volunteer exercise with the spade, other than such as is needed for moat and breastwork, or even for the burial of the fruit of the leaden avena-seed, subject to the shrill Lemures' criticism-- Wer hat das Haus so schlecht gebauet? If you were to embank Lincolnshire more stoutly against the sea? or strip the peat of Solway, or plant Plinlimmon moors with larch--then, in due season, some amateur reaping and threshing? "Nay, we reap and thresh by steam, in these advanced days." I know it, my wise and economical friends. The stout arms God gave you to win your bread by, you would fain shoot your neighbours, and God's sweet singers with;[87] then you invoke the fiends to your farm-service; and-- When young and old come forth to play On a sulphurous holiday, Tell how the darkling goblin sweat (His feast of cinders duly set), And, belching night, where breathed the morn, His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn That ten day-labourers could not end. 150. Going back to the matter in hand, we will press the example closer. On a green knoll above that plain of the Arve, between Cluse and Bonneville, there was, in the year 1860, a cottage, inhabited by a well-doing family--man and wife, three children, and the grandmother. I call it a cottage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the ground, wide at the bottom, so that the family might live round the fire; lighted by one small broken window, and entered by an unclosing door. The family, I say, was "well-doing;" at least it was hopeful and cheerful; the wife healthy, the children, for Savoyards, pretty and active, but the husband threatened with decline, from exposure under the cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts between every plank of his chimney in the frosty nights. "Why could he not plaster the chinks?" asks the practical reader. For the same reason that your child cannot wash its face and hands till you have washed them many a day for it, and will not wash them when it can, till you force it. 151. I passed this cottage often in my walks, had its window and door mended; sometimes mended also a little the meal of sour bread and broth, and generally got kind greeting and smile from the face of young or old; which greeting this year, narrowed itself into the half-recognizing stare of the elder child, and the old woman's tears; for the father and mother were both dead,--one of sickness, the other of sorrow. It happened that I passed not alone, but with a companion, a practised English joiner, who, while these people were dying of cold, had been employed from six in the morning to six in the evening, for two months, in fitting, without nails, the panels of a single door in a large house in London. Three days of his work taken, at the right time from fastening the oak panels with useless precision, and applied to fasten the larch timbers with decent strength, would have saved these Savoyards' lives. _He_ would have been maintained equally; (I suppose him equally paid for his work by the owner of the greater house, only the work not consumed selfishly on his own walls;) and the two peasants, and eventually, probably their children, saved. 152. There are, therefore,--let me finally enforce, and leave with the reader, this broad conclusion,--three things to be considered in employing any poor person. It is not enough to give him employment. You must employ him first to produce useful things; secondly, of the several (suppose equally useful) things he can equally well produce, you must set him to make that which will cause him to lead the healthiest life; lastly, of the things produced, it remains a question of wisdom and conscience how much you are to take yourself, and how much to leave to others. A large quantity, remember, unless you destroy it, _must_ always be so left at one time or another; the only questions you have to decide are, not _what_ you will give, but _when_, and _how_, and _to whom_, you will give. The natural law of human life is, of course, that in youth a man shall labour and lay by store for his old age, and when age comes, shall use what he has laid by, gradually slackening his toil, and allowing himself more frank use of his store; taking care always to leave himself as much as will surely suffice for him beyond any possible length of life. What he has gained, or by tranquil and unanxious toil continues to gain, more than is enough for his own need, he ought so to administer, while he yet lives, as to see the good of it again beginning, in other hands; for thus he has himself the greatest sum of pleasure from it, and faithfully uses his sagacity in its control. Whereas most men, it appears, dislike the sight of their fortunes going out into service again, and say to themselves,--"I can indeed nowise prevent this money from falling at last into the hands of others, nor hinder the good of it from becoming theirs, not mine; but at least let a merciful death save me from being a witness of their satisfaction; and may God so far be gracious to me as to let no good come of any of this money of mine before my eyes." 153. Supposing this feeling unconquerable, the safest way of rationally indulging it would be for the capitalist at once to spend all his fortune on himself, which might actually, in many cases, be quite the rightest as well as the pleasantest thing to do, if he had just tastes and worthy passions. But, whether for himself only, or through the hands, and for the sake, of others also, the law of wise life is, that the maker of the money shall also be the spender of it, and spend it, approximately, all, before he dies; so that his true ambition as an economist should be, to die, not as rich, but as poor, as possible,[88] calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to the ebb tide of life. Which law, checking the wing of accumulative desire in the mid-volley,[89] and leading to peace of possession and fulness of fruition in old age, is also wholesome, in that by the freedom of gift, together with present help and counsel, it at once endears and dignifies age in the sight of youth, which then no longer strips the bodies of the dead, but receives the grace of the living. Its chief use would (or will be, for men are indeed capable of attaining to this much use of their reason), that some temperance and measure will be put to the acquisitiveness of commerce.[90] For as things stand, a man holds it his duty to be temperate in his food, and of his body, but for no duty to be temperate in his riches, and of his mind. He sees that he ought not to waste his youth and his flesh for luxury; but he will waste his age, and his soul, for money, and think he does no wrong, nor know the _delirium tremens_ of the intellect for disease. But the law of life is, that a man should fix the sum he desires to make annually, as the food he desires to eat daily; and stay when he has reached the limit, refusing increase of business, and leaving it to others, so obtaining due freedom of time for better thoughts.[91] How the gluttony of business is punished, a bill of health for the principals of the richest city houses, issued annually, would show in a sufficiently impressive manner. 154. I know, of course, that these statements will be received by the modern merchant as an active border rider of the sixteenth century would have heard of its being proper for men of the Marches to get their living by the spade, instead of the spur. But my business is only to state veracities and necessities; I neither look for the acceptance of the one, nor hope for the nearness of the other. Near or distant, the day _will_ assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald, instead of Mercury the gain-guarder. 155. And now, finally, for immediate rule to all who will accept it. The distress of any population means that they need food, house-room, clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any labourer to produce food, house-room, clothes, or fuel; but you are _always_ wrong if you employ him to produce nothing, (for then some other labourer must be worked double time to feed him); and you are generally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can do nothing else) to produce works of art or luxuries; because modern art is mostly on a false basis, and modern luxury is criminally great.[92] 156. The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground, and increase facilities of carriage;--to break rock, exchange earth, drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of refuge. Taxation thus spent will annihilate taxation, but spent in war, it annihilates revenue. 157. The way to produce house-room is to apply your force first to the humblest dwellings. When your brick-layers are out of employ, do not build splendid new streets, but better the old ones; send your paviours and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the county of Middlesex; and our deputies met to talk within massive walls that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years,--the decoration might have been afterwards, and the talk now. And touching even our highly conscientious church building, it may be well to remember that in the best days of church plans, their masons called themselves "logeurs du bon Dieu;" and that since, according to the most trusted reports, God spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He might perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also. 158. The way to get more clothes is--not, necessarily, to get more cotton. There were words written twenty years ago[93] which would have saved many of us some shivering, had they been minded in time. Shall we read them again? "The Continental people, it would seem, are importing our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves; to cut us out of this market, and then out of that! Sad news, indeed; but irremediable. By no means the saddest news--the saddest news, is that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people. A most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on! A stand which, with all the Corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring. "My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly down from it and said--'This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fur, your heart with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them; we will be content to equal-sell them; to be happy selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling them: cotton-cloth is already twopence a yard, or lower; and yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent a little how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us. "Let inventive men consider--whether the secret of this universe does after all consist in making money. With a hell which means--'failing to make money,' I do not think there is any heaven possible that would suit one well. In brief, all this Mammon gospel of supply-and-demand, competition _laissez faire_, and devil take the hindmost (foremost, is it not, rather, Mr. Carlyle?), 'begins to be one of the shabbiest gospels ever preached.'" 159. The way to produce more fuel[94] is first to make your coal mines safer, by sinking more shafts; then set all your convicts to work in them, and if, as is to be hoped, you succeed in diminishing the supply of that sort of labourer, consider what means there may be, first, of growing forest where its growth will improve climate; secondly, of splintering the forests which now make continents of fruitful land pathless and poisonous, into fagots for fire;--so gaining at once dominion icewards and sunwards. Your steam power has been given (you will find eventually) for work such as that: and not for excursion trains, to give the labourer a moment's breath, at the peril of his breath for ever, from amidst the cities which it has crushed into masses of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them, you will be able to breathe in their streets, and the "excursion" will be the afternoon's walk or game in the fields round them. 160. "But nothing of this work will pay?" No; no more than it pays to dust your rooms, or wash your doorsteps. It will pay; not at first in currency, but in that which is the end and the source of currency,--in life; (and in currency richly afterwards). It will pay in that which is more than life,--in light, whose true price has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image of which, all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must either be as the lightning, which, Begot but in a cloud, Though shining bright, and speaking loud, Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race; And, where it gilds, it wounds the place;-- or else, as the lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part of the heaven to the other. There is no other choice; you must either take dust for deity, spectre for possession, fettered dream for life, and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy (Psalm cxii.):--"He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor, his iniquity remaineth for ever:"--or else, having the sun of justice to shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your possession, and the pure law and liberty of life within you, leave men to write this better legend over your grave:-- "He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His righteousness remaineth for ever." FOOTNOTES: [78] In the present general examination, I concede so much to ordinary economists as to ignore all _innocent_ poverty. I adapt my reasoning, for once, to the modern English practical mind, by assuming poverty to be always criminal; the conceivable exceptions we will examine afterwards. [79] [I have no terms of English, and can find none in Greek nor Latin, nor in any other strong language known to me, contemptuous enough to attach to the bestial idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be measured by competition.] [80] I say nothing yet of the quality of the servants, which, nevertheless, is the gist of the business. Will you have Paul Veronese to paint your ceiling, or the plumber from over the way? Both will work for the same money; Paul, if anything, a little the cheaper of the two, if you keep him in good humour; only you have to discern him first, which will need eyes. [81] [I have not altered a syllable in these three paragraphs, 137, 138, 139, on revision; but have much italicised: the principles stated being as vital, as they are little known.] [82] By his art he may; but only when its produce, or the sight or hearing of it, becomes a subject of dispute, so as to enable the artist to tax the labour of multitudes highly, in exchange for his own. [83] [Observe this; the legal right to keep what you have worked for, and use it as you please, is the corner-stone of all economy: compare the end of Chap. II.] [84] [I should now put the time of necessary labour rather under than over the third of the day.] [85] [See Preface to _Unto this Last_.] [86] I have not hitherto touched on the subject of interest of money; it is too complex, and must be reserved for its proper place in the body of the work. The definition of interest (apart from compensation for risk) is, "the exponent of the comfort of accomplished labour, separated from its power;" the power being what is lent: and the French economists who have maintained the entire illegality of interest are wrong; yet by no means so curiously or wildly wrong as the English and French ones opposed to them, whose opinions have been collected by Dr. Whewell at page 41 of his _Lectures_; it never seeming to occur to the mind of the compiler, any more than to the writers whom he quotes, that it is quite possible, and even (according to Jewish proverb) prudent, for men to hoard as ants and mice do, for use, not usury; and lay by something for winter nights, in the expectation of rather sharing than lending the scrapings. My Savoyard squirrels would pass a pleasant time of it under the snow-laden pine branches, if they always declined to economize because no one would pay them interest on nuts. [I leave this note as it stood: but, as I have above stated, should now side wholly with the French economists spoken of, in asserting the absolute illegality of interest.] [87] Compare Chaucer's feeling respecting birds (from Canace's falcon, to the nightingale, singing, "Domine, labia--" to the Lord of Love), with the usual modern British sentiments on this subject. Or even Cowley's:-- "What prince's choir of music can excel That which within this shade does dwell, To which we nothing pay, or give, They, like all other poets, live Without reward, or thanks for their obliging pains! 'Tis well if they become not prey." Yes; it Is better than well; particularly since the seed sown by the wayside has been protected by the peculiar appropriation of part of the church-rates in our country parishes. See the remonstrance from a "Country parson," in _The Times_ of June 4th (or 5th; the letter is dated June 3rd,) 1862:--"I have heard at a vestry meeting a good deal of higgling over a few shillings' outlay in cleaning the church; but I have never heard any dissatisfaction expressed on account of that part of the rate which is invested in 50 or 100 dozens of birds' heads." [If we could trace the innermost of all causes of modern war, I believe it would be found, not in the avarice nor ambition of nations, but in the mere idleness of the upper classes. They have nothing to do but to teach the peasantry to kill each other.] [88] [See the _Life of Fenelon_. "The labouring peasantry were at all times the objects of his tenderest care; his palace at Cambray, with all his books and writings, being consumed by fire, he bore the misfortune with unruffled calmness, and said it was better his palace should be burnt than the cottage of a poor peasant." (These thoroughly good men always go too far, and lose their power over the mass.) He died exemplifying the mean he had always observed between prodigality and avarice, leaving neither debts nor money.] [89] [Greek: kai penian hêgoumenous einai mê to tên ousian elattô poiein alla to têi aplêstian pleiô]. "And thinking (wisely) that poverty consists not in making one's possessions less, but one's avarice more."--_Laws_, v. 8. Read the context, and compare. "He who spends for all that is noble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be notably wealthy, or distressfully poor."--_Laws_, v. 42. [90] The fury of modern trade arises chiefly out of the possibility of making sudden fortunes by largeness of transaction, and accident of discovery or contrivance. I have no doubt that the final interest of every nation is to check the action of these commercial lotteries; and that all great accidental gains or losses should be national,--not individual. But speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial effort, is an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless evils beside. [91] [I desire in the strongest terms to reinforce all that is contained in this paragraph.] [92] It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his mind fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as the true sources of national poverty. Men are apt to call every exchange "expenditure," but it is only consumption which is expenditure. A large number of the purchases made by the richer classes are mere forms of interchange of unused property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It matters nothing to the state whether, if a china pipkin be rated as worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin and B the pounds, or A the pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin is pretty, and A or B breaks it, there is national loss, not otherwise. So again, when the loss has really taken place, no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do away with the reality of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by denying it. When a debt is denied, the lender loses instead of the borrower, that is all; the loss is precisely, accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans borrow money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny their debt, by one-third already [1863], gold being at fifty premium; and they will probably deny it wholly. That merely means that the holders of the notes are to be the losers instead of the issuers. The quantity of loss is precisely equal, and irrevocable; it is the quantity of human industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quantity of goods exploded. Honour only decides _who_ shall pay the sum lost not whether it is to be paid or not. Paid it must be, and to the uttermost farthing. [93] [(_Past and Present._ Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that for these twenty--now twenty-six--years, this one voice of Carlyle's has been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has sounded through all these years in vain! See _Fors Clavigera_, Letter X.] [94] [We don't want to produce more fuel just now, but much less; and to use what we get for cooking and warming ourselves, instead of for running from place to place.] APPENDICES. I have brought together in these last pages a few notes, which were not properly to be incorporated with the text, and which, at the bottom of pages, checked the reader's attention to the main argument. They contain, however, several statements to which I wish to be able to refer, or have already referred, in other of my books, so that I think right to preserve them. APPENDIX I.--(p. 22.) The greatest of all economists are those most opposed to the doctrine of "laissez faire," namely, the fortifying virtues, which the wisest men of all time have arranged under the general heads of Prudence, or Discretion (the spirit which discerns and adopts rightly); Justice (the spirit which rules and divides rightly); Fortitude (the spirit which persists and endures rightly); and Temperance (the spirit which stops and refuses rightly). These cardinal and sentinel virtues are not only the means of protecting and prolonging life itself, but they are the chief guards, or sources, of the material means of life, and the governing powers and princes of economy. Thus, precisely according to the number of just men in a nation, is their power of avoiding either intestine or foreign war. All disputes may be peaceably settled, if a sufficient number of persons have been trained to submit to the principles of justice, while the necessity for war is in direct ratio to the number of unjust persons who are incapable of determining a quarrel but by violence. Whether the injustice take the form of the desire of dominion, or of refusal to submit to it, or of lust of territory, or lust of money, or of mere irregular passion and wanton will, the result is economically the same;--loss of the quantity of power and life consumed in repressing the injustice, added to the material and moral destruction caused by the fact of war. The early civil wars of England, and the existing[95] war in America, are curious examples--these under monarchical, this under republican, institutions--of the results on large masses of nations of the want of education in principles of justice. But the mere dread or distrust resulting from the want of the inner virtues of Faith and Charity prove often no less costly than war itself. The fear which France and England have of each other costs each nation about fifteen millions sterling annually, besides various paralyses of commerce; that sum being spent in the manufacture of means of destruction instead of means of production. There is no more reason in the nature of things that France and England should be hostile to each other than that England and Scotland should be, or Lancashire and Yorkshire; and the reciprocal terrors of the opposite sides of the English Channel are neither more necessary, more economical, nor more virtuous, than the old riding and reiving on the opposite flanks of the Cheviots, or than England's own weaving for herself of crowns of thorn, from the stems of her Red and White roses. APPENDIX II.--(p. 34.) Few passages of the book which at least some part of the nations at present most advanced in civilization accept as an expression of final truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of sculpture. It is simply the substitution of an "Eidolon," phantasm, or imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring; from the Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is said to have "seen good" in creating, are in this their eternal goodness appointed always to be "worshipped,"--_i. e._, to have goodness and worth ascribed to them from the heart; and the sweep and range of idolatry extend to the rejection of any or all of these, "calling evil good, and good evil,--putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter."[96] For in that rejection and substitution we betray the first of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of life, and with resolute opposite loyalty serve our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the House, but of the Grave, (otherwise called the law of "mark missing," which we translate "law of Sin"); these "two masters," between whose services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as God and Mammon, which Mammon, though we narrowly take it as the power of money only, is in truth the great evil Spirit of false and fond desire, or "Covetousness, which is Idolatry." So that Iconoclasm--_image_-breaking--is easy; but an Idol cannot be broken--it must be forsaken; and this is not so easy, either to do, or persuade to doing. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image; but not of the emptiness of an imagination. APPENDIX III.--(p. 36.) I have not attempted to support, by the authority of other writers, any of the statements made in these papers; indeed, if such authorities were rightly collected, there would be no occasion for my writing at all. Even in the scattered passages referring to this subject in three books of Carlyle's--Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and the Latter Day Pamphlets,--all has been said that needs to be said, and far better than I shall ever say it again. But the habit of the public mind at present is to require everything to be uttered diffusely, loudly, and a hundred times over, before it will listen; and it has revolted against these papers of mine as if they contained things daring and new, when there is not one assertion in them of which the truth has not been for ages known to the wisest, and proclaimed by the most eloquent of men. It would be [I had written _will_ be; but have now reached a time of life for which there is but one mood--the conditional,] a far greater pleasure to me hereafter, to collect their words than to add to mine; Horace's clear rendering of the substance of the passages in the text may be found room for at once, Si quis emat citharas, emptas comportet in unum Nec studio citharae, nec Musae deditus ulli; Si scalpra et formas non sutor, nautica vela Aversus mercaturis, delirus et amens Undique dicatur merito. Qui discrepat istis Qui nummos aurumque recondit, nescius uti Compositis; metuensque velut contingere sacrum? [Which may be roughly thus translated:-- "Were anybody to buy fiddles, and collect a number, being in no wise given to fiddling, nor fond of music: or if, being no cobbler, he collected awls and lasts, or, having no mind for sea-adventure, bought sails, every one would call him a madman, and deservedly. But what difference is there between such a man and one who lays by coins and gold, and does not know how to use, when he has got them?"] With which it is perhaps desirable also to give Xenophon's statement, it being clearer than any English one can be, owing to the power of the general Greek term for wealth, "useable things." [I have cut out the Greek because I can't be troubled to correct the accents, and am always nervous about them; here it is in English, as well as I can do it:-- "This being so, it follows that things are only property to the man who knows how to use them; as flutes, for instance, are property to the man who can pipe upon them respectably; but to one who knows not how to pipe, they are no property, unless he can get rid of them advantageously.... For if they are not sold, the flutes are no property (being serviceable for nothing); but, sold, they become property. To which Socrates made answer,--'and only then if he knows how to sell them, for if he sell them to another man who cannot play on them, still they are no property.'"] APPENDIX IV.--(p. 39.) The reader is to include here in the idea of "Government," any branch of the Executive, or even any body of private persons, entrusted with the practical management of public interests unconnected directly with their own personal ones. In theoretical discussions of legislative interference with political economy, it is usually, and of course unnecessarily, assumed that Government must be always of that form and force in which we have been accustomed to see it;--that its abuses can never be less, nor its wisdom greater, nor its powers more numerous. But, practically, the custom in most civilized countries is, for every man to deprecate the interference of Government as long as things tell for his personal advantage, and to call for it when they cease to do so. The request of the Manchester Economists to be supplied with cotton by Government (the system of supply and demand having, for the time, fallen sorrowfully short of the expectations of scientific persons from it), is an interesting case in point. It were to be wished that less wide and bitter suffering, suffering, too, of the innocent, had been needed to force the nation, or some part of it, to ask itself why a body of men, already confessedly capable of managing matters both military and divine, should not be permitted, or even requested, at need, to provide in some wise for sustenance as well as for defence; and secure, if it might be,--(and it might, I think, even the _rather_ be),--purity of bodily, as well as of spiritual, aliment? Why, having made many roads for the passage of armies, may they not make a few for the conveyance of food; and after organizing, with applause, various schemes of theological instruction for the Public, organize, moreover, some methods of bodily nourishment for them? Or is the soul so much less trustworthy in its instincts than the stomach, that legislation is necessary for the one, but inapplicable to the other. APPENDIX V.--(p. 70.) I debated with myself whether to make the note on Homer longer by examining the typical meaning of the shipwreck of Ulysses, and his escape from Charybdis by help of her fig-tree; but as I should have had to go on to the lovely myth of Leucothea's veil, and did not care to spoil this by a hurried account of it, I left it for future examination; and, three days after the paper was published, observed that the reviewers, with their customary helpfulness, were endeavouring to throw the whole subject back into confusion by dwelling on this single (as they imagined) oversight. I omitted also a note on the sense of the word [Greek: lygron], with respect to the pharmacy of Circe, and herb-fields of Helen, (compare its use in Odyssey, xvii., 473, &c.), which would farther have illustrated the nature of the Circean power. But, not to be led too far into the subtleties of these myths, observe respecting them all, that even in very simple parables, it is not always easy to attach indisputable meaning to every part of them. I recollect some years ago, throwing an assembly of learned persons who had met to delight themselves with interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son, (interpretations which had up to that moment gone very smoothly,) into mute indignation, by inadvertently asking who the _un_prodigal son was, and what was to be learned by _his_ example. The leading divine of the company, Mr. Molyneux, at last explained to me that the unprodigal son was a lay figure, put in for dramatic effect, to make the story prettier, and that no note was to be taken of him. Without, however, admitting that Homer put in the last escape of Ulysses merely to make his story prettier, this is nevertheless true of all Greek myths, that they have many opposite lights and shades; they are as changeful as opal, and like opal, usually have one colour by reflected, and another by transmitted light. But they are true jewels for all that, and full of noble enchantment for those who can use them; for those who cannot, I am content to repeat the words I wrote four years ago, in the appendix to the _Two Paths_-- "The entire purpose of a great thinker may be difficult to fathom, and we may be over and over again more or less mistaken in guessing at his meaning; but the real, profound, nay, quite bottomless and unredeemable mistake, is the fool's thought, that he had _no_ meaning." APPENDIX VI.--(p. 84) The derivation of words is like that of rivers: there is one real source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the hills; then, as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in the force of other words from other sources, and becomes quite another word--often much more than one word, after the junction--a word as it were of many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter. Thus the whole force of our English "charity" depends on the guttural in "charis" getting confused with the c of the Latin "carus;" thenceforward throughout the middle ages, the two ideas ran on together, and both got confused with St. Paul's [Greek: agapê], which expresses a different idea in all sorts of ways; our "charity" having not only brought in the entirely foreign sense of alms-giving, but lost the essential sense of contentment, and lost much more in getting too far away from the "charis" of the final Gospel benedictions. For truly it is fine Christianity we have come to, which, professing to expect the perpetual grace or charity of its Founder, has not itself grace or charity enough to hinder it from overreaching its friends in sixpenny bargains; and which, supplicating evening and morning the forgiveness of its own debts, goes forth at noon to take its fellow-servants by the throat, saying,--not merely "Pay me that thou owest," but "Pay me that thou owest me _not_." It is true that we sometimes wear Ophelia's rue with a difference, and call it "Herb o' grace o' Sundays," taking consolation out of the offertory with--"Look, what he layeth out; it shall be paid him again." Comfortable words indeed, and good to set against the old royalty of Largesse-- Whose moste joie was, I wis, When that she gave, and said, "Have this." [I am glad to end, for this time, with these lovely words of Chaucer. We have heard only too much lately of "Indiscriminate charity," with implied reproval, not of the Indiscrimination merely, but of the Charity also. We have partly succeeded in enforcing on the minds of the poor the idea that it is disgraceful to receive; and are likely, without much difficulty, to succeed in persuading not a few of the rich that it is disgraceful to give. But the political economy of a great state makes both giving and receiving graceful; and the political economy of true religion interprets the saying that "it is more blessed to give than to receive," not as the promise of reward in another life for mortified selfishness in this, but as pledge of bestowal upon us of that sweet and better nature, which does not mortify itself in giving.] _Brantwood, Coniston,_ _5th October, 1871._ THE END FOOTNOTES: [95] [Written in 1862. I little thought that when I next corrected my type, the "existing" war best illustrative of the sentence would be between Frenchmen in the Elysian Fields of Paris.] [96] Compare the close of the Fourth Lecture in _Aratra Pentelici_. PRE-RAPHAELITISM To FRANCIS HAWKSWORTH FAWKES, ESQ OF FARNLEY THESE PAGES WHICH OWE THEIR PRESENT FORM TO ADVANTAGES GRANTED BY HIS KINDNESS ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED BY HIS OBLIGED FRIEND JOHN RUSKIN PREFACE. Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of "Modern Painters," I ventured to give the following advice to the young artists of England:-- "They should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite labor and humiliation in the following it; and was therefore, for the most part, rejected. It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public press. I have, therefore, thought it due to them to contradict the directly false statements which have been made respecting their works; and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient in some respects, those works possess beyond the possibility of dispute. Denmark Hill, Aug. 1851. PRE-RAPHAELITISM. It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in the sweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of thine heart," thou shalt eat bread; and I find that, as on the one hand, infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the other hand, no small misery is caused by over-worked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of some kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it--not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work. The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents or masters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. In which inquiry a man may be very safely guided by his likings, if he be not also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some such fashion as this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don't seem quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., but I daresay I might do something in a small green-grocery business; I used to be a good judge of peas;" that is to say, always trying lower instead of trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, a man may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every one in his neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility is rendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown on men in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which once separated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfold more shameful in foolish people's, i. e. in most people's eyes, to remain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a man born of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species of animal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable or ashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes a horse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But now that a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself, unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the natural discontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatever a man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain in the state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his _duty_ to try to be a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management of public institutions for charitable education know how common this feeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters from mothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make the grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is something wrong in the foundations of society, because this is not possible. Out of every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason of the writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in such and such a "station of life." There is no real desire for the safety, the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horror of the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or two lower on the molehill of the world--a calamity to be averted at any cost whatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not believe that any greater good could be achieved for the country, than the change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought about by a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," who would, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and make them honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain his dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of his time was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in serving customers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, and gravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, and truth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character, should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they were demanded, or even hoped for, there. Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life and manner of work have been discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is, that he do not over-work himself therein. I am not going to say anything here about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce, which appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us to over-work ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still more fruitful cause of unhealthy toil--the incapability, in many men, of being content with the little that is indeed necessary to their happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of over-work--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is pernicious; not only making men over-work themselves, but rendering all the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best interests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he does it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by us than this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say it as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may. I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean the assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state of intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physical or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's work--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom of heaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be done quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow the plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of the heart. How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and law were but once sincerely, humbly understood,--that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed to be done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it; but _he_ can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is, than it costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena? Is not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there has been a great _effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_ here"? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognise in all mighty things; and that is just what we now _never_ recognise, but think that we are to do great things, by help of iron bars and perspiration:--alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight. Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed anywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they need not work if they have genius. The fact is, that a man of genius is always far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more good from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what he is: "If I _am_ anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work will be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be his best. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. If he be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, small things; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, if restlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable. Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a good judge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent upon popular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may have the just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honest consciousness of victory: how else can he become "That awful independent on to-morrow, Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile." I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling as this is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. For whatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outward bearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of each other, how little confidence they have in the sterling value of their several doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; and there is too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the supposition that they have any stable support of faith in themselves. I have stated these principles generally, because there is no branch of labor to which they do not apply: But there is one in which our ignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount of suffering: and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with especial reference to it,--the branch of the Arts. In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosen their profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it; yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me the reason, that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make their bread _by being clever_--not by steady or quiet work; and are, therefore, for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in an utterly false state of mind and action. This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession or employment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more wit than those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession; but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He will generally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorous examination and collation of the facts of every case entrusted to him, which his clients will mainly demand; this it is which he has to be paid for; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. If he happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will come into play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them as his chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that industry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his profession without them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorely tempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their own hearts will deny, but then they _know_ this to _be_ a temptation: they never would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected from them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even the dullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, and pretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They would not openly ask of their hearers--Did you think my sermon ingenious, or my language poetical? They would early understand that they were not paid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; that if they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these would appear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continually sought after or exhibited: and if it should happen that they had them not, they might still be serviceable pastors without them. Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful work of him; but every one expects him to be ingenious. Originality, dexterity, invention, imagination, every thing is asked of him except what alone is to be had for asking--honesty and sound work, and the due discharge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the reader in some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have any idea what their function is, or even that they have any at all. And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties, which when a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, I suppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The man is created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to convey knowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained a religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose. He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies. But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. It was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and has maintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting in the recent schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its power. That instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to his true duty--_the faithful representation of all objects of historical interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period_; representations such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences, and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change. The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let the reader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by this time have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their painters understood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining themselves so as to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the particular kind of subject in which he most delighted, they had separated into two great armies of historians and naturalists;--that the first had painted with absolute faithfulness every edifice, every city, every battle-field, every scene of the slightest historical interest, precisely and completely rendering their aspect at the time; and that their companions, according to their several powers, had painted with like fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery, and the atmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth--suppose that a faithful and complete record were now in our museums of every building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200 years--suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had been penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the geologist's diagram was no longer necessary--suppose that every tree of the forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of the field in its savage life--that all these gatherings were already in our national galleries, and that the painters of the present day were laboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of knowledge more and more within reach of the common people--would not that be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by "bright effects?" They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, and therefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so all their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is most difficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render, as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of the earth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest; each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will be strange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is, however, one of the lips only; for every painter knows that when he draws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener in cowardice than in disdain. I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have not space to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which would follow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission, and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how the man himself would be elevated: how content he would become, how earnest, how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free from envy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what he did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people; the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy, pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; the far greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupied with it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads of inferior talents, now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, and then look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and "sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces;" the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, and what we might have been. Take a single instance in one branch of archæology. Let those who are interested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we should now have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and drunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religious and domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals and castles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any other subsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with the same precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint bas-reliefs of Cupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left in ancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtle expression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings habits, histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches and domestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole of Europe--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannot bring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skill enough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all this faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the heart in you that will break too. But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty? Yes; the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank attributed to these powers,--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be attained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only in various ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks of bringing men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of general recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor? Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover in the works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering millions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the whole intellect into general strength, and all the affections into warmth and honesty, and look to heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should have sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words: but, it being required to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting to work? We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principle shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind of teaching which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press criticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, we give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters! But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some sense of the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some of our younger painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones, our older men having become familiarised with the false system, or else having passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowing the degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence, however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of the judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter contempt and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, farther, that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case, one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely, _à priori_, that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such a system should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus rendered dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up these conditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that pictures painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, of stubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little natural perception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, to win us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention, invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, and recommended to our respect by established authority. We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and their success in attaining them. All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert Durer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the other,--these are strangest of all--unimaginable unless they had been experienced. And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them, in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which is at work against these men--how first roused it is difficult to say, for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so cruel;--hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent. That of the "absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times--I here contradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single error in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt, if with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's _Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_, are out of perspective.[97] It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful or unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false respecting them,[98] and the direction of the mind and sight of the public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake, Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign it and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to English art than any thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But as I cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their pictures careful examination, and look at them at once with the indulgence and the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve. Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters, finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do say that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due time all the more forcibly because they have received training so severe. For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another, either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest, equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise trained in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is comparatively near-sighted. Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the pebbles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can remember nothing, and invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fulness of matter in his subject. Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and the march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire scene in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensible of the aërial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent. But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows along the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not a flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so, but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remain congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with those now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to "draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of them escaped, for all that: they are sealed up in that strange storehouse of his; he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day twenty years, and paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may tell both of these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest, that they have an important function, and that they are not to care what Raphael did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy the exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of the qualities of the other. I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of invention in the first painter, that the contrast between them might be more striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with exquisite sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his other faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett Millais, the second Joseph Mallard William Turner. They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have, therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they were entrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner, have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility, earnestness, and industry in study. It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in the works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value they possess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is there who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet humorous truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is there who does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he dwells on the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And yet there is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be allowed continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and supply to the Water Color Society a succession of pineapples with the regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered that primrose banks are lovely; but there are other things grow wild besides primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest blue, and the soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and paint a gray wall of Alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to paint bouquets in china vases. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented their possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail; but I think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement;" when, however, nearly every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindled wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into nothingness. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is this fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their own--nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all his powers (and they are magnificent ones) than any other man amongst us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was prepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowed with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian, have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either ravenous fiends or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power, mingled with grace, as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago. Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence, and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical composition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the same time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only, as the minutiæ of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate. I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion of drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and the pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown it away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his powers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman," exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the "Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir William Thornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for this subject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts are progressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, and yet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered in painting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth, but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready, therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting, has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. He has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how to direct it. Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I need not point out to any one acquainted with his earlier works, the labor, or watchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more than allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be granted that the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in those parts of them which are least like what had before been accomplished; and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminent success, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers. None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examples of the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study of matters of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power, in its magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in no mean degree; but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than once in an age. We _have_ had it once, and must be content. Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawings executed, according to the quiet manner of the time, in greyish blue, with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rather more than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.[99] There was nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even of more than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a large perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken, like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year 1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years. During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of which the key-notes are greyish green and brown; pure blues and delicate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity, as the lowest and highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in extremely small quantity in figures or other minor accessories. Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking, works in _color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use of two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places, does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any more than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the idea of color be in general more present to the artist's mind, when he was at work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in the mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness being not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly expressible by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this advantage when it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself with the actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the fore ground might in nature have been cold grey, but it will be drawn nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze; but it will be drawn nevertheless of a cool grey, because it is in the distance. This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great severity in many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him during the period: in others more or less modified by the cautious introduction of color, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for the system was evidently never considered as final, or as anything more than a means of progress: the conventional, easily manageable color, was visibly adopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to address itself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary knowledge in all art--that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies vast bulk and space, the use of the tints which enabled him best to express them, was actually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and, therefore, not only permissible, but even necessary, while more brilliant or varied tints were never indulged in, except when they might be introduced without the slightest danger of diverting his mind for an instant from his principal object. And, therefore, it will be generally found in the works of this period, that exactly in proportion to the importance and general toil of the composition, is the severity of the tint; and that the play of color begins to show itself first in slight and small drawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that he wanted in form. Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and large compositions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue, with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in the minor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur not unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure, add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the simple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his most severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he seems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft pencilling the bloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of his almost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequently permitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges of his evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while, whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into his system, and can be caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and the usual serenity of his aërial blue is enriched into the softness and depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its hills. The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all the strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his choice of subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as various as his color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give the reader who is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their infinitude of aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which prevades them all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for him; we find him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their family of chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of his execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day, he is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next he is painting the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject. Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind, including nearly all farming operations,--ploughing, harrowing, hedging and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else; then all kinds of town life--court-yards of inns, starting of mail coaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, &c.; then all kinds of inner domestic life--interiors of rooms, studies of costumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes of symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of local incident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish, being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England;--pilchard fishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne; and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part of the vessels, and many marine battle-pieces, two in particular of Trafalgar, both of high importance,--one of the Victory after the battle, now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the Death of Nelson, in his own gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealised into compositions, others of definite localities; together with classical compositions, Romes and Carthages and such others, by the myriad, with mythological, historical, or allegorical figures,--nymphs, monsters, and spectres; heroes and divinities.[100] What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possibly pervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings--an utter forgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are at present concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutely infinite--a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that of Shakespeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife resting by the roadside is not beneath it; Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the dead bodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as that it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his whole heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself into harmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment, whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears. This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter of course that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression, even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painter ever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference between the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would; and therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thorough stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful: in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathises with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult, no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched without loss of its own perfect balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness upon the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, now several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the perfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing of Brignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gathered from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on the "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone; and the Greta glances brightly in the valley, singing its evening-song; two white clouds, following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the ravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf of the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to recover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it, the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the stream; and around it the low churchyard wall, and the few white stones which mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more, nor hear the river sing as it passes. There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful; yet they are not, as I said above, more numerous than those which express his sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his own feelings. One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be noticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance, of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction, so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson. It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was productive of unmixed mischief to him; he spoiled many of his marine pictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former; and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confirmed by the notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most of our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in his subsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and Paul Veronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of the putting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of Titian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightest influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvator was a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was a wilful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped by feeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he had never himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him as competent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents, and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them. One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately bears a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated drawing, no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley, one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and bears the inscription, unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences of the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W. TURNER, January 15th, 1820." The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember such at present,--a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, is seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violent blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds which hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing but this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses, unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels, and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen. Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accustomed to the earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time, would be struck by two altogether new characters in it. The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in some inherent feeling in the painter's mind. The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapable of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading, instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of the buildings, clearly opposed, even in shade, to the grey of the snow wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues of the glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transition utterly unexampled in any previous drawings. These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works of Turner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energy inherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalting the force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as at least an essential, and often a principal, element of design. Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serene subject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of this period; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were in the earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by an effort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The "Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in most perfect peace: in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dash of the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in at least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are in rapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those which have even violent action in one or other, or in all: e. g. high force of Tees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others. The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must return to Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it was effected. That such a change would take place at one time or other was of course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of the first period being, as above stated, merely a means of Study. But the immediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessed from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis, January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color, now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since been the themes of his mightiest thoughts. I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was the impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When he first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away at once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away: the memories of Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them; the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever; and a new dawn rose over the rocks of the Siebengebirge. There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still more complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his superior power in drawing, and their best hope was, that he might not be able to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for it to reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marine pictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period in question, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of the plate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one of his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece of luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stood before the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously to the fish;--"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away. Under the force of these various impulses the change was total. _Every subject thenceforth was primarily conceived in color_; and no engraving ever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period. The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; the Beaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as much indignation as their dulness was capable of. They had deliberately closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do you put your brown tree?" A vast revelation was made to them at once, enough to have dazzled any one; but to _them_, light unendurable as incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous, unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised against the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how true they are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, from all the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling up the hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he may look back, and become a black stone like themselves. Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong man must be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears. He retired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel, or sympathy from any one; and the spirit of defiance in which he was forced to labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the slightest expression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy that was upon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven, were both alike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil effects of both; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and others little more than magnificent expressions of defiance of public opinion. But all have this noble virtue--they are in everything his own: there are no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill in the manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon nature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her. I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially necessary to notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of grasp which a man of real imagination takes of all things that are once brought within his reach--grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever. On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series of them, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, or even many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable. Probably most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subject twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds in different places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new "effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner's subjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession of impressions actually perceived by him at some favorite locality, or else repetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again and again realised as his increasing powers enabled him to do better justice to it. In either case we shall find them records of _seen facts_; _never_ compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline. For instance, every traveller, at least every traveller of thirty years' standing, must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself in a strange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have never catalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five: there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which is what he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near the French side. It is a careful study of French fishing boats running for the shore before the wind, with the picturesque old city in the distance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: that is what he saw just as he was going into the harbor,--a heavy brig warping out, and very likely to get in his way, or run against the pier, and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a large painting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:[101] that is what he saw when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see what had become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomen were being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, and some more fishing boats were running in with all speed. Then there is the "Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home to Dessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on the sands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sands before, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were all scattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wild shore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset--such a sunset,--and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise. He did not paint that directly; thought over it,--painted it a long while afterwards. Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is what he saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving lighthouse came blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He did not like that so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was asked to do a bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having already done all the rest. Turner never told me all this, but any one may see it if he will compare the pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day, but of two days or three; though in all human probability they were seen just as I have stated them;[102] but they _are_ records of successive impressions, as plainly written as ever traveller's diary. All of them pure veracities. Therefore immortal. I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of his works. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark running through all the subjects. Thus I know three drawings of Scarborough, and all of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not remember any others of his marine subjects which have a starfish. The other kind of repetition--the recurrence to one early impression--is however still more remarkable. In the collection of F. H. Bale, Esq., there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his boyish manner, its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from nature, finished at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at intervals. A man was fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner sought a place of some shelter under the bushes; made his sketch, took great pains when he got home to imitate the rain, as he best could; added his child's luxury of a rainbow; put in the very bush under which he had taken shelter, and the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and long-legged fisherman, in the courtly short breeches which were the fashion of the time. Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their strongest training, and after the total change in his feelings and principles which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series of "England and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch, and boy's thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better. The resultant drawing[103] is one of the very noblest of his second period. Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year 1808, or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in grey shadow, the eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless about a hundred yards from the shore: the foreground is of broken rocks, with lovely pieces of copse on the right and left. This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render the sunset colors: he went back to it therefore in the England series, and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the same shadows, the same cows,--they had stood in his mind, on the same spot, for twenty years,--the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse is cut away--it interfered with the masses of his color: some figures are introduced bathing, and what was grey, and feeble gold in the first drawing, becomes purple, and burning rose-color in the last. But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series of subjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea, Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speaking to a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is another small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engraving bears date 1817. It has _two_ women with bundles, and _two_ soldiers toiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage waggon in the distance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he did another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date 1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage waggon is there, having got no further on in the thirteen years, but one of the women is tired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her against her bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added, and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen. Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents, that Turner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color or arrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of a shadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, and strangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is a single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of a common wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewer than three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum. I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because I wish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infinite luxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everything that he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on his forgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to be understood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, his greatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. And thus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and the same, so far as education can influence them. They are different in their choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this, that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded or followed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truths around them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had been taught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them. There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second period, on which I have still to dwell, especially with reference to what has been above advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely, the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_ done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_ done easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself; and in these the outpouring of invention is not less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand that expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see the evidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness of every touch of color; but when the multitude of delicate touches, with which all the aërial tones are worked, is taken into consideration, it would still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completed with _ease_, unless we had direct evidence in the matter: fortunately, it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of a man-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual size of those of the England series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not appear one of the most highly finished, but is still farther removed from slightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her portholes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and went out to shoot. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters, and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them not torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that, and repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can compose at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite of himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept in most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics, especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or picture. The marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that they do not see that what they call "principles of composition," are mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a dinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object. A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could. Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same importance in a picture that it is in any thing else,--no more. It is well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was every thing, and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty. It is not, however, only in invention that men over-work themselves, but in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire of men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or "bold," or "broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truth remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed that the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what example is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines, which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let them look at the drawings of John Lewis. These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner, in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, to be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, what with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him almost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities, and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London, and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of Parliament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career. In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into Switzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seen the Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which could not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself, bears date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fond memory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies and drawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with his fondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in the Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and, counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, six compositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and, probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche, and Chamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seem to have made very profound impressions on him. He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossed the St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large number of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of them on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I shall henceforth call his Third period. The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by a richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and the works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of the rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day; and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever yet conceived by human intellect. Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century. Many a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best attained by following in his path; by beginning in all quietness and hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own. And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved; for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist, as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the man of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not subservient, but superior. Every archæologist, every natural philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his more informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model: where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock, familiarised already to his imagination as extending in a shallow stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of fan-like fissures radiating, in his imagination, through their centres[104]. That in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations of all these things to the universe, and to man, that in the views which have been opened to him of natural energies such as no human mind would have ventured to conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new way bearing witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent providence of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well worthy the sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of the loss is not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted; and it would be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man, who, retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make them dazzling with the splendor of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided anatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with soft forests, enrich the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [97] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite rejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes upon him to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may as well first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an Under-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of Bonington's,--a professional landscape painter, observe,--for the want of _aërial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to apologise, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blunders in _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture. [98] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, and directly contradicted in succession. The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was, that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters. A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere but in England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a picture of early Italian Masters. If they had, they would have known that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge of effect, as inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word, there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have opposed themselves as a body to that kind of teaching above described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. If they adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into mediævalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school. The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well. This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who had never looked at the pictures. The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. To which it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade is exactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast that of the Renaissance, however brilliant. [99] He did not use his full signature, J. M. W., until about the year 1800. [100] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnée_ of all this in the third volume of "Modern Painters." [101] The plate was, however, never published. [102] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying long at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or three days at the beginning of his journey. [103] Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. § 14. [104] This state of mind appears to have been the only one which Wordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain of which, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III. l. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of his works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. What else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so in the intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But these lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in mere want of sympathy with the men they describe; for, observe, though the passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fully confirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows. ARATRA PENTELICI SIX LECTURES ON THE ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870 PREFACE. I must pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately encumbered a subject which all think themselves competent to discuss. The possibility of such vindication is, of course, implied in the original consent of the universities to the establishment of Art Professorships. Nothing can be made an element of education of which it is impossible to determine whether it is ill done or well; and the clear assertion that there is a canon law in formative Art is, at this time, a more important function of each University than the instruction of its younger members in any branch of practical skill. It matters comparatively little whether few or many of our students learn to draw; but it matters much that all who learn should be taught with accuracy. And the number who may be justifiably advised to give any part of the time they spend at college to the study of painting or sculpture ought to depend, and finally _must_ depend, on their being certified that painting and sculpture, no less than language or than reasoning, have grammar and method,--that they permit a recognizable distinction between scholarship and ignorance, and enforce a constant distinction between Right and Wrong. This opening course of Lectures on Sculpture is therefore restricted to the statement, not only of first principles, but of those which were illustrated by the practice of one school, and by that practice in its simplest branch, the analysis of which could be certified by easily accessible examples, and aided by the indisputable evidence of photography.[105] The exclusion of the terminal Lecture of the course from the series now published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the time to extempore delivery, (not through indolence, but because explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar,) have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I said too imperfectly, completed. In one essential particular I have felt it necessary to write what I would not have spoken. I had intended to make no reference, in my University Lectures, to existing schools of Art, except in cases where it might be necessary to point out some undervalued excellence. The objects specified in the eleventh paragraph of my inaugural Lecture, might, I hoped, have been accomplished without reference to any works deserving of blame; but the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in the present year showed me a necessity of departing from my original intention. The task of impartial criticism[106] is now, unhappily, no longer to rescue modest skill from neglect; but to withstand the errors of insolent genius, and abate the influence of plausible mediocrity. The Exhibition of 1871 was very notable in this important particular, that it embraced some representation of the modern schools of nearly every country in Europe; and I am well assured that looking back upon it after the excitement of that singular interest has passed away, every thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not a single picture of accomplished merit; while it contained many that were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity. It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of the existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths whose judgments I am entrusted to form, from being misled, either by their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly devised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have, therefore, added to the second of these Lectures such illustration of the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its subject, and shall continue in future to make similar applications; rarely, indeed, permitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before the University, to introduce subjects of instant, and therefore too exciting, interest; but completing the addresses which I prepare for publication in these, and in any other particulars which may render them more widely serviceable. The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to fulfil the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on Architecture; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture: but, in the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident students to Natural History, and to the higher branches of ideal Landscape: and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavour to deduce, from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the Natural Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art students, to whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no less important than that of the human body. The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be carried on meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done, the reader is referred to the _Catalogue of the Educational Series_, published at the end of the Spring Term; of what remains to be done I will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to me rather the fault of narrowness in design, than of extravagance in expectation. DENMARK HILL, _25th November, 1871._ FOOTNOTES: [105] Photography cannot exhibit the character of large and finished sculpture; but its audacity of shadow is in perfect harmony with the more roughly picturesque treatment necessary in coins. For the rendering of all such frank relief, and for the better explanation of forms disturbed by the lustre of metal or polished stone, the method employed in the plates of this volume will be found, I believe, satisfactory. Casts are first taken from the coins, in white plaster; these are photographed, and the photograph printed by the heliotype process of Messrs. Edwards and Kidd. Plate XII. is exceptional, being a pure mezzotint engraving of the old school, excellently carried through by my assistant, Mr. Allen, who was taught, as a personal favour to myself, by my friend, and Turner's fellow-worker, Thomas Lupton. Plate IV. was intended to be a photograph from the superb vase in the British Museum, No. 564 in Mr. Newton's Catalogue; but its variety of colour defied photography, and after the sheets had gone to press I was compelled to reduce Le Normand's plate of it, which is unsatisfactory, but answers my immediate purpose. The enlarged photographs for use in the Lecture Room were made for me with most successful skill by Sergeant Spackman, of South Kensington; and the help throughout rendered to me by Mr. Burgess is acknowledged in the course of the Lectures; though with thanks which must remain inadequate lest they should become tedious; for Mr. Burgess drew the subjects of Plates III., X., and XIII.; drew and engraved every woodcut in the book; and printed all the plates with his own hand. [106] A pamphlet by the Earl of Southesk, "_Britain's Art Paradise_," (Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh) contains an entirely admirable criticism of the most faultful pictures of the 1871 Exhibition. It is to be regretted that Lord Southesk speaks only to condemn; but indeed, in my own three days' review of the rooms, I found nothing deserving of notice otherwise, except Mr. Hook's always pleasant sketches from fisher life, and Mr. Pettie's graceful and powerful, though too slightly painted, study from _Henry VI_. ARATRA PENTELICI. LECTURE I. OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS. _November, 1870._ 1. If, as is commonly believed, the subject of study which it is my special function to bring before you had no relation to the great interests of mankind, I should have less courage in asking for your attention to-day, than when I first addressed you; though, even then, I did not do so without painful diffidence. For at this moment, even supposing that in other places it were possible for men to pursue their ordinary avocations undisturbed by indignation or pity; here, at least, in the midst of the deliberative and religious influences of England, only one subject, I am well assured, can seriously occupy your thoughts--the necessity, namely, of determining how it has come to pass, that in these recent days, iniquity the most reckless and monstrous can be committed unanimously, by men more generous than ever yet in the world's history were deceived into deeds of cruelty; and that prolonged agony of body and spirit, such as we should shrink from inflicting wilfully on a single criminal, has become the appointed and accepted portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent persons, inhabiting the districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with the honour, and indulged in the felicity, of peace. Believe me, however, the subject of Art--instead of being foreign to these deep questions of social duty and peril,--is so vitally connected with them, that it would be impossible for me now to pursue the line of thought in which I began these lectures, because so ghastly an emphasis would be given to every sentence by the force of passing events. It is well, then, that in the plan I have laid down for your study, we shall now be led into the examination of technical details, or abstract conditions of sentiment; so that the hours you spend with me may be times of repose from heavier thoughts. But it chances strangely that, in this course of minutely detailed study, I have first to set before you the most essential piece of human workmanship, the plough, at the very moment when--(you may see the announcement in the journals either of yesterday or the day before)--the swords of your soldiers have been sent for _to be sharpened_, and not at all to be beaten into ploughshares. I permit myself, therefore, to remind you of the watchword of all my earnest writings--"Soldiers of the Ploughshare, instead of Soldiers of the Sword"--and I know it my duty to assert to you that the work we enter upon to-day is no trivial one, but full of solemn hope; the hope, namely, that among you there may be found men wise enough to lead the national passions towards the arts of peace, instead of the arts of war. I say the work "we enter upon," because the first four lectures I gave in the spring were wholly prefatory; and the following three only defined for you methods of practice. To-day we begin the systematic analysis and progressive study of our subject. 2. In general, the three great, or fine, Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, are thought of as distinct from the lower and more mechanical formative arts, such as carpentry or pottery. But we cannot, either verbally, or with any practical advantage, admit such classification. How are we to distinguish painting on canvas from painting on china?--or painting on china from painting on glass?--or painting on glass from infusion of colour into any vitreous substance, such as enamel?--or the infusion of colour into glass and enamel from the infusion of colour into wool or silk, and weaving of pictures in tapestry, or patterns in dress? You will find that although, in ultimately accurate use of the word, painting must be held to mean only the laying of a pigment on a surface with a soft instrument; yet, in broad comparison of the functions of Art, we must conceive of one and the same great artistic faculty, as governing _every mode of disposing colours in a permanent relation on, or in, a solid substance_; whether it be by tinting canvas, or dyeing stuffs; inlaying metals with fused flint, or coating walls with coloured stone. 3. Similarly the word "Sculpture,"--though in ultimate accuracy it is to be limited to the development of form in hard substances by cutting away portions of their mass--in broad definition, must be held to signify _the reduction of any shapeless mass of solid matter into an intended shape_, whatever the consistence of the substance, or nature of the instrument employed; whether we carve a granite mountain, or a piece of box-wood, and whether we use, for our forming instrument axe, or hammer, or chisel, or our own hands, or water to soften, or fire to fuse;--whenever and however we bring a shapeless thing into shape, we do so under the laws of the one great Art of Sculpture. 4. Having thus broadly defined painting and sculpture, we shall see that there is, in the third place, a class of work separated from both, in a specific manner, and including a great group of arts which neither, of necessity, _tint_, nor for the sake of form merely, _shape_, the substances they deal with; but construct or arrange them with a view to the resistance of some external force. We construct, for instance, a table with a flat top, and some support of prop, or leg, proportioned in strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and therefore, in every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our materials, and the nature of that strength, elastic, tenacious, brittle, and the like. Now although this group of arts nearly always involves the putting of two or more separate pieces together, we must not define it by that accident. The blade of an oar is not less formed with reference to external force than if it were made of many pieces; and the frame of a boat, whether hollowed out of a tree-trunk, or constructed of planks nailed together, is essentially the same piece of art; to be judged by its buoyancy and capacity of progression. Still, from the most wonderful piece of all architecture, the human skeleton, to this simple one,[107] the ploughshare, on which it depends for its subsistence, _the putting of two or more pieces together_ is curiously necessary to the perfectness of every fine instrument; and the peculiar mechanical work of Dædalus,--inlaying,--becomes all the more delightful to us in external aspect, because, as in the jawbone of a Saurian, or the wood of a bow, it is essential to the finest capacities of tension and resistance. 5. And observe how unbroken the ascent from this, the simplest architecture, to the loftiest. The placing of the timbers in a ship's stem, and the laying of the stones in a bridge buttress, are similar in art to the construction of the ploughshare, differing in no essential point, either in that they deal with other materials, or because, of the three things produced, one has to divide earth by advancing through it, another to divide water by advancing through it, and the third to divide water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain, and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the ploughshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can set a logical distinction. 6. Thus then we have simply three divisions of Art--one, that of giving colours to substance; another, that of giving form to it without question of resistance to force; and the third, that of giving form or position which will make it capable of such resistance. All the fine arts are embraced under these three divisions. Do not think that it is only a logical or scientific affectation to mass them together in this manner; it is, on the contrary, of the first practical importance to understand that the painter's faculty, or masterhood over colour, being as subtle as a musician's over sound, must be looked to for the government of every operation in which colour is employed; and that, in the same manner, the appliance of any art whatsoever to minor objects cannot be right, unless under the direction of a true master of that art. Under the present system, you keep your Academician occupied only in producing tinted pieces of canvas to be shown in frames, and smooth pieces of marble to be placed in niches; while you expect your builder or constructor to design coloured patterns in stone and brick, and your china-ware merchant to keep a separate body of workwomen who can paint china, but nothing else. By this division of labour, you ruin all the arts at once. The work of the Academician becomes mean and effeminate, because he is not used to treat colour on a grand scale and in rough materials; and your manufactures become base because no well educated person sets hand to them. And therefore it is necessary to understand, not merely as a logical statement, but as a practical necessity, that wherever beautiful colour is to be arranged, you need a Master of Painting; and wherever noble form is to be given, a Master of Sculpture; and wherever complex mechanical force is to be resisted, a Master of Architecture. 7. But over this triple division there must rule another yet more important. Any of these three arts may be either imitative of natural objects or limited to useful appliance. You may either paint a picture that represents a scene, or your street door, to keep it from rotting; you may mould a statue, or a plate; build the resemblance of a cluster of lotus stalks, or only a square pier. Generally speaking, Painting and Sculpture will be imitative, and Architecture merely useful; but there is a great deal of Sculpture--as this crystal ball[108] for instance, which is not imitative, and a great deal of Architecture which, to some extent is so, as the so called foils of Gothic apertures; and for many other reasons you will find it necessary to keep distinction clear in your minds between the arts--of whatever kind--which are imitative, and produce a resemblance or image of something which is not present; and those which are limited to the production of some useful reality, as the blade of a knife, or the wall of a house. You will perceive also, as we advance, that sculpture and painting are indeed in this respect only one art; and that we shall have constantly to speak and think of them as simply _graphic_, whether with chisel or colour, their principal function being to make us, in the words of Aristotle, "[Greek: theôrêtikoi tou peri ta sômata kallous]" (Polit. 8, 3.), "having capacity and habit of contemplation of the beauty that is in material things;" while Architecture, and its co-relative arts, are to be practised under quite other conditions of sentiment. 8. Now it is obvious that so far as the fine arts consist either in imitation or mechanical construction, the right judgment of them must depend on our knowledge of the things they imitate, and forces they resist: and my function of teaching here would (for instance) so far resolve itself, either into demonstration that this painting of a peach,[109] does resemble a peach, or explanation of the way in which this ploughshare (for instance) is shaped so as to throw the earth aside with least force of thrust. And in both of these methods of study, though of course your own diligence must be your chief master, to a certain extent your Professor of Art can always guide you securely, and can show you, either that the image does truly resemble what it attempts to resemble, or that the structure is rightly prepared for the service it has to perform. But there is yet another virtue of fine art which is, perhaps, exactly that about which you will expect your Professor to teach you most, and which, on the contrary, is exactly that about which you must teach yourselves all that it is essential to learn. 9. I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible examples of the union of the graphic and constructive powers,--one of my breakfast plates. Since all the finely architectural arts, we said, began in the shaping of the cup and the platter, we will begin, ourselves, with the platter. Why has it been made round? For two structural reasons: first, that the greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest space; and secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table, it may come into least contact with them. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] Next, why has it a rim? For two other structural reasons; first, that it is convenient to put salt or mustard upon; but secondly and chiefly, that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form of continuous handle. Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this ridge beneath, round the bottom; for as the rim is the simplest possible form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential one of a rightly made platter. 10. Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian having respect to conditions of collision, of carriage, and of support. But now, on the surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of colour which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye. Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent flowers. These then have as distinctly a graphic purpose as the other properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are like roses or not. I will anticipate what I have to say in subsequent lectures so far as to assure you that, if they are to be like roses at all, the liker they can be, the better. Do not suppose, as many people will tell you, that because this is a common manufactured article, your roses on it are the better for being ill-painted, or half-painted. If they had been painted by the same hand that did this peach, the plate would have been all the better for it; but, as it chanced, there was no hand such as William Hunt's to paint them, and their graphic power is not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no graphic power at all, but are meaningless spaces of colour or metal. Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural, character; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, either of mere colours to the eye (as of taste to the tongue), or in the placing of those colours in relations which obey some mental principle of order, or physical principle of harmony. 11. These abstract relations and inherent pleasantnesses, whether in space, number, or time, and whether of colours or sounds, form what we may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of art-philosophy to which the word "æsthetics" should be strictly limited, being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service _being_ their pleasantness. Thus it is the province of æsthetics to tell you, (if you did not know it before,) that the taste and colour of a peach are pleasant, and to ascertain, if it be ascertainable, (and you have any curiosity to know,) why they are so. 12. The information would, I presume, to most of you, be gratuitous. If it were not, and you chanced to be in a sick state of body in which you disliked peaches, it would be, for the time, to you false information, and, so far as it was true of other people, to you useless. Nearly the whole study of æsthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless. Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that "he never took fruit or sweets." "That" replied, or is said to have replied, Thackeray, "is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the whole science of æsthetics is, in the depth of it, expressed by one passage of Goethe's in the end of the 2nd part of Faust;--the notable one that follows the song of the Lemures, when the angels enter to dispute with the fiends for the soul of Faust. They enter singing--"Pardon to sinners and life to the dust." Mephistopheles hears them first, and exclaims to his troop, "Discord I hear, and filthy jingling"--"Mistöne höre ich; garstiges Geklimper." This, you see, is the extreme of bad taste in music. Presently the angelic host begin strewing roses, which discomfits the diabolic crowd altogether. Mephistopheles in vain calls to them--"What do you duck and shrink for--is that proper hellish behaviour? Stand fast, and let them strew"--"Was duckt und zuckt ihr; ist das Hellen-brauch? So haltet stand, und lasst sie streuen." There you have, also, the extreme of bad taste in sight and smell. And in the whole passage is a brief embodiment for you of the ultimate fact that all æsthetics depend on the health of soul and body, and the proper exercise of both, not only through years, but generations. Only by harmony of both collateral and successive lives can the great doctrine of the Muses be received which enables men "[Greek: chairein orthôs]," "to have pleasures rightly;" and there is no other definition of the beautiful, nor of any subject of delight to the æsthetic faculty, than that it is what one noble spirit has created, seen and felt by another of similar or equal nobility. So much as there is in you of ox, or of swine, perceives no beauty, and creates none: what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfectness of its humanity, can create it, and receive. 13. Returning now to the very elementary form in which the appeal to our æsthetic virtue is made in our breakfast-plate, you notice that there are two distinct kinds of pleasantness attempted. One by hues of colour; the other by proportions of space. I have called these the musical elements of the arts relating to sight; and there are indeed two complete sciences, one of the combinations of colour, and the other of the combinations of line and form, which might each of them separately engage us in as intricate study as that of the science of music. But of the two, the science of colour is, in the Greek sense, the more musical, being one of the divisions of the Apolline power; and it is so practically educational, that if we are not using the faculty for colour to discipline nations, they will infallibly use it themselves as a means of corruption. Both music and colour are naturally influences of peace; but in the war trumpet, and the war shield, in the battle song and battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes, colours have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline of the Roman Empire; black against white, in that of Florence; red against white, in the wars of the Royal houses in England; and at this moment, red against white, in the contest of anarchy and loyalty, in all the world. 14. On the other hand, the directly ethical influence of colour in the sky, the trees, flowers, and coloured creatures round us, and in our own various arts massed under the one name of painting, is so essential and constant that we cease to recognize it, because we are never long enough altogether deprived of it to feel our need; and the mental diseases induced by the influence of corrupt colour are as little suspected, or traced to their true source, as the bodily weaknesses resulting from atmospheric miasmata. 15. The second musical science which belongs peculiarly to sculpture (and to painting, so far as it represents form), consists in the disposition of beautiful masses. That is to say, beautiful surfaces limited by beautiful lines. Beautiful _surfaces_, observe; and remember what is noted in my fourth lecture of the difference between a space and a mass. If you have at any time examined carefully, or practised from, the drawings of shells placed in your copying series, you cannot but have felt the difference in the grace between the aspects of the same line, when enclosing a rounded or unrounded space. The exact science of sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it limits; and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the mental purpose; it is the science always of the beauty of relation in three dimensions. To take the simplest possible line of continuous limit--the circle: the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an element of decoration, though a very meagre one but its relative mass, the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful. Here[110] is at once the simplest, and in mere patient mechanism, the most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you,--a piece of the purest rock-crystal, chiselled, (I believe, by mere toil of hand,) into a perfect sphere. Imitating nothing, constructing nothing; sculpture for sculpture's sake, of purest natural substance into simplest primary form. 16. Again. Out of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell _is_ used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing value to what is difficult to obtain, make the little boss so precious in men's sight that wise eagerness of search for the kingdom of heaven can be likened to their eagerness of search for _it_; and the gates of Paradise can be no otherwise rendered so fair to their poor intelligence, as by telling them that every several gate was of "one pearl." 17. But take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's "to take pleasure rightly" or straightly--[Greek: chairein orthôs]. Now, it is not possible to do the direct opposite of that,--to take pleasure iniquitously or obliquely--[Greek: chairein adikôs] or [Greek: skoliôs]--more than you do in enjoying a thing because your neighbour cannot get it. You may enjoy a thing legitimately because it is rare, and cannot be seen often, (as you do a fine aurora, or a sunset, or an unusually lovely flower); that is Nature's way of stimulating your attention. But if you enjoy it because your neighbour cannot have it--and, remember, all value attached to pearls more than glass beads, is merely and purely for that cause,--then you rejoice through the worst of idolatries, covetousness; and neither arithmetic, nor writing, nor any other so-called essential of education, is now so vitally necessary to the population of Europe, as such acquaintance with the principles of intrinsic value, as may result in the iconoclasm of jewellery; and in the clear understanding that we are not in that instinct, civilized, but yet remain wholly savage, so far as we care for display of this selfish kind. You think, perhaps, I am quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole professorship, would be accomplished,--and far more than that,--if only the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all; and that though the idolatry may not have been wholly divine which sculptured gods, the idolatry is wholly diabolic, which, for vulgar display, sculptures diamonds. 18. To go back to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead, may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle the faculty of sight must be, since it recognizes at any distance, and is gratified by, the mystery of the termination of cusp obtained by the gradated light on the ball. In that Venetian tracery this simplest element of sculptured form is used sparingly, as the most precious that can be employed to finish the façade. But alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the ball-flower is lavished on every line--and in your St. Mary's spire, and the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich pleasantness of decoration,--indeed, their so-called "decorated style,"--consists only in being daintily beset with stone balls. It is true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is their intended effect? 19. But farther, let the ball have motion; then the form it generates will be that of a cylinder. You have, perhaps, thought that pure Early English Architecture depended for its charm on visibility of construction. It depends for its charm altogether on the abstract harmony of groups of cylinders,[111] arbitrarily bent into mouldings, and arbitrarily associated as shafts, having no _real_ relation to construction whatsoever, and a theoretical relation so subtle that none of us had seen it, till Professor Willis worked it out for us. 20. And now, proceeding to analysis of higher sculpture, you may have observed the importance I have attached to the porch of San Zenone, at Verona, by making it, among your standards, the first of the group which is to illustrate the system of sculpture and architecture founded on faith in a future life. That porch, fortunately represented in the photograph, from which Plate I. has been engraved, under a clear and pleasant light, furnishes you with examples of sculpture of every kind from the flattest incised bas-relief to solid statues, both in marble and bronze. And the two points I have been pressing upon you are conclusively exhibited here, namely,--(1). That sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface; (2) that the pleasantness of that bossy condition to the eye is irrespective of imitation on one side, and of structure on the other. 21. (1.) Sculpture is essentially the production of a pleasant bossiness or roundness of surface. If you look from some distance at these two engravings of Greek coins, (place the book open so that you can see the opposite plate three or four yards off,) you will find the relief on each of them simplifies itself into a pearl-like portion of a sphere, with exquisitely gradated light on its surface. When you look at them nearer, you will see that each smaller portion into which they are divided--cheek, or brow, or leaf, or tress of hair--resolves itself also into a rounded or undulated surface, pleasant by gradation of light. Every several surface is delightful in itself, as a shell, or a tuft of rounded moss, or the bossy masses of distant forest would be. That these intricately modulated masses present some resemblance to a girl's face, such as the Syracusans imagined that of the water-goddess Arethusa, is entirely a secondary matter; the primary condition is that the masses shall be beautifully rounded, and disposed with due discretion and order. [Illustration: PLATE I.--PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA.] 22. (2.) It is difficult for you, at first, to feel this order and beauty of surface, apart from the imitation. But you can see there is a pretty disposition of, and relation between, the projections of a fir-cone, though the studded spiral imitates nothing. Order exactly the same in kind, only much more complex; and an abstract beauty of surface rendered definite by increase and decline of light--(for every curve of surface has its own luminous law, and the light and shade on a parabolic solid differs, specifically, from that on an elliptical or spherical one)--it is the essential business of the sculptor to obtain; as it is the essential business of a painter to get good colour, whether he imitates anything or not. At a distance from the picture, or carving, where the things represented become absolutely unintelligible, we must yet be able to say, at a glance, "That is good painting, or good carving." And you will be surprised to find, when you try the experiment, how much the eye must instinctively judge in this manner. Take the front of San Zenone for instance, Plate I. You will find it impossible without a lens, to distinguish in the bronze gates, and in great part of the wall, anything that their bosses represent. You cannot tell whether the sculpture is of men, animals, or trees; only you feel it to be composed of pleasant projecting masses; you acknowledge that both gates and wall are, somehow, delightfully roughened; and only afterwards, by slow degrees, can you make out what this roughness means; nay, though here (Plate III.) I magnify[112] one of the bronze plates of the gate to a scale, which gives you the same advantage as if you saw it quite close, in the reality,--you may still be obliged to me for the information, that _this_ boss represents the Madonna asleep in her little bed, and this smaller boss, the Infant Christ in His; and this at the top, a cloud with an angel coming out of it, and these jagged bosses, two of the Three Kings, with their crowns on, looking up to the star, (which is intelligible enough I admit); but what this straggling, three-legged boss beneath signifies, I suppose neither you nor I can tell, unless it be the shepherd's dog, who has come suddenly upon the Kings with their crowns on, and is greatly startled at them. 23. Farther, and much more definitely, the pleasantness of the surface decoration is independent of structure; that is to say, of any architectural requirement of stability. The greater part of the sculpture here is exclusively ornamentation of a flat wall, or of door panelling; only a small portion of the church front is thus treated, and the sculpture has no more to do with the form of the building than a piece of a lace veil would have, suspended beside its gates on a festal day; the proportions of shaft and arch might be altered in a hundred different ways, without diminishing their stability; and the pillars would stand more safely on the ground than on the backs of these carved animals. 24. I wish you especially to notice these points, because the false theory that ornamentation should be merely decorated structure is so pretty and plausible, that it is likely to take away your attention from the far more important abstract conditions of design. Structure should never be contradicted, and in the best buildings it is pleasantly exhibited and enforced; in this very porch the joints of every stone are visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed chapel with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York--but round it, in order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe, but to _conceal_) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested by the relations of dimension and curve between pieces of encrusting marble of different colours, which have no more to do with the real make of the building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with his bones. [Illustration: PLATE II.--THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE.] [Illustration: PLATE III.--THE WARNING TO THE KINGS. San Zenone. Verona.] 25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a piece of art entirely depends, is one of the æsthetic faculties which nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to highly-trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for excitement, and for the kind of splendour that exhibits wealth, careless of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall-mall. The order and harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus, Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic sculpture. 26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which the investigation comes under the general term, Anatomy; whether the junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling into two distinct divisions--one using colours, the other masses, for its elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned with the representation of the outward appearances of things. And, for many reasons, I think it best to begin with imitative Sculpture; that being defined as _the art which, by the musical disposition of masses, imitates anything of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us; and does so in accordance with structural laws having due reference to the materials employed_. So that you see our task will involve the immediate inquiry what the things are of which the imitation is justly pleasant to us: what, in few words,--if we are to be occupied in the making of graven images--we ought to like to make images _of_. Secondly, after having determined its subject, what degree of imitation or likeness we ought to desire in our graven image; and lastly, under what limitations demanded by structure and material, such likeness may be obtained. These inquiries I shall endeavour to pursue with you to some practical conclusion, in my next four lectures, and in the sixth, I will briefly sketch the actual facts that have taken place in the development of sculpture by the two greatest schools of it that hitherto have existed in the world. 27. The tenor of our next lecture then must be an inquiry into the real nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols: and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question, not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely, whether the God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance "from battle, murder, and sudden death," _is_ indeed, seeing that the present state of Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying to that effect, "as the gods of the heathen who were but idols;" or whether--(and observe, one or other of these things _must_ be true)--whether our prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry;--that heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods; and our prayers have been false prayers to the True One. FOOTNOTES: [107] I had a real ploughshare on my lecture table; but it would interrupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I attempted here to illustrate by figures the relation of the coulter to the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share itself. [108] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the reader, without a figure. [109] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable altogether, but still less representable by figure. [110] The crystal ball above mentioned. [111] All grandest effects in mouldings may be, and for the most part have been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental) section. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft, are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the text that the mouldings, even of best time, "have no real relation to construction," is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming to be the concealment of the joints of the voussoirs. [112] Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant Mr. Burgess, during the course of these lectures, consisted in making enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which Plate I. is a reduction. LECTURE II. IDOLATRY. _November, 1870._ 28. Beginning with the simple conception of sculpture as the art of fiction in solid substance, we are now to consider what its subjects should be. What--having the gift of imagery--should we by preference endeavour to image? A question which is, indeed, subordinate to the deeper one--why we should wish to image anything at all. 29. Some years ago, having been always desirous that the education of women should begin in learning how to cook, I got leave, one day, for a little girl of eleven years old to exchange, much to her satisfaction, her schoolroom for the kitchen. But as ill fortune would have it, there was some pastry toward, and she was left unadvisedly in command of some delicately rolled paste; whereof she made no pies, but an unlimited quantity of cats and mice. Now you may read the works of the gravest critics of art from end to end; but you will find, at last, they can give you no other true account of the spirit of sculpture than that it is an irresistible human instinct for the making of cats and mice, and other imitable living creatures, in such permanent form that one may play with the images at leisure. Play with them, or love them, or fear them, or worship them. The cat may become the goddess Pasht, and the mouse, in the hand of the sculptured king, enforce his enduring words "[Greek: es eme tis oreôn eusebês estô];" but the great mimetic instinct underlies all such purpose; and is zooplastic,--life-shaping,--alike in the reverent and the impious. 30. Is, I say, and has been, hitherto; none of us dare say that it will be. I shall have to show you hereafter that the greater part of the technic energy of men, as yet, has indicated a kind of childhood; and that the race becomes, if not more wise, at least more manly,[113] with every gained century. I can fancy that all this sculpturing and painting of ours may be looked back upon, in some distant time, as a kind of doll-making, and that the words of Sir Isaac Newton may be smiled at no more: only it will not be for stars that we desert our stone dolls, but for men. When the day comes, as come it must, in which we no more deface and defile God's image in living clay, I am not sure that we shall any of us care so much for the images made of Him, in burnt clay. 31. But, hitherto, the energy of growth in any people may be almost directly measured by their passion for imitative art; namely, for sculpture, or for the drama, which is living and speaking sculpture, or, as in Greece, for both; and in national as in actual childhood, it is not merely the _making_, but the _making-believe_; not merely the acting for the sake of the scene, but acting for the sake of acting, that is delightful. And, of the two mimetic arts, the drama, being more passionate, and involving conditions of greater excitement and luxury, is usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. _There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence._ Their drama may gain in grace and wit; but their sculpture, in days of decline, is _always_ base. 32. If my little lady in the kitchen had been put in command of colours, as well as of dough, and if the paste would have taken the colours, we may be sure her mice would have been painted brown, and her cats tortoise-shell; and this, partly indeed for the added delight and prettiness of colour itself, but more for the sake of absolute realization to her eyes and mind. Now all the early sculpture of the most accomplished nations has been thus coloured, rudely or finely; and, therefore, you see at once how necessary it is that we should keep the term "graphic" for imitative art generally; since no separation can at first be made between carving and painting, with reference to the mental powers exerted in, or addressed by, them. In the earliest known art of the world, a reindeer hunt may be scratched in outline on the flat side of a clean-picked bone, and a reindeer's head carved out of the end of it; both these are flint-knife work, and, strictly speaking, sculpture: but the scratched outline is the beginning of drawing, and the carved head of sculpture proper. When the spaces enclosed by the scratched outline are filled with colour, the colouring soon becomes a principal means of effect; so that, in the engraving of an Egyptian-colour bas-relief (S. 101), Rosellini has been content to miss the outlining incisions altogether, and represent it as a painting only. Its proper definition is, "painting accented by sculpture;" on the other hand, in solid coloured statues,--Dresden china figures, for example,--we have pretty sculpture accented by painting; the mental purpose in both kinds of art being to obtain the utmost degree of realization possible, and the ocular impression being the same, whether the delineation is obtained by engraving or painting. For, as I pointed out to you in my fifth lecture, everything is seen by the eye as patches of colour, and of colour only; a fact which the Greeks knew well; so that when it becomes a question in the dialogue of Minos, "[Greek: tini onti tê opsei horatai ta hoômena]," the answer is "[Greek: aisthêsei tautê tê dia tôn ophthalmôn dêloisê hêmin ta chrômata]."--"What kind of power is the sight with which we see things? It is that sense which, through the eyes, can reveal _colours_ to us." 33. And now observe that while the graphic arts begin in the mere mimetic effort, they proceed, as they obtain more perfect realization, to act under the influence of a stronger and higher instinct. They begin by scratching the reindeer, the most interesting object of sight. But presently, as the human creature rises in scale of intellect, it proceeds to scratch, not the most interesting object of sight only, but the most interesting object of imagination; not the reindeer, but the Maker and Giver of the reindeer. And the second great condition for the advance of the art of sculpture is that the race should possess, in addition to the mimetic instinct, the realistic or idolizing instinct; the desire to see as substantial the powers that are unseen, and bring near those that are far off, and to possess and cherish those that are strange. To make in some way tangible and visible the nature of the gods--to illustrate and explain it by symbols; to bring the immortals out of the recesses of the clouds, and make them Penates; to bring back the dead from darkness, and make them Lares. 34. Our conception of this tremendous and universal human passion has been altogether narrowed by the current idea that Pagan religious art consisted only, or chiefly, in giving personality to the gods. The personality was never doubted; it was visibility, interpretation, and possession that the hearts of men sought. Possession, first of all--the getting hold of some hewn log of wild olive-wood that would fall on its knees if it was pulled from its pedestal--and, afterwards, slowly clearing manifestation; the exactly right expression is used in Lucian's dream,--[Greek: Pheidias edeixe ton Dia]; "Showed[114] Zeus;" manifested him, nay, in a certain sense, brought forth, or created, as you have it, in Anacreon's ode to the Rose, of the birth of Athena herself-- [Greek: polemoklonon t' Athênên koruphês edeiknye Zeus.] But I will translate the passage from Lucian to you at length--it is in every way profitable. 35. "There came to me, in the healing[115] night, a divine dream, so clear that it missed nothing of the truth itself; yes, and still after all this time, the shapes of what I saw remain in my sight, and the sound of what I heard dwells in my ears"--note the lovely sense of [Greek: enaulos]--the sound being as of a stream passing always by in the same channel,--"so distinct was everything to me. Two women laid hold of my hands and pulled me, each towards herself, so violently, that I had like to have been pulled asunder; and they cried out against one another,--the one, that she was resolved to have me to herself, being indeed her own, and the other that it was vain for her to claim what belonged to others;--and the one who first claimed me for her own was like a hard worker, and had strength as a man's; and her hair was dusty, and her hand full of horny places, and her dress fastened tight about her, and the folds of it loaded with white marble-dust, so that she looked just as my uncle used to look when he was filing stones: but the other was pleasant in features, and delicate in form, and orderly in her dress; and so in the end, they left it to me to decide, after hearing what they had to say, with which of them I would go; and first the hard featured and masculine one spoke:-- [Illustration: IV THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA.] 36. "'Dear child, I am the Art of Image-sculpture, which yesterday you began to learn; and I am as one of your own people, and of your house, for your grandfather,' (and she named my mother's father) 'was a stone-cutter; and both your uncles had good name through me: and if you will keep yourself well clear of the sillinesses and fluent follies that come from this creature,' (and she pointed to the other woman) 'and will follow me, and live with me, first of all, you shall be brought up as a man should be, and have strong shoulders; and, besides that, you shall be kept well quit of all restless desires, and you shall never be obliged to go away into any foreign places, leaving your own country and the people of your house; _neither shall all men praise you for your talk_.[116] And you must not despise this rude serviceableness of my body, neither this meanness of my dusty dress; for, pushing on in their strength from such things as these, that great Phidias revealed Zeus, and Polyclitus wrought out Hera, and Myron was praised, and Praxiteles marvelled at: therefore are these men worshipped with the gods.'" 37. There is a beautiful ambiguity in the use of the preposition with the genitive in this last sentence. "Pushing on from these things" means indeed, justly, that the sculptors rose from a mean state to a noble one; but not as _leaving_ the mean state;--not as, from a hard life, attaining to a soft one,--but as being helped and strengthened by the rough life to do what was greatest. Again, "worshipped with the gods" does not mean that they are thought of as in any sense equal to, or like to, the gods, but as being on the side of the gods against what is base and ungodly; and that the kind of worth which is in them is therefore indeed worshipful, as having its source with the gods. Finally, observe that every one of the expressions, used of the four sculptors, is definitely the best that Lucian could have chosen. Phidias carved like one who had seen Zeus, and had only to _reveal_ him; Polyclitus, in labour of intellect, completed his sculpture by just law, and _wrought_ out Hera; Myron was of all most _praised_, because he did best what pleased the vulgar; and Praxiteles, the most _wondered at_ or admired, because he bestowed utmost exquisiteness of beauty. 38. I am sorry not to go on with the dream; the more refined lady, as you may remember, is liberal or gentlemanly Education, and prevails at last; so that Lucian becomes an author instead of a sculptor, I think to his own regret, though to our present benefit. One more passage of his I must refer you to, as illustrative of the point before us; the description of the temple of the Syrian Hieropolis, where he explains the absence of the images of the sun and moon. "In the temple itself," he says, "on the left hand as one goes in, there is set first the throne of the sun; but no form of him is thereon, for of these two powers alone, the sun and the moon, they show no carved images. And I also learned why this is their law, for they say that it is permissible, indeed, to make of the other gods, graven images, since the forms of them are not visible to all men. But Helios and Selenaia are everywhere clear-bright, and all men behold them; what need is there therefore for sculptured work of these, who appear in the air?" 39. This, then, is the second instinct necessary to sculpture; the desire for the manifestation, description, and companionship of unknown powers; and for possession of a bodily substance--the "bronze Strasbourg," which you can embrace, and hang immortelles on the head of--instead of an abstract idea. But if you get nothing more in the depth of the national mind than these two feelings, the mimetic and idolizing instincts, there may be still no progress possible for the arts except in delicacy of manipulation and accumulative caprice of design. You must have not only the idolizing instinct, but an [Greek: êthos] which chooses the right thing to idolize! Else, you will get states of art like those in China or India, non-progressive, and in great part diseased and frightful, being wrought under the influence of foolish terror, or foolish admiration. So that a third condition, completing and confirming both the others, must exist in order to the development of the creative power. 40. This third condition is that the heart of the nation shall be set on the discovery of just or equal law, and shall be from day to day developing that law more perfectly. The Greek school of sculpture is formed during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justice; the Tuscan, during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justification. I assert to you at present briefly, what will, I hope, be the subject of prolonged illustration hereafter. 41. Now when a nation with mimetic instinct and imaginative longing is also thus occupied earnestly in the discovery of Ethic law, that effort gradually brings precision and truth into all its manual acts; and the physical progress of sculpture as in the Greek, so in the Tuscan, school, consists in gradually _limiting_ what was before indefinite, in _verifying_ what was inaccurate, and in _humanizing_ what was monstrous. I might perhaps content you by showing these external phenomena, and by dwelling simply on the increasing desire of naturalness, which compels, in every successive decade of years, literally, in the sculptured images, the mimicked bones to come together, bone to his bone; and the flesh to come up upon them, until from a flattened and pinched handful of clay, respecting which you may gravely question whether it was intended for a human form at all;--by slow degrees, and added touch to touch, in increasing consciousness of the bodily truth,--at last the Aphrodite of Melos stands before you, a perfect woman. But all that search for physical accuracy is merely the external operation, in the arts, of the seeking for truth in the inner soul; it is impossible without that higher effort, and the demonstration of it would be worse than useless to you, unless I made you aware at the same time of its spiritual cause. 42. Observe farther; the increasing truth in representation is co-relative with increasing beauty in the thing to be represented. The pursuit of justice which regulates the imitative effort, regulates also the development of the race into dignity of person, as of mind; and their culminating art-skill attains the grasp of entire truth at the moment when the truth becomes most lovely. And then, ideal sculpture may go on safely into portraiture. But I shall not touch on the subject of portrait sculpture to-day; it introduces many questions of detail, and must be a matter for subsequent consideration. 43. These then are the three great passions which are concerned in true sculpture. I cannot find better, or, at least, more easily remembered, names for them than "the Instincts of Mimicry, Idolatry, and Discipline;" meaning, by the last, the desire of equity and wholesome restraint, in all acts and works of life. Now of these, there is no question but that the love of Mimicry is natural and right, and the love of Discipline is natural and right. But it looks a grave question whether the yearning for Idolatry, (the desire of companionship with images,) is right. Whether, indeed, if such an instinct be essential to good sculpture, the art founded on it can possibly be "fine" art. 44. I must now beg for your close attention, because I have to point out distinctions in modes of conception which will appear trivial to you, unless accurately understood; but of an importance in the history of art which cannot be overrated. When the populace of Paris adorned the statue of Strasbourg with immortelles, none, even the simplest of the pious decorators, would suppose that the city of Strasbourg itself, or any spirit or ghost of the city, was actually there, sitting in the Place de la Concorde. The figure was delightful to them as a visible nucleus for their fond thoughts about Strasbourg; but never for a moment supposed to _be_ Strasbourg. Similarly, they might have taken delight in a statue purporting to represent a river instead of a city,--the Rhine, or Garonne, suppose,--and have been touched with strong emotion in looking at it, if the real river were dear to them, and yet never think for an instant that the statue _was_ the river. And yet again, similarly, but much more distinctly, they might take delight in the beautiful image of a god, because it gathered and perpetuated their thoughts about that god; and yet never suppose, nor be capable of being deceived by any arguments into supposing, that the statue _was_ the god. On the other hand, if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most probably lay it aside in some, to him, sacred place, and believe _the stone itself_ to be a kind of god, and offer prayer and sacrifice to it. In like manner, any other strange or terrifying object, such, for instance, as a powerfully noxious animal or plant, he would be apt to regard in the same way; and very possibly also construct for himself frightful idols of some kind, calculated to produce upon him a vague impression of their being alive; whose imaginary anger he might deprecate or avert with sacrifice, although incapable of conceiving in them any one attribute of exalted intellectual or moral nature. 45. If you will now refer to § 52-59 of my Introductory Lectures, you will find this distinction between a resolute conception, recognized for such, and an involuntary apprehension of spiritual existence, already insisted on at some length. And you will see more and more clearly as we proceed, that the deliberate and intellectually commanded conception is not idolatrous in any evil sense whatever, but is one of the grandest and wholesomest functions of the human soul; and that the essence of evil idolatry begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of any kind, in a thing in which there is no such presence. 46. I need not say that the harm of the idolatry must depend on the certainty of the negative. If there be a real presence in a pillar of cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a still small voice, it is no sin to bow down before these. But, as matter of historical fact, the idea of such presence has generally been both ignoble and false, and confined to nations of inferior race, who are often condemned to remain for ages in conditions of vile terror, destitute of thought. Nearly all Indian architecture and Chinese design arise out of such a state: so also, though in a less gross degree, Ninevite and Phoenician art, early Irish, and Scandinavian; the latter, however, with vital elements of high intellect mingled in it from the first. But the greatest races are never grossly subject to such terror, even in their childhood, and the course of their minds is broadly divisible into three distinct stages. 47. (I.) In their infancy they begin to imitate the real animals about them, as my little girl made the cats and mice, but with an undercurrent of partial superstition--a sense that there must be more in the creatures than they can see; also they catch up vividly any of the fancies of the baser nations round them, and repeat these more or less apishly, yet rapidly naturalizing and beautifying them. They then connect all kinds of shapes together, compounding meanings out of the old chimeras, and inventing new ones with the speed of a running wild-fire; but always getting more of man into their images, and admitting less of monster or brute; their own characters, meanwhile, expanding and purging themselves, and shaking off the feverish fancy, as springing flowers shake the earth off their stalks. 48. (II.) In the second stage, being now themselves perfect men and women, they reach the conception of true and great gods as existent in the universe; and absolutely cease to think of them as in any wise present in statues or images; but they have now learned to make these statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes that may concentrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, accurately the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian; the Phidian is already dimmed with a faint shadow of infidelity; still, the Olympic Zeus may be taken as a sufficiently central type of a statue which was no more supposed to _be_ Zeus, than the gold or elephants' tusks it was made of; but in which the most splendid powers of human art were exhausted in representing a believed and honoured God to the happy and holy imagination of a sincerely religious people. 49. (III.) The third stage of national existence follows, in which, the imagination having now done its utmost, and being partly restrained by the sanctities of tradition, which permit no farther change in the conceptions previously created, begins to be superseded by logical deduction and scientific investigation. At the same moment, the elder artists having done all that is possible in realizing the national conceptions of the Gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more limited to manual dexterity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also, in the course of centuries, the methods of every art continually improving, and being made subjects of popular inquiry, praise is now to be got, for eminence in these, from the whole mob of the nation; whereas intellectual design can never be discerned but by the few. So that in this third æra, we find every kind of imitative and vulgar dexterity more and more cultivated; while design and imagination are every day less cared for, and less possible. 50. Meanwhile, as I have just said, the leading minds in literature and science become continually more logical and investigative; and, once that they are established in the habit of testing facts accurately, a very few years are enough to convince all the strongest thinkers that the old imaginative religion is untenable, and cannot any longer be honestly taught in its fixed traditional form, except by ignorant persons. And at this point the fate of the people absolutely depends on the degree of moral strength into which their hearts have been already trained. If it be a strong, industrious, chaste, and honest race, the taking its old gods, or at least the old forms of them, away from it, will indeed make it deeply sorrowful and amazed; but will in no whit shake its will, nor alter its practice. Exceptional persons, naturally disposed to become drunkards, harlots, and cheats, but who had been previously restrained from indulging these dispositions by their fear of God, will, of course, break out into open vice, when that fear is removed. But the heads of the families of the people, instructed in the pure habits and perfect delights of an honest life, and to whom the thought of a Father in heaven had been a comfort, not a restraint, will assuredly not seek relief from the discomfort of their orphanage by becoming uncharitable and vile. Also the high leaders of their thought gather their whole strength together in the gloom; and at the first entrance of this valley of the Shadow of Death, look their new enemy full in the eyeless face of him, and subdue him, and his terror, under their feet. "Metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum,... strepitumque Acherontis avari." This is the condition of national soul expressed by the art, and the words, of Holbein, Durer, Shakspeare, Pope, and Goethe. 51. But if the people, at the moment when the trial of darkness approaches, be not confirmed in moral character, but are only maintaining a superficial virtue by the aid of a spectral religion; the moment the staff of their faith is broken, the character of the race falls like a climbing plant cut from its hold: then all the earthliest vices attack it as it lies in the dust; every form of sensual and insane sin is developed, and half a century is sometimes enough to close, in hopeless shame, the career of the nation in literature, art, and war. 52. Notably, within the last hundred years, all religion has perished from the practically active national mind of France and England. No statesman in the senate of either country would dare to use a sentence out of their acceptedly divine Revelation, as having now a literal authority over them for their guidance, or even a suggestive wisdom for their contemplation. England, especially, has cast her Bible full in the face of her former God; and proclaimed, with open challenge to Him, her resolved worship of His declared enemy, Mammon. All the arts, therefore, founded on religion, and sculpture chiefly, are here in England effete and corrupt, to a degree which arts never were hitherto in the history of mankind: and it is possible to show you the condition of sculpture living, and sculpture dead, in accurate opposition, by simply comparing the nascent Pisan school in Italy with the existing school in England. 53. You were perhaps surprised at my placing in your educational series, as a type of original Italian sculpture, the pulpit by Niccola Pisano in the Duomo of Siena. I would rather, had it been possible, have given the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the Duomo of Pisa; but that pulpit is dispersed in fragments through the upper galleries of the Duomo, and the cloister of the Campo Santo; and the casts of its fragments now put together at Kensington are too coarse to be of use to you. You may partly judge, however, of the method of their execution by the eagle's head, which I have sketched from the marble in the Campo Santo (Edu., No. 113), and the lioness with her cubs, (Edu., No. 103, more carefully studied at Siena); and I will get you other illustrations in due time. Meanwhile, I want you to compare the main purpose of the Cathedral of Pisa, and its associated Bell Tower, Baptistery, and Holy Field, with the main purpose of the principal building lately raised for the people of London. In these days, we indeed desire no cathedrals; but we have constructed an enormous and costly edifice, which, in claiming educational influence over the whole London populace, and middle class, is verily the Metropolitan cathedral of this century,--the Crystal Palace. 54. It was proclaimed, at its erection, an example of a newly discovered style of architecture, greater than any hitherto known,--our best popular writers, in their enthusiasm, describing it as an edifice of Fairyland. You are nevertheless to observe that this novel production of fairy enchantment is destitute of every kind of sculpture, except the bosses produced by the heads of nails and rivets; while the Duomo of Pisa, in the wreathen work of its doors, in the foliage of its capitals, inlaid colour designs of its façade, embossed panels of its baptistery font, and figure sculpture of its two pulpits, contained the germ of a school of sculpture which was to maintain, through a subsequent period of four hundred years, the greatest power yet reached by the arts of the world in description of Form, and expression of Thought. 55. Now it is easy to show you the essential cause of the vast discrepancy in the character of these two buildings. In the vault of the apse of the Duomo of Pisa, was a colossal image of Christ, in coloured mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon; and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on the attributes of the God in whom he believed. In precisely the same position with respect to the nave of the building, but of larger size, as proportioned to the three or four times greater scale of the whole, a colossal piece of sculpture was placed by English designers, at the extremity of the Crystal Palace, in preparation for their solemnities in honour of the birthday of Christ, in December, 1867 or 1868. That piece of sculpture was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the mechanism which is our pride, every half minute opened its mouth from ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these periodical seasons of expression being increased and explained by the illuminated inscription underneath "Here we are again." 56. When it is assumed, and with too good reason, that the mind of the English populace is to be addressed, in the principal Sacred Festival of its year, by sculpture such as this, I need scarcely point out to you that the hope is absolutely futile of advancing their intelligence by collecting within this building, (itself devoid absolutely of every kind of art, and so vilely constructed that those who traverse it are continually in danger of falling over the cross-bars that bind it together) examples of sculpture filched indiscriminately from the past work, bad and good, of Turks, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and Christians, miscoloured, misplaced, and misinterpreted;[117] here thrust into unseemly corners, and there mortised together into mere confusion of heterogeneous obstacle; pronouncing itself hourly more intolerable in weariness, until any kind of relief is sought from it in steam wheelbarrows or cheap toy-shops; and most of all in beer and meat, the corks and the bones being dropped through the chinks in the damp deal flooring of the English Fairy Palace. 57. But you will probably think me unjust in assuming that a building prepared only for the amusement of the people can typically represent the architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge, that I ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general. I will, however, in some points, tell you the facts by anticipation. 58. We have much excellent portrait sculpture; but portrait sculpture, which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by men of genius;--nor does it in the least require men of genius to produce it. To paint a portrait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts of painting; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feeling, can carve a satisfactory bust. 59. Of our powers in historical sculpture, I am, without question, just, in taking for sufficient evidence the monuments we have erected to our two greatest heroes by sea and land; namely, the Nelson Column, and the statue of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley House. Nor will you, I hope, think me severe,--certainly, whatever you may think me, I am using only the most temperate language, in saying of both these monuments, that they are absolutely devoid of high sculptural merit. But, consider how much is involved in the fact thus dispassionately stated, respecting the two monuments in the principal places of our capital, to our two greatest heroes. 60. Remember that we have before our eyes, as subjects of perpetual study and thought, the art of all the world for three thousand years past: especially, we have the best sculpture of Greece, for example of bodily perfection; the best of Rome, for example of character in portraiture; the best of Florence, for example of romantic passion: we have unlimited access to books and other sources of instruction; we have the most perfect scientific illustrations of anatomy, both human and comparative; and, we have bribes for the reward of success, large, in the proportion of at least twenty to one, as compared with those offered to the artists of any other period. And with all these advantages, and the stimulus also of fame carried instantly by the press to the remotest corners of Europe, the best efforts we can make, on the grandest of occasions, result in work which it is impossible in any one particular to praise. Now consider for yourselves what an intensity of the negation of the faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measures can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand years, and produce as the result of that instruction, what it is courteous to call "nothing?" 61. That is the conclusion at which we arrive, on the evidence presented by our historical sculpture. To complete the measure of ourselves, we must endeavour to estimate the rank of the two opposite schools of sculpture employed by us in the nominal service of religion, and in the actual service of vice. I am aware of no statue of Christ, nor of any apostle of Christ, nor of any scene related in the New Testament, produced by us within the last three hundred years, which has possessed even superficial merit enough to attract public attention. Whereas the steadily immoral effect of the formative art which we learn, more or less apishly, from the French schools, and employ, but too gladly, in manufacturing articles for the amusement of the luxurious classes, must be ranked as one of the chief instruments used by joyful fiends and angry fates, for the ruin of our civilization. If, after I have set before you the nature and principles of true sculpture, in Athens, Pisa, and Florence, you reconsider these facts,--(which you will then at once recognize as such),--you will find that they absolutely justify my assertion that the state of sculpture in modern England, as compared with that of the great Ancients, is literally one of corrupt and dishonourable death, as opposed to bright and fameful life. 62. And now, will you bear with me, while I tell you finally why this is so? The cause with which you are personally concerned is your own frivolity; though essentially this is not your fault, but that of the system of your early training. But the fact remains the same, that here, in Oxford, you, a chosen body of English youth, in no wise care for the history of your country, for its present dangers, or its present duties. You still, like children of seven or eight years old, are interested only in bats, balls, and oars: nay, including with you the students of Germany and France, it is certain that the general body of modern European youth have their minds occupied more seriously by the sculpture and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the divinest workmanship and passionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and Mediæval Christendom. 63. But the elementary causes, both of this frivolity in you, and of worse than frivolity in older persons, are the two forms of deadly Idolatry which are now all but universal in England. The first of these is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth; worship of which you will find the nature partly examined in the 37th paragraph of my _Munera Pulveris_; but which is briefly to be defined as the servile apprehension of an active power in Money, and the submission to it as the God of our life. 64. The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands we refuse to obey. No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful idolatry, than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority of English religious persons, that the Word of God, by which the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water,--the Word of God which came to the prophets, and comes still for ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear); and which, called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, the armies of heaven,--that this "Word of God" may yet be bound at our pleasure in morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with tasselled ribands to mark the passages she most approves of. 65. Gentlemen, there has hitherto been seen no instance, and England is little likely to give the unexampled spectacle, of a country successful in the noble arts, yet in which the youths were frivolous, the maidens falsely religious, the men, slaves of money, and the matrons, of vanity. Not from all the marble of the hills of Luni will such a people ever shape one statue that may stand nobly against the sky; not from all the treasures bequeathed to them by the great dead, will they gather, for their own descendants, any inheritance but shame. FOOTNOTES: [113] Glance forward at once to § 75, read it, and return to this. [114] There is a primary and vulgar sense of "exhibited" in Lucian's mind; but the higher meaning is involved in it. [115] In the Greek, "ambrosial." Recollect always that ambrosia, as food of gods, is the continual restorer of strength; that all food is ambrosial when it nourishes, and that the night is called "ambrosial" because it restores strength to the soul through its peace, as, in the 23rd Psalm, the stillness of waters. [116] I have italicised this final promise of blessedness, given by the noble Spirit of Workmanship. Compare Carlyle's 5th Latter-day pamphlet, throughout; but especially pp. 12-14, in the first edition. [117] "Falsely represented," would be the better expression. In the cast of the tomb of Queen Eleanor, for a single instance, the Gothic foliage of which one essential virtue is its change over every shield, is represented by a repetition of casts from one mould, of which the design itself is entirely conjectural. LECTURE III. IMAGINATION. _November, 1870._ 66. The principal object of the preceding lecture (and I choose rather to incur your blame for tediousness in repeating, than for obscurity in defining it), was to enforce the distinction between the ignoble and false phase of Idolatry, which consists in the attribution of a spiritual power to a material thing; and the noble and truth-seeking phase of it, to which I shall in these lectures[118] give the general term of Imagination;--that is to say, the invention of material symbols which may lead us to contemplate the character and nature of gods, spirits, or abstract virtues and powers, without in the least implying the actual presence of such Beings among us, or even their possession, in reality, of the forms we attribute to them. [Illustration: FIG. 2.] 67. For instance, in the ordinarily received Greek type of Athena, on vases of the Phidian time (sufficiently represented in the opposite woodcut), no Greek would have supposed the vase on which this was painted to be itself Athena, nor to contain Athena inside of it, as the Arabian fisherman's casket contained the genie; neither did he think that this rude black painting, done at speed as the potter's fancy urged his hand, represented anything like the form or aspect of the Goddess herself. Nor would he have thought so, even had the image been ever so beautifully wrought. The goddess might, indeed, visibly appear under the form of an armed virgin, as she might under that of a hawk or a swallow, when it pleased her to give such manifestation of her presence; but it did not, therefore, follow that she was constantly invested with any of these forms, or that the best which human skill could, even by her own aid, picture of her, was, indeed, a likeness of her. The real use, at all events, of this rude image, was only to signify to the eye and heart the facts of the existence, in some manner, of a Spirit of wisdom, perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger; having also physical dominion over the air which is the life and breadth of all creatures, and clothed, to human eyes, with ægis of fiery cloud, and raiment of falling dew. 68. In the yet more abstract conception of the Spirit of agriculture, in which the wings of the chariot represent the winds of spring, and its crested dragons are originally a mere type of the seed with its twisted root piercing the ground, and sharp-edged leaves rising above it; we are in still less danger of mistaking the symbol for the presumed form of an actual Person. But I must, with persistence, beg of you to observe that in all the noble actions of imagination in this kind, the distinction from idolatry consists, not in the denial of the being, or presence of the Spirit, but only in the due recognition of our human incapacity to conceive the one, or compel the other. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] 69. Farther--and for this statement I claim your attention still more earnestly. As no nation has ever attained real greatness during periods in which it was subject to any condition of Idolatry, so no nation has ever attained or persevered in greatness, except in reaching and maintaining a passionate Imagination of a spiritual estate higher than that of men; and of spiritual creatures nobler than men, having a quite real and personal existence, however imperfectly apprehended by us. And all the arts of the present age deserving to be included under the name of sculpture have been degraded by us, and all principles of just policy have vanished from us,--and that totally,--for this double reason; that we are on one side, given up to idolatries of the most servile kind, as I showed you in the close of the last lecture,--while, on the other hand, we have absolutely ceased from the exercise of faithful imagination; and the only remnants of the desire of truth which remain in us have been corrupted into a prurient itch to discover the origin of life in the nature of the dust, and prove that the source of the order of the universe is the accidental concurrence of its atoms. 70. Under these two calamities of our time, the art of sculpture has perished more totally than any other, because the object of that art is exclusively the representation of form as the exponent of life. It is essentially concerned only with the human form, which is the exponent of the highest life we know; and with all subordinate forms only as they exhibit conditions of vital power which have some certain relation to humanity. It deals with the "particula undique desecta" of the animal nature, and itself contemplates, and brings forward for its disciples' contemplation, all the energies of creation which transform the [Greek: pêlos], or lower still, the [Greek: borboros] of the _trivia_, by Athena's help, into forms of power;--([Greek: to men holon architektôn autos ên. syneirgazeto de toi kai ê 'Athêna empneousa ton pêlon kai empsycha poiousa einai ta plasmata];)[119]--but it has nothing whatever to do with the representation of forms not living, however beautiful, (as of clouds or waves); nor may it condescend to use its perfect skill, except in expressing the noblest conditions of life. These laws of sculpture, being wholly contrary to the practice of our day, I cannot expect you to accept on my assertion, nor do I wish you to do so. By placing definitely good and bad sculpture before you, I do not doubt but that I shall gradually prove to you the nature of all excelling and enduring qualities; but to-day I will only confirm my assertions by laying before you the statement of the Greeks themselves on the subject; given in their own noblest time, and assuredly authoritative, in every point which it embraces, for all time to come. 71. If any of you have looked at the explanation I have given of the myth of Athena in my _Queen of the Air_, you cannot but have been surprised that I took scarcely any note of the story of her birth. I did not, because that story is connected intimately with the Apolline myths; and is told of Athena, not essentially as the goddess of the air, but as the goddess of Art-Wisdom. You have probably often smiled at the legend itself, or avoided thinking of it, as revolting. It is indeed, one of the most painful and childish of sacred myths; yet remember, ludicrous and ugly as it seems to us, this story satisfied the fancy of the Athenian people in their highest state; and if it did not satisfy--yet it was accepted by, all later mythologists: you may also remember I told you to be prepared to find that, given a certain degree of national intellect, the ruder the symbol, the deeper would be its purpose. And this legend of the birth of Athena is the central myth of all that the Greeks have left us respecting the power of their arts; and in it they have expressed, as it seemed good to them, the most important things they had to tell us on these matters. We may read them wrongly; but we must read them here, if anywhere. 72. There are so many threads to be gathered up in the legend, that I cannot hope to put it before you in total clearness, but I will take main points. Athena is born in the island of Rhodes; and that island is raised out of the sea by Apollo, after he had been left without inheritance among the gods. Zeus[120] would have cast the lot again, but Apollo orders the golden-girdled Lachesis to stretch out her hands; and not now by chance or lot, but by noble enchantment, the island rises out of the sea. Physically, this represents the action of heat and light on chaos, especially on the deep sea. It is the "Fiat lux" of Genesis, the first process in the conquest of Fate by Harmony. The island is dedicated to the Nymph Rhodos, by whom Apollo has the seven sons who teach [Greek: sophôtata noêmata]; because the rose is the most beautiful organism existing in matter not vital, expressive of the direct action of light on the earth, giving lovely form and colour at once; (compare the use of it by Dante as the form of the sainted crowd in highest heaven) and remember that, therefore, the rose is in the Greek mind, essentially a Doric flower, expressing the worship of Light, as the Iris or Ion is an Ionic one, expressing the worship of the Winds and Dew. 73. To understand the agency of Hephæstus at the birth of Athena, we must again return to the founding of the arts on agriculture by the hand. Before you can cultivate land you must clear it; and the characteristic weapon of Hephæstus,--which is as much his attribute as the trident is of Poseidon, and the rhabdos of Hermes, is not, as you would have expected, the hammer, but the clearing-axe--the doubled-edged [Greek: pélekys], the same that Calypso gives Ulysses with which to cut down the trees for his home voyage; so that both the naval and agricultural strength of the Athenians are expressed by this weapon, with which they had to hew out their fortune. And you must keep in mind this agriculturally laborious character of Hephæstus, even when he is most distinctly the god of serviceable fire; thus Horace's perfect epithet for him "avidus" expresses at once the devouring eagerness of fire, and the zeal of progressive labour, for Horace gives it to him when he is fighting against the giants. And this rude symbol of his cleaving the forehead of Zeus with the axe, and giving birth to Athena signifies, indeed, physically the thrilling power of heat in the heavens, rending the clouds, and giving birth to the blue air; but far more deeply it signifies the subduing of adverse Fate by true labour; until, out of the chasm, cleft by resolute and industrious fortitude, springs the Spirit of Wisdom. 74. Here (Fig. 4) is an early drawing of the myth, to which I shall have to refer afterwards in illustration of the childishness of the Greek mind at the time when its art-symbols were first fixed; but it is of peculiar value, because the physical character of Vulcan, as fire, is indicated by his wearing the [Greek: endromides] of Hermes, while the antagonism of Zeus, as the adverse chaos, either of cloud or of fate, is shown by his striking at Hephæstus with his thunderbolt. But Plate IV. gives you (as far as the light on the rounded vase will allow it to be deciphered) a characteristic representation of the scene, as conceived in later art. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] 75. I told you in a former lecture of this course that the entire Greek intellect was in a childish phase as compared to that of modern times. Observe, however, childishness does not necessarily imply universal inferiority: there may be a vigorous, acute, pure, and solemn childhood, and there may be a weak, foul, and ridiculous condition of advanced life; but the one is still essentially the childish, and the other the adult phase of existence. 76. You will find, then, that the Greeks were the first people that were born into complete humanity. All nations before them had been, and all around them still were, partly savage, bestial, clay-encumbered, inhuman; still semi-goat, or semi-ant, or semi-stone, or semi-cloud. But the power of a new spirit came upon the Greeks, and the stones were filled with breath, and the clouds clothed with flesh; and then came the great spiritual battle between the Centaurs and Lapithæ; and the living creatures became "Children of Men." Taught, yet, by the Centaur--sown, as they knew, in the fang--from the dappled skin of the brute, from the leprous scale of the serpent, their flesh came again as the flesh of a little child, and they were clean. Fix your mind on this as the very central character of the Greek race--the being born pure and human out of the brutal misery of the past, and looking abroad, for the first time, with their children's eyes, wonderingly open, on the strange and divine world. 77. Make some effort to remember, so far as may be possible to you, either what you felt in yourselves when you were young, or what you have observed in other children, of the action of thought and fancy. Children are continually represented as living in an ideal world of their own. So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present, having little pleasure in memory, and being utterly impatient and tormented by anticipation: weak alike in reflection and forethought, but having an intense possession of the actual present, down to the shortest moments and least objects of it; possessing it, indeed, so intensely that the sweet childish days are as long as twenty days will be; and setting all the faculties of heart and imagination on little things, so as to be able to make anything out of them he chooses. Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine himself somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that; possessed of an acorn-cup, he will not despise it and throw it away, and covet a golden one in its stead: it is the adult who does so. The child keeps his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a golden one out of it in his mind; so that the wondering grown-up person standing beside him is always tempted to ask concerning his treasures, not, "What would you have more than these?" but "What possibly can you see _in_ these?" for, to the bystander, there is a ludicrous and incomprehensible inconsistency between the child's words and the reality. The little thing tells him gravely, holding up the acorn-cup, that "this is a queen's crown, or a fairy's boat," and, with beautiful effrontery, expects him to believe the same. But observe--the acorn-cup must be _there_, and in his own hand. "Give it me;" then I will make more of it for myself. That is the child's one word, always. [Illustration: FIG. 5.] 78. It is also the one word of the Greek--"Give it me." Give me _any_ thing definite here in my sight, then I will make more of it. [Illustration: PLATE V.--TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO.] I cannot easily express to you how strange it seems to me that I am obliged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek art; that I find, in spite of all the devotion of the admirable scholars who have so long maintained in our public schools the authority of Greek literature, our younger students take no interest in the manual work of the people upon whose thoughts the tone of their early intellectual life has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or armour, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating within even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that we at first cannot recognize the art as elucidatory of, or in any way related to, the poetic language. 79. You will find, however, exactly the same kind of discrepancy between early sculpture, and the languages of deed and thought, in the second birth, and childhood, of the world, under Christianity. The same fair thoughts and bright imaginations arise again; and similarly, the fancy is content with the rudest symbols by which they can be formalized to the eyes. You cannot understand that the rigid figure (2) with chequers or spots on its breast, and sharp lines of drapery to its feet, could represent, to the Greek, the healing majesty of heaven: but can you any better understand how a symbol so haggard as this (Fig. 5) could represent to the noblest hearts of the Christian ages the power and ministration of angels? Yet it not only did so, but retained in the rude undulatory and linear ornamentation of its dress, record of the thoughts intended to be conveyed by the spotted ægis and falling chiton of Athena, eighteen hundred years before. Greek and Venetian alike, in their noble childhood, knew with the same terror the coiling wind and congealed hail in heaven--saw with the same thankfulness the dew shed softly on the earth, and on its flowers; and both recognized, ruling these, and symbolized by them, the great helpful spirit of Wisdom, which leads the children of men to all knowledge, all courage, and all art. 80. Read the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription:-- "Quos natura pares studiis, virtutibus, arte Edidit, illustres genitor natusque, sepulti Hác sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles Theupula collatis dedit hos celebranda triumphis. Omnia presentis donavit predia templi Dux Jacobus: valido fixit moderamine leges Urbis, et ingratam redimens certamine Jadram Dalmatiosque dedit patrie, post, Marte subactas Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine classes. Suscipit oblatos princeps Laurentius Istros, Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage cadentes, Bononie populos. Hinc subdita Cervia cessit. Fundavere vias pacis; fortique relictá Re, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo. "Dominus Jachobus hobiit[121] M.CCLI. Dominus Laurentius hobiit M.CCLXXVIII." You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of thirteenth century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an example of the (coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in Greece to the thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols was everything and the workmanship comparatively nothing. The upper head is an Athena, of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth century--(the coin itself may have been struck later, but the archaic type was retained). The two smaller impressions below are the front and obverse of a coin of the same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on one side, and Pegasus, with the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller head is bare, the hair being looped up at the back and closely bound with an olive branch. You are to note this general outline of the head, already given in a more finished type in Plate II., as a most important elementary form in the finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all Christendom. In the upper head the hair is restrained still more closely by a round helmet, for the most part smooth, but embossed with a single flower tendril, having one bud, one flower, and above it, two olive leaves. You have thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to human thought of the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the earth. An olive leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a tree, but the two can, when set in position of growth. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH.] I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the rest; but here it is, wonderfully engraved for you (Fig. 6): of it we shall have more to say afterwards. [Illustration: FIG. 6.] 81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of Greece, and at the vestiges, still ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the religion of Christendom, take warning against two opposite errors. There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek art is deserving of study, and that all our work at this day should be an imitation of it. Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of Athena and her owl, and be assured that Greek art is not in all respects perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation. There is another school of teachers who will tell you that Greek art is good for nothing; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works. Whenever you feel tempted to believe _them_, think of this angel on the tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo; and remember, that Christianity, after it had been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth, could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of Greece to help it; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had invented. 82. Receiving these two warnings, receive also this lesson; In both examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue, they are the thoughts of men. We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without sincerity;--absolutely, therefore, without imagination, and without virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of machines; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we cling to in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of in vanity, without loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or imitate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it; we cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it; we are, in the sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechanisms of conceited clay, masked in the furs and feathers of living creatures, and convulsed with voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation. 83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence. They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment. For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes' tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and give lustre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for advertisement's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury; and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth (still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentry boxes. 84. Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side and of St. Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and stately moment of its whole course--it has to pass under one of the arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the damp shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which are, in point of fact, the principal approach to it, a-foot, from central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this approach, living designers _are_ answerable. 85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it or, rather, half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam. Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, and Peace of Heaven. 86. I am obliged always to use the English word "Grace" in two senses, but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (§ 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti]), led the mind of mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:-- "Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy, become trustworthy through Love." 87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emêsato pioton]--"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be so"--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity--a part which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that, to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of the [Greek: mênis] and [Greek: mnêmê] with which we seek after them, does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for; evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they were. 88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I referred you to the forms of passionate affection with which a noble people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged [Greek: charis] in the form of gratitude, the return of Love for benefits continually bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest minds, when they are honourable and pure, makes this untrue thing trustworthy; [Greek: apiston emêsato piston], until it becomes to them the safe basis of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature. Next to the marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the sculpture of Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the entrance of its temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your introduction to the best sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms under which it represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But, without restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply point out to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate and heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in _Comus_, the endearing and tender promise, "Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium," and the joyful and proud affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted land,-- Te, Lari maxume, teque Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino, may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river, as the final worship rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more forcibly. 89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with too much attention), Molière's most perfect work, the _Misanthrope_, must remember Celiméne's description of her lovers, and her excellent reason for being unable to regard with any favour, "notre grand flandrin de vicomte,--depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher dans un puits pour faire des ronds." That sentence is worth noting, both in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs, and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the loathsome habit among the upper classes of Europe and America, which now renders all external grace, dignity, and decency, impossible in the thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that sentence of Molière's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light, and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching, as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat below. 90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within ten miles of our University. Most of all, is it terrific when we regard it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is), of the temper which, as distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation, the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of youth;--teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and the grace of behaviour, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in shame. 91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his resolute labour. 92. "[Greek: Aphaistou technaisi]." Note that word of Pindar in the Seventh Olympic. This axe-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been "[Greek: tês de dexias cheros ergon dikaias tektonos]"; physically, it meant the opening of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of local terrestrial heat of Hephæstus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on the surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them; and, spiritually, it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude labour, the clearing-axe in the hand of the woodman being the practical elementary sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood. Then he goes on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing forth, cried with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled at her, and the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed out, physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud, she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at her reproof. 93. Uttereth her voice in "the streets." For all men, that is to say; but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them? What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what the sign of the people's obedience to her? This was to be the sign--"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-labouring hands in every art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes, undeceitful." 94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were, of the woodman's axe; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word and a blow. She guides the hands that labour best, in every art. 95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that labour best, is that the streets and ways, [Greek: keleuthoi], shall be filled by likenesses of living and creeping things? Things living, and creeping! Are the Reptile things not alive then? You think Pindar wrote that carelessly? or that, if he had only known a little modern anatomy, instead of "reptile" things, he would have said "monochondylous" things? Be patient, and let us attend to the main points first. Sculpture, it thus appears, is the only work of wisdom that the Greeks care to speak of; they think it involves and crowns every other. Image-making art; _this_ is Athena's, as queenliest of the arts. Literature, the order and the strength of word, of course belongs to Apollo and the Muses; under Athena are the Substances and the Forms of things. 96, Thirdly. By this forming of Images there is to be gained a "deep"--that is to say--a weighty, and prevailing, glory; not a floating nor fugitive one. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes, "undeceitful." "[Greek: Daenti]" I am forced to use two English words to translate that single Greek one. The "cunning" workman, thoughtful in experience, touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of ship-timber true, (_Il._ xv. 410) [Greek: "All' ôste stathmê dory nêion exithynei tektonos en palamêsi daêmonos, hos ra te pasês ed eidê sophiês, upothêmosynêsin Athênês,"] and the beautiful epithet of Persephone, "[Greek: daeira]," as the Tryer and Knower of good work; and remembering these, trust Pindar for the truth of his saying, that to the cunning workman--(and let me solemnly enforce the words by adding--that to him _only_,) knowledge comes undeceitful. 97. You may have noticed, perhaps, and with a smile, as one of the paradoxes you often hear me blamed for too fondly stating, what I told you in the close of my Third Introductory Lecture, that "so far from art's being immoral, little else except art is moral." I have now farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise; that all knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve itself into some elementary practice of manual labour. And I would, in all sober and direct earnestness advise you, whatever may be the aim, predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually with your hands, something that is useful to mankind. To do anything well with your hands, useful or not;--to be, even in trifling, [Greek: palamêsi daêmôn] is already much;--when we come to examine the art of the middle ages I shall be able to show you that the strongest of all influences of right then brought to bear upon character was the necessity for exquisite manual dexterity in the management of the spear and bridle; and in your own experience most of you will be able to recognize the wholesome effect, alike on body and mind, of striving, within proper limits of time, to become either good batsmen, or good oarsmen. But the bat and the racer's oar are children's toys. Resolve that you will be men in usefulness, as well as in strength; and you will find that then also, but not till then, you can become men in understanding; and that every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you thenceforward undeceitfully, [Greek: hypothêmosynêsin Athênês]. 98. But there is more to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is thinking, in his brief, intense way, at once of Athena's work on the soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His "[Greek: keleuthoi]" is a wide word meaning all the paths of sea and land. Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work _actually is_--in the literal fact of it. The blue, clear air _is_ the sculpturing power upon the earth and sea. Where the surface of the earth is reached by that, and its matter and substance inspired with, and filled by that, organic form becomes possible. You must indeed have the sun, also, and moisture; the kingdom of Apollo risen out of the sea: but the sculpturing of living things, shape by shape, is Athena's, so that under the brooding spirit of the air, what was without form, and void brings forth the moving creature that hath life. 99. That is her work then--the giving of Form; then the separately Apolline work is the giving of Light; or, more strictly, Sight: giving that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light, but the existence of it; for light is to be defined only as the sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions; those same conditions being, to a stone, only warmth or chemical influence, but not light. And that power of seeing, and the other various personalities and authorities of the animal body, in pleasure and pain, have never, hitherto, been, I do not say, explained, but in any wise touched or approached by scientific discovery. Some of the conditions of mere external animal form and of muscular vitality have been shown; but for the most part that is true, even of external form, which I wrote six years ago. "You may always stand by Form against Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of it, and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or whatever else they like to call it), in a tea-kettle, as in a gier-eagle. Very good: that is so; and it is very interesting. It requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the gier-eagle up to his nest, and as much more to bring him down again on a hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects, attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are, that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction also of volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode of force--but, then to an artist, the form or mode is the gist of the business." 100. As you will find that it is, not to the artist only, but to all of us. The laws under which matter is collected and constructed are the same throughout the universe: the substance so collected, whether for the making of the eagle, or the worm, may be analyzed into gaseous identity; a diffusive vital force, apparently so closely related to mechanically measurable heat as to admit the conception of its being itself mechanically measurable, and unchanging in total quantity, ebbs and flows alike through the limbs of men, and the fibres of insects. But, above all this, and ruling every grotesque or degraded accident of this, are two laws of beauty in form, and of nobility in character, which stand in the chaos of creation between the Living and the Dead, to separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature; and the power of Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these [Greek: zôa and erpeta], these living and reptile things, is put forth, finally, in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from the other; to know the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the unquenchable fires of Death; and to choose, not unaided, between submission to the Love that cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die. 101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct, which have become the curses of recent science,[122] art, and policy. 102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present, not to be decided, and of which the decision is to persons in the modern temper of mind, wholly without significance: and I earnestly desire that you, my pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that you were once seraphs; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you have passed through the elementary condition of apes. 103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is only of moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot expect your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves--in the other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening the advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be so), with incredulous disdain. 104. But that you _are_ yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay; that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you acknowledge instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you that the man is worthier than the baboon--_this_ is a fact of infinite significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter. 105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Remember that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of _texture_, but as an instrument of _picture_; the ideas of clothing, and of the warmth of life, being thus inseparably connected with those of graphic beauty and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor without the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colours of needlework. There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and Gobelins. 106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on her own robe; "[Greek: peplon heanon, poikilon hou r autê poiêsato kai kame chersin]." The subject of that [Greek: poikilia] of hers, as you know, was the war of the giants and gods. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is that used by Hesiod, "[Greek: pêlochonoi]," "mud-begotten," and the meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, [Greek: pêlogonôn elatêr], is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the goddess of breath; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you, daily, of the earth, heaping itself into cumbrous war with the powers above it. 107. Thus briefly, the entire material of Art, under Athena's hand, is the contest of life with clay; and all my task in explaining to you the early thought of both the Athenian and Tuscan schools will only be the tracing of this battle of the giants into its full heroic form, when, not in tapestry only--but in sculpture--and on the portal of the Temple of Delphi itself, you have the "[Greek: klonos en teichesi lainoisi gigantôn]," and their defeat hailed by the passionate cry of delight from the Athenian maids, beholding Pallas in her full power, "[Greek: leussô Pallad' eman theon]," my own goddess. All our work, I repeat, will be nothing but the inquiry into the development of this the subject, and the pressing fully home the question of Plato about that embroidery--"And think you that there is verily war with each other among the Gods? and dreadful enmities and battle, such as the poets have told, and such as our painters set forth in graven scripture, to adorn all our sacred rites and holy places; yes, and in the great Panathenaea themselves, the Peplus, full of such wild picturing, is carried up into the Acropolis--shall we say that these things are true, oh Euthuphron, right-minded friend?" 108. Yes, we say, and know, that these things are true; and true for ever: battles of the gods, not among themselves, but against the earth-giants. Battle prevailing age by age, in nobler life and lovelier imagery; creation, which no theory of mechanism, no definition of force, can explain, the adoption and completing of individual form by individual animation, breathed out of the lips of the Father of Spirits. And to recognize the presence in every knitted shape of dust, by which it lives and moves and has its being--to recognize it, revere, and show it forth, is to be our eternal Idolatry. "Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them." "Assuredly no," we answered once, in our pride; and through porch and aisle, broke down the carved work thereof, with axes and hammers. Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to worship, not the creatures, but their atoms,--not the forces that form, but those that dissolve them? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is stringent against adoration of brutality, is stringent no less against adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be reformed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice;--it is well,--if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts. We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair phantasms, to which we once sought for succour;--it is well, if we learn to distrust also the adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation; but the verity of gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honour in the fervent heart, by which, increasing visibly, may yet be manifested to us the holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving God, who visits the iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto thousands in them that love Him, and keep His Commandments. FOOTNOTES: [118] I shall be obliged in future lectures, as hitherto in my other writings, to use the terms, Idolatry and Imagination in a more comprehensive sense; but here I use them for convenience sake, limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms, noble and ignoble, or false and true, with reference to modes of conception. [119] "And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the moulded things to have soul (psyche) in them."--LUCIAN, PROMETHEUS. [120] His relations with the two great Titans, Themis and Mnemosyne, belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long withdraws and disguises herself. [121] The Latin verses are of later date; the contemporary plain prose retains the Venetian gutturals and aspirates. [122] The best modern illustrated scientific works show perfect faculty of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects; absolute incapability of representing either a man, a horse, or a lion. LECTURE IV. LIKENESS. _November, 1870._ 109. You were probably vexed, and tired, towards the close of my last lecture, by the time it took us to arrive at the apparently simple conclusion, that sculpture must only represent organic form, and the strength of life in its contest with matter. But it is no small thing to have that "[Greek: leussô Pallada]" fixed in your minds, as the one necessary sign by which you are to recognize right sculpture, and believe me you will find it the best of all things, if you can take for yourselves the saying from the lips of the Athenian maids, in its entirety, and say also--[Greek: leussô Pallad' eman theon]. I proceed to-day into the practical appliance of this apparently speculative, but in reality imperative, law. 110. You observe, I have hitherto spoken of the power of Athena, as over painting no less than sculpture. But her rule over both arts is only so far as they are zoographic;--representative, that is to say, of animal life, or of such order and discipline among other elements, as may invigorate and purify it. Now there is a speciality of the art of painting beyond this, namely, the representation of phenomena of colour and shadow, as such, without question of the nature of the things that receive them. I am now accordingly obliged to speak of sculpture and painting as distinct arts, but the laws which bind sculpture, bind no less the painting of the higher schools which has, for its main purpose, the showing beauty in human or animal form; and which is therefore placed by the Greeks equally under the rule of Athena, as the Spirit, first, of Life, and then of Wisdom in conduct. 111. First, I say, you are to "see Pallas" in all such work, as the Queen of Life; and the practical law which follows from this, is one of enormous range and importance, namely, that nothing must be represented by sculpture, external to any living form, which does not help to enforce or illustrate the conception of life. Both dress and armour may be made to do this, by great sculptors, and are continually so used by the greatest. One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and Florentine schools is dependent on their treatment of drapery in this respect; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body, by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to illustrate both its form and gesture; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery to conceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental emotion: but both use it to enhance the life, either of the body or soul; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic chivalry, ennoble armour in the same way; but base sculptors carve drapery and armour for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only, and forget the body beneath. The rule is so stern that all delight in mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly forbidden to sculpture;--for instance, in _painting_ the branch of a tree, you may rightly represent and enjoy the lichens and moss on it, but a sculptor must not touch one of them: they are inessential to the tree's life,--he must give the flow and bending of the branch only, else he does not enough "see Pallas" in it. Or to take a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem, by Edward Frere; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within the last two months[123] have been laid desolate in unhappy France. Every accessory in the painting is of value--the fireside, the tiled floor, the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible in sculpture. You must carve nothing but what has life. "Why"? you probably feel instantly inclined to ask me.--You see the principle we have got, instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are startled the moment I apply it. "Must we refuse every pleasant accessory and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures"?--Even so: I would not assert it on my own authority. It is the Greeks who say it, but whatever they say of sculpture, be assured, is true. 112. That then is the first law--you must see Pallas as the Lady of Life--the second is, you must see her as the Lady of Wisdom; or [Greek: sophia]--and this is the chief matter of all. I cannot but think, that after the considerations into which we have now entered, you will find more interest than hitherto in comparing the statements of Aristotle, in the Ethics, with those of Plato in the Polity, which are authoritative as Greek definitions of goodness in art, and which you may safely hold authoritative as constant definitions of it. You remember, doubtless, that the [Greek: sophia] or [Greek: aretê technês], for the sake of which Phidias is called [Greek: sophos] as a sculptor, and Polyclitus as an image-maker, Eth. 6. 7. (the opposition is both between ideal and portrait sculpture, and between working in stone and bronze) consists in the "[Greek: nous tôn timiôtatôn tê physei]" "the mental apprehension of the things that are most honourable in their nature." Therefore what is, indeed, most lovely, the true image-maker will most love; and what is most hateful, he will most hate, and in all things discern the best and strongest part of them, and represent that essentially, or, if the opposite of that, then with manifest detestation and horror. That is his art wisdom; the knowledge of good and evil, and the love of good, so that you may discern, even in his representation of the vilest thing, his acknowledgment of what redemption is possible for it, or latent power exists in it; and, contrariwise, his sense of its present misery. But for the most part, he will idolize, and force us also to idolize, whatever is living, and virtuous, and victoriously right; opposing to it in some definite mode the image of the conquered [Greek: herpeton]. 113. This is generally true of both the great arts; but in severity and precision, true of sculpture. To return to our illustration: this poor little girl was more interesting to Edward Frere, he being a painter, because she was poorly dressed, and wore these clumsy shoes, and old red cap, and patched gown. May we sculpture her so? No. We may sculpture her naked, if we like; but not in rags. But if we may not put her into marble in rags, may we give her a pretty frock with ribands and flounces to it, and put her into marble in that? No. We may put her simplest peasant's dress, so it be perfect and orderly, into marble; anything finer than that would be more dishonourable in the eyes of Athena than rags. If she were a French princess, you might carve her embroidered robe and diadem; if she were Joan of Arc you might carve her armour--for then these also would be "[Greek: tôn timiôtatôn]," not otherwise. 114. Is not this an edge-tool we have got hold of, unawares? and a subtle one too; so delicate and scimitar-like in decision. For note, that even Joan of Arc's armour must be only sculptured, _if she has it on_; it is not the honourableness or beauty of it that are enough, but the direct bearing of it by her body. You might be deeply, even pathetically, interested by looking at a good knight's dinted coat of mail, left in his desolate hall. May you sculpture it where it hangs? No; the helmet for his pillow, if you will--no more. You see we did not do our dull work for nothing in last lecture. I define what we have gained once more, and then we will enter on our new ground. 115. The proper subject of sculpture, we have determined, is the spiritual power seen in the form of any living thing, and so represented as to give evidence that the sculptor has loved the good of it and hated the evil. "_So_ represented," we say; but how is that to be done? Why should it not be represented, if possible, just as it is seen? What mode or limit of representation may we adopt? We are to carve things that have life;--shall we try so to imitate them that they may indeed seem living,--or only half living, and like stone instead of flesh? It will simplify this question if I show you three examples of what the Greeks actually did: three typical pieces of their sculpture, in order of perfection. 116. And now, observe that in all our historical work, I will endeavour to do, myself, what I have asked you to do in your drawing exercises; namely, to outline firmly in the beginning, and then fill in the detail more minutely. I will give you first, therefore, in a symmetrical form, absolutely simple and easily remembered, the large chronology of the Greek school; within that unforgettable scheme we will place, as we discover them, the minor relations of arts and times. I number the nine centuries before Christ thus, upwards, and divide them into three groups of three each. { 9 A. ARCHAIC. { 8 { 7 ---- { 6 B. BEST. { 5 { 4 ---- { 3 C. CORRUPT. { 2 { 1 Then the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries are the period of Archaic Greek Art, steadily progressive wherever it existed. The sixth, fifth, and fourth are the period of central Greek Art; the fifth, or central century producing the finest. That is easily recollected by the battle of Marathon. And the third, second, and first centuries are the period of steady decline. [Illustration: PLATE VII.--ARCHAIC, CENTRAL AND DECLINING ART OF GREECE.] Learn this A B C thoroughly, and mark, for yourselves, what you, at present, think the vital events in each century. As you know more, you will think other events the vital ones; but the best historical knowledge only approximates to true thought in that matter; only be sure that what is truly vital in the character which governs events, is always expressed by the art of the century; so that if you could interpret that art rightly, the better part of your task in reading history would be done to your hand. 117. It is generally impossible to date with precision art of the archaic period--often difficult to date even that of the central three hundred years. I will not weary you with futile minor divisions of time; here are three coins (Plate VII.) roughly, but decisively, characteristic of the three ages. The first is an early coin of Tarentum. The city was founded as you know, by the Spartan Phalanthus, late in the eighth century. I believe the head is meant for that of Apollo Archegetes, it may however be Taras, the son of Poseidon; it is no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we cannot know, is itself of the greatest import. We cannot say, with any certainty, unless by discovery of some collateral evidence, whether this head is intended for that of a god, or demi-god, or a mortal warrior. Ought not that to disturb some of your thoughts respecting Greek idealism? Farther, if by investigation we discover that the head is meant for that of Phalanthus, we shall know nothing of the character of Phalanthus from the face; for there is no portraiture at this early time. 118. The second coin is of Ænus in Macedonia; probably of the fifth or early fourth century, and entirely characteristic of the central period. This we know to represent the face of a god--Hermes. The third coin is a king's, not a city's. I will not tell you, at this moment, what king's; but only that it is a late coin of the third period, and that it is as distinct in purpose as the coin of Tarentum is obscure. We know of this coin, that it represents no god nor demi-god, but a mere mortal; and we know precisely, from the portrait, what that mortal's face was like. 119. A glance at the three coins, as they are set side by side, will now show you the main differences in the three great Greek styles. The archaic coin is sharp and hard; every line decisive and numbered, set unhesitatingly in its place; nothing is wrong, though everything incomplete, and, to us who have seen finer art, ugly. The central coin is as decisive and clear in arrangement of masses, but its contours are completely rounded and finished. There is no character in its execution so prominent that you can give an epithet to the style. It is not hard, it is not soft, it is not delicate, it is not coarse, it is not grotesque, it is not beautiful; and I am convinced, unless you had been told that this is fine central Greek art, you would have seen nothing at all in it to interest you. Do not let yourselves be anywise forced into admiring it; there is, indeed, nothing more here, than an approximately true rendering of a healthy youthful face, without the slightest attempt to give an expression of activity, cunning, nobility, or any other attribute of the Mercurial mind. Extreme simplicity, unpretending vigour of work, which claims no admiration either for minuteness or dexterity, and suggests no idea of effort at all; refusal of extraneous ornament, and perfectly arranged disposition of counted masses in a sequent order, whether in the beads, or the ringlets of hair; this is all you have to be pleased with; neither will you ever find, in the best Greek Art, more. You might at first suppose that the chain of beads round the cap was an extraneous ornament; but I have little doubt that it is as definitely the proper fillet for the head of Hermes, as the olive for Zeus, or corn for Triptolemus. The cap or petasus cannot have expanded edges, there is no room for them on the coin; these must be understood, therefore; but the nature of the cloud-petasus is explained by edging it with beads, representing either dew or hail. The shield of Athena often bears white pellets for hail, in like manner. 120. The third coin will, I think, at once strike you by what we moderns should call its "vigour of character." You may observe also that the features are finished with great care and subtlety, but at the cost of simplicity and breadth. But the _essential_ difference between it and the central art, is its disorder in design--you see the locks of hair cannot be counted any longer--they are entirely dishevelled and irregular. Now the individual character may, or may not be, a sign of decline; but the licentiousness, the casting loose of the masses in the design, is an infallible one. The effort at portraiture is good for art if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance before you, the head is that of Mithridates VI. of Pontus, who had, indeed, the good qualities of being a linguist and a patron of the arts; but as you will remember, murdered, according to report, his mother, certainly his brother, certainly his wives and sisters, I have not counted how many of his children, and from a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand persons besides; these last in a single day's massacre. The effort to represent this kind of person is not by any means a method of study from life ultimately beneficial to art. 121. This however is not the point I have to urge to-day. What I want you to observe is that, though the master of the great time does not attempt portraiture, he _does_ attempt animation. And as far as his means will admit, he succeeds in making the face--you might almost think--vulgarly animated; as like a real face, literally, "as it can stare." Yes: and its sculptor meant it to be so; and that was what Phidias meant his Jupiter to be, if he could manage it. Not, indeed, to be taken for Zeus himself; and yet, to be as like a living Zeus as art could make it. Perhaps you think he tried to make it look living only for the sake of the mob, and would not have tried to do so for connoisseurs. Pardon me; for real connoisseurs, he would, and did; and herein consists a truth which belongs to all the arts, and which I will at once drive home in your minds, as firmly as I can. 122. All second-rate artists--(and remember, the second-rate ones are a loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century; and then, silently)--all second-rate artists will tell you that the object of fine art is not resemblance, but some kind of abstraction more refined than reality. Put that out of your heads at once. The object of the great Resemblant Arts is, and always has been, to resemble; and to resemble as closely as possible. It is the function of a good portrait to set the man before you in habit as he lived, and I would we had a few more that did so. It is the function of a good landscape to set the scene before you in its reality, to make you, if it may be, think the clouds are flying, and the streams foaming. It is the function of the best sculptor--the true Dædalus--to make stillness look like breathing, and marble look like flesh. 123. And in all great times of art, this purpose is as naïvely expressed as it is steadily held. All the talk about abstraction belongs to periods of decadence. In living times, people see something living that pleases them; and they try to make it live for ever, or to make it something as like it as possible, that will last for ever. They paint their statues, and inlay the eyes with jewels, and set real crowns on their heads; they finish, in their pictures, every thread of embroidery, and would fain, if they could, draw every leaf upon the trees. And their only verbal expression of conscious success is, that they have made their work "look real." 124. You think all that very wrong. So did I, once; but it was I that was wrong. A long time ago, before ever I had seen Oxford, I painted a picture of the Lake of Como, for my father. It was not at all like the Lake of Como; but I thought it rather the better for that. My father differed with me; and objected particularly to a boat with a red and yellow awning, which I had put into the most conspicuous corner of my drawing. I declared this boat to be "necessary to the composition." My father not the less objected, that he had never seen such a boat, either at Como or elsewhere; and suggested that if I would make the lake look a little more like water, I should be under no necessity of explaining its nature by the presence of floating objects. I thought him at the time a very simple person for his pains; but have since learned, and it is the very gist of all practical matters, which, as professor of fine art, I have now to tell you, that the great point in painting a lake is--to get it to look like water. 125. So far, so good. We lay it down for a first principle, that our graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something which shall look as like Nature as possible. But now we must go one step farther, and say that it is to produce what shall look like Nature to people who know what Nature is like! You see this is at once a great restriction, as well as a great exaltation of our aim. Our business is not to deceive the simple; but to deceive the wise! Here, for instance, is a modern Italian print, representing, to the best of its power, St. Cecilia, in a brilliantly realistic manner. And the fault of the work is not in its earnest endeavour to show St. Cecilia in habit as she lived, but in that the effort could only be successful with persons unaware of the habit St. Cecilia lived in. And this condition of appeal only to the wise increases the difficulty of imitative resemblance so greatly, that, with only average skill or materials, we must surrender all hope of it, and be content with an imperfect representation, true as far as it reaches, and such as to excite the imagination of a wise beholder to complete it; though falling very far short of what either he or we should otherwise have desired. For instance, here is a suggestion, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, of the general appearance of a British Judge--requiring the imagination of a very wise beholder indeed, to fill it up, or even at first to discover what it is meant for. Nevertheless, it is better art than the Italian St. Cecilia, because the artist, however little he may have done to represent his knowledge, does, indeed, know altogether what a Judge is like, and appeals only to the criticism of those who know also. 126. There must be, therefore, two degrees of truth to be looked for in the good graphic arts; one, the commonest, which, by any partial or imperfect sign conveys to you an idea which you must complete for yourself; and the other, the finest, a representation so perfect as to leave you nothing to be farther accomplished by this independent exertion; but to give you the same feeling of possession and presence which you would experience from the natural object itself. For instance of the first, in this representation of a rainbow,[124] the artist has no hope that, by the black lines of engraving, he can deceive you into any belief of the rainbow's being there, but he gives indication enough of what he intends, to enable you to supply the rest of the idea yourself, providing always you know beforehand what a rainbow is like. But in this drawing of the falls of Terni,[125] the painter has strained his skill to the utmost to give an actually deceptive resemblance of the iris, dawning and fading among the foam. So far as he has not actually deceived you, it is not because he would not have done so if he could; but only because his colours and science have fallen short of his desire. They have fallen so little short that, in a good light, you may all but believe the foam and the sunshine are drifting and changing among the rocks. 127. And after looking a little while, you will begin to regret that they are not so: you will feel that, lovely as the drawing is, you would like far better to see the real place, and the goats skipping among the rocks, and the spray floating above the fall. And this is the true sign of the greatest art--to part voluntarily with its greatness;--to make _itself_ poor and unnoticed; but so to exalt and set forth its theme that you may be fain to see the theme instead of it. So that you have never enough admired a great workman's doing till you have begun to despise it. The best homage that could be paid to the Athena of Phidias would be to desire rather to see the living goddess; and the loveliest Madonnas of Christian art fall short of their due power, if they do not make their beholders sick at heart to see the living Virgin. 128. We have then, for our requirement of the finest art (sculpture, or anything else), that it shall be so like the thing it represents as to please those who best know or can conceive the original; and, if possible, please them deceptively--its final triumph being to deceive even the wise; and (the Greeks thought) to please even the Immortals, who were so wise as to be undeceivable. So that you get the Greek, thus far entirely true, idea of perfectness in sculpture, expressed to you by what Phalaris says, at first sight of the bull of Perilaus, "It only wanted motion and bellowing to seem alive; and as soon as I saw it, I cried out, it ought to be sent to the god." To Apollo, for only he, the undeceivable, could thoroughly understand such sculpture, and perfectly delight in it. 129. And with this expression of the Greek ideal of sculpture, I wish you to join the early Italian, summed in a single line by Dante--"non vide me' di me, chi vide 'l vero." Read the 12th canto of the "Purgatory," and learn that whole passage by heart; and if ever you chance to go to Pistoja, look at La Robbia's coloured porcelain bas-reliefs of the seven works of Mercy on the front of the hospital there; and note especially the faces of the two sick men--one at the point of death, and the other in the first peace and long-drawn breathing of health after fever--and you will know what Dante meant by the preceding line, "Morti li morti, e i vivi parèn vivi." 130. But now, may we not ask farther,--is it impossible for art such as this, prepared for the wise, to please the simple also? Without entering on the awkward questions of degree, how many the wise can be, or how much men should know, in order to be rightly called wise, may we not conceive an art to be possible, which would deceive _every_body, or everybody worth deceiving? I showed you at my first lecture, a little ringlet of Japan ivory, as a type of elementary bas-relief touched with colour; and in your rudimentary series you have a drawing by Mr. Burgess, of one of the little fishes enlarged, with every touch of the chisel facsimiled on the more visible scale; and showing the little black bead inlaid for the eye, which in the original is hardly to be seen without a lens. You may, perhaps be surprised, when I tell you, that (putting the question of _subject_ aside for the moment, and speaking only of the mode of execution and aim at resemblance), you have there a perfect example of the Greek ideal of method in sculpture. And you will admit that, to the simplest person whom we could introduce as a critic, that fish would be a satisfactory, nay, almost a deceptive fish; while to any one caring for subtleties of art, I need not point out that every touch of the chisel is applied with consummate knowledge, and that it would be impossible to convey more truth and life with the given quantity of workmanship. [Illustration: FIG. 7.] 131. Here is, indeed, a drawing by Turner, (Edu. 131), in which with some fifty times the quantity of labour, and far more highly educated faculty of sight, the artist has expressed some qualities of lustre and colour which only very wise persons indeed could perceive in a John Dory; and this piece of paper contains, therefore, much more, and more subtle, art, than the Japan ivory; but are we sure that it is therefore _greater_ art? or that the painter was better employed in producing this drawing, which only one person can possess, and only one in a hundred enjoy, than he would have been in producing two or three pieces on a larger scale, which should have been at once accessible to, and enjoyable by, a number of simpler persons? Suppose for instance, that Turner, instead of faintly touching this outline, on white paper, with his camel's hair pencil, had struck the main forms of his fish into marble, thus (Fig. 7): and instead of colouring the white paper so delicately that, perhaps, only a few of the most keenly observant artists in England can see it at all, had, with his strong hand, tinted the marble with a few colours, deceptive to the people, and harmonious to the initiated; suppose that he had even conceded so much to the spirit of popular applause as to allow of a bright glass bead being inlaid for the eye, in the Japanese manner; and that the enlarged, deceptive, and popularly pleasing work had been carved on the outside of a great building,--say Fishmongers' Hall,--where everybody commercially connected with Billingsgate could have seen it, and ratified it with the wisdom of the market;--might not the art have been greater, worthier, and kinder in such use? 132. Perhaps the idea does not once approve itself to you of having your public buildings covered with ornaments like this; but pray, remember that the choice of _subject_ is an ethical question, not now before us. All I ask you to decide is whether the method is right, and would be pleasant in giving the distinctiveness to pretty things, which it has here given to what, I suppose it may be assumed, you feel to be an ugly thing. Of course, I must note parenthetically, such realistic work is impossible in a country where the buildings are to be discoloured by coal-smoke; but so is all fine sculpture, whatsoever; and the whiter, the worse its chance. For that which is prepared for private persons, to be kept under cover, will, of necessity, degenerate into the copyism of past work, or merely sensational and sensual forms of present life, unless there be a governing school addressing the populace, for their instruction, on the outside of buildings. So that, as I partly warned you in my third lecture, you can simply have _no_ sculpture in a coal country. Whether you like coals or carvings best, is no business of mine. I merely have to assure you of the fact that they are incompatible. But, assuming that we are again, some day, to become a civilized and governing race, deputing ironmongery, coal-digging, and lucre-digging, to our slaves in other countries, it is quite conceivable that, with an increasing knowledge of natural history, and desire for such knowledge, what is now done by careful, but inefficient, woodcuts, and in ill-coloured engravings, might be put in quite permanent sculptures, with inlay of variegated precious stones, on the outside of buildings, where such pictures would be little costly to the people; and in a more popular manner still, by Robbia ware and Palissy ware, and inlaid majolica, which would differ from the housewives' present favourite decoration of plates above her kitchen dresser, by being every piece of it various, instructive, and universally visible. 133. You hardly know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream or jest. Still, I do not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture wholly of this character; though beast, and fowl, and creeping things, and fishes, might all find room on such a building as the Solomon's House of a New Atlantis; and some of them might even become symbolic of much to us again. Passing through the Strand, only the other day, for instance, I saw four highly finished and delicately coloured pictures of cock-fighting, which, for imitative quality, were nearly all that could be desired, going far beyond the Greek cock of Himera; and they would have delighted a Greek's soul, if they had meant as much as a Greek cock-fight; but they were only types of the "[Greek: endomachas alektôr]," and of the spirit of home contest, which has been so fatal lately to the Bird of France; and not of the defence of one's own barnyard, in thought of which the Olympians set the cock on the pillars of their chariot course; and gave it goodly alliance in its battle, as you may see here, in what is left of the angle of mouldering marble in the chair of the priest of Dionusos. The cast of it, from the centre of the theatre under the Acropolis, is in the British Museum; and I wanted its spiral for you, and this kneeling Angel of Victory;--it is late Greek art, but nobly systematic flat bas-relief. So I set Mr. Burgess to draw it; but neither he nor I for a little while, could make out what the Angel of Victory was kneeling for. His attitude is an ancient and grandly conventional one among the Egyptians; and I was tracing it back to a kneeling goddess of the greatest dynasty of the Pharaohs--a goddess of Evening, or Death, laying down the sun out of her right hand;--when, one bright day, the shadows came out clear on the Athenian throne, and I saw that my Angel of Victory was only backing a cock at a cock-fight. 134. Still, as I have said, there is no reason why sculpture, even for simplest persons, should confine itself to imagery of fish, or fowl, or four-footed things. We go back to our first principle: we ought to carve nothing but what is honourable. And you are offended, at this moment, with my fish, (as I believe, when the first sculptures appeared on the windows of this museum, offence was taken at the unnecessary introduction of cats), these dissatisfactions being properly felt by your "[Greek: nous tôn timiôtatôn]." For indeed, in all cases, our right judgment must depend on our wish to give honour only to things and creatures that deserve it. 135. And now I must state to you another principle of veracity, both in sculpture, and all following arts, of wider scope than any hitherto examined. We have seen that sculpture is to be a true representation of true external form. Much more is it to be a representation of true internal emotion. You must carve only what you yourself see as you see it; but, much more, you must carve only what you yourself feel, as you feel it. You may no more endeavour to feel through other men's souls, than to see with other men's eyes. Whereas generally now in Europe and America, every man's energy is bent upon acquiring some false emotion, not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all second hand; and we are practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a door-knocker without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are gone--where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we could. 136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for real growth, but what we can find of honest liking and longing, in ourselves and in others. We must discover, if we would healthily advance, what things are verily [Greek: timiôtata] among us; and if we delight to honour the dishonourable, consider how, in future, we may better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me from all our popular declarations, that we, at present, honour nothing so much as liberty and independence; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man, who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one. And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture, was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest approach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely organized [Greek: herpeton]. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if you take the Septuagint text.--"[Greek: poiêseis tous anthrôpous hôs tous ichthyas tês thalassês, kai hôs ta herpeta ta ouk echonta hêgoumenon."] "Thou wilt make men as the fishes of the sea, and as the reptile things, _that have no ruler over them_." And it chanced that as I was preparing this lecture, one of our most able and popular prints gave me a woodcut of the "self-made man," specified as such, so vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias or Turner himself could scarcely have done it better; so that I had only to ask my assistant to enlarge it with accuracy, and it became comparable with my fish at once. Of course it is not given by the caricaturist as an admirable face; only, I am enabled by his skill to set before you, without any suspicion of unfairness on _my_ part, the expression to which the life we profess to think most honourable, naturally leads. If we were to take the hat off, you see how nearly the profile corresponds with that of the typical fish. [Illustration: PLATE VIII.--THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE MAN.] 137. Such, then, being the definition by your best popular art, of the ideal of feature at which we are gradually arriving by self-manufacture; when I place opposite to it (in Plate VIII.) the profile of a man not in any wise self-made, neither by the law of his own will, nor by the love of his own interest--nor capable, for a moment, of any kind of "Independence," or of the idea of independence; but wholly dependent upon, and subjected to, external influence of just law, wise teaching, and trusted love and truth, in his fellow-spirits;--setting before you, I say, this profile of a God-made instead of a self-made, man, I know that you will feel, on the instant, that you are brought into contact with the vital elements of human art; and that this, the sculpture of the good, is indeed the only permissible sculpture. 138. A God-made _man_, I say. The face, indeed, stands as a symbol of more than man in its sculptor's mind. For as I gave you, to lead your first effort in the form of leaves, the sceptre of Apollo, so this, which I give you as the first type of rightness in the form of flesh, is the countenance of the holder of that sceptre, the Sun-God of Syracuse. But there is nothing in the face (nor did the Greek suppose there was) more perfect than might be seen in the daily beauty of the creatures the Sun-God shone upon, and whom his strength and honour animated. This is not an ideal, but a quite literally true, face of a Greek youth; nay, I will undertake to show you that it is not supremely beautiful, and even to surpass it altogether with the literal portrait of an Italian one. It is in verity no more than the form habitually taken by the features of a well educated young Athenian or Sicilian citizen; and the one requirement for the sculptors of to-day is not, as it has been thought, to invent the same ideal, but merely to see the same reality. Now, you know I told you in my fourth lecture, that the beginning of art was in getting our country clean and our people beautiful, and you supposed that to be a statement irrelevant to my subject; just as, at this moment, you perhaps think, I am quitting the great subject of this present lecture--the method of likeness-making--and letting myself branch into the discussion of what things we are to make likeness of. But you shall see hereafter that the method of imitating a beautiful thing must be different from the method of imitating an ugly one; and that, with the change in subject from what is dishonourable to what is honourable, there will be involved a parallel change in the management of tools, of lines, and of colours. So that before I can determine for you _how_ you are to imitate, you must tell me what kind of face you wish to imitate. The best draughtsmen in the world could not draw this Apollo in ten scratches, though he can draw the self-made man. Still less this nobler Apollo of Ionian Greece, (Plate IX.) in which the incisions are softened into a harmony like that of Correggio's painting. So that you see the method itself,--the choice between black incision or fine sculpture, and perhaps, presently, the choice between colour or no colour, will depend on what you have to represent. Colour may be expedient for a glistening dolphin or a spotted fawn;--perhaps inexpedient for white Poseidon, and gleaming Dian. So that, before defining the laws of sculpture, I am compelled to ask you, _what you mean to carve_; and that, little as you think it, is asking you how you mean to live, and what the laws of your State are to be, for _they_ determine those of your statue. You can only have this kind of face to study from, in the sort of state that produced it. And you will find that sort of state described in the beginning of the fourth book of the laws of Plato; as founded, for one thing, on the conviction that of all the evils that can happen to a state, quantity of money is the greatest! [Greek: meizon kakon, ôs epos eipein, polei ouden an gignoito, eis gennaiôn kai dikaiôn êthôn ktêsin], "for, to speak shortly, no greater evil, matching each against each, can possibly happen to a city, as adverse to its forming just or generous character," than its being full of silver and gold. 139. Of course, the Greek notion may be wrong, and ours right, only--[Greek: ôs epos eipein]--you can have Greek sculpture only on that Greek theory: shortly expressed by the words put into the mouth of Poverty herself, in the Plutus of Aristophanes "[Greek: Tou ploutou parechô beltionas andras, kai tên gnômên, kai tên idean]," "I deliver to you better men than the God of Money can, both in imagination and feature." So on the other hand, this ichthyoid, reptilian, or mono-chondyloid ideal of the self-made man can only be reached, universally, by a nation which holds that poverty, either of purse or spirit,--but especially the spiritual character of being [Greek: ptôchoi tô pneumati], is the lowest of degradations; and which believes that the desire of wealth is the first of manly and moral sentiments. As I have been able to get the popular ideal represented by its own living art, so I can give you this popular faith in its own living words; but in words meant seriously and not at all as caricature, from one of our leading journals, professedly æsthetic also in its very name, the _Spectator_, of August 6th, 1870. [Illustration: PLATE IX.--APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENÆ.] "Mr. Ruskin's plan," it says, "would make England poor, in order that she might be cultivated, and refined and artistic. A wilder proposal was never broached by a man of ability; and it might be regarded as a proof that the assiduous study of art emasculates the intellect, _and even the moral sense_. Such a theory almost warrants the contempt with which art is often regarded by essentially intellectual natures, like Proudhon" (sic). "Art is noble as the flower of life, and the creations of a Titian are a great heritage of the race; but if England could secure high art and Venetian glory of colour only by the sacrifice of her manufacturing supremacy, and _by the acceptance of national poverty_, then the pursuit of such artistic achievements would imply that we had ceased to possess natures of manly strength, _or to know the meaning of moral aims_. If we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton mill, then, in the name of manhood and of morality, give us the cotton mill. Only the dilettantism of the studio; that dilettantism which loosens the moral no less than the intellectual fibre, and which is as fatal to rectitude of action as to correctness of reasoning power, would make a different choice." You see also, by this interesting and most memorable passage, how completely the question is admitted to be one of ethics--the only real point at issue being, whether this face or that is developed on the truer moral principle. 140. I assume, however, for the present, that this Apolline type is the kind of form you wish to reach and to represent. And now observe, instantly, the whole question of manner of imitation is altered for us. The fins of the fish, the plumes of the swan, and the flowing of the Sun-God's hair are all represented by incisions--but the incisions do sufficiently represent the fin and feather,--they _in_sufficiently represent the hair. If I chose, with a little more care and labor, I could absolutely get the surface of the scales and spines of the fish, and the expression of its mouth; but no quantity of labor would obtain the real surface of a tress of Apollo's hair, and the full expression of his mouth. So that we are compelled at once to call the imagination to help us, and say to it, _You_ know what the Apollo Chrysocomes must be like; finish all this for yourself. Now, the law under which imagination works, is just that of other good workers. "You must give me clear orders; show me what I have to do, and where I am to begin, and let me alone." And the orders can be given, quite clearly, up to a certain point, in form; but they cannot be given clearly in color, now that the subject is subtle. All beauty of this high kind depends on harmony; let but the slightest discord come into it, and the finer the thing is, the more fatal will be the flaw. Now, on a flat surface, I can command my color to be precisely what and where I mean it to be; on a round one I cannot. For all harmony depends, first, on the fixed proportion of the color of the light to that of the relative shadow; and therefore if I fasten my color, I must fasten my shade. But on a round surface the shadow changes at every hour of the day; and therefore all coloring which is expressive of form, is impossible; and if the form is fine, (and here there is nothing but what is fine,) you may bid farewell to color. 141. Farewell to color; that is to say, if the thing is to be seen distinctly, and you have only wise people to show it to; but if it is to be seen indistinctly, at a distance, color may become explanatory; and if you have simple people to show it to, color may be necessary to excite _their_ imaginations, though not to excite yours. And the art is great always by meeting its conditions in the straightest way; and if it is to please a multitude of innocent and bluntly-minded persons, must express itself in the terms that will touch them; else it is not good. And I have to trace for you through the history of the past, and possibilities of the future, the expedients used by great sculptors to obtain clearness, impressiveness, or splendor; and the manner of their appeal to the people, under various light and shadow, and with reference to different degrees of public intelligence: such investigation resolving itself again and again, as we proceed, into questions absolutely ethical; as, for instance, whether color is to be bright or dull,--that is to say, for a populace cheerful or heartless;--whether it is to be delicate or strong,--that is to say, for a populace attentive or careless; whether it is to be a background like the sky, for a procession of young men and maidens, because your populace revere life--or the shadow of the vault behind a corpse stained with drops of blackened blood, for a populace taught to worship Death. Every critical determination of rightness depends on the obedience to some ethic law, by the most rational and, therefore, simplest means. And you see how it depends most, of all things, on whether you are working for chosen persons, or for the mob; for the joy of the boudoir, or of the Borgo. And if for the mob, whether the mob of Olympia, or of St. Antoine. Phidias, showing his Jupiter for the first time, hides behind the temple door to listen, resolved afterwards "[Greek: rhythmizein to agalma pros to tois pleistois dokoun, ou gar hêgeito mikran einai symboulên dêmou tosoutou]," and truly, as your people is, in judgment, and in multitude, so must your sculpture be, in glory. An elementary principle which has been too long out of mind. 142. I leave you to consider it, since, for some time, we shall not again be able to take up the inquiries to which it leads. But, ultimately, I do not doubt that you will rest satisfied in these following conclusions: 1. Not only sculpture, but all the other fine arts, must be for the people. 2. They must be didactic to the people, and that as their chief end. The structural arts, didactic in their manner; the graphic arts, in their matter also. 3. And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts--that is to say, the drama and sculpture--are to teach what is noble in past history, and lovely in existing human and organic life. 4. And the test of right manner of execution in these arts, is that they strike, in the most emphatic manner, the rank of popular minds to which they are addressed. 5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfil the words of their greatest Master, "THE BEST, IN THIS KIND, ARE BUT SHADOWS." FOOTNOTES: [123] See date of delivery of Lecture. The picture was of a peasant girl of eleven or twelve years old, peeling carrots by a cottage fire. [124] In Durer's "Melencholia." [125] Turner's, in the Hakewill series. LECTURE V. STRUCTURE. _December, 1870._ 143. On previous occasions of addressing you, I have endeavoured to show you, first, how sculpture is distinguished from other arts; then its proper subjects, then its proper method in the realization of these subjects. To-day, we must, in the fourth place, consider the means at its command for the accomplishment of these ends; the nature of its materials; and the mechanical or other difficulties of their treatment. And however doubtful we may have remained, as to the justice of Greek ideals, or propriety of Greek methods of representing them, we may be certain that the example of the Greeks will be instructive in all practical matters relating to this great art, peculiarly their own. I think even the evidence I have already laid before you is enough to convince you, that it was by rightness and reality, not by idealism or delightfulness only, that their minds were finally guided; and I am sure that, before closing the present course, I shall be able so far to complete that evidence, as to prove to you that the commonly received notions of classic art are, not only unfounded, but even in many respects, directly contrary to the truth. You are constantly told that Greece idealized whatever she contemplated. She did the exact contrary: she realized and verified it. You are constantly told she sought only the beautiful. She sought, indeed, with all her heart; but she found, because she never doubted that the search was to be consistent with propriety and common sense. And the first thing you will always discern in Greek work is the first which you _ought_ to discern in all work; namely, that the object of it has been rational, and has been obtained by simple and unostentatious means. 144. "That the object of the work has been rational!" Consider how much that implies. That it should be by all means seen to have been determined upon, and carried through, with sense and discretion; these being gifts of intellect far more precious than any knowledge of mathematics, or of the mechanical resources of art. Therefore, also, that it should be a modest and temperate work, a structure fitted to the actual state of men; proportioned to their actual size, as animals,--to their average strength,--to their true necessities,--and to the degree of easy command they have over the forces and substances of nature. 145. You see how much this law excludes! All that is fondly magnificent, insolently ambitious, or vainly difficult. There is, indeed, such a thing as Magnanimity in design, but never unless it be joined also with modesty and _Equ_animity. Nothing extravagant, monstrous, strained, or singular, can be structurally beautiful. No towers of Babel envious of the skies; no pyramids in mimicry of the mountains of the earth; no streets that are a weariness to traverse, nor temples that make pigmies of the worshippers. It is one of the primal merits and decencies of Greek work that it was, on the whole, singularly small in scale, and wholly within reach of sight, to its finest details. And, indeed, the best buildings that I know are thus modest; and some of the best are minute jewel cases for sweet sculpture. The Parthenon would hardly attract notice, if it were set by the Charing Cross Railway Station: the Church of the Miracoli, at Venice, the Chapel of the Rose, at Lucca, and the Chapel of the Thorn, at Pisa, would not, I suppose, all three together, fill the tenth part, cube, of a transept of the Crystal Palace. And they are better so. 146. In the chapter on Power in the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," I have stated what seems, at first, the reverse of what I am saying now; namely, that it is better to have one grand building than any number of mean ones. And that is true, but you cannot command grandeur by size till you can command grace in minuteness; and least of all, remember, will you so command it to-day, when magnitude has become the chief exponent of folly and misery, co-ordinate in the fraternal enormities of the Factory and Poorhouse,--the Barracks and Hospital. And the final law in this matter is, that if you require edifices only for the grace and health of mankind, and build them without pretence and without chicanery, they will be sublime on a modest scale, and lovely with little decoration. 147. From these principles of simplicity and temperance, two very severely fixed laws of construction follow; namely, first, that our structure, to be beautiful, must be produced with tools of men; and secondly, that it must be composed of natural substances. First, I say, produced with tools of men. All fine art requires the application of the whole strength and subtlety of the body, so that such art is not possible to any sickly person, but involves the action and force of a strong man's arm from the shoulder, as well as the delicatest touch of his finger: and it is the evidence that this full and fine strength has been spent on it which makes the art executively noble; so that no instrument must be used, habitually, which is either too heavy to be delicately restrained, or too small and weak to transmit a vigorous impulse; much less any mechanical aid, such as would render the sensibility of the fingers ineffectual.[126] 148. Of course, any kind of work in glass, or in metal, on a large scale, involves some painful endurance of heat; and working in clay, some habitual endurance of cold; but the point beyond which the effort must not be carried is marked by loss of power of manipulation. As long as the eyes and fingers have complete command of the material (as a glass blower has, for instance, in doing fine ornamental work)--the law is not violated; but all our great engine and furnace work, in gun-making and the like, is degrading to the intellect; and no nation can long persist in it without losing many of its human faculties. Nay, even the use of machinery, other than the common rope and pully, for the lifting of weights, is degrading to architecture; the invention of expedients for the raising of enormous stones has always been a characteristic of partly savage or corrupted races. A block of marble not larger than a cart with a couple of oxen could carry, and a cross-beam, with a couple of pulleys, raise, is as large as should generally be used in any building. The employment of large masses is sure to lead to vulgar exhibitions of geometrical arrangement,[127] and to draw away the attention from the sculpture. In general, rocks naturally break into such pieces as the human beings that have to build with them can easily lift, and no larger should be sought for. 149. In this respect, and in many other subtle ways, the law that the work is to be with tools of men is connected with the farther condition of its modesty, that it is to be wrought in substance provided by Nature, and to have a faithful respect to all the essential qualities of such substance. And here I must ask your attention to the idea, and, more than idea,--the fact, involved in that infinitely misused term, "Providentia," when applied to the Divine Power. In its truest sense and scholarly use, it is a human virtue, [Greek: Promêtheia]; the personal type of it is in Prometheus, and all the first power of [Greek: technê], is from him, as compared to the weakness of days when men without foresight "[Greek: ephyron eikê panta]." But, so far as we use the word "Providence" as an attribute of the Maker and Giver of all things, it does not mean that in a shipwreck He takes care of the passengers who are to be saved and takes none of those who are to be drowned; but it _does_ mean that every race of creatures is born into the world under circumstances of approximate adaptation to its necessities; and, beyond all others, the ingenious and observant race of man is surrounded with elements naturally good for his food, pleasant to his sight, and suitable for the subjects of his ingenuity;--the stone, metal, and clay of the earth he walks upon lending themselves at once to his hand, for all manner of workmanship. 150. Thus, his truest respect for the law of the entire creation is shown by his making the most of what he can get most easily; and there is no virtue of art, nor application of common sense, more sacredly necessary than this respect to the beauty of natural substance, and the ease of local use; neither are there any other precepts of construction so vital as these--that you show all the strength of your material, tempt none of its weaknesses, and do with it only what can be simply and permanently done. 151. Thus, all good building will be with rocks, or pebbles, or burnt clay, but with no artificial compound; all good painting, with common oils and pigments on common canvas, paper, plaster, or wood,--admitting, sometimes for precious work, precious things, but all applied in a simple and visible way. The highest imitative art should not, indeed, at first sight, call attention to the means of it; but even that, at length, should do so distinctly, and provoke the observer to take pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting its unctious quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten together into rugged walls. In a marble country one should be always more and more astonished at the exquisite colour and structure of marble; in a slate country one should feel as if every rock cleft itself only for the sake of being built with conveniently. [Illustration: PLATE X.--MARBLE MASONRY IN THE DUOMO OF VERONA.] 152. Now, for sculpture, there are, briefly, two materials--Clay, and Stone; for glass is only a clay that gets clear and brittle as it cools, and metal a clay that gets opaque and tough as it cools. Indeed, the true use of gold in this world is only as a very pretty and very ductile clay, which you can spread as flat as you like, spin as fine as you like, and which will neither crack, nor tarnish. All the arts of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word "Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the word "Glyptic." 153. Sculpture in clay will accordingly include all cast brick-work, pottery, and tile-work[128]--a somewhat important branch of human skill. Next to the potter's work, you have all the arts in porcelain, glass, enamel, and metal; everything, that is to say, playful and familiar in design, much of what is most felicitously inventive, and, in bronze or gold, most precious and permanent. 154. Sculpture in stone, whether granite, gem, or marble, while we accurately use the general term "glyptic" for it, may be thought of with, perhaps, the most clear force under the English word "engraving." For, from the mere angular incision which the Greek consecrated in the triglyphs of his greatest order of architecture, grow forth all the arts of bas-relief, and methods of localized groups of sculpture connected with each other and with architecture: as, in another direction, the arts of engraving and wood-cutting themselves. 155. Over all this vast field of human skill the laws which I have enunciated to you rule with inevitable authority, embracing the greatest, and consenting to the humblest, exertion; strong to repress the ambition of nations, if fantastic and vain, but gentle to approve the efforts of children, made in accordance with the visible intention of the Maker of all flesh, and the Giver of all Intelligence. These laws, therefore, I now repeat, and beg of you to observe them as irrefragable. 1. That the work is to be with tools of men. 2. That it is to be in natural materials. 3. That it is to exhibit the virtues of those materials, and aim at no quality inconsistent with them. 4. That its temper is to be quiet and gentle, in harmony with common needs, and in consent to common intelligence. We will now observe the bearing of these laws on the elementary conditions of the art at present under discussion. 156. There is, first, work in baked clay, which contracts as it dries, and is very easily frangible. Then you must put no work into it requiring niceness in dimension, nor any so elaborate that it would be a great loss if it were broken, but as the clay yields at once to the hand, and the sculptor can do anything with it he likes, it is a material for him to sketch with and play with,--to record his fancies in, before they escape him--and to express roughly, for people who can enjoy such sketches, what he has not time to complete in marble. The clay, being ductile, lends itself to all softness of line; being easily frangible, it would be ridiculous to give it sharp edges, so that a blunt and massive rendering of graceful gesture will be its natural function; but as it can be pinched, or pulled, or thrust in a moment into projection which it would take hours of chiselling to get in stone, it will also properly be used for all fantastic and grotesque form, not involving sharp edges. Therefore, what is true of chalk and charcoal, for painters, is equally true of clay, for sculptors; they are all most precious materials for true masters, but tempt the false ones into fatal license; and to judge rightly of terra-cotta work is a far higher reach of skill in sculpture-criticism than to distinguish the merits of a finished statue. 157. We have, secondly, work in bronze, iron, gold, and other metals; in which the laws of structure are still more definite. All kinds of twisted and wreathen work on every scale become delightful when wrought in ductile or tenacious metal, but metal which is to be _hammered_ into form separates itself into two great divisions--solid, and flat. [Illustration: PLATE XI.--THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE. Incised Outline and Opened Space.] (A.) In solid metal work, _i. e._, metal cast thick enough to resist bending, whether it be hollow or not, violent and various projection may be admitted, which would be offensive in marble; but no sharp edges, because it is difficult to produce them with the hammer. But since the permanence of the material justifies exquisiteness of workmanship, whatever delicate ornamentation can be wrought with rounded surfaces may be advisedly introduced; and since the colour of bronze or any other metal is not so pleasantly representative of flesh as that of marble, a wise sculptor will depend less on flesh contour, and more on picturesque accessories, which, though they would be vulgar if attempted in stone, are rightly entertaining in bronze or silver. Verrochio's statue of Colleone at Venice, Cellini's Perseus at Florence, and Ghiberti's gates at Florence, are models of bronze treatment. (B.) When metal is beaten thin, it becomes what is technically called "plate," (the _flattened_ thing) and may be treated advisably in two ways; one, by beating it out into bosses, the other by cutting it into strips and ramifications. The vast schools of goldsmith's work and of iron decoration, founded on these two principles, have had the most powerful influences over general taste in all ages and countries. One of the simplest and most interesting elementary examples of the treatment of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive style of iron-work, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the bending down of the several portions. The ordinary domestic window balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribands of iron, bent into curves as studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated merely by their own terminations in spiral volutes. [Illustration: FIG. 8.] All cast work in metal, unfinished by hand, is inadmissible in any school of living art, since it cannot possess the perfection of form due to a permanent substance; and the continual sight of it is destructive of the faculty of taste: but metal stamped with precision, as in coins, is to sculpture what engraving is to painting. 158. Thirdly. Stone-sculpture divides itself into three schools: one in very hard material; one in very soft, and one in that of centrally useful consistence. A. The virtue of work in hard material is the expression of form in shallow relief, or in broad contours; deep cutting in hard material is inadmissible, and the art, at once pompous and trivial, of gem engraving, has been in the last degree destructive of the honour and service of sculpture. B. The virtue of work in soft material is deep cutting, with studiously graceful disposition of the masses of light and shade. The greater number of flamboyant churches of France are cut out of an adhesive chalk; and the fantasy of their latest decoration was, in great part, induced by the facility of obtaining contrast of black space, undercut, with white tracery easily left in sweeping and interwoven rods--the lavish use of wood in domestic architecture materially increasing the habit of delight in branched complexity of line. These points, however, I must reserve for illustration in my lectures on architecture. To-day, I shall limit myself to the illustration of elementary sculptural structure in the best material;--that is to say, in crystalline marble, neither soft enough to encourage the caprice of the workman, nor hard enough to resist his will. 159. C. By the true "Providence" of Nature, the rock which is thus submissive has been in some places stained with the fairest colours, and in others blanched into the fairest absence of colour, that can be found to give harmony to inlaying, or dignity to form. The possession by the Greeks of their [Greek: leukos lithos] was indeed the first circumstance regulating the development of their art; it enabled them at once to express their passion for light by executing the faces, hands, and feet of their dark wooden statues in white marble, so that what we look upon only with pleasure for fineness of texture was to them an imitation of the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes; and ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate colour--(therefore to this day the favourite ground of miniature painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach-coloured marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white marble and green serpentine between Pisa and Genoa, defined the manner both of sculpture and architecture for all the Gothic buildings of Italy. No subtlety of education could have formed a high school of art without these materials. 160. Next to the colour, the fineness of substance which will take a perfectly sharp edge, is essential; and this not merely to admit fine delineation in the sculpture itself, but to secure a delightful precision in placing the blocks of which it is composed. For the possession of too fine marble, as far as regards the work itself, is a temptation instead of an advantage to an inferior sculptor; and the abuse of the facility of undercutting, especially of undercutting so as to leave profiles defined by an edge against shadow, is one of the chief causes of decline of style in such encrusted bas-reliefs as those of the Certosa of Pavia and its contemporary monuments. But no undue temptation ever exists as to the fineness of block fitting; nothing contributes to give so pure and healthy a tone to sculpture as the attention of the builder to the jointing of his stones; and his having both the power to make them fit so perfectly as not to admit of the slightest portion of cement showing externally, and the skill to insure, if needful, and to suggest always, their stability in cementless construction. Plate X. represents a piece of entirely fine Lombardic building, the central portion of the arch in the Duomo of Verona, which corresponds to that of the porch of San Zenone, represented in Plate I. In both these pieces of building, the only line that traces the architrave round the arch, is that of the masonry joint; yet this line is drawn with extremest subtlety, with intention of delighting the eye by its relation of varied curvature to the arch itself; and it is just as much considered as the finest pen-line of a Raphael drawing. Every joint of the stone is used, in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign of pre-eminence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb, into the stone of the course above. 161. Proceeding from this fine jointing to fine draughtsmanship, you have, in the very outset and earliest stage of sculpture, your flat stone surface given you as a sheet of white paper, on which you are required to produce the utmost effect you can with the simplest means, cutting away as little of the stone as may be, to save both time and trouble; and, above all, leaving the block itself, when shaped, as solid as you can, that its surface may better resist weather, and the carved parts be as much protected as possible by the masses left around them. 162. The first thing to be done is clearly to trace the outline of subject with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow of a plough, only more equal-sided. A fine sculptor strikes it, as his chisel leans, freely, on marble; an Egyptian, in hard rock, cuts it sharp, as in cuneiform inscriptions. In any case, you have a result somewhat like the upper figure, Plate XI., in which I show you the most elementary indication of form possible, by cutting the outline of the typical archaic Greek head with an incision like that of a Greek triglyph, only not so precise in edge or slope, as it is to be modified afterwards. 163. Now, the simplest thing we can do next, is to round off the flat surface _within_ the incision, and put what form we can get into the feebler projection of it thus obtained. The Egyptians do this, often with exquisite skill, and then, as I showed you in a former lecture, colour the whole--using the incision as an outline. Such a method of treatment is capable of good service in representing, at little cost of pains, subjects in distant effect, and common, or merely picturesque, subjects even near. To show you what it is capable of, and what coloured sculpture would be in its rudest type, I have prepared the coloured relief of the John Dory[129] as a natural history drawing for distant effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly--as ugly as any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier things--peacocks and kingfishers,--butterflies and flowers, on grounds of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect you, in right use of your æsthetic faculties, to like those better than what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if you will look, after the lecture, first at the mere white relief, and then see how much may be gained by a few dashes of colour, such as a practised workman could lay in a quarter of an hour,--the whole forming, if well done, almost a deceptive image--you will, at least, have the range of power in Egyptian sculpture clearly expressed to you. 164. But for fine sculpture, we must advance by far other methods. If we carve the subject with real delicacy, the cast shadow of the incision will interfere with its outline, so that, for representation of beautiful things, you must clear away the ground about it, at all events for a little distance. As the law of work is to use the least pains possible, you clear it only just as far back as you need, and then for the sake of order and finish, you give the space a geometrical outline. By taking, in this case, the simplest I can,--a circle,--I can clear the head with little labor in the removal of surface round it; (see the lower figure in Plate XI.) 165. Now, these are the first terms of all well-constructed bas-relief. The mass you have to treat consists of a piece of stone, which, however you afterwards carve it, can but, at its most projecting point, reach the level of the external plane surface out of which it was mapped, and defined by a depression round it; that depression being at first a mere trench, then a moat of certain width, of which the outer sloping bank is in contact, as a limiting geometrical line, with the laterally salient portions of sculpture. This, I repeat, is the primal construction of good bas-relief, implying, first, perfect protection to its surface from any transverse blow, and a geometrically limited space to be occupied by the design, into which it shall pleasantly (and as you shall ultimately see, ingeniously,) contract itself: implying, secondly, a determined depth of projection, which it shall rarely reach, and never exceed: and implying, finally, the production of the whole piece with the least possible labor of chisel and loss of stone. 166. And these, which are the first, are very nearly the last constructive laws of sculpture. You will be surprised to find how much they include, and how much of minor propriety in treatment their observance involves. In a very interesting essay on the architecture of the Parthenon, by the professor of architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique, M. Emile Boutmy, you will find it noticed that the Greeks do not usually weaken, by carving, the constructive masses of their building; but put their chief sculpture in the empty spaces between the triglyphs, or beneath the roof. This is true; but in so doing, they merely build their panel instead of carving it; they accept no less than the Goths, the laws of recess and limitation, as being vital to the safety and dignity of their design; and their noblest recumbent statues are, constructively, the fillings of the acute extremity of a panel in the form of an obtusely summitted triangle. 167. In gradual descent from that severest type, you will find that an immense quantity of sculpture of all times and styles may be generally embraced under the notion of a mass hewn out of, or, at least, placed in, a panel or recess, deepening, it may be, into a niche; the sculpture being always designed with reference to its position in such recess; and, therefore, to the effect of the building out of which the recess is hewn. But, for the sake of simplifying our inquiry, I will at first suppose no surrounding protective ledge to exist, and that the area of stone we have to deal with is simply a flat slab, extant from a flat surface depressed all round it. 168. A _flat_ slab, observe. The flatness of surface is essential to the problem of bas-relief. The lateral limit of the panel may, or may not, be required; but the vertical limit of surface _must_ be expressed; and the art of bas-relief is to give the effect of true form on that condition. For observe, if nothing more were needed than to make first a cast of a solid form, then cut it in half, and apply the half of it to the flat surface;--if, for instance, to carve a bas-relief of an apple, all I had to do was to cut my sculpture of the whole apple in half, and pin it to the wall, any ordinary trained sculptor, or even a mechanical workman, could produce bas-relief; but the business is to carve a _round_ thing out of _flat_ thing; to carve an apple out of a biscuit!--to conquer, as a subtle Florentine has here conquered,[130] his marble, so as not only to get motion into what is most rigidly fixed, but to get boundlessness into what is most narrowly bounded; and carve Madonna and Child, rolling clouds, flying angels, and space of heavenly air behind all, out of a film of stone not the third of an inch thick where it is thickest. 169. Carried, however, to such a degree of subtlety as this, and with so ambitious and extravagant aim, bas-relief becomes a tour-de-force; and, you know, I have just told you all tours-de-force are wrong. The true law of bas-relief is to begin with a depth of incision proportioned justly to the distance of the observer and the character of the subject, and out of that rationally determined depth, neither increased for ostentation of effect, nor diminished for ostentation of skill, to do the utmost that will be easily visible to an observer, supposing him to give an average human amount of attention, but not to peer into, or critically scrutinize the work. 170. I cannot arrest you to-day by the statement of any of the laws of sight and distance which determine the proper depth of bas-relief. Suppose that depth fixed; then observe what a pretty problem, or, rather, continually varying cluster of problems, will be offered to us. You might, at first, imagine that, given what we may call our scale of solidity, or scale of depth, the diminution from nature would be in regular proportion, as for instance, if the real depth of your subject be, suppose a foot, and the depth of your bas-relief an inch, then the parts of the real subject which were six inches round the side of it would be carved, you might imagine, at the depth of half-an-inch, and so the whole thing mechanically reduced to scale. But not a bit of it. Here is a Greek bas-relief of a chariot with two horses (upper figure, Plate XXI). Your whole subject has therefore the depth of two horses side by side, say six or eight feet. Your bas-relief has, on the scale,[131] say the depth of the third of an inch. Now, if you gave only the sixth of an inch for the depth of the off horse, and, dividing him again, only the twelfth of an inch for that of each foreleg, you would make him look a mile away from the other, and his own forelegs a mile apart. Actually, the Greek has made the _near leg of the off horse project much beyond the off leg of the near horse_; and has put nearly the whole depth and power of his relief into the breast of the off horse, while for the whole distance from the head of the nearest to the neck of the other, he has allowed himself only a shallow line; knowing that, if he deepened that, he would give the nearest horse the look of having a thick nose; whereas, by keeping that line down, he has not only made the head itself more delicate, but detached it from the other by giving no cast shadow, and left the shadow below to serve for thickness of breast, cutting it as sharp down as he possibly can, to make it bolder. 171. Here is a fine piece of business we have got into!--even supposing that all this selection and adaptation were to be contrived under constant laws, and related only to the expression of given forms. But the Greek sculptor, all this while, is not only debating and deciding how to show what he wants, but, much more, debating and deciding what, as he can't show everything, he will choose to show at all. Thus, being himself interested, and supposing that you will be, in the manner of the driving, he takes great pains to carve the reins, to show you where they are knotted, and how they are fastened round the driver's waist (you recollect how Hippolytus was lost by doing that), but he does not care the least bit about the chariot, and having rather more geometry than he likes in the cross and circle of one wheel of it, entirely omits the other! 172. I think you must see by this time that the sculptor's is not quite a trade which you can teach like brickmaking; nor its produce an article of which you can supply any quantity "demanded" for the next railroad waiting-room. It may perhaps, indeed, seem to you that, in the difficulties thus presented by it, bas-relief involves more direct exertion of intellect than finished solid sculpture. It is not so, however. The questions involved by bas-relief are of a more curious and amusing kind, requiring great variety of expedients; though none except such as a true workmanly instinct delights in inventing and invents easily; but design in solid sculpture involves considerations of weight in mass, of balance, of perspective and opposition, in projecting forms, and of restraint for those which must not project, such as none but the greatest masters have ever completely solved; and they, not always; the difficulty of arranging the composition so as to be agreeable from points of view on all sides of it, being, itself, arduous enough. 173. Thus far, I have been speaking only of the laws of structure relating to the projection of the mass which becomes itself the sculpture. Another most interesting group of constructive laws governs its relation to the line that contains or defines it. In your Standard Series I have placed a photograph of the south transept of Rouen Cathedral. Strictly speaking, all standards of Gothic are of the thirteenth century; but, in the fourteenth, certain qualities of richness are obtained by the diminution of restraint; out of which we must choose what is best in their kinds. The pedestals of the statues which once occupied the lateral recesses are, as you see, covered with groups of figures, enclosed each in a quatrefoil panel; the spaces between this panel and the enclosing square being filled with sculptures of animals. You cannot anywhere find a more lovely piece of fancy, or more illustrative of the quantity of result that may be obtained with low and simple chiselling. The figures are all perfectly simple in drapery, the story told by lines of action only in the main group, no accessories being admitted. There is no undercutting anywhere, nor exhibition of technical skill, but the fondest and tenderest appliance of it; and one of the principal charms of the whole is the adaptation of every subject to its quaint limit. The tale must be told within the four petals of the quatrefoil, and the wildest and playfullest beasts must never come out of their narrow corners. The attention with which spaces of this kind are filled by the Gothic designers is not merely a beautiful compliance with architectural requirements, but a definite assertion of their delight in the restraint of law; for, in illuminating books, although, if they chose it, they might have designed floral ornaments, as we now usually do, rambling loosely over the leaves, and although, in later works, such license is often taken by them, in all books of the fine time the wandering tendrils are enclosed by limits approximately rectilinear, and in gracefullest branching often detach themselves from the right line only by curvature of extreme severity. 174 Since the darkness and extent of shadow by which the sculpture is relieved necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the same thing may be beautifully done for a wise purpose, by one person, which is basely done, and to no purpose, or to a bad one, by another. Thus, the desire for emphasis itself may be the craving of a deadened imagination, or the passion of a vigorous one; and relief against shadow may be sought by one man only for sensation, and by another for intelligibility. John of Pisa undercuts fiercely, in order to bring out the vigour of life which no level contour could render; the Lombardi of Venice undercut delicately, in order to obtain beautiful lines, and edges of faultless precision; but the base Indian craftsmen undercut only that people may wonder how the chiselling was done through the holes, or that they may see every monster white against black. 175. Yet, here again we are met by another necessity for discrimination. There may be a true delight in the inlaying of white on dark, as there is a true delight in vigorous rounding. Nevertheless, the general law is always, that, the lighter the incisions, and the broader the surface, the grander, cæteris paribus, will be the work. Of the structural terms of that work you now know enough to understand that the schools of good sculpture, considered in relation to projection, divide themselves into four entirely distinct groups:-- 1st. Flat Relief, in which the surface is, in many places, absolutely flat; and the expression depends greatly on the lines of its outer contour, and on fine incisions within them. 2nd. Round Relief, in which, as in the best coins, the sculptured mass projects so as to be capable of complete modulation into form, but is not anywhere undercut. The formation of a coin by the blow of a die necessitates, of course, the severest obedience to this law. 3rd. Edged Relief. Undercutting admitted, so as to throw out the forms against a background of shadow. 4th. Full Relief. The statue completely solid in form, and unreduced in retreating depth of it, yet connected locally with some definite part of the building, so as to be still dependent on the shadow of its background and direction of protective line. 176. Let me recommend you at once to take what pains may be needful to enable you to distinguish these four kinds of sculpture, for the distinctions between them are not founded on mere differences in gradation of depth. They are truly four species, or orders, of sculpture, separated from each other by determined characters. I have used, you may have noted, hitherto in my Lectures, the word "bas-relief" almost indiscriminately for all, because the degree of lowness or highness of relief is not the question, but the _method_ of relief. Observe again, therefore-- A. If a portion of the surface is absolutely flat, you have the first order--Flat Relief. B. If every portion of the surface is rounded, but none undercut, you have Round Relief--essentially that of seals and coins. C. If any part of the edges be undercut, but the general projection of solid form reduced, you have what I think you may conveniently call Foliate Relief,--the parts of the design overlapping each other in places, like edges of leaves. D. If the undercutting is bold and deep, and the projection of solid form unreduced, you have full relief. Learn these four names at once by heart:-- Flat Relief. Round Relief. Foliate Relief. Full Relief. And whenever you look at any piece of sculpture, determine first to which of these classes it belongs; and then consider how the sculptor has treated it with reference to the necessary structure--that reference, remember, being partly to the mechanical conditions of the material, partly to the means of light and shade at his command. [Illustration: PLATE XII.--BRANCH OF PHILLYREA. DARK PURPLE] 177. To take a single instance. You know, for these many years, I have been telling our architects with all the force of voice I had in me, that they could design nothing until they could carve natural forms rightly. Many imagine that work was easy; but judge for yourselves whether it be or not. In Plate XII., I have drawn, with approximate accuracy, a cluster of Phillyrea leaves as they grow. Now, if we wanted to cut them in bas-relief, the first thing we should have to consider would be the position of their outline on the marble;--here it is, as far down as the spring of the leaves. But do you suppose that is what an ordinary sculptor could either lay for his first sketch, or contemplate as a limit to be worked down to? Then consider how the interlacing and springing of the leaves can be expressed within this outline. It must be done by leaving such projection in the marble as will take the light in the same proportion as the drawing does;--and a Florentine workman could do it, for close sight, without driving one incision deeper, or raising a single surface higher, than the eighth of an inch. Indeed, no sculptor of the finest time would design such a complex cluster of leaves as this, except for bronze or iron work; they would take simpler contours for marble; but the laws of treatment would, under these conditions, remain just as strict: and you may, perhaps, believe me now when I tell you that, in any piece of fine structural sculpture by the great masters, there is more subtlety and noble obedience to lovely laws than could be explained to you if I took twenty lectures to do it in, instead of one. [Illustration: FIG. 9.] 178. There remains yet a point of mechanical treatment, on which I have not yet touched at all; nor that the least important,--namely, the actual method and style of handling. A great sculptor uses his tools exactly as a painter his pencil, and you may recognize the decision of his thought, and glow of his temper, no less in the workmanship than the design. The modern system of modelling the work in clay, getting it into form by machinery, and by the hands of subordinates, and touching it at last, if indeed the (so called) sculptor touch it at all, only to correct their inefficiencies, renders the production of good work in marble a physical impossibility. The first result of it is that the sculptor thinks in clay instead of marble, and loses his instinctive sense of the proper treatment of a brittle substance. The second is that neither he nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as expressive of personal feeling or power, and that nothing is looked for except mechanical polish. 179. The perfectly simple piece of Greek relief represented in Plate XIII., will enable you to understand at once,--examination of the original, at your leisure, will prevent you, I trust, from ever forgetting--what is meant by the virtue of handling in sculpture. [Illustration: PLATE XIII.--GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED INCISION.] The projection of the heads of the four horses, one behind the other, is certainly not more, altogether, than three-quarters of an inch from the flat ground, and the one in front does not in reality project more than the one behind it, yet, by mere drawing,[132] you see the sculptor has got them to appear to recede in due order, and by the soft rounding of the flesh surfaces, and modulation of the veins, he has taken away all look of flatness from the necks. He has drawn the eyes and nostrils with dark incision, careful as the finest touches of a painter's pencil: and then, at last, when he comes to the manes, he has let fly hand and chisel with their full force, and where a base workman, (above all, if he had modelled the thing in clay first,) would have lost himself in laborious imitation of hair, the Greek has struck the tresses out with angular incisions, deep driven, every one in appointed place and deliberate curve, yet flowing so free under his noble hand that you cannot alter, without harm, the bending of any single ridge, nor contract, nor extend, a point of them. And if you will look back to Plate IX. you will see the difference between this sharp incision, used to express horse-hair, and the soft incision with intervening rounded ridge, used to express the hair of Apollo Chrysocomes; and, beneath, the obliquely ridged incision used to express the plumes of his swan; in both these cases the handling being much more slow, because the engraving is in metal; but the structural importance of incision, as the means of effect, never lost sight of. Finally, here are two actual examples of the work in marble of the two great schools of the world; one, a little Fortune, standing tiptoe on the globe of the Earth, its surface traced with lines in hexagons; not chaotic under Fortune's feet; Greek, this, and by a trained workman;--dug up in the temple of Neptune at Corfu;--and here, a Florentine portrait-marble, found in the recent alterations, face downwards, under the pavement of St'a Maria Novella;[133] both of them first-rate of their kind; and both of them, while exquisitely finished at the telling points, showing, on all their unregarded surfaces, the rough furrow of the fast-driven chisel, as distinctly as the edge of a common paving-stone. 180. Let me suggest to you, in conclusion, one most interesting point of mental expression in these necessary aspects of finely executed sculpture. I have already again and again pressed on your attention the beginning of the arts of men in the make and use of the ploughshare. Read more carefully--you might indeed do well to learn at once by heart,--the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;--what the delicate and consummate arts of man have done by the ploughing of marble, and granite, and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as you advance in actual practice, how the primary manual art of engraving, in the steadiness, clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best art-discipline that can be given either to mind or hand;[134] you will recognize one law of right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work of every age; you will see the firmly traced and irrevocable incision determining not only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of all vitally progressive art; you will trace the same principle and power in the furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own Egyptian city,--in the white scratch of the stylus through the colour on a Greek vase--in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups of an Italian fresco; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great engraver of Nüremberg,--and in the deep driven and deep bitten ravines of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the Liber Studiorum. Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word, [Greek: charassô];--and, give me pardon--if you think pardon needed, that I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word derived from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other furrows to be driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The fruitfullest, or the fatallest of all ploughing is that by the thoughts of your youth, on the white field of its imagination. For by these, either down to the disturbed spirit, "[Greek: kekoptai kai charassetai pedon];" or around the quiet spirit, and on all the laws of conduct that hold it, as a fair vase its frankincense, are ordained the pure colours, and engraved the just Characters, of Æonian life. FOOTNOTES: [126] Nothing is more wonderful, or more disgraceful among the forms of ignorance engendered by modern vulgar occupations in pursuit of gain, than the unconsciousness, now total, that fine art is essentially Athletic. I received a letter from Birmingham, some little time since, inviting me to see how much, in glass manufacture, "machinery excelled rude hand work." The writer had not the remotest conception that he might as well have asked me to come and see a mechanical boat-race rowed by automata, and "how much machinery excelled rude arm-work." [127] Such as the sculptureless arch of Waterloo Bridge, for instance, referred to in the Third Lecture, § 84. [128] It is strange, at this day, to think of the relation of the Athenian Ceramicus to the French Tile-fields, Tileries, or Tuileries; and how these last may yet become--have already partly become--"the Potter's field," blood-bought (December, 1870.) [129] This relief is now among the other casts which I have placed in the lower school in the University galleries. [130] The reference is to a cast from a small and low relief of Florentine work in the Kensington Museum. [131] The actual bas-relief is on a coin, and the projection not above the twentieth of an inch, but I magnified it in photograph, for this Lecture, so as to represent a relief with about the third of an inch for maximum projection. [132] This plate has been executed from a drawing by Mr. Burgess, in which he has followed the curves of incision with exquisite care, and preserved the effect of the surface of the stone, where a photograph would have lost it by exaggerating accidental stains. [133] These two marbles will always, henceforward, be sufficiently accessible for reference in my room at Corpus Christi College. [134] That it was also, in, some cases, the earliest that the Greeks gave, is proved by Lucian's account of his first lesson at his uncle's; the [Greek: enkopeus], literally "in-cutter"--being the first tool put into his hand, and an earthenware tablet to cut upon, which the boy pressing too hard, presently breaks;--gets beaten--goes home crying, and becomes, after his dream above quoted, a philosopher instead of a sculptor. LECTURE VI. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS. _December, 1870._ 181. It can scarcely be needful for me to tell even the younger members of my present audience, that the conditions necessary for the production of a perfect school of sculpture have only twice been met in the history of the world, and then for a short time; nor for short time only, but also in narrow districts, namely, in the valleys and islands of Ionian Greece, and in the strip of land deposited by the Arno, between the Apennine crests and the sea. All other schools, except these two, led severally by Athens in the fifth century before Christ, and by Florence in the fifteenth of our own era, are imperfect; and the best of them are derivative: these two are consummate in themselves, and the origin of what is best in others. 182. And observe, these Athenian and Florentine schools are both of equal rank, as essentially original and independent. The Florentine, being subsequent to the Greek, borrowed much from it; but it would have existed just as strongly--and, perhaps, in some respects, more nobly--had it been the first, instead of the latter of the two. The task set to each of these mightiest of the nations was, indeed, practically the same, and as hard to the one as to the other. The Greeks found Phoenician and Etruscan art monstrous, and had to make them human. The Italians found Byzantine and Norman art monstrous, and had to make them human. The original power in the one case is easily traced; in the other it has partly to be unmasked, because the change at Florence was, in many points, suggested and stimulated by the former school. But we mistake in supposing that Athens taught Florence the laws of design; she taught her, in reality, only the duty of truth. 183. You remember that I told you the highest art could do no more than rightly represent the human form. This is the simple test, then, of a perfect school,--that it has represented the human form, so that it is impossible to conceive of its being better done. And that, I repeat, has been accomplished twice only: once in Athens, once in Florence. And so narrow is the excellence even of these two exclusive schools, that it cannot be said of either of them that they represented the entire human form. The Greeks perfectly drew, and perfectly moulded the body and limbs; but there is, so far as I am aware, no instance of their representing the face as well as any great Italian. On the other hand, the Italian painted and carved the face insuperably; but I believe there is no instance of his having perfectly represented the body, which, by command of his religion, it became his pride to despise, and his safety to mortify. 184. The general course of your study here renders it desirable that you should be accurately acquainted with the leading principles of Greek sculpture; but I cannot lay these before you without giving undue prominence to some of the special merits of that school, unless I previously indicate the relation it holds to the more advanced, though less disciplined, excellence of Christian art. In this and the last lecture of the present course,[135] I shall endeavour, therefore, to mass for you, in such rude and diagram-like outline as may be possible or intelligible, the main characteristics of the two schools, completing and correcting the details of comparison afterwards; and not answering, observe, at present, for any generalization I give you, except as a ground for subsequent closer and more qualified statements. And in carrying out this parallel, I shall speak indifferently of works of sculpture, and of the modes of painting which propose to themselves the same objects as sculpture. And this indeed Florentine, as opposed to Venetian, painting, and that of Athens in the fifth century, nearly always did. 185. I begin, therefore, by comparing two designs of the simplest kind--engravings, or, at least, linear drawings, both; one on clay, one on copper, made in the central periods of each style, and representing the same goddess--Aphrodite. They are now set beside each other in your Rudimentary Series. The first is from a patera lately found at Camirus, authoritatively assigned by Mr. Newton, in his recent catalogue, to the best period of Greek art. The second is from one of the series of engravings executed, probably, by Baccio Baldini, in 1485, out of which I chose your first practical exercise--the Sceptre of Apollo. I cannot, however, make the comparison accurate in all respects, for I am obliged to set the restricted type of the Aphrodite Urania of the Greeks beside the universal Deity conceived by the Italian as governing the air, earth, and sea; nevertheless the restriction in the mind of the Greek, and expatiation in that of the Florentine, are both characteristic. The Greek Venus Urania is flying in heaven, her power over the waters symbolized by her being borne by a swan, and her power over the earth by a single flower in her right hand; but the Italian Aphrodite is rising out of the actual sea, and only half risen: her limbs are still in the sea, her merely animal strength filling the waters with their life; but her body to the loins is in the sunshine, her face raised to the sky; her hand is about to lay a garland of flowers on the earth. 186. The Venus Urania of the Greeks, in her relation to men, has power only over lawful and domestic love; therefore, she is fully dressed, and not only quite dressed, but most daintily and trimly: her feet delicately sandalled, her gown spotted with little stars, her hair brushed exquisitely smooth at the top of her head, trickling in minute waves down her forehead; and though, because there's such a quantity of it, she can't possibly help having a chignon, look how tightly she has fastened it in with her broad fillet. Of course she is married, so she must wear a cap with pretty minute pendant jewels at the border; and a very small necklace, all that her husband can properly afford, just enough to go closely round the neck, and no more. On the contrary, the Aphrodite of the Italian, being universal love, is pure-naked; and her long hair is thrown wild to the wind and sea. These primal differences in the symbolism, observe, are only because the artists are thinking of separate powers: they do not necessarily involve any national distinction in feeling. But the differences I have next to indicate are essential, and characterize the two opposed national modes of mind. 187. First, and chiefly. The Greek Aphrodite is a very pretty person, and the Italian a decidedly plain one. That is because a Greek thought no one could possibly love any but pretty people; but an Italian thought that love could give dignity to the meanest form that it inhabited, and light to the poorest that it looked upon. So his Aphrodite will not condescend to be pretty. 188. Secondly. In the Greek Venus the breasts are broad and full, though perfectly severe in their almost conical profile;--(you are allowed on purpose to see the outline of the right breast, under the chiton:)--also the right arm is left bare, and you can just see the contour of the front of the right limb and knee; both arm and limb pure and firm, but lovely. The plant she holds in her hand is a branching and flowering one, the seed vessel prominent. These signs all mean that her essential function is child-bearing. On the contrary, in the Italian Venus the breasts are so small as to be scarcely traceable; the body strong, and almost masculine in its angles; the arms meagre and unattractive, and she lays a decorative garland of flowers on the earth. These signs mean that the Italian thought of love as the strength of an eternal spirit, for ever helpful; and for ever crowned with flowers, that neither know seed-time nor harvest, and bloom where there is neither death, nor birth. 189. Thirdly. The Greek Aphrodite is entirely calm, and looks straight forward. Not one feature of her face is disturbed, or seems ever to have been subject to emotion. The Italian Aphrodite looks up, her face all quivering and burning with passion and wasting anxiety. The Greek one is quiet, self-possessed, and self-satisfied; the Italian incapable of rest, she has had no thought nor care for herself; her hair has been bound by a fillet like the Greeks; but it is now all fallen loose, and clotted with the sea, or clinging to her body; only the front tress of it is caught by the breeze from her raised forehead, and lifted, in the place where the tongues of fire rest on the brows, in the early Christian pictures of Pentecost, and the waving fires abide upon the heads of Angelico's seraphim. 190. There are almost endless points of interest, great and small, to be noted in these differences of treatment. This binding of the hair by the single fillet marks the straight course of one great system of art method, from that Greek head which I showed you on the archaic coin of the seventh century before Christ, to this of the fifteenth of our own era--nay, when you look close, you will see the entire action of the head depends on one lock of hair falling back from the ear, which it does in compliance with the old Greek observance of its being bent there by the pressure of the helmet. That rippling of it down her shoulders comes from the Athena of Corinth; the raising of it on her forehead, from the knot of the hair of Diana, changed into the vestal fire of the angels. But chiefly, the calmness of the features in the one face, and their anxiety in the other, indicate first, indeed, the characteristic difference in every conception of the schools, the Greek never representing expression, the Italian primarily seeking it; but far more, mark for us here the utter change in the conception of love; from the tranquil guide and queen of a happy terrestrial domestic life, accepting its immediate pleasures and natural duties, to the agonizing hope of an infinite good, and the ever mingled joy and terror of a love divine in jealousy, crying, "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave." The vast issues dependent on this change in the conception of the ruling passion of the human soul, I will endeavour to show you, on a future occasion: in my present lecture, I shall limit myself to the definition of the temper of Greek sculpture, and of its distinctions from Florentine in the treatment of any subject whatever, be it love or hatred, hope or despair. These great differences are mainly the following. 191. 1. A Greek never expresses momentary passion; a Florentine looks to momentary passion as the ultimate object of his skill. When you are next in London, look carefully in the British Museum at the casts from the statues in the pediment of the Temple of Minerva at Ægina. You have there Greek work of definite date;--about 600 B.C., certainly before 580--of the purest kind; and you have the representation of a noble ideal subject, the combats of the Æacidæ at Troy, with Athena herself looking on. But there is no attempt whatever to represent expression in the features, none to give complexity of action or gesture; there is no struggling, no anxiety, no visible temporary exertion of muscles. There are fallen figures, one pulling a lance out of his wound, and others in attitudes of attack and defence; several kneeling to draw their bows. But all inflict and suffer, conquer or expire, with the same smile. 192. Plate XIV. gives you examples, from more advanced art, of true Greek representation; the subjects being the two contests of leading import to the Greek heart--that of Apollo with the Python, and of Hercules with the Nemean Lion. You see that in neither case is there the slightest effort to represent the [Greek: lyssa] or agony of contest. No good Greek artist would have you behold the suffering, either of gods, heroes, or men; nor allow you to be apprehensive of the issue of their contest with evil beasts, or evil spirits. All such lower sources of excitement are to be closed to you; your interest is to be in the thoughts involved by the fact of the war; and in the beauty or rightness of form, whether active or inactive. I have to work out this subject with you afterwards, and to compare with the pure Greek method of thought, that of modern dramatic passion, engrafted on it, as typically in Turner's contest of Apollo and the Python: in the meantime, be content with the statement of this first great principle--that a Greek, as such, never expresses momentary passion. [Illustration: PLATE XIV.--APOLLO AND THE PYTHON. HERACLES AND THE NEMEAN LION.] [Illustration: PLATE XV.--HERA OF ARGOS. ZEUS OF SYRACUSE.] 193. Secondly. The Greek, as such, never expresses personal character, while a Florentine holds it to be the ultimate condition of beauty. You are startled, I suppose, at my saying this, having had it often pointed out to you, as a transcendent piece of subtlety in Greek art, that you could distinguish Hercules from Apollo by his being stout, and Diana from Juno by her being slender. That is very true; but those are general distinctions of class, not special distinctions of personal character. Even as general, they are bodily, not mental. They are the distinctions, in fleshly aspect, between an athlete and a musician,--between a matron and a huntress; but in no wise distinguish the simple-hearted hero from the subtle Master of the Muses, nor the wilful and fitful girl-goddess from the cruel and resolute matron-goddess. But judge for yourselves;--In the successive plates, XV.--XVIII., I show you,[136] typically represented as the protectresses of nations, the Argive, Cretan, and Lacinian Hera, the Messenian Demeter, the Athena of Corinth, the Artemis of Syracuse, the fountain Arethusa of Syracuse, and the Sirem Ligeia of Terina. Now, of these heads, it is true that some are more delicate in feature than the rest, and some softer in expression: in other respects, can you trace any distinction between the Goddesses of Earth and Heaven, or between the Goddess of Wisdom and the Water Nymph of Syracuse? So little can you do so, that it would have remained a disputed question--had not the name luckily been inscribed on some Syracusan coins--whether the head upon them was meant for Arethusa at all; and, continually, it becomes a question respecting finished statues, if without attributes, "Is this Bacchus or Apollo--Zeus or Poseidon?" There is a fact for you; noteworthy, I think! There is no personal character in true Greek art:--abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and vice,--yes: but there is no individuality; and the negative holds down to the revived conventionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo, when he tells you how you are to paint young women, and how old ones; though a Greek would hardly have been so discourteous to age as the Italian is in his canon of it,--"old women should be represented as passionate and hasty, after the manner of Infernal Furies." 194. "But at least, if the Greeks do not give character, they give ideal beauty?" So it is said, without contradiction. But will you look again at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art, which I have just set before you? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very beautiful? Certainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren, and Arethusa, have well-formed and regular features; but I am quite sure that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither reach even the average standard of pretty English girls. The Venus Urania suggests at first, the idea of a very charming person, but you will find there is no real depth nor sweetness in the contours, looked at closely. And remember, these are chosen examples; the best I can find of art current in Greece at the great time; and if even I were to take the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not one of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already asserted, in _The Queen of the Air_, has nothing notable in feature except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the best time, to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, in popular art, not only unattained, but unattempted; and finally,--and this you may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness to the most subtle beauty--there is little evidence even in their literature, and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any beauty in infancy, or early childhood. [Illustration: PLATE XVI.--DEMETER OF MESSENE. HERA OF CROSSUS.] [Illustration: PLATE XVII.--ATHENA OF THURIUM. SEREIE LIGEIA OF TERINA] 195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do not give refined or naïve beauty. But you may think that the absence of these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some expression of divine mystery or power. I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin, images of the most mysterious of their Deities, and the most powerful,--Demeter and Zeus. Remember, that just as the west coasts of Ireland and England catch first on their hills the rain of the Atlantic, so the western Peloponnese arrests, in the clouds of the first mountain ranges of Arcadia, the moisture of the Mediterranean; and over all the plains of Elis, Pylos, and Messene, the strength and sustenance of men was naturally felt to be granted by Zeus; as, on the east coast of Greece, the greater clearness of the air by the power of Athena. If you will recollect the prayer of Rhea, in the single line of Callimachus--"[Greek: Gaia philê, teke kai su teai d' ôdines elaphrai]," (compare Pausanias iv. 33, at the beginning,)--it will mark for you the connection, in the Greek mind, of the birth of the mountain springs of Arcadia with the birth of Zeus. And the centres of Greek thought on this western coast are necessarily Elis, and, (after the time of Epaminondas,) Messene. 196. I show you the coin of Messene, because the splendid height and form of Mount Ithome were more expressive of the physical power of Zeus than the lower hills of Olympia; and also because it was struck just at the time of the most finished and delicate Greek art--a little after the main strength of Phidias, but before decadence had generally pronounced itself. The coin is a silver didrachm, bearing on one side a head of Demeter (Plate XVI., at the top); on the other a full figure of Zeus Aietophoros (Plate XIX., at the top); the two together signifying the sustaining strength of the earth and heaven. Look first at the head of Demeter. It is merely meant to personify fulness of harvest; there is no mystery in it, no sadness, no vestige of the expression which we should have looked for in any effort to realize the Greek thoughts of the Earth Mother, as we find them spoken by the poets. But take it merely as personified abundance;--the goddess of black furrow and tawny grass--how commonplace it is, and how poor! The hair is grand, and there is one stalk of wheat set in it, which is enough to indicate the goddess who is meant; but, in that very office, ignoble, for it shows that the artist could only inform you that this was Demeter by such a symbol. How easy it would have been for a great designer to have made the hair lovely with fruitful flowers, and the features noble in mystery of gloom, or of tenderness. But here you have nothing to interest you, except the common Greek perfections of a straight nose and a full chin. 197. We pass, on the reverse of the die, to the figure of Zeus Aietophoros. Think of the invocation to Zeus in the Suppliants, (525), "King of Kings, and Happiest of the Happy, Perfectest of the Perfect in strength, abounding in all things, Jove--hear us and be with us;" and then, consider what strange phase of mind it was, which, under the very mountain-home of the god, was content with this symbol of him as a well-fed athlete, holding a diminutive and crouching eagle on his fist. The features and the right hand have been injured in this coin, but the action of the arms shows that it held a thunderbolt, of which, I believe, the twisted rays were triple. In the, presumably earlier, coin engraved by Millingen, however,[137] it is singly pointed only; and the added inscription "[Greek: ITHÔM]," in the field, renders the conjecture of Millingen probable, that this is a rude representation of the statue of Zeus Ithomates, made by Ageladas, the master of Phidias; and I think it has, indeed, the aspect of the endeavour, by a workman of more advanced knowledge, and more vulgar temper, to put the softer anatomy of later schools into the simple action of an archaic figure. Be that as it may, here is one of the most refined cities of Greece content with the figure of an athlete as the representative of their own mountain god; marked as a divine power merely by the attributes of the eagle and thunderbolt. [Illustration: PLATE XVIII.--ARTEMIS OF SYRACUSE. HERA OF LACINIAN CAPE.] [Illustration: PLATE XIX.--ZEUS OF MESSENE. AJAX OF OPUS.] 198. Lastly. The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give divine sadness? Shall we find in their artwork any of that pensiveness and yearning for the dead, which fills the chants of their tragedy? I suppose if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in afterlife is to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about the Island of Leuce, at the mouth of the Danube, inhabited by the ghosts of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax the son of Oïleus, and Helen; and in which the pavement of the Temple of Achilles was washed daily by the sea-birds with their wings, dipping them in the sea. Now it happens that we have actually on a coin of the Locrians the representation of the ghost of the Lesser Ajax. There is nothing in the history of human imagination more lovely, than their leaving always a place for his spirit, vacant in their ranks of battle. But here is their sculptural representation of the phantom; (lower figure, Plate XIX.), and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul, unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce itself, with the waves flowing round it. 199. Again and again, however, I have to remind you, with respect to these apparently frank and simple failures, that the Greek always intends you to think for yourself, and understand, more than he can speak. Take this instance at our hands, the trim little circlet for the Island of Leuce. The workman knows very well it is not like the island, and that he could not make it so; that at its best, his sculpture can be little more than a letter; and yet, in putting this circlet, and its encompassing fretwork of minute waves, he does more than if he had merely given you a letter L, or written "Leuce." If you know anything of beaches and sea, this symbol will set your imagination at work in recalling them; then you will think of the temple service of the novitiate sea-birds, and of the ghosts of Achilles and Patroclus appearing, like the Dioscuri, above the storm-clouds of the Euxine. And the artist, throughout his work, never for an instant loses faith in your sympathy and passion being ready to answer his;--if you have none to give, he does not care to take you into his counsel; on the whole, would rather that you should not look at his work. 200. But if you have this sympathy to give, you may be sure that whatever he does for you will be right, as far as he can render it so. It may not be sublime, nor beautiful, nor amusing; but it will be full of meaning, and faithful in guidance. He will give you clue to myriads of things that he cannot literally teach; and, so far as he does teach, you may trust him. Is not this saying much? And as he strove only to teach what was true, so, in his sculptured symbol, he strove only to carve what was--Right. He rules over the arts to this day, and will for ever, because he sought not first for beauty, nor first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with, in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course, every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false or fanciful, is not the Greek part of it--it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:--Eastern nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with two;--Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth. 201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which encumbered our thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That relation is strangely duplicate; for on one side, Greek art is the root of all simplicity; and on the other, of all complexity. [Illustration: PLATE XX.--GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE.] On one side I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin Room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the Hôtel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship, you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand, simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys of the rest of mankind. 202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean decoration--all weak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms of man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true flesh, and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other races, as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the work of the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement to what was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school, hereafter, it belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests them with the brotherhood of the Greek. And this is the deep meaning of the myth of Dædalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal change from the binding together of the feet to their separation, and the other modifications of action which took place, either in progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides), these literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at Branchidæ sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the work of Dædalus is the giving of deceptive life, as that of Prometheus the giving of real life; and I can put the relation of Greek to all other art, in this function, before you in easily compared and remembered examples. 203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere and for ever. Now, besides this colossal bull, here is a bit of Dædalus work, enlarged from a coin not bigger than a shilling: look at the two together, and you ought to know, henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days. 204. In this aspect of it then, I say, it is the simplest and nakedest of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole, for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most complex of human art. I told you in my fifth Lecture, showing you the spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of Polygnotus, "[Greek: stoa poikilê]," occurs to the Greeks as connected with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it "[Greek: poikilia]," which observe, both in that place and again in the third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and sound--the "ravishing division to the lute," as in Pindar's "[Greek: poikiloi hymnoi]"--runs through the compass of all Greek art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles you were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for instance, to Plate IV. here), your impression of it would be, instead of breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and chequeredness, "[Greek: en angeôn Herkesin pampoikilois];" and of the artist's delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly. Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a "spotty." Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon, which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes and which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek: poikilia], however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them caught," he says, "but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited beside the river till sunset." [Illustration: PLATE XXI.--THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY.] 205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long. The Greeks have been thus the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous; "variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof--quartering of the Christian shield,--rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan Chapel of the Thorn. And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and justice, subduing the animal nature guided by the spiritual one, as you see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI). And the beginnings of Christian chivalary were in that Greek bridling of the dark and the white horses. 206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of them; but so far he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness. He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land, and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He became _Græculus esuriens_, little, and hungry, and every man's errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk. But his Græcism was in having done, at least at one period of his dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of, everything possible to man. Take Dædalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Dædalus invents,--he, or his nephew,-- The potter's wheel, and all work in clay; The saw, and all work in wood; The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion; (wings only proving too dangerous!) The entire art of minute ornament; And the deceptive life of statues. By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among the wild parsley fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx, under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in exquisiteness the golden honeycomb. 207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Dædalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons--reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Dædalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good: Rhadamanthus only can measure _that_; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. "Cignesi con la coda tante volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa." And this peril of the influence of Dædalus is twofold; first in leading us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in their form, or truth;--admire the harlequin's jacket more than the hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its words;--but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Dædalus may even become bestial, an instinct for mechanical labour only, strangely involved with a feverish and ghastly cruelty:--(you will find this distinct in the intensely Dædal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the laws of nature and honour, and building labyrinths for monsters,--not combs for bees. 208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty: but we may at least learn his disdain of mechanism:--of all work which he felt to be monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities. We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship _London_,) when I say that either an Æginetan or Ionian shipwright built ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside down if a squall struck her topsail. Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity; and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at this very hour,[138] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues once so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all to feel that the skill of Dædalus, set to build impregnable fortresses, is not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: trêton ponou]--the golden honeycomb. FOOTNOTES: [135] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine, though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the published course on Florentine Sculpture. [136] These plates of coins are given for future reference and examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very noble; her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of storms though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.) [137] Ancient Cities and Kings, Plate IV. No. 20. [138] The siege of Paris, at the time of the delivery of this Lecture, was in one of its most destructive phases. _THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND._ (_Delivered at the R. A. Institution, Woolwich, December 14, 1869._) I would fain have left to the frank expression of the moment, but fear I could not have found clear words--I cannot easily find them, even deliberately,--to tell you how glad I am, and yet how ashamed, to accept your permission to speak to you. Ashamed of appearing to think that I can tell you any truth which you have not more deeply felt than I; but glad in the thought that my less experience, and way of life sheltered from the trials, and free from the responsibilities of yours, may have left me with something of a child's power of help to you; a sureness of hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that can be helpful to men who have done too much not to have often failed in doing all that they desired. And indeed, even the most hopeful of us, cannot but now be in many things apprehensive. For this at least we all know too well, that we are on the eve of a great political crisis, if not of political change. That a struggle is approaching between the newly-risen power of democracy and the apparently departing power of feudalism; and another struggle, no less imminent, and far more dangerous, between wealth and pauperism. These two quarrels are constantly thought of as the same. They are being fought together, and an apparently common interest unites for the most part the millionaire with the noble, in resistance to a multitude, crying, part of it for bread and part of it for liberty. And yet no two quarrels can be more distinct. Riches--so far from being necessary to noblesse--are adverse to it. So utterly adverse, that the first character of all the Nobilities which have founded great dynasties in the world is to be poor;--often poor by oath--always poor by generosity. And of every true knight in the chivalric ages, the first thing history tells you is, that he never kept treasure for himself. Thus the causes of wealth and noblesse are not the same; but opposite. On the other hand, the causes of anarchy and of the poor are not the same, but opposite. Side by side, in the same rank, are now indeed set the pride that revolts against authority, and the misery that appeals against avarice. But, so far from being a common cause, all anarchy is the forerunner of poverty, and all prosperity begins in obedience. So that thus, it has become impossible to give due support to the cause of order, without seeming to countenance injury; and impossible to plead justly the claims of sorrow, without seeming to plead also for those of license. Let me try, then, to put in very brief terms, the real plan of this various quarrel, and the truth of the cause on each side. Let us face that full truth, whatever it may be, and decide what part, according to our power, we should take in the quarrel. First. For eleven hundred years, all but five, since Charlemagne set on his head the Lombard crown, the body of European people have submitted patiently to be governed; generally by kings--always by single leaders of some kind. But for the last fifty years they have begun to suspect, and of late they have many of them concluded, that they have been on the whole ill-governed, or misgoverned, by their kings. Whereupon they say, more and more widely, "Let us henceforth have no kings; and no government at all." Now we said, we must face the full truth of the matter, in order to see what we are to do. And the truth is that the people _have_ been misgoverned;--that very little is to be said, hitherto, for most of their masters--and that certainly in many places they will try their new system of "no masters:"--and as that arrangement will be delightful to all foolish persons, and, at first, profitable to all wicked ones,--and as these classes are not wanting or unimportant in any human society,--the experiment is likely to be tried extensively. And the world may be quite content to endure much suffering with this fresh hope, and retain its faith in anarchy, whatever comes of it, till it can endure no more. Then, secondly. The people have begun to suspect that one particular form of this past misgovernment has been, that their masters have set them to do all the work, and have themselves taken all the wages. In a word, that what was called governing them, meant only wearing fine clothes, and living on good fare at their expense. And I am sorry to say, the people are quite right in this opinion also. If you inquire into the vital fact of the matter, this you will find to be the constant structure of European society for the thousand years of the feudal system; it was divided into peasants who lived by working; priests who lived by begging; and knights who lived by pillaging; and as the luminous public mind becomes gradually cognizant of these facts, it will assuredly not suffer things to be altogether arranged that way any more; and the devising of other ways will be an agitating business; especially because the first impression of the intelligent populace is, that whereas, in the dark ages, half the nation lived idle, in the bright ages to come, the whole of it may. Now, thirdly--and here is much the worst phase of the crisis. This past system of misgovernment, especially during the last three hundred years, has prepared, by its neglect, a class among the lower orders which it is now peculiarly difficult to govern. It deservedly lost their respect--but that was the least part of the mischief. The deadly part of it was, that the lower orders lost their habit, and at last their faculty, of respect;--lost the very capability of reverence, which is the most precious part of the human soul. Exactly in the degree in which you can find creatures greater than yourself, to look up to, in that degree, you are ennobled yourself, and, in that degree, happy. If you could live always in the presence of archangels, you would be happier than in that of men; but even if only in the company of admirable knights and beautiful ladies, the more noble and bright they were, and the more you could reverence their virtue the happier you would be. On the contrary, if you were condemned to live among a multitude of idiots, dumb, distorted and malicious, you would not be happy in the constant sense of your own superiority. Thus all real joy and power of progress in humanity depend on finding something to reverence; and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain. Now, by general misgovernment, I repeat, we have created in Europe a vast populace, and out of Europe a still vaster one, which has lost even the power and conception of reverence;[139]--which exists only in the worship of itself--which can neither see anything beautiful around it, nor conceive anything virtuous above it; which has, towards all goodness and greatness, no other feelings than those of the lowest creatures--fear, hatred, or hunger a populace which has sunk below your appeal in their nature, as it has risen beyond your power in their multitude;--whom you can now no more charm than you can the adder, nor discipline, than you can the summer fly. It is a crisis, gentlemen; and time to think of it. I have roughly and broadly put it before you in its darkness. Let us look what we may find of light. Only the other day, in a journal which is a fairly representative exponent of the Conservatism of our day, and for the most part not at all in favor of strikes or other popular proceedings; only about three weeks since, there was a leader, with this, or a similar, title--"What is to become of the House of Lords?" It startled me, for it seemed as if we were going even faster than I had thought, when such a question was put as a subject of quite open debate, in a journal meant chiefly for the reading of the middle and upper classes. Open or not--the debate is near. What _is_ to become of them? And the answer to such question depends first on their being able to answer another question--"What is the _use_ of them!" For some time back, I think the theory of the nation has been, that they are useful as impediments to business, so as to give time for second thoughts. But the nation is getting impatient of impediments to business; and certainly, sooner or later, will think it needless to maintain these expensive obstacles to its humors. And I have not heard, either in public, or from any of themselves, a clear expression of their own conception of their use. So that it seems thus to become needful for all men to tell them, as our one quite clear-sighted teacher, Carlyle, has been telling us for many a year, that the use of the Lords of a country is to _govern_ the country. If they answer that use, the country will rejoice in keeping them; if not, that will become of them which must of all things found to have lost their serviceableness. Here, therefore, is the one question, at this crisis, for them, and for us. Will they be lords indeed, and give us laws--dukes indeed, and give us guiding--princes indeed, and give us beginning, of truer dynasty, which shall not be soiled by covetousness, nor disordered by iniquity? Have they themselves sunk so far as not to hope this? Are there yet any among them who can stand forward with open English brows, and say,--So far as in me lies, I will govern with my might, not for Dieu et _mon_ Droit, but for the first grand reading of the war cry, from which that was corrupted, "Dieu et Droit?" Among them I know there are some--among you, soldiers of England, I know there are many, who can do this; and in you is our trust. I, one of the lower people of your country, ask of you in their name--you whom I will not any more call soldiers, but by the truer name of Knights;--Equites of England. How many yet of you are there, knights errant now beyond all former fields of danger--knights patient now beyond all former endurance; who still retain the ancient and eternal purpose of knighthood, to subdue the wicked, and aid the weak? To them, be they few or many, we English people call for help to the wretchedness, and for rule over the baseness, of multitudes desolate and deceived, shrieking to one another this new gospel of their new religion. "Let the weak do as they can, and the wicked as they will." I can hear you saying in your hearts, even the bravest of you, "The time is past for all that." Gentlemen, it is not so. The time has come for _more_ than all that. Hitherto, soldiers have given their lives for false fame, and for cruel power. The day is now when they must give their lives for true fame, and for beneficent power: and the work is near every one of you--close beside you--the means of it even thrust into your hands. The people are crying to you for command, and you stand there at pause, and silent. You think they don't want to be commanded; try them; determine what is needful for them--honorable for them; show it them, promise to bring them to it, and they will follow you through fire. "Govern us," they cry with one heart, though many minds. They _can_ be governed still, these English; they are men still; not gnats, nor serpents. They love their old ways yet, and their old masters, and their old land. They would fain live in it, as many as may stay there, if you will show them how, there, to live;--or show them even, how, there, like Englishmen, to die. "To live in it, as many as may!" How many do you think may? How many _can_? How many do you want to live there? As masters, your first object must be to increase your power; and in what does the power of a country consist? Will you have dominion over its stones, or over its clouds, or over its souls? What do you mean by a great nation, but a great multitude of men who are true to each other, and strong, and of worth? Now you can increase the multitude only definitely--your island has only so much standing room--but you can increase the _worth in_definitely. It is but a little island;--suppose, little as it is, you were to fill it with friends? You may, and that easily. You must, and that speedily; or there will be an end to this England of ours, and to all its loves and enmities. To fill this little island with true friends--men brave, wise, and happy! Is it so impossible, think you, after the world's eighteen hundred years of Christianity, and our own thousand years of toil, to fill only this little white gleaming crag with happy creatures, helpful to each other? Africa, and India, and the Brazilian wide-watered plain, are these not wide enough for the ignorance of our race? have they not space enough for its pain? Must we remain _here_ also savage,--_here_ at enmity with each other,--_here_ foodless, houseless, in rags, in dust, and without hope, as thousands and tens of thousands of us are lying? Do not think it, gentlemen. The thought that it is inevitable is the last infidelity; infidelity not to God only, but to every creature and every law that He has made. Are we to think that the earth was only shaped to be a globe of torture; and that there cannot be one spot of it where peace can rest, or justice reign? Where are men ever to be happy, if not in England? by whom shall they ever be taught to do right, if not by you? Are we not of a race first among the strong ones of the earth; the blood in us incapable of weariness, unconquerable by grief? Have we not a history of which we can hardly think without becoming insolent in our just pride of it? Can we dare, without passing every limit of courtesy to other nations, to say how much more we have to be proud of in our ancestors than they? Among our ancient monarchs, great crimes stand out as monstrous and strange. But their valor, and, according to their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. The Wars of the Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow on our land, represent the normal condition of other nations; while from the days of the Heptarchy downwards we have had examples given us, in all ranks, of the most varied and exalted virtue; a heap of treasure that no moth can corrupt, and which even our traitorship, if we are to become traitors to it, cannot sully. And this is the race, then, that we know not any more how to govern! and this the history which we are to behold broken off by sedition! and this is the country, of all others, where life is to become difficult to the honest, and ridiculous to the wise! And the catastrophe, forsooth, is to come just when we have been making swiftest progress beyond the wisdom and wealth of the past. Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. We have blackened every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the people die of cold; our harbors are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of hunger. Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours only. You alone can feed them, and clothe, and bring into their right minds, for you only can govern--that is to say, you only can educate them. Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word. Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. And the true "compulsory education" which the people now ask of you is not catechism, but drill. It is not teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise,--but above all--by example. Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye out into the highways and hedges, and _compel_ them to come in." Compulsory! Yes, and gratis also. _Dei Gratia_, they must be taught, as, _Dei Gratia_, you are set to teach them. I hear strange talk continually, "how difficult it is to make people pay for being educated!" Why, I should think so! Do you make your children pay for their education, or do you give it them compulsorily, and gratis? You do not expect _them_ to pay you for their teaching, except by becoming good children. Why should you expect a peasant to pay for his, except by becoming a good man?--payment enough, I think, if we knew it. Payment enough to himself, as to us. For that is another of our grand popular mistakes--people are always thinking of education as a means of livelihood. Education is not a profitable business, but a costly one; nay, even the best attainments of it are always unprofitable, in any terms of coin. No nation ever made its bread either by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes: but its noble scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art, are always to be bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. You do not learn that you may live--you live that you may learn. You are to spend on National Education, and to be spent for it, and to make by it, not more money, but better men;--to get into this British Island the greatest possible number of good and brave Englishmen. _They_ are to be your "money's worth." But where is the money to come from? Yes, that is to be asked. Let us, as quite the first business in this our national crisis, look not only into our affairs, but into our accounts, and obtain some general notion how we annually spend our money, and what we are getting for it. Observe, I do not mean to inquire into the public revenue only; of that some account is rendered already. But let us do the best we can to set down the items of the national _private_ expenditure; and know what we spend altogether, and how. To begin with this matter of education. You probably have nearly all seen the admirable lecture lately given by Captain Maxse, at Southampton. It contains a clear statement of the facts at present ascertained as to our expenditure in that respect. It appears that of our public moneys, for every pound that we spend on education we spend twelve either in charity or punishment;--ten millions a year in pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thousand in instruction. Now Captain Maxse adds to this estimate of ten millions public money spent on crime and want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight millions for private charities. My impression is that this is much beneath the truth, but at all events it leaves out of consideration much the heaviest and saddest form of charity--the maintenance, by the working members of families, of the unfortunate or ill-conducted persons whom the general course of misrule now leaves helpless to be the burden of the rest. Now I want to get first at some, I do not say approximate, but at all events some suggestive, estimate of the quantity of real distress and misguided life in this country. Then next, I want some fairly representative estimate of our private expenditure in luxuries. We won't spend more, publicly, it appears, than eight hundred thousand a year, on educating men gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what we spend privately a year, in educating horses gratis. Let us, at least, quit ourselves in this from the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see that for every horse we train also a horseman; and that the rider be at least as high-bred as the horse, not jockey, but chevalier. Again, we spend eight hundred thousand, which is certainly a great deal of money, in making rough _minds_ bright. I want to know how much we spend annually in making rough _stones_ bright; that is to say, what may be the united annual sum, or near it, of our jewellers' bills. So much we pay for educating children gratis;--how much for educating diamonds gratis? and which pays best for brightening, the spirit or the charcoal? Let us get those two items set down with some sincerity, and a few more of the same kind. _Publicly_ set down. We must not be ashamed of the way we spend our money. If our right hand is not to know what our left does, it must not be because it would be ashamed if it did. That is, therefore, quite the first practical thing to be done. Let every man who wishes well to his country, render it yearly an account of his income, and of the main heads of his expenditure; or, if he is ashamed to do so, let him no more impute to the poor their poverty as a crime, nor set them to break stones in order to frighten them from committing it. To lose money ill is indeed often a crime; but to get it ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, worst of all. You object, Lords of England, to increase, to the poor, the wages you give them, because they spend them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, an account of the wages which _they_ give _you_; and show them, by your example, how to spend theirs, to the last farthing advisedly. It is indeed time to make this an acknowledged subject of instruction, to the workingman,--how to spend his wages. For, gentlemen, we _must_ give that instruction, whether we will or no, one way or the other. We have given it in years gone by; and now we find fault with our peasantry for having been too docile, and profited too shrewdly by our tuition. Only a few days since I had a letter from the wife of a village rector, a man of common sense and kindness, who was greatly troubled in his mind because it was precisely the men who got highest wages in summer that came destitute to his door in the winter. Destitute, and of riotous temper--for their method of spending wages in their period of prosperity was by sitting two days a week in the tavern parlor, ladling port wine, not out of bowls, but out of buckets. Well, gentlemen, who taught them that method of festivity? Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced freshman, went to my first college supper; at the head of the table sat a nobleman of high promise and of admirable powers, since dead of palsy; there also we had in the midst of us, not buckets, indeed, but bowls as large as buckets; there also, we helped ourselves with ladles. There (for this beginning of college education was compulsory), I choosing ladlefuls of punch instead of claret, because I was then able, unperceived to pour them into my waistcoat instead of down my throat, stood it out to the end, and helped to carry four of my fellow-students, one of them the son of the head of a college, head foremost, down stairs and home. Such things are no more; but the fruit of them remains, and will for many a day to come. The laborers whom you cannot now shut out of the ale-house are only the too faithful disciples of the gentlemen who were wont to shut themselves into the dining-room. The gentlemen have not thought it necessary, in order to correct their own habits, to diminish their incomes; and, believe me, the way to deal with your drunken workman is not to lower his wages,--but to mend his wits.[140] And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly how to deal with the sins of our poor brother, it is possible that our dimness of sight may still have other causes that can be cast out. There are two opposite cries of the great liberal and conservative parties, which are both most right, and worthy to be rallying cries. On their side "let every man have his chance;" on yours "let every man stand in his place." Yes, indeed, let that be so, every man in his place, and every man fit for it. See that he holds that place from Heaven's Providence; and not from his family's Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit themselves of simony, we laymen will look after the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of their authority for them. Publish for us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one subject of daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion; a gazette which shall simply tell us, what there certainly can be no detriment to the service in our knowing, when any officer is appointed to a new command,--what his former services and successes have been,--whom he has superseded,--and on what ground. It will be always a satisfaction to us; it may sometimes be an advantage to you: and then, when there is really necessary debate respecting reduction of wages, let us always begin not with the wages of the industrious classes, but with those of the idle ones. Let there be honorary titles, if people like them; but let there be no honorary incomes. So much for the master's motto, "Every man in his place." Next for the laborer's motto, "Every man his chance." Let us mend that for them a little, and say, "Every man his certainty"--certainty, that if he does well, he will be honored, and aided, and advanced in such degree as may be fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace; and equal certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure justice be judged, and by sure punishment be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if that may not be, condemned. That is the right reading of the Republican motto, "Every man his chance." And then, with such a system of government, pure, watchful and just, you may approach your great problem of national education, or in other words, of national employment. For all education begins in work. What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we _do;_ and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is to make them do their best. It is the law of good economy to make the best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature! Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him instantly--What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you only drag a weight with your shoulders? Stand at the bottom of this hill and help up the overladen horses. Can you weld iron and chisel stone? Fortify this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor; and change these shifting sands into fruitful ground. Wherever death was, bring life; that is to be your work; that your parish refuge; that your education. So and no otherwise can we meet existent distress. But for the continual education of the whole people, and for their future happiness, they must have such consistent employment as shall develop all the powers of the fingers, and the limbs, and the brain: and that development is only to be obtained by hand-labor, of which you have these four great divisions--hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, hand-labor in art, hand-labor in war. Of the last two of these I cannot speak to-night, and of the first two only with extreme brevity. I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the husbandman and of the shepherd;--to dress the earth and to keep the flocks of it--the first task of man, and the final one--the education always of noblest lawgivers, kings and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its tenderness: the pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with singing:--not steam-piston labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England--in Wordsworth's own home--a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at the head of them. Give me patience while I put the principle of machine labor before you, as clearly and in as short compass as possible; it is one that should be known at this juncture. Suppose a farming proprietor needs to employ a hundred men on his estate, and that the labor of these hundred men is enough, but not more than enough, to till all his land, and to raise from it food for his own family, and for the hundred laborers. He is obliged, under such circumstances, to maintain all the men in moderate comfort, and can only by economy accumulate much for himself. But, suppose he contrive a machine that will easily do the work of fifty men, with only one man to watch it. This sounds like a great advance in civilization. The farmer of course gets his machine made, turns off the fifty men, who may starve or emigrate at their choice, and now he can keep half of the produce of his estate, which formerly went to feed them, all to himself. That is the essential and constant operation of machinery among us at this moment. Nay, it is at first answered; no man can in reality keep half the produce of an estate to himself, nor can he in the end keep more than his own human share of anything; his riches must diffuse themselves at some time; he must maintain somebody else with them, however he spends them. That is mainly true (not altogether so), for food and fuel are in ordinary circumstances personally wasted by rich people, in quantities which would save many lives. One of my own great luxuries, for instance, is candlelight--and I probably burn, for myself alone, as many candles during the winter, as would comfort the old eyes, or spare the young ones, of a whole rushlighted country village. Still, it is mainly true, that it is not by their personal waste that rich people prevent the lives of the poor. This is the way they do it. Let me go back to my farmer. He has got his machine made, which goes creaking, screaming, and occasionally exploding, about modern Arcadia. He has turned off his fifty men to starve. Now, at some distance from his own farm, there is another on which the laborers were working for their bread in the same way, by tilling the land. The machinist sends over to these, saying--"I have got food enough for you without your digging or ploughing any more. I can maintain you in other occupations instead of ploughing that land; if you rake in its gravel you will find some hard stones--you shall grind those on mills till they glitter; then, my wife shall wear a necklace of them. Also, if you turn up the meadows below you will find some fine white clay, of which you shall make a porcelain service for me: and the rest of the farm I want for pasture for horses for my carriage--and you shall groom them, and some of you ride behind the carriage with staves in your hands, and I will keep you much fatter for doing that than you can keep yourselves by digging." Well--but it is answered, are we to have no diamonds, nor china, nor pictures, nor footmen, then--but all to be farmers? I am not saying what we ought to do, I want only to show you with perfect clearness first what we _are doing_; and that, I repeat, is the upshot of machine-contriving in this country. And observe its effect on the national strength. Without machines, you have a hundred and fifty yeomen ready to join for defence of the land. You get your machine, starve fifty of them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of as many more, and for your national defence against an enemy, you have now, and _can_ have, only fifty men, instead of a hundred and fifty; these also now with minds much alienated from you as their chief,[141] and the rest, lapidaries or footmen; and a steam plough. That is one effect of machinery; but at all events, if we have thus lost in men, we have gained in riches; instead of happy human souls, we have at least got pictures, china, horses, and are ourselves better off than we were before. But very often, and in much of our machine-contriving, even _that_ result does not follow. We are not one whit the richer for the machine, we only employ it for our amusement. For observe, our gaining in riches depends on the men who are out of employment consenting to be starved, or sent out of the country. But suppose they do not consent passively to be starved, but some of them become criminals, and have to be taken charge of and fed at a much greater cost than if they were at work, and, others, paupers, rioters, and the like, then you attain the real outcome of modern wisdom and ingenuity. You have your hundred men honestly at country work; but you don't like the sight of human beings in your fields; you like better to see a smoking kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that pleasure, and you employ your fifty men in picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thieving. By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we are to till the ground. By hand-labor also to plough the sea; both for food, and in commerce, and in war: not with floating kettles there neither, but with hempen bridle, and the winds of heaven in harness. That is the way the power of Greece rose on her Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfi in her blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from the North Cape to Sicily:--so, your own dominion also of the past. Of the past mind you. On the Baltic and the Nile, your power is already departed. By machinery you would advance to discovery; by machinery you would carry your commerce;--you would be engineers instead of sailors; and instantly in the North seas you are beaten among the ice, and before the very Gods of Nile, beaten among the sand. Agriculture, then, by the hand or by the plough drawn only by animals; and shepherd and pastoral husbandry, are to be the chief schools of Englishmen. And this most royal academy of all academies you have to open over all the land, purifying your heaths and hills, and waters, and keeping them full of every kind of lovely natural organism, in tree, herb, and living creature. All land that is waste and ugly, you must redeem into ordered fruitfulness; all ruin, desolateness, imperfectness of hut or habitation, you must do away with; and throughout every village and city of your English dominion there must not be a hand that cannot find a helper, nor a heart that cannot find a comforter. "How impossible!" I know, you are thinking. Ah! So far from impossible, it is easy, it is natural, it is necessary, and I declare to you that, sooner or later, it _must be done_, at our peril. If now our English lords of land will fix this idea steadily before them; take the people to their hearts, trust to their loyalty, lead their labor;--then indeed there will be princes again in the midst of us, worthy of the island throne, "This royal throne of kings--this sceptred isle-- This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection, and the hand of war; This precious stone set in the silver sea; This happy breed of men--this little world: This other Eden--Demi-Paradise." But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and equivocate, clutching through the confused catastrophe of all things only at what they can still keep stealthily for themselves--their doom is nearer than even their adversaries hope, and it will be deeper than even their despisers dream. That, believe me, is the work you have to do in England; and out of England you have room for everything else you care to do. Are her dominions in the world so narrow that she can find no place to spin cotton in but Yorkshire? We may organize emigration into an infinite power. We may assemble troops of the more adventurous and ambitious of our youth; we may send them on truest foreign service, founding new seats of authority, and centres of thought, in uncultivated and unconquered lands; retaining the full affection to the native country no less in our colonists than in our armies, teaching them to maintain allegiance to their fatherland in labor no less than in battle; aiding them with free hand in the prosecution of discovery, and the victory over adverse natural powers; establishing seats of every manufacture in the climates and places best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves into due alliance and harmony of skill with the dexterities of every race, and the wisdoms of every tradition and every tongue. And then you may make England itself the centre of the learning, of the arts, of the courtesies and felicities of the world. Yon may cover her mountains with pasture; her plains with corn, her valleys with the lily, and her gardens with the rose. You may bring together there in peace the wise and the pure, and the gentle of the earth, and by their word, command through its farthest darkness the birth of "God's first creature, which was Light." You know whose words those are; the words of the wisest of Englishmen. He, and with him the wisest of all other great nations, have spoken always to men of this hope, and they would not hear. Plato, in the dialogue of Critias, his last, broken off at his death--Pindar, in passionate singing of the fortunate islands--Virgil, in the prophetic tenth eclogue--Bacon, in his fable of the New Atlantis--More, in the book which, too impatiently wise, became the bye-word of fools--these, all, have told us with one voice what we should strive to attain; _they_ not hopeless of it, but for our follies forced, as it seems, by heaven, to tell us only partly and in parables, lest we should hear them and obey. Shall we never listen to the words of these wisest of men? Then listen at least to the words of your children--let us in the lips of babes and sucklings find our strength; and see that we do not make them mock instead of pray, when we teach them, night and morning, to ask for what we believe never can be granted;--that the will of the Father,--which is, that His creatures may be righteous and happy--should be done, _on earth_, as it is in Heaven. FOOTNOTES: [139] Compare _Time and Tide_, § 169, _and Fors Clavigera_, Letter XIV, page 9. [140] See Appendix, "Modern Education," and compare § 70 of _Time and Tide_. [141] [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early part of this year, 1873, at the rate of a regiment a week.] _NOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA._ I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions. When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of avoidable human suffering, and that it ought to cease among Christian nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind. But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful characters yet developed among men have been formed in war;--that all great nations have been warrior nations, and that the only kinds of peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to the intellect, and the heart. The lecture on "War," in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had for its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, praying them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And I have been hindered from completing my long intended notes on the economy of the Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far the machinery and discipline of war, under which they learned the art of government, was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and sagacity of the Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, might have done for the happiness of his Prussia, unruined. In war, however, or in peace, the character which Carlyle chiefly loves him for, and in which Carlyle has shown him to differ from all kings up to this time succeeding him, is his constant purpose to use every power entrusted to him for the good of his people; and be, not in name only, but in heart and hand, their king. Not in ambition, but in natural instinct of duty. Friedrich, born to govern, determines to govern to the best of his faculty. That "best" may sometimes be unwise; and self-will, or love of glory, may have their oblique hold on his mind, and warp it this way or that; but they are never principal with him. He believes that war is necessary, and maintains it; sees that peace is necessary, and calmly persists in the work of it to the day of his death, not claiming therein more praise than the head of any ordinary household, who rules it simply because it is his place, and he must not yield the mastery of it to another. How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it, seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that, broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth's character of the happy warrior cannot be reached in the height of it _but by_ a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the best soldiers of England himself read me the poem,[142] and taught me, what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was entirely literal. There is nothing of so high reach distinctly demonstrable in Friedrich: but I see more and more, as I grow older, that the things which are the most worth, encumbered among the errors and faults of every man's nature, are never clearly demonstrable; and are often most forcible when they are scarcely distinct to his own conscience,--how much less, clamorous for recognition by others! Nothing can be more beautiful than Carlyle's showing of this, to any careful reader of Friedrich. But careful readers are but one in the thousand; and by the careless, the masses of detail with which the historian must deal are insurmountable. My own notes, made for the special purpose of hunting down the one point of economy, though they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own current and method of thought, may yet be useful in enabling readers, unaccustomed to books involving so vast a range of conception, to discern what, on this one subject only, may be gathered from that history. On any other subject of importance, similar gatherings might be made of other passages. The historian has to deal with all at once. I therefore have determined to print here, as a sequel to the Essay on War, my notes from the first volume of Friedrich, on the economies of Brandenburg, up to the date of the establishment of the Prussian monarchy. The economies of the first three Kings of Prussia I shall then take up in _Fors Clavigera_, finding them fitter for examination in connection with the subject of that book than of this. I assume, that the reader will take down his first volume of Carlyle, and read attentively the passages to which I refer him. I give the reference first to the largest edition, in six volumes (1858-1865); then, in parenthesis, to the smallest or "people's edition" (1872-1873). The pieces which I have quoted in my own text are for the use of readers who may not have ready access to the book; and are enough for the explanation of the points to which I wish them to direct their thoughts in reading such histories of soldiers or soldier-kingdoms. I. _Year_ 928 to 936.--_Dawn of Order in Christian Germany._ Book II. Chap. i. p. 67 (47). Henry the Fowler, "the beginning of German kings," is a mighty soldier _in the cause of peace_; his essential work the building and organization of fortified towns for the protection of men. Read page 72 with utmost care (51), "He fortified towns," to end of small print. I have added some notes on the matter in my lecture on Giovanni Pisano; but whether you can glance at them or not, fix in your mind this institution of truly civil or civic building in Germany, as distinct from the building of baronial castles for the security of _robbers_: and of a standing army consisting of every ninth man, called a "burgher" ("townsman")--a soldier, appointed to learn that profession that he may guard the walls--the exact reverse of _our_ notion of a burgher. Frederick's final idea of his army is, indeed, only this. Brannibor, a chief fortress of the Wends, is thus taken, and further strengthened by Henry the Fowler; wardens appointed for it; and thus the history of Brandenburg begins. On all frontiers, also, this "beginning of German kings" has his "Markgraf." "Ancient of the marked place." Read page 73, measuredly, learning it by heart, if it may be. (51-2.) II. 936-1000.--_History of Nascent Brandenburg._ The passage I last desired you to read ends with this sentence: "The sea-wall you build, and what main floodgates you establish in it, will depend on the state of the outer sea." From this time forward you have to keep clearly separate in your minds, (A) the history of that outer sea, Pagan Scandinavia, Russia, and Bor-Russia, or Prussia proper; (B) the history of Henry the Fowler's Eastern and Western Marches; asserting themselves gradually as Austria and the Netherlands; and (C) the history of this inconsiderable fortress of Brandenburg, gradually becoming considerable, and the capital city of increasing district between them. That last history, however, Carlyle is obliged to leave vague and gray for two hundred years after Henry's death. Absolutely dim for the first century, in which nothing is evident but that its wardens or Markgraves had no peaceable possession of the place. Read the second paragraph in page 74 (52-3), "in old books" to "reader," and the first in page 83 (59) "meanwhile" to "substantial," consecutively. They bring the story of Brandenburg itself down, at any rate, from 936 to 1000. III. 936-1000.--_State of the Outer Sea._ Read now Chapter II. beginning at page 76 (54), wherein you will get account of the beginning of vigorous missionary work on the outer sea, in Prussia proper; of the death of St. Adalbert, and of the purchase of his dead body by the Duke of Poland. You will not easily understand Carlyle's laugh in this chapter, unless you have learned yourself to laugh in sadness, and to laugh in love. "No Czech blows his pipe in the woodlands without certain precautions and preliminary fuglings of a devotional nature." (Imagine St. Adalbert, in spirit, at the railway station in Birmingham!) My own main point for notice in the chapter is the purchase of his body for its "weight in gold." Swindling angels held it up in the scales; it did not weigh so much as a web of gossamer. "Had such excellent odor, too, and came for a mere nothing of gold," says Carlyle. It is one of the first commercial transactions of Germany, but I regret the conduct of the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism has been proud of ceasing to invest in relics, its swindling angels helping it to better things, as it supposes. For my own part, I believe Christian Germany could not have bought at this time any treasure more precious; nevertheless, the missionary work itself you find is wholly vain. The difference of opinion between St. Adalbert and the Wends, on Divine matters, does not signify to the Fates. They will not have it disputed about; and end the dispute adversely, to St. Adalbert--adversely, even, to Brandenburg and its civilizing power, as you will immediately see. IV. 1000-1030.--_History of Brandenburg in Trouble._ Book II. Chap. iii. p. 83 (59). The adventures of Brandenburg in contest with Pagan Prussia, irritated, rather than amended, by St. Adalbert. In 1023, roughly, a hundred years after Henry the Fowler's death, Brandenburg is taken by the Wends, and its first line of Markgraves ended; its population mostly butchered, especially the priests; and the Wends' God, Triglaph, "something like three whales' cubs combined by boiling," set up on the top of St. Mary's Hill. Here is an adverse "Doctrine of the Trinity" which has its supporters! It is wonderful,--this Tripod and Triglyph--three-footed, three-cut faith of the North and South, the leaf of the oxalis, and strawberry, and clover, fostering the same in their simple manner. I suppose it to be the most savage and natural of notions about Deity; a prismatic idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill. "For a time," says Carlyle, "the priests all slain or fled--shadowy Markgraves the like--church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph, like a triple porpoise under the influence of laudanum, stood, I know not whether on his head or his tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as the Supreme of this Universe for the time being." V. 1030-1130.--_Brandenburg under the Ditmarsch Markgraves, or Ditmarsch-Stade Markgraves._ Book II. Chap. iii. p. 85 (60). Of Anglish, or Saxon breed. They attack Brandenburg, under its Triglyphic protector, take it--dethrone him, and hold the town for a hundred years, their history "stamped beneficially on the face of things, Markgraf after Markgraf getting killed in the business. 'Erschlagen,' 'slain,' fighting with the Heathen--say the old books, and pass on to another." If we allow seven years to Triglaph--we get a clear century for these--as above indicated. They die out in 1130. VI. 1130-1170.--_Brandenburg under Albert the Bear._ Book II. Chap iv. p. 91 (64). He is the first of the Ascanien Markgraves, whose castle of Ascanica is on the northern slope of the Hartz Mountains, "ruins still dimly traceable." There had been no soldier or king of note among the Ditmarsch Markgraves, so that you will do well to fix in your mind successively the three men, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, and Albert the Bear. A soldier again, and a strong one. Named the Bear only from the device on his shield, first wholly definite Markgraf of Brandenburg that there is, "and that the luckiest of events for Brandenburg." Read page 93 (66) carefully, and note this of his economies. * * * * * Nothing better is known to me of Albert the Bear than his introducing large numbers of Dutch Netherlanders into those countries; men thrown out of work, who already knew how to deal with bog and sand, by mixing and delving, and who first taught Brandenburg what greenness and cow-pasture was. The Wends, in presence of such things, could not but consent more and more to efface themselves--either to become German, and grow milk and cheese in the Dutch manner, or to disappear from the world. * * * * * After two-hundred and fifty years of barking and worrying, the Wends are now finally reduced to silence; their anarchy well buried and wholesome Dutch cabbage planted over it; Albert did several great things in the world; but this, for posterity, remains his memorable feat. Not done quite easily, but done: big destinies of nations or of persons are not founded gratis in this world, He had a sore, toilsome time of it, coercing, warring, managing among his fellow-creatures, while his day's work lasted--fifty years or so, for it began early. He died in his castle of Ballenstädt, peaceably among the Hartz Mountains at last, in the year 1170, age about sixty-five. * * * * * Now, note in all this the steady gain of soldiership enforcing order and agriculture, with St. Adalbert giving higher strain to the imagination. Henry the Fowler establishes walled towns, fighting for mere peace. Albert the Bear plants the country with cabbages, fighting for his cabbage-fields. And the disciples of St. Adalbert, generally, have succeeded in substituting some idea of Christ for the idea of Triglaph. Some idea only; other ideas than of Christ haunt even to this day those Hartz Mountains among which Albert the Bear dies so peacefully. Mephistopheles, and all his ministers, inhabit there, commanding mephitic clouds and earth-born dreams. VII. 1170-1320.--_Brandenburg 150 years under the Ascanien Markgraves._ Vol. I. Book II Chap. viii. p. 135 (96). "Wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to be more and more planted by them in the waste sand: intrusive chaos, and Triglaph held at bay by them," till at last in 1240, seventy years after the great Bear's death, they fortify a new Burg, a "_little_ rampart," Wehrlin, diminutive of Wehr (or vallum), gradually smoothing itself, with a little echo of the Bear in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily river Spree flowing by, "in which you catch various fish;" while trade over the flats and by the dull streams, is widely possible. Of the Ascanien race, the notablest is Otto with the Arrow, whose story see, pp. 138-141 (98-100), noting that Otto is one of the first Minnesingers; that, being a prisoner to the Archbishop of Magdeburg, his wife rescues him, selling her jewels to bribe the canons; and that the Knight, set free on parole and promise of farther ransom, rides back with his own price in his hand; holding himself thereat cheaply bought, though no angelic legerdemain happens to the scales now. His own estimate of his price--"Rain gold ducats on my war-horse and me, till you cannot see the point of my spear atop." Emptiness of utter pride, you think? Not so. Consider with yourself, reader, how much you dare to say, aloud, _you_ are worth. If you have _no_ courage to name any price whatsoever for yourself, believe me, the cause is not your modesty, but that in very truth you feel in your heart there would be no bid for you at Lucian's sale of lives, were that again possible, at Christie and Manson's. Finally (1319 exactly; say 1320, for memory), the Ascanien line expired in Brandenburg, and the little town and its electorate lapsed to the Kaiser: meantime other economical arrangements had been in progress; but observe first how far we have got. The Fowler, St. Adalbert and the Bear have established order, and some sort of Christianity; but the established persons begin to think somewhat too well of themselves. On quite honest terms, a dead saint or a living knight ought to be worth their true "weight in gold." But a pyramid, with only the point of the spear seen at top, would be many times over one's weight in gold. And although men were yet far enough from the notion of modern days, that the gold is better than the flesh, and from buying it with the clay of one's body, and even the fire of one's soul, instead of soul and body with _it_, they were beginning to fight for their own supremacy, or for their own religious fancies, and not at all to any useful end, until an entirely unexpected movement is made in the old useful direction forsooth, only by some kind ship-captains of Lübeck! VIII. 1210-1320.--_Civil work, aiding military, during the Ascanien period._ Vol. I. Book II. Chap. vi. p. 109 (77). In the year 1190, Acre not yet taken, and the crusading army wasting by murrain on the shore, the German soldiers especially having none to look after them, certain compassionate ship-captains of Lübeck, one Walpot von Bassenheim taking the lead, formed themselves into an union for succor of the sick and the dying, set up canvas tents from the Lübeck ship stores, and did what utmost was in them silently in the name of mercy and heaven. Finding its work prosper, the little medicinal and weather-fending company took vows on itself, strict chivalry forms, and decided to become permanent "Knights Hospitallers of our dear Lady of Mount Zion," separate from the former Knights Hospitallers, as being entirely German: yet soon, as the German Order of St. Mary, eclipsing in importance Templars, Hospitallers, and every other chivalric order then extant; no purpose of battle in them, but much strength for it; their purpose only the helping of German pilgrims. To this only they are bound by their vow, "gelübde," and become one of the usefullest of clubs in all the Pall Mall of Europe. Finding pilgrimage in Palestine falling slack, and more need for them on the homeward side of the sea, their Hochmeister, Hermann of the Salza, goes over to Venice in 1210. There the titular bishop of still unconverted Preussen advises him of that field of work for his idle knights. Hermann thinks well of it: sets his St. Mary's riders at Triglaph, with the sword in one hand and a missal in the other. Not your modern way of affecting conversion! Too illiberal, you think; and what would Mr. J. S. Mill say? But if Triglaph _had_ been verily "three whales' cubs combined by boiling," you would yourself have promoted attack upon him for the sake of his oil, would not you? The Teutsch Ritters, fighting him for charity, are they so much inferior to you? * * * * * They built, and burnt, innumerable stockades for and against; built wooden forts which are now stone towns. They fought much and prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might become grassy meadow--as it continues to this day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand stone Schloss still visible and even habitable: this was at length their headquarter. But how many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in different parts; what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man has counted. But always some preaching by zealous monks, accompanied the chivalrous fighting. And colonists came in from Germany; trickling in, or at times streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten heathen: terms not of tolerant nature, but which _will be punctually kept by Ritterdom_. When the flame of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up again too extensively, high personages came on crusade to them. Ottocar, King of Bohemia, with his extensive far-shining chivalry, "conquered Samland in a month;" tore up the Romova where Adalbert had been massacred, and burned it from the face of the earth. A certain fortress was founded at that time, in Ottocar's presence; and in honor of him they named it King's Fortress, "Königsberg." Among King Ottocar's esquires, or subaltern junior officials, on this occasion, is one Rudolf, heir of a poor Swiss lordship and gray hill castle, called Hapsburg, rather in reduced circumstances, whom Ottocar likes for his prudent, hardy ways; a stout, modest, wise young man, who may chance to redeem Hapsburg a little, if he lives. Conversion, and complete conquest once come, there was a happy time for Prussia; ploughshare instead of sword: busy sea-havens, German towns, getting built; churches everywhere rising; grass growing, and peaceable cows, where formerly had been quagmire and snakes, and for the Order a happy time. On the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the first century and more, was a grand phenomenon, and flamed like a bright blessed beacon through the night of things, in those Northern countries. For above a century, we perceive, it was the rallying place of all brave men who had a career to seek on terms other than vulgar. The noble soul, aiming beyond money, and sensible to more than hunger in this world, had a beacon burning (as we say), if the night chanced to overtake it, and the earth to grow too intricate, as is not uncommon. Better than the career of stump-oratory, I should fancy, and its Hesperides apples, golden, and of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling away one's poor spiritual gift of God (loan, not gift), such as it may be, in building the lofty rhyme, the lofty review article, for a discerning public that has sixpence to spare! Times alter greatly.[143] * * * * * We must pause here again for a moment to think where we are, and who is _with us_. The Teutsch Ritters have been fighting, independently of all states, for their own hand, or St. Adalbert's; partly for mere love of fight, partly for love of order, partly for love of God. Meantime, other Riders have been fighting wholly for what they could get by it; and other persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at all, but in their own towns peacefully manufacturing and selling. Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has become a military power, Flanders a mercantile one, pious only in the degree consistent with their several occupations. Prussia is now a practical and farming country, more Christian than its longer-converted neighbors. * * * * * Towns are built, Königsberg (King Ottocar's town), Thoren (Thorn, City of the Gates), with many others; so that the wild population and the tame now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and Lübeck law; and all was ploughing and trading. * * * * * But Brandenburg itself, what of it? The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the whole prosperously down to 1320, when their line expires, and it falls into the power of Imperial Austria. IX. 1320-1415.--_Brandenburg under the Austrians._ A century--the fourteenth--of miserable anarchy and decline for Brandenburg, its Kurfürsts, in deadly succession, making what they can out of it for their own pockets. The city itself and its territory utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). "The towns suffered much, any trade they might have had going to wreck. Robber castles flourished, all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Hamburg pedlars made for but to be robbed?" X. 1415-1440.--_Brandenburg under Friedrich of Nüremberg._ This is the fourth of the men whom you are to remember as creators of the Prussian monarchy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert the Bear, of Ascanien, and Friedrich of Nüremberg; (of Hohenzollern, by name, and by country, of the Black Forest, north of the Lake of Constance). Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, during the great Council, for about 200,000_l._ of our money, worth perhaps a million in that day; still, with its capabilities, "dog cheap." Admitting, what no one at the time denied, the general marketableness of states as private property, this is the one practical result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think wrong), of that oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of the "elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And that one thing was not its doing; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated," putting, however, at last, Brandenburg again under the will of one strong man. On St. John's day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, "and Brandenburg, under its wise Kurfürst, begins to be cosmic again." The story of Heavy Peg, pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and important passages of the first volume; page 199, specially to our purpose, must be given entire:-- The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old days; but he wisely declined that too. It was in Brandenburg, by what he silently founded there, that he did his chief benefit to Germany and mankind. He understood the noble art of governing men; had in him the justness, clearness, valor, and patience needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for one thing. _Which indeed is the first requisite in said art_:--if you will have your laws obeyed without mutiny, see well that they be pieces of God Almighty's law; otherwise all the artillery in the world will not keep down mutiny. Friedrich "travelled much over Brandenburg;" looking into everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy, innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which no man could prosper, he may be defined as constantly prosperous. To Brandenburg he was, very literally, the blessing of blessings; redemption out of death into life. In the ruins of that old Friesack Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg, antiquarian science (if it had any eyes) might look for the taproot of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun. Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its various budding and withering, under the succession of the twelve Electors, of whom Friedrich, with his heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth. XI. 1416-1701.--_Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern Kurfürsts._ Book III. Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they came to power in Nüremberg, is told in Chap. v. of Book II. Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at page 377 (269). I copy it, in absolute barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary convenience, here: Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of Nüremberg), 1412-1440 Friedrich II., called "Iron Teeth," 1440-1472 Albert, 1472-1486 Johann, 1486-1499 Joachim I., 1499-1535 Joachim II., 1535-1571 Johann George, 1571-1598 Joachim Friedrich, 1598-1608 Johann Sigismund, 1608-1619 George Wilhelm, 1619-1640 Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector), 1640-1688 Friedrich, first King; crowned 18th January, 1701 Of this line of princes we have to say they followed generally in their ancestor's steps, and had success of the like kind more or less; Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and behaviour as well as by descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There was likewise solid fair-play in general, no founding of yourself on ground that will not carry, _and there was instant, gentle, but inexorable crushing of mutiny_, if it showed itself, which after the Second Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether ceased to do. This is the general account of them; of special matters note the following:-- II. Friedrich, called "Iron-teeth," from his firmness, proves a notable manager and governor. Builds the palace at Berlin in its first form, and makes it his chief residence. Buys Neumark from the fallen Teutsch Ritters, and generally establishes things on securer footing. III. Albert, "a fiery, tough old Gentlemen," called the Achilles of Germany in his day; has half-a-century of fighting with his own Nürembergers, with Bavaria, France, Burgundy, and its fiery Charles, besides being head constable to the Kaiser among any disorderly persons in the East. His skull, long shown on his tomb, "marvellous for strength and with no visible sutures." IV. John, the orator of his race; (but the orations unrecorded). His second son, Archbishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memorable work see page 223 (143) and read in connection with that the history of Margraf George, pp. 237-241 (152-154), and the 8th chapter of the third book. V. Joachim I., of little note; thinks there has been enough Reformation, and checks proceedings in a dull stubbornness, causing him at least grave domestic difficulties.--Page 271 (173). VI. Joachim II. Again active in the Reformation, and staunch, though generally in a cautious, weighty, never in a rash, swift way, to the great cause of Protestantism and to all good causes. He was himself a solemnly devout man; deep, awe-stricken reverence dwelling in his view of this universe. Most serious, though with a jocose dialect, commonly having a cheerful wit in speaking to men. Luther's books he called his Seelenschatz, (soul's treasure); Luther and the Bible were his chief reading. Fond of profane learning, too, and of the useful or ornamental arts; given to music, and "would himself sing aloud" when he had a melodious leisure hour. VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr; no mistresses, no luxuries allowed; at the sight of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on an unhappy youth and pack him from his presence. Very strict in point of justice; a peasant once appealing to him in one of his inspection journeys through the country-- "Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so and so; I am your Highness's born subject." "Thou shouldst have it, man, wert thou a born Turk!" answered Johann George. Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors representing in Europe the Puritan mind of England in a somewhat duller, but less dangerous, form; receiving what Protestantism could teach of honesty and common sense, but not its anti-Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual anxiety. Pardon of sins is not to be had from Tetzel; neither, the Hohenzollern mind advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master, for either the buying, or the asking. On the whole, we had better commit as few as possible, and live just lives and plain ones. A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest solidity, looks through the conduct of this Herr; a determined Protestant he too, as indeed all the following were and are. VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of Prussia, which hitherto, you observe, has always been spoken of as a separate country from Brandenburg. March 11, 1605--"squeezed his way into the actual guardianship of Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which was his by right." For my own part, I do not trouble myself much about these rights, never being able to make out any single one, to begin with, except the right to keep everything and every place about you in as good order as you can--Prussia, Poland, or what else. I should much like, for instance, just now, to hear of any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake breed taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying what he could make of his rights as far round Gibraltar as he could enforce them. At all events, Master Joachim has somehow got hold of Prussia; and means to keep it. IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our economical purposes, as getting the "guardianship" of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at page 317 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new order of things among the knights of Europe--"princely etiquettes melting all into smoke." Too literally so, that being one of the calamitous functions of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life our country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, especially, concerning which legal dispute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is well worth the lawyers' trouble, it seems. It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old days--"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Jülich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says Büsching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud with sounds of the anvil and the loom. The lawyers took two hundred and six years to settle the question concerning this Duchy, and the thing Johann Sigismund had claimed legally in 1609 was actually handed over to Johann Sigismund's descendant in the seventh generation. "These litigated duchies are now the Prussian provinces, Jülich, Berg, Cleve, and the nucleus of Prussia's possessions in the Rhine country." X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327 (231, 233) on this Elector and German Protestantism, now fallen cold, and somewhat too little dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the only weak prince of all the twelve. For another example how the heart and life of a country depend upon its prince, not on its council, read this, of Gustavus Adolphus, demanding the cession of Spandau and Küstrin: Which cession Kurfürst George Wilhelm, though giving all his prayers to the good cause, could by no means grant. Gustav had to insist, with more and more emphasis, advancing at last with military menace upon Berlin itself. He was met by George Wilhelm and his Council, "in the woods of Cöpenick," short way to the east of that city; there George Wilhelm and his Council wandered about, sending messages, hopelessly consulting, saying among each other, "Que faire? ils ont des canons." For many hours so, round the inflexible Gustav, who was there like a fixed mile-stone, and to all questions and comers had only one answer. On our special question of war and its consequences, read this of the Thirty Years' one: But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and towards the latter times, the exclusive one, was hunger. The opposing armies tried to starve one another; at lowest, tried each not to starve. Each trying to eat the country or, at any rate, to leave nothing eatable in it; what that will mean for the country we may consider. As the armies too frequently, and the Kaiser's armies habitually, lived without commissariat, often enough without pay, all horrors of war and of being a seat of war, that have been since heard of, are poor to those then practised, the detail of which is still horrible to read. Germany, in all eatable quarters of it, had to undergo the process; tortured, torn to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar, under the iron mace of war. Brandenburg saw its towns seized and sacked, its country populations driven to despair by the one party and the other. Three times--first in the Wallenstein-Mecklenburg times, while fire and sword were the weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of the struggle, when starvation had become the method--Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre of conflict, where all forms of the dismal were at their height. In 1638, three years after that precious "Peace of Prag,"... the ravages of the starving Gallas and his Imperialists excelled all precedent,... men ate human flesh, nay, human creatures ate their own children. "Que faire? ils ont des canons!" "We have now arrived at the lowest nadir point" (says Carlyle) "of the history of Brandenburg under the Hohenzollerns." Is this then all that Heavy Peg and our nine Kurfürsts have done for us? Carlyle does not mean that; but even he, greatest of historians since Tacitus, is not enough careful to mark for us the growth of national character, as distinct from the prosperity of dynasties. A republican historian would think of this development only, and suppose it to be possible without any dynasties. Which is indeed in a measure so, and the work now chiefly needed in moral philosophy, as well as history, is an analysis of the constant and prevalent, yet unthought of, influences, which, without any external help from kings, and in a silent and entirely necessary manner, form, in Sweden, in Bavaria, in the Tyrol, in the Scottish border, and on the French sea-coast, races of noble peasants; pacific, poetic, heroic, Christian-hearted in the deepest sense, who may indeed perish by sword or famine in any cruel thirty years' war, or ignoble thirty years' peace, and yet leave such strength to their children that the country, apparently ravaged into hopeless ruin, revives, under any prudent king, as the cultivated fields do under the spring rain. How the rock to which no seed can cling, and which no rain can soften, is subdued into the good ground which can bring forth its hundredfold, we forget to watch, while we follow the footsteps of the sower, or mourn the catastrophes of storm. All this while, the Prussian earth--the Prussian soul--has been thus dealt upon by successive fate; and now, though laid, as it seems, utterly desolate, it can be revived by a few years of wisdom and of peace. Vol. I. Book III. Chap, xviii.--The Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm. Eleventh of the dynasty:-- There hardly ever came to sovereign power a young man of twenty under more distressing, hopeless-looking circumstances. Political significance Brandenburg had none; a mere Protestant appendage, dragged about by a Papist Kaiser. His father's Prime Minister, as we have seen, was in the interest of his enemies; not Brandenburg's servant, but Austria's. The very commandants of his fortresses, Commandant of Spandau more especially, refused to obey Friedrich Wilhelm on his accession; "were bound to obey the Kaiser in the first place." For twenty years past Brandenburg had been scoured by hostile armies, which, especially the Kaiser's part of which, committed outrages new in human history. In a year or two hence, Brandenburg became again the theatre of business, Austrian Gallas advancing thither again (1644) with intent "to shut up Torstenson and his Swedes in Jutland." Gallas could by no means do what he intended; on the contrary, he had to run from Torstenson--what feet could do; was hunted, he and his Merode Brüder (beautiful inventors of the "marauding" art), till they pretty much all died (crepirten) says Köhler. No great loss to society, the death of these artists, but we can fancy what their life, and especially what the process of their dying, may have cost poor Brandenburg again! Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in this as in other emergencies, was sun-clear to himself, but for most part dim to everybody else. He had to walk very warily, Sweden on one hand of him, suspicious Kaiser on the other: he had to wear semblances, to be ready with evasive words, and advance noiselessly by many circuits. More delicate operation could not be imagined. But advance he did; advance and arrive. With extraordinary talent, diligence, and felicity the young man wound himself out of this first fatal position, got those foreign armies pushed out of his country, and kept them out. His first concern had been to find some vestige of revenue, to put that upon a clear footing, and by loans or otherwise to scrape a little ready-money together. On the strength _of which a small body of soldiers could be collected about him, and drilled into real ability to fight and obey_. This as a basis: on this followed all manner of things, freedom from Swedish-Austrian invasions, as the first thing. He was himself, as appeared by-and-by, a fighter of the first quality, when it came to that; but never was willing to fight if he could help it. Preferred rather to shift, manoeuvre, and negotiate, which he did in most vigilant, adroit, and masterly manner. But by degrees he had grown to have, and could maintain it, an army of twenty-four thousand men, among the best troops then in being. To wear semblances, to be ready with evasive words, how is this, Mr. Carlyle? thinks perhaps the rightly thoughtful reader. Yes, such things have to be; There are lies and lies, and there are truths and truths. Ulysses cannot ride on the ram's back, like Phryxus; but must ride under his belly. Read also this, presently following: Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm, who had shone much in the battle of Warsaw, into which he was dragged against his will, changed sides. An inconsistent, treacherous man? Perhaps not, O reader! perhaps a man advancing "in circuits," the only way he has; spirally, face now to east, now to west, with his own reasonable private aim sun-clear to him all the while? The battle of Warsaw, three days long, fought with Gustavus, the grandfather of Charles XII., against the Poles, virtually ends the Polish power: Old Johann Casimir, not long after that peace of Oliva, getting tired of his unruly Polish chivalry and their ways, abdicated--retired to Paris, and "and lived much with Ninon de l'Enclos and her circle," for the rest of his life. He used to complain of his Polish chivalry, that there was no solidity in them; nothing but outside glitter, with tumult and anarchic noise; fatal want of one essential talent, _the talent of obeying_; and has been heard to prophesy that a glorious Republic, persisting in such courses, would arrive at results which would surprise it. Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm figures in the world; public men watching his procedure; kings anxious to secure him--Dutch print-sellers sticking up his portraits for a hero-worshipping public. Fighting hero, had the public known it, was not his essential character, though he had to fight a great deal. He was essentially an industrial man; great in organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic heaps to become cosmic for him. He drains bogs, settles colonies in the waste places of his dominions, cuts canals; unweariedly encourages trade and work. The Friedrich Wilhelm's Canal, which still carries tonnage from the Oder to the Spree, is a monument of his zeal in this way; creditable with the means he had. To the poor French Protestants in the Edict-of-Nantes affair, he was like an express benefit of Heaven; one helper appointed to whom the help itself was profitable. He munificently welcomed them to Brandenburg; showed really a noble piety and human pity, as well as judgment; nor did Brandenburg and he want their reward. Some twenty thousand nimble French souls, evidently of the best French quality, found a home there; made "waste sands about Berlin into potherb gardens;" and in spiritual Brandenburg, too, did something of horticulture which is still noticeable. Now read carefully the description of the man, p. 352 (224-5); the story of the battle of Fehrbellin, "the Marathon of Brandenburg," p. 354 (225); and of the winter campaign of 1679, p. 356 (227), beginning with its week's marches at sixty miles a day; his wife, as always, being with him; Louisa, honest and loving Dutch girl, aunt to our William of Orange, who trimmed up her own "Orange-burg" (country-house), twenty miles north of Berlin, into a little jewel of the Dutch type, potherb gardens, training-schools for young girls, and the like, a favorite abode of hers when she was at liberty for recreation. But her life was busy and earnest; she was helpmate, not in name only, to an ever busy man. They were married young; a marriage of love withal. Young Friedrich Wilhelm's courtship; wedding in Holland; the honest, trustful walk and conversation of the two sovereign spouses, their journeyings together, their mutual hopes, fears, and manifold vicissitudes, till death, with stern beauty, shut it in; all is human, true, and wholesome in it, interesting to look upon, and rare among sovereign persons. Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before her husband, who married again--(little to his contentment)--died in 1688; and Louisa's second son, Friedrich, ten years old at his mother's death, and now therefore thirty-one, succeeds, becoming afterwards Friedrich I. of Prussia. And here we pause on two great questions. Prussia is assuredly at this point a happier and better country than it was, when inhabited by Wends. But is Friedrich I. a happier and better man than Henry the Fowler? Have all these kings thus improved their country, but never themselves? Is this somewhat expensive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich I. buttoned in diamonds, indeed the best that Protestantism can produce, as against Fowlers, Bears, and Red Beards? Much more, Friedrich Wilhelm, orthodox on predestination; most of all, his less orthodox son;--have we, in these, the highest results which Dr. Martin Luther can produce for the present, in the first circles of society? And if not, how is it that the country, having gained so much in intelligence and strength, lies more passively in their power than the baser country did under that of nobler men? These, and collateral questions, I mean to work out as I can, with Carlyle's good help;--but must pause for this time; in doubt, as heretofore. Only of this one thing I doubt not, that the name of all great kings, set over Christian nations, must at last be, in fufilment, the hereditary one of these German princes, "Rich in Peace;" and that their coronation will be with Wild olive, not with gold. FOOTNOTES: [142] The late Sir Herbert Edwardes. [143] I would much rather print these passages of Carlyle in large golden letters than small black ones; but they are only here at all for unlucky people who can't read them with the context. THE ETHICS OF THE DUST TEN LECTURES TO LITTLE HOUSEWIVES ON THE ELEMENTS OF CRYSTALLISATION CONTENTS. ETHICS OF THE DUST. LECTURE I. PAGE THE VALLEY OF DIAMONDS 1 LECTURE II. THE PYRAMID BUILDERS 21 LECTURE III. THE CRYSTAL LIFE 31 LECTURE IV. THE CRYSTAL ORDERS 43 LECTURE V. CRYSTAL VIRTUES 56 LECTURE VI. CRYSTAL QUARRELS 70 LECTURE VII. HOME VIRTUES 82 LECTURE VIII. CRYSTAL CAPRICE 98 LECTURE IX. CRYSTAL SORROWS 111 LECTURE X. THE CRYSTAL REST 125 NOTES 143 FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL 153 ELEMENTS OF DRAWING. LETTER I. ON FIRST PRACTICE 233 LETTER II. SKETCHING FROM NATURE 293 LETTER III. ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION 331 APPENDIX: THINGS TO BE STUDIED 403 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. ELEMENTS OF DRAWING. FIGURE PAGE 1. SQUARES 237 2. GRADATED SPACES 241 3. OUTLINE OF LETTER 245 4. OUTLINE OF BOUGH OF TREE 248 5. CHARRED LOG 257 6. SHOOT OF LILAC 272 7. LEAF 274 8. BOUGH OF PHILLYREA 275 9. SPRAY OF PHILLYREA 276 10. TRUNK OF TREE, BY TITIAN 284 11. SKETCH FROM RAPHAEL 285 12. OUTLINES OF A BALL 287 13. WOODCUT OF DURER'S 289 14, 15, 16. MASSES OF LEAVES 290, 291 17, 18, 19. CURVATURES IN LEAVES 295, 296 20. FROM AN ETCHING, BY TURNER 297 21. ALPINE BRIDGE 307 22. ALPINE BRIDGE AS IT APPEARS AT VARIOUS DISTANCES 308 23. OUTLINES EXPRESSIVE OF FOLIAGE 314 24. SHOOT OF SPANISH CHESTNUT 315 25. YOUNG SHOOT OF OAK 316 26, 27, 28. WOODCUTS AFTER TITIAN 321, 322 29. DIAGRAM OF WINDOW 339 30. SWISS COTTAGE 355 31. GROUPS OF LEAVE 350 32. PAINTING, by Turner 361 33. SKETCH ON CALAIS SANDS, by Turner 365 34. DRAWING OF AN IDEAL BRIDGE, by Turner 369 35. PROFILE OF THE TOWERS OF EHRENBREITSTEIN 370 36. CURVES 371 37, 38, 39. CURVES FOUND IN LEAVES 372 40. OUTLINES OF A TREE TRUNK 373 41-44. TREE RADIATION 374, 375 45, 46. WOODCUTS OF LEAF 376 47. LEAF OF COLUMBINE 378 48. TOP OF AN OLD TOWER 385 PERSONÆ. OLD LECTURER (of incalculable age) FLORRIE, on astronomical evidence presumed to be aged 9. ISABEL " 11. MAY " 11. LILY " 12. KATHLEEN " 14. LUCILLA " 15. VIOLET " 16. DORA (who has the keys and is housekeeper) " 17. EGYPT (so called from her dark eyes) " 17. JESSIE (who somehow always makes the room look brighter when she is in it) " 18. MARY (of whom everybody, including the Old Lecturer, is in great awe) " 20. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. I have seldom been more disappointed by the result of my best pains given to any of my books, than by the earnest request of my publisher, after the opinion of the public had been taken on the 'Ethics of the Dust,' that I would "write no more in dialogue!" However, I bowed to public judgment in this matter at once, (knowing also my inventive powers to be of the feeblest,); but in reprinting the book, (at the prevailing request of my kind friend, Mr. Henry Willett,) I would pray the readers whom it may at first offend by its disconnected method, to examine, nevertheless, with care, the passages in which the principal speaker sums the conclusions of any dialogue: for these summaries were written as introductions, for young people, to all that I have said on the same matters in my larger books; and, on re-reading them, they satisfy me better, and seem to me calculated to be more generally useful, than anything else I have done of the kind. The summary of the contents of the whole book, beginning, "You may at least earnestly believe," at p. 130, is thus the clearest exposition I have ever yet given of the general conditions under which the Personal Creative Power manifests itself in the forms of matter; and the analysis of heathen conceptions of Deity, beginning at p. 131, and closing at p. 138, not only prefaces, but very nearly supersedes, all that in more lengthy terms I have since asserted, or pleaded for, in 'Aratra Pentelici,' and the 'Queen of the Air.' And thus, however the book may fail in its intention of suggesting new occupations or interests to its younger readers, I think it worth reprinting, in the way I have also reprinted 'Unto this Last,'--page for page; that the students of my more advanced works may be able to refer to these as the original documents of them; of which the most essential in this book are these following. I. The explanation of the baseness of the avaricious functions of the Lower Pthah, p. 39, with his beetle-gospel, p. 41, "that a nation can stand on its vices better than on its virtues," explains the main motive of all my books on Political Economy. II. The examination of the connexion between stupidity and crime, pp. 57-62, anticipated all that I have had to urge in Fors Clavigera against the commonly alleged excuse for public wickedness,--"They don't mean it--they don't know any better." III. The examination of the roots of Moral Power, pp. 90-92, is a summary of what is afterwards developed with utmost care in my inaugural lecture at Oxford on the relation of Art to Morals; compare in that lecture, §§ 83-85, with the sentence in p. 91 of this book, "Nothing is ever done so as really to please our Father, unless we would also have done it, though we had had no Father to know of it." This sentence, however, it must be observed, regards only the general conditions of action in the children of God, in consequence of which it is foretold of them by Christ that they will say at the Judgment, "When saw we thee?" It does not refer to the distinct cases in which virtue consists in faith given to command, appearing to foolish human judgment inconsistent with the Moral Law, as in the sacrifice of Isaac; nor to those in which any directly-given command requires nothing more of virtue than obedience. IV. The subsequent pages, 92-97, were written especially to check the dangerous impulses natural to the minds of many amiable young women, in the direction of narrow and selfish religious sentiment: and they contain, therefore, nearly everything which I believe it necessary that young people should be made to observe, respecting the errors of monastic life. But they in nowise enter on the reverse, or favourable side: of which indeed I did not, and as yet do not, feel myself able to speak with any decisiveness; the evidence on that side, as stated in the text, having "never yet been dispassionately examined." V. The dialogue with Lucilla, beginning at p. 63, is, to my own fancy, the best bit of conversation in the book, and the issue of it, at p. 67, the most practically and immediately useful. For on the idea of the inevitable weakness and corruption of human nature, has logically followed, in our daily life, the horrible creed of modern "Social science," that all social action must be scientifically founded on vicious impulses. But on the habit of measuring and reverencing our powers and talents that we may kindly use them, will be founded a true Social science, developing, by the employment of them, all the real powers and honourable feelings of the race. VI. Finally, the account given in the second and third lectures, of the real nature and marvellousness of the laws of crystallization, is necessary to the understanding of what farther teaching of the beauty of inorganic form I may be able to give, either in 'Deucalion,' or in my 'Elements of Drawing.' I wish however that the second lecture had been made the beginning of the book; and would fain now cancel the first altogether, which I perceive to be both obscure and dull. It was meant for a metaphorical description of the pleasures and dangers in the kingdom of Mammon, or of worldly wealth; its waters mixed with blood, its fruits entangled in thickets of trouble, and poisonous when gathered; and the final captivity of its inhabitants within frozen walls of cruelty and disdain. But the imagery is stupid and ineffective throughout; and I retain this chapter only because I am resolved to leave no room for any one to say that I have withdrawn, as erroneous in principle, so much as a single sentence of any of my books written since 1860. One license taken in this book, however, though often permitted to essay-writers for the relief of their dulness, I never mean to take more,--the relation of composed metaphor as of actual dream, pp. 23 and 104. I assumed, it is true, that in these places the supposed dream would be easily seen to be an invention; but must not any more, even under so transparent disguise, pretend to any share in the real powers of Vision possessed by great poets and true painters. BRANTWOOD: _10th October, 1877._ PREFACE. The following lectures were really given, in substance, at a girls' school (far in the country); which in the course of various experiments on the possibility of introducing some better practice of drawing into the modern scheme of female education, I visited frequently enough to enable the children to regard me as a friend. The lectures always fell more or less into the form of fragmentary answers to questions; and they are allowed to retain that form, as, on the whole, likely to be more interesting than the symmetries of a continuous treatise. Many children (for the school was large) took part, at different times, in the conversations; but I have endeavoured, without confusedly multiplying the number of imaginary[144] speakers, to represent, as far as I could, the general tone of comment and enquiry among young people. It will be at once seen that these Lectures were not intended for an introduction to mineralogy. Their purpose was merely to awaken in the minds of young girls, who were ready to work earnestly and systematically, a vital interest in the subject of their study. No science can be learned in play; but it is often possible, in play, to bring good fruit out of past labour, or show sufficient reasons for the labour of the future. The narrowness of this aim does not, indeed, justify the absence of all reference to many important principles of structure, and many of the most interesting orders of minerals; but I felt it impossible to go far into detail without illustrations; and if readers find this book useful, I may, perhaps, endeavour to supplement it by illustrated notes of the more interesting phenomena in separate groups of familiar minerals;--flints of the chalk;--agates of the basalts;--and the fantastic and exquisitely beautiful varieties of the vein-ores of the two commonest metals, lead and iron. But I have always found that the less we speak of our intentions, the more chance there is of our realizing them; and this poor little book will sufficiently have done its work, for the present, if it engages any of its young readers in study which may enable them to despise it for its shortcomings. DENMARK HILL: _Christmas, 1865._ FOOTNOTES: [144] I do not mean, in saying 'imaginary,' that I have not permitted to myself, in several instances, the affectionate discourtesy of some reminiscence of personal character; for which I must hope to be forgiven by my old pupils and their friends, as I could not otherwise have written the book at all. But only two sentences in all the dialogues, and the anecdote of 'Dotty,' are literally 'historical.' THE ETHICS OF THE DUST. LECTURE I. _THE VALLEY OF DIAMONDS._ _A very idle talk, by the dining-room fire, after raisin-and-almond time._ OLD LECTURER; FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LILY, _and_ SIBYL. OLD LECTURER (L.). Come here, Isabel, and tell me what the make-believe was, this afternoon. ISABEL (_arranging herself very primly on the foot-stool_). Such a dreadful one! Florrie and I were lost in the Valley of Diamonds. L. What! Sindbad's, which nobody could get out of? ISABEL. Yes; but Florrie and I got out of it. L. So I see. At least, I see you did; but are you sure Florrie did? ISABEL. Quite sure. FLORRIE (_putting her head round from behind_ L.'s _sofa-cushion_). Quite sure. (_Disappears again._) L. I think I could be made to feel surer about it. (FLORRIE _reappears, gives_ L. _a kiss, and again exit._) L. I suppose it's all right; but how did you manage it? ISABEL. Well, you know, the eagle that took up Sindbad was very large--very, very large--the largest of all the eagles. L. How large were the others? ISABEL. I don't quite know--they were so far off. But this one was, oh, so big! and it had great wings, as wide as--twice over the ceiling. So, when it was picking up Sindbad, Florrie and I thought it wouldn't know if we got on its back too: so I got up first, and then I pulled up Florrie, and we put our arms round its neck, and away it flew. L. But why did you want to get out of the valley? and why haven't you brought me some diamonds? ISABEL. It was because of the serpents. I couldn't pick up even the least little bit of a diamond, I was so frightened. L. You should not have minded the serpents. ISABEL. Oh, but suppose that they had minded me? L. We all of us mind you a little too much, Isabel, I'm afraid. ISABEL. No--no--no, indeed. L. I tell you what, Isabel--I don't believe either Sindbad, or Florrie, or you, ever were in the Valley of Diamonds. ISABEL. You naughty! when I tell you we were! L. Because you say you were frightened at the serpents. ISABEL. And wouldn't you have been? L. Not at those serpents. Nobody who really goes into the valley is ever frightened at them--they are so beautiful. ISABEL (_suddenly serious_). But there's no real Valley of Diamonds, is there? L. Yes, Isabel; very real indeed. FLORRIE (_reappearing_). Oh, where? Tell me about it. L. I cannot tell you a great deal about it; only I know it is very different from Sindbad's. In his valley, there was only a diamond lying here and there; but, in the real valley, there are diamonds covering the grass in showers every morning, instead of dew: and there are clusters of trees, which look like lilac trees; but, in spring, all their blossoms are of amethyst. FLORRIE. But there can't be any serpents there, then? L. Why not? FLORRIE. Because they don't come into such beautiful places. L. I never said it was a beautiful place. FLORRIE. What! not with diamonds strewed about it like dew? L. That's according te your fancy, Florrie. For myself, I like dew better. ISABEL. Oh, but the dew won't stay; it all dries! L. Yes; and it would be much nicer if the diamonds dried too, for the people in the valley have to sweep them off the grass, in heaps, whenever they want to walk on it; and then the heaps glitter so, they hurt one's eyes. FLORRIE. Now you're just playing, you know. L. So are you, you know. FLORRIE. Yes, but you mustn't play. L. That's very hard, Florrie; why mustn't I, if you may? FLORRIE. Oh, I may, because I'm little, but you mustn't, because you're--(_hesitates for a delicate expression of magnitude_). L. (_rudely taking the first that comes_). Because I'm big? No; that's not the way of it at all, Florrie. Because you're little, you should have very little play; and because I'm big I should have a great deal. ISABEL _and_ FLORRIE (_both_). No--no--no--no. That isn't it at all. (ISABEL _sola, quoting Miss Ingelow._) 'The lambs play always--they know no better.' (_Putting her head very much on one side._) Ah, now--please--please--tell us true; we want to know. L. But why do you want me to tell you true, any more than the man who wrote the 'Arabian Nights?' ISABEL. Because--because we like to know about real things; and you can tell us, and we can't ask the man who wrote the stories. L. What do you call real things? ISABEL. Now, you know! Things that really are. L. Whether you can see them or not? ISABEL. Yes, if somebody else saw them. L. But if nobody has ever seen them? ISABEL (_evading the point_.) Well, but, you know, if there were a real Valley of Diamonds, somebody _must_ have seen it. L. You cannot be so sure of that, Isabel. Many people go to real places, and never see them; and many people pass through this valley, and never see it. FLORRIE. What stupid people they must be! L. No, Florrie. They are much wiser than the people who do see it. MAY. I think I know where it is. ISABEL. Tell us more about it, and then we'll guess. L. Well. There's a great broad road, by a river-side, leading up into it. MAY (_gravely cunning, with emphasis on the last word_). Does the road really go _up_? L. You think it should go down into a valley? No, it goes up; this is a valley among the hills, and it is as high as the clouds, and is often full of them; so that even the people who most want to see it, cannot, always. ISABEL. And what is the river beside the road like? L. It ought to be very beautiful, because it flows over diamond sand--only the water is thick and red. ISABEL. Red water? L. It isn't all water. MAY. Oh, please never mind that, Isabel, just now; I want to hear about the valley. L. So the entrance to it is very wide, under a steep rock; only such numbers of people are always trying to get in, that they keep jostling each other, and manage it but slowly. Some weak ones are pushed back, and never get in at all; and make great moaning as they go away: but perhaps they are none the worse in the end. MAY. And when one gets in, what is it like? L. It is up and down, broken kind of ground: the road stops directly; and there are great dark rocks, covered all over with wild gourds and wild vines; the gourds, if you cut them, are red, with black seeds, like water-melons, and look ever so nice; and the people of the place make a red pottage of them: but you must take care not to eat any if you ever want to leave the valley (though I believe putting plenty of meal in it makes it wholesome). Then the wild vines have clusters of the colour of amber; and the people of the country say they are the grape of Eshcol; and sweeter than honey; but, indeed, if anybody else tastes them, they are like gall. Then there are thickets of bramble, so thorny that they would be cut away directly, anywhere else; but here they are covered with little cinque-foiled blossoms of pure silver; and, for berries, they have clusters of rubies. Dark rubies, which you only see are red after gathering them. But you may fancy what blackberry parties the children have! Only they get their frocks and hands sadly torn. LILY. But rubies can't spot one's frocks as blackberries do? L. No; but I'll tell you what spots them--the mulberries. There are great forests of them, all up the hills, covered with silkworms, some munching the leaves so loud that it is like mills at work; and some spinning. But the berries are the blackest you ever saw; and, wherever they fall, they stain a deep red; and nothing ever washes it out again. And it is their juice, soaking through the grass, which makes the river so red, because all its springs are in this wood. And the boughs of the trees are twisted, as if in pain, like old olive branches; and their leaves are dark. And it is in these forests that the serpents are; but nobody is afraid of them. They have fine crimson crests, and they are wreathed about the wild branches, one in every tree, nearly; and they are singing serpents, for the serpents are, in this forest, what birds are in ours. FLORRIE. Oh, I don't want to go there at all, now. L. You would like it very much indeed, Florrie, if you were there. The serpents would not bite you; the only fear would be of your turning into one! FLORRIE. Oh, dear, but that's worse. L. You wouldn't think so if you really were turned into one, Florrie; you would be very proud of your crest. And as long as you were yourself (not that you could get there if you remained quite the little Florrie you are now), you would like to hear the serpents sing. They hiss a little through it, like the cicadas in Italy; but they keep good time, and sing delightful melodies; and most of them have seven heads, with throats which each take a note of the octave; so that they can sing chords--it is very fine indeed. And the fire-flies fly round the edge of the forests all the night long; you wade in fire-flies, they make the fields look like a lake trembling with reflection of stars; but you must take care not to touch them, for they are not like Italian fireflies, but burn, like real sparks. FLORRIE. I don't like it at all; I'll never go there. L. I hope not, Florrie; or at least that you will get out again if you do. And it is very difficult to get out, for beyond these serpent forests there are great cliffs of dead gold, which form a labyrinth, winding always higher and higher, till the gold is all split asunder by wedges of ice; and glaciers, welded, half of ice seven times frozen, and half of gold seven times frozen, hang down from them, and fall in thunder, cleaving into deadly splinters, like the Cretan arrowheads; and into a mixed dust of snow and gold, ponderous, yet which the mountain whirlwinds are able to lift and drive in wreaths and pillars, hiding the paths with a burial cloud, fatal at once with wintry chill, and weight of golden ashes. So the wanderers in the labyrinth fall, one by one, and are buried there:--yet, over the drifted graves, those who are spared climb to the last, through coil on coil of the path;--for at the end of it they see the king of the valley, sitting on his throne: and beside him (but it is only a false vision), spectra of creatures like themselves, set on thrones, from which they seem to look down on all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. And on the canopy of his throne there is an inscription in fiery letters, which they strive to read, but cannot; for it is written in words which are like the words of all languages, and yet are of none. Men say it is more like their own tongue to the English than it is to any other nation; but the only record of it is by an Italian, who heard the King himself cry it as a war cry, 'Pape Satan, Pape Satan Aleppe.'[145] SIBYL. But do they all perish there? You said there was a way through the valley, and out of it. L. Yes; but few find it. If any of them keep to the grass paths, where the diamonds are swept aside; and hold their hands over their eyes so as not to be dazzled, the grass paths lead forward gradually to a place where one sees a little opening in the golden rocks. You were at Chamouni last year, Sibyl; did your guide chance to show you the pierced rock of the Aiguille du Midi? SIBYL. No, indeed, we only got up from Geneva on Monday night; and it rained all Tuesday; and we had to be back at Geneva again, early on Wednesday morning. L. Of course. That is the way to see a country in a Sibylline manner, by inner consciousness: but you might have seen the pierced rock in your drive up, or down, if the clouds broke: not that there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into a little eyelet hole; which you may see, seven thousand feet above the valley (as the clouds flit past behind it, or leave the sky), first white, and then dark blue. Well, there's just such an eyelet hole in one of the upper crags of the Diamond Valley; and, from a distance, you think that it is no bigger than the eye of a needle. But if you get up to it, they say you may drive a loaded camel through it, and that there are fine things on the other side, but I have never spoken with anybody who had been through. SIBYL. I think we understand it now. We will try to write it down, and think of it. L. Meantime, Florrie, though all that I have been telling you is very true, yet you must not think the sort of diamonds that people wear in rings and necklaces are found lying about on the grass. Would you like to see how they really are found? FLORRIE. Oh, yes--yes. L. Isabel--or Lily--run up to my room and fetch me the little box with a glass lid, out of the top drawer of the chest of drawers. (_Race between_ LILY _and_ ISABEL.) (_Re-enter_ ISABEL _with the box, very much out of breath._ LILY _behind._) L. Why, you never can beat Lily in a race on the stairs, can you, Isabel? ISABEL (_panting_). Lily--beat me--ever so far--but she gave me--the box--to carry in. L. Take off the lid, then; gently. FLORRIE (_after peeping in, disappointed_). There's only a great ugly brown stone! L. Not much more than that, certainly, Florrie, if people were wise. But look, it is not a single stone; but a knot of pebbles fastened together by gravel; and in the gravel, or compressed sand, if you look close, you will see grains of gold glittering everywhere, all through; and then, do you see these two white beads, which shine, as if they had been covered with grease? FLORRIE. May I touch them? L. Yes; you will find they are not greasy, only very smooth. Well, those are the fatal jewels; native here in their dust with gold, so that you may see, cradled here together, the two great enemies of mankind,--the strongest of all malignant physical powers that have tormented our race. SIBYL. Is that really so? I know they do great harm; but do they not also do great good? L. My dear child, what good? Was any woman, do you suppose, ever the better for possessing diamonds? but how many have been made base, frivolous, and miserable by desiring them? Was ever man the better for having coffers full of gold? But who shall measure the guilt that is incurred to fill them? Look into the history of any civilised nations; analyse, with reference to this one cause of crime and misery, the lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests, merchants, and men of luxurious life. Every other temptation is at last concentrated into this; pride, and lust, and envy, and anger all give up their strength to avarice. The sin of the whole world is essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve their Christ; but they sell Him. SIBYL. But surely that is the fault of human nature? it is not caused by the accident, as it were, of there being a pretty metal, like gold, to be found by digging. If people could not find that, would they not find something else, and quarrel for it instead? L. No. Wherever legislators have succeeded in excluding, for a time, jewels and precious metals from among national possessions, the national spirit has remained healthy. Covetousness is not natural to man--generosity is; but covetousness must be excited by a special cause, as a given disease by a given miasma; and the essential nature of a material for the excitement of covetousness is, that it shall be a beautiful thing which can be retained _without a use_. The moment we can use our possessions to any good purpose ourselves, the instinct of communicating that use to others rises side by side with our power. If you can read a book rightly, you will want others to hear it; if you can enjoy a picture rightly, you will want others to see it: learn how to manage a horse, a plough, or a ship, and you will desire to make your subordinates good horsemen, ploughmen, or sailors; you will never be able to see the fine instrument you are master of, abused; but, once fix your desire on anything useless, and all the purest pride and folly in your heart will mix with the desire, and make you at last wholly inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and suckers, like a cuttle-fish. SIBYL. But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds, must have been appointed to some good purpose? L. Quite conceivably so, my dear: as also earthquakes and pestilences; but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight. The practical, immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence is to slay us, like moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live out of their way. So, the practical, immediate office of gold and diamonds is the multiplied destruction of souls (in whatever sense you have been taught to understand that phrase); and the paralysis of wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbour round the whole island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true piece of regalia. (_Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while._) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the chance of seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the jeweller. SIBYL. Would it be more beautiful uncut? L. No; but of infinite interest. We might even come to know something about the making of diamonds. SIBYL. I thought the chemists could make them already? L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they are formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed there at all. These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept down with the gravel and gold; only we can trace the gravel and gold to their native rocks, but not the diamonds. Read the account given of the diamond in any good work on mineralogy;--you will find nothing but lists of localities of gravel, or conglomerate rock (which is only an old indurated gravel). Some say it was once a vegetable gum; but it may have been charred wood; but what one would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal should make itself into diamonds in India, and only into black lead in Borrowdale. SIBYL. Are they wholly the same, then? L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead but nothing to hinder its crystallisation. Your pencils in fact are all pointed with formless diamond, though they would be HHH pencils to purpose, if it crystallised. SUBYL. But what _is_ crystallisation? L. A pleasant question, when one's half asleep, and it has been tea time these two hours. What thoughtless things girls are! SIBYL. Yes, we are; but we want to know, for all that. L. My dear, it would take a week to tell you. SIBYL. Well, take it, and tell us. L. But nobody knows anything about it. SIBYL. Then tell us something that nobody knows. L. Get along with you, and tell Dora to make tea. (_The house rises; but of course the_ LECTURER _wanted to be forced to lecture again, and was._) FOOTNOTES: [145] Dante, Inf. 7. 1. LECTURE II. _THE PYRAMID BUILDERS._ _In the large Schoolroom, to which everybody has been summoned by ringing of the great bell._ L. So you have all actually come to hear about crystallisation! I cannot conceive why, unless the little ones think that the discussion may involve some reference to sugar-candy. (_Symptoms of high displeasure among the younger members of council._ ISABEL _frowns severely at L., and shakes her head violently._) My dear children, if you knew it, you are yourselves, at this moment, as you sit in your ranks, nothing, in the eye of a mineralogist, but a lovely group of rosy sugar-candy, arranged by atomic forces. And even admitting you to be something more, you have certainly been crystallising without knowing it. Did I not hear a great hurrying and whispering, ten minutes ago, when you were late in from the playground; and thought you would not all be quietly seated by the time I was ready:--besides some discussion about places--something about 'it's not being fair that the little ones should always be nearest?' Well, you were then all being crystallised. When you ran in from the garden, and against one another in the passages, you were in what mineralogists would call a state of solution, and gradual confluence; when you got seated in those orderly rows, each in her proper place, you became crystalline. That is just what the atoms of a mineral do, if they can, whenever they get disordered: they get into order again as soon as may be. I hope you feel inclined to interrupt me, and say, 'But we know our places; how do the atoms know theirs? And sometimes we dispute about our places; do the atoms--(and, besides, we don't like being compared to atoms at all)--never dispute about theirs?' Two wise questions these, if you had a mind to put them! it was long before I asked them myself, of myself. And I will not call you atoms any more. May I call you--let me see--'primary molecules?' (_General dissent, indicated in subdued but decisive murmurs._) No! not even, in familiar Saxon, 'dust?' (_Pause, with expression on faces of sorrowful doubt_; LILY _gives voice to the general sentiment in a timid 'Please don't._') No, children, I won't call you that; and mind, as you grow up, that you do not get into an idle and wicked habit of calling yourselves that. You are something better than dust, and have other duties to do than ever dust can do; and the bonds of affection you will enter into are better than merely 'getting into order.' But see to it, on the other hand, that you always behave at least as well as 'dust;' remember, it is only on compulsion, and while it has no free permission to do as it likes, that _it_ ever gets out of order; but sometimes, with some of us, the compulsion has to be the other way--hasn't it? (_Remonstratory whispers, expressive of opinion that the_ LECTURER _is becoming too personal._) I'm not looking at anybody in particular--indeed I am not. Nay, if you blush so, Kathleen, how can one help looking? We'll go back to the atoms. 'How do they know their places?' you asked, or should have asked. Yes, and they have to do much more than know them: they have to find their way to them, and that quietly and at once, without running against each other. We may, indeed, state it briefly thus:--Suppose you have to build a castle, with towers and roofs and buttresses, out of bricks of a given shape, and that these bricks are all lying in a huge heap at the bottom, in utter confusion, upset out of carts at random. You would have to draw a great many plans, and count all your bricks, and be sure you had enough for this and that tower, before you began, and then you would have to lay your foundation, and add layer by layer, in order, slowly. But how would you be astonished, in these melancholy days, when children don't read children's books, nor believe any more in fairies, if suddenly a real benevolent fairy, in a bright brick-red gown, were to rise in the midst of the red bricks, and to tap the heap of them with her wand, and say: 'Bricks, bricks, to your places!' and then you saw in an instant the whole heap rise in the air, like a swarm of red bees, and--you have been used to see bees make a honeycomb, and to think that strange enough, but now you would see the honeycomb make itself!--You want to ask something, Florrie, by the look of your eyes. FLORRIE. Are they turned into real bees, with stings? L. No, Florrie; you are only to fancy flying bricks, as you saw the slates flying from the roof the other day in the storm; only those slates didn't seem to know where they were going, and, besides, were going where they had no business: but my spell-bound bricks, though they have no wings, and what is worse, no heads and no eyes, yet find their way in the air just where they should settle, into towers and roofs, each flying to his place and fastening there at the right moment, so that every other one shall fit to him in his turn. LILY. But who are the fairies, then, who build the crystals? L. There is one great fairy, Lily, who builds much more than crystals; but she builds these also. I dreamed that I saw her building a pyramid, the other day, as she used to do, for the Pharaohs. ISABEL. But that was only a dream? L. Some dreams are truer than some wakings, Isabel; but I won't tell it you unless you like. ISABEL. Oh, please, please. L. You are all such wise children, there's no talking to you; you won't believe anything. LILY. No, we are not wise, and we will believe anything, when you say we ought. L. Well, it came about this way. Sibyl, do you recollect that evening when we had been looking at your old cave by Cumæ, and wondering why you didn't live there still; and then we wondered how old you were; and Egypt said you wouldn't tell, and nobody else could tell but she; and you laughed--I thought very gaily for a Sibyl--and said you would harness a flock of cranes for us, and we might fly over to Egypt if we liked, and see. SIBYL. Yes, and you went, and couldn't find out after all! L. Why, you know, Egypt had been just doubling that third pyramid of hers;[146] and making a new entrance into it; and a fine entrance it was! First, we had to go through an ante-room, which had both its doors blocked up with stones; and then we had three granite portcullises to pull up, one after another; and the moment we had got under them, Egypt signed to somebody above; and down they came again behind us, with a roar like thunder, only louder; then we got into a passage fit for nobody but rats, and Egypt wouldn't go any further herself, but said we might go on if we liked; and so we came to a hole in the pavement, and then to a granite trap-door--and then we thought we had gone quite far enough, and came back, and Egypt laughed at us. EGYPT. You would not have had me take my crown off, and stoop all the way down a passage fit only for rats? L. It was not the crown, Egypt--you know that very well. It was the flounces that would not let you go any farther. I suppose, however, you wear them as typical of the inundation of the Nile, so it is all right. ISABEL. Why didn't you take me with you? Where rats can go, mice can. I wouldn't have come back. L. No, mousie; you would have gone on by yourself, and you might have waked one of Pasht's cats.[147] and it would have eaten you. I was very glad you were not there. But after all this, I suppose the imagination of the heavy granite blocks and the underground ways had troubled me, and dreams are often shaped in a strange opposition to the impressions that have caused them; and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen about stones that couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about stones that lifted themselves with wings. SIBYL. Now you must just tell us all about it. L. I dreamed that I was standing beside the lake, out of whose clay the bricks were made for the great pyramid of Asychis.[148] They had just been all finished, and were lying by the lake margin, in long ridges, like waves. It was near evening; and as I looked towards the sunset, I saw a thing like a dark pillar standing where the rock of the desert stoops to the Nile valley. I did not know there was a pillar there, and wondered at it; and it grew larger, and glided nearer, becoming like the form of a man, but vast, and it did not move its feet, but glided like a pillar of sand. And as it drew nearer, I looked by chance past it, towards the sun; and saw a silver cloud, which was of all the clouds closest to the sun (and in one place crossed it), draw itself back from the sun, suddenly. And it turned, and shot towards the dark pillar; leaping in an arch, like an arrow out of a bow. And I thought it was lightning; but when it came near the shadowy pillar, it sank slowly down beside it, and changed into the shape of a woman, very beautiful, and with a strength of deep calm in her blue eyes. She was robed to the feet with a white robe; and above that, to her knees, by the cloud which I had seen across the sun; but all the golden ripples of it had become plumes, so that it had changed into two bright wings like those of a vulture, which wrapped round her to her knees. She had a weaver's shuttle hanging over her shoulder, by the thread of it, and in her left hand, arrows, tipped with fire. ISABEL (_clapping her hands_). Oh! it was Neith, it was Neith! I know now. L. Yes; it was Neith herself; and as the two great spirits came nearer to me, I saw they were the Brother and Sister--the pillared shadow was the Greater Pthah.[149] And I heard them speak, and the sound of their words was like a distant singing. I could not understand the words one by one; yet their sense came to me; and so I knew that Neith had come down to see her brother's work, and the work that he had put into the mind of the king to make his servants do. And she was displeased at it; because she saw only pieces of dark clay: and no porphyry, nor marble, nor any fair stone that men might engrave the figures of the gods upon. And she blamed her brother, and said, 'Oh, Lord of truth! is this then thy will, that men should mould only four-square pieces of clay: and the forms of the gods no more?' Then the Lord of truth sighed, and said, 'Oh! sister, in truth they do not love us; why should they set up our images? Let them do what they may, and not lie--let them make their clay four-square; and labour; and perish.' Then Neith's dark blue eyes grew darker, and she said, 'Oh, Lord of truth! why should they love us? their love is vain; or fear us? for their fear is base. Yet let them testify of us, that they knew we lived for ever.' But the Lord of truth answered, 'They know, and yet they know not. Let them keep silence; for their silence only is truth.' But Neith answered, 'Brother, wilt thou also make league with Death, because Death is true? Oh! thou potter, who hast cast these human things from thy wheel, many to dishonour, and few to honour; wilt thou not let them so much as see my face; but slay them in slavery?' But Pthah only answered, 'Let them build, sister, let them build.' And Neith answered, 'What shall they build, if I build not with them?' And Pthah drew with his measuring rod upon the sand. And I saw suddenly, drawn on the sand, the outlines of great cities, and of vaults, and domes, and aqueducts, and bastions, and towers, greater than obelisks, covered with black clouds. And the wind blew ripples of sand amidst the lines that Pthah drew, and the moving sand was like the marching of men. But I saw that wherever Neith looked at the lines, they faded, and were effaced. 'Oh, Brother!' she said at last, 'what is this vanity? If I, who am Lady of wisdom, do not mock the children of men, why shouldst thou mock them, who art Lord of truth?' But Pthah answered, 'They thought to bind me; and they shall be bound. They shall labour in the fire for vanity.' And Neith said, looking at the sand, 'Brother, there is no true labour here--there is only weary life and wasteful death.' And Pthah answered, 'Is it not truer labour, sister, than thy sculpture of dreams?' Then Neith smiled; and stopped suddenly. She looked to the sun; its edge touched the horizon-edge of the desert. Then she looked to the long heaps of pieces of clay, that lay, each with its blue shadow, by the lake shore. 'Brother,' she said, 'how long will this pyramid of thine be in building?' 'Thoth will have sealed the scroll of the years ten times, before the summit is laid.' 'Brother, thou knowest not how to teach thy children to labour,' answered Neith. 'Look! I must follow Phre beyond Atlas; shall I build your pyramid for you before he goes down?' And Pthah answered, 'Yea, sister, if thou canst put thy winged shoulders to such work.' And Neith drew herself to her height; and I heard a clashing pass through the plumes of her wings, and the asp stood up on her helmet, and fire gathered in her eyes. And she took one of the flaming arrows out of the sheaf in her left hand, and stretched it out over the heaps of clay. And they rose up like flights of locusts, and spread themselves in the air, so that it grew dark in a moment. Then Neith designed them places with her arrow point; and they drew into ranks, like dark clouds laid level at morning. Then Neith pointed with her arrow to the north, and to the south, and to the east, and to the west, and the flying motes of earth drew asunder into four great ranked crowds; and stood, one in the north, and one in the south, and one in the east, and one in the west--one against another. Then Neith spread her wings wide for an instant, and closed them with a sound like the sound of a rushing sea; and waved her hand towards the foundation of the pyramid, where it was laid on the brow of the desert. And the four flocks drew together and sank down, like sea-birds settling to a level rock; and when they met, there was a sudden flame, as broad as the pyramid, and as high as the clouds; and it dazzled me; and I closed my eyes for an instant; and when I looked again, the pyramid stood on its rock, perfect; and purple with the light from the edge of the sinking sun. THE YOUNGER CHILDREN (_variously pleased_). I'm so glad! How nice! But what did Pthah say? L. Neith did not wait to hear what he would say. When I turned back to look at her, she was gone; and I only saw the level white cloud form itself again, close to the arch of the sun as it sank. And as the last edge of the sun disappeared, the form of Pthah faded into a mighty shadow, and so passed away. EGYPT. And was Neith's pyramid left? L. Yes; but you could not think, Egypt, what a strange feeling of utter loneliness came over me when the presence of the two gods passed away. It seemed as if I had never known what it was to be alone before; and the unbroken line of the desert was terrible. EGYPT. I used to feel that, when I was queen: sometimes I had to carve gods, for company, all over my palace. I would fain have seen real ones, if I could. L. But listen a moment yet, for that was not quite all my dream. The twilight drew swiftly to the dark, and I could hardly see the great pyramid; when there came a heavy murmuring sound in the air; and a horned beetle, with terrible claws, fell on the sand at my feet, with a blow like the beat of a hammer. Then it stood up on its hind claws, and waved its pincers at me: and its fore claws became strong arms, and hands; one grasping real iron pincers, and the other a huge hammer; and it had a helmet on its head, without any eyelet holes, that I could see. And its two hind claws became strong crooked legs, with feet bent inwards. And so there stood by me a dwarf, in glossy black armour, ribbed and embossed like a beetle's back, leaning on his hammer. And I could not speak for wonder; but he spoke with a murmur like the dying away of a beat upon a bell. He said, 'I will make Neith's great pyramid small. I am the lower Pthah; and have power over fire. I can wither the strong things, and strengthen the weak; and everything that is great I can make small, and everything that is little I can make great.' Then he turned to the angle of the pyramid and limped towards it. And the pyramid grew deep purple; and then red like blood, and then pale rose-colour, like fire. And I saw that it glowed with fire from within. And the lower Pthah touched it with the hand that held the pincers; and it sank down like the sand in an hour-glass,--then drew itself together, and sank, still, and became nothing, it seemed to me; but the armed dwarf stooped down, and took it into his hand, and brought it to me, saying, 'Everything that is great I can make like this pyramid; and give into men's hands to destroy.' And I saw that he had a little pyramid in his hand, with as many courses in it as the large one; and built like that, only so small. And because it glowed still, I was afraid to touch it; but Pthah said, 'Touch it--for I have bound the fire within it, so that it cannot burn.' So I touched it, and took it into my own hand; and it was cold; only red, like a ruby. And Pthah laughed, and became like a beetle again, and buried himself in the sand, fiercely; throwing it back over his shoulders. And it seemed to me as if he would draw me down with him into the sand; and I started back, and woke, holding the little pyramid so fast in my hand that it hurt me. EGYPT. Holding WHAT in your hand? L. The little pyramid. EGYPT. Neith's pyramid? L. Neith's, I believe; though not built for Asychis. I know only that it is a little rosy transparent pyramid, built of more courses of bricks than I can count, it being made so small. You don't believe me, of course, Egyptian infidel; but there it is. (_Giving crystal of rose Fluor._) (_Confused examination by crowded audience, over each other's shoulders and under each other's arms. Disappointment begins to manifest itself._) SIBYL (_not quite knowing why she and others are disappointed_). But you showed us this the other day! L. Yes; but you would not look at it the other day. SIBYL. But was all that fine dream only about this? L. What finer thing could a dream be about than this! It is small, if you will; but when you begin to think of things rightly, the ideas of smallness and largeness pass away. The making of this pyramid was in reality just as wonderful as the dream I have been telling you, and just as incomprehensible. It was not, I suppose, as swift, but quite as grand things are done as swiftly. When Neith makes crystals of snow, it needs a great deal more marshalling of the atoms, by her flaming arrows, than it does to make crystals like this one; and that is done in a moment. EGYPT. But how you _do_ puzzle us! Why do you say Neith does it? You don't mean that she is a real spirit, do you? L. What _I_ mean, is of little consequence. What the Egyptians meant, who called her 'Neith,'--or Homer, who called her 'Athena,'--or Solomon, who called her by a word which the Greeks render as 'Sophia,' you must judge for yourselves. But her testimony is always the same, and all nations have received it: 'I was by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight; rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth, and my delights were with the sons of men.' MARY. But is not that only a personification? L. If it be, what will you gain by unpersonifying it, or what right have you to do so? Cannot you accept the image given you, in its life; and listen, like children, to the words which chiefly belong to you as children: 'I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me?' (_They are all quiet for a minute or two; questions begin to appear in their eyes._) I cannot talk to you any more to-day. Take that rose-crystal away with you and think. FOOTNOTES: [146] Note i. [147] Note iii. [148] Note ii. [149] Note iii. LECTURE III. _THE CRYSTAL LIFE._ _A very dull Lecture, wilfully brought upon themselves by the elder children. Some of the young ones have, however, managed to get in by mistake._ SCENE, _the Schoolroom._ L. So I am to stand up here merely to be asked questions, to-day, Miss Mary, am I? MARY. Yes; and you must answer them plainly; without telling us any more stories. You are quite spoiling the children: the poor little things' heads are turning round like kaleidoscopes; and they don't know in the least what you mean. Nor do we old ones, either, for that matter: to-day you must really tell us nothing but facts. L. I am sworn; but you won't like it, a bit. MARY. Now, first of all, what do you mean by 'bricks?'--Are the smallest particles of minerals all of some accurate shape, like bricks? L. I do not know, Miss Mary; I do not even know if anybody knows. The smallest atoms which are visibly and practically put together to make large crystals, may better be described as 'limited in fixed directions' than as 'of fixed forms.' But I can tell you nothing clear about ultimate atoms: you will find the idea of little bricks, or, perhaps, of little spheres, available for all the uses you will have to put it to. MARY. Well, it's very provoking; one seems always to be stopped just when one is coming to the very thing one wants to know. L. No, Mary, for we should not wish to know anything but what is easily and assuredly knowable. There's no end to it If I could show you, or myself, a group of ultimate atoms, quite clearly, in this magnifying glass, we should both be presently vexed because we could not break them in two pieces, and see their insides. MARY. Well then, next, what do you mean by the flying of the bricks? What is it the atoms do, that is like flying? L. When they are dissolved, or uncrystallised, they are really separated from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or like a shoal of fish in the sea;--generally at about equal distances. In currents of solutions, or at different depths of them, one part may be more full of the dissolved atoms than another; but on the whole, you may think of them as equidistant, like the spots in the print of your gown. If they are separated by force of heat only, the substance is said to be melted; if they are separated by any other substance, as particles of sugar by water, they are said to be 'dissolved.' Note this distinction carefully, all of you. DORA. I will be very particular. When next you tell me there isn't sugar enough in your tea, I will say, 'It is not yet dissolved, sir.' L. I tell you what shall be dissolved, Miss Dora; and that's the present parliament, if the members get too saucy. (DORA _folds her hands and casts down her eyes._) L. (_proceeds in state_). Now, Miss Mary, you know already, I believe, that nearly everything will melt, under a sufficient heat, like wax. Limestone melts (under pressure); sand melts; granite melts; the lava of a volcano is a mixed mass of many kinds of rocks, melted: and any melted substance nearly always, if not always, crystallises as it cools; the more slowly the more perfectly. Water melts at what we call the freezing, but might just as wisely, though not as conveniently, call the melting, point; and radiates as it cools into the most beautiful of all known crystals. Glass melts at a greater heat, and will crystallise, if you let it cool slowly enough, in stars, much like snow. Gold needs more heat to melt it, but crystallises also exquisitely, as I will presently show you. Arsenic and sulphur crystallise from their vapours. Now in any of these cases, either of melted, dissolved, or vaporous bodies, the particles are usually separated from each other, either by heat, or by an intermediate substance; and in crystallising they are both brought nearer to each other, and packed, so as to fit as closely as possible: the essential part of the business being not the bringing together, but the packing. Who packed your trunk for you, last holidays, Isabel? ISABEL. Lily does, always. L. And how much can you allow for Lily's good packing, in guessing what will go into the trunk? ISABEL. Oh! I bring twice as much as the trunk holds. Lily always gets everything in. LILY. Ah! but, Isey, if you only knew what a time it takes! and since you've had those great hard buttons on your frocks, I can't do anything with them. Buttons won't go anywhere, you know. L. Yes, Lily, it would be well if she only knew what a time it takes; and I wish any of us knew what a time crystallisation takes, for that is consummately fine packing. The particles of the rock are thrown down, just as Isabel brings her things--in a heap; and innumerable Lilies, not of the valley, but of the rock, come to pack them. But it takes such a time! However, the best--out and out the best--way of understanding the thing, is to crystallise yourselves. THE AUDIENCE. Ourselves! L. Yes; not merely as you did the other day, carelessly, on the schoolroom forms; but carefully and finely, out in the playground. You can play at crystallisation there as much as you please. KATHLEEN _and_ JESSIE. Oh! how?--how? L. First, you must put yourselves together, as close as you can, in the middle of the grass, and form, for first practice any figure you like. JESSIE. Any dancing figure, do you mean? L. No; I mean a square, or a cross, or a diamond. Any figure you like, standing close together. You had better outline it first on the turf, with sticks, or pebbles, so as to see that it is rightly drawn; then get into it and enlarge or diminish it at one side, till you are all quite in it, and no empty space left. DORA. Crinoline and all? L. The crinoline may stand eventually for rough crystalline surface, unless you pin it in; and then you may make a polished crystal of yourselves. LILY. Oh, we'll pin it in--we'll pin it in! L. Then, when you are all in the figure, let every one note her place, and who is next her on each side; and let the outsiders count how many places they stand from the corners. KATHLEEN. Yes, yes,--and then? L. Then you must scatter all over the playground--right over it from side to side, and end to end; and put yourselves all at equal distances from each other, everywhere. You needn't mind doing it very accurately, but so as to be nearly equidistant; not less than about three yards apart from each other, on every side. JESSIE. We can easily cut pieces of string of equal length, to hold. And then? L. Then, at a given signal, let everybody walk, at the same rate, towards the outlined figure in the middle. You had better sing as you walk; that will keep you in good time. And as you close in towards it, let each take her place, and the next comers fit themselves in beside the first ones, till you are all in the figure again. KATHLEEN. Oh! how we shall run against each other! What fun it will be! L. No, no, Miss Katie; I can't allow any running against each other. The atoms never do that, whatever human creatures do. You must all know your places, and find your way to them without jostling. LILY. But how ever shall we do that? ISABEL. Mustn't the ones in the middle be the nearest, and the outside ones farther off--when we go away to scatter, I mean? L. Yes; you must be very careful to keep your order; you will soon find out how to do it; it is only like soldiers forming square, except that each must stand still in her place as she reaches it, and the others come round her; and you will have much more complicated figures, afterwards, to form, than squares. ISABEL. I'll put a stone at my place: then I shall know it. L. You might each nail a bit of paper to the turf, at your place, with your name upon it: but it would be of no use, for if you don't know your places, you will make a fine piece of business of it, while you are looking for your names. And, Isabel, if with a little head, and eyes, and a brain (all of them very good and serviceable of their kind, as such things go), you think you cannot know your place without a stone at it, after examining it well,--how do you think each atom knows its place, when it never was there before, and there's no stone at it? ISABEL. But does every atom know its place? L. How else could it get there? MARY. Are they not attracted to their places? L. Cover a piece of paper with spots, at equal intervals; and then imagine any kind of attraction you choose, or any law of attraction, to exist between the spots, and try how, on that permitted supposition, you can attract them into the figure of a Maltese cross, in the middle of the paper. MARY (_having tried it_). Yes; I see that I cannot:--one would need all kinds of attractions, in different ways, at different places. But you do not mean that the atoms are alive? L. What is it to be alive? DORA. There now; you're going to be provoking, I know. L. I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be alive. Do you think you don't know whether you are alive or not? (ISABEL _skips to the end of the room and back._) L. Yes, Isabel, that's all very fine; and you and I may call that being alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a 'mode of motion.' It requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and exactly the same quantity to bring you back again. That's all. ISABEL. No, it isn't. And besides, I'm not hot. L. I am, sometimes, at the way they talk. However, you know, Isabel, you might have been a particle of a mineral, and yet have been carried round the room, or anywhere else, by chemical forces, in the liveliest way. ISABEL. Yes; but I wasn't carried: I carried myself. L. The fact is, mousie, the difficulty is not so much to say what makes a thing alive, as what makes it a Self. As soon as you are shut off from the rest of the universe into a Self, you begin to be alive. VIOLET (_indignant_). Oh, surely--surely that cannot be so. Is not all the life of the soul in communion, not separation? L. There can be no communion where there is no distinction. But we shall be in an abyss of metaphysics presently, if we don't look out; and besides, we must not be too grand, to-day, for the younger children. We'll be grand, some day, by ourselves, if we must. (_The younger children are not pleased, and prepare to remonstrate; but, knowing by experience, that all conversations in which the word 'communion' occurs, are unintelligible, think better of it._) Meantime, for broad answer about the atoms. I do not think we should use the word 'life,' of any energy which does not belong to a given form. A seed, or an egg, or a young animal are properly called 'alive' with respect to the force belonging to those forms, which consistently develops that form, and no other. But the force which crystallises a mineral appears to be chiefly external, and it does not produce an entirely determinate and individual form, limited in size, but only an aggregation, in which some limiting laws must be observed. MARY. But I do not see much difference, that way, between a crystal and a tree. L. Add, then, that the mode of the energy in a living thing implies a continual change in its elements; and a period for its end. So you may define life by its attached negative, death; and still more by its attached positive, birth. But I won't be plagued any more about this, just now; if you choose to think the crystals alive, do, and welcome. Rocks have always been called 'living' in their native place. MARY. There's one question more; then I've done. L. Only one? MARY. Only one. L. But if it is answered, won't it turn into two? MARY. No; I think it will remain single, and be comfortable. L. Let me hear it. MARY. You know, we are to crystallise ourselves out of the whole playground. Now, what playground have the minerals? Where are they scattered before they are crystallised; and where are the crystals generally made? L. That sounds to me more like three questions than one, Mary. If it is only one, it is a wide one. MARY. I did not say anything about the width of it. L. Well, I must keep it within the best compass I can. When rocks either dry from a moist state, or cool from a heated state, they necessarily alter in bulk; and cracks, or open spaces, form in them in all directions. These cracks must be filled up with solid matter, or the rock would eventually become a ruinous heap. So, sometimes by water, sometimes by vapour, sometimes nobody knows how, crystallisable matter is brought from somewhere, and fastens itself in these open spaces, so as to bind the rock together again, with crystal cement. A vast quantity of hollows are formed in lavas by bubbles of gas, just as the holes are left in bread well baked. In process of time these cavities are generally filled with various crystals. MARY. But where does the crystallising substance come from? L. Sometimes out of the rock itself; sometimes from below or above, through the veins. The entire substance of the contracting rock may be filled with liquid, pressed into it so as to fill every pore;--or with mineral vapour;--or it may be so charged at one place, and empty at another. There's no end to the 'may be's.' But all that you need fancy, for our present purpose, is that hollows in the rocks, like the caves in Derbyshire, are traversed by liquids or vapour containing certain elements in a more or less free or separate state, which crystallise on the cave walls. SIBYL. There now;--Mary has had all her questions answered: it's my turn to have mine. L. Ah, there's a conspiracy among you, I see. I might have guessed as much. DORA. I'm sure you ask us questions enough! How can you have the heart, when you dislike so to be asked them yourself? L. My dear child, if people do not answer questions, it does not matter how many they are asked, because they've no trouble with them. Now, when I ask you questions, I never expect to be answered; but when you ask me, you always do; and it's not fair. DORA. Very well, we shall understand, next time. SIBYL. No, but seriously, we all want to ask one thing more, quite dreadfully. L. And I don't want to be asked it, quite dreadfully; but you'll have your own way, of course. SIBYL. We none of us understand about the lower Pthah. It was not merely yesterday; but in all we have read about him in Wilkinson, or in any book, we cannot understand what the Egyptians put their god into that ugly little deformed shape for. L. Well, I'm glad it's that sort of question; because I can answer anything I like, to that. EGYPT. Anything you like will do quite well for us; we shall be pleased with the answer, if you are. L. I am not so sure of that, most gracious queen; for I must begin by the statement that queens seem to have disliked all sorts of work, in those days, as much as some queens dislike sewing to-day. EGYPT. Now, it's too bad! and just when I was trying to say the civillest thing I could! L. But, Egypt, why did you tell me you disliked sewing so? EGYPT. Did not I show you how the thread cuts my fingers? and I always get cramp, somehow, in my neck, if I sew long. L. Well, I suppose the Egyptian queens thought every body got cramp in their neck, if they sewed long; and that thread always cut people's fingers. At all events, every kind of manual labour was despised both by them, and the Greeks; and, while they owned the real good and fruit of it, they yet held it a degradation to all who practised it. Also, knowing the laws of life thoroughly, they perceived that the special practice necessary to bring any manual art to perfection strengthened the body distortedly; one energy or member gaining at the expense of the rest. They especially dreaded and despised any kind of work that had to be done near fire: yet, feeling what they owed to it in metal-work, as the basis of all other work, they expressed this mixed reverence and scorn in the varied types of the lame Hephæstus, and the lower Pthah. SIBYL. But what did you mean by making him say 'everything great I can make small, and everything small great?' L. I had my own separate meaning in that. We have seen in modern times the power of the lower Pthah developed in a separate way, which no Greek nor Egyptian could have conceived. It is the character of pure and eyeless manual labour to conceive everything as subjected to it: and, in reality, to disgrace and diminish all that is so subjected; aggrandising itself, and the thought of itself, at the expense of all noble things. I heard an orator, and a good one too, at the Working Men's College, the other day, make a great point in a description of our railroads; saying, with grandly conducted emphasis, 'They have made man greater, and the world less.' His working audience were mightily pleased; they thought it so very fine a thing to be made bigger themselves; and all the rest of the world less. I should have enjoyed asking them (but it would have been a pity--they were so pleased), how much less they would like to have the world made;--and whether, at present, those of them really felt the biggest men, who lived in the least houses. SIBYL. But then, why did you make Pthah say that he could make weak things strong, and small things great? L. My dear, he is a boaster and self-assertor, by nature; but it is so far true. For instance, we used to have a fair in our neighbourhood--a very fine fair we thought it. You never saw such an one; but if you look at the engraving of Turner's 'St. Catherine's Hill,' you will see what it was like. There were curious booths, carried on poles; and peep-shows; and music, with plenty of drums and cymbals; and much barley-sugar and gingerbread, and the like: and in the alleys of this fair the London populace would enjoy themselves, after their fashion, very thoroughly. Well, the little Pthah set to work upon it one day; he made the wooden poles into iron ones, and put them across, like his own crooked legs, so that you always fall over them if you don't look where you are going; and he turned all the canvas into panes of glass, and put it up on his iron cross-poles; and made all the little booths into one great booth; and people said it was very fine, and a new style of architecture; and Mr. Dickens said nothing was ever like it in Fairyland, which was very true. And then the little Pthah set to work to put fine fairings in it; and he painted the Nineveh bulls afresh, with the blackest eyes he could paint (because he had none himself), and he got the angels down from Lincoln choir, and gilded their wings like his gingerbread of old times; and he sent for everything else he could think of, and put it in his booth. There are the casts of Niobe and her children; and the Chimpanzee; and the wooden Caffres and New-Zealanders; and the Shakespeare House; and Le Grand Blondin, and Le Petit Blondin; and Handel; and Mozart; and no end of shops, and buns, and beer; and all the little-Pthah-worshippers say, never was anything so sublime! SIBYL. Now, do you mean to say you never go to these Crystal Palace concerts? They're as good as good can be. L. I don't go to the thundering things with a million of bad voices in them. When I want a song, I get Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram and Counsellor Pleydell to sing 'We be three poor Mariners' to me; then I've no headache next morning. But I do go to the smaller concerts, when I can; for they are very good, as you say, Sibyl: and I always get a reserved seat somewhere near the orchestra, where I am sure I can see the kettle-drummer drum. SIBYL. Now _do_ be serious, for one minute. L. I am serious--never was more so. You know one can't see the modulation of violinists' fingers, but one can see the vibration of the drummer's hand; and it's lovely. SIBYL. But fancy going to a concert, not to hear, but to see! L. Yes, it is very absurd. The quite right thing, I believe, is to go there to talk. I confess, however, that in most music, when very well done, the doing of it is to me the chiefly interesting part of the business. I'm always thinking how good it would be for the fat, supercilious people, who care so little for their half-crown's worth, to be set to try and do a half-crown's worth of anything like it. MARY. But surely that Crystal Palace is a great good and help to the people of London? L. The fresh air of the Norwood hills is, or was, my dear; but they are spoiling that with smoke as fast as they can. And the palace (as they call it) is a better place for them, by much, than the old fair; and it is always there, instead of for three days only; and it shuts up at proper hours of night. And good use may be made of the things in it, if you know how: but as for its teaching the people, it will teach them nothing but the lowest of the lower Pthah's work--nothing but hammer and tongs. I saw a wonderful piece, of his doing, in the place, only the other day. Some unhappy metal-worker--I am not sure if it was not a metal-working firm--had taken three years to make a Golden eagle. SIBYL. Of real gold? L. No; of bronze, or copper, or some of their foul patent metal--it is no matter what. I meant a model of our chief British eagle. Every feather was made separately; and every filament of every feather separately, and so joined on; and all the quills modelled of the right length and right section, and at last the whole cluster of them fastened together. You know, children, I don't think much of my own drawing; but take my proud word for once, that when I go to the Zoological Gardens, and happen to have a bit of chalk in my pocket, and the Gray Harpy will sit, without screwing his head round, for thirty seconds,--I can do a better thing of him in that time than the three years' work of this industrious firm. For, during the thirty seconds, the eagle is my object,--not myself; and during the three years, the firm's object, in every fibre of bronze it made, was itself, and not the eagle. That is the true meaning of the little Pthah's having no eyes--he can see only himself. The Egyptian beetle was not quite the full type of him; our northern ground beetle is a truer one. It is beautiful to see it at work, gathering its treasures (such as they are) into little round balls; and pushing them home with the strong wrong end of it,--head downmost all the way,--like a modern political economist with his ball of capital, declaring that a nation can stand on its vices better than on its virtues. But away with you, children, now, for I'm getting cross. DORA. I'm going down-stairs; I shall take care, at any rate, that there are no little Pthahs in the kitchen cupboards. LECTURE IV. _THE CRYSTAL ORDERS._ _A working Lecture, in the large Schoolroom; with experimental Interludes The great bell has rung unexpectedly._ KATHLEEN (_entering disconsolate, though first at the summons_). Oh dear, oh dear, what a day! Was ever anything so provoking! just when we wanted to crystallise ourselves;--and I'm sure it's going to rain all day long. L. So am I, Kate. The sky has quite an Irish way with it But I don't see why Irish girls should also look so dismal. Fancy that you don't want to crystallise yourselves: you didn't, the day before yesterday, and you were not unhappy when it rained then. FLORRIE. Ah! but we do want to-day; and the rain's so tiresome. L. That is to say, children, that because you are all the richer by the expectation of playing at a new game, you choose to make yourselves unhappier than when you had nothing to look forward to, but the old ones. ISABEL. But then, to have to wait--wait--wait; and before we've tried it;--and perhaps it will rain to-morrow, too! L. It may also rain the day after to-morrow. We can make ourselves uncomfortable to any extent with perhapses, Isabel. You may stick perhapses into your little minds, like pins, till you are as uncomfortable as the Lilliputians made Gulliver with their arrows, when he would not lie quiet. ISABEL. But what _are_ we to do to-day? L. To be quiet, for one thing, like Gulliver when he saw there was nothing better to be done. And to practise patience. I can tell you children, _that_ requires nearly as much practising as music; and we are continually losing our lessons when the master comes. Now, to-day, here's a nice little adagio lesson for us, if we play it properly. ISABEL. But I don't like that sort of lesson. I can't play it properly. L. Can you play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to practise. All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time. But there must be no hurry. KATHLEEN. I'm sure there's no music in stopping in on a rainy day. L. There's no music in a 'rest,' Katie, that I know of: but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life-melody; and scrambling on without counting--not that it's easy to count; but nothing on which so much depends ever _is_ easy. People are always talking of perseverance, and courage, and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude,--and the rarest, too. I know twenty persevering girls for one patient one: but it is only that twenty-first who can do her work, out and out, or enjoy it. For patience lies at the root of all pleasures, as well as of all powers. Hope herself ceases to be happiness, when Impatience companions her. (ISABEL _and_ LILY _sit down on the floor, and fold their hands. The others follow their example._) Good children! but that's not quite the way of it, neither. Folded hands are not necessarily resigned ones. The Patience who really smiles at grief usually stands, or walks, or even runs: she seldom sits; though she may sometimes have to do it, for many a day, poor thing, by monuments; or like Chaucer's, 'with facë pale, upon a hill of sand.' But we are not reduced to that to-day. Suppose we use this calamitous forenoon to choose the shapes we are to crystallise into? we know nothing about them yet. (_The pictures of resignation rise from the floor, not in the patientest manner. General applause._) MARY _(with one or two others_). The very thing we wanted to ask you about! LILY. We looked at the books about crystals, but they are so dreadful. L. Well, Lily, we must go through a little dreadfulness, that's a fact: no road to any good knowledge is wholly among the lilies and the grass; there is rough climbing to be done always. But the crystal-books are a little _too_ dreadful, most of them, I admit; and we shall have to be content with very little of their help. You know, as you cannot stand on each other's heads, you can only make yourselves into the sections of crystals,--the figures they show when they are cut through; and we will choose some that will be quite easy. You shall make diamonds of yourselves---- ISABEL. Oh, no, no! we won't be diamonds, please. L. Yes, you shall, Isabel; they are very pretty things, if the jewellers, and the kings and queens, would only let them alone. You shall make diamonds of yourselves, and rubies of yourselves, and emeralds; and Irish diamonds; two of those--with Lily in the middle of one, which will be very orderly, of course; and Kathleen in the middle of the other, for which we will hope the best;--and you shall make Derbyshire spar of yourselves, and Iceland spar, and gold, and silver, and--Quicksilver there's enough of in you, without any making. MARY. Now, you know, the children will be getting quite wild: we must really get pencils and paper, and begin properly. L. Wait a minute, Miss Mary; I think as we've the school room clear to-day, I'll try to give you some notion of the three great orders or ranks of crystals, into which all the others seem more or less to fall. We shall only want one figure a day, in the playground; and that can be drawn in a minute: but the general ideas had better be fastened first. I must show you a great many minerals; so let me have three tables wheeled into the three windows, that we may keep our specimens separate;--we will keep the three orders of crystals on separate tables. (_First Interlude, of pushing and pulling, and spreading of baize covers._ VIOLET, _not particularly minding what she is about, gets herself jammed into a corner, and bid to stand out of the way; on which she devotes herself to meditation._) VIOLET (_after interval of meditation_). How strange it is that everything seems to divide into threes! L. Everything doesn't divide into threes. Ivy won't, though shamrock will; and daisies won't, though lilies will. VIOLET. But all the nicest things seem to divide into threes. L. Violets won't. VIOLET. No; I should think not, indeed! But I mean the great things. L. I've always heard the globe had four quarters. ISABEL. Well; but you know you said it hadn't any quarters at all. So mayn't it really be divided into three? L. If it were divided into no more than three, on the outside of it, Isabel, it would be a fine world to live in; and if it were divided into three in the inside of it, it would soon be no world to live in at all. DORA. We shall never get to the crystals, at this rate. (_Aside to_ MARY.) He will get off into political economy before we know where we are. (_Aloud._) But the crystals are divided into three, then? L. No; but there are three general notions by which we may best get hold of them. Then between these notions there are other notions. LILY (_alarmed_). A great many? And shall we have to learn them all? L. More than a great many--a quite infinite many. So you cannot learn them all. LILY (_greatly relieved_). Then may we only learn the three? L. Certainly; unless, when you have got those three notions, you want to have some more notions;--which would not surprise me. But we'll try for the three, first. Katie, you broke your coral necklace this morning? KATHLEEN. Oh! who told you? It was in jumping. I'm so sorry! L. I'm very glad. Can you fetch me the beads of it? KATHLEEN. I've lost some; here are the rest in my pocket, if I can only get them out. L. You mean to get them out some day, I suppose; so try now. I want them. (KATHLEEN _empties her pocket on the floor. The beads disperse. The School disperses also. Second Interlude--hunting piece._) L. (_after waiting patiently for a quarter of an hour, to_ ISABEL, _who comes up from under the table with her hair all about her ears, and the last findable beads in her hand_). Mice are useful little things sometimes. Now, mousie, I want all those beads crystallised. How many ways are there of putting them in order? ISABEL. Well, first one would string them, I suppose? L. Yes, that's the first way. You cannot string ultimate atoms; but you can put them in a row, and then they fasten themselves together, somehow, into a long rod or needle. We will call these '_Needle_-crystals.' What would be the next way? ISABEL. I suppose, as we are to get together in the playground, when it stops raining, in different shapes? L. Yes; put the beads together, then, in the simplest form you can, to begin with. Put them into a square, and pack them close. ISABEL (_after careful endeavour_). I can't get them closer. L. That will do. Now you may see, beforehand, that if you try to throw yourselves into square in this confused way, you will never know your places; so you had better consider every square as made of rods, put side by side. Take four beads of equal size, first, Isabel; put them into a little square. That, you may consider as made up of two rods of two beads each. Then you can make a square a size larger, out of three rods of three. Then the next square may be a size larger. How many rods, Lily? LILY. Four rods of four beads each, I suppose. L. Yes, and then five rods of five, and so on. But now, look here; make another square of four beads again. You see they leave a little opening in the centre. ISABEL (_pushing two opposite ones closer together_). Now they don't. L. No; but now it isn't a square; and by pushing the two together you have pushed the two others farther apart. ISABEL. And yet, somehow, they all seem closer than they were! L. Yes; for before, each of them only touched two of the others, but now each of the two in the middle touches the other three. Take away one of the outsiders, Isabel; now you have three in a triangle--the smallest triangle you can make out of the beads. Now put a rod of three beads on at one side. So, you have a triangle of six beads; but just the shape of the first one. Next a rod of four on the side of that; and you have a triangle of ten beads: then a rod of five on the side of that; and you have a triangle of fifteen. Thus you have a square with five beads on the side, and a triangle with five beads on the side; equal-sided, therefore, like the square. So, however few or many you may be, you may soon learn how to crystallise quickly into these two figures, which are the foundation of form in the commonest, and therefore actually the most important, as well as in the rarest, and therefore, by our esteem, the most important, minerals of the world. Look at this in my hand. VIOLET. Why, it is leaf-gold! L. Yes; but beaten by no man's hammer; or rather, not beaten at all, but woven. Besides, feel the weight of it. There is gold enough there to gild the walls and ceiling, if it were beaten thin. VIOLET. How beautiful! And it glitters like a leaf covered with frost. L. You only think it so beautiful because you know it is gold. It is not prettier, in reality, than a bit of brass: for it is Transylvanian gold; and they say there is a foolish gnome in the mines there, who is always wanting to live in the moon, and so alloys all the gold with a little silver. I don't know how that may be: but the silver always _is_ in the gold; and if he does it, it's very provoking of him, for no gold is woven so fine anywhere else. MARY (_who has been looking through her magnifying glass_). But this is not woven. This is all made of little triangles. L. Say 'patched,' then, if you must be so particular. But if you fancy all those triangles, small as they are (and many of them are infinitely small), made up again of rods, and those of grains, as we built our great triangle of the beads, what word will you take for the manufacture? MAY. There's no word--it is beyond words. L. Yes; and that would matter little, were it not beyond thoughts too. But, at all events, this yellow leaf of dead gold, shed, not from the ruined woodlands, but the ruined rocks, will help you to remember the second kind of crystals, _Leaf_-crystals, or _Foliated_ crystals; though I show you the form in gold first only to make a strong impression on you, for gold is not generally, or characteristically, crystallised in leaves; the real type of foliated crystals is this thing, Mica; which if you once feel well, and break well, you will always know again; and you will often have occasion to know it, for you will find it everywhere, nearly, in hill countries. KATHLEEN. If we break it well! May we break it? L. To powder, if you like. (_Surrenders plate of brown mica to public investigation. Third Interlude. It sustains severely philosophical treatment at all hands._) FLORRIE. (_to whom the last fragments have descended_) Always leaves, and leaves, and nothing but leaves, or white dust! L. That dust itself is nothing but finer leaves. (_Shows them to_ FLORRIE _through magnifying glass._) ISABEL. (_peeping over_ FLORRIE'S _shoulder_). But then this bit under the glass looks like that bit out of the glass! If we could break this bit under the glass, what would it be like? L. It would be all leaves still. ISABEL. And then if we broke those again? L. All less leaves still. ISABEL (_impatient_). And if we broke them again, and again, and again, and again, and again? L. Well, I suppose you would come to a limit, if you could only see it. Notice that the little flakes already differ somewhat from the large ones: because I can bend them up and down, and they stay bent; while the large flake, though it bent easily a little way, sprang back when you let it go, and broke, when you tried to bend it far. And a large mass would not bend at all. MARY. Would that leaf gold separate into finer leaves, in the same way? L. No; and therefore, as I told you, it is not a characteristic specimen of a foliated crystallisation. The little triangles are portions of solid crystals, and so they are in this, which looks like a black mica; but you see it is made up of triangles like the gold, and stands, almost accurately, as an intermediate link, in crystals, between mica and gold. Yet this is the commonest, as gold the rarest, of metals. MARY. Is it iron? I never saw iron so bright. L. It is rust of iron, finely crystallised: from its resemblance to mica, it is often called micaceous iron. KATHLEEN. May we break this, too? L. No, for I could not easily get such another crystal; besides, it would not break like the mica; it is much harder. But take the glass again, and look at the fineness of the jagged edges of the triangles where they lap over each other. The gold has the same: but you see them better here, terrace above terrace, countless, and in successive angles, like superb fortified bastions. MAY. But all foliated crystals are not made of triangles? L. Far from it: mica is occasionally so, but usually of hexagons; and here is a foliated crystal made of squares, which will show you that the leaves of the rock-land have their summer green, as well as their autumnal gold. FLORRIE. Oh! oh! oh! (_jumps for joy_). L. Did you never see a bit of green leaf before, Florrie? FLORRIE. Yes, but never so bright as that, and not in a stone. L. If you will look at the leaves of the trees in sunshine after a shower, you will find they are much brighter than that; and surely they are none the worse for being on stalks instead of in stones? FLORRIE. Yes, but then there are so many of them, one never looks, I suppose. L. Now you have it, Florrie. VIOLET (_sighing_). There are so many beautiful things we never see! L. You need not sigh for that, Violet; but I will tell you what we should all sigh for,--that there are so many ugly things we never see. VIOLET. But we don't want to see ugly things! L. You had better say, 'We don't want to suffer them.' You ought to be glad in thinking how much more beauty God has made, than human eyes can ever see; but not glad in thinking how much more evil man has made, than his own soul can ever conceive, much more than his hands can ever heal. VIOLET. I don't understand;--how is that like the leaves? L. The same law holds in our neglect of multiplied pain, as in our neglect of multiplied beauty. Florrie jumps for joy at sight of half an inch of a green leaf in a brown stone; and takes more notice of it than of all the green in the wood: and you, or I, or any of us, would be unhappy if any single human creature beside us were in sharp pain; but we can read, at breakfast, day after day, of men being killed, and of women and children dying of hunger, faster than the leaves strew the brooks in Vallombrosa;--and then go out to play croquet, as if nothing had happened. MAY. But we do not see the people being killed or dying. L. You did not see your brother, when you got the telegram the other day, saying he was ill, May; but you cried for him and played no croquet. But we cannot talk of these things now; and what is more, you must let me talk straight on, for a little while; and ask no questions till I've done: for we branch ('exfoliate,' I should say, mineralogically) always into something else,--though that's my fault more than yours; but I must go straight on now. You have got a distinct notion, I hope, of leaf-crystals; and you see the sort of look they have: you can easily remember that 'folium' is Latin for a leaf, and that the separate flakes of mica, or any other such stones, are called 'folia;' but, because mica is the most characteristic of these stones, other things that are like it in structure are called 'micas;' thus we have Uran-mica, which is the green leaf I showed you; and Copper-mica, which is another like it, made chiefly of copper; and this foliated iron is called 'micaceous iron.' You have then these two great orders, Needle-crystals, made (probably) of grains in rows; and Leaf-crystals, made (probably) of needles interwoven; now, lastly, there are crystals of a third order, in heaps, or knots, or masses, which may be made, either of leaves laid one upon another, or of needles bound like Roman fasces; and mica itself, when it is well crystallised, puts itself into such masses, as if to show us how others are made. Here is a brown six-sided crystal, quite as beautifully chiselled at the sides as any castle tower; but you see it is entirely built of folia of mica, one laid above another, which break away the moment I touch the edge with my knife. Now, here is another hexagonal tower, of just the same size and colour, which I want you to compare with the mica carefully; but as I cannot wait for you to do it just now, I must tell you quickly what main differences to look for. First, you will feel it is far heavier than the mica. Then, though its surface looks quite micaceous in the folia of it, when you try them with the knife, you will find you cannot break them away---- KATHLEEN. May I try? L. Yes, you mistrusting Katie. Here's my strong knife for you. (_Experimental pause._ KATHLEEN, _doing her best._) You'll have that knife shutting on your finger presently, Kate; and I don't know a girl who would like less to have her hand tied up for a week. KATHLEEN (_who also does not like to be beaten--giving up the knife despondently_). What _can_ the nasty hard thing be? L. It is nothing but indurated clay, Kate: very hard set certainly, yet not so hard as it might be. If it were thoroughly well crystallised, you would see none of those micaceous fractures; and the stone would be quite red and clear, all through. KATHLEEN. Oh, cannot you show us one? L. Egypt can, if you ask her; she has a beautiful one in the clasp of her favourite bracelet. KATHLEEN. Why, that's a ruby! L. Well, so is that thing you've been scratching at. KATHLEEN. My goodness! (_Takes up the stone again, very delicately; and drops it. General consternation._) L. Never mind, Katie; you might drop it from the top of the house, and do it no harm. But though you really are a very good girl, and as good-natured as anybody can possibly be, remember, you have your faults, like other people; and, if I were you, the next time I wanted to assert anything energetically, I would assert it by 'my badness,' not 'my goodness.' KATHLEEN. Ah, now, it's too bad of you! L. Well, then, I'll invoke, on occasion, my 'too-badness.' But you may as well pick up the ruby, now you have dropped it; and look carefully at the beautiful hexagonal lines which gleam on its surface; and here is a pretty white sapphire (essentially the same stone as the ruby), in which you will see the same lovely structure, like the threads of the finest white cobweb. I do not know what is the exact method of a ruby's construction; but you see by these lines, what fine construction there _is_, even in this hardest of stones (after the diamond), which usually appears as a massive lump or knot. There is therefore no real mineralogical distinction between needle crystals and knotted crystals, but, practically, crystallised masses throw themselves into one of the three groups we have been examining to-day; and appear either as Needles, as Folia, or as Knots; when they are in needles (or fibres), they make the stones or rocks formed out of them '_fibrous_;' when they are in folia, they make them '_foliated_;' when they are in knots (or grains), '_granular_.' Fibrous rocks are comparatively rare, in mass; but fibrous minerals are innumerable; and it is often a question which really no one but a young lady could possibly settle, whether one should call the fibres composing them 'threads' or 'needles.' Here is amianthus, for instance, which is quite as fine and soft as any cotton thread you ever sewed with; and here is sulphide of bismuth, with sharper points and brighter lustre than your finest needles have; and fastened in white webs of quartz more delicate than your finest lace; and here is sulphide of antimony, which looks like mere purple wool, but it is all of purple needle crystals; and here is red oxide of copper (you must not breathe on it as you look, or you may blow some of the films of it off the stone), which is simply a woven tissue of scarlet silk. However, these finer thread forms are comparatively rare, while the bolder and needle-like crystals occur constantly; so that, I believe, 'Needle-crystal' is the best word (the grand one is 'Acicular crystal,' but Sibyl will tell you it is all the same, only less easily understood; and therefore more scientific). Then the Leaf-crystals, as I said, form an immense mass of foliated rocks; and the Granular crystals, which are of many kinds, form essentially granular, or granitic and porphyritic rocks; and it is always a point of more interest to me (and I think will ultimately be to you), to consider the causes which force a given mineral to take any one of these three general forms, than what the peculiar geometrical limitations are, belonging to its own crystals.[150] It is more interesting to me, for instance, to try and find out why the red oxide of copper, usually crystallising in cubes or octahedrons, makes itself exquisitely, out of its cubes, into this red silk in one particular Cornish mine, than what are the absolutely necessary angles of the octahedron, which is its common form. At all events, that mathematical part of crystallography is quite beyond girls' strength; but these questions of the various tempers and manners of crystals are not only comprehensible by you, but full of the most curious teaching for you. For in the fulfilment, to the best of their power, of their adopted form under given circumstances, there are conditions entirely resembling those of human virtue; and indeed expressible under no term so proper as that of the Virtue, or Courage of crystals:--which, if you are not afraid of the crystals making you ashamed of yourselves, we will try to get some notion of, to-morrow. But it will be a bye-lecture, and more about yourselves than the minerals, Don't come unless you like. MARY. I'm sure the crystals will make us ashamed of ourselves; but we'll come, for all that. L. Meantime, look well and quietly over these needle, or thread crystals, and those on the other two tables, with magnifying glasses, and see what thoughts will come into your little heads about them. For the best thoughts are generally those which come without being forced, one does not know how. And so I hope you will get through your wet day patiently. FOOTNOTES: [150] Note iv. LECTURE V. _CRYSTAL VIRTUES._ _A quiet talk, in the afternoon, by the sunniest window of the Drawing-room. Present_, FLORRIE, ISABEL, MAY, LUCILLA, KATHLEEN, DORA, MARY, _and some others, who have saved time for the bye-Lecture._ L. So you have really come, like good girls, to be made ashamed of yourselves? DORA (_very meekly_). No, we needn't be made so; we always are. L. Well, I believe that's truer than most pretty speeches: but you know, you saucy girl, some people have more reason to be so than others. Are you sure everybody is, as well as you? THE GENERAL VOICE. Yes, yes; everybody. L. What! Florrie ashamed of herself? (FLORRIE _hides behind the curtain._) L. And Isabel? (ISABEL _hides under the table._) L. And May? (MAY _runs into the corner behind the piano._) L. And Lucilla? (LUCILLA _hides her face in her hands._) L. Dear, dear; but this will never do. I shall have to tell you of the faults of the crystals, instead of virtues, to put you in heart again. MAY (_coming out of her corner_). Oh! have the crystals faults, like us? L. Certainly, May. Their best virtues are shown in fighting their faults. And some have a great many faults; and some are very naughty crystals indeed. FLORRIE (_from behind her curtain_). As naughty as me? ISABEL (_peeping from under the table cloth_). Or me? L. Well, I don't know. They never forget their syntax, children, when once they've been taught it. But I think some of them are, on the whole, worse than any of you. Not that it's amiable of you to look so radiant, all in a minute, on that account. DORA. Oh! but it's so much more comfortable. (_Everybody seems to recover their spirits. Eclipse of_ FLORRIE _and_ ISABEL _terminates._) L. What kindly creatures girls are, after all, to their neighbours' failings! I think you may be ashamed of yourselves indeed, now, children! I can tell you, you shall hear of the highest crystalline merits that I can think of, to-day: and I wish there were more of them; but crystals have a limited, though a stern, code of morals; and their essential virtues are but two;--the first is to be pure, and the second to be well shaped. MARY. Pure! Does that mean clear--transparent? L. No; unless in the case of a transparent substance. You cannot have a transparent crystal of gold; but you may have a perfectly pure one. ISABEL. But you said it was the shape that made things be crystals; therefore, oughtn't their shape to be their first virtue, not their second? L. Right, you troublesome mousie. But I call their shape only their second virtue, because it depends on time and accident, and things which the crystal cannot help. If it is cooled too quickly, or shaken, it must take what shape it can; but it seems as if, even then, it had in itself the power of rejecting impurity, if it has crystalline life enough. Here is a crystal of quartz, well enough shaped in its way; but it seems to have been languid and sick at heart; and some white milky substance has got into it, and mixed itself up with it, all through. It makes the quartz quite yellow, if you hold it up to the light, and milky blue on the surface. Here is another, broken into a thousand separate facets, and out of all traceable shape; but as pure as a mountain spring. I like this one best. THE AUDIENCE. So do I--and I--and I. MARY. Would a crystallographer? L. I think so. He would find many more laws curiously exemplified in the irregularly grouped but pure crystal. But it is a futile question, this of first or second. Purity is in most cases a prior, if not a nobler, virtue; at all events it is most convenient to think about it first. MARY. But what ought we to think about it? Is there much to be thought--I mean, much to puzzle one? L. I don't know what you call 'much.' It is a long time since I met with anything in which there was little. There's not much in this, perhaps. The crystal must be either dirty or clean,--and there's an end. So it is with one's hands, and with one's heart--only you can wash your hands without changing them, but not hearts, nor crystals. On the whole, while you are young, it will be as well to take care that your hearts don't want much washing; for they may perhaps need wringing also, when they do. (_Audience doubtful and uncomfortable._ LUCILLA _at last takes courage._) LUCILLA. Oh! but surely, sir, we cannot make our hearts clean? L. Not easily, Lucilla; so you had better keep them so when they are. LUCILLA. When they are! But, sir-- L. Well? LUCILLA. Sir--surely--are we not told that they are all evil? L. Wait a little, Lucilla; that is difficult ground you are getting upon; and we must keep to our crystals, till at least we understand what _their_ good and evil consist in; they may help us afterwards to some useful hints about our own. I said that their goodness consisted chiefly in purity of substance, and perfectness of form: but those are rather the _effects_ of their goodness, than the goodness itself. The inherent virtues of the crystals, resulting in these outer conditions, might really seem to be best described in the words we should use respecting living creatures--'force of heart' and steadiness of purpose.' There seem to be in some crystals, from the beginning, an unconquerable purity of vital power, and strength of crystal spirit. Whatever dead substance, unacceptant of this energy, comes in their way, is either rejected, or forced to take some beautiful subordinate form; the purity of the crystal remains unsullied, and every atom of it bright with coherent energy. Then the second condition is, that from the beginning of its whole structure, a fine crystal seems to have determined that it will be of a certain size and of a certain shape; it persists in this plan, and completes it. Here is a perfect crystal of quartz for you. It is of an unusual form, and one which it might seem very difficult to build--a pyramid with convex sides, composed of other minor pyramids. But there is not a flaw in its contour throughout; not one of its myriads of component sides but is as bright as a jeweller's facetted work (and far finer, if you saw it close). The crystal points are as sharp as javelins; their edges will cut glass with a touch. Anything more resolute, consummate, determinate in form, cannot be conceived. Here, on the other hand, is a crystal of the same substance, in a perfectly simple type of form--a plain six-sided prism; but from its base to its point,--and it is nine inches long,--it has never for one instant made up its mind what thickness it will have. It seems to have begun by making itself as thick as it thought possible with the quantity of material at command. Still not being as thick as it would like to be, it has clumsily glued on more substance at one of its sides. Then it has thinned itself, in a panic of economy; then puffed itself out again; then starved one side to enlarge another; then warped itself quite out of its first line. Opaque, rough-surfaced, jagged on the edge, distorted in the spine, it exhibits a quite human image of decrepitude and dishonour; but the worst of all the signs of its decay and helplessness, is that half-way up, a parasite crystal, smaller, but just as sickly, has rooted itself in the side of the larger one, eating out a cavity round its root, and then growing backwards, or downwards, contrary to the direction of the main crystal. Yet I cannot trace the least difference in purity of substance between the first most noble stone, and this ignoble and dissolute one. The impurity of the last is in its will, or want of will. MARY. Oh, if we could but understand the meaning of it all! L. We can understand all that is good for us. It is just as true for us, as for the crystal, that the nobleness of life depends on its consistency,--clearness of purpose,--quiet and ceaseless energy. All doubt, and repenting, and botching, and retouching, and wondering what it will be best to do next, are vice, as well as misery. MARY (_much wondering_). But must not one repent when one does wrong, and hesitate when one can't see one's way? L. You have no business at all to do wrong; nor to get into any way that you cannot see. Your intelligence should always be far in advance of your act. Whenever you do not know what you are about, you are sure to be doing wrong. KATHLEEN. Oh, dear, but I never know what I am about! L. Very true, Katie, but it is a great deal to know, if you know that. And you find that you have done wrong afterwards; and perhaps some day you may begin to know, or at least, think, what you are about. ISABEL. But surely people can't do very wrong if they don't know, can they? I mean, they can't be very naughty. They can be wrong, like Kathleen or me, when we make mistakes; but not wrong in the dreadful way. I can't express what I mean; but there are two sorts of wrong are there not? L. Yes, Isabel; but you will find that the great difference is between kind and unkind wrongs, not between meant and unmeant wrong. Very few people really mean to do wrong,--in a deep sense, none. They only don't know what they are about. Cain did not mean to do wrong when he killed Abel. (ISABEL _draws a deep breath, and opens her eyes very wide._) L. No, Isabel; and there are countless Cains among us now, who kill their brothers by the score a day, not only for less provocation than Cain had, but for _no_ provocation,--and merely for what they can make of their bones,--yet do not think they are doing wrong in the least. Then sometimes you have the business reversed, as over in America these last years, where you have seen Abel resolutely killing Cain, and not thinking he is doing wrong. The great difficulty is always to open people's eyes: to touch their feelings, and break their hearts, is easy; the difficult thing is to break their heads. What does it matter, as long as they remain stupid, whether you change their feelings or not? You cannot be always at their elbow to tell them what is right: and they may just do as wrong as before, or worse; and their best intentions merely make the road smooth for them,--you know where, children. For it is not the place itself that is paved with them, as people say so often. You can't pave the bottomless pit; but you may the road to it. MAY. Well, but if people do as well as they can see how, surely that is the right for them, isn't it? L. No, May, not a bit of it; right is right, and wrong is wrong. It is only the fool who does wrong, and says he 'did it for the best.' And if there's one sort of person in the world that the Bible speaks harder of than another, it is fools. Their particular and chief way of saying 'There is no God' is this, of declaring that whatever their 'public opinion' may be, is right: and that God's opinion is of no consequence. MAY. But surely nobody can always know what is right? L. Yes, you always can, for to-day; and if you do what you see of it to-day, you will see more of it, and more clearly, to-morrow. Here, for instance, you children are at school, and have to learn French, and arithmetic, and music, and several other such things. That is your 'right' for the present; the 'right' for us, your teachers, is to see that you learn as much as you can, without spoiling your dinner, your sleep, or your play; and that what you do learn, you learn well. You all know when you learn with a will, and when you dawdle. There's no doubt of conscience about that, I suppose? VIOLET. No; but if one wants to read an amusing book, instead of learning one's lesson? L. You don't call that a 'question,' seriously, Violet? You are then merely deciding whether you will resolutely do wrong or not. MARY. But, in after life, how many fearful difficulties may arise, however one tries to know or to do what is right! L. You are much too sensible a girl, Mary, to have felt that, whatever you may have seen. A great many of young ladies' difficulties arise from their falling in love with a wrong person: but they have no business to let themselves fall in love, till they know he is the right one. DORA. How many thousands ought he to have a year? L. (_disdaining reply_). There are, of course, certain crises of fortune when one has to take care of oneself, and mind shrewdly what one is about. There is never any real doubt about the path, but you may have to walk very slowly. MARY. And if one is forced to do a wrong thing by some one who has authority over you? L. My dear, no one can be forced to do a wrong thing, for the guilt is in the will: but you may any day be forced to do a fatal thing, as you might be forced to take poison; the remarkable law of nature in such cases being, that it is always unfortunate _you_ who are poisoned, and not the person who gives you the dose. It is a very strange law, but it _is_ a law. Nature merely sees to the carrying out of the normal operation of arsenic. She never troubles herself to ask who gave it you. So also you may be starved to death, morally as well as physically, by other people's faults. You are, on the whole, very good children sitting here to-day;--do you think that your goodness comes all by your own contriving? or that you are gentle and kind because your dispositions are naturally more angelic than those of the poor girls who are playing, with wild eyes, on the dustheaps in the alleys of our great towns; and who will one day fill their prisons,--or, better, their graves? Heaven only knows where they, and we who have cast them there, shall stand at last. But the main judgment question will be, I suppose, for all of us, 'Did you keep a good heart through it?' What you were, others may answer for;--what you tried to be, you must answer for, yourself. Was the heart pure and true--tell us that? And so we come back to your sorrowful question, Lucilla, which I put aside a little ago. You would be afraid to answer that your heart _was_ pure and true, would not you? LUCILLA. Yes, indeed, sir. L. Because you have been taught that it is all evil--'only evil continually.' Somehow, often as people say that, they never seem, to me, to believe it? Do you really believe it? LUCILLA. Yes, sir; I hope so. L. That you have an entirely bad heart? LUCILLA (_a little uncomfortable at the substitution of the monosyllable for the dissyllable, nevertheless persisting in her orthodoxy_). Yes, sir. L. Florrie, I am sure you are tired; I never like you to stay when you are tired; but, you know, you must not play with the kitten while we're talking. FLORRIE. Oh! but I'm not tired; and I'm only nursing her. She'll be asleep in my lap directly. L. Stop! that puts me in mind of something I had to show you, about minerals that are like hair. I want a hair out of Tittie's tail. FLORRIE (_quite rude, in her surprise, even to the point of repeating expressions_). Out of Tittie's tail! L. Yes; a brown one: Lucilla, you can get at the tip of it nicely, under Florrie's arm; just pull one out for me. LUCILLA. Oh! but, sir, it will hurt her so! L. Never mind; she can't scratch you while Florrie is holding her. Now that I think of it, you had better pull out two. LUCILLA. But then she may scratch Florrie! and it will hurt her so, sir! if you only want brown hairs, wouldn't two of mine do? L. Would you really rather pull out your own than Tittie's? LUCILLA. Oh, of course, if mine will do. L. But that's very wicked, Lucilla! LUCILLA. Wicked, sir? L. Yes; if your heart was not so bad, you would much rather pull all the cat's hairs out, than one of your own. LUCILLA. Oh! but sir, I didn't mean bad, like that. L. I believe, if the truth were told, Lucilla, you would like to tie a kettle to Tittie's tail, and hunt her round the playground. LUCILLA. Indeed, I should not, sir. L. That's not true, Lucilla; you know it cannot be. LUCILLA. Sir? L. Certainly it is not;--how can you possibly speak any truth out of such a heart as you have? It is wholly deceitful. LUCILLA. Oh! no, no; I don't mean that way; I don't mean that it makes me tell lies, quite out. L. Only that it tells lies within you? LUCILLA. Yes. L. Then, outside of it, you know what is true, and say so; and I may trust the outside of your heart; but within, it is all foul and false. Is that the way? LUCILLA. I suppose so: I don't understand it, quite. L. There is no occasion for understanding it; but do you feel it? Are you sure that your heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked? LUCILLA (_much relieved by finding herself among phrases with which she is acquainted_). Yes, sir. I'm sure of that. L. (_pensively_). I'm sorry for it, Lucilla. LUCILLA. So am I, indeed. L. What are you sorry with, Lucilla? LUCILLA. Sorry with, sir? L. Yes; I mean, where do you feel sorry? in your feet? LUCILLA (_laughing a little_). No, sir, of course. L. In your shoulders, then? LUCILLA. No, sir. L. You are sure of that? Because, I fear, sorrow in the shoulders would not be worth much. LUCILLA. I suppose I feel it in my heart, if I really am sorry. L. If you really are! Do you mean to say that you are sure you are utterly wicked, and yet do not care? LUCILLA. No, indeed; I have cried about it often. L. Well, then, you are sorry in your heart? LUCILLA. Yes, when the sorrow is worth anything. L. Even if it be not, it cannot be anywhere else but there. It is not the crystalline lens of your eyes which is sorry, when you cry? LUCILLA. No, sir, of course. L. Then, have you two hearts; one of which is wicked, and the other grieved? or is one side of it sorry for the other side? LUCILLA (_weary of cross-examination, and a little vexed_). Indeed, sir, you know I can't understand it; but you know how it is written--'another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.' L. Yes, Lucilla, I know how it is written; but I do not see that it will help us to know that, if we neither understand what is written, nor feel it. And you will not get nearer to the meaning of one verse, if, as soon as you are puzzled by it, you escape to another, introducing three new words--'law,' 'members,' and 'mind'; not one of which you at present know the meaning of; and respecting which, you probably never will be much wiser; since men like Montesquieu and Locke have spent great part of their lives in endeavouring to explain two of them. LUCILLA. Oh! please, sir, ask somebody else. L. If I thought anyone else could answer better than you, Lucilla, I would; but suppose I try, instead, myself, to explain your feelings to you? LUCILLA. Oh, yes; please do. L. Mind, I say your 'feelings,' not your 'belief.' For I cannot undertake to explain anybody's beliefs. Still I must try a little, first, to explain the belief also, because I want to draw it to some issue. As far as I understand what you say, or any one else, taught as you have been taught, says, on this matter,--you think that there is an external goodness, a whited-sepulchre kind of goodness, which appears beautiful outwardly, but is within full of uncleanness: a deep secret guilt, of which we ourselves are not sensible; and which can only be seen by the Maker of us all. (_Approving murmurs from audience._) L. Is it not so with the body as well as the soul? (_Looked notes of interrogation._) L. A skull, for instance, is not a beautiful thing? (_Grave faces, signifying 'Certainly not,' and 'What next?'_) L. And if you all could see in each other, with clear eyes, whatever God sees beneath those fair faces of yours, you would not like it? (_Murmured 'No's.'_) L. Nor would it be good for you? (_Silence._) L. The probability being that what God does not allow you to see, He does not wish you to see; nor even to think of? (_Silence prolonged._) L. It would not at all be good for you, for instance, whenever you were washing your faces, and braiding your hair, to be thinking of the shapes of the jawbones, and of the cartilage of the nose, and of the jagged sutures of the scalp? (_Resolutely whispered No's._) L. Still less, to see through a clear glass the daily processes of nourishment and decay? (_No._) L. Still less if instead of merely inferior and preparatory conditions of structure, as in the skeleton,--or inferior offices of structure, as in operations of life and death,--there were actual disease in the body; ghastly and dreadful. You would try to cure it; but having taken such measures as were necessary, you would not think the cure likely to be promoted by perpetually watching the wounds, or thinking of them. On the contrary, you would be thankful for every moment of forgetfulness: as, in daily health, you must be thankful that your Maker has veiled whatever is fearful in your frame under a sweet and manifest beauty; and has made it your duty, and your only safety, to rejoice in that, both in yourself and in others:--not indeed concealing, or refusing to believe in sickness, if it come; but never dwelling on it. Now, your wisdom and duty touching soul-sickness are just the same. Ascertain clearly what is wrong with you; and so far as you know any means of mending it, take those means, and have done: when you are examining yourself, never call yourself merely a 'sinner,' that is very cheap abuse; and utterly useless. You may even get to like it, and be proud of it. But call yourself a liar, a coward, a sluggard, a glutton, or an evil-eyed jealous wretch, if you indeed find yourself to be in any wise any of these. Take steady means to check yourself in whatever fault you have ascertained, and justly accused yourself of. And as soon as you are in active way of mending, you will be no more inclined to moan over an undefined corruption. For the rest, you will find it less easy to uproot faults, than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do not think of your faults; still less of others' faults: in every person who comes near you, look for what is good and strong: honour that; rejoice in it; and, as you can, try to imitate it: and your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes. If, on looking back, your whole life should seem rugged as a palm tree stem; still, never mind, so long as it has been growing; and has its grand green shade of leaves, and weight of honied fruit, at top. And even if you cannot find much good in yourself at last, think that it does not much matter to the universe either what you were, or are; think how many people are noble, if you cannot be; and rejoice in _their_ nobleness. An immense quantity of modern confession of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism; which will rather gloat over its own evil, than lose the centralisation of its interest in itself. MARY. But then, if we ought to forget ourselves so much, how did the old Greek proverb 'Know thyself' come to be so highly esteemed? L. My dear, it is the proverb of proverbs; Apollo's proverb, and the sun's;--but do you think you can know yourself by looking _into_ yourself? Never. You can know what you are, only by looking _out_ of yourself. Measure your own powers with those of others; compare your own interests with those of others; try to understand what you appear to them, as well as what they appear to you; and judge of yourselves, in all things, relatively and subordinately; not positively: starting always with a wholesome conviction of the probability that there is nothing particular about you. For instance, some of you perhaps think you can write poetry. Dwell on your own feelings and doings:--and you will soon think yourselves Tenth Muses; but forget your own feelings; and try, instead, to understand a line or two of Chaucer or Dante: and you will soon begin to feel yourselves very foolish girls--which is much like the fact. So, something which befalls you may seem a great misfortune;--you meditate over its effects on you personally; and begin to think that it is a chastisement, or a warning, or a this or that or the other of profound significance; and that all the angels in heaven have left their business for a little while, that they may watch its effects on your mind. But give up this egotistic indulgence of your fancy; examine a little what misfortunes, greater a thousandfold, are happening, every second, to twenty times worthier persons: and your self-consciousness will change into pity and humility; and you will know yourself, so far as to understand that 'there hath nothing taken thee but what is common to man.' Now, Lucilla, these are the practical conclusions which any person of sense would arrive at, supposing the texts which relate to the inner evil of the heart were as many, and as prominent, as they are often supposed to be by careless readers. But the way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the ground. What fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off, and ate. So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture; and that nothing else is. But you can only get the skins of the texts that way. If you want their juice, you must press them in cluster. Now, the clustered texts about the human heart, insist, as a body, not on any inherent corruption in all hearts, but on the terrific distinction between the bad and the good ones. 'A good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man, out of the evil treasure, bringeth forth that which is evil.' 'They on the rock are they which, in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it.' 'Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.' 'The wicked have bent their bow, that they may privily shoot at him that is upright in heart.' And so on; they are countless, to the same effect. And, for all of us, the question is not at all to ascertain how much or how little corruption there is in human nature; but to ascertain whether, out of all the mass of that nature, we are of the sheep or the goat breed; whether we are people of upright heart, being shot at, or people of crooked heart, shooting. And, of all the texts bearing on the subject, this, which is a quite simple and practical order, is the one you have chiefly to hold in mind. 'Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.' LUCILLA. And yet, how inconsistent the texts seem! L. Nonsense, Lucilla! do you think the universe is bound to look consistent to a girl of fifteen? Look up at your own room window;--you can just see it from where you sit. I'm glad that it is left open, as it ought to be, in so fine a day. But do you see what a black spot it looks, in the sunlighted wall? LUCILLA. Yes, it looks as black as ink. L. Yet you know it is a very bright room when you are inside of it; quite as bright as there is any occasion for it to be, that its little lady may see to keep it tidy. Well, it is very probable, also, that if you could look into your heart from the sun's point of view, it might appear a very black hole indeed; nay, the sun may sometimes think good to tell you that it looks so to Him; but He will come into it, and make it very cheerful for you, for all that, if you don't put the shutters up. And the one question for _you_, remember, is not 'dark or light?' but 'tidy or untidy?' Look well to your sweeping and garnishing; and be sure it is only the banished spirit, or some of the seven wickeder ones at his back, who will still whisper to you that it is all black. LECTURE VI. _CRYSTAL QUARRELS._ _Full conclave, in Schoolroom. There has been a game at crystallisation in the morning, of which various account has to be rendered. In particular, everybody has to explain why they were always where they were not intended to be._ L. (_having received and considered the report_). You have got on pretty well, children: but you know these were easy figures you have been trying. Wait till I have drawn you out the plans of some crystals of snow! MARY. I don't think those will be the most difficult:--they are so beautiful that we shall remember our places better; and then they are all regular, and in stars: it is those twisty oblique ones we are afraid of. L. Read Carlyle's account of the battle of Leuthen, and learn Freidrich's 'oblique order.' You will 'get it done for once, I think, provided you _can_ march as a pair of compasses would.' But remember, when you can construct the most difficult single figures, you have only learned half the game--nothing so much as the half, indeed, as the crystals themselves play it. MARY. Indeed; what else is there? L. It is seldom that any mineral crystallises alone. Usually two or three, under quite different crystalline laws, form together. They do this absolutely without flaw or fault, when they are in fine temper: and observe what this signifies. It signifies that the two, or more, minerals of different natures agree, somehow, between themselves, how much space each will want;--agree which of them shall give away to the other at their junction; or in what measure each will accommodate itself to the other's shape! And then each takes its permitted shape, and allotted share of space; yielding, or being yielded to, as it builds, till each crystal has fitted itself perfectly and gracefully to its differently-natured neighbour. So that, in order to practise this, in even the simplest terms, you must divide into two parties, wearing different colours; each must choose a different figure to construct; and you must form one of these figures through the other, both going on at the same time. MARY. I think _we_ may, perhaps, manage it; but I cannot at all understand how the crystals do. It seems to imply so much preconcerting of plan, and so much giving way to each other, as if they really were living. L. Yes, it implies both concurrence and compromise, regulating all wilfulness of design: and, more curious still, the crystals do _not_ always give way to each other. They show exactly the same varieties of temper that human creatures might. Sometimes they yield the required place with perfect grace and courtesy; forming fantastic, but exquisitely finished groups: and sometimes they will not yield at all; but fight furiously for their places, losing all shape and honour, and even their own likeness, in the contest. MARY. But is not that wholly wonderful? How is it that one never sees it spoken of in books? L. The scientific men are all busy in determining the constant laws under which the struggle takes place; these indefinite humours of the elements are of no interest to them. And unscientific people rarely give themselves the trouble of thinking at all when they look at stones. Not that it is of much use to think; the more one thinks, the more one is puzzled. MARY. Surely it is more wonderful than anything in botany? L. Everything has its own wonders; but, given the nature of the plant, it is easier to understand what a flower will do, and why it does it, than, given anything we as yet know of stone-nature, to understand what a crystal will do, and why it does it. You at once admit a kind of volition and choice, in the flower, but we are not accustomed to attribute anything of the kind to the crystal. Yet there is, in reality, more likeness to some conditions of human feeling among stones than among plants. There is a far greater difference between kindly-tempered and ill-tempered crystals of the same mineral, than between any two specimens of the same flower: and the friendships and wars of crystals depend more definitely and curiously on their varieties of disposition, than any associations of flowers. Here, for instance, is a good garnet, living with good mica; one rich red, and the other silver white: the mica leaves exactly room enough for the garnet to crystallise comfortably in; and the garnet lives happily in its little white house; fitted to it, like a pholas in its cell. But here are wicked garnets living with wicked mica. See what ruin they make of each other! You cannot tell which is which; the garnets look like dull red stains on the crumbling stone. By the way, I never could understand, if St. Gothard is a real saint, why he can't keep his garnets in better order. These are all under his care; but I suppose there are too many of them for him to look after. The streets of Airolo are paved with them. MAY. Paved with garnets? L. With mica-slate and garnets; I broke this bit out of a paving stone. Now garnets and mica are natural friends, and generally fond of each other; but you see how they quarrel when they are ill brought up. So it is always. Good crystals are friendly with almost all other good crystals, however little they chance to see of each other, or however opposite their habits may be; while wicked crystals quarrel with one another, though they may be exactly alike in habits, and see each other continually. And of course the wicked crystals quarrel with the good ones. ISABEL. Then do the good ones get angry? L. No, never: they attend to their own work and life; and live it as well as they can, though they are always the sufferers. Here, for instance, is a rock-crystal of the purest race and finest temper, who was born, unhappily for him, in a bad neighbourhood, near Beaufort in Savoy; and he has had to fight with vile calcareous mud all his life. See here, when he was but a child, it came down on him, and nearly buried him; a weaker crystal would have died in despair; but he only gathered himself together, like Hercules against the serpents, and threw a layer of crystal over the clay; conquered it,--imprisoned it,--and lived on. Then, when he was a little older, came more clay; and poured itself upon him here, at the side; and he has laid crystal over that, and lived on, in his purity. Then the clay came on at his angles, and tried to cover them, and round them away; but upon that he threw out buttress-crystals at his angles, all as true to his own central line as chapels round a cathedral apse; and clustered them round the clay; and conquered it again. At last the clay came on at his summit, and tried to blunt his summit; but he could not endure that for an instant; and left his flanks all rough, but pure; and fought the clay at his crest, and built crest over crest, and peak over peak, till the clay surrendered at last; and here is his summit, smooth and pure, terminating a pyramid of alternate clay and crystal, half a foot high! LILY. Oh, how nice of him! What a dear, brave crystal! But I can't bear to see his flanks all broken, and the clay within them. L. Yes; it was an evil chance for him, the being born to such contention; there are some enemies so base that even to hold them captive is a kind of dishonour. But look, here has been quite a different kind of struggle: the adverse power has been more orderly, and has fought the pure crystal in ranks as firm as its own. This is not mere rage and impediment of crowded evil: here is a disciplined hostility; army against army. LILY. Oh, but this is much more beautiful! L. Yes, for both the elements have true virtue in them; it is a pity they are at war, but they war grandly. MARY. But is this the same clay as in the other crystal? L. I used the word clay for shortness. In both, the enemy is really limestone; but in the first, disordered, and mixed with true clay; while, here, it is nearly pure, and crystallises into its own primitive form, the oblique six-sided one, which you know: and out of these it makes regiments; and then squares of the regiments, and so charges the rock crystal literally in square against column. ISABEL. Please, please, let me see. And what does the rock crystal do? L. The rock crystal seems able to do nothing. The calcite cuts it through at every charge. Look here,--and here! The loveliest crystal in the whole group is hewn fairly into two pieces. ISABEL. Oh, dear; but is the calcite harder than the crystal then? L. No, softer. Very much softer. MARY. But then, how can it possibly cut the crystal? L. It did not really cut it, though it passes through it. The two were formed together, as I told you; but no one knows how. Still, it is strange that this hard quartz has in all cases a good-natured way with it, of yielding to everything else. All sorts of soft things make nests for themselves in it; and it never makes a nest for itself in anything. It has all the rough outside work; and every sort of cowardly and weak mineral can shelter itself within it. Look; these are hexagonal plates of mica; if they were outside of this crystal they would break, like burnt paper; but they are inside of it,--nothing can hurt them,--the crystal has taken them into its very heart, keeping all their delicate edges as sharp as if they were under water, instead of bathed in rock. Here is a piece of branched silver: you can bend it with a touch of your finger, but the stamp of its every fibre is on the rock in which it lay, as if the quartz had been as soft as wool. LILY. Oh, the good, good quartz! But does it never get inside of anything? L. As it is a little Irish girl who asks, I may perhaps answer, without being laughed at, that it gets inside of itself sometimes. But I don't remember seeing quartz make a nest for itself in anything else. ISABEL. Please, there was something I heard you talking about, last term, with Miss Mary. I was at my lessons, but I heard something about nests; and I thought it was birds' nests; and I couldn't help listening; and then, I remember, it was about 'nests of quartz in granite.' I remember, because I was so disappointed! L. Yes, mousie, you remember quite rightly; but I can't tell you about those nests to-day, nor perhaps to-morrow: but there's no contradiction between my saying then, and now; I will show you that there is not, some day. Will you trust me meanwhile? ISABEL. Won't I! L. Well, then, look, lastly, at this piece of courtesy in quartz; it is on a small scale, but wonderfully pretty. Here is nobly born quartz living with a green mineral, called epidote; and they are immense friends. Now, you see, a comparatively large and strong quartz-crystal, and a very weak and slender little one of epidote, have begun to grow, close by each other, and sloping unluckily towards each other, so that they at last meet. They cannot go on growing together; the quartz crystal is five times as thick, and more than twenty times as strong,[151] as the epidote; but he stops at once, just in the very crowning moment of his life, when he is building his own summit! He lets the pale little film of epidote grow right past him; stopping his own summit for it; and he never himself grows any more. LILY (_after some silence of wonder_). But is the quartz _never_ wicked then? L. Yes, but the wickedest quartz seems good-natured, compared to other things. Here are two very characteristic examples; one is good quartz, living with good pearlspar, and the other, wicked quartz, living with wicked pearlspar. In both, the quartz yields to the soft carbonate of iron: but, in the first place, the iron takes only what it needs of room; and is inserted into the planes of the rock crystal with such precision, that you must break it away before you can tell whether it really penetrates the quartz or not; while the crystals of iron are perfectly formed, and have a lovely bloom on their surface besides. But here, when the two minerals quarrel, the unhappy quartz has all its surfaces jagged and torn to pieces; and there is not a single iron crystal whose shape you can completely trace. But the quartz has the worst of it, in both instances. VIOLET. Might we look at that piece of broken quartz again, with the weak little film across it? it seems such a strange lovely thing, like the self-sacrifice of a human being. L. The self-sacrifice of a human being is not a lovely thing, Violet. It is often a necessary and noble thing; but no form nor degree of suicide can be ever lovely. VIOLET. But self-sacrifice is not suicide! L. What is it then? VIOLET. Giving up one's self for another. L. Well; and what do you mean by 'giving up one's self?' VIOLET. Giving up one's tastes, one's feelings, one's time, one's happiness, and so on, to make others happy. L. I hope you will never marry anybody, Violet, who expects you to make him happy in that way. VIOLET (_hesitating_). In what way? L. By giving up your tastes, and sacrificing your feelings, and happiness. VIOLET. No, no, I don't mean that; but you know, for other people, one must. L. For people who don't love you, and whom you know nothing about? Be it so; but how does this 'giving up' differ from suicide then? VIOLET. Why, giving up one's pleasures is not killing one's self? L. Giving up wrong pleasure is not; neither is it self-sacrifice, but self-culture. But giving up right pleasure is. If you surrender the pleasure of walking, your foot will wither; you may as well cut it off: if you surrender the pleasure of seeing, your eyes will soon be unable to bear the light; you may as well pluck them out. And to maim yourself is partly to kill yourself. Do but go on maiming, and you will soon slay. VIOLET. But why do you make me think of that verse then about the foot and the eye? L. You are indeed commanded to cut off and to pluck out, if foot or eye offend you; but why _should_ they offend you? VIOLET. I don't know; I never quite understood that. L. Yet it is a sharp order; one needing to be well understood if it is to be well obeyed! When Helen sprained her ancle the other day, you saw how strongly it had to be bandaged: that is to say, prevented from all work, to recover it. But the bandage was not 'lovely.' VIOLET. No, indeed. L. And if her foot had been crushed, or diseased, or snake-bitten, instead of sprained, it might have been needful to cut it off. But the amputation would not have been 'lovely.' VIOLET. No. L. Well, if eye and foot are dead already, and betray you--if the light that is in you be darkness, and your feet run into mischief, or are taken in the snare,--it is indeed time to pluck out, and cut off, I think: but, so crippled, you can never be what you might have been otherwise. You enter into life, at best, halt or maimed; and the sacrifice is not beautiful, though necessary. VIOLET (_after a pause_). But when one sacrifices one's self for others? L. Why not rather others for you? VIOLET. Oh! but I couldn't bear that. L. Then why should they bear it? DORA (_bursting in, indignant_). And Thermopylæ, and Protesilaus, and Marcus Curtius, and Arnold de Winkelried, and Iphigenia, and Jephthah's daughter? L. (_sustaining the indignation unmoved_). And the Samaritan woman's son? DORA. Which Samaritan woman's? L. Read 2 Kings vi. 29. DORA (_obeys_). How horrid! As if we meant anything like that! L. You don't seem to me to know in the least what you do mean, children. What practical difference is there between 'that,' and what you are talking about? The Samaritan children had no voice of their own in the business, it is true; but neither had Iphigenia: the Greek girl was certainly neither boiled, nor eaten; but that only makes a difference in the dramatic effect; not in the principle. DORA (_biting her lip_). Well, then, tell us what we ought to mean. As if you didn't teach it all to us, and mean it yourself, at this moment, more than we do, if you wouldn't be tiresome! L. I mean, and have always meant, simply this, Dora;--that the will of God respecting us is that we shall live by each other's happiness, and life; not by each other's misery, or death. I made you read that verse which so shocked you just now, because the relations of parent and child are typical of all beautiful human help. A child may have to die for its parents; but the purpose of Heaven is that it shall rather live for them;--that, not by its sacrifice, but by its strength, its joy, its force of being, it shall be to them renewal of strength; and as the arrow in the hand of the giant. So it is in all other right relations. Men help each other by their joy, not by their sorrow. They are not intended to slay themselves for each other, but to strengthen themselves for each other. And among the many apparently beautiful things which turn, through mistaken use, to utter evil, I am not sure but that the thoughtlessly meek and self-sacrificing spirit of good men must be named as one of the fatallest. They have so often been taught that there is a virtue in mere suffering, as such; and foolishly to hope that good may be brought by Heaven out of all on which Heaven itself has set the stamp of evil, that we may avoid it,--that they accept pain and defeat as if these were their appointed portion; never understanding that their defeat is not the less to be mourned because it is more fatal to their enemies than to them. The one thing that a good man has to do, and to see done, is justice; he is neither to slay himself nor others causelessly: so far from denying himself, since he is pleased by good, he is to do his utmost to get his pleasure accomplished. And I only wish there were strength, fidelity, and sense enough, among the good Englishmen of this day, to render it possible for them to band together in a vowed brotherhood, to enforce, by strength of heart and hand, the doing of human justice among all who came within their sphere. And finally, for your own teaching, observe, although there may be need for much self-sacrifice and self-denial in the correction of faults of character, the moment the character is formed, the self-denial ceases. Nothing is really well done, which it costs you pain to do. VIOLET. But surely, sir, you are always pleased with us when we try to please others, and not ourselves? L. My dear child, in the daily course and discipline of right life, we must continually and reciprocally submit and surrender in all kind and courteous and affectionate ways: and these submissions and ministries to each other, of which you all know (none better) the practice and the preciousness, are as good for the yielder as the receiver: they strengthen and perfect as much as they soften and refine. But the real sacrifice of all our strength, or life, or happiness to others (though it may be needed, and though all brave creatures hold their lives in their hand, to be given, when such need comes, as frankly as a soldier gives his life in battle), is yet always a mournful and momentary necessity; not the fulfilment of the continuous law of being. Self-sacrifice which is sought after, and triumphed in, is usually foolish; and calamitous in its issue: and by the sentimental proclamation and pursuit of it, good people have not only made most of their own lives useless, but the whole framework of their religion so hollow, that at this moment, while the English nation, with its lips, pretends to teach every man to 'love his neighbour as himself,' with its hands and feet it clutches and tramples like a wild beast; and practically lives, every soul of it that can, on other people's labour. Briefly, the constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts; and to strengthen them for the help of others. Do you think Titian would have helped the world better by denying himself, and not painting; or Casella by denying himself, and not singing? The real virtue is to be ready to sing the moment people ask us; as he was, even in purgatory. The very word 'virtue' means not 'conduct' but 'strength,' vital energy in the heart. Were not you reading about that group of words beginning with V,--vital, virtuous, vigorous, and so on,--in Max Muller, the other day, Sibyl? Can't you tell the others about it? SIBYL. No, I can't; will you tell us, please? L. Not now, it is too late. Come to me some idle time to-morrow, and I'll tell you about it, if all's well. But the gist of it is, children, that you should at least know two Latin words; recollect that 'mors' means death and delaying; and 'vita' means life and growing: and try always, not to mortify yourselves, but to vivify yourselves. VIOLET. But, then, are we not to mortify our earthly affections? and surely we are to sacrifice ourselves, at least in God's service, if not in man's? L. Really, Violet, we are getting too serious. I've given you enough ethics for one talk, I think! Do let us have a little play. Lily, what were you so busy about, at the ant-hill in the wood, this morning? LILY. Oh, it was the ants who were busy, not I; I was only trying to help them a little. L. And they wouldn't be helped, I suppose? LILY. No, indeed. I can't think why ants are always so tiresome, when one tries to help them! They were carrying bits of stick, as fast as they could, through a piece of grass; and pulling and pushing, _so_ hard; and tumbling over and over,--it made one quite pity them; so I took some of the bits of stick, and carried them forward a little, where I thought they wanted to put them; but instead of being pleased, they left them directly, and ran about looking quite angry and frightened; and at last ever so many of them got up my sleeves, and bit me all over, and I had to come away. L. I couldn't think what you were about. I saw your French grammar lying on the grass behind you, and thought perhaps you had gone to ask the ants to hear you a French verb. ISABEL. Ah! but you didn't, though! L. Why not, Isabel? I knew, well enough, Lily couldn't learn that verb by herself. ISABEL. No; but the ants couldn't help her. L. Are you sure the ants could not have helped you, Lily? LILY (_thinking_). I ought to have learned something from them, perhaps. L. But none of them left their sticks to help you through the irregular verb? LILY. No, indeed. (_Laughing, with some others._) L. What are you laughing at, children? I cannot see why the ants should not have left their tasks to help Lily in her's,--since here is Violet thinking she ought to leave _her_ tasks, to help God in His. Perhaps, however, she takes Lily's more modest view, and thinks only that 'He ought to learn something from her.' (_Tears in_ VIOLET'S _eyes._) DORA (_scarlet_). It's too bad--it's a shame:--poor Violet! L. My dear children, there's no reason why one should be so red, and the other so pale, merely because you are made for a moment to feel the absurdity of a phrase which you have been taught to use, in common with half the religious world. There is but one way in which man can ever help God--that is, by letting God help him: and there is no way in which his name is more guiltily taken in vain, than by calling the abandonment of our own work, the performance of His. God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where He wishes us to be employed; and that employment is truly 'our Father's business.' He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them, if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are not happy ourselves. Now, away with you, children; and be as happy as you can. And when you cannot, at least don't plume yourselves upon pouting. FOOTNOTES: [151] Quartz is not much harder than epidote; the strength is only supposed to be in some proportion to the squares of the diameters. LECTURE VII. _HOME VIRTUES._ _By the fireside, in the Drawing-room. Evening._ DORA. Now, the curtains are drawn, and the fire's bright and here's your arm-chair--and you're to tell us all about what you promised. L. All about what? DORA. All about virtue. KATHLEEN. Yes, and about the words that begin with V. L. I heard you singing about a word that begins with V, in the playground, this morning, Miss Katie. KATHLEEN. Me singing? MAY. Oh tell us--tell us. L. 'Vilikens and his----' KATHLEEN (_stopping his mouth_). Oh! please don't. Where were you? ISABEL. I'm sure I wish I had known where he was! We lost him among the rhododendrons, and I don't know where he got to; oh, you naughty--naughty--(_climbs on his knee_). DORA. Now, Isabel, we really want to talk. L. _I_ don't. DORA. Oh, but you must. You promised, you know. L. Yes, if all was well; but all's ill. I'm tired, and cross; and I won't. DORA. You're not a bit tired, and you're not crosser than two sticks; and we'll make you talk, if you were crosser than six. Come here, Egypt; and get on the other side of him. (EGYPT _takes up a commanding position near the hearth-brush._) DORA (_reviewing her forces_). Now, Lily, come and sit on the rug in front. (LILY _does as she is bid._) L. (_seeing he has no chance against the odds_.) Well, well; but I'm really tired. Go and dance a little, first; and let me think. DORA. No; you mustn't think. You will be wanting to make us think next; that will be tiresome. L. Well, go and dance first, to get quit of thinking; and then I'll talk as long as you like. DORA. Oh, but we can't dance to-night. There isn't time; and we want to hear about virtue. L. Let me see a little of it first. Dancing is the first of girl's virtues. EGYPT. Indeed! And the second? L. Dressing. EGYPT. Now, you needn't say that! I mended that tear the first thing before breakfast this morning. L. I cannot otherwise express the ethical principle, Egypt; whether you have mended your gown or not. DORA. Now don't be tiresome. We really must hear about virtue, please; seriously. L. Well. I'm telling you about it, as fast as I can. DORA. What! the first of girls' virtues is dancing? L. More accurately, it is wishing to dance, and not wishing to tease, nor hear about virtue. DORA (_to_ EGYPT). Isn't he cross? EGYPT. How many balls must we go to in the season, to be perfectly virtuous? L. As many as you can without losing your colour. But I did not say you should wish to go to balls. I said you should be always wanting to dance. EGYPT. So we do; but everybody says it is very wrong. L. Why, Egypt, I thought-- 'There was a lady once, That would not be a queen,--that would she not, For all the mud in Egypt.' You were complaining the other day of having to go out a great deal oftener than you liked. EGYPT. Yes, so I was; but then, it isn't to dance. There's no room to dance: it's--(_Pausing to consider what it is for_). L. It is only to be seen, I suppose. Well, there's no harm in that. Girls ought to like to be seen. DORA (_her eyes flashing_). Now, you don't mean that; and you're too provoking; and we won't dance again, for a month. L. It will answer every purpose of revenge, Dora, if you only banish me to the library; and dance by yourselves: but I don't think Jessie and Lily will agree to that. You like me to see you dancing, don't you Lily? LILY. Yes, certainly,--when we do it rightly. L. And besides, Miss Dora, if young ladies really do not want to be seen, they should take care not to let their eyes flash when they dislike what people say; and, more than that, it is all nonsense from beginning to end, about not wanting to be seen. I don't know any more tiresome flower in the borders than your especially 'modest' snowdrop; which one always has to stoop down and take all sorts of tiresome trouble with, and nearly break its poor little head off, before you can see it; and then, half of it is not worth seeing. Girls should be like daisies; nice and white, with an edge of red, if you look close; making the ground bright wherever they are; knowing simply and quietly that they do it, and are meant to do it, and that it would be very wrong if they didn't do it. Not want to be seen, indeed! How long were you in doing your back hair, this afternoon, Jessie? (JESSIE _not immediately answering_, DORA _comes to her assistance._) DORA. Not above three-quarters of an hour, I think, Jess? JESSIE (_putting her finger up_). Now, Dorothy, _you_ needn't talk, you know! L. I know she needn't, Jessie; I shall ask her about those dark plaits presently. (DORA _looks round to see if there is any way open for retreat._) But never mind; it was worth the time, whatever it was; and nobody will ever mistake that golden wreath for a chignon; but if you don't want it to be seen, you had better wear a cap. JESSIE. Ah, now, are you really going to do nothing but play? And we all have been thinking, and thinking, all day; and hoping you would tell us things; and now--! L. And now I am telling you things, and true things, and things good for you; and you won't believe me. You might as well have let me go to sleep at once, as I wanted to. (_Endeavours again to make himself comfortable._) ISABEL. Oh, no, no, you sha'n't go to sleep, you naughty--Kathleen, come here. L. (_knowing what he has to expect if_ KATHLEEN _comes_). Get away, Isabel, you're too heavy. (_Sitting up._) What have I been saying? DORA. I do believe he has been asleep all the time! You never heard anything like the things you've been saying. L. Perhaps not. If you have heard them, and anything like them, it is all I want. EGYPT. Yes, but we don't understand, and you know we don't; and we want to. L. What did I say first? DORA. That the first virtue of girls was wanting to go to balls. L. I said nothing of the kind. JESSIE. 'Always wanting to dance,' you said. L. Yes, and that's true. Their first virtue is to be intensely happy;--so happy that they don't know what to do with themselves for happiness,--and dance, instead of walking. Don't you recollect 'Louisa,' 'No fountain from a rocky cave E'er tripped with foot so free; She seemed as happy as a wave That dances on the sea.' A girl is always like that, when everything's right with her. VIOLET. But, surely, one must be sad sometimes? L. Yes, Violet; and dull sometimes, and stupid sometimes, and cross sometimes. What must be, must; but it is always either our own fault, or somebody else's. The last and worst thing that can be said of a nation is, that it has made its young girls sad, and weary. MAY. But I am sure I have heard a great many good people speak against dancing? L. Yes, May; but it does not follow they were wise as well as good. I suppose they think Jeremiah liked better to have to write Lamentations for his people, than to have to write that promise for them, which everybody seems to hurry past, that they may get on quickly to the verse about Rachel weeping for her children; though the verse they pass is the counter-blessing to that one: 'Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance; and both young men and old together; and I will turn their mourning into joy.' (_The children get very serious, but look at each other, as if pleased._) MARY. They understand now: but, do you know what you said next? L. Yes; I was not more than half asleep. I said their second virtue was dressing. MARY. Well! what did you mean by that? L. What do _you_ mean by dressing? MARY. Wearing fine clothes. L. Ah! there's the mistake. _I_ mean wearing plain ones. MARY. Yes, I daresay! but that's not what girls understand by dressing, you know. L. I can't help that. If they understand by dressing, buying dresses, perhaps they also understand by drawing, buying pictures. But when I hear them say they can draw, I understand that they can make a drawing; and when I hear them say they can dress, I understand that they can make a dress and--which is quite as difficult--wear one. DORA. I'm not sure about the making; for the wearing, we can all wear them--out, before anybody expects it. EGYPT (_aside, to_ L., _piteously_). Indeed I have mended that torn flounce quite neatly; look if I haven't! L. (_aside, to_ EGYPT). All right; don't be afraid. (_Aloud to_ DORA.) Yes, doubtless; but you know that is only a slow way of _un_dressing. DORA. Then, we are all to learn dress-making, are we? L. Yes; and always to dress yourselves beautifully--not finely, unless on occasion; but then very finely and beautifully too. Also, you are to dress as many other people as you can; and to teach them how to dress, if they don't know; and to consider every ill-dressed woman or child whom you see anywhere, as a personal disgrace; and to get at them, somehow, until everybody is as beautifully dressed as birds. (_Silence; the children drawing their breaths hard, as if they had come from under a shower bath._) L (_seeing objections begin to express themselves in the eyes_). Now you needn't say you can't; for you can: and it's what you were meant to do, always; and to dress your houses, and your gardens, too; and to do very little else, I believe, except singing; and dancing, as we said, of course; and--one thing more. DORA. Our third and last virtue, I suppose? L. Yes; on Violet's system of triplicities. DORA. Well, we are prepared for anything now. What is it? L. Cooking. DORA. Cardinal, indeed! If only Beatrice were here with her seven handmaids, that she might see what a fine eighth we had found for her! MARY. And the interpretation? What does 'cooking' mean? L. It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices; and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savoury in meats; it means carefulness, and inventiveness, and watchfulness, and willingness, and readiness of appliance; it means the economy of your great-grandmothers, and the science of modern chemists; it means much tasting, and no wasting; it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian hospitality; and it means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly and always 'ladies'--'loaf-givers;' and, as you are to see, imperatively that everybody has something pretty to put on,--so you are to see, yet more imperatively, that everybody has something nice to eat. (_Another pause, and long drawn breath._) DORA (_slowly recovering herself_) _to_ EGYPT. We had better have let him go to sleep, I think, after all! L. You had better let the younger ones go to sleep now: for I haven't half done. ISABEL (_panic-struck_). Oh! please, please! just one quarter of an hour. L. No, Isabel; I cannot say what I've got to say, in a quarter of an hour; and it is too hard for you, besides:--you would be lying awake, and trying to make it out, half the night. That will never do. ISABEL. Oh, please! L. It would please me exceedingly, mousie: but there are times when we must both be displeased; more's the pity. Lily may stay for half an hour, if she likes. LILY. I can't; because Isey never goes to sleep, if she is waiting for me to come. ISABEL. Oh, yes, Lily; I'll go to sleep to-night, I will, indeed. LILY. Yes, it's very likely, Isey, with those fine round eyes! (_To_ L.) You'll tell me something of what you've been saying, to-morrow, won't you? L. No, I won't, Lily. You must choose. It's only in Miss Edgeworth's novels that one can do right, and have one's cake and sugar afterwards, as well (not that I consider the dilemma, to-night, so grave). (LILY, _sighing, takes_ ISABEL's _hand._) Yes, Lily dear, it will be better, in the outcome of it, so, than if you were to hear all the talks that ever were talked, and all the stories that ever were told. Good night. (_The door leading to the condemned cells of the Dormitory closes on_ LILY, ISABEL, FLORRIE, _and other diminutive and submissive victims._) JESSIE (_after a pause_). Why, I thought you were so fond of Miss Edgeworth! L. So I am; and so you ought all to be. I can read her over and over again, without ever tiring; there's no one whose every page is so full, and so delightful; no one who brings you into the company of pleasanter or wiser people; no one who tells you more truly how to do right. And it is very nice, in the midst of a wild world, to have the very ideal of poetical justice done always to one's hand:--to have everybody found out, who tells lies; and everybody decorated with a red riband, who doesn't; and to see the good Laura, who gave away her half sovereign, receiving a grand ovation from an entire dinner party disturbed for the purpose; and poor, dear, little Rosamond, who chooses purple jars instead of new shoes, left at last without either her shoes or her bottle. But it isn't life: and, in the way children might easily understand it, it isn't morals. JESSIE. How do you mean we might understand it? L. You might think Miss Edgeworth meant that the right was to be done mainly because one was always rewarded for doing it. It is an injustice to her to say that: her heroines always do right simply for its own sake, as they should; and her examples of conduct and motive are wholly admirable. But her representation of events is false and misleading. Her good characters never are brought into the deadly trial of goodness,--the doing right, and suffering for it, quite finally. And that is life, as God arranges it. 'Taking up one's cross' does not at all mean having ovations at dinner parties, and being put over everybody else's head. DORA. But what _does_ it mean then? That is just what we couldn't understand, when you were telling us about not sacrificing ourselves, yesterday. L. My dear, it means simply that you are to go the road which you see to be the straight one; carrying whatever you find is given you to carry, as well and stoutly as you can; without making faces, or calling people to come and look at you. Above all, you are neither to load, nor unload, yourself; nor cut your cross to your own liking. Some people think it would be better for them to have it large; and many, that they could carry it much faster if it were small; and even those who like it largest are usually very particular about its being ornamental, and made of the best ebony. But all that you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it--above all, not to boast of what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of 'virtue' is in that straightness of back. Yes; you may laugh, children, but it is. You know I was to tell about the words that began with V. Sibyl, what does 'virtue' mean, literally? SIBYL. Does it mean courage? L. Yes; but a particular kind of courage. It means courage of the nerve; vital courage. That first syllable of it, if you look in Max Müller, you will find really means 'nerve,' and from it come 'vis,' and 'vir,' and 'virgin' (through vireo), and the connected word 'virga'--'a rod;'--the green rod, or springing bough of a tree, being the type of perfect human strength, both in the use of it in the Mosaic story, when it becomes a serpent, or strikes the rock; or when Aaron's bears its almonds; and in the metaphorical expressions, the 'Rod out of the stem of Jesse,' and the 'Man whose name is the Branch,' and so on. And the essential idea of real virtue is that of a vital human strength, which instinctively, constantly, and without motive, does what is right. You must train men to this by habit, as you would the branch of a tree; and give them instincts and manners (or morals) of purity, justice, kindness, and courage. Once rightly trained, they act as they should, irrespectively of all motive, of fear, or of reward. It is the blackest sign of putrescence in a national religion, when men speak as if it were the only safeguard of conduct; and assume that, but for the fear of being burned, or for the hope of being rewarded, everybody would pass their lives in lying, stealing, and murdering. I think quite one of the notablest historical events of this century (perhaps the very notablest), was that council of clergymen, horror-struck at the idea of any diminution in our dread of hell, at which the last of English clergymen whom one would have expected to see in such a function, rose as the devil's advocate; to tell us how impossible it was we could get on without him. VIOLET (_after a pause_). But, surely, if people weren't afraid--(_hesitates again_). L. They should be afraid of doing wrong, and of that only, my dear. Otherwise, if they only don't do wrong for fear of being punished, they _have_ done wrong in their hearts, already. VIOLET. Well, but surely, at least one ought to be afraid of displeasing God; and one's desire to please Him should be one's first motive? L. He never would be pleased with us, if it were, my dear. When a father sends his son out into the world--suppose as an apprentice--fancy the boy's coming home at night, and saying, 'Father, I could have robbed the till to-day; but I didn't, because I thought you wouldn't like it.' Do you think the father would be particularly pleased? (VIOLET _is silent._) He would answer, would he not, if he were wise and good, 'My boy, though you had no father, you must not rob tills'? And nothing is ever done so as really to please our Great Father, unless we would also have done it, though we had had no Father to know of it. VIOLET (_after long pause_). But, then, what continual threatenings, and promises of reward there are! L. And how vain both! with the Jews, and with all of us. But the fact is, that the threat and promise are simply statements of the Divine law, and of its consequences. The fact is truly told you,--make what use you may of it: and as collateral warning, or encouragement, or comfort, the knowledge of future consequences may often be helpful to us; but helpful chiefly to the better state when we can act without reference to them. And there's no measuring the poisoned influence of that notion of future reward on the mind of Christian Europe, in the early ages. Half the monastic system rose out of that, acting on the occult pride and ambition of good people (as the other half of it came of their follies and misfortunes). There is always a considerable quantity of pride, to begin with, in what is called 'giving one's self to God.' As if one had ever belonged to anybody else! DORA. But, surely, great good has come out of the monastic system--our books,--our sciences--all saved by the monks? L. Saved from what, my dear? From the abyss of misery and ruin which that false Christianity allowed the whole active world to live in. When it had become the principal amusement, and the most admired art, of Christian men, to cut one another's throats, and burn one another's towns; of course the few feeble or reasonable persons left, who desired quiet, safety, and kind fellowship, got into cloisters; and the gentlest, thoughtfullest, noblest men and women shut themselves up, precisely where they could be of least use. They are very fine things, for us painters, now,--the towers and white arches upon the tops of the rocks; always in places where it takes a day's climbing to get at them; but the intense tragi-comedy of the thing, when one thinks of it, is unspeakable. All the good people of the world getting themselves hung up out of the way of mischief, like Bailie Nicol Jarvie;--poor little lambs, as it were, dangling there for the sign of the Golden Fleece; or like Socrates in his basket in the 'Clouds'! (I must read you that bit of Aristophanes again, by the way.) And believe me, children, I am no warped witness, as far as regards monasteries; or if I am, it is in their favour. I have always had a strong leaning that way; and have pensively shivered with Augustines at St. Bernard; and happily made hay with Franciscans at Fesolé; and sat silent with Carthusians in their little gardens, south of Florence; and mourned through many a day-dream, at Melrose and Bolton. But the wonder is always to me, not how much, but how little, the monks have, on the whole, done, with all that leisure, and all that goodwill! What nonsense monks characteristically wrote;--what little progress they made in the sciences to which they devoted themselves as a duty,--medicine especially;--and, last and worst, what depths of degradation they can sometimes see one another, and the population round them, sink into; without either doubting their system, or reforming it! (_Seeing questions rising to lips._) Hold your little tongues, children; it's very late, and you'll make me forget what I've to say. Fancy yourselves in pews, for five minutes. There's one point of possible good in the conventual system, which is always attractive to young girls; and the idea is a very dangerous one;--the notion of a merit, or exalting virtue, consisting in a habit of meditation on the 'things above,' or things of the next world. Now it is quite true, that a person of beautiful mind, dwelling on whatever appears to them most desirable and lovely in a possible future will not only pass their time pleasantly, but will even acquire, at last, a vague and wildly gentle charm of manner and feature, which will give them an air of peculiar sanctity in the eyes of others. Whatever real or apparent good there may be in this result, I want you to observe, children, that we have no real authority for the reveries to which it is owing. We are told nothing distinctly of the heavenly world; except that it will be free from sorrow, and pure from sin. What is said of pearl gates, golden floors, and the like, is accepted as merely figurative by religious enthusiasts themselves; and whatever they pass their time in conceiving, whether of the happiness of risen souls, of their intercourse, or of the appearance and employment of the heavenly powers, is entirely the product of their own imagination; and as completely and distinctly a work of fiction, or romantic invention, as any novel of Sir Walter Scott's. That the romance is founded on religious theory or doctrine;--that no disagreeable or wicked persons are admitted into the story;--and that the inventor fervently hopes that some portion of it may hereafter come true, does not in the least alter the real nature of the effort or enjoyment. Now, whatever indulgence may be granted to amiable people for pleasing themselves in this innocent way, it is beyond question, that to seclude themselves from the rough duties of life, merely to write religious romances, or, as in most cases, merely to dream them, without taking so much trouble as is implied in writing, ought not to be received as an act of heroic virtue. But, observe, even in admitting thus much, I have assumed that the fancies are just and beautiful, though fictitious. Now, what right have any of us to assume that our own fancies will assuredly be either the one or the other? That they delight us, and appear lovely to us, is no real proof of its not being wasted time to form them: and we may surely be led somewhat to distrust our judgment of them by observing what ignoble imaginations have sometimes sufficiently, or even enthusiastically, occupied the hearts of others. The principal source of the spirit of religious contemplation is the East; now I have here in my hand a Byzantine image of Christ, which, if you will look at it seriously, may, I think, at once and for ever render you cautious in the indulgence of a merely contemplative habit of mind. Observe, it is the fashion to look at such a thing only as a piece of barbarous art; that is the smallest part of its interest. What I want you to see, is the baseness and falseness of a religious state of enthusiasm, in which such a work could be dwelt upon with pious pleasure. That a figure, with two small round black beads for eyes; a gilded face, deep cut into horrible wrinkles; an open gash for a mouth, and a distorted skeleton for a body, wrapped about, to make it fine, with striped enamel of blue and gold;--that such a figure, I say, should ever have been thought helpful towards the conception of a Redeeming Deity, may make you, I think, very doubtful, even of the Divine approval,--much more of the Divine inspiration,--of religious reverie in general. You feel, doubtless, that your own idea of Christ would be something very different from this; but in what does the difference consist? Not in any more divine authority in your imagination; but in the intellectual work of six intervening centuries; which, simply, by artistic discipline, has refined this crude conception for you, and filled you, partly with an innate sensation, partly with an acquired knowledge, of higher forms,--which render this Byzantine crucifix as horrible to you, as it was pleasing to its maker. More is required to excite your fancy; but your fancy is of no more authority than his was: and a point of national art-skill is quite conceivable, in which the best we can do now will be as offensive to the religious dreamers of the more highly cultivated time, as this Byzantine crucifix is to you. MARY. But surely, Angelico will always retain his power over everybody? L. Yes, I should think, always; as the gentle words of a child will: but you would be much surprised, Mary, if you thoroughly took the pains to analyse, and had the perfect means of analysing, that power of Angelico,--to discover its real sources. Of course it is natural, at first, to attribute it to the pure religious fervour by which he was inspired; but do you suppose Angelico was really the only monk, in all the Christian world of the middle ages, who laboured, in art, with a sincere religious enthusiasm? MARY. No, certainly not. L. Anything more frightful, more destructive of all religious faith whatever, than such a supposition, could not be. And yet, what other monk ever produced such work? I have myself examined carefully upwards of two thousand illuminated missals, with especial view to the discovery of any evidence of a similar result upon the art, from the monkish devotion; and utterly in vain. MARY. But then, was not Fra Angelico a man of entirely separate and exalted genius? L. Unquestionably; and granting him to be that, the peculiar phenomenon in his art is, to me, not its loveliness, but its weakness. The effect of 'inspiration,' had it been real, on a man of consummate genius, should have been, one would have thought, to make everything that he did faultless and strong, no less than lovely. But of all men, deserving to be called 'great,' Fra Angelico permits to himself the least pardonable faults, and the most palpable follies. There is evidently within him a sense of grace, and power of invention, as great as Ghiberti's:--we are in the habit of attributing those high qualities to his religious enthusiasm; but, if they were produced by that enthusiasm in him, they ought to be produced by the same feelings in others; and we see they are not. Whereas, comparing him with contemporary great artists, of equal grace and invention, one peculiar character remains notable in him--which, logically, we ought therefore to attribute to the religious fervour;--and that distinctive character is, the contented indulgence of his own weaknesses, and perseverance in his own ignorances. MARY. But that's dreadful! And what _is_ the source of the peculiar charm which we all feel in his work? L. There are many sources of it, Mary; united and seeming like one. You would never feel that charm but in the work of an entirely good man; be sure of that; but the goodness is only the recipient and modifying element, not the creative one. Consider carefully what delights you in any original picture of Angelico's. You will find, for one minor thing, an exquisite variety and brightness of ornamental work. That is not Angelico's inspiration. It is the final result of the labour and thought of millions of artists, of all nations; from the earliest Egyptian potters downwards--Greeks, Byzantines, Hindoos, Arabs, Gauls, and Northmen--all joining in the toil; and consummating it in Florence, in that century, with such embroidery of robe and inlaying of armour as had never been seen till then; nor, probably, ever will be seen more. Angelico merely takes his share of this inheritance, and applies it in the tenderest way to subjects which are peculiarly acceptant of it. But the inspiration, if it exist anywhere, flashes on the knight's shield quite as radiantly as on the monk's picture. Examining farther into the sources of your emotion in the Angelico work, you will find much of the impression of sanctity dependent on a singular repose and grace of gesture, consummating itself in the floating, flying, and above all, in the dancing groups. That is not Angelico's inspiration. It is only a peculiarly tender use of systems of grouping which had been long before developed by Giotto, Memmi, and Orcagna; and the real root of it all is simply--What do you think, children? The beautiful dancing of the Florentine maidens! DORA (_indignant again_). Now, I wonder what next! Why not say it all depended on Herodias' daughter, at once? L. Yes; it is certainly a great argument against singing, that there were once sirens. DORA. Well, it may be all very fine and philosophical, but shouldn't I just like to read you the end of the second volume of 'Modern Painters'! L. My dear, do you think any teacher could be worth your listening to, or anybody else's listening to, who had learned nothing, and altered his mind in nothing, from seven and twenty to seven and forty? But that second volume is very good for you as far as it goes. It is a great advance, and a thoroughly straight and swift one, to be led, as it is the main business of that second volume to lead you, from Dutch cattle pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra Angelico. And it is right for you also, as you grow older, to be strengthened in the general sense and judgment which may enable you to distinguish the weaknesses from the virtues of what you love: else you might come to love both alike; or even the weaknesses without the virtues. You might end by liking Overbeck and Cornelius as well as Angelico. However, I have perhaps been leaning a little too much to the merely practical side of things, in to-night's talk; and you are always to remember, children, that I do not deny, though I cannot affirm, the spiritual advantages resulting, in certain cases, from enthusiastic religious reverie, and from the other practices of saints and anchorites. The evidence respecting them has never yet been honestly collected, much less dispassionately examined: but assuredly, there is in that direction a probability, and more than a probability, of dangerous error, while there is none whatever in the practice of an active, cheerful, and benevolent life. The hope of attaining a higher religious position, which induces us to encounter, for its exalted alternative, the risk of unhealthy error, is often, as I said, founded more on pride than piety; and those who, in modest usefulness, have accepted what seemed to them here the lowliest place in the kingdom of their Father, are not, I believe, the least likely to receive hereafter the command, then unmistakable, 'Friend, go up higher.' LECTURE VIII. _CRYSTAL CAPRICE._ _Formal Lecture in Schoolroom, after some practical examination of minerals._ L. We have seen enough, children, though very little of what might be seen if we had more time, of mineral structures produced by visible opposition, or contest among elements; structures of which the variety, however great, need not surprise us: for we quarrel, ourselves, for many and slight causes;--much more, one should think, may crystals, who can only feel the antagonism, not argue about it. But there is a yet more singular mimicry of our human ways in the varieties of form which appear owing to no antagonistic force; but merely to the variable humour and caprice of the crystals themselves: and I have asked you all to come into the schoolroom to-day, because, of course, this is a part of the crystal mind which must be peculiarly interesting to a feminine audience. (_Great symptoms of disapproval on the part of said audience._) Now, you need not pretend that it will not interest you; why should it not? It is true that we men are never capricious; but that only makes us the more dull and disagreeable. You, who are crystalline in brightness, as well as in caprice, charm infinitely, by infinitude of change. (_Audible murmurs of 'Worse and worse!' 'As if we could be got over that way!' &c. The_ LECTURER, _however, observing the expression of the features to be more complacent, proceeds._) And the most curious mimicry, if not of your changes of fashion, at least of your various modes (in healthy periods) of national costume, takes place among the crystals of different countries. With a little experience, it is quite possible to say at a glance, in what districts certain crystals have been found; and although, if we had knowledge extended and accurate enough, we might of course ascertain the laws and circumstances which have necessarily produced the form peculiar to each locality, this would be just as true of the fancies of the human mind. If we could know the exact circumstances which affect it, we could foretell what now seems to us only caprice of thought, as well as what now seems to us only caprice of crystal: nay, so far as our knowledge reaches, it is on the whole easier to find some reason why the peasant girls of Berne should wear their caps in the shape of butterflies; and the peasant girls of Munich their's in the shape of shells, than to say why the rock-crystals of Dauphiné should all have their summits of the shape of lip-pieces of flageolets, while those of St. Gothard are symmetrical; or why the fluor of Chamouni is rose-coloured, and in octahedrons, while the fluor of Weardale is green, and in cubes. Still farther removed is the hope, at present, of accounting for minor differences in modes of grouping and construction. Take, for instance, the caprices of this single mineral, quartz;--variations upon a single theme. It has many forms; but see what it will make out of this _one_, the six-sided prism. For shortness' sake, I shall call the body of the prism its 'column,' and the pyramid at the extremities its 'cap.' Now, here, first you have a straight column, as long and thin as a stalk of asparagus, with two little caps at the ends; and here you have a short thick column, as solid as a haystack, with two fat caps at the ends; and here you have two caps fastened together, and no column at all between them! Then here is a crystal with its column fat in the middle, and tapering to a little cap; and here is one stalked like a mushroom, with a huge cap put on the top of a slender column! Then here is a column built wholly out of little caps, with a large smooth cap at the top. And here is a column built of columns and caps; the caps all truncated about half way to their points. And in both these last, the little crystals are set anyhow, and build the large one in a disorderly way; but here is a crystal made of columns and truncated caps, set in regular terraces all the way up. MARY. But are not these, groups of crystals, rather than one crystal? L. What do you mean by a group, and what by one crystal? DORA (_audibly aside, to_ MARY, _who is brought to pause_). You know you are never expected to answer, Mary. L. I'm sure this is easy enough. What do you mean by a group of people? MARY. Three or four together, or a good many together, like the caps in these crystals. L. But when a great many persons get together they don't take the shape of one person? (MARY _still at pause._) ISABEL. No, because they can't; but, you know the crystals can; so why shouldn't they? L. Well, they don't; that is to say, they don't always, nor even often. Look here, Isabel. ISABEL. What a nasty ugly thing! L. I'm glad you think it so ugly. Yet it is made of beautiful crystals; they are a little grey and cold in colour, but most of them are clear. ISABEL. But they're in such horrid, horrid disorder! L. Yes; all disorder is horrid, when it is among things that are naturally orderly. Some little girl's rooms are naturally _dis_orderly, I suppose; or I don't know how they could live in them, if they cry out so when they only see quartz crystals in confusion. ISABEL. Oh! but how come they to be like that? L. You may well ask. And yet you will always hear people talking as if they thought order more wonderful than disorder! It _is_ wonderful--as we have seen; but to me, as to you, child, the supremely wonderful thing is that nature should ever be ruinous or wasteful, or deathful! I look at this wild piece of crystallisation with endless astonishment. MARY. Where does it come from? L. The Tête Noire of Chamonix. What makes it more strange is that it should be in a vein of fine quartz rock. If it were in a mouldering rock, it would be natural enough; but in the midst of so fine substance, here are the crystals tossed in a heap; some large, myriads small (almost as small as dust), tumbling over each other like a terrified crowd, and glued together by the sides, and edges, and backs, and heads; some warped, and some pushed out and in, and all spoiled and each spoiling the rest. MARY. And how flat they all are! L. Yes; that's the fashion at the Tête Noire. MARY. But surely this is ruin, not caprice? L. I believe it is in great part misfortune; and we will examine these crystal troubles in next lecture. But if you want to see the gracefullest and happiest caprices of which dust is capable, you must go to the Hartz; not that I ever mean to go there myself, for I want to retain the romantic feeling about the name; and I have done myself some harm already by seeing the monotonous and heavy form of the Brocken from the suburbs of Brunswick. But whether the mountains be picturesque or not, the tricks which the goblins (as I am told) teach the crystals in them, are incomparably pretty. They work chiefly on the mind of a docile, bluish coloured, carbonate of lime; which comes out of a grey limestone. The goblins take the greatest possible care of its education, and see that nothing happens to it to hurt its temper; and when it may be supposed to have arrived at the crisis which is, to a well brought up mineral, what presentation at court is to a young lady--after which it is expected to set fashions--there's no end to its pretty ways of behaving. First it will make itself into pointed darts as fine as hoar-frost; here, it is changed into a white fur as fine as silk; here into little crowns and circlets, as bright as silver; as if for the gnome princesses to wear; here it is in beautiful little plates, for them to eat off; presently it is in towers which they might be imprisoned in; presently in caves and cells, where they may make nun-gnomes of themselves, and no gnome ever hear of them more; here is some of it in sheaves, like corn; here, some in drifts, like snow; here, some in rays, like stars: and, though these are, all of them, necessarily, shapes that the mineral takes in other places, they are all taken here with such a grace that you recognise the high caste and breeding of the crystals wherever you meet them; and know at once they are Hartz-born. Of course, such fine things as these are only done by crystals which are perfectly good, and good-humoured; and of course, also, there are ill-humoured crystals who torment each other, and annoy quieter crystals, yet without coming to anything like serious war. Here (for once) is some ill-disposed quartz, tormenting a peaceable octahedron of fluor, in mere caprice. I looked at it the other night so long, and so wonderingly, just before putting my candle out, that I fell into another strange dream. But you don't care about dreams. DORA. No; we didn't, yesterday; but you know we are made up of caprice; so we do, to-day: and you must tell it us directly. L. Well, you see, Neith and her work were still much in my mind; and then, I had been looking over these Hartz things for you, and thinking of the sort of grotesque sympathy there seemed to be in them with the beautiful fringe and pinnacle work of Northern architecture. So, when I fell asleep, I thought I saw Neith and St. Barbara talking together. DORA. But what had St. Barbara to do with it?[152] L. My dear, I am quite sure St. Barbara is the patroness of good architects: not St. Thomas, whatever the old builders thought. It might be very fine, according to the monks' notions, in St. Thomas, to give all his employer's money away to the poor: but breaches of contract are bad foundations; and I believe, it was not he, but St. Barbara, who overlooked the work in all the buildings you and I care about. However that may be, it was certainly she whom I saw in my dream with Neith. Neith was sitting weaving, and I thought she looked sad, and threw her shuttle slowly; and St. Barbara was standing at her side, in a stiff little gown, all ins and outs, and angles; but so bright with embroidery that it dazzled me whenever she moved; the train of it was just like a heap of broken jewels, it was so stiff, and full of corners, and so many-coloured, and bright. Her hair fell over her shoulders in long, delicate waves, from under a little three pinnacled crown, like a tower. She was asking Neith about the laws of architecture in Egypt and Greece; and when Neith told her the measures of the pyramids, St. Barbara said she thought they would have been better three-cornered: and when Neith told her the measures of the Parthenon, St. Barbara said she thought it ought to have had two transepts. But she was pleased when Neith told her of the temple of the dew, and of the Caryan maidens bearing its frieze: and then she thought that perhaps Neith would like to hear what sort of temples she was building herself, in the French valleys, and on the crags of the Rhine. So she began gossiping, just as one of you might to an old lady: and certainly she talked in the sweetest way in the world to Neith; and explained to her all about crockets and pinnacles: and Neith sat, looking very grave; and always graver as St. Barbara went on; till at last, I'm sorry to say, St. Barbara lost her temper a little. MAY (_very grave herself_). 'St. Barbara?' L. Yes, May. Why shouldn't she? It was very tiresome of Neith to sit looking like that. MAY. But, then, St. Barbara was a saint! L. What's that, May? MAY. A saint! A saint is--I am sure you know! L. If I did, it would not make me sure that you knew too, May: but I don't. VIOLET (_expressing the incredulity of the audience_). Oh,--sir! L. That is to say, I know that people are called saints who are supposed to be better than others: but I don't know how much better they must be, in order to be saints; nor how nearly anybody may be a saint, and yet not be quite one; nor whether everybody who is called a saint was one; nor whether everybody who isn't called a saint, isn't one. (_General silence; the audience feeling themselves on the verge of the Infinities--and a little shocked--and much puzzled by so many questions at once._) L. Besides, did you never hear that verse about being 'called to be saints'? MAY (_repeats Rom._ i. 7.) L. Quite right, May. Well, then, who are called to be that? People in Rome only? MAY. Everybody, I suppose, whom God loves. L. What! little girls as well as other people? MAY. All grown-up people, I mean. L. Why not little girls? Are they wickeder when they are little? MAY. Oh, I hope not. L. Why not little girls, then? (_Pause._) LILY. Because, you know, we can't be worth anything if we're ever so good;--I mean, if we try to be ever so good; and we can't do difficult things--like saints. L. I am afraid, my dear, that old people are not more able or willing for their difficulties than you children are for yours. All I can say is, that if ever I see any of you, when you are seven or eight and twenty, knitting your brows over any work you want to do or to understand, as I saw you, Lily, knitting your brows over your slate this morning, I should think you very noble women. But--to come back to my dream--St. Barbara _did_ lose her temper a little; and I was not surprised. For you can't think how provoking Neith looked, sitting there just like a statue of sandstone; only going on weaving, like a machine; and never quickening the cast of her shuttle; while St. Barbara was telling her so eagerly all about the most beautiful things, and chattering away, as fast as bells ring on Christmas Eve, till she saw that Neith didn't care; and then St. Barbara got as red as a rose, and stopped, just in time;--or I think she would really have said something naughty. ISABEL. Oh, please, but didn't Neith say anything then? L. Yes. She said, quite quietly, 'It may be very pretty, my love; but it is all nonsense.' ISABEL. Oh dear, oh dear; and then? L. Well; then I was a little angry myself, and hoped St. Barbara would be quite angry; but she wasn't. She bit her lips first; and then gave a great sigh--such a wild, sweet sigh--and then she knelt down and hid her face on Neith's knees. Then Neith smiled a little, and was moved. ISABEL. Oh, I am so glad! L. And she touched St. Barbara's forehead with a flower of white lotus; and St. Barbara sobbed once or twice, and then said: 'If you only could see how beautiful it is, and how much it makes people feel what is good and lovely; and if you could only hear the children singing in the Lady chapels!' And Neith smiled,--but still sadly,--and said, 'How do you know what I have seen, or heard, my love? Do you think all those vaults and towers of yours have been built without me? There was not a pillar in your Giotto's Santa Maria del Fiore which I did not set true by my spearshaft as it rose. But this pinnacle and flame work which has set your little heart on fire, is all vanity; and you will see what it will come to, and that soon; and none will grieve for it more than I. And then every one will disbelieve your pretty symbols and types. Men must be spoken simply to, my dear, if you would guide them kindly, and long.' But St. Barbara answered, that, 'Indeed she thought every one liked her work,' and that 'the people of different towns were as eager about their cathedral towers as about their privileges or their markets;' and then she asked Neith to come and build something with her, wall against tower; and 'see whether the people will be as much pleased with your building as with mine.' But Neith answered, 'I will not contend with you, my dear. I strive not with those who love me; and for those who hate me, it is not well to strive with me, as weaver Arachne knows. And remember, child, that nothing is ever done beautifully, which is done in rivalship; nor nobly, which is done in pride.' Then St. Barbara hung her head quite down, and said she was very sorry she had been so foolish; and kissed Neith; and stood thinking a minute: and then her eyes got bright again, and she said, she would go directly and build a chapel with five windows in it; four for the four cardinal virtues, and one for humility, in the middle, bigger than the rest. And Neith very nearly laughed quite out, I thought; certainly her beautiful lips lost all their sternness for an instant; then she said, 'Well, love, build it, but do not put so many colours into your windows as you usually do; else no one will be able to see to read, inside: and when it is built, let a poor village priest consecrate it, and not an archbishop.' St. Barbara started a little, I thought, and turned as if to say something; but changed her mind, and gathered up her train, and went out. And Neith bent herself again to her loom, in which she was weaving a web of strange dark colours, I thought; but perhaps it was only after the glittering of St. Barbara's embroidered train: and I tried to make out the figures in Neith's web, and confused myself among them, as one always does in dreams; and then the dream changed altogether, and I found myself, all at once, among a crowd of little Gothic and Egyptian spirits, who were quarrelling: at least the Gothic ones were trying to quarrel; for the Egyptian ones only sat with their hands on their knees, and their aprons sticking out very stiffly; and stared. And after a while I began to understand what the matter was. It seemed that some of the troublesome building imps, who meddle and make continually, even in the best Gothic work, had been listening to St. Barbara's talk with Neith; and had made up their minds that Neith had no workpeople who could build against them. They were but dull imps, as you may fancy by their thinking that; and never had done much, except disturbing the great Gothic building angels at their work, and playing tricks to each other; indeed, of late they had been living years and years, like bats, up under the cornices of Strasbourg and Cologne cathedrals, with nothing to do but to make mouths at the people below. However, they thought they knew everything about tower building; and those who had heard what Neith said, told the rest; and they all flew down directly, chattering in German, like jackdaws, to show Neith's people what they could do. And they had found some of Neith's old workpeople somewhere near Sais, sitting in the sun, with their hands on their knees; and abused them heartily: and Neith's people did not mind at first, but, after a while, they seemed to get tired of the noise; and one or two rose up slowly, and laid hold of their measuring rods, and said, 'If St. Barbara's people liked to build with them, tower against pyramid, they would show them how to lay stones.' Then the little Gothic spirits threw a great many double somersaults for joy; and put the tips of their tongues out slily to each other, on one side; and I heard the Egyptians say, 'they must be some new kind of frog--they didn't think there was much building in _them_.' However, the stiff old workers took their rods, as I said, and measured out a square space of sand; but as soon as the German spirits saw that, they declared they wanted exactly that bit of ground to build on, themselves. Then the Egyptian builders offered to go farther off, and the Germans ones said, 'Ja wohl.' But as soon as the Egyptians had measured out another square, the little Germans said they must have some of that too. Then Neith's people laughed; and said, 'they might take as much as they liked, but they would not move the plan of their pyramid again.' Then the little Germans took three pieces, and began to build three spires directly; one large, and two little. And when the Egyptians saw they had fairly begun, they laid their foundation all round, of large square stones: and began to build, so steadily that they had like to have swallowed up the three little German spires. So when the Gothic spirits saw that, they built their spires leaning, like the tower of Pisa, that they might stick out at the side of the pyramid. And Neith's people stared at them; and thought it very clever, but very wrong; and on they went, in their own way, and said nothing. Then the little Gothic spirits were terribly provoked because they could not spoil the shape of the pyramid; and they sat down all along the ledges of it to make faces; but that did no good. Then they ran to the corners, and put their elbows on their knees, and stuck themselves out as far as they could, and made more faces; but that did no good, neither. Then they looked up to the sky, and opened their mouths wide, and gobbled, and said it was too hot for work, and wondered when it would rain; but that did no good, neither. And all the while the Egyptian spirits were laying step above step, patiently. But when the Gothic ones looked, and saw how high they had got, they said, 'Ach, Himmel!' and flew down in a great black cluster to the bottom; and swept out a level spot in the sand with their wings, in no time, and began building a tower straight up, as fast as they could. And the Egyptians stood still again to stare at them; for the Gothic spirits had got quite into a passion, and were really working very wonderfully. They cut the sandstone into strips as fine as reeds; and put one reed on the top of another, so that you could not see where they fitted: and they twisted them in and out like basket work, and knotted them into likenesses of ugly faces, and of strange beasts biting each other; and up they went, and up still, and they made spiral staircases at the corners, for the loaded workers to come up by (for I saw they were but weak imps, and could not fly with stones on their backs), and then they made traceried galleries for them to run round by; and so up again; with finer and finer work, till the Egyptians wondered whether they meant the thing for a tower or a pillar: and I heard them saying to one another, 'It was nearly as pretty as lotus stalks; and if it were not for the ugly faces, there would be a fine temple, if they were going to build it all with pillars as big as that!' But in a minute afterwards,--just as the Gothic spirits had carried their work as high as the upper course, but three or four, of the pyramid--the Egyptians called out to them to 'mind what they were about, for the sand was running away from under one of their tower corners.' But it was too late to mind what they were about; for, in another instant, the whole tower sloped aside; and the Gothic imps rose out of it like a flight of puffins, in a single cloud; but screaming worse than any puffins you ever heard: and down came the tower, all in a piece, like a falling poplar, with its head right on the flank of the pyramid; against which it snapped short off. And of course that waked me! MARY. What a shame of you to have such a dream, after all you have told us about Gothic architecture! L. If you have understood anything I ever told you about it, you know that no architecture was ever corrupted more miserably; or abolished more justly by the accomplishment of its own follies. Besides, even in its days of power, it was subject to catastrophes of this kind. I have stood too often, mourning, by the grand fragment of the apse of Beauvais, not to have that fact well burnt into me. Still, you must have seen, surely, that these imps were of the Flamboyant school; or, at least, of the German schools correspondent with it in extravagance. MARY. But, then, where is the crystal about which you dreamed all this? L. Here; but I suppose little Pthah has touched it again, for it is very small. But, you see, here is the pyramid, built of great square stones of fluor spar, straight up; and here are the three little pinnacles of mischievous quartz, which have set themselves, at the same time, on the same foundation; only they lean like the tower of Pisa, and come out obliquely at the side: and here is one great spire of quartz which seems as if it had been meant to stand straight up, a little way off; and then had fallen down against the pyramid base, breaking its pinnacle away. In reality, it has crystallised horizontally, and terminated imperfectly: but, then, by what caprice does one crystal form horizontally, when all the rest stand upright? But this is nothing to the phantasies of fluor, and quartz, and some other such companions, when they get leave to do anything they like. I could show you fifty specimens, about every one of which you might fancy a new fairy tale. Not that, in truth, any crystals get leave to do quite what they like; and many of them are sadly tried, and have little time for caprices--poor things! MARY. I thought they always looked as if they were either in play or in mischief! What trials have they? L. Trials much like our own. Sickness, and starvation; fevers, and agues, and palsy; oppression; and old age, and the necessity of passing away in their time, like all else. If there's any pity in you, you must come to-morrow, and take some part in these crystal griefs. DORA. I am sure we shall cry till our eyes are red. L. Ah, you may laugh, Dora: but I've been made grave, not once, nor twice, to see that even crystals 'cannot choose but be old' at last. It may be but a shallow proverb of the Justice's; but it is a shrewdly wide one. DORA (_pensive, for once_). I suppose it is very dreadful to be old! But then (_brightening again_), what should we do without our dear old friends, and our nice old lecturers? L. If all nice old lecturers were minded as little as one I know of---- DORA. And if they all meant as little what they say, would they not deserve it? But we'll come--we'll come, and cry. FOOTNOTES: [152] Note v. LECTURE IX. _CRYSTAL SORROWS._ _Working Lecture in Schoolroom._ L. We have been hitherto talking, children, as if crystals might live, and play, and quarrel, and behave ill or well, according to their characters, without interruption from anything else. But so far from this being so, nearly all crystals, whatever their characters, have to live a hard life of it, and meet with many misfortunes. If we could see far enough, we should find, indeed, that, at the root, all their vices were misfortunes: but to-day I want you to see what sort of troubles the best crystals have to go through, occasionally, by no fault of their own. This black thing, which is one of the prettiest of the very few pretty black things in the world, is called 'Tourmaline.' It may be transparent, and green, or red, as well as black; and then no stone can be prettier (only, all the light that gets into it, I believe, comes out a good deal the worse; and is not itself again for a long while). But this is the commonest state of it,--opaque, and as black as jet. MARY. What does 'Tourmaline' mean? L. They say it is Ceylanese, and I don't know Ceylanese; but we may always be thankful for a graceful word, whatever it means. MARY. And what is it made of? L. A little of everything; there's always flint, and clay, and magnesia in it; and the black is iron, according to its fancy; and there's boracic acid, if you know what that is; and if you don't, I cannot tell you to-day; and it doesn't signify; and there's potash, and soda; and, on the whole, the chemistry of it is more like a mediæval doctor's prescription, than the making of a respectable mineral: but it may, perhaps, be owing to the strange complexity of its make, that it has a notable habit which makes it, to me, one of the most interesting of minerals. You see these two crystals are broken right across, in many places, just as if they had been shafts of black marble fallen from a ruinous temple; and here they lie, imbedded in white quartz, fragment succeeding fragment, keeping the line of the original crystal, while the quartz fills up the intervening spaces. Now tourmaline has a trick of doing this, more than any other mineral I know: here is another bit which I picked up on the glacier of Macugnaga; it is broken, like a pillar built of very flat broad stones, into about thirty joints, and all these are heaved and warped away from each other sideways, almost into a line of steps; and then all is filled up with quartz paste. And here, lastly, is a green Indian piece, in which the pillar is first disjointed, and then wrung round into the shape of an S. MARY. How _can_ this have been done? L. There are a thousand ways in which it may have been done; the difficulty is not to account for the doing of it; but for the showing of it in some crystals, and not in others. You never by any chance get a quartz crystal broken or twisted in this way. If it break or twist at all, which it does sometimes, like the spire of Dijon, it is by its own will or fault; it never seems to have been passively crushed. But, for the forces which cause this passive ruin of the tourmaline,--here is a stone which will show you multitudes of them in operation at once. It is known as 'brecciated agate,' beautiful, as you see; and highly valued as a pebble: yet, so far as I can read or hear, no one has ever looked at it with the least attention. At the first glance, you see it is made of very fine red striped agates, which have been broken into small pieces, and fastened together again by paste, also of agate. There would be nothing wonderful in this, if this were all. It is well known that by the movements of strata, portions of rock are often shattered to pieces:--well known also that agate is a deposit of flint by water under certain conditions of heat and pressure: there is, therefore, nothing wonderful in an agate's being broken; and nothing wonderful in its being mended with the solution out of which it was itself originally congealed. And with this explanation, most people, looking at a brecciated agate, or brecciated anything, seem to be satisfied. I was so myself, for twenty years; but, lately happening to stay for some time at the Swiss Baden, where the beach of the Limmat is almost wholly composed of brecciated limestones, I began to examine them thoughtfully; and perceived, in the end, that they were, one and all, knots of as rich mystery as any poor little human brain was ever lost in. That piece of agate in your hand, Mary, will show you many of the common phenomena of breccias; but you need not knit your brows over it in that way; depend upon it, neither you nor I shall ever know anything about the way it was made, as long as we live. DORA. That does not seem much to depend upon. L. Pardon me, puss. When once we gain some real notion of the extent and the unconquerableness of our ignorance, it is a very broad and restful thing to depend upon: you can throw yourself upon it at ease, as on a cloud, to feast with the gods. You do not thenceforward trouble yourself,--nor any one else,--with theories, or the contradiction of theories; you neither get headache nor heartburning; and you never more waste your poor little store of strength, or allowance of time. However, there are certain facts, about this agate-making, which I can tell you; and then you may look at it in a pleasant wonder as long as you like; pleasant wonder is no loss of time. First, then, it is not broken freely by a blow; it is slowly wrung, or ground, to pieces. You can only with extreme dimness conceive the force exerted on mountains in transitional states of movement. You have all read a little geology; and you know how coolly geologists talk of mountains being raised or depressed. They talk coolly of it, because they are accustomed to the fact; but the very universality of the fact prevents us from ever conceiving distinctly the conditions of force involved. You know I was living last year in Savoy; my house was on the back of a sloping mountain which rose gradually for two miles, behind it; and then fell at once in a great precipice towards Geneva, going down three thousand feet in four or five cliffs, or steps. Now that whole group of cliffs had simply been torn away by sheer strength from the rocks below, as if the whole mass had been as soft as biscuit. Put four or five captains' biscuits on the floor, on the top of one another; and try to break them all in half, not by bending, but by holding one half down, and tearing the other halves straight up;--of course you will not be able to do it, but you will feel and comprehend the sort of force needed. Then, fancy each captains' biscuit a bed of rock, six or seven hundred feet thick; and the whole mass torn straight through; and one half heaved up three thousand feet, grinding against the other as it rose,--and you will have some idea of the making of the Mont Saléve. MAY. But it must crush the rocks all to dust! L. No; for there is no room for dust. The pressure is too great; probably the heat developed also so great that the rock is made partly ductile; but the worst of it is, that we never can see these parts of mountains in the state they were left in at the time of their elevation; for it is precisely in these rents and dislocations that the crystalline power principally exerts itself. It is essentially a styptic power, and wherever the earth is torn, it heals and binds; nay, the torture and grieving of the earth seem necessary to bring out its full energy; for you only find the crystalline living power fully in action, where the rents and faults are deep and many. DORA. If you please, sir,--would you tell us--what are 'faults'? L. You never heard of such things? DORA. Never in all our lives. L. When a vein of rock which is going on smoothly, is interrupted by another troublesome little vein, which stops it, and puts it out, so that it has to begin again in another place--that is called a fault. _I_ always think it ought to be called the fault of the vein that interrupts it; but the miners always call it the fault of the vein that is interrupted. DORA. So it is, if it does not begin again where it left off. L. Well, that is certainly the gist of the business: but, whatever good-natured old lecturers may do, the rocks have a bad habit, when they are once interrupted, of never asking 'Where was I?' DORA. When the two halves of the dining table came separate, yesterday, was that a 'fault'? L. Yes; but not the table's. However, it is not a bad illustration, Dora. When beds of rock are only interrupted by a fissure, but remain at the same level, like the two halves of the table, it is not called a fault, but only a fissure; but if one half of the table be either tilted higher than the other, or pushed to the side, so that the two parts will not fit, it is a fault. You had better read the chapter on faults in Jukes's Geology; then you will know all about it. And this rent that I am telling you of in the Saléve, is one only of myriads, to which are owing the forms of the Alps, as, I believe, of all great mountain chains. Wherever you see a precipice on any scale of real magnificence, you will nearly always find it owing to some dislocation of this kind; but the point of chief wonder to me, is the delicacy of the touch by which these gigantic rents have been apparently accomplished. Note, however, that we have no clear evidence, hitherto, of the time taken to produce any of them. We know that a change of temperature alters the position and the angles of the atoms of crystals, and also the entire bulk of rocks. We know that in all volcanic, and the greater part of all subterranean, action, temperatures are continually changing, and therefore masses of rock must be expanding or contracting, with infinite slowness, but with infinite force. This pressure must result in mechanical strain somewhere, both in their own substance, and in that of the rocks surrounding them; and we can form no conception of the result of irresistible pressure, applied so as to rend and raise, with imperceptible slowness of gradation, masses thousands of feet in thickness. We want some experiments tried on masses of iron and stone; and we can't get them tried, because Christian creatures never will seriously and sufficiently spend money, except to find out the shortest ways of killing each other. But, besides this slow kind of pressure, there is evidence of more or less sudden violence, on the same terrific scale; and, through it all, the wonder, as I said, is always to me the delicacy of touch. I cut a block of the Saléve limestone from the edge of one of the principal faults which have formed the precipice; it is a lovely compact limestone, and the fault itself is filled up with a red breccia formed of the crushed fragments of the torn rock, cemented by a rich red crystalline paste. I have had the piece I cut from it smoothed, and polished across the junction; here it is; and you may now pass your soft little fingers over the surface, without so much as feeling the place where a rock which all the hills of England might have been sunk in the body of, and not a summit seen, was torn asunder through that whole thickness, as a thin dress is torn when you tread upon it. (_The audience examine the stone, and touch it timidly; but the matter remains inconceivable to them._) MARY (_struck by the beauty of the stone_). But this is almost marble? L. It is quite marble. And another singular point in the business, to my mind, is that these stones, which men have been cutting into slabs, for thousands of years, to ornament their principal buildings with,--and which, under the general name of 'marble,' have been the delight of the eyes, and the wealth of architecture, among all civilised nations,--are precisely those on which the signs and brands of these earth agonies have been chiefly struck; and there is not a purple vein nor flaming zone in them, which is not the record of their ancient torture. What a boundless capacity for sleep, and for serene stupidity, there is in the human mind! Fancy reflective beings, who cut and polish stones for three thousand years, for the sake of the pretty stains upon them; and educate themselves to an art at last (such as it is), of imitating these veins by dexterous painting; and never a curious soul of them, all that while, asks, 'What painted the rocks?' (_The audience look dejected, and ashamed of themselves._) The fact is, we are all, and always, asleep, through our lives; and it is only by pinching ourselves very hard that we ever come to see, or understand, anything. At least, it is not always we who pinch ourselves; sometimes other people pinch us; which I suppose is very good of them,--or other things, which I suppose is very proper of them. But it is a sad life; made up chiefly of naps and pinches. (_Some of the audience, on this, appearing to think that the others require pinching, the_ LECTURER _changes the subject._) Now, however, for once, look at a piece of marble carefully, and think about it. You see this is one side of the fault; the other side is down or up, nobody knows where; but, on this side, you can trace the evidence of the dragging and tearing action. All along the edge of this marble, the ends of the fibres of the rock are torn, here an inch, and there half an inch, away from each other; and you see the exact places where they fitted, before they were torn separate; and you see the rents are now all filled up with the sanguine paste, full of the broken pieces of the rock; the paste itself seems to have been half melted, and partly to have also melted the edge of the fragments it contains, and then to have crystallised with them, and round them. And the brecciated agate I first showed you contains exactly the same phenomena; a zoned crystallisation going on amidst the cemented fragments, partly altering the structure of those fragments themselves, and subject to continual change, either in the intensity of its own power, or in the nature of the materials submitted to it;--so that, at one time, gravity acts upon them, and disposes them in horizontal layers, or causes them to droop in stalactites; and at another, gravity is entirely defied, and the substances in solution are crystallised in bands of equal thickness on every side of the cell. It would require a course of lectures longer than these (I have a great mind,--you have behaved so saucily--to stay and give them) to describe to you the phenomena of this kind, in agates and chalcedonies only;--nay, there is a single sarcophagus in the British Museum, covered with grand sculpture of the 18th dynasty, which contains in the magnificent breccia (agates and jaspers imbedded in porphyry), out of which it is hewn, material for the thought of years; and record of the earth-sorrow of ages in comparison with the duration of which, the Egyptian letters tell us but the history of the evening and morning of a day. Agates, I think, of all stones, confess most of their past history; but all crystallisation goes on under, and partly records, circumstances of this kind--circumstances of infinite variety, but always involving difficulty, interruption, and change of condition at different times. Observe, first, you have the whole mass of the rock in motion, either contracting itself, and so gradually widening the cracks; or being compressed, and thereby closing them, and crushing their edges;--and, if one part of its substance be softer, at the given temperature, than another, probably squeezing that softer substance out into the veins. Then the veins themselves, when the rock leaves them open by its contraction, act with various power of suction upon its substance;--by capillary attraction when they are fine,--by that of pure vacuity when they are larger, or by changes in the constitution and condensation of the mixed gases with which they have been originally filled. Those gases themselves may be supplied in all variation of volume and power from below; or, slowly, by the decomposition of the rocks themselves; and, at changing temperatures, must exert relatively changing forces of decomposition and combination on the walls of the veins they fill; while water, at every degree of heat and pressure (from beds of everlasting ice, alternate with cliffs of native rock, to volumes of red hot, or white hot, steam), congeals, and drips, and throbs, and thrills, from crag to crag; and breathes from pulse to pulse of foaming or fiery arteries, whose beating is felt through chains of the great islands of the Indian seas, as your own pulses lift your bracelets, and makes whole kingdoms of the world quiver in deadly earthquake, as if they were light as aspen leaves. And, remember, the poor little crystals have to live their lives, and mind their own affairs, in the midst of all this, as best they may. They are wonderfully like human creatures,--forget all that is going on if they don't see it, however dreadful; and never think what is to happen to-morrow. They are spiteful or loving, and indolent or painstaking, and orderly or licentious, with no thought whatever of the lava or the flood which may break over them any day; and evaporate them into air-bubbles, or wash them into a solution of salts. And you may look at them, once understanding the surrounding conditions of their fate, with an endless interest. You will see crowds of unfortunate little crystals, who have been forced to constitute themselves in a hurry, their dissolving element being fiercely scorched away; you will see them doing their best, bright and numberless, but tiny. Then you will find indulged crystals, who have had centuries to form themselves in, and have changed their mind and ways continually; and have been tired, and taken heart again; and have been sick, and got well again; and thought they would try a different diet, and then thought better of it; and made but a poor use of their advantages, after all. And others you will see, who have begun life as wicked crystals; and then have been impressed by alarming circumstances, and have become converted crystals, and behaved amazingly for a little while, and fallen away again, and ended, but discreditably, perhaps even in decomposition; so that one doesn't know what will become of them. And sometimes you will see deceitful crystals, that look as soft as velvet, and are deadly to all near them; and sometimes you will see deceitful crystals, that seem flint-edged, like our little quartz-crystal of a housekeeper here, (hush! Dora,) and are endlessly gentle and true wherever gentleness and truth are needed. And sometimes you will see little child-crystals put to school like school-girls, and made to stand in rows; and taken the greatest care of, and taught how to hold themselves up, and behave: and sometimes you will see unhappy little child-crystals left to lie about in the dirt, and pick up their living, and learn manners, where they can. And sometimes you will see fat crystals eating up thin ones, like great capitalists and little labourers; and politico-economic crystals teaching the stupid ones how to eat each other, and cheat each other; and foolish crystals getting in the way of wise ones; and impatient crystals spoiling the plans of patient ones, irreparably; just as things go on in the world. And sometimes you may see hypocritical crystals taking the shape of others, though they are nothing like in their minds; and vampire crystals eating out the hearts of others; and hermit-crab crystals living in the shells of others; and parasite crystals living on the means of others; and courtier crystals glittering in attendance upon others; and all these, besides the two great companies of war and peace, who ally themselves, resolutely to attack, or resolutely to defend. And for the close, you see the broad shadow and deadly force of inevitable fate, above all this: you see the multitudes of crystals whose time has come; not a set time, as with us, but yet a time, sooner or later, when they all must give up their crystal ghosts:--when the strength by which they grew, and the breath given them to breathe, pass away from them; and they fail, and are consumed, and vanish away; and another generation is brought to life, framed out of their ashes. MARY. It is very terrible. Is it not the complete fulfilment, down into the very dust, of that verse: 'The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain'? L. I do not know that it is in pain, Mary: at least, the evidence tends to show that there is much more pleasure than pain, as soon as sensation becomes possible. LUCILLA. But then, surely, if we are told that it is pain, it must be pain? L. Yes; if we are told; and told in the way you mean, Lucilla; but nothing is said of the proportion to pleasure. Unmitigated pain would kill any of us in a few hours; pain equal to our pleasures would make us loathe life; the word itself cannot be applied to the lower conditions of matter, in its ordinary sense. But wait till to-morrow to ask me about this. To-morrow is to be kept for questions and difficulties; let us keep to the plain facts to-day. There is yet one group of facts connected with this rending of the rocks, which I especially want you to notice. You know, when you have mended a very old dress, quite meritoriously, till it won't mend any more---- EGYPT (_interrupting_). Could not you sometimes take gentlemen's work to illustrate by? L. Gentlemen's work is rarely so useful as yours, Egypt; and when it is useful, girls cannot easily understand it. DORA. I am sure we should understand it better than gentlemen understand about sewing. L. My dear, I hope I always speak modestly, and under correction, when I touch upon matters of the kind too high for me; and besides, I never intend to speak otherwise than respectfully of sewing;--though you always seem to think I am laughing at you. In all seriousness, illustrations from sewing are those which Neith likes me best to use; and which young ladies ought to like everybody to use. What do you think the beautiful word 'wife' comes from? DORA (_tossing her head_). I don't think it is a particularly beautiful word. L. Perhaps not. At your ages you may think 'bride' sounds better; but wife's the word for wear, depend upon it. It is the great word in which the English and Latin languages conquer the French and the Greek. I hope the French will some day get a word for it, yet, instead of their dreadful 'femme.' But what do you think it comes from? DORA. I never _did_ think about it. L. Nor you, Sibyl? SIBYL. No; I thought it was Saxon, and stopped there. L. Yes; but the great good of Saxon words is, that they usually do mean something. Wife means 'weaver.' You have all the right to call yourselves little 'housewives,' when you sew neatly. DORA. But I don't think we want to call ourselves 'little housewives.' L. You must either be house-Wives, or house-Moths; remember that. In the deep sense, you must either weave men's fortunes, and embroider them; or feed upon, and bring them to decay. You had better let me keep my sewing illustration, and help me out with it. DORA. Well we'll hear it, under protest. L. You have heard it before; but with reference to other matters. When it is said, 'no man putteth a piece of new cloth on an old garment, else it taketh from the old,' does it not mean that the new piece tears the old one away at the sewn edge? DORA. Yes; certainly. L. And when you mend a decayed stuff with strong thread, does not the whole edge come away sometimes, when it tears again? DORA. Yes; and then it is of no use to mend it any more. L. Well, the rocks don't seem to think that: but the same thing happens to them continually. I told you they were full of rents, or veins. Large masses of mountain are sometimes as full of veins as your hand is; and of veins nearly as fine (only you know a rock vein does not mean a tube, but a crack or cleft). Now these clefts are mended, usually, with the strongest material the rock can find; and often literally with threads; for the gradually opening rent seems to draw the substance it is filled with into fibres, which cross from one side of it to the other, and are partly crystalline; so that, when the crystals become distinct, the fissure has often exactly the look of a tear, brought together with strong cross stitches. Now when this is completely done, and all has been fastened and made firm, perhaps some new change of temperature may occur, and the rock begin to contract again. Then the old vein must open wider; or else another open elsewhere. If the old vein widen, it _may_ do so at its centre; but it constantly happens, with well filled veins, that the cross stitches are too strong to break; the walls of the vein, instead, are torn away by them; and another little supplementary vein--often three or four successively--will be thus formed at the side of the first. MARY. That is really very much like our work. But what do the mountains use to sew with? L. Quartz, whenever they can get it: pure limestones are obliged to be content with carbonate of lime; but most mixed rocks can find some quartz for themselves. Here is a piece of black slate from the Buet: it looks merely like dry dark mud;--you could not think there was any quartz in it; but, you see, its rents are all stitched together with beautiful white thread, which is the purest quartz, so close drawn that you can break it like flint, in the mass; but, where it has been exposed to the weather, the fine fibrous structure is shown: and, more than that, you see the threads have been all twisted and pulled aside, this way and the other, by the warpings and shifting of the sides of the vein as it widened. MARY. It is wonderful! But is that going on still? Are the mountains being torn and sewn together again at this moment? L. Yes, certainly, my dear: but I think, just as certainly (though geologists differ on this matter), not with the violence, or on the scale, of their ancient ruin and renewal. All things seem to be tending towards a condition of at least temporary rest; and that groaning and travailing of the creation, as, assuredly, not wholly in pain, is not, in the full sense, 'until now.' MARY. I want so much to ask you about that! SIBYL. Yes; and we all want to ask you about a great many other things besides. L. It seems to me that you have got quite as many new ideas as are good for any of you at present: and I should not like to burden you with more; but I must see that those you have are clear, if I can make them so; so we will have one more talk, for answer of questions, mainly. Think over all the ground, and make your difficulties thoroughly presentable. Then we'll see what we can make of them. DORA. They shall all be dressed in their very best; and curtsey as they come in. L. No, no, Dora; no curtseys, if you please. I had enough of them the day you all took a fit of reverence, and curtsied me out of the room. DORA. But, you know, we cured ourselves of the fault, at once, by that fit. We have never been the least respectful since. And the difficulties will only curtsey themselves out of the room, I hope;--come in at one door--vanish at the other. L. What a pleasant world it would be, if all its difficulties were taught to behave so! However, one can generally make something, or (better still) nothing, or at least less, of them, if they thoroughly know their own minds; and your difficulties--I must say that for you, children,--generally do know their own minds, as you do yourselves. DORA. That is very kindly said for us. Some people would not allow so much as that girls had any minds to know. L. They will at least admit that you have minds to change, Dora. MARY. You might have left us the last speech, without a retouch. But we'll put our little minds, such as they are, in the best trim we can, for to-morrow. LECTURE X. _THE CRYSTAL REST._ _Evening. The fireside._ L's _arm-chair in the comfortablest corner._ L. (_perceiving various arrangements being made of foot-stool, cushion, screen, and the like_). Yes, yes, it's all very fine! and I am to sit here to be asked questions till supper-time, am I? DORA. I don't think you can have any supper to-night:--we've got so much to ask. LILY. Oh, Miss Dora! We can fetch it him here, you know, so nicely! L. Yes, Lily, that will be pleasant, with competitive examination going on over one's plate; the competition being among the examiners. Really, now that I know what teasing things girls are, I don't so much wonder that people used to put up patiently with the dragons who took _them_ for supper. But I can't help myself, I suppose;--no thanks to St. George. Ask away, children, and I'll answer as civilly as may be. DORA. We don't so much care about being answered civilly, as about not being asked things back again. L. 'Ayez seulement la patience que je le parle.' There shall be no requitals. DORA. Well, then, first of all--What shall we ask first, Mary? MARY. It does not matter. I think all the questions come into one, at last, nearly. DORA. You know, you always talk as if the crystals were alive; and we never understand how much you are in play, and how much in earnest. That's the first thing. L. Neither do I understand, myself, my dear, how much I am in earnest. The stones puzzle me as much as I puzzle you. They look as if they were alive, and make me speak as if they were; and I do not in the least know how much truth there is in the appearance. I'm not to ask things back again to-night, but all questions of this sort lead necessarily to the one main question, which we asked, before, in vain, 'What is it to be alive?' DORA. Yes; but we want to come back to that: for we've been reading scientific books about the 'conservation of forces,' and it seems all so grand, and wonderful; and the experiments are so pretty; and I suppose it must be all right: but then the books never speak as if there were any such thing as 'life.' L. They mostly omit that part of the subject, certainly, Dora; but they are beautifully right as far as they go; and life is not a convenient element to deal with. They seem to have been getting some of it into and out of bottles, in their 'ozone' and 'antizone' lately; but they still know little of it: and, certainly, I know less. DORA. You promised not to be provoking, to-night. L. Wait a minute. Though, quite truly, I know less of the secrets of life than the philosophers do; I yet know one corner of ground on which we artists can stand, literally as 'Life Guards' at bay, as steadily as the Guards at Inkermann; however hard the philosophers push. And you may stand with us, if once you learn to draw nicely. DORA. I'm sure we are all trying! but tell us where we may stand. L. You may always stand by Form, against Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of it; and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or whatever else they like to call it), in a tea-kettle as in a Gier-eagle. Very good; that is so; and it is very interesting. It requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the Gier-eagle up to his nest; and as much more to bring him down again on a hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects, attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are, that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of wings;--not to speak of the distinction also of volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode of force;--but then, to an artist, the form, or mode, is the gist of the business. The kettle chooses to sit still on the hob; the eagle to recline on the air. It is the fact of the choice, not the equal degree of temperature in the fulfilment of it, which appears to us the more interesting circumstance;--though the other is very interesting too. Exceedingly so! Don't laugh, children; the philosophers have been doing quite splendid work lately, in their own way: especially, the transformation of force into light is a great piece of systematised discovery; and this notion about the sun's being supplied with his flame by ceaseless meteoric hail is grand, and looks very likely to be true. Of course, it is only the old gun-lock,--flint and steel,--on a large scale: but the order and majesty of it are sublime. Still, we sculptors and painters care little about it. 'It is very fine,' we say, 'and very useful, this knocking the light out of the sun, or into it, by an eternal cataract of planets. But you may hail away, so, for ever, and you will not knock out what we can. Here is a bit of silver, not the size of half-a-crown, on which, with a single hammer stroke, one of us, two thousand and odd years ago, hit out the head of the Apollo of Clazomenæ. It is merely a matter of form; but if any of you philosophers, with your whole planetary system to hammer with, can hit out such another bit of silver as this,--we will take off our hats to you. For the present, we keep them on.' MARY. Yes, I understand; and that is nice; but I don't think we shall any of us like having only form to depend upon. L. It was not neglected in the making of Eve, my dear. MARY. It does not seem to separate us from the dust of the ground. It is that breathing of the life which we want to understand. L. So you should: but hold fast to the form, and defend that first, as distinguished from the mere transition of forces. Discern the moulding hand of the potter commanding the clay, from his merely beating foot, as it turns the wheel. If you can find incense, in the vase, afterwards,--well: but it is curious how far mere form will carry you ahead of the philosophers. For instance, with regard to the most interesting of all their modes of force--light;--they never consider how far the existence of it depends on the putting of certain vitreous and nervous substances into the formal arrangement which we call an eye. The German philosophers began the attack, long ago, on the other side, by telling us, there was no such thing as light at all, unless we chose to see it: now, German and English, both, have reversed their engines, and insist that light would be exactly the same light that it is, though nobody could ever see it. The fact being that the force must be there, and the eyes there; and 'light' means the effect of the one on the other;--and perhaps, also--(Plato saw farther into that mystery than any one has since, that I know of),--on something a little way within the eyes; but we may stand quite safe, close behind the retina, and defy the philosophers. SIBYL. But I don't care so much about defying the philosophers, if only one could get a clear idea of life, or soul, for one's self. L. Well, Sibyl, you used to know more about it, in that cave of yours, than any of us. I was just going to ask you about inspiration, and the golden bough, and the like; only I remembered I was not to ask anything. But, will not you, at least, tell us whether the ideas of Life, as the power of putting things together, or 'making' them; and of Death, as the power of pushing things separate, or 'unmaking' them, may not be very simply held in balance against each other? SIBYL. No, I am not in my cave to-night; and cannot tell you anything. L. I think they may. Modern Philosophy is a great separator; it is little more than the expansion of Molière's great sentence, 'Il s'ensuit de là, que tout ce qu'il y a de beau est dans les dictionnaires; il n'y a que les mots qui sont transposés.' But when you used to be in your cave, Sibyl, and to be inspired, there was (and there remains still in some small measure), beyond the merely formative and sustaining power, another, which we painters call 'passion'--I don't know what the philosophers call it; we know it makes people red, or white; and therefore it must be something, itself; and perhaps it is the most truly 'poetic' or 'making' force of all, creating a world of its own out of a glance, or a sigh: and the want of passion is perhaps the truest death, or 'unmaking' of everything;--even of stones. By the way, you were all reading about that ascent of the Aiguille Verte, the other day? SIBYL. Because you had told us it was so difficult, you thought it could not be ascended. L. Yes; I believed the Aiguille Verte would have held its own. But do you recollect what one of the climbers exclaimed, when he first felt sure of reaching the summit? SIBYL. Yes, it was, 'Oh, Aiguille Verte, vous êtes morte, vous êtes morte!' L. That was true instinct. Real philosophic joy. Now can you at all fancy the difference between that feeling of triumph in a mountain's death; and the exultation of your beloved poet, in its life-- 'Quantus Athos, aut quantus Eryx, aut ipse coruscis Quum fremit ilicibus quantus, gandetque nivali Vertice, se attollens pater Apenninus ad auras.' DORA. You must translate for us mere house-keepers, please,--whatever the cave-keepers may know about it. MARY. Will Dryden do? L. No. Dryden is a far way worse than nothing, and nobody will 'do.' You can't translate it. But this is all you need know, that the lines are full of a passionate sense of the Apennines' fatherhood, or protecting power over Italy; and of sympathy with their joy in their snowy strength in heaven; and with the same joy, shuddering through all the leaves of their forests. MARY. Yes, that is a difference indeed! but then, you know, one can't help feeling that it is fanciful. It is very delightful to imagine the mountains to be alive; but then,--_are_ they alive? L. It seems to me, on the whole, Mary, that the feelings of the purest and most mightily passioned human souls are likely to be the truest. Not, indeed, if they do not desire to know the truth, or blind themselves to it that they may please themselves with passion; for then they are no longer pure: but if, continually seeking and accepting the truth as far as it is discernible, they trust their Maker for the integrity of the instincts He has gifted them with, and rest in the sense of a higher truth which they cannot demonstrate, I think they will be most in the right, so. DORA _and_ JESSIE (_clapping their hands_). Then we really may believe that the mountains are living? L. You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state. You will find it impossible to separate this idea of gradated manifestation from that of the vital power. Things are not either wholly alive, or wholly dead. They are less or more alive. Take the nearest, most easily examined instance--the life of a flower. Notice what a different degree and kind of life there is in the calyx and the corolla. The calyx is nothing but the swaddling clothes of the flower; the child-blossom is bound up in it, hand and foot; guarded in it, restrained by it, till the time of birth. The shell is hardly more subordinate to the germ in the egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose; or harmonise itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla's bright passion of life. And the gradations which thus exist between the different members of organic creatures, exist no less between the different ranges of organism. We know no higher or more energetic life than our own; but there seems to me this great good in the idea of gradation of life--it admits the idea of a life above us, in other creatures, as much nobler than ours, as ours is nobler than that of the dust. MARY. I am glad you have said that; for I know Violet and Lucilla and May want to ask you something; indeed, we all do; only you frightened Violet so about the ant-hill, that she can't say a word; and May is afraid of your teasing her, too: but I know they are wondering why you are always telling them about heathen gods and goddesses, as if you half believed in them; and you represent them as good; and then we see there is really a kind of truth in the stories about them; and we are all puzzled: and, in this, we cannot even make our difficulty quite clear to ourselves;--it would be such a long confused question, if we could ask you all we should like to know. L. Nor is it any wonder, Mary; for this is indeed the longest, and the most wildly confused question that reason can deal with; but I will try to give you, quickly, a few clear ideas about the heathen gods, which you may follow out afterwards, as your knowledge increases. Every heathen conception of deity in which you are likely to be interested, has three distinct characters:-- I. It has a physical character. It represents some of the great powers or objects of nature--sun or moon, or heaven, or the winds, or the sea. And the fables first related about each deity represent, figuratively, the action of the natural power which it represents; such as the rising and setting of the sun, the tides of the sea, and so on. II. It has an ethical character, and represents, in its history, the moral dealings of God with man. Thus Apollo is first, physically, the sun contending with darkness; but morally, the power of divine life contending with corruption. Athena is, physically, the air; morally, the breathing of the divine spirit of wisdom. Neptune is, physically, the sea; morally, the supreme power of agitating passion; and so on. III. It has, at last, a personal character; and is realised in the minds of its worshippers as a living spirit, with whom men may speak face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. Now it is impossible to define exactly, how far, at any period of a national religion, these three ideas are mingled; or how far one prevails over the other. Each enquirer usually takes up one of these ideas, and pursues it, to the exclusion of the others: no impartial effort seems to have been made to discern the real state of the heathen imagination in its successive phases. For the question is not at all what a mythological figure meant in its origin; but what it became in each subsequent mental development of the nation inheriting the thought. Exactly in proportion to the mental and moral insight of any race, its mythological figures mean more to it, and become more real. An early and savage race means nothing more (because it has nothing more to mean) by its Apollo, than the sun; while a cultivated Greek means every operation of divine intellect and justice. The Neith, of Egypt, meant, physically, little more than the blue of the air; but the Greek, in a climate of alternate storm and calm, represented the wild fringes of the storm-cloud by the serpents of her ægis; and the lightning and cold of the highest thunder-clouds, by the Gorgon on her shield: while morally, the same types represented to him the mystery and changeful terror of knowledge, as her spear and helm its ruling and defensive power. And no study can be more interesting, or more useful to you, than that of the different meanings which have been created by great nations, and great poets, out of mythological figures given them, at first, in utter simplicity. But when we approach them in their third, or personal, character (and, for its power over the whole national mind, this is far the leading one), we are met at once by questions which may well put all of you at pause. Were they idly imagined to be real beings? and did they so usurp the place of the true God? Or were they actually real beings--evil spirits,--leading men away from the true God? Or is it conceivable that they might have been real beings,--good spirits,--entrusted with some message from the true God? These were the questions you wanted to ask; were they not, Lucilla? LUCILLA. Yes, indeed. L. Well, Lucilla, the answer will much depend upon the clearness of your faith in the personality of the spirits which are described in the book of your own religion;--their personality, observe, as distinguished from merely symbolical visions. For instance, when Jeremiah has the vision of the seething pot with its mouth to the north, you know that this which he sees is not a real thing; but merely a significant dream. Also, when Zechariah sees the speckled horses among the myrtle trees in the bottom, you still may suppose the vision symbolical;--you do not think of them as real spirits, like Pegasus, seen in the form of horses. But when you are told of the four riders in the Apocalypse, a distinct sense of personality begins to force itself upon you. And though you might, in a dull temper, think that (for one instance of all) the fourth rider on the pale horse was merely a symbol of the power of death,--in your stronger and more earnest moods you will rather conceive of him as a real and living angel. And when you look back from the vision of the Apocalypse to the account of the destruction of the Egyptian first-born, and of the army of Sennacherib, and again to David's vision at the threshing floor of Araunah, the idea of personality in this death-angel becomes entirely defined, just as in the appearance of the angels to Abraham, Manoah, or Mary. Now, when you have once consented to this idea of a personal spirit, must not the question instantly follow: 'Does this spirit exercise its functions towards one race of men only, or towards all men? Was it an angel of death to the Jew only, or to the Gentile also?' You find a certain Divine agency made visible to a King of Israel, as an armed angel, executing vengeance, of which one special purpose was to lower his kingly pride. You find another (or perhaps the same) agency, made visible to a Christian prophet as an angel standing in the sun, calling to the birds that fly under heaven to come, that they may eat the flesh of kings. Is there anything impious in the thought that the same agency might have been expressed to a Greek king, or Greek seer, by similar visions?--that this figure, standing in the sun, and armed with the sword, or the bow (whose arrows were drunk with blood), and exercising especially its power in the humiliation of the proud, might, at first, have been called only 'Destroyer,' and afterwards, as the light, or sun, of justice, was recognised in the chastisement, called also 'Physician' or 'Healer?' If you feel hesitation in admitting the possibility of such a manifestation, I believe you will find it is caused, partly indeed by such trivial things as the difference to your ear between Greek and English terms; but, far more, by uncertainty in your own mind respecting the nature and truth of the visions spoken of in the Bible. Have any of you intently examined the nature of your belief in them? You, for instance, Lucilla, who think often, and seriously, of such things? LUCILLA. No; I never could tell what to believe about them. I know they must be true in some way or other; and I like reading about them. L. Yes; and I like reading about them too, Lucilla; as I like reading other grand poetry. But, surely, we ought both to do more than like it? Will God be satisfied with us, think you, if we read His words merely for the sake of an entirely meaningless poetical sensation? LUCILLA. But do not the people who give themselves to seek out the meaning of these things, often get very strange, and extravagant? L. More than that, Lucilla. They often go mad. That abandonment of the mind to religious theory, or contemplation, is the very thing I have been pleading with you against. I never said you should set yourself to discover the meanings; but you should take careful pains to understand them, so far as they _are_ clear; and you should always accurately ascertain the state of your mind about them. I want you never to read merely for the pleasure of fancy; still less as a formal religious duty (else you might as well take to repeating Paters at once; for it is surely wiser to repeat one thing we understand, than read a thousand which we cannot). Either, therefore, acknowledge the passages to be, for the present, unintelligible to you; or else determine the sense in which you at present receive them; or, at all events, the different senses between which you clearly see that you must choose. Make either your belief, or your difficulty, definite; but do not go on, all through your life, believing nothing intelligently, and yet supposing that your having read the words of a divine book must give you the right to despise every religion but your own. I assure you, strange as it may seem, our scorn of Greek tradition depends, not on our belief, but our disbelief, of our own traditions. We have, as yet, no sufficient clue to the meaning of either; but you will always find that, in proportion to the earnestness of our own faith, its tendency to accept a spiritual personality increases: and that the most vital and beautiful Christian temper rests joyfully in its conviction of the multitudinous ministry of living angels, infinitely varied in rank and power. You all know one expression of the purest and happiest form of such faith, as it exists in modern times, in Richter's lovely illustrations of the Lord's Prayer. The real and living death-angel, girt as a pilgrim for journey, and softly crowned with flowers, beckons at the dying mother's door; child-angels sit talking face to face with mortal children, among the flowers;--hold them by their little coats, lest they fall on the stairs;--whisper dreams of heaven to them, leaning over their pillows; carry the sound of the church bells for them far through the air; and even descending lower in service, fill little cups with honey, to hold out to the weary bee. By the way, Lily, did you tell the other children that story about your little sister, and Alice, and the sea? LILY. I told it to Alice, and to Miss Dora. I don't think I did to anybody else. I thought it wasn't worth. L. We shall think it worth a great deal now, Lily, if you will tell it us. How old is Dotty, again? I forget. LILY. She is not quite three; but she has such odd little old ways, sometimes. L. And she was very fond of Alice? LILY. Yes; Alice was so good to her always! L. And so when Alice went away? LILY. Oh, it was nothing, you know, to tell about; only it was strange at the time. L. Well; but I want you to tell it. LILY. The morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she could find Alice in them, and at last she came to me, and said, 'Is Alie gone over the great sea?' And I said, 'Yes, she is gone over the great, deep sea, but she will come back again some day.' Then Dotty looked round the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hands through the water, again and again; and cried, 'Oh, deep, deep sea! send little Alie back to me.' L. Isn't that pretty, children? There's a dear little heathen for you! The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal being in the elemental power;--of its being moved by prayer;--and of its presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred. Now, remember, the measure in which we may permit ourselves to think of this trusted and adored personality, in Greek, or in any other, mythology, as conceivably a shadow of truth, will depend on the degree in which we hold the Greeks, or other great nations, equal, or inferior, in privilege and character, to the Jews, or to ourselves. If we believe that the great Father would use the imagination of the Jew as an instrument by which to exalt and lead him; but the imagination of the Greek only to degrade and mislead him: if we can suppose that real angels were sent to minister to the Jews and to punish them; but no angels, or only mocking spectra of angels, or even devils in the shapes of angels, to lead Lycurgus and Leonidas from desolate cradle to hopeless grave:--and if we can think that it was only the influence of spectres, or the teaching of demons, which issued in the making of mothers like Cornelia, and of sons like Cleobis and Bito, we may, of course, reject the heathen Mythology in our privileged scorn: but, at least, we are bound to examine strictly by what faults of our own it has come to pass, that the ministry of real angels among ourselves is occasionally so ineffectual, as to end in the production of Cornelias who entrust their child-jewels to Charlotte Winsors for the better keeping of them; and of sons like that one who, the other day, in France, beat his mother to death with a stick; and was brought in by the jury, 'guilty, with extenuating circumstances.' MAY. Was that really possible? L. Yes, my dear. I am not sure that I can lay my hand on the reference to it (and I should not have said 'the other day'--it was a year or two ago), but you may depend on the fact; and I could give you many like it, if I chose. There was a murder done in Russia, very lately, on a traveller. The murderess's little daughter was in the way, and found it out, somehow. Her mother killed her, too, and put her into the oven. There is a peculiar horror about the relations between parent and child, which are being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of European white slavery. Here _is_ one reference, I see, in my notes on that story of Cleobis and Bito; though I suppose I marked this chiefly for its quaintness, and the beautifully Christian names of the sons; but it is a good instance of the power of the King of the Valley of Diamonds[153] among us. In 'Galignani' of July 21-22, 1862, is reported a trial of a farmer's son in the department of the Yonne. The father, two years ago, at Malay le Grand, gave up his property to his two sons, on condition of being maintained by them. Simon fulfilled his agreement, but Pierre would not. The tribunal of Sens condemns Pierre to pay eighty-four francs a year to his father. Pierre replies, 'he would rather die than pay it.' Actually, returning home, he throws himself into the river, and the body is not found till next day. MARY. But--but--I can't tell what you would have us think. Do you seriously mean that the Greeks were better than we are; and that their gods were real angels? L. No, my dear. I mean only that we know, in reality, less than nothing of the dealings of our Maker with our fellow-men; and can only reason or conjecture safely about them, when we have sincerely humble thoughts of ourselves and our creeds. We owe to the Greeks every noble discipline in literature; every radical principle of art; and every form of convenient beauty in our household furniture and daily occupations of life. We are unable, ourselves, to make rational use of half that we have received from them: and, of our own, we have nothing but discoveries in science, and fine mechanical adaptations of the discovered physical powers. On the other hand, the vice existing among certain classes, both of the rich and poor, in London, Paris, and Vienna, could have been conceived by a Spartan or Roman of the heroic ages only as possible in a Tartarus, where fiends were employed to teach, but not to punish, crime. It little becomes us to speak contemptuously of the religion of races to whom we stand in such relations; nor do I think any man of modesty or thoughtfulness will ever speak so of any religion, in which God has allowed one good man to die, trusting. The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become: and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow _us_ to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so. There may be doubt of the meaning of other visions, but there is none respecting that of the dream of St. Peter; and you may trust the Rock of the Church's Foundation for true interpreting, when he learned from it that, 'in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.' See that you understand what that righteousness means; and set hand to it stoutly: you will always measure your neighbors' creed kindly, in proportion to the substantial fruits of your own. Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter into the faith of others, and to sympathise, in imagination, with the guiding principles of their lives. So only can you justly love them, or pity them, or praise. By the gracious effort you will double, treble--nay, indefinitely multiply, at once the pleasure, the reverence, and the intelligence with which you read: and, believe me, it is wiser and holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves, through the gathering darkness, and communicable cold. MARY (_after some pause_). We shall all like reading Greek history so much better after this! but it has put everything else out of our heads that we wanted to ask. L. I can tell you one of the things; and I might take credit for generosity in telling you; but I have a personal reason--Lucilla's verse about the creation. DORA. Oh, yes--yes; and its 'pain together, until now.' L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old error of my own. Somewhere in the fourth volume of 'Modern Painters,' I said that the earth seemed to have passed through its highest state: and that, after ascending by a series of phases, culminating in its habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually becoming less fit for that habitation. MARY. Yes, I remember. L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the gradual perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew in the physical world;--not in any doubtful way, such as I might have attributed to loss of sensation in myself--but by violent and definite physical action; such as the filling up of the Lac de Chêde by landslips from the Rochers des Fiz;--the narrowing of the Lake Lucerne by the gaining delta of the stream of the Muotta-Thal, which, in the course of years, will cut the lake into two, as that of Brientz has been divided from that of Thun;--the steady diminishing of the glaciers north of the Alps, and still more, of the sheets of snow on their southern slopes, which supply the refreshing streams of Lombardy:--the equally steady increase of deadly maremma round Pisa and Venice; and other such phenomena, quite measurably traceable within the limits even of short life, and unaccompanied, as it seemed, by redeeming or compensatory agencies. I am still under the same impression respecting the existing phenomena; but I feel more strongly, every day, that no evidence to be collected within historical periods can be accepted as any clue to the great tendencies of geological change; but that the great laws which never fail, and to which all change is subordinate, appear such as to accomplish a gradual advance to lovelier order, and more calmly, yet more deeply, animated Rest. Nor has this conviction ever fastened itself upon me more distinctly, than during my endeavour to trace the laws which govern the lowly framework of the dust. For, through all the phases of its transition and dissolution, there seems to be a continual effort to raise itself into a higher state; and a measured gain, through the fierce revulsion and slow renewal of the earth's frame, in beauty, and order, and permanence. The soft white sediments of the sea draw themselves, in process of time, into smooth knots of sphered symmetry; burdened and strained under increase of pressure, they pass into a nascent marble; scorched by fervent heat, they brighten and blanch into the snowy rock of Paros and Carrara. The dark drift of the inland river, or stagnant slime of inland pool and lake, divides, or resolves itself as it dries, into layers of its several elements; slowly purifying each by the patient withdrawal of it from the anarchy of the mass in which it was mingled. Contracted by increasing drought, till it must shatter into fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor into the opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first rudiments of a perfect strength. Bent at last, rock from rock, nay, atom from atom, and tormented in lambent fire, it knits, through the fusion, the fibres of a perennial endurance; and, during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or rather let me say, rising to repose, finishes the infallible lustre of its crystalline beauty, under harmonies of law which are wholly beneficent, because wholly inexorable. (_The children seem pleased, but more inclined to think over these matters than to talk._) L. (_after giving them a little time_). Mary, I seldom ask you to read anything out of books of mine; but there is a passage about the Law of Help, which I want you to read to the children now, because it is of no use merely to put it in other words for them. You know the place I mean, do not you? MARY. Yes (_presently finding it_); where shall I begin? L. Here; but the elder ones had better look afterwards at the piece which comes just before this. MARY (_reads_): * * * * * 'A pure or holy state of anything is that in which all its parts are helpful or consistent. The highest and first law of the universe, and the other name of life, is therefore, "help." The other name of death is "separation." Government and co-operation are in all things, and eternally, the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in all things, the laws of death. 'Perhaps the best, though the most familiar, example we could take of the nature and power of consistence, will be that of the possible changes in the dust we tread on. 'Exclusive of animal decay, we can hardly arrive at a more absolute type of impurity, than the mud or slime of a damp, over-trodden path, in the outskirts of a manufacturing town. I do not say mud of the road, because that is mixed with animal refuse; but take merely an ounce or two of the blackest slime of a beaten footpath, on a rainy day, near a manufacturing town. That slime we shall find in most cases composed of clay (or brickdust, which is burnt clay), mixed with soot, a little sand and water. All these elements are at helpless war with each other, and destroy reciprocally each other's nature and power: competing and fighting for place at every tread of your foot; sand squeezing out clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere, and defiling the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible. 'Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful, and fit, with help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings' palaces. But such artificial consistence is not its best. Leave it still quiet, to follow its own instinct of unity, and it becomes, not only white but clear; not only clear, but hard; nor only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only, refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire. 'Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth; then proceeds to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious, infinitely fine parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting, not merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays, in the greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material whatsoever. We call it then an opal. 'In next order the soot sets to work. It cannot make itself white at first; but, instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder; and comes out clear at last; and the hardest thing in the world: and for the blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting all the rays of the sun at once, in the vividest blaze that any solid thing can shoot. We call it then a diamond. 'Last of all, the water purifies, or unites itself; contented enough if it only reach the form of a dewdrop: but, if we insist on its proceeding to a more perfect consistence, it crystallises into the shape of a star. And, for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of competition, we have, by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.' * * * * * L. I have asked you to hear that, children, because, from all that we have seen in the work and play of these past days, I would have you gain at least one grave and enduring thought. The seeming trouble,--the unquestionable degradation,--of the elements of the physical earth, must passively wait the appointed time of their repose, or their restoration. It can only be brought about for them by the agency of external law. But if, indeed, there be a nobler life in us than in these strangely moving atoms;--if, indeed, there is an eternal difference between the fire which inhabits them, and that which animates us,--it must be shown, by each of us in his appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in the activity of our hope; not merely by our desire, but our labour, for the time when the Dust of the generations of men shall be confirmed for foundations of the gates of the city of God. The human clay, now trampled and despised, will not be,--cannot be,--knit into strength and light by accident or ordinances of unassisted fate. By human cruelty and iniquity it has been afflicted;--by human mercy and justice it must be raised: and, in all fear or questioning of what is or is not, the real message of creation, or of revelation, you may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required,--and content that He should indeed require no more of you,--than to do Justice, to love Mercy, and to walk humbly with Him. FOOTNOTES: [153] Note vi. NOTES. NOTE I. Page 24. _'That third pyramid of hers.'_ Throughout the dialogues, it must be observed that 'Sibyl' is addressed (when in play) as having once been the Cumæan Sibyl; and 'Egypt' as having been queen Nitocris,--the Cinderella, and 'the greatest heroine and beauty' of Egyptian story. The Egyptians called her 'Neith the Victorious' (Nitocris), and the Greeks 'Face of the Rose' (Rhodope). Chaucer's beautiful conception of Cleopatra in the 'Legend of Good Women,' is much more founded on the traditions of her than on those of Cleopatra; and, especially in its close, modified by Herodotus's terrible story of the death of Nitocris, which, however, is mythologically nothing more than a part of the deep monotonous ancient dirge for the fulfilment of the earthly destiny of Beauty; 'She cast herself into a chamber full of ashes.' I believe this Queen is now sufficiently ascertained to have either built, or increased to double its former size, the third pyramid of Gizeh: and the passage following in the text refers to an imaginary endeavour, by the Old Lecturer and the children together, to make out the description of that pyramid in the 167th page of the second volume of Bunsen's 'Egypt's Place in Universal History'--ideal endeavour,--which ideally terminates as the Old Lecturer's real endeavours to the same end always have terminated. There are, however, valuable notes respecting Nitocris at page 210 of the same volume: but the 'Early Egyptian History for the Young,' by the author of Sidney Gray, contains, in a pleasant form, as much information as young readers will usually need. NOTE II. Page 25. _'Pyramid of Asychis.'_ This pyramid, in mythology, divides with the Tower of Babel the shame, or vain glory, of being presumptuously, and first among great edifices, built with 'brick for stone.' This was the inscription on it, according to Herodotus:-- 'Despise me not, in comparing me with the pyramids of stone; for I have the pre-eminence over them, as far as Jupiter has pre-eminence over the gods. For, striking with staves into the pool, men gathered the clay which fastened itself to the staff, and kneaded bricks out of it, and so made me.' The word I have translated 'kneaded' is literally 'drew;' in the sense of drawing, for which the Latins used 'duco;' and thus gave us our 'ductile' in speaking of dead clay, and Duke, Doge, or leader, in speaking of living clay. As the asserted pre-eminence of the edifice is made, in this inscription, to rest merely on the quantity of labour consumed in it, this pyramid is considered, in the text, as the type, at once, of the base building, and of the lost labour, of future ages, so far at least as the spirits of measured and mechanical effort deal with it: but Neith, exercising her power upon it, makes it a type of the work of wise and inspired builders. NOTE III. Page 25. _'The Greater Pthah.'_ It is impossible, as yet, to define with distinctness the personal agencies of the Egyptian deities. They are continually associated in function, or hold derivative powers, or are related to each other in mysterious triads; uniting always symbolism of physical phenomena with real spiritual power. I have endeavoured partly to explain this in the text of the tenth Lecture: here, it is only necessary for the reader to know that the Greater Pthah more or less represents the formative power of order and measurement: he always stands on a four-square pedestal, 'the Egyptian cubit, metaphorically used as the hieroglyphic for truth;' his limbs are bound together, to signify fixed stability, as of a pillar; he has a measuring-rod in his hand; and at Philæ, is represented as holding an egg on a potter's wheel; but I do not know if this symbol occurs in older sculptures. His usual title is the 'Lord of Truth.' Others, very beautiful: 'King of the Two Worlds, of Gracious Countenance,' 'Superintendent of the Great Abode,' &c., are given by Mr. Birch in Arundale's 'Gallery of Antiquities,' which I suppose is the book of best authority easily accessible. For the full titles and utterances of the gods, Rosellini is as yet the only--and I believe, still a very questionable--authority; and Arundale's little book, excellent in the text, has this great defect, that its drawings give the statues invariably a ludicrous or ignoble character. Readers who have not access to the originals must be warned against this frequent fault in modern illustration (especially existing also in some of the painted casts of Gothic and Norman work at the Crystal Palace). It is not owing to any wilful want of veracity: the plates in Arundale's book are laboriously faithful: but the expressions of both face and body in a figure depend merely on emphasis of touch; and, in barbaric art, most draughtsmen emphasise what they plainly see--the barbarism; and miss conditions of nobleness, which they must approach the monument in a different temper before they will discover, and draw with great subtlety before they can express. The character of the Lower Pthah, or perhaps I ought rather to say, of Pthah in his lower office, is sufficiently explained in the text of the third Lecture; only the reader must be warned that the Egyptian symbolism of him by the beetle was not a scornful one; it expressed only the idea of his presence in the first elements of life. But it may not unjustly be used, in another sense, by us, who have seen his power in new development; and, even as it was, I cannot conceive that the Egyptians should have regarded their beetle-headed image of him (Champollion, 'Pantheon,' pl. 12), without some occult scorn. It is the most painful of all their types of any beneficent power; and even among those of evil influences, none can be compared with it, except its opposite, the tortoise-headed demon of indolence. Pasht (p. 24, line 32) is connected with the Greek Artemis, especially in her offices of judgment and vengeance. She is usually lioness-headed; sometimes cat-headed; her attributes seeming often trivial or ludicrous unless their full meaning is known; but the enquiry is much too wide to be followed here. The cat was sacred to her; or rather to the sun, and secondarily to her. She is alluded to in the text because she is always the companion of Pthah (called 'the beloved of Pthah,' it may be as Judgment, demanded and longed for by Truth); and it may be well for young readers to have this fixed in their minds, even by chance association. There are more statues of Pasht in the British Museum than of any other Egyptian deity; several of them fine in workmanship; nearly all in dark stone, which may be, presumably, to connect her, as the moon, with the night; and in her office of avenger, with grief. Thoth (p. 27, line 17), is the Recording Angel of Judgment; and the Greek Hermes Phre (line 20), is the Sun. Neith is the Egyptian spirit of divine wisdom; and the Athena of the Greeks. No sufficient statement of her many attributes, still less of their meanings, can be shortly given; but this should be noted respecting the veiling of the Egyptian image of her by vulture wings--that as she is, physically, the goddess of the air, this bird, the most powerful creature of the air known to the Egyptians, naturally became her symbol. It had other significations; but certainly this, when in connection with Neith. As representing her, it was the most important sign, next to the winged sphere, in Egyptian sculpture; and, just as in Homer, Athena herself guides her heroes into battle, this symbol of wisdom, giving victory, floats over the heads of the Egyptian kings. The Greeks, representing the goddess herself in human form, yet would not lose the power of the Egyptian symbol, and changed it into an angel of victory. First seen in loveliness on the early coins of Syracuse and Leontium, it gradually became the received sign of all conquest, and the so-called 'Victory' of later times; which, little by little, loses its truth, and is accepted by the moderns only as a personification of victory itself,--not as an actual picture of the living Angel who led to victory. There is a wide difference between these two conceptions,--all the difference between insincere poetry, and sincere religion. This I have also endeavoured farther to illustrate in the tenth Lecture; there is however one part of Athena's character which it would have been irrelevant to dwell upon there; yet which I must not wholly leave unnoticed. As the goddess of the air, she physically represents both its beneficent calm, and necessary tempest: other storm-deities (as Chrysaor and Æolus) being invested with a subordinate and more or less malignant function, which is exclusively their own, and is related to that of Athena as the power of Mars is related to hers in war. So also Virgil makes her able to wield the lightning herself, while Juno cannot, but must pray for the intervention of Æolus. She has precisely the correspondent moral authority over calmness of mind, and just anger. She soothes Achilles, as she incites Tydides; her physical power over the air being always hinted correlatively. She grasps Achilles by his hair--as the wind would lift it--softly, 'It fanned his cheek, it raised his hair, Like a meadow gale in spring.' She does not merely turn the lance of Mars from Diomed; but seizes it in both her hands, and casts it aside, with a sense of making it vain, like chaff in the wind;--to the shout of Achilles, she adds her own voice of storm in heaven--but in all cases the moral power is still the principal one--most beautifully in that seizing of Achilles by the hair, which was the talisman of his life (because he had vowed it to the Sperchius if he returned in safety), and which, in giving at Patroclus' tomb, he, knowingly, yields up the hope of return to his country, and signifies that he will die with his friend. Achilles and Tydides are, above all other heroes, aided by her in war, because their prevailing characters are the desire of justice, united in both with deep affections; and, in Achilles, with a passionate tenderness, which is the real root of his passionate anger. Ulysses is her favourite chiefly in her office as the goddess of conduct and design. NOTE IV. Page 54. _'Geometrical limitations.'_ It is difficult, without a tedious accuracy, or without full illustration, to express the complete relations of crystalline structure, which dispose minerals to take, at different times, fibrous, massive, or foliated forms; and I am afraid this chapter will be generally skipped by the reader: yet the arrangement itself will be found useful, if kept broadly in mind; and the transitions of state are of the highest interest, if the subject is entered upon with any earnestness. It would have been vain to add to the scheme of this little volume any account of the geometrical forms of crystals: an available one, though still far too difficult and too copious, has been arranged by the Rev. Mr. Mitchell, for Orr's 'Circle of the Sciences'; and, I believe, the 'nets' of crystals, which are therein given to be cut out with scissors and put prettily together, will be found more conquerable by young ladies than by other students. They should also, when an opportunity occurs, be shown, at any public library, the diagram of the crystallisation of quartz referred to poles, at p. 8 of Cloizaux's 'Manuel de Minéralogie': that they may know what work is; and what the subject is. With a view to more careful examination of the nascent states of silica, I have made no allusion in this volume to the influence of mere segregation, as connected with the crystalline power. It has only been recently, during the study of the breccias alluded to in page 113, that I have fully seen the extent to which this singular force often modifies rocks in which at first its influence might hardly have been suspected; many apparent conglomerates being in reality formed chiefly by segregation, combined with mysterious brokenly-zoned structures, like those of some malachites. I hope some day to know more of these and several other mineral phenomena (especially of those connected with the relative sizes of crystals), which otherwise I should have endeavoured to describe in this volume. NOTE V. Page 102. _'St. Barbara.'_ I would have given the legends of St. Barbara, and St. Thomas, if I had thought it always well for young readers to have everything at once told them which they may wish to know. They will remember the stories better after taking some trouble to find them: and the text is intelligible enough as it stands. The idea of St. Barbara, as there given is founded partly on her legend in Peter de Natalibus, partly on the beautiful photograph of Van Eyck's picture of her at Antwerp: which was some time since published at Lille. NOTE VI. Page 137. _'King of the Valley of Diamonds.'_ Isabel interrupted the Lecturer here, and was briefly bid to hold her tongue; which gave rise to some talk, apart, afterwards, between L. and Sibyl, of which a word or two may be perhaps advisably set down. SIBYL. We shall spoil Isabel, certainly, if we don't mind: I was glad you stopped her, and yet sorry; for she wanted so much to ask about the Valley of Diamonds again, and she has worked so hard at it, and made it nearly all out by herself. She recollected Elisha's throwing in the meal, which nobody else did. L. But what did she want to ask? SIBYL. About the mulberry trees and the serpents; we are all stopped by that. Won't you tell us what it means? L. Now, Sibyl, I am sure you, who never explained yourself, should be the last to expect others to do so. I hate explaining myself. SIBYL. And yet how often you complain of other people for not saying what they meant. How I have heard you growl over the three stone steps to purgatory; for instance! L. Yes; because Dante's meaning is worth getting at; but mine matters nothing: at least, if ever I think it is of any consequence, I speak it as clearly as may be. But you may make anything you like of the serpent forests. I could have helped you to find out what they were, by giving a little more detail, but it would have been tiresome. SIBYL. It is much more tiresome not to find out. Tell us, please, as Isabel says, because we feel so stupid. L. There is no stupidity; you could not possibly do more than guess at anything so vague. But I think, you, Sibyl, at least, might have recollected what first dyed the mulberry? SIBYL. So I did; but that helped little; I thought of Dante's forest of suicides, too, but you would not simply have borrowed that? L. No. If I had had strength to use it, I should have stolen it, to beat into another shape; not borrowed it. But that idea of souls in trees is as old as the world; or at least, as the world of man. And I _did_ mean that there were souls in those dark branches; the souls of all those who had perished in misery through the pursuit of riches; and that the river was of their blood, gathering gradually, and flowing out of the valley. That I meant the serpents for the souls of those who had lived carelessly and wantonly in their riches; and who have all their sins forgiven by the world, because they are rich: and therefore they have seven crimson crested heads, for the seven mortal sins; of which they are proud: and these, and the memory and report of them, are the chief causes of temptation to others, as showing the pleasantness and absolving power of riches; so that thus they are singing serpents. And the worms are the souls of the common money-getters and traffickers, who do nothing but eat and spin: and who gain habitually by the distress or foolishness of others (as you see the butchers have been gaining out of the panic at the cattle plague, among the poor),--so they are made to eat the dark leaves, and spin, and perish. SIBYL. And the souls of the great, cruel, rich people who oppress the poor, and lend money to government to make unjust war, where are they? L. They change into the ice, I believe, and are knit with the gold; and make the grave dust of the valley. I believe so, at least, for no one ever sees those souls anywhere. (SIBYL _ceases questioning._) ISABEL (_who has crept up to her side without any one's seeing_). Oh, Sibyl, please ask him about the fire-flies! L. What, you there, mousie! No; I won't tell either Sibyl or you about the fire-flies; nor a word more about anything else. You ought to be little fire-flies yourselves, and find your way in twilight by your own wits. ISABEL. But you said they burned, you know? L. Yes; and you may be fire-flies that way too, some of you, before long, though I did not mean that. Away with you, children. You have thought enough for to-day. NOTE TO SECOND EDITION. _Sentence_ out of letter from May (who is staying with Isabel just now at Cassel), dated 15th June, 1877:-- "I am reading the Ethics with a nice Irish girl who is staying here, and she's just as puzzled as I've always been about the fire-flies, and we both want to know so much.--Please be a very nice old Lecturer, and tell us, won't you?" Well, May, you never were a vain girl; so could scarcely guess that I meant them for the light, unpursued vanities, which yet blind us, confused among the stars. One evening, as I came late into Siena, the fire-flies were flying high on a stormy sirocco wind,--the stars themselves no brighter, and all their host seeming, at moments, to fade as the insects faded. FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL. On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in this year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded College of Dulwich. In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green bye-road traversable for some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part, little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by blackberry hedges from the better cared-for meadows on each side of it: growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a primrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles in autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning dew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath the hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and deep pools, in which, under their veils of duck-weed, a fresh-water shell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of tadpoles in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered themselves to my boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate, observation. There, my mother and I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn; and there, in after years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a place wilder and sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage I wanted to make better than usual in _Modern Painters_. So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtful more than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place. Often, both in those days, and since, I have put myself hard to it, vainly, to find words wherewith to tell of beautiful things; but beauty has been in the world since the world was made, and human language can make a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiar forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the world lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side of it are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of three railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces of waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of--Hades only knows what!--mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here and there over all these,--remnants broadcast, of every manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and mortal slime. The lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut off by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: and on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good attached gardens and offices--most of these tenements being larger--all more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children resembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and thus brought up at the same distance from London, and in the same or better circumstances of worldly fortune; but with only Croxsted Lane in its present condition for their country walk. The trimly kept road before their doors, such as one used to see in the fashionable suburbs of Cheltenham or Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel, and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillar contributing indeed to the splendour, but scarcely to the interest of the scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contrive escape from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself to investigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history of Croxsted Lane. But, for its sense or fancy, what food, or stimulus, can it find, in that foul causeway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happened to myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed from the instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man, what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of corruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of worms with more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivified the more simply smelling plasma of antiquity. One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain; namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of imaginative literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and the conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphere of low vitality, have become the most valued material of modern fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy. The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be massed under a few general heads. I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens. In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune, of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and provides for his favourite a separate and clandestine establishment with her lover. On his deathbed, he sends for this favourite daughter, who wishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so, and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chief ambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball. This story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts and spectral catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large city. A village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry his daughters to titled squires, and cannot die without having his children brought to him, if in the neighbourhood, by fear of village gossip, if for no better cause. II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of science in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the carefullest forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting from the mere trampling pressure and electric friction of town life, become to the sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness, and frightful in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings over them for evil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the pollution, and of their own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that chokes and crushes them into perdition, brings every law of healthy existence into question with them, and every alleged method of help and hope into doubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigour of manure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic Providence; showing how everybody's fault is somebody else's, how infection has no law, digestion no will, and profitable dirt no dishonour. And thus an elaborate and ingenious scholasticism, in what may be called the Divinity of Decomposition, has established itself in connection with the more recent forms of romance, giving them at once a complacent tone of clerical dignity, and an agreeable dash of heretical impudence; while the inculcated doctrine has the double advantage of needing no laborious scholarship for its foundation, and no painful self-denial for its practice. III. The monotony of life in the central streets of any great modern city, but especially in those of London, where every emotion intended to be derived by men from the sight of nature, or the sense of art, is forbidden for ever, leaves the craving of the heart for a sincere, yet changeful, interest, to be fed from one source only. Under natural conditions the degree of mental excitement necessary to bodily health is provided by the course of the seasons, and the various skill and fortune of agriculture. In the country every morning of the year brings with it a new aspect of springing or fading nature; a new duty to be fulfilled upon earth, and a new promise or warning in heaven. No day is without its innocent hope, its special prudence, its kindly gift, and its sublime danger; and in every process of wise husbandry, and every effort of contending or remedial courage, the wholesome passions, pride, and bodily power of the labourer are excited and exerted in happiest unison. The companionship of domestic, the care of serviceable, animals, soften and enlarge his life with lowly charities, and discipline him in familiar wisdoms and unboastful fortitudes; while the divine laws of seed-time which cannot be recalled, harvest which cannot be hastened, and winter in which no man can work, compel the impatiences and coveting of his heart into labour too submissive to be anxious, and rest too sweet to be wanton. What thought can enough comprehend the contrast between such life, and that in streets where summer and winter are only alternations of heat and cold; where snow never fell white, nor sunshine clear; where the ground is only a pavement, and the sky no more than the glass roof of an arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to choke the gutters, and the finest magic of spring, to change mud into dust: where--chief and most fatal difference in state, there is no interest of occupation for any of the inhabitants but the routine of counter or desk within doors, and the effort to pass each other without collision outside; so that from morning to evening the only possible variation of the monotony of the hours, and lightening of the penalty of existence, must be some kind of mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinary godsend of fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the slitting of a pocket. I said that under these laws of inanition, the craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from _one_ source only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained Londoner can enjoy no other excitement than that to which he has been accustomed, but asks for _that_ in continually more ardent or more virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain him is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dulness the horrors, of Death. In the single novel of _Bleak House_ there are nine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wrought out or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's at the brickmaker's, or finished in their threatenings and sufferings, with as much enjoyment as can be contrived in the anticipation, and as much pathology as can be concentrated in the description. Under the following varieties of method:-- One by assassination Mr. Tulkinghorn. One by starvation, with phthisis Joe. One by chagrin Richard. One by spontaneous combustion Mr. Krook. One by sorrow Lady Dedlock's lover. One by remorse Lady Dedlock. One by insanity Miss Flite. One by paralysis Sir Leicester. Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to be hanged. And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story, but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to be amusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London. Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths (which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in _Old Mortality_, and reached, within one or two, both in _Waverley_ and _Guy Mannering_) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison. Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed as faultless in the eye of heaven as a dove or a woodcock; but it is not, in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should be dropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved in the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles's churchyard. In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally and deeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that of Polonius or Roderigo). In _Old Mortality_, four of the deaths, Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, are magnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift; the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the old miser's, as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful in its last words of--now unselfish--care. 'Ailie' (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance,) 'Ailie, take ye care and haud the gear weel thegither; for the name of Morton of Milnwood's gane out like the last sough of an auld sang.' And sae he fell out o' ae dwam into another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it were something we cou'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being gude eneugh to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a moulded ane, and there was ane, by ill luck, on the table. In _Guy Mannering_, the murder, though unpremeditated, of a single person, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness in a cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on all the men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of his wife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half-a-dozen lines; and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in the highest, and happy. Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's with inferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life, tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions of commercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves. There are parts even in his best novels coloured to meet tastes which he despised; and many pages written in his later ones to lengthen his article for the indiscriminate market. But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained incapable to the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or fastidious audiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is obtained, for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or disgusting death; but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, and recognised, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weak writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study of it from the living--or dying--model is so easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle the broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easily rendered, and too surely recognised, image of familiar suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility shrink from it.[154] Only under conditions of personal weakness, presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the cravings of his lower audience in scenes of terror like the death of Front-de-Boeuf. But he never once withdrew the sacred curtain of the sick-chamber, nor permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round the humiliation of strength, or the wreck of beauty. IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the scenes in Coeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal incident in the _Talisman_. An inferior writer would have made the king charge in imagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams by the brooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more startling symptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and impatient, and could not wear his armour. Nor is any bodily weakness, or crisis of danger, permitted to disturb for an instant the royalty of intelligence and heart in which he examines, trusts and obeys the physician whom his attendants fear. Yet the choice of the main subject in this story and its companion--the trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love Scott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavours to disguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, and mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which culminate in _Castle Dangerous_, cast a Stygian hue over _St. Ronan's Well, The Fair Maid of Perth_, and _Anne of Geierstein_, which lowers them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole body of our lower fictitious literature. Fictitious! I use the ambiguous word deliberately; for it is impossible to distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far their vice and gloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a vile demand, and how far they are an integral condition of thought in the minds of men trained from their youth up in the knowledge of Londinian and Parisian misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight in the exposition of the relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I call the results of it literature 'of the prison-house,' because the thwarted habits of body and mind, which are the punishment of reckless crowding in cities, become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finally delight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, by coloured firelights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness, in the prison calendar, the police news, and the hospital report. The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest work of Dickens, _Oliver Twist_, with honour, from the loathsome mass to which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble passion. Even the _Mysteries of Paris_ and Gaboriau's _Crime d'Augival_ are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible civilisation, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis of such figures as the Vicomte d'Augival, the Stabber,[155] the Skeleton, and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole cretinous school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like _Poor Miss Finch_, in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[156] This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not only the cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of the Hôtel-Dieu, the Hôpital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ile de Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the 'Cité de Paris'--is, when understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion of the Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental ruin are the corruption of love. I have therefore called it 'Fiction mécroyante,' with literal accuracy and precision; according to the explanation of the word which the reader may find in any good French dictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with aberration of the mind. Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normal evil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a wasp or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least permits, our thoughts; not so, the stages of agony in the fury-driven hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of the modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population, find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and colour in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled into senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock. V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast or card-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest, and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other as children--meet, as they grow up in testing labour; and if a stout farmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in the patrician families of the field, the young people know what they are doing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with some conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these, their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology for their peculiar forms of illbreeding. It is quite curious how often the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element of ordinarily decent behaviour. Rashly inquiring the other day the plot of a modern story from a female friend, I elicited, after some hesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's 'forgetting themselves in a boat;' and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly an axiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiable sentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express, and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the old school used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent when he ought, (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed love where it was honourable, and reverence where it was due); but the automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledge little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the effervescence of a chemical mixture. There is a pretty little story of Alfred de Musset's,--_La Mouche_, which, if the reader cares to glance at it, will save me further trouble in explaining the disciplinarian authority of mere old-fashioned politeness, as in some sort protective of higher things. It describes, with much grace and precision, a state of society by no means pre-eminently virtuous, or enthusiastically heroic; in which many people do extremely wrong, and none sublimely right. But as there are heights of which the achievement is unattempted, there are abysses to which fall is barred; neither accident nor temptation will make any of the principal personages swerve from an adopted resolution, or violate an accepted principle of honour; people are expected as a matter of course to speak with propriety on occasion, and to wait with patience when they are bid: those who do wrong, admit it; those who do right don't boast of it; everybody knows his own mind, and everybody has good manners. Nor must it be forgotten that in the worst days of the self-indulgence which destroyed the aristocracies of Europe, their vices, however licentious, were never, in the fatal modern sense, 'unprincipled.' The vainest believed in virtue; the vilest respected it. 'Chaque chose avait son nom,'[158] and the severest of English moralists recognises the accurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted benevolence, which redeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of d'Alembert and Marmontel.[159] I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days, 'believed' in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were always before them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching to what may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scott gave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the name of the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[160] It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone Scott felt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honourable to portray, that they act and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant liable to any of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the resolution, of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a country and time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that dignified and nobly severe[161] middle class to which he himself belonged, a habit of serene and stainless thought was as natural to the people as their mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie Dinmont were the grace and guard of almost every household (God be praised that the race of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or Boulevard can do), and it has perhaps escaped the notice of even attentive readers that the comparatively uninteresting character of Sir Walter's heroes had always been studied among a class of youths who were simply incapable of doing anything seriously wrong; and could only be embarrassed by the consequences of their levity or imprudence. But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from the cobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of human life. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman, the most important business of their existence;[162] nor love the only reward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in his reading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, either by love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[163] and marriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness of life, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And upon analysing with some care the motives of his principal stories, we shall often find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sterner features of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of the hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be drawn, and deeper fates forth-shadowed. The judgments between the faith and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell bridge owe little of their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the captain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returns a prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the white sail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, very nearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small sense of any consolation to be had out of that minor circumstance,--that 'Roland and Catherine were united, spite of their differing faiths.' Neither let it be thought for an instant that the slight, and sometimes scornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a novelist of our own day would have analysed with the airs of a philosopher, and painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicate any absence in his heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal happiness. An era like ours, which has with diligence and ostentation swept its heart clear of all the passions once known as loyalty, patriotism, and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force of the one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, or clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard with awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to be love. That Scott was never himself, in the sense of the phrase as employed by lovers of the Parisian school, 'ivre d'amour,' may be admitted without prejudice to his sensibility,[164] and that he never knew 'l'amor che move 'l sol e l'altre stelle,' was the chief, though unrecognised, calamity of his deeply chequered life. But the reader of honour and feeling will not therefore suppose that the love which Miss Vernon sacrifices, stooping for an instant from her horse, is of less noble stamp, or less enduring faith, than that which troubles and degrades the whole existence of Consuelo; or that the affection of Jeanie Deans for the companion of her childhood, drawn like a field of soft blue heaven beyond the cloudy wrack of her sorrow, is less fully in possession of her soul than the hesitating and self-reproachful impulses under which a modern heroine forgets herself in a boat, or compromises herself in the cool of the evening. I do not wish to return over the waste ground we have traversed, comparing, point by point, Scott's manner with those of Bermondsey and the Faubourgs; but it may be, perhaps, interesting at this moment to examine, with illustration from those Waverley novels which have so lately _re_tracted the attention of a fair and gentle public, the universal conditions of 'style,' rightly so called, which are in all ages, and above all local currents or wavering tides of temporary manners, pillars of what is for ever strong, and models of what is for ever fair. But I must first define, and that within strict horizon, the works of Scott, in which his perfect mind may be known, and his chosen ways understood. His great works of prose fiction, excepting only the first half-volume of _Waverley_, were all written in twelve years, 1814-26 (of his own age forty-three to fifty-five), the actual time employed in their composition being not more than a couple of months out of each year; and during that time only the morning hours and spare minutes during the professional day. 'Though the first volume of _Waverley_ was begun long ago, and actually lost for a time, yet the other two were begun and finished between the 4th of June and the first of July, during all which I attended my duty in court, and proceeded without loss of time or hindrance of business.'[165] Few of the maxims for the enforcement of which, in _Modern Painters_, long ago, I got the general character of a lover of paradox, are more singular, or more sure, than the statement, apparently so encouraging to the idle, that if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily. But it is in that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms after long years of gathered strength, and all Scott's great writings were the recreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labour, and rich with organic gathering of boundless resource. Omitting from our count the two minor and ill-finished sketches of the _Black Dwarf_ and _Legend of Montrose_, and, for a reason presently to be noticed, the unhappy _St. Ronan's_, the memorable romances of Scott are eighteen, falling into three distinct groups, containing six each. The first group is distinguished from the other two by characters of strength and felicity which never more appeared after Scott was struck down by his terrific illness in 1819. It includes _Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, _The Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old Mortality_, and _The Heart of Midlothian_. The composition of these occupied the mornings of his happiest days, between the ages of 43 and 48. On the 8th of April, 1819 (he was 48 on the preceding 15th of August) he began for the first time to dictate--being unable for the exertion of writing--_The Bride of Lammermuir_, 'the affectionate Laidlaw beseeching him to stop dictating, when his audible suffering filled every pause. "Nay, Willie," he answered "only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as for giving over work, that can only be when I am in woollen."'[166] From this time forward the brightness of joy and sincerity of inevitable humour, which perfected the imagery of the earlier novels, are wholly absent, except in the two short intervals of health unaccountably restored, in which he wrote _Redgauntlet_ and _Nigel_. It is strange, but only a part of the general simplicity of Scott's genius, that these revivals of earlier power were unconscious, and that the time of extreme weakness in which he wrote _St. Ronan's Well_, was that in which he first asserted his own restoration. It is also a deeply interesting characteristic of his noble nature that he never gains anything by sickness; the whole man breathes or faints as one creature; the ache that stiffens a limb chills his heart, and every pang of the stomach paralyses the brain. It is not so with inferior minds, in the workings of which it is often impossible to distinguish native from narcotic fancy, and throbs of conscience from those of indigestion. Whether in exaltation or languor, the colours of mind are always morbid, which gleam on the sea for the 'Ancient Mariner,' and through the casements on 'St. Agnes' Eve;' but Scott is at once blinded and stultified by sickness; never has a fit of the cramp without spoiling a chapter, and is perhaps the only author of vivid imagination who never wrote a foolish word but when he was ill. It remains only to be noticed on this point that any strong natural excitement, affecting the deeper springs of his heart, would at once restore his intellectual powers in all their fullness, and that, far towards their sunset: but that the strong will on which he prided himself, though it could trample upon pain, silence grief, and compel industry, never could warm his imagination, or clear the judgment in his darker hours. I believe that this power of the heart over the intellect is common to all great men: but what the special character of emotion was, that alone could lift Scott above the power of death, I am about to ask the reader, in a little while, to observe with joyful care. The first series of romances then, above named, are all that exhibit the emphasis of his unharmed faculties. The second group, composed in the three years subsequent to illness all but mortal, bear every one of them more or less the seal of it. They consist of the _Bride of Lammermuir_, _Ivanhoe_, the _Monastery_, the _Abbot_, _Kenilworth_, and the _Pirate_.[167] The marks of broken health on all these are essentially twofold--prevailing melancholy, and fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the _Abbot_ scarcely less so in its main event, and _Ivanhoe_ deeply wounded through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the series, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incredibly opportune appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the resuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb in the _Bride_, Triptolemus and Halcro in the _Pirate_, are all laborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the _Abbot_ is spent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with his fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with the future story; and the lady of Avenel herself disappears after the first volume, 'like a snaw wreath when it's thaw, Jeanie.' The public has for itself pronounced on the _Monastery_, though as much too harshly as it has foolishly praised the horrors of _Ravenswood_ and the nonsense of _Ivanhoe_; because the modern public finds in the torture and adventure of these, the kind of excitement which it seeks at an opera, while it has no sympathy whatever with the pastoral happiness of Glendearg, or with the lingering simplicities of superstition which give historical likelihood to the legend of the White Lady. But both this despised tale and its sequel have Scott's heart in them. The first was begun to refresh himself in the intervals of artificial labour on _Ivanhoe_. 'It was a relief,' he said, 'to interlay the scenery most familiar to me[168] with the strange world for which I had to draw so much on imagination.'[169] Through all the closing scenes of the second he is raised to his own true level by his love for the queen. And within the code of Scott's work to which I am about to appeal for illustration of his essential powers, I accept the _Monastery_ and _Abbot_, and reject from it the remaining four of this group. The last series contains two quite noble ones, _Redgauntlet_ and _Nigel_; two of very high value, _Durward_ and _Woodstock_; the slovenly and diffuse _Peveril_, written for the trade; the sickly _Tales of the Crusaders_, and the entirely broken and diseased _St. Ronan's Well_. This last I throw out of count altogether, and of the rest, accept only the four first named as sound work; so that the list of the novels in which I propose to examine his methods and ideal standards, reduces itself to these following twelve (named in order of production): _Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, the _Antiquary_, _Rob Roy_, _Old Mortality_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, the _Monastery_, the _Abbot_, the _Fortunes of Nigel_, _Quentin Durward_, and _Woodstock_.[170] It is, however, too late to enter on my subject in this article, which I may fitly close by pointing out some of the merely verbal characteristics of his style, illustrative in little ways of the questions we have been examining, and chiefly of the one which may be most embarrassing to many readers, the difference, namely, between character and disease. One quite distinctive charm in the Waverleys is their modified use of the Scottish dialect; but it has not generally been observed, either by their imitators, or the authors of different taste who have written for a later public, that there is a difference between the dialect of a language, and its corruption. A dialect is formed in any district where there are persons of intelligence enough to use the language itself in all its fineness and force, but under the particular conditions of life, climate, and temper, which introduce words peculiar to the scenery, forms of word and idioms of sentence peculiar to the race, and pronunciations indicative of their character and disposition. Thus 'burn' (of a streamlet) is a word possible only in a country where there are brightly running waters, 'lassie,' a word possible only where girls are as free as the rivulets, and 'auld,' a form of the southern 'old,' adopted by a race of finer musical ear than the English. On the contrary, mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, and, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, 'broad' forms of utterance, are not dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them, and all phrases developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the speakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the moment the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and monotonous labour, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part of the popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write and spell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms of human speech. Abortive, crippled, or brutal, are however not necessarily 'corrupted' dialects. Corrupt language is that gathered by ignorance, invented by vice, misused by insensibility, or minced and mouthed by affectation, especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only half the meaning is understood, or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's 'aperiently so'--and the 'undermined' with primal sense of undermine, of--I forget which gossip, in the _Mill on the Floss_, are master- and mistress-pieces in this latter kind. Mrs. Malaprop's 'allegories on the banks of the Nile' are in a somewhat higher order of mistake: Miss Tabitha Bramble's ignorance is vulgarised by her selfishness, and Winifred Jenkins' by her conceit. The 'wot' of Noah Claypole, and the other degradations of cockneyism (Sam Weller and his father are in nothing more admirable than in the power of heart and sense that can purify even these); the 'trewth' of Mr. Chadband, and 'natur' of Mr. Squeers, are examples of the corruption of words by insensibility: the use of the word 'bloody' in modern low English is a deeper corruption, not altering the form of the word, but defiling the thought in it. Thus much being understood, I shall proceed to examine thoroughly a fragment of Scott's Lowland Scottish dialect; not choosing it of the most beautiful kind; on the contrary, it shall be a piece reaching as low down as he ever allows Scotch to go--it is perhaps the only unfair patriotism in him, that if ever he wants a word or two of really villainous slang, he gives it in English or Dutch--not Scotch. I had intended in the close of this paper to analyse and compare the characters of Andrew Fairservice and Richie Moniplies for examples, the former of innate evil, unaffected by external influences, and undiseased, but distinct from natural goodness as a nettle is distinct from balm or lavender; and the latter of innate goodness, contracted and pinched by circumstance, but still undiseased, as an oak-leaf crisped by frost, not by the worm. This, with much else in my mind, I must put off; but the careful study of one sentence of Andrew's will give us a good deal to think of. I take his account of the rescue of Glasgow Cathedral at the time of the Reformation. Ah! it's a brave kirk--nane o' yere whigmaleeries and curliewurlies and opensteek hems about it--a' solid, weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as lang as the warld, keep hands and gunpowther aff it. It had amaist a douncome lang syne at the Reformation, when they pu'd doun the kirks of St. Andrews and Perth, and thereawa', to cleanse them o' Papery, and idolatry, and image-worship, and surplices, and sic-like rags o' the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end. Sae the commons o' Renfrew, and o' the Barony, and the Gorbals, and a' about, they behoved to come into Glasgow ae fair morning, to try their hand on purging the High Kirk o' Popish nicknackets. But the townsmen o' Glasgow, they were feared their auld edifice might slip the girths in gaun through siccan rough physic, sae they rang the common bell, and assembled the train-bands wi' took o' drum. By good luck, the worthy James Rabat was Dean o' Guild that year--(and a gude mason he was himsell, made him the keener to keep up the auld bigging), and the trades assembled, and offered downright battle to the commons, rather than their kirk should coup the crans, as others had done elsewhere. It wasna for luve o' Paperie--na, na!--nane could ever say that o' the trades o' Glasgow--Sae they sune came to an agreement to take a' the idolatrous statues of sants (sorrow be on them!) out o' their neuks--And sae the bits o' stane idols were broken in pieces by Scripture warrant, and flung into the Molendinar burn, and the auld kirk stood as crouse as a cat when the flaes are kaimed aff her, and a'body was alike pleased. And I hae heard wise folk say, that if the same had been done in ilka kirk in Scotland, the Reform wad just hae been as pure as it is e'en now, and we wad hae mair Christian-like kirks; for I hae been sae lang in England, that naething will drived out o' my head, that the dog-kennel at Osbaldistone-Hall is better than mony a house o' God in Scotland. Now this sentence is in the first place a piece of Scottish history of quite inestimable and concentrated value. Andrew's temperament is the type of a vast class of Scottish--shall we call it '_sow_-thistlian'--mind, which necessarily takes the view of either Pope or saint that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies in Lebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottish revolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this one paragraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for the sake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for its flavour, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of that coarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part of the history to be told. Secondly, observe that this speech, in the religious passion of it, such as there may be, is entirely sincere. Andrew is a thief, a liar, a coward, and, in the Fair service from which he takes his name, a hypocrite; but in the form of prejudice, which is all that his mind is capable of in the place of religion, he is entirely sincere. He does not in the least pretend detestation of image worship to please his master, or any one else; he honestly scorns the 'carnal morality[171] as dowd and fusionless as rue-leaves at Yule' of the sermon in the upper cathedral; and when wrapt in critical attention to the 'real savour o' doctrine' in the crypt, so completely forgets the hypocrisy of his fair service as to return his master's attempt to disturb him with hard punches of the elbow. Thirdly. He is a man of no mean sagacity, quite up to the average standard of Scottish common sense, not a low one; and, though incapable of understanding any manner of lofty thought or passion, is a shrewd measurer of weaknesses, and not without a spark or two of kindly feeling. See first his sketch of his master's character to Mr. Hammorgaw, beginning: 'He's no a'thegither sae void o' sense, neither;' and then the close of the dialogue: 'But the lad's no a bad lad after a', and he needs some carefu' body to look after him.' Fourthly. He is a good workman; knows his own business well, and can judge of other craft, if sound, or otherwise. All these four qualities of him must be known before we can understand this single speech. Keeping them in mind, I take it up, word by word. You observe, in the outset, Scott makes no attempt whatever to indicate accents or modes of pronunciation by changed spelling, unless the word becomes a quite definitely new and scarcely writeable one. The Scottish way of pronouncing 'James,' for instance, is entirely peculiar, and extremely pleasant to the ear. But it is so, just because it does _not_ change the word into Jeems, nor into Jims, nor into Jawms. A modern writer of dialects would think it amusing to use one or other of these ugly spellings. But Scott writes the name in pure English, knowing that a Scots reader will speak it rightly, and an English one be wise in letting it alone. On the other hand he writes 'weel' for 'well,' because that word is complete in its change, and may be very closely expressed by the double _e_. The ambiguous '_u_'s in 'gude' and 'sune' are admitted, because far liker the sound than the double _o_ would be, and that in 'hure,' for grace' sake, to soften the word;--so also 'flaes' for 'fleas.' 'Mony' for 'many' is again positively right in sound, and 'neuk' differs from our 'nook' in sense, and is not the same word at all, as we shall presently see. Secondly, observe, not a word is corrupted in any indecent haste, slowness, slovenliness, or incapacity of pronunciation. There is no lisping, drawling, slobbering, or snuffling: the speech is as clear as a bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are either melodious, ('na,' for 'not,'--'pu'd,' for 'pulled,') or as normal as in a Latin verse. The long words are delivered without the slightest bungling; and 'bigging' finished to its last _g_. I take the important words now in their places. _Brave._ The old English sense of the word in 'to go brave' retained, expressing Andrew's sincere and respectful admiration. Had he meant to insinuate a hint of the church's being too fine, he would have said 'braw.' _Kirk._ This is of course just as pure and unprovincial a word as 'Kirche,' or 'église.' _Whigmaleerie._ I cannot get at the root of this word, but it is one showing that the speaker is not bound by classic rules, but will use any syllables that enrich his meaning. 'Nipperty-tipperty' (of his master's 'poetry-nonsense') is another word of the same class. 'Curlieurlie' is of course just as pure as Shakespeare's 'Hurly-burly.' But see first suggestion of the idea to Scott at Blair-Adam (L. vi. 264). _Opensteek hems._ More description, or better, of the later Gothic cannot be put into four syllables. 'Steek,' melodious for stitch, has a combined sense of closing or fastening. And note that the later Gothic, being precisely what Scott knew best (in Melrose) and liked best, it is, here as elsewhere, quite as much himself[172] as Frank, that he is laughing at, when he laughs _with_ Andrew, whose 'opensteek hems' are only a ruder metaphor for his own 'willow-wreaths changed to stone.' _Gunpowther._ '-Ther' is a lingering vestige of the French '-dre.' _Syne._ One of the melodious and mysterious Scottish words which have partly the sound of wind and stream in them, and partly the range of softened idea which is like a distance of blue hills over border land ('far in the distant Cheviot's blue'). Perhaps even the least sympathetic 'Englisher' might recognise this, if he heard 'Old Long Since' vocally substituted for the Scottish words to the air. I do not know the root; but the word's proper meaning is not 'since,' but before or after an interval of some duration, 'as weel sune as syne.' 'But first on Sawnie gies a ca', Syne, bauldly in she enters.' _Behoved_ (_to come_). A rich word, with peculiar idiom, always used more or less ironically of anything done under a partly mistaken and partly pretended notion of duty. _Siccan._ Far prettier, and fuller in meaning than 'such.' It contains an added sense of wonder; and means properly 'so great' or 'so unusual.' _Took_ (_o' drum_). Classical 'tuck' from Italian 'toccata,' the preluding 'touch' or flourish, on any instrument (but see Johnson under word 'tucket,' quoting _Othello_). The deeper Scottish vowels are used here to mark the deeper sound of the bass drum, as in more solemn warning. _Bigging._ The only word in all the sentence of which the Scottish form is less melodious than the English, 'and what for no,' seeing that Scottish architecture is mostly little beyond Bessie Bell's and Mary Gray's? 'They biggit a bow're by yon burnside, and theekit it ow're wi rashes.' But it is pure Anglo-Saxon in roots; see glossary to Fairbairn's edition of the Douglas _Virgil_, 1710. _Coup._ Another of the much-embracing words; short for 'upset,' but with a sense of awkwardness as the inherent cause of fall; compare Richie Moniplies (also for sense of 'behoved'): 'Ae auld hirplin deevil of a potter behoved just to step in my way, and offer me a pig (earthern pot--etym. dub.), as he said "just to put my Scotch ointment in;" and I gave him a push, as but natural, and the tottering deevil coupit owre amang his own pigs, and damaged a score of them.' So also Dandie Dinmont in the postchaise: ''Od! I hope they'll no coup us.' _The Crans._ Idiomatic; root unknown to me, but it means in this use, full, total, and without recovery. _Molendinar._ From 'molendinum,' the grinding-place. I do not know if actually the local name,[173] or Scott's invention. Compare Sir Piercie's 'Molinaras.' But at all events used here with bye-sense of degradation of the formerly idle saints to grind at the mill. _Crouse._ Courageous, softened with a sense of comfort. _Ilka._ Again a word with azure distance, including the whole sense of 'each' and 'every.' The reader must carefully and reverently distinguish these comprehensive words, which gather two or more perfectly understood meanings into one _chord_ of meaning, and are harmonies more than words, from the above-noted blunders between two half-hit meanings, struck as a bad piano-player strikes the edge of another note. In English we have fewer of these combined thoughts; so that Shakespeare rather plays with the distinct lights of his words, than melts them into one. So again Bishop Douglas spells, and doubtless spoke, the word 'rose,' differently, according to his purpose; if as the chief or governing ruler of flowers, 'rois,' but if only in her own beauty, rose. _Christian-like._ The sense of the decency and order proper to Christianity is stronger in Scotland than in any other country, and the word 'Christian' more distinctly opposed to 'beast.' Hence the back-handed cut at the English for their over-pious care of dogs. I am a little surprised myself at the length to which this examination of one small piece of Sir Walter's first-rate work has carried us, but here I must end for this time, trusting, if the Editor of the _Nineteenth Century_ permit me, yet to trespass, perhaps more than once, on his readers' patience; but, at all events, to examine in a following paper the technical characteristics of Scott's own style, both in prose and verse, together with Byron's, as opposed to our fashionably recent dialects and rhythms; the essential virtues of language, in both the masters of the old school, hinging ultimately, little as it might be thought, on certain unalterable views of theirs concerning the code called 'of the Ten Commandments,' wholly at variance with the dogmas of automatic morality which, summed again by the witches' line, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair,' hover through the fog and filthy air of our prosperous England. JOHN RUSKIN. * * * * * '_He hated greetings in the market-place_, and there were generally loiterers in the streets to persecute him _either about the events of the day_, or about some petty pieces of business.' These lines, which the reader will find near the beginning of the sixteenth chapter of the first volume of the _Antiquary_, contain two indications of the old man's character, which, receiving the ideal of him as a portrait of Scott himself, are of extreme interest to me. They mean essentially that neither Monkbarns nor Scott had any mind to be called of men, Rabbi, in mere hearing of the mob; and especially that they hated to be drawn back out of their far-away thoughts, or forward out of their long-ago thoughts, by any manner of 'daily' news, whether printed or gabbled. Of which two vital characteristics, deeper in both the men, (for I must always speak of Scott's creations as if they were as real as himself,) than any of their superficial vanities, or passing enthusiasms, I have to speak more at another time. I quote the passage just now, because there was one piece of the daily news of the year 1815 which did extremely interest Scott, and materially direct the labour of the latter part of his life; nor is there any piece of history in this whole nineteenth century quite so pregnant with various instruction as the study of the reasons which influenced Scott and Byron in their opposite views of the glories of the battle of Waterloo. But I quote it for another reason also. The principal greeting which Mr. Oldbuck on this occasion receives in the market-place, being compared with the speech of Andrew Fairservice, examined in my first paper, will furnish me with the text of what I have mainly to say in the present one. '"Mr. Oldbuck," said the town-clerk (a more important person, who came in front and ventured to stop the old gentleman), "the provost, understanding you were in town, begs on no account that you'll quit it without seeing him; he wants to speak to ye about bringing the water frae the Fairwell spring through a part o' your lands." '"What the deuce!--have they nobody's land but mine to cut and carve on?--I won't consent, tell them." '"And the provost," said the clerk, going on, without noticing the rebuff, "and the council, wad be agreeable that you should hae the auld stanes at Donagild's Chapel, that ye was wussing to hae." '"Eh?--what?--Oho! that's another story--Well, well, I'll call upon the provost, and we'll talk about it." '"But ye maun speak your mind on't forthwith, Monkbarns, if ye want the stanes; for Deacon Harlewalls thinks the carved through-stanes might be put with advantage on the front of the new council-house--that is, the twa cross-legged figures that the callants used to ca' Robbin and Bobbin, ane on ilka door-cheek; and the other stane, that they ca'd Ailie Dailie, abune the door. It will be very tastefu', the Deacon says, and just in the style of modern Gothic." '"Good Lord deliver me from this Gothic generation!" exclaimed the Antiquary,--"a monument of a knight-templar on each side of a Grecian porch, and a Madonna on the top of it!--_O crimini!_--Well, tell the provost I wish to have the stones, and we'll not differ about the water-course.--It's lucky I happened to come this way to-day." 'They parted mutually satisfied; but the wily clerk had most reason to exult in the dexterity he had displayed, since the whole proposal of an exchange between the monuments (which the council had determined to remove as a nuisance, because they encroached three feet upon the public road) and the privilege of conveying the water to the burgh, through the estate of Monkbarns, was an idea which had originated with himself upon the pressure of the moment.' In this single page of Scott, will the reader please note the kind of prophetic instinct with which the great men of every age mark and forecast its destinies? The water from the Fairwell is the future Thirlmere carried to Manchester; the 'auld stanes'[174] at Donagild's Chapel, removed as a _nuisance_, foretell the necessary view taken by modern cockneyism, Liberalism, and progress, of all things that remind them of the noble dead, of their father's fame, or of their own duty; and the public road becomes their idol, instead of the saint's shrine. Finally, the roguery of the entire transaction--the mean man seeing the weakness of the honourable, and 'besting' him--in modern slang, in the manner and at the pace of modern trade--'on the pressure of the moment.' But neither are these things what I have at present quoted the passage for. I quote it, that we may consider how much wonderful and various history is gathered in the fact, recorded for us in this piece of entirely fair fiction, that in the Scottish borough of Fairport, (Montrose, really,) in the year 17-- of Christ, the knowledge given by the pastors and teachers provided for its children by enlightened Scottish Protestantism, of their fathers' history, and the origin of their religion, had resulted in this substance and sum;--that the statues of two crusading knights had become, to their children, Robin and Bobbin; and the statue of the Madonna, Ailie Dailie. A marvellous piece of history, truly: and far too comprehensive for general comment here. Only one small piece of it I must carry forward the readers' thoughts upon. The pastors and teachers aforesaid, (represented typically in another part of this errorless book by Mr. Blattergowl) are not, whatever else they may have to answer for, answerable for these names. The names are of the children's own choosing and bestowing, but not of the children's own inventing. 'Robin' is a classically endearing cognomen, recording the _errant_ heroism of old days--the name of the Bruce and of Rob Roy. 'Bobbin' is a poetical and symmetrical fulfilment and adornment of the original phrase. 'Ailie' is the last echo of 'Ave,' changed into the softest Scottish Christian name familiar to the children, itself the beautiful feminine form of royal 'Louis;' the 'Dailie' again symmetrically added for kinder and more musical endearment. The last vestiges, you see, of honour for the heroism and religion of their ancestors, lingering on the lips of babes and sucklings. But what is the meaning of this necessity the children find themselves under of completing the nomenclature rhythmically and rhymingly? Note first the difference carefully, and the attainment of both qualities by the couplets in question. Rhythm is the syllabic and quantitative measure of the words, in which Robin, both in weight and time, balances Bobbin; and Dailie holds level scale with Ailie. But rhyme is the added correspondence of sound; unknown and undesired, so far as we can learn, by the Greek Orpheus, but absolutely essential to, and, as special virtue, becoming titular of, the Scottish Thomas. The 'Ryme,'[175] you may at first fancy, is the especially childish part of the work. Not so. It is the especially chivalric and Christian part of it. It characterises the Christian chant or canticle, as a higher thing than a Greek ode, melos, or hymnos, or than a Latin carmen. Think of it, for this again is wonderful! That these children of Montrose should have an element of music in their souls which Homer had not,--which a melos of David the Prophet and King had not,--which Orpheus and Amphion had not,--which Apollo's unrymed oracles became mute at the sound of. A strange new equity this,--melodious justice and judgment as it were,--in all words spoken solemnly and ritualistically by Christian human creatures;--Robin and Bobbin--by the Crusader's tomb, up to 'Dies iræ, dies illa,' at judgment of the crusading soul. You have to understand this most deeply of all Christian minstrels, from first to last; that they are more musical, because more joyful, than any others on earth: ethereal minstrels, pilgrims of the sky, true to the kindred points of heaven and home; their joy essentially the sky-lark's, in light, in purity; but, with their human eyes, looking for the glorious appearing of something in the sky, which the bird cannot. This it is that changes Etruscan murmur into Terza rima--Horatian Latin into Provençal troubadour's melody; not, because less artful, less wise. Here is a little bit, for instance, of French ryming just before Chaucer's time--near enough to our own French to be intelligible to us yet. 'O quant très-glorieuse vie, Quant cil quit out peut et maistrie, Veult esprouver pour nécessaire, Ne pour quant il ne blasma mie La vie de Marthe sa mie: Mais il lui donna exemplaire D'autrement vivre, et de bien plaire A Dieu; et plut de bien à faire: Pour se conclut-il que Marie Qui estoit à ses piedz sans braire, Et pensait d'entendre et de taire, Estleut la plus saine partie. La meilleur partie esleut-elle Et la plus saine et la plus belle, Qui jà ne luy sera ostée Car par vérité se fut celle Qui fut tousjours fresche et nouvelle, D'aymer Dieu et d'en estre aymée; Car jusqu'au cueur fut entamée, Et si ardamment enflammée. Que tous-jours ardoit l'estincelle; Par quoi elle fut visitée Et de Dieu premier comfortée; Car charité est trop ysnelle.' The only law of _metre_, observed in this song, is that each line shall be octosyllabic: Qui fut | tousjours | fresche et | nouvelle, D'autre | ment vi | vret de | bien (ben) plaire, Et pen | soit den | tendret | de taire But the reader must note that words which were two-syllabled in Latin mostly remain yet so in the French. La _vi_ | -_e_ de | Marthe | sa mie, although _mie_, which is pet language, loving abbreviation of _amica_ through _amie_, remains monosyllabic. But _vie_ elides its _e_ before a vowel: Car Mar- | the me | nait vie | active Et Ma- | ri-e | contemp | lative; and custom endures many exceptions. Thus _Marie_ may be three-syllabled as above, or answer to _mie_ as a dissyllable; but _vierge_ is always, I think, dissyllabic, _vier-ge_, with even stronger accent on the -_ge_, for the Latin -_go_. Then, secondly, of quantity, there is scarcely any fixed law. The metres may be timed as the minstrel chooses--fast or slow--and the iambic current checked in reverted eddy, as the words chance to come. But, thirdly, there is to be rich ryming and chiming, no matter how simply got, so only that the words jingle and tingle together with due art of interlacing and answering in different parts of the stanza, correspondent to the involutions of tracery and illumination. The whole twelve-line stanza is thus constructed with two rymes only, six of each, thus arranged: AAB | AAB | BBA | BBA | dividing the verse thus into four measures, reversed in ascent and descent, or _descant_ more properly; and doubtless with correspondent phases in the voice-given, and duly accompanying, or following, music; Thomas the Rymer's own precept, that 'tong is chefe in mynstrelsye,' being always kept faithfully in mind.[176] Here then you have a sufficient example of the pure chant of the Christian ages; which is always at heart joyful, and divides itself into the four great forms, Song of Praise, Song of Prayer, Song of Love, and Song of Battle; praise, however, being the keynote of passion through all the four forms; according to the first law which I have already given in the laws of Fesolé; 'all great Art is Praise,' of which the contrary is also true, all foul or miscreant Art is accusation, [Greek: diabolê]: 'She gave me of the tree and I did eat' being an entirely museless expression on Adam's part, the briefly essential contrary of Love-song. With these four perfect forms of Christian chant, of which we may take for pure examples the 'Te Deum,' the 'Te Lucis Ante,' the 'Amor che nella mente,'[177] and the 'Chant de Roland,' are mingled songs of mourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp still of the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering and sorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chiefly the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody vanish in the 'Vanity of human wishes.' And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the different branches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, the reader must please put for the present out of his head all thought of the progress of 'civilisation'--that is to say, broadly, of the substitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. This is an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion. It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the French Revolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certain subtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice, which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes her prefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to be dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr. Johnson might have worn his wig in fulness conforming to his dignity, without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain; nor is Queen Antoinette's civilised hair-powder, as opposed to Queen Bertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying her head at last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb. Again, I have just now used the words 'poet' and 'dunce,' meaning the degree of each quality possible to average human nature. Men are eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and _de_formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore _benedicti_, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore _maledicti_, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant vulgus. So also, whether it is indeed the gods who have given any gentleman the grace to despise the rabble, depends wholly on whether it is indeed the rabble, or he, who are the malignant persons. But yet again. This difference between the persons to whom Heaven, according to Orpheus, has granted 'the hour of delight,'[178] and those whom it has condemned to the hour of detestableness, being, as I have just said, of all times and nations,--it is an interior and more delicate difference which we are examining in the gift of _Christian_, as distinguished from unchristian, song. Orpheus, Pindar, and Horace are indeed distinct from the prosaic rabble, as the bird from the snake; but between Orpheus and Palestrina, Horace and Sidney, there is another division, and a new power of music and song given to the humanity which has hope of the Resurrection. _This_ is the root of all life and all rightness in Christian harmony, whether of word or instrument; and so literally, that in precise manner as this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken away utterly. When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of the Resurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have known the hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, or Philomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare that the human wishes, which are summed in that one--'Thy kingdom come'--are vain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing after that denial. For observe this, and earnestly. The old Orphic song, with its dim hope of yet once more Eurydice,--the Philomela song--granted after the cruel silence,--the Halcyon song--with its fifteen days of peace, were all sad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But the Johnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory to Johnson--accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope--triumphantly and with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed for the glorious discovery of the civilised ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not invented gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[179] There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the Day of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the flat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but only gravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting hail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in which our worships were born. And there is no Gospel, but only, whatever we've got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And are not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled of, and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century song of praise? The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping, suddenly Astræa returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort, and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious triplet of Amphisbænic ryme. '_Ça ira._' Amphisbænic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's precept, 'Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye,' to the syllable.--Don Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted 'Andiam, andiam,' become suddenly impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A cry--before it is a song, then song and accompaniment together--perfectly done; and the march 'towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fifty thousand--they to the sound of stringed music--preceded by young girls with tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldier-wise their shovels and picks, and with one throat are singing _Ça ira_.'[180] Through all the springtime of 1790, 'from Brittany to Burgundy, on most plains of France, under most city walls, there march and constitutionally wheel to the Ça-iraing mood of fife and drum--our clear glancing phalanxes;--the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand, virgin led, is in the long light of July.' Nevertheless, another song is yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers having gone--amphisbænic,--on the 28th of August 1792, 'Dumouriez rode from the camp of Maulde, eastwards to _Sedan_.'[181] And Longwi has fallen basely, and Brunswick and the Prussian king will beleaguer Verdun, and Clairfait and the Austrians press deeper in over the northern marches, Cimmerian Europe behind. And on that same night Dumouriez assembles council of war at his lodgings in Sedan. Prussians here, Austrians there, triumphant both. With broad highway to Paris and little hindrance--_we_ scattered, helpless here and there--what to advise? The generals advise retreating, and retreating till Paris be sacked at the latest day possible. Dumouriez, silent, dismisses _them_,--keeps only, with a sign, Thouvenot. Silent, thus, when needful, yet having voice, it appears, of what musicians call tenor-quality, of a rare kind. Rubini-esque, even, but scarcely producible to fastidious ears at opera. The seizure of the forest of Argonne follows--the cannonade of Valmy. The Prussians do not march on Paris _this_ time, the autumnal hours of fate pass on--_ça ira_--and on the 6th of November, Dumouriez meets the Austrians also. 'Dumouriez wide-winged, they wide-winged--at and around Jemappes, its green heights fringed and maned with red fire. And Dumouriez is swept back on this wing and swept back on that, and is like to be swept back utterly, when he rushes up in person, speaks a prompt word or two, and then, with clear tenor-pipe, uplifts the hymn of the Marseillaise, ten thousand tenor or bass pipes joining, or say some forty thousand in all, for every heart leaps up at the sound; and so, with rhythmic march melody, they rally, they advance, they rush death-defying, and like the fire whirlwind sweep all manner of Austrians from the scene of action.' Thus, through the lips of Dumouriez, sings Tyrtæus, Rouget de Lisle,[182] 'Aux armes--marchons!' Iambic measure with a witness! in what wide strophe here beginning--in what unthought-of antistrophe returning to that council chamber in Sedan! While these two great songs were thus being composed, and sung, and danced to in cometary cycle, by the French nation, here in our less giddy island there rose, amidst hours of business in Scotland and of idleness in England, three troubadours of quite different temper. Different also themselves, but not opponent; forming a perfect chord, and adverse all the three of them alike to the French musicians, in this main point--that while the _Ça ira_ and Marseillaise were essentially songs of blame and wrath, the British bards wrote, virtually, always songs of praise, though by no means psalmody in the ancient keys. On the contrary, all the three are alike moved by a singular antipathy to the priests, and are pointed at with fear and indignation by the pietists, of their day;--not without latent cause. For they are all of them, with the most loving service, servants of that world which the Puritan and monk alike despised; and, in the triple chord of their song, could not but appear to the religious persons around them as respectively and specifically the praisers--Scott of the world, Burns of the flesh, and Byron of the devil. To contend with this carnal orchestra, the religious world, having long ago rejected its Catholic Psalms as antiquated and unscientific, and finding its Puritan melodies sunk into faint jar and twangle from their native trumpet-tone, had nothing to oppose but the innocent, rather than religious, verses of the school recognised as that of the English Lakes; very creditable to them; domestic at once and refined; observing the errors of the world outside of the Lakes with a pitying and tender indignation, and arriving in lacustrine seclusion at many valuable principles of philosophy, as pure as the tarns of their mountains, and of corresponding depth.[183] I have lately seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold's arrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest his high estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangement by other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How should clearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, we must not forget that, over yonder, are the Andes, all the while. Wordsworth's rank and scale among poets were determined by himself, in a single exclamation:-- 'What was the great Parnassus' self to thee, Mount Skiddaw?' Answer his question faithfully, and you have the relation between the great masters of the Muse's teaching, and the pleasant fingerer of his pastoral flute among the reeds of Rydal. Wordsworth is simply a Westmoreland peasant, with considerably less shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no sense of humour: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of natural beauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as far as they reach, medicinal to the fever of the restless and corrupted life around him. Water to parched lips may be better than Samian wine, but do not let us therefore confuse the qualities of wine and water. I much doubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards; but I am very sure there are many Wordsworths resting there, who were inferior to the renowned one only in caring less to hear themselves talk. With an honest and kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesome contentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in that accepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time in wishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, and other such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth has left us a series of studies of the graceful and happy shepherd life of our lake country, which to me personally, for one, are entirely sweet and precious; but they are only so as the mirror of an existent reality in many ways more beautiful than its picture. But the other day I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of one of our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearly midway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhill walk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made tea for me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. 'Why do not you go to the nearer church?' I asked. 'Don't you like the clergyman?' 'Oh no, sir,' she answered, 'it isn't that; but you know I couldn't leave my mother.' 'Your mother! she is buried at H---- then?' 'Yes, sir; and you know I couldn't go to church anywhere else.' That feelings such as these existed among the peasants, not of Cumberland only, but of all the tender earth that gives forth her fruit for the living, and receives her dead to peace, might perhaps have been, to our great and endless comfort, discovered before now, if Wordsworth had been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people, not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simply as a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, kind to the parish children, and reverent of the spade with which Wilkinson had tilled his lands: and I am by no means sure that his influence on the stronger minds of his time was anywise hastened or extended by the spirit of tunefulness under whose guidance he discovered that heaven rhymed to seven, and Foy to boy. Tuneful nevertheless at heart, and of the heavenly choir, I gladly and frankly acknowledge him; and our English literature enriched with a new and a singular virtue in the aërial purity and healthful rightness of his quiet song;--but _aërial_ only,--not ethereal; and lowly in its privacy of light. A measured mind, and calm; innocent, unrepentant; helpful to sinless creatures and scatheless, such of the flock as do not stray. Hopeful at least, if not faithful; content with intimations of immortality such as may be in skipping of lambs, and laughter of children,--incurious to see in the hands the print of the Nails. A gracious and constant mind; as the herbage of its native hills, fragrant and pure;--yet, to the sweep and the shadow, the stress and distress, of the greater souls of men, as the tufted thyme to the laurel wilderness of Tempe,--as the gleaming euphrasy to the dark branches of Dodona. * * * * * [I am obliged to defer the main body of this paper to next month,--revises penetrating all too late into my lacustrine seclusion; as chanced also unluckily with the preceding paper, in which the reader will perhaps kindly correct the consequent misprints, p. 29, l. 20, of 'scarcely' to 'securely,' and p. 31, l. 34, 'full,' with comma, to 'fall,' without one; noticing besides that _Redgauntlet_ has been omitted in the italicised list, p. 25, l. 16; and that the reference to note 2 should not be at the word 'imagination,' p. 24, but at the word 'trade,' p. 25, l. 7. My dear old friend, Dr. John Brown, sends me, from Jamieson's _Dictionary_, the following satisfactory end to one of my difficulties:--'Coup the crans.' The language is borrowed from the 'cran,' or trivet on which small pots are placed in cookery, which is sometimes turned with its feet uppermost by an awkward assistant. Thus it signifies to be _completely_ upset.] JOHN RUSKIN. [BYRON.] 'Parching summer hath no warrant To consume this crystal well; Rains, that make each brook a torrent, Neither sully it, nor swell.' So was it, year by year, among the unthought-of hills. Little Duddon and child Rotha ran clear and glad; and laughed from ledge to pool, and opened from pool to mere, translucent, through endless days of peace. But eastward, between her orchard plains, Loire locked her embracing dead in silent sands; dark with blood rolled Iser; glacial-pale, Beresina-Lethe, by whose shore the weary hearts forgot their people, and their father's house. Nor unsullied, Tiber; nor unswoln, Arno and Aufidus; and Euroclydon high on Helle's wave; meantime, let our happy piety glorify the garden rocks with snowdrop circlet, and breathe the spirit of Paradise, where life is wise and innocent. Maps many have we, now-a-days clear in display of earth constituent, air current, and ocean tide. Shall we ever engrave the map of meaner research, whose shadings shall content themselves in the task of showing the depth, or drought,--the calm, or trouble, of Human Compassion? For this is indeed all that is noble in the life of Man, and the source of all that is noble in the speech of Man. Had it narrowed itself then, in those days, out of all the world, into this peninsula between Cockermouth and Shap? Not altogether so; but indeed the _Vocal_ piety seemed conclusively to have retired (or excursed?) into that mossy hermitage, above Little Langdale. The _Un_vocal piety, with the uncomplaining sorrow, of Man, may have had a somewhat wider range, for aught we know: but history disregards those items; and of firmly proclaimed and sweetly canorous religion, there really seemed at that juncture none to be reckoned upon, east of Ingleborough, or north of Criffel. Only under Furness Fells, or by Bolton Priory, it seems we can still write Ecclesiastical Sonnets, stanzas on the force of Prayer, Odes to Duty, and complimentary addresses to the Deity upon His endurance for adoration. Far otherwise, over yonder, by Spezzia Bay, and Ravenna Pineta, and in ravines of Hartz. There, the softest voices speak the wildest words; and Keats discourses of Endymion, Shelley of Demogorgon, Goethe of Lucifer, and Bürger of the Resurrection of Death unto Death--while even Puritan Scotland and Episcopal Anglia produce for us only these three minstrels of doubtful tone, who show but small respect for the 'unco guid,' put but limited faith in gifted Gilfillan, and translate with unflinching frankness the _Morgante Maggiore_.[184] Dismal the aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of it, might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of the period--dismal in angels' eyes also assuredly! Yet is it possible that the dismalness in angelic sight may be otherwise quartered, as it were, from the way of mortal heraldry; and that seen, and heard, of angels,--again I say--hesitatingly--_is_ it possible that the goodness of the Unco Guid, and the gift of Gilfillan, and the word of Mr. Blattergowl, may severally not have been the goodness of God, the gift of God, nor the word of God: but that in the much blotted and broken efforts at goodness, and in the careless gift which they themselves despised,[185] and in the sweet ryme and murmur of their unpurposed words, the Spirit of the Lord had, indeed, wandering, as in chaos days on lightless waters, gone forth in the hearts and from the lips of those other three strange prophets, even though they ate forbidden bread by the altar of the poured-out ashes, and even though the wild beast of the desert found them, and slew. This, at least, I know, that it had been well for England, though all her other prophets, of the Press, the Parliament, the Doctor's chair, and the Bishop's throne, had fallen silent; so only that she had been able to understand with her heart here and there the simplest line of these, her despised. I take one at mere chance: 'Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?'[186] Well, I don't know; Mr. Wordsworth certainly did, and observed, with truth, that its clouds took a sober colouring in consequence of his experiences. It is much if, indeed, this sadness be unselfish, and our eyes _have_ kept loving watch o'er Man's Mortality. I have found it difficult to make any one now-a-days believe that such sobriety can be; and that Turner saw deeper crimson than others in the clouds of Goldau. But that any should yet think the clouds brightened by Man's _Im_mortality instead of dulled by his death,--and, gazing on the sky, look for the day when every eye must gaze also--for behold, He cometh with the clouds--this it is no more possible for Christian England to apprehend, however exhorted by her gifted and guid. 'But Byron was not thinking of such things!'--He, the reprobate! how should such as he think of Christ? Perhaps not wholly as you or I think of Him. Take, at chance, another line or two, to try: 'Carnage (so Wordsworth tells you) is God's daughter;[187] If _he_ speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and Just now, behaved as in the Holy Land.' Blasphemy, cry you, good reader? Are you sure you understand it? The first line I gave you was easy Byron--almost shallow Byron--these are of the man in his depth, and you will not fathom them, like a tarn,--nor in a hurry. 'Just now behaved as in the Holy Land.' How _did_ Carnage behave in the Holy Land then? You have all been greatly questioning, of late, whether the sun, which you find to be now going out, ever stood still. Did you in any lagging minute, on those scientific occasions, chance to reflect what he was bid stand still _for_? or if not--will you please look--and what, also, going forth again as a strong man to run his course, he saw, rejoicing? 'Then Joshua passed from Makkedah unto Libnah--and fought against Libnah. And the Lord delivered it and the king thereof into the hand of Israel, and he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein.' And from Lachish to Eglon, and from Eglon to Kirjath-Arba, and Sarah's grave in the Amorites' land, 'and Joshua smote all the country of the hills and of the south--and of the vale and of the springs, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed--as the Lord God of Israel commanded.' Thus 'it is written:' though you perhaps do not so often hear _these_ texts preached from, as certain others about taking away the sins of the world. I wonder how the world would like to part with them! hitherto it has always preferred parting first with its Life--and God has taken it at its word. But Death is not _His_ Begotten Son, for all that; nor is the death of the innocent in battle carnage His 'instrument for working out a pure intent' as Mr. Wordsworth puts it; but Man's instrument for working out an impure one, as Byron would have you to know. Theology perhaps less orthodox, but certainly more reverent;--neither is the Woolwich Infant a Child of God; neither does the iron-clad 'Thunderer' utter thunders of God--which facts, if you had had the grace or sense to learn from Byron, instead of accusing him of blasphemy, it had been better at this day for _you_, and for many a savage soul also, by Euxine shore, and in Zulu and Afghan lands. It was neither, however, for the theology, nor the use, of these lines that I quoted them; but to note this main point of Byron's own character. He was the first great Englishman who felt the cruelty of war, and, in its cruelty, the shame. Its guilt had been known to George Fox--its folly shown practically by Penn. But the _compassion_ of the pious world had still for the most part been shown only in keeping its stock of Barabbases unhanged if possible: and, till Byron came, neither Kunersdorf, Eylau, nor Waterloo, had taught the pity and the pride of men that 'The drying up a single tear has more Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.'[188] Such pacific verse would not indeed have been acceptable to the Edinburgh volunteers on Portobello sands. But Byron can write a battle song too, when it is _his_ cue to fight. If you look at the introduction to the _Isles of Greece_, namely the 85th and 86th stanzas of the 3rd canto of _Don Juan_,--you will find--what will you _not_ find, if only you understand them! 'He' in the first line, remember, means the typical modern poet. 'Thus usually, when he was asked to sing, He gave the different nations something national. 'Twas all the same to him--"God save the King" Or "Ça ira" according to the fashion all; His muse made increment of anything From the high lyric down to the low rational: If Pindar sang horse races, what should hinder Himself from being as pliable as Pindar? 'In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In England a six-canto quarto tale; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on The last war--much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on Would be old Goethe's--(see what says de Staël) In Italy he'd ape the 'Trecentisti;' In Greece, he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t' ye. Note first here, as we did in Scott, the concentrating and foretelling power. The 'God Save the Queen' in England, fallen hollow now, as the 'Ça ira' in France--not a man in France knowing where either France or 'that' (whatever 'that' may be) is going to; nor the Queen of England daring, for her life, to ask the tiniest Englishman to do a single thing he doesn't like;--nor any salvation, either of Queen or Realm, being any more possible to God, unless under the direction of the Royal Society: then, note the estimate of height and depth in poetry, swept in an instant, 'high lyric to low rational.' Pindar to Pope (knowing Pope's height, too, all the while, no man better); then, the poetic power of France--resumed in a word--Béranger; then the cut at Marmion, entirely deserved, as we shall see, yet kindly given, for everything he names in these two stanzas is the best of its kind; then Romance in Spain on--the _last_ war, (_present_ war not being to Spanish poetical taste), then, Goethe the real heart of all Germany, and last, the aping of the Trecentisti which has since consummated itself in Pre-Raphaelitism! that also being the best thing Italy has done through England, whether in Rossetti's 'blessed damozels' or Burne Jones's 'days of creation.' Lastly comes the mock at himself--the modern English Greek--(followed up by the 'degenerate into hands like mine' in the song itself); and then--to amazement, forth he thunders in his Achilles voice. We have had one line of him in his clearness--five of him in his depth--sixteen of him in his play. Hear now but these, out of his whole heart:-- 'What,--silent yet? and silent _all_? Ah no, the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, "Let _one_ living head, But one, arise--we come--we come:" --'Tis but the living who are dumb.' Resurrection, this, you see like Bürger's; but not of death unto death. 'Sound like a distant torrent's fall.' I said the _whole_ heart of Byron was in this passage. First its compassion, then its indignation, and the third element, not yet examined, that love of the beauty of this world in which the three--unholy--children, of its Fiery Furnace were like to each other; but Byron the widest-hearted. Scott and Burns love Scotland more than Nature itself: for Burns the moon must rise over Cumnock Hills,--for Scott, the Rymer's glen divide the Eildons; but, for Byron, Loch-na-Gar _with Ida_, looks o'er Troy, and the soft murmurs of the Dee and the Bruar change into voices of the dead on distant Marathon. Yet take the parallel from Scott, by a field of homelier rest:-- 'And silence aids--though the steep hills Send to the lake a thousand rills; In summer tide, so soft they weep, The sound but lulls the ear asleep; Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude, So stilly is the solitude. Naught living meets the eye or ear, But well I ween the dead are near; For though, in feudal strife, a foe Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low, Yet still beneath the hallowed soil, The peasant rests him from his toil, And, dying, bids his bones be laid Where erst his simple fathers prayed.' And last take the same note of sorrow--with Burns's finger on the fall of it: 'Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens, Ye hazly shaws and briery dens, Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens Wi' toddlin' din, Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens Frae lin to lin.' As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the great masters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in their passion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from that of 'Parching summer hath no warrant'? Is it more profane, think you--or more tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true? For instance, when we are told that 'Wharfe, as he moved along, To matins joined a mournful voice,' is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite logically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no means rhythmically dulcet,) that 'The boy is in the arms of Wharfe, And strangled by a merciless force'? Or, when we are led into the improving reflection, 'How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more Then 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline, From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!' --is the divinity of the extract assured to us by its being made at leisure, and in a reclining attitude--as compared with the meditations of otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many of us, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity and Humanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position? On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few words more of the school of Belial? Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Some very wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically, into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselves safe, indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them to drink: 'A little stream came tumbling from the height And straggling into ocean as it might. Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray, Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure And fresh as Innocence; and more secure. Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep, While, far below, the vast and sullen swell Of ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell.'[189] Now, I beg, with such authority as an old workman may take concerning his trade, having also looked at a waterfall or two in my time, and not unfrequently at a wave, to assure the reader that here _is_ entirely first-rate literary work. Though Lucifer himself had written it, the thing is itself good, and not only so, but unsurpassably good, the closing line being probably the best concerning the sea yet written by the race of the sea-kings. But Lucifer himself _could_ not have written it; neither any servant of Lucifer. I do not doubt but that most readers were surprised at my saying, in the close of my first paper, that Byron's 'style' depended in any wise on his views respecting the Ten Commandments. That so all-important a thing as 'style' should depend in the least upon so ridiculous a thing as moral sense: or that Allegra's father, watching her drive by in Count G.'s coach and six, had any remnant of so ridiculous a thing to guide,--or check,--his poetical passion, may alike seem more than questionable to the liberal and chaste philosophy of the existing British public. But, first of all, putting the question of who writes, or speaks, aside, do you, good reader, _know_ good 'style' when you get it? Can you say, of half-a-dozen given lines taken anywhere out of a novel, or poem, or play, That is good, essentially, in style, or bad, essentially? and can you say why such half-dozen lines are good, or bad? I imagine that in most cases, the reply would be given with hesitation, yet if you will give me a little patience, and take some accurate pains, I can show you the main tests of style in the space of a couple of pages. I take two examples of absolutely perfect, and in manner highest, _i. e._ kingly, and heroic, style: the first example in expression of anger, the second of love. (1) 'We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us, His present, and your pains, we thank you for. When we have match'd our rackets to these balls, We will in France, by God's grace, play a set, Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.' (2) 'My gracious Silence, hail! Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home That weep'st to see me triumph? Ah, my dear, Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, And mothers that lack sons.' Let us note, point by point, the conditions of greatness common to both these passages, so opposite in temper. A. Absolute command over all passion, however intense; this the first-of-first conditions, (see the King's own sentence just before, 'We are no tyrant, but a Christian King, Unto _whose grace_ our passion is as subject As are our wretches fettered in our prisons'); and with this self-command, the supremely surveying grasp of every thought that is to be uttered, before its utterance; so that each may come in its exact place, time, and connection. The slightest hurry, the misplacing of a word, or the unnecessary accent on a syllable, would destroy the 'style' in an instant. B. Choice of the fewest and simplest words that can be found in the compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way; allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without obscurity; thus, 'his present, and your pains, we thank you for' is better than 'we thank you for his present and your pains,' because the Dauphin's gift is by courtesy put before the Ambassador's pains; but 'when to these balls our rackets we have matched' would have spoiled the style in a moment, because--I was going to have said, ball and racket are of equal rank, and therefore only the natural order proper; but also here the natural order is the desired one, the English racket to have precedence of the French ball. In the fourth line the 'in France' comes first, as announcing the most important resolution of action; the 'by God's grace' next, as the only condition rendering resolution possible; the detail of issue follows with the strictest limit in the final word. The King does not say 'danger,' far less 'dishonour,' but 'hazard' only; of _that_ he is, humanly speaking, sure. C. Perfectly emphatic and clear utterance of the chosen words; slowly in the degree of their importance, with omission however of every word not absolutely required; and natural use of the familiar contractions of final dissyllable. Thus, 'play a set shall strike' is better than 'play a set _that_ shall strike,' and 'match'd' is kingly short--no necessity could have excused 'matched' instead. On the contrary, the three first words, 'We are glad,' would have been spoken by the king more slowly and fully than any other syllables in the whole passage, first pronouncing the kingly 'we' at its proudest, and then the 'are' as a continuous state, and then the 'glad,' as the exact contrary of what the ambassadors expected him to be.[190] D. Absolute spontaneity in doing all this, easily and necessarily as the heart beats. The king _cannot_ speak otherwise than he does--nor the hero. The words not merely come to them, but are compelled to them. Even lisping numbers 'come,' but mighty numbers are ordained, and inspired. E. Melody in the words, changeable with their passion fitted to it exactly and the utmost of which the language is capable--the melody in prose being Eolian and variable--in verse, nobler by submitting itself to stricter law. I will enlarge upon this point presently. F. Utmost spiritual contents in the words; so that each carries not only its instant meaning, but a cloudy companionship of higher or darker meaning according to the passion--nearly always indicated by metaphor: 'play a set'--sometimes by abstraction--(thus in the second passage 'silence' for silent one) sometimes by description instead of direct epithet ('coffined' for dead) but always indicative of there being more in the speaker's mind than he has said, or than he can say, full though his saying be. On the quantity of this attendant fulness depends the majesty of style; that is to say, virtually, on the quantity of contained thought in briefest words, such thought being primarily loving and true: and this the sum of all--that nothing can be well said, but with truth, nor beautifully, but by love. These are the essential conditions of noble speech in prose and verse alike, but the adoption of the form of verse, and especially rymed verse, means the addition to all these qualities of one more; of music, that is to say, not Eolian merely, but Apolline; a construction or architecture of words fitted and befitting, under external laws of time and harmony. When Byron says 'rhyme is of the rude,'[191] he means that Burns needs it,--while Henry the Fifth does not, nor Plato, nor Isaiah--yet in this need of it by the simple, it becomes all the more religious: and thus the loveliest pieces of Christian language are all in ryme--the best of Dante, Chaucer, Douglas, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney. I am not now able to keep abreast with the tide of modern scholarship; (nor, to say the truth, do I make the effort, the first edge of its waves being mostly muddy, and apt to make a shallow sweep of the shore refuse:) so that I have no better book of reference by me than the confused essay on the antiquity of ryme at the end of Turner's _Anglo-Saxons_. I cannot however conceive a more interesting piece of work, if not yet done, than the collection of sifted earliest fragments known of rymed song in European languages. Of Eastern I know nothing; but, this side Hellespont, the substance of the matter is all given in King Canute's impromptu 'Gaily (or is it sweetly?--I forget which, and it's no matter) sang the monks of Ely, As Knut the king came sailing by;' much to be noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and their Sunday the eclipse of the week. And observe further, that if Milton does not ryme, it is because his faculty of Song was concerning Loss, chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain; while Dante, though modern readers never go further with him than into the Pit, is stayed only by Casella in the ascent to the Rose of Heaven. So, Gibbon can write in _his_ manner the Fall of Rome; but Virgil, in _his_ manner, the rise of it; and finally Douglas, in _his_ manner, bursts into such rymed passion of praise both of Rome and Virgil, as befits a Christian Bishop, and a good subject of the Holy See. 'Master of Masters--sweet source, and springing well, Wide where over all ringes thy heavenly bell; * * * * Why should I then with dull forehead and vain, With rude ingene, and barane, emptive brain, With bad harsh speech, and lewit barbare tongue Presume to write, where thy sweet bell is rung, Or counterfeit thy precious wordis dear? Na, na--not so; but kneel when I them hear. But farther more--and lower to descend Forgive me, Virgil, if I thee offend Pardon thy scolar, suffer him to ryme Since _thou_ wast but ane mortal man sometime.' 'Before honour is humility.' Does not clearer light come for you on that law after reading these nobly pious words? And note you _whose_ humility? How is it that the sound of the bell comes so instinctively into his chiming verse? This gentle singer is the son of--Archibald Bell-the-Cat! And now perhaps you can read with right sympathy the scene in _Marmion_ between his father and King James. 'His hand the monarch sudden took-- Now, by the Bruce's soul, Angus, my hasty speech forgive, For sure as doth his spirit live As he said of the Douglas old I well may say of you,-- That never king did subject hold, In speech more free, in war more bold, More tender and more true: And while the king his hand did strain The old man's tears fell down like rain.' I believe the most infidel of scholastic readers can scarcely but perceive the relation between the sweetness, simplicity, and melody of expression in these passages, and the gentleness of the passions they express, while men who are not scholastic, and yet are true scholars, will recognise further in them that the simplicity of the educated is lovelier than the simplicity of the rude. Hear next a piece of Spenser's teaching how rudeness itself may become more beautiful even by its mistakes, if the mistakes are made lovingly. 'Ye shepherds' daughters that dwell on the green, Hye you there apace; Let none come there but that virgins been To adorn her grace: And when you come, whereas she in place, See that your rudeness do not you disgrace; Bind your fillets fast, And gird in your waste, For more fineness, with a taudry lace.' 'Bring hither the pink and purple cullumbine With gylliflowers; Bring coronatiöns, and sops in wine, Worn of paramours; Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies And cowslips, and kingcups, and loved lilies; The pretty paunce And the chevisaunce Shall match with the fair flowre-delice.'[192] Two short pieces more only of master song, and we have enough to test all by. (2) 'No more, no more, since thou art dead, Shall we e'er bring coy brides to bed, No more, at yearly festivals, We cowslip balls Or chains of columbines shall make, For this or that occasion's sake. No, no! our maiden pleasures be Wrapt in thy winding-sheet with thee.'[193] (3) 'Death is now the phoenix rest, And the turtle's loyal breast To eternity doth rest. Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but 'tis not she: Truth and beauty buried be.'[194] If now, with the echo of these perfect verses in your mind, you turn to Byron, and glance over, or recall to memory, enough of him to give means of exact comparison, you will, or should, recognise these following kinds of mischief in him. First, if any one offends him--as for instance Mr. Southey, or Lord Elgin--'his manners have not that repose that marks the caste,' &c. _This_ defect in his Lordship's style, being myself scrupulously and even painfully reserved in the use of vituperative language, I need not say how deeply I deplore.[195] Secondly. In the best and most violet-bedded bits of his work there is yet, as compared with Elizabethan and earlier verse, a strange taint; and indefinable--evening flavour of Covent Garden, as it were;--not to say, escape of gas in the Strand. That is simply what it proclaims itself--London air. If he had lived all his life in Green-head Ghyll, things would of course have been different. But it was his fate to come to town--modern town--like Michael's son; and modern London (and Venice) are answerable for the state of their drains, not Byron. Thirdly. His melancholy is without any relief whatsoever; his jest sadder than his earnest; while, in Elizabethan work, all lament is full of hope, and all pain of balsam. Of this evil he has himself told you the cause in a single line, prophetic of all things since and now. 'Where _he_ gazed, a gloom pervaded space.'[196] So that, for instance, while Mr. Wordsworth, on a visit to town, being an exemplary early riser, could walk, felicitous, on Westminster Bridge, remarking how the city now did like a garment wear the beauty of the morning; Byron, rising somewhat later, contemplated only the garment which the beauty of the morning had by that time received for wear from the city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religious rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance, and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it, 'The sordor of civilisation, mixed With all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed.'[197] Fourthly, with this steadiness of bitter melancholy, there is joined a sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, colour-depth, and morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,--with other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be analysed by extreme care,--is found, to the full, only in five men that I know of in modern times; namely Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and myself,--differing totally and throughout the entire group of us, from the delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti; and separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for 'Rokkes blak' and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans, which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to climb, or cross;--all this love of impending mountains, coiled thunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky, almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmettes, gulphs of Spezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and close brushwood at Coniston. And, lastly, also in the whole group of us, glows volcanic instinct of Astræan justice returning not to, but up out of, the earth, which will not at all suffer us to rest any more in Pope's serene 'whatever is, is right;' but holds, on the contrary, profound conviction that about ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: conviction making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and the implacableness of Fate. In Byron the indignation, the sorrow, and the effort are joined to the death: and they are the parts of his nature (as of mine also in its feebler terms), which the selfishly comfortable public have, literally, no conception of whatever; and from which the piously sentimental public, offering up daily the pure emotion of divine tranquillity, shrink with anathema not unembittered by alarm. Concerning which matters I hope to speak further and with more precise illustration in my next paper; but, seeing that this present one has been hitherto somewhat sombre, and perhaps, to gentle readers, not a little discomposing, I will conclude it with a piece of light biographic study, necessary to my plan, and as conveniently admissible in this place as afterwards;--namely, the account of the manner in which Scott--whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient and palpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is of the Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, damnable,--spent his Sunday. As usual, from Lockhart's farrago we cannot find out the first thing we want to know,--whether Scott worked after his week-day custom, on the Sunday morning. But, I gather, not; at all events his household and his cattle rested (L. iii. 108). I imagine he walked out into his woods, or read quietly in his study. Immediately after breakfast, whoever was in the house, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read prayers at eleven, when I expect you all to attend' (vii. 306). Question of college and other externally unanimous prayers settled for us very briefly: 'if you have no faith, have at least manners.' He read the Church of England service, lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (_ibid._). After the service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After the sermon, if the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests, to _cold_ picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblical novelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, by heart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). These lessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whether there was picnic or not. For the rest of the afternoon he took his pleasure in the woods with Tom Purdie, who also always appeared at his master's elbow on Sunday after dinner was over, and drank long life to the laird and his lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whiskey or a tumbler of wine, according to his fancy (vi. 195). Whatever might happen on the other evenings of the week, Scott always dined at home on Sunday; and with old friends: never, unless inevitably, receiving any person with whom he stood on ceremony (v. 335). He came into the room rubbing his hands like a boy arriving at home for the holidays, his Peppers and Mustards gambolling about him, 'and even the stately Maida grinning and wagging his tail with sympathy.' For the usquebaugh of the less honoured week-days, at the Sunday board he circulated the champagne briskly during dinner, and considered a pint of claret each man's fair share afterwards (v. 339). In the evening, music being to the Scottish worldly mind indecorous, he read aloud some favourite author, for the amusement or edification of his little circle. Shakespeare it might be, or Dryden,--Johnson, or Joanna Baillie,--Crabbe, or Wordsworth. But in those days 'Byron was pouring out his spirit fresh and full, and if a new piece from _his_ hand had appeared, it was _sure to be read by Scott the Sunday evening afterwards_; and that with such delighted emphasis as showed how completely the elder bard had kept up his enthusiasm for poetry at pitch of youth, and all his admiration of genius, free, pure, and unstained by the least drop of literary jealousy' (v. 341). With such necessary and easily imaginable varieties as chanced in having Dandy Dinmont or Captain Brown for guests at Abbotsford, or Colonel Mannering, Counsellor Pleydell, and Dr. Robertson in Castle Street, such was Scott's habitual Sabbath: a day, we perceive, of eating the fat, (_dinner_, presumably not cold, being a work of necessity and mercy--thou also, even thou, Saint Thomas of Trumbull, hast thine!) and drinking the sweet, abundant in the manner of Mr. Southey's cataract of Lodore,--'Here it comes, sparkling.' A day bestrewn with coronatiöns and sops in wine; deep in libations to good hope and fond memory; a day of rest to beast, and mirth to man, (as also to sympathetic beasts that can be merry,) and concluding itself in an Orphic hour of delight, signifying peace on Tweedside, and goodwill to men, there or far away;--always excepting the French, and Boney. 'Yes, and see what it all came to in the end.' Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite other things: of _these_, came such length of days and peace as Scott had in his Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands. Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes overmuch light-mindedness, was administered to him by the more grave and thoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heart as well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother as her dearest possession. Knew it, and, what was more, had thought of it, and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain to seek. And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in the way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance, remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning, every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of him before courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as his own _Bride of Abydos_, for instance, which he had written from beginning to end in four days, or even the travelling reflections of Harold and Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon's reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates to him a work of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done his best,--the drama of _Cain_. Of which dedication the virtual significance to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Border soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of White Maidens, also of Grey Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may tremblingly ask 'Gude guide us, what's yon?' hast thou yet known, seeing that thou hast yet told, _nothing_. Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear. JOHN RUSKIN FOOTNOTES: [154] Nell, in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, was simply killed for the market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's _Life_), and Paul was written under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--a part of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject, both in _Dombey_ and _Little Dorrit_. [155] Chourineur' not striking with dagger-point, but ripping with knife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them with the two others; they are put together only as parts in the same phantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the 'Louvécienne' (Lucienne) of Gaboriau--she, province-born and bred; and opposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstress friend. 'De ce Paris, où elle était née, elle savait tout--elle connaissait tout. Rien ne l'étonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa science des détails matériels de l'existence était inconcevable. Impossible de la duper!--Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si économe n'avait même pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme. Je n'avais pas idée d'une si complète absence de sens moral; d'une si inconsciente dépravation, d'une impudence si effrontément naïve.'--_L'Argent des autres_, vol. i. p. 358. [156] The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity, complicated with grossness. Horace, in the _Epodes_, scoffs at it, but not without horror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeply struck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almost beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, and suspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot Lord's Prayer; it takes entire possession of Balzac in the _Contes Drolatiques_; it struck Scott in the earliest days of his childish 'visions' intensified by the axe-stroke murder of his grand aunt; L. i. 142, and see close of this note. It chose for him the subject of the _Heart of Midlothian_, and produced afterwards all the recurrent ideas of executions, tainting _Nigel_, almost spoiling _Quentin Durward_--utterly the _Fair Maid of Perth_: and culminating in _Bizarro_, L. x. 149. It suggested all the deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep--Kennedy, Eveline Neville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of Ravenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here--compare the dream of Gride, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, and Dickens's own last words, _on the ground_, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain, two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out on the other side). In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all the figures of the Lay Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy, Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella, and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like manner gives Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in _Barnaby Rudge_, where, with a _corps de drame_ composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in ribands--carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content without shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in _two_ wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love of thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limbless serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare _Modern Painters_, vol. iv., 'Chapter on the Mountain Gloom,' s. 19); and in _all_ forms of it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the blood, whence the last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--'cool it with a baboon's _blood_, _then_ the charm is firm and good.' The two frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London (the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation) are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque under this influence; and it is well worth while to get the number for the week ending April 3, 1880, of _Young Folks_--'A magazine of instructive and entertaining literature for boys and girls of all ages,' containing 'A Sequel to Desdichado' (the modern development of Ivanhoe), in which a quite monumental example of the kind of art in question will be found as a leading illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "_my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger._" The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of _Ivanhoe_; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators--their wisdom none will so much as hear, how much less follow! In both of the Masters, it is always to be remembered that the evil and good are alike conditions of literal _vision_: and therefore also, inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the first elements of all Scott's errors were in the milk of his consumptive nurse, which all but killed him as an infant, L. i. 19--and was without doubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness (L. i. 20). Then came (if the reader cares to know what I mean by Fors, let him read the page carefully) the fearful accidents to his only sister, and her death, L. i. 17; then the madness of his nurse, who planned his own murder (21), then the stories continually told him of the executions at Carlisle (24), his aunt's husband having seen them; issuing, he himself scarcely knows how, in the unaccountable terror that came upon him at the sight of statuary, 31--especially Jacob's ladder; then the murder of Mrs. Swinton, and finally the nearly fatal bursting of the blood vessel at Kelso, with the succeeding nervous illness, 65-67--solaced, while he was being 'bled and blistered till he had scarcely a pulse left,' by that history of the Knights of Malta--fondly dwelt on and realised by actual modelling of their fortress, which returned to his mind for the theme of its last effort in passing away. [157] 'Se dit par dénigrement, d'un chrétien qui ne croit pas les dogmes de sa religion.'--Fleming, vol. ii. p. 659. [158] 'A son nom,' properly. The sentence is one of Victor Cherbuliez's, in _Prosper Randoce_, which is full of other valuable ones. See the old nurse's 'ici bas les choses vont de travers, comme un chien qui va à vêpres, p. 93; and compare Prosper's treasures, 'la petite Vénus, et le petit Christ d'ivoire,' p. 121; also Madame Brehanne's request for the divertissement of 'quelque belle batterie à coups de couteau' with Didier's answer. 'Hélas! madame, vous jouez de malheur, ici dans la Drôme, l'on se massacre aussi peu que possible,' p. 33. [159] Edgeworth's _Tales_ (Hunter, 1827), 'Harrington and Ormond,' vol. iii. p. 260. [160] Alice of Salisbury, Alice Lee, Alice Bridgnorth. [161] Scott's father was habitually ascetic. 'I have heard his son tell that it was common with him, if any one observed that the soup was good, to taste it again, and say, "Yes--it is too good, bairns," and dash a tumbler of cold water into his plate.'--Lockhart's _Life_ (Black, Edinburgh, 1869), vol. i. p. 312. In other places I refer to this book in the simple form of 'L.' [162] A young lady sang to me, just before I copied out this page for press, a Miss Somebody's 'great song,' 'Live, and Love, and Die.' Had it been written for nothing better than silkworms, it should at least have added--Spin. [163] See passage of introduction to _Ivanhoe_, wisely quoted in L. vi. 106. [164] See below, note, p. 25, on the conclusion of _Woodstock_. [165] L. iv. 177. [166] L. vi. 67. [167] 'One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can last for ever? who ever lasted so long?'--Sydney Smith (of the _Pirate_) to Jeffrey, December 30, 1821. (_Letters_, vol. ii. p. 223.) [168] L. vi. p. 188. Compare the description of Fairy Dean, vii. 192. [169] All, alas! were now in a great measure so written. _Ivanhoe_, _The Monastery_, _The Abbot_ and _Kenilworth_ were all published between December 1819 and January 1821, Constable & Co. giving five thousand guineas for the remaining copyright of them, Scott clearing ten thousand before the bargain was completed; and before the _Fortunes of Nigel_ issued from the press Scott had exchanged instruments and received his bookseller's bills for no less than four 'works of fiction,' not one of them otherwise described in the deeds of agreement, to be produced in unbroken succession, _each of them to fill up at least three volumes, but with proper saving clauses as to increase of copy money in case any of them should run to four_; and within two years all this anticipation had been wiped off by _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan's Well_, and _Redgauntlet_. [170] _Woodstock_ was finished 26th March 1826. He knew then of his ruin; and wrote in bitterness, but not in weakness. The closing pages are the most beautiful of the book. But a month afterwards Lady Scott died; and he never wrote glad word more. [171] Compare Mr. Spurgeon's not unfrequent orations on the same subject. [172] There are three definite and intentional portraits of himself, in the novels, each giving a separate part of himself: Mr. Oldbuck, Frank Osbaldistone, and Alan Fairford. [173] Andrew knows Latin, and might have coined the word in his conceit; but, writing to a kind friend in Glasgow, I find the brook was called 'Molyndona' even before the building of the Sub-dean Mill in 1446. See also account of the locality in Mr. George's admirable volume, _Old Glasgow_, pp. 129, 149, &c. The Protestantism of Glasgow, since throwing that powder of saints into her brook Kidron, has presented it with other pious offerings; and my friend goes on to say that the brook, once famed for the purity of its waters (much used for bleaching), 'has for nearly a hundred years been a crawling stream of loathsomeness. It is now bricked over, and a carriage way made on the top of it; underneath the foul mess still passes through the heart of the city, till it falls into the Clyde close to the harbour.' [174] The following fragments out of the letters in my own possession, written by Scott to the builder of Abbotsford, as the outer decorations of the house were in process of completion, will show how accurately Scott had pictured himself in Monkbarns. 'Abbotsford: April 21, 1817. 'Dear Sir,--Nothing can be more obliging than your attention to the old stones. You have been as true as the sundial itself.' [The sundial had just been erected.] 'Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it is to be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case of accidents it will be safest in your custody till I come to town again on the 12th of May. Your former favours (which were weighty as acceptable) have come safely out here, and will be disposed of with great effect.' 'Abbotsford: July 30. 'I fancy the Tolbooth still keeps its feet, but, as it must soon descend, I hope you will remember me. I have an important use for the niche above the door; and though many a man has got a niche _in_ the Tolbooth by building, I believe I am the first that ever got a niche out of it on such an occasion. For which I have to thank your kindness, and to remain very much your obliged humble servant, 'WALTER SCOTT.' 'August 16. 'My dear Sir,--I trouble you with this [_sic_] few lines to thank you for the very accurate drawings and measurements of the Tolbooth door, and for your kind promise to attend to my interest and that of Abbotsford in the matter of the Thistle and Fleur de Lis. Most of our scutcheons are now mounted, and look very well, as the house is something after the model of an old hall (not a castle), where such things are well in character.' [Alas--Sir Walter, Sir Walter!] 'I intend the old lion to predominate over a well which the children have christened the Fountain of the Lions. His present den, however, continues to be the hall at Castle Street.' 'September 5. 'Dear Sir,--I am greatly obliged to you for securing the stone. I am not sure that I will put up the gate quite in the old form, but I would like to secure the means of doing so. The ornamental stones are now put up, and have a very happy effect. If you will have the kindness to let me know when the Tolbooth door comes down, I will send in my carts for the stones; I have an admirable situation for it. I suppose the door itself' [he means, the wooden one] 'will be kept for the new jail; if not, and not otherwise wanted, I would esteem it curious to possess it. Certainly I hope so many sore hearts will not pass through the celebrated door when in my possession as heretofore.' * * * * * 'September 8. 'I should esteem it very fortunate if I could have the door also, though I suppose it is modern, having been burned down at the time of Porteous-mob. 'I am very much obliged to the gentlemen who thought these remains of the Heart of Midlothian are not ill bestowed on their intended possessor.' [175] Henceforward, not in affectation, but for the reader's better convenience, I shall continue to spell 'Ryme' without our wrongly added _h_. [176] L. ii. 278. [177] 'Che nella mente mia _ragiona_.' Love--you observe, the highest _Reasonableness_, instead of French _ivresse_, or even Shakespearian 'mere folly'; and Beatrice as the Goddess of Wisdom in this third song of the _Convito_, to be compared with the Revolutionary Goddess of Reason; remembering of the whole poem chiefly the line:-- 'Costei penso chi che mosso l'universo.' (See Lyell's _Canzoniere_, p. 104.) [178] [Greek: hôran tês terpsios]--Plato, _Laws_, ii., Steph. 669. 'Hour' having here nearly the power of 'Fate' with added sense of being a daughter of Themis. [179] 'Gunpowder is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, _and what has given such a superiority to civilised nations over barbarous_'! (_Evenings at Home_--fifth evening.) No man can owe more than I both to Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth; and I only wish that in the substance of what they wisely said, they had been more listened to. Nevertheless, the germs of all modern conceit and error respecting manufacture and industry, as rivals to Art and to Genius, are concentrated in '_Evenings at Home_' and '_Harry and Lucy_'--being all the while themselves works of real genius, and prophetic of things that have yet to be learned and fulfilled. See for instance the paper, 'Things by their Right Names,' following the one from which I have just quoted (The Ship), and closing the first volume of the old edition of the _Evenings_. [180] Carlyle, _French Revolution_ (Chapman, 1869), vol. ii. p. 70; conf. p. 25, and the _Ça ira_ at Arras, vol. iii. p. 276. [181] _Ibid._ iii. 26. [182] Carlyle, _French Revolution_, iii. 106, the last sentence altered in a word or two. [183] I have been greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of our most majestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on the unfathomable. [184] 'It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and verse for verse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic country and a bigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion--and so tell those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy. 'I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet--but the masquing goes on the same.' (Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1828.) 'A dreadfully moral place, for you must not look at anybody's wife, except your neighbour's.' [185] See quoted _infra_ the mock, by Byron, of himself and all other modern poets, _Juan_, canto iii. stanza 86, and compare canto xiv. stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will stand always for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, for line. [186] _Island_, ii. 16, where see context. [187] _Juan_, viii. 5; but, by your Lordship's quotation, Wordsworth says 'instrument'--not 'daughter.' Your Lordship had better have said 'Infant' and taken the Woolwich authorities to witness: only Infant would not have rymed. [188] _Juan_, viii. 3; compare 14 and 63, with all its lovely context 61--68: then 82, and afterwards slowly and with thorough attention, the Devil's speech, beginning, 'Yes, Sir, you forget' in scene 2 of _The Deformed Transformed_: then Sardanapalus's, act i. scene 2, beginning 'he is gone, and on his finger bears my signet,' and finally, the _Vision of Judgment_, stanzas 3 to 5. [189] _Island_, iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the 'slings its high flakes, shivered into sleet' of stanza 7. [190] A modern editor--of whom I will not use the expressions which occur to me--finding the 'we' a redundant syllable in the iambic line, prints 'we're.' It is a little thing--but I do not recollect, in the forty years of my literary experience, any piece of editor's retouch quite so base. But I don't read the new editions much; that must be allowed for. [191] _Island_, ii. 5. I was going to say, 'Look to the context.' but am fain to give it here; for the stanza, learned by heart, ought to be our school-introduction to the literature of the world. 'Such was this ditty of Tradition's days, Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys In song, where fame as yet hath left no sign Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine; Which leaves no record to the sceptic eye, But yields young history all to harmony; A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire. For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave, Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side, Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide, Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear, Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear; Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme For sages' labours or the student's dream; Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil-- The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil. Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude, But such inspired the Norseman's solitude, Who came and conquer'd; such, wherever rise Lands which no foes destroy or civilise, Exist; and what can our accomplish'd art Of verse do more than reach the a waken'd heart?' [192] _Shepherd's Calendar._ 'Coronatiön,' loyal-pastoral for Carnation; 'sops in wine,' jolly-pastoral for double pink; 'paunce,' thoughtless pastoral for pansy; 'chevisaunce' I don't know, (not in Gerarde); 'flowre-delice'--pronounce dellice--half made up of 'delicate' and 'delicious.' [193] Herrick, _Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter_. [194] _Passionate Pilgrim._ [195] In this point, compare the _Curse of Minerva_ with the _Tears of the Muses_. [196] 'He,'--Lucifer; (_Vision of Judgment_, 24). It is precisely because Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the gloom. To the Devil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both cheerfulness and prosperity;--with a delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue; and of the 'progress' of things in general:--in smooth sea and fair weather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom. [197] _Island_, ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe; no denial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay, nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in its civilisation. THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING IN THREE LETTERS TO BEGINNERS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR PREFACE. It may perhaps be thought, that in prefacing a Manual of Drawing, I ought to expatiate on the reasons why drawing should be learned; but those reasons appear to me so many and so weighty, that I cannot quickly state or enforce them. With the reader's permission, as this volume is too large already, I will waive all discussion respecting the importance of the subject, and touch only on those points which may appear questionable in the method of its treatment. In the first place, the book is not calculated for the use of children under the age of twelve or fourteen. I do not think it advisable to engage a child in any but the most voluntary practice of art. If it has talent for drawing, it will be continually scrawling on what paper it can get; and should be allowed to scrawl at its own free will, due praise being given for every appearance of care, or truth, in its efforts. It should be allowed to amuse itself with cheap colours almost as soon as it has sense enough to wish for them. If it merely daubs the paper with shapeless stains, the colour-box may be taken away till it knows better: but as soon as it begins painting red coats on soldiers, striped flags to ships, etc., it should have colours at command; and, without restraining its choice of subject in that imaginative and historical art, of a military tendency, which children delight in, (generally quite as valuable, by the way, as any historical art delighted in by their elders,) it should be gently led by the parents to try to draw, in such childish fashion as may be, the things it can see and likes,--birds, or butterflies, or flowers, or fruit. In later years, the indulgence of using the colour should only be granted as a reward, after it has shown care and progress in its drawings with pencil. A limited number of good and amusing prints should always be within a boy's reach: in these days of cheap illustration he can hardly possess a volume of nursery tales without good woodcuts in it, and should be encouraged to copy what he likes best of this kind; but should be firmly restricted to a _few_ prints and to a few books. If a child has many toys, it will get tired of them and break them; if a boy has many prints he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure in them is perfected, and his attention concentrated. The parents need give themselves no trouble in instructing him, as far as drawing is concerned, beyond insisting upon economical and neat habits with his colours and paper, showing him the best way of holding pencil and rule, and, so far as they take notice of his work, pointing out where a line is too short or too long, or too crooked, when compared with the copy; _accuracy_ being the first and last thing they look for. If the child shows talent for inventing or grouping figures, the parents should neither check, nor praise it. They may laugh with it frankly, or show pleasure in what it has done, just as they show pleasure in seeing it well, or cheerful; but they must not praise it for being clever, any more than they would praise it for being stout. They should praise it only for what costs it self-denial, namely attention and hard work; otherwise they will make it work for vanity's sake, and always badly. The best books to put into its hands are those illustrated by George Cruikshank or by Richter. (See Appendix.) At about the age of twelve or fourteen, it is quite time enough to set youth or girl to serious work; and then this book will, I think, be useful to them; and I have good hope it may be so, likewise, to persons of more advanced age wishing to know something of the first principles of art. Yet observe, that the method of study recommended is not brought forward as absolutely the best, but only as the best which I can at present devise for an isolated student. It is very likely that farther experience in teaching may enable me to modify it with advantage in several important respects; but I am sure the main principles of it are sound, and most of the exercises as useful as they can be rendered without a master's superintendence. The method differs, however, so materially from that generally adopted by drawing-masters, that a word or two of explanation may be needed to justify what might otherwise be thought wilful eccentricity. The manuals at present published on the subject of drawing are all directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil or water-colour, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the second is the object kept chiefly in view at Marlborough House, and in the branch Government Schools of Design. Of the fitness of the modes of study adopted in those schools, to the end specially intended, judgment is hardly yet possible; only, it seems to me, that we are all too much in the habit of confusing art as _applied_ to manufacture, with manufacture itself. For instance, the skill by which an inventive workman designs and moulds a beautiful cup, is skill of true art; but the skill by which that cup is copied and afterwards multiplied a thousandfold, is skill of manufacture: and the faculties which enable one workman to design and elaborate his original piece, are not to be developed by the same system of instruction as those which enable another to produce a maximum number of approximate copies of it in a given time. Farther: it is surely inexpedient that any reference to purposes of manufacture should interfere with the education of the artist himself. Try first to manufacture a Raphael; then let Raphael direct your manufacture. He will design you a plate, or cup, or a house, or a palace, whenever you want it, and design them in the most convenient and rational way; but do not let your anxiety to reach the platter and the cup interfere with your education of the Raphael. Obtain first the best work you can, and the ablest hands, irrespective of any consideration of economy or facility of production. Then leave your trained artist to determine how far art can be popularised, or manufacture ennobled. Now, I believe that (irrespective of differences in individual temper and character) the excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a master or a school can teach; so that while powers of invention distinguish man from man, powers of perception distinguish school from school. All great schools enforce delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight: and the only rule which I have, as yet, found to be without exception respecting art, is that all great art is delicate. Therefore, the chief aim and bent of the following system is to obtain, first, a perfectly patient, and, to the utmost of the pupil's power, a delicate method of work, such as may ensure his seeing truly. For I am nearly convinced, that when once we see keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even supposing that this difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw. It is surely also a more important thing for young people and unprofessional students, to know how to appreciate the art of others, than to gain much power in art themselves. Now the modes of sketching ordinarily taught are inconsistent with this power of judgment. No person trained to the superficial execution of modern water-colour painting, can understand the work of Titian or Leonardo; they must for ever remain blind to the refinement of such men's pencilling, and the precision of their thinking. But, however slight a degree of manipulative power the student may reach by pursuing the mode recommended to him in these letters, I will answer for it that he cannot go once through the advised exercises without beginning to understand what masterly work means; and, by the time he has gained some proficiency in them, he will have a pleasure in looking at the painting of the great schools, and a new perception of the exquisiteness of natural scenery, such as would repay him for much more labour than I have asked him to undergo. That labour is, nevertheless, sufficiently irksome, nor is it possible that it should be otherwise, so long as the pupil works unassisted by a master. For the smooth and straight road which admits unembarrassed progress must, I fear, be dull as well as smooth; and the hedges need to be close and trim when there is no guide to warn or bring back the erring traveller. The system followed in this work will, therefore, at first, surprise somewhat sorrowfully those who are familiar with the practice of our class at the Working Men's College; for there, the pupil, having the master at his side to extricate him from such embarrassments as his first efforts may lead into, is _at once_ set to draw from a solid object, and soon finds entertainment in his efforts and interest in his difficulties. Of course the simplest object which it is possible to set before the eye is a sphere; and practically, I find a child's toy, a white leather ball, better than anything else; as the gradations on balls of plaster of Paris, which I use sometimes to try the strength of pupils who have had previous practice, are a little too delicate for a beginner to perceive. It has been objected that a circle, or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines to draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that his study of the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective; but in the sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle, becomes, merely by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is just as striking to the learner, whether his circular outline be true or false. He is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in due time, care of itself. I call it outline, for the sake of immediate intelligibility,--strictly speaking, it is merely the edge of the shade; no pupil in my class being ever allowed to draw an outline, in the ordinary sense. It is pointed out to him, from the first, that Nature relieves one mass, or one tint, against another; but outlines none. The outline exercise, the second suggested in this letter, is recommended, not to enable the pupil to draw outlines, but as the only means by which, unassisted, he can test his accuracy of eye, and discipline his hand. When the master is by, errors in the form and extent of shadows can be pointed out as easily as in outline, and the handling can be gradually corrected in details of the work. But the solitary student can only find out his own mistakes by help of the traced limit, and can only test the firmness of his hand by an exercise in which nothing but firmness is required; and during which all other considerations (as of softness, complexity, &c.) are entirely excluded. Both the system adopted at the Working Men's College, and that recommended here, agree, however, in one principle, which I consider the most important and special of all that are involved in my teaching: namely, the attaching its full importance, from the first, to local colour. I believe that the endeavour to separate, in the course of instruction, the observation of light and shade from that of local colour, has always been, and must always be, destructive of the student's power of accurate sight, and that it corrupts his taste as much as it retards his progress. I will not occupy the reader's time by any discussion of the principle here, but I wish him to note it as the only distinctive one in my system, so far as it is a system. For the recommendation to the pupil to copy faithfully, and without alteration, whatever natural object he chooses to study, is serviceable, among other reasons, just because it gets rid of systematic rules altogether, and teaches people to draw, as country lads learn to ride, without saddle or stirrups; my main object being, at first, not to get my pupils to hold their reins prettily, but to "sit like a jackanapes, never off." In these written instructions, therefore, it has always been with regret that I have seen myself forced to advise anything like monotonous or formal discipline. But, to the unassisted student, such formalities are indispensable, and I am not without hope that the sense of secure advancement, and the pleasure of independent effort, may render the following out of even the more tedious exercises here proposed, possible to the solitary learner, without weariness. But if it should be otherwise, and he finds the first steps painfully irksome, I can only desire him to consider whether the acquirement of so great a power as that of pictorial expression of thought be not worth some toil; or whether it is likely, in the natural order of matters in this working world, that so great a gift should be attainable by those who will give no price for it. One task, however, of some difficulty, the student will find I have not imposed upon him: namely, learning the laws of perspective. It would be worth while to learn them, if he could do so easily; but without a master's help, and in the way perspective is at present explained in treatises, the difficulty is greater than the gain. For perspective is not of the slightest use, except in rudimentary work. You can draw the rounding line of a table in perspective, but you cannot draw the sweep of a sea bay; you can foreshorten a log of wood by it, but you cannot foreshorten an arm. Its laws are too gross and few to be applied to any subtle form; therefore, as you must learn to draw the subtle forms by the eye, certainly you may draw the simple ones. No great painters ever trouble themselves about perspective, and very few of them know its laws; they draw everything by the eye, and, naturally enough, disdain in the easy parts of their work rules which cannot help them in difficult ones. It would take about a month's labour to draw imperfectly, by laws of perspective, what any great Venetian will draw perfectly in five minutes, when he is throwing a wreath of leaves round a head, or bending the curves of a pattern in and out among the folds of drapery. It is true that when perspective was first discovered, everybody amused themselves with it; and all the great painters put fine saloons and arcades behind their madonnas, merely to show that they could draw in perspective: but even this was generally done by them only to catch the public eye, and they disdained the perspective so much, that though they took the greatest pains with the circlet of a crown, or the rim of a crystal cup, in the heart of their picture, they would twist their capitals of columns and towers of churches about in the background in the most wanton way, wherever they liked the lines to go, provided only they left just perspective enough to please the public. In modern days, I doubt if any artist among us, except David Roberts, knows so much perspective as would enable him to draw a Gothic arch to scale, at a given angle and distance. Turner, though he was professor of perspective to the Royal Academy, did not know what he professed, and never, as far as I remember, drew a single building in true perspective in his life; he drew them only with as much perspective as suited him. Prout also knew nothing of perspective, and twisted his buildings, as Turner did, into whatever shapes he liked. I do not justify this; and would recommend the student at least to treat perspective with common civility, but to pay no court to it. The best way he can learn it, by himself, is by taking a pane of glass, fixed in a frame, so that it can be set upright before the eye, at the distance at which the proposed sketch is intended to be seen. Let the eye be placed at some fixed point, opposite the middle of the pane of glass, but as high or as low as the student likes; then with a brush at the end of a stick, and a little body-colour that will adhere to the glass, the lines of the landscape may be traced on the glass, as you see them through it. When so traced they are all in true perspective. If the glass be sloped in any direction, the lines are still in true perspective, only it is perspective calculated for a sloping plane, while common perspective always supposes the plane of the picture to be vertical. It is good, in early practice, to accustom yourself to enclose your subject, before sketching it, with a light frame of wood held upright before you; it will show you what you may legitimately take into your picture, and what choice there is between a narrow foreground near you, and a wide one farther off; also, what height of tree or building you can properly take in, &c.[198] Of figure drawing, nothing is said in the following pages, because I do not think figures, as chief subjects, can be drawn to any good purpose by an amateur. As accessaries in landscape, they are just to be drawn on the same principles as anything else. Lastly: If any of the directions given subsequently to the student should be found obscure by him, or if at any stage of the recommended practice he finds himself in difficulties which I have not provided enough against, he may apply by letter to Mr. Ward, who is my under drawing-master at the Working Men's College (45 Great Ormond Street), and who will give any required assistance, on the lowest terms that can remunerate him for the occupation of his time. I have not leisure myself in general to answer letters of inquiry, however much I may desire to do so; but Mr. Ward has always the power of referring any question to me when he thinks it necessary. I have good hope, however, that enough guidance is given in this work to prevent the occurrence of any serious embarrassment; and I believe that the student who obeys its directions will find, on the whole, that the best answer of questions is perseverance; and the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills. FOOTNOTES: [198] If the student is fond of architecture, and wishes to know more of perspective than he can learn in this rough way, Mr. Runciman (of 40 Accacia Road, St. John's Wood), who was my first drawing-master, and to whom I owe many happy hours, can teach it him quickly, easily, and rightly. THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING. LETTER I. ON FIRST PRACTICE. MY DEAR READER: Whether this book is to be of use to you or not, depends wholly on your reason for wishing to learn to draw. If you desire only to possess a graceful accomplishment, to be able to converse in a fluent manner about drawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in listless hours, I cannot help you: but if you wish to learn drawing that you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot be described in words, either to assist your own memory of them, or to convey distinct ideas of them to other people; if you wish to obtain quicker perceptions of the beauty of the natural world, and to preserve something like a true image of beautiful things that pass away, or which you must yourself leave; if, also, you wish to understand the minds of great painters, and to be able to appreciate their work sincerely, seeing it for yourself, and loving it, not merely taking up the thoughts of other people about it; then I _can_ help you, or, which is better, show you how to help yourself. Only you must understand, first of all, that these powers which indeed are noble and desirable, cannot be got without work. It is much easier to learn to draw well, than it is to learn to play well on any musical instrument; but you know that it takes three or four years of practice, giving three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary command over the keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly command of your pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it, can be acquired without painstaking, or in a very short time. The kind of drawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil; profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person, after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will try to copy the commonest piece of real _work_--suppose a lithograph on the title-page of a new opera air, or a woodcut in the cheapest illustrated newspaper of the day--they will find themselves entirely beaten. And yet that common lithograph was drawn with coarse chalk, much more difficult to manage than the pencil of which an accomplished young lady is supposed to have command; and that woodcut was drawn in urgent haste, and half spoiled in the cutting afterwards; and both were done by people whom nobody thinks of as artists, or praises for their power; both were done for daily bread, with no more artist's pride than any simple handicraftsmen feel in the work they live by. Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a new language, without some hard and disagreeable labour. But do not, on the other hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear that you may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is indeed true that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, draw instinctively and get on almost without teaching; though never without toil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there are many degrees; it will take one person a much longer time than another to attain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained are never quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when the faculties are naturally adapted to the study. But I have never yet, in the experiments I have made, met with a person who could not learn to draw at all; and, in general, there is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin, or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree, if their lot in life requires them to possess such knowledge. Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: of which hours, if you have one to spare at present, we may as well begin at once. EXERCISE I. Everything that you can see, in the world around you, presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.[199] Some of these patches of colour have an appearance of lines or texture within them, as a piece of cloth or silk has of threads, or an animal's skin shows texture of hairs; but whether this be the case or not, the first broad aspect of the thing is that of a patch of some definite colour; and the first thing to be learned is, how to produce extents of smooth colour, without texture. This can only be done properly with a brush; but a brush, being soft at the point, causes so much uncertainty in the touch of an unpractised hand, that it is hardly possible to learn to draw first with it, and it is better to take, in early practice, some instrument with a hard and fine point, both that we may give some support to the hand, and that by working over the subject with so delicate a point, the attention may be properly directed to all the most minute parts of it. Even the best artists need occasionally to study subjects with a pointed instrument, in order thus to discipline their attention: and a beginner must be content to do so for a considerable period. Also, observe that before we trouble ourselves about differences of colour, we must be able to lay on _one_ colour properly, in whatever gradations of depth and whatever shapes we want. We will try, therefore, first to lay on tints or patches of _grey_, of whatever depth we want, with a pointed instrument. Take any finely-pointed steel pen (one of Gillott's lithographic crow-quills is best), and a piece of quite smooth, but not shining, note-paper, cream-laid, and get some ink that has stood already some time in the inkstand, so as to be quite black, and as thick as it can be without clogging the pen. Take a rule, and draw four straight lines, so as to enclose a square or nearly a square, about as large as _a_, Fig. 1. I say nearly a square, because it does not in the least matter whether it is quite square or not, the object being merely to get a space enclosed by straight lines. [Illustration: FIG. 1.] Now, try to fill in that square space with crossed lines, so completely and evenly that it shall look like a square patch of grey silk or cloth, cut out and laid on the white paper, as at _b_. Cover it quickly, first with straightish lines, in any direction you like, not troubling yourself to draw them much closer or neater than those in the square _a_. Let them quite dry before retouching them. (If you draw three or four squares side by side, you may always be going on with one while the others are drying). Then cover these lines with others in a different direction, and let those dry; then in another direction still, and let those dry. Always wait long enough to run no risk of blotting, and then draw the lines as quickly as you can. Each ought to be laid on as swiftly as the dash of the pen of a good writer; but if you try to reach this great speed at first you will go over the edge of the square, which is a fault in this exercise. Yet it is better to do so now and then than to draw the lines very slowly; for if you do, the pen leaves a little dot of ink at the end of each line, and these dots spoil your work. So draw each line quickly, stopping always as nearly as you can at the edge of the square. The ends of lines which go over the edge are afterwards to be removed with the penknife, but not till you have done the whole work, otherwise you roughen the paper, and the next line that goes over the edge makes a blot. When you have gone over the whole three or four times, you will find some parts of the square look darker than other parts. Now try to make the lighter parts as dark as the rest, so that the whole may be of equal depth or darkness. You will find, on examining the work, that where it looks darkest the lines are closest, or there are some much darker lines, than elsewhere; therefore you must put in other lines, or little scratches and dots, _between_ the lines in the paler parts; and where there are very conspicuous dark lines, scratch them out lightly with the penknife, for the eye must not be attracted by any line in particular. The more carefully and delicately you fill in the little gaps and holes the better; you will get on faster by doing two or three squares perfectly than a great many badly. As the tint gets closer and begins to look even, work with very little ink in your pen, so as hardly to make any mark on the paper; and at last, where it is too dark, use the edge of your penknife very lightly, and for some time, to wear it softly into an even tone. You will find that the greatest difficulty consists in getting evenness: one bit will always look darker than another bit of your square; or there will be a granulated and sandy look over the whole. When you find your paper quite rough and in a mess, give it up and begin another square, but do not rest satisfied till you have done your best with every square. The tint at last ought _at least_ to be as close and even as that in _b_, Fig. 1. You will find, however, that it is very difficult to get a _pale_ tint; because, naturally, the ink lines necessary to produce a close tint at all, blacken the paper more than you want. You must get over this difficulty not so much by leaving the lines wide apart as by trying to draw them excessively fine, lightly and swiftly; being very cautious in filling in; and, at last, passing the penknife over the whole. By keeping several squares in progress at one time, and reserving your pen for the light one just when the ink is nearly exhausted, you may get on better. The paper ought, at last, to look lightly and evenly toned all over, with no lines distinctly visible. EXERCISE II. As this exercise in shading is very tiresome, it will be well to vary it by proceeding with another at the same time. The power of shading rightly depends mainly on _lightness_ of hand and _keenness_ of sight; but there are other qualities required in drawing, dependent not merely on lightness, but steadiness of hand; and the eye, to be perfect in its power, must be made _accurate_ as well as keen, and not only see shrewdly, but measure justly. Possess yourself, therefore, of any cheap work on botany containing _outline_ plates of leaves and flowers, it does not matter whether bad or good: "Baxter's British Flowering Plants" is quite good enough. Copy any of the simplest outlines, first with a soft pencil, following it, by the eye, as nearly as you can; if it does not look right in proportions, rub out and correct it, always by the eye, till you think it is right: when you have got it to your mind, lay tracing-paper on the book, on this paper trace the outline you have been copying, and apply it to your own; and having thus ascertained the faults, correct them all patiently, till you have got it as nearly accurate as may be. Work with a very soft pencil, and do not rub out so hard[200] as to spoil the surface of your paper; never mind how _dirty_ the paper gets, but do not roughen it; and let the false outlines alone where they do not really interfere with the true one. It is a good thing to accustom yourself to hew and shape your drawing out of a dirty piece of paper. When you have got it as right as you can, take a quill pen, not very fine at the point; rest your hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to hold the pen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising your pen point as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on one part of the line than on another. In most outline drawings of the present day, parts of the curves are thickened to give an effect of shade; all such outlines are bad, but they will serve well enough for your exercises, provided you do not imitate this character: it is better, however, if you can, to choose a book of pure outlines. It does not in the least matter whether your pen outline be thin or thick; but it matters greatly that it should be _equal_, not heavier in one place than in another. The power to be obtained is that of drawing an even line slowly and in any direction; all _dashing_ lines, or approximations to penmanship, are bad. The pen should, as it were, walk slowly over the ground, and you should be able at any moment to stop it, or to turn it in any other direction, like a well-managed horse. As soon as you can copy every curve _slowly_ and accurately, you have made satisfactory progress; but you will find the difficulty is in the _slowness_. It is easy to draw what appears to be a good line with a sweep of the hand, or with what is called freedom;[201] the real difficulty and masterliness is in never letting the hand _be_ free, but keeping it under entire control at every part of the line. EXERCISE III. Meantime, you are always to be going on with your shaded squares, and chiefly with these, the outline exercises being taken up only for rest. [Illustration: FIG. 2.] As soon as you find you have some command of the pen as a shading instrument, and can lay a pale or dark tint as you choose, try to produce gradated spaces like Fig. 2., the dark tint passing gradually into the lighter ones. Nearly _all_ expression of form, in drawing, depends on your power of gradating delicately; and the gradation is always most skilful which passes from one tint into another _very little_ paler. Draw, therefore, two parallel lines for limits to your work, as in Fig. 2., and try to gradate the shade evenly from white to black, passing over the greatest possible distance, yet so that every part of the band may have visible change in it. The perception of gradation is very deficient in all beginners (not to say, in many artists), and you will probably, for some time, think your gradation skilful enough when it is quite patchy and imperfect. By getting a piece of grey shaded riband, and comparing it with your drawing, you may arrive, in early stages of your work, at a wholesome dissatisfaction with it. Widen your band little by little as you get more skilful, so as to give the gradation more lateral space, and accustom yourself at the same time to look for gradated spaces in Nature. The sky is the largest and the most beautiful; watch it at twilight, after the sun is down, and try to consider each pane of glass in the window you look through as a piece of paper coloured blue, or grey, or purple, as it happens to be, and observe how quietly and continuously the gradation extends over the space in the window, of one or two feet square. Observe the shades on the outside and inside of a common white cup or bowl, which make it look round and hollow;[202] and then on folds of white drapery; and thus gradually you will be led to observe the more subtle transitions of the light as it increases or declines on flat surfaces. At last, when your eye gets keen and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature. But it will not be in your power yet awhile to draw from any objects in which the gradations are varied and complicated; nor will it be a bad omen for your future progress, and for the use that art is to be made of by you, if the first thing at which you aim should be a little bit of sky. So take any narrow space of evening sky, that you can usually see, between the boughs of a tree, or between two chimneys, or through the corner of a pane in the window you like best to sit at, and try to gradate a little space of white paper as evenly as that is gradated--as _tenderly_ you cannot gradate it without colour, no, nor with colour either; but you may do it as evenly; or, if you get impatient with your spots and lines of ink, when you look at the beauty of the sky, the sense you will have gained of that beauty is something to be thankful for. But you ought not to be impatient with your pen and ink; for all great painters, however delicate their perception of colour, are fond of the peculiar effect of light which may be got in a pen-and-ink sketch, and in a woodcut, by the gleaming of the white paper between the black lines; and if you cannot gradate well with pure black lines, you will never gradate well with pale ones. By looking at any common woodcuts, in the cheap publications of the day, you may see how gradation is given to the sky by leaving the lines farther and farther apart; but you must make your lines as _fine_ as you can, as well as far apart, towards the light; and do not try to make them long or straight, but let them cross irregularly in any direction easy to your hand, depending on nothing but their gradation for your effect. On this point of direction of lines, however, I shall have to tell you more presently; in the meantime, do not trouble yourself about it. EXERCISE IV. As soon as you find you can gradate tolerably with the pen, take an H. or HH. pencil, using its point to produce shade, from the darkest possible to the palest, in exactly the same manner as the pen, lightening, however, now with India-rubber instead of the penknife. You will find that all _pale_ tints of shade are thus easily producible with great precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same dark power as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is apt to become glossy and metallic, or dirty-looking, or sandy. Persevere, however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removing any single speck or line that may be too black, with the _point_ of the knife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink. If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over with India-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively fine touches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale to perfect evenness with the darker spots. You cannot use the point too delicately or cunningly in doing this; work with it as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly's wing. At this stage of your progress, if not before, you may be assured that some clever friend will come in, and hold up his hands in mocking amazement, and ask you who could set you to that "niggling;" and if you persevere in it, you will have to sustain considerable persecution from your artistical acquaintances generally, who will tell you that all good drawing depends on "boldness." But never mind them. You do not hear them tell a child, beginning music, to lay its little hand with a crash among the keys, in imitation of the great masters; yet they might, as reasonably as they may tell you to be bold in the present state of your knowledge. Bold, in the sense of being undaunted, yes; but bold in the sense of being careless, confident, or exhibitory,--no,--no, and a thousand times no; for, even if you were not a beginner, it would be bad advice that made you bold. Mischief may easily be done quickly, but good and beautiful work is generally done slowly; you will find no boldness in the way a flower or a bird's wing is painted; and if Nature is not bold at _her_ work, do you think you ought to be at _yours_? So never mind what people say, but work with your pencil point very patiently; and if you can trust me in anything, trust me when I tell you, that though there are all kinds and ways of art,--large work for large places, small work for narrow places, slow work for people who can wait, and quick work for people who cannot,--there is one quality, and, I think, only one, in which all great and good art agrees;--it is all _delicate_ art. Coarse art is always bad art. You cannot understand this at present, because you do not know yet how much tender thought, and subtle care, the great painters put into touches that at first look coarse; but, believe me, it is true, and you will find it is so in due time. You will be perhaps also troubled, in these first essays at pencil drawing, by noticing that more delicate gradations are got in an instant by a chance touch of the India-rubber, than by an hour's labour with the point; and you may wonder why I tell you to produce tints so painfully, which might, it appears, be obtained with ease. But there are two reasons: the first, that when you come to draw forms, you must be able to gradate with absolute precision, in whatever place and direction you wish; not in any wise vaguely, as the India-rubber does it; and, secondly, that all natural shadows are more or less mingled with gleams of light. In the darkness of ground there is the light of the little pebbles or dust; in the darkness of foliage, the glitter of the leaves; in the darkness of flesh, transparency; in that of a stone, granulation: in every case there is some mingling of light, which cannot be represented by the leaden tone which you get by rubbing, or by an instrument known to artists as the "stump." When you can manage the point properly, you will indeed be able to do much also with this instrument, or with your fingers; but then you will have to retouch the flat tints afterwards, so as to put life and light into them, and that can only be done with the point. Labour on, therefore, courageously, with that only. EXERCISE V. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] When you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point, get a good large alphabet, and try to _tint_ the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as _a b_, _a c_, Fig. 3., and then scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter A, enclosed within the lines, being in what Turner would have called a "state of forwardness." Then, when you are satisfied with the shape of the letter, draw pen and ink lines firmly round the tint, as at _d_, and remove any touches outside the limit, first with the India-rubber, and then with the penknife, so that all may look clear and right. If you rub out any of the pencil inside the outline of the letter, retouch it, closing it up to the inked line. The straight lines of the outline are all to be _ruled_,[203] but the curved lines are to be drawn by the eye and hand; and you will soon find what good practice there is in getting the curved letters, such as Bs, Cs, &c., to stand quite straight, and come into accurate form. All these exercises are very irksome, and they are not to be persisted in alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in any of them. An entire master of the pencil or brush ought, indeed, to be able to draw any form at once, as Giotto his circle; but such skill as this is only to be expected of the consummate master, having pencil in hand all his life, and all day long, hence the force of Giotto's proof of his skill; and it is quite possible to draw very beautifully, without attaining even an approximation to such a power; the main point being, not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish, but that the line which we intended or wished to draw should be right. If we always see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the hand may stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it does not matter how firm the hand is. Do not, therefore, torment yourself because you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently, sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase of power; and as soon as you can draw your letters pretty well, here is a more amusing exercise for you. EXERCISE VI. Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of leaves, and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or other light ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will find the looking at it hurts your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you will be puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in shade; and the sky blue, or grey, or dull white. A wholly grey or rainy day is the best for this practice. You will see that _all_ the boughs of the tree are _dark_ against the sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the _roundness_ of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with pencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct and alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in curvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between them with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave the hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy the whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do not take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused network or mist; leave them all out,[204] drawing only the main branches as far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being not to draw a tree, but to _learn how_ to do so. When you have got the thing as nearly right as you can--and it is better to make one good study than twenty left unnecessarily inaccurate--take your pen, and put a fine outline to all the boughs, as you did to your letter, taking care, as far as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so as not to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to _affirm_ the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental roughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross, or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement in this kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It may perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to mark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly and careless, and the outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolence into attention and precision. The outline should be about the thickness of that in Fig. 4, which represents the ramification of a small stone pine, only I have not endeavoured to represent the pencil shading within the outline, as I could not easily express it in a woodcut; and you have nothing to do at present with the indication of the foliage above, of which in another place. You may also draw your trees as much larger than this figure as you like; only, however large they may be, keep the outline as delicate, and draw the branches far enough into their outer sprays to give quite as slender ramification as you have in this figure, otherwise you do not get good enough practice out of them. [Illustration: FIG. 4.] You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give you some new notion about trees: but when you are tired of tree boughs, take any forms whatever which are drawn in flat colour, one upon another; as patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance), executed in two colours only; and practice drawing them of the right shape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depth required. In doing this, you will first have to meet the difficulty of representing depth of colour by depth of shade. Thus a pattern of ultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of grey than a pattern of yellow. And now it is both time for you to begin to learn the mechanical use of the brush, and necessary for you to do so in order to provide yourself with the gradated scale of colour which you will want. If you can, by any means, get acquainted with any ordinarily skilful water-colour painter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with a brush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long while yet, to begin to colour, but because the brush is often more convenient than the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooner you know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, you have no opportunity of seeing how water-colour is laid on by a workman of any kind, the following directions will help you:-- EXERCISE VII. Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so as to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub much more, and the colour gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two teaspoonfuls of water to the colour you have rubbed down, and mix it well up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long. Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your brush into the colour you have mixed, and taking up as much of the liquid as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay a pond or runlet of colour along the top edge. Lead this pond of colour gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the colour as full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only that it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should, never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all in. When you get to the bottom, the colour will lodge there in a great wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and with the dry brush take up the superfluous colour as you would with a sponge, till it all looks even. In leading the colour down, you will find your brush continually go over the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not endeavour to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great thing is to get the colour to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in alternate blots and pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the square as fast as possible, with such attention to your limit as you are able to give. The use of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally to strike the colour up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first thing is to get it even, the power of rightly striking the edge comes only by time and practice; even the greatest artists rarely can do this quite perfectly. When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does not communicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares, as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again with the first, and put another coat over it, and so on over all the others. The use of turning the paper upside down is to neutralise the increase of darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwise take place from the ponding of the colour. Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of your lips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will save you from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw the brush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even wipe it as you would a pen when you want it very dry, without doing harm, provided you do not crush it upwards. Get a good brush at first, and cherish it; it will serve you longer and better than many bad ones. When you have done the squares all over again, do them a third time, always trying to keep your edges as neat as possible. When your colour is exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to as much as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternate squares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, and dry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to the same tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which then will mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of your unskilfulness. As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and then draw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the spaces so produced between the straight line and the circumference; and then draw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No. 2., and fill up those, until you can lay on colour quite evenly in any shape you want. You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always put exactly the same quantity of water to the colour, that the darker the colour is, the more difficult it becomes to lay it on evenly. Therefore, when you have gained some definite degree of power, try to fill in the forms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead of laying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint, however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much of it is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as it dries. A little experience will teach you how apt the colour is to do this, and how to prevent it; not that it needs always to be prevented, for a great master in water-colours will sometimes draw a firm outline, when he _wants_ one, simply by letting the colour dry in this way at the edge. When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darker colour, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as it is led on from part to part. You will then find the following method useful. Lay in the colour very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, that you can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all the outlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly wet everywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker colour, and lay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid colour. It will spread gradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to the outlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fills its place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as a single dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately. Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint, you must try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the colour with three or four teaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away about two-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale colour. Sloping your paper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a space between them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at the top of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the first brushful of colour, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep in water, and mix up the colour on the plate quickly with as much more water as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this paler colour, lead the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the colour again, and thus lead down the tint, always dipping in water once between each replenishing of the brush, and stirring the colour on the plate well, but as quickly as you can. Go on until the colour has become so pale that you cannot see it; then wash your brush thoroughly in water, and carry the wave down a little farther with that, and then absorb it with the dry brush, and leave it to dry. If you get to the bottom of your paper before your colour gets pale, you may either take longer paper, or begin, with the tint as it was when you left off, on another sheet; but be sure to exhaust it to pure whiteness at last. When all is quite dry, recommence at the top with another similar mixture of colour, and go down in the same way. Then again, and then again, and so continually until the colour at the top of the paper is as dark as your cake of Prussian blue, and passes down into pure white paper at the end of your column, with a perfectly smooth gradation from one into the other. You will find at first that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead of evenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up more water in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on the plate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next. Practice only will enable you to do it well; the best artists cannot always get gradations of this kind quite to their minds; nor do they ever leave them on their pictures without after touching. As you get more power, and can strike the colour more quickly down, you will be able to gradate in less compass;[205] beginning with a small quantity of colour, and adding a drop of water, instead of a brushful; with finer brushes, also, you may gradate to a less scale. But slight skill will enable you to test the relations of colour to shade as far as is necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:-- Take cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[206] Cut a narrow slip all the way down, of each gradated colour, and set the three slips side by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across all the three, so as to divide them into fifty degrees, and number the degrees of each, from light to dark, 1, 2, 3, &c. If you have gradated them rightly, the darkest part either of the red or blue will be nearly equal in power to the darkest part of the blue-black, and any degree of the black slip will also, accurately enough for our purpose, balance in weight the degree similarly numbered in the red or the blue slip. Then, when you are drawing from objects of a crimson or blue colour, if you can match their colour by any compartment of the crimson or blue in your scales, the grey in the compartment of the grey scale marked with the same number is the grey which must represent that crimson or blue in your light and shade drawing. Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will find that you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[207] for yellow and scarlet, so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot approach to black; we cannot have, properly speaking, a dark yellow or dark scarlet. Make your scales of full yellow, blue, and scarlet, half-way down; passing _then_ gradually to white. Afterwards use lake to darken the upper half of the vermilion and gamboge; and Prussian blue to darken the cobalt. You will thus have three more scales, passing from white nearly to black, through yellow and orange, through sky-blue, and through scarlet. By mixing the gamboge and Prussian blue you may make another with green; mixing the cobalt and lake, another with violet; the sepia alone will make a forcible brown one; and so on, until you have as many scales as you like, passing from black to white through different colours. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equally divided, the compartment or degree No. 1. of the grey will represent in chiaroscuro the No. 1. of all the other colours; No. 2. of grey the No. 2. of the other colours, and so on. It is only necessary, however, in this matter that you should understand the principle; for it would never be possible for you to gradate your scales so truly as to make them practically accurate and serviceable; and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, and were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, you could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of a frost-bitten apple: but when once you fully understand the principle, and see how all colours contain as it were a certain quantity of darkness, or power of dark relief from white--some more, some less; and how this pitch or power of each may be represented by equivalent values of grey, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an approximation by a glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at all. You must now go on, again with the pen, drawing patterns, and any shapes of shade that you think pretty, as veinings in marble, or tortoise-shell, spots in surfaces of shells, &c., as tenderly as you can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colours; and when you find you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding. EXERCISE VIII. Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first round or oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and the smoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your table near the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about the size of _a_ in Fig. 5. (it had better not be much larger), on a piece of not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fall on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much consequence. Now, if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything: I mean, anything that is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if you can draw the stone _rightly_, every thing within reach of art is also within yours. For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing _Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be able to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses; not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces. Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds are rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself is round, and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work, which is often very flat indeed. Therefore, set yourself steadily to conquer that round stone, and you have won the battle. Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that the side of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper: that the side of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and that the light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown to the right _on_ the paper itself by the stone: the general appearance of things being more or less as in _a_, Fig. 5., the spots on the stone excepted, of which more presently. Now, remember always what was stated in the outset, that every thing you can see in Nature is seen only so far as it is lighter or darker than the things about it, or of a different colour from them. It is either seen as a patch of one colour on a ground of another; or as a pale thing relieved from a dark thing, or a dark thing from a pale thing. And if you can put on patches of colour or shade of exactly the same size, shape, and gradations as those on the object and its ground, you will produce the appearance of the object and its ground. The best draughtsman--Titian and Paul Veronese themselves--could do no more than this; and you will soon be able to get some power of doing it in an inferior way, if you once understand the exceeding simplicity of what is to be done. Suppose you have a brown book on a white sheet of paper, on a red tablecloth. You have nothing to do but to put on spaces of red, white, and brown, in the same shape, and gradated from dark to light in the same degrees, and your drawing is done. If you will not look at what you see, if you try to put on brighter or duller colours than are there, if you try to put them on with a dash or a blot, or to cover your paper with "vigorous" lines, or to produce anything, in fact, but the plain, unaffected, and finished tranquillity of the thing before you, you need not hope to get on. Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself up for her master. But forget yourself, and try to obey _her_, and you will find obedience easier and happier than you think. The real difficulties are to get the _refinement_ of the forms and the _evenness_ of the gradations. You may depend upon it, when you are dissatisfied with your work, it is always too coarse or too uneven. It may not be wrong--in all probability is not wrong, in any (so-called) _great_ point. But its edges are not true enough in outline; and its shades are in blotches, or scratches, or full of white holes. Get it more tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful. [Illustration: FIG. 5.] Do not, therefore, think your drawing must be weak because you have a finely pointed pen in your hand. Till you can draw with that, you can draw with nothing; when you can draw with that, you can draw with a log of wood charred at the end. True boldness and power are only to be gained by care. Even in fencing and dancing, all ultimate ease depends on early precision in the commencement; much more in singing or drawing. Now, I do not want you to copy Fig. 5., but to copy the stone before you in the way that Fig. 5. is done. To which end, first measure the extreme length of the stone with compasses, and mark that length on your paper; then, between the points marked, leave something like the form of the stone in light, scrawling the paper all over, round it, as at _b_, Fig. 5. You cannot rightly see what the form of the stone really is till you begin finishing, so sketch it in quite rudely; only rather leave too _much_ room for the high light, than too little: and then more cautiously fill in the shade, shutting the light gradually up, and putting in the dark cautiously on the dark side. You need not plague yourself about accuracy of shape, because, till you have practised a great deal, it is impossible for you to draw that shape quite truly, and you must gradually gain correctness by means of these various exercises: what you have mainly to do at present is, to get the stone to look solid and round, not much minding what its exact contour is--only draw it as nearly right as you can without vexation; and you will get it _more_ right by thus feeling your way to it in shade, than if you tried to draw the outline at first. For you can _see_ no outline; what you see is only a certain space of gradated shade, with other such spaces about it; and those pieces of shade you are to imitate as nearly as you can, by scrawling the paper over till you get them to the right shape, with the same gradations which they have in Nature. And this is really more likely to be done well, if you have to fight your way through a little confusion in the sketch, than if you have an accurately traced outline. For instance, I was going to draw, beside _a_, another effect on the stone; reflected light bringing its dark side out from the background: but when I had laid on the first few touches, I thought it would be better to stop, and let you see how I had begun it, at _b_. In which beginning it will be observed that nothing is so determined but that I can more or less modify, and add to or diminish the contour as I work on, the lines which suggest the outline being blended with the others if I do not want them; and the having to fill up the vacancies and conquer the irregularities of such a sketch, will probably secure a higher completion at last, than if half an hour had been spent in getting a true outline before beginning. In doing this, however, take care not to get the drawing too dark. In order to ascertain what the shades of it really are, cut a round hole, about half the size of a pea, in a piece of white paper, the colour of that you use to draw on. Hold this bit of paper, with the hole in it, between you and your stone; and pass the paper backwards and forwards, so as to see the different portions of the stone (or other subject) through the hole. You will find that, thus, the circular hole looks like one of the patches of colour you have been accustomed to match, only changing in depth as it lets different pieces of the stone be seen through it. You will be able thus actually to _match_ the colour of the stone, at any part of it, by tinting the paper beside the circular opening. And you will find that this opening never looks quite _black_, but that all the roundings of the stone are given by subdued greys.[208] You will probably find, also, that some parts of the stone, or of the paper it lies on, look luminous through the opening, so that the little circle then tells as a light spot instead of a dark spot. When this is so, you cannot imitate it, for you have no means of getting light brighter than white paper: but by holding the paper more sloped towards the light, you will find that many parts of the stone, which before looked light through the hole, then look dark through it; and if you can place the paper in such a position that every part of the stone looks slightly dark, the little hole will tell always as a spot of shade, and if your drawing is put in the same light, you can imitate or match every gradation. You will be amazed to find, under these circumstances, how slight the differences of tint are, by which, through infinite delicacy of gradation, Nature can express form. If any part of your subject will obstinately show itself as a light through the hole, that part you need not hope to imitate. Leave it white, you can do no more. When you have done the best you can to get the general form, proceed to finish, by imitating the texture and all the cracks and stains of the stone as closely as you can; and note, in doing this, that cracks or fissures of any kind, whether between stones in walls, or in the grain of timber or rocks, or in any of the thousand other conditions they present, are never expressible by single black lines, or lines of simple shadow. A crack must always have its complete system of light and shade, however small its scale. It is in reality a little _ravine_, with a dark or shady side, and light or sunny side, and, usually, shadow in the bottom. This is one of the instances in which it may be as well to understand the reason of the appearance; it is not often so in drawing, for the aspects of things are so subtle and confused that they cannot in general be explained; and in the endeavour to explain some, we are sure to lose sight of others, while the natural overestimate of the importance of those on which the attention is fixed, causes us to exaggerate them, so that merely _scientific_ draughtsmen caricature a third part of Nature, and miss two-thirds. The best scholar is he whose eye is so keen as to see at once how the thing looks, and who need not, therefore, trouble himself with any reasons why it looks so: but few people have this acuteness of perception; and to those who are destitute of it, a little pointing out of rule and reason will be a help, especially when a master is not near them. I never allow my own pupils to ask the reason of anything, because, as I watch their work, I can always show them how the thing is, and what appearance they are missing in it; but when a master is not by to direct the sight, science may, here and there, be allowed to do so in his stead. Generally, then, every solid illumined object--for instance, the stone you are drawing--has a light side turned towards the light, a dark side turned away from the light, and a shadow, which is cast on something else (as by the stone on the paper it is set upon). You may sometimes be placed so as to see only the light side and shadow, and sometimes only the dark side and shadow, and sometimes both, or either, without the shadow; but in most positions solid objects will show all the three, as the stone does here. Hold up your hand with the edge of it towards you, as you sit now with your side to the window, so that the flat of your hand is turned to the window. You will see one side of your hand distinctly lighted, the other distinctly in shade. Here are light side and dark side, with no seen shadow; the shadow being detached, perhaps on the table, perhaps on the other side of the room; you need not look for it at present. Take a sheet of note-paper, and holding it edgeways, as you hold your hand, wave it up and down past the side of your hand which is turned from the light, the paper being, of course, farther from the window. You will see, as it passes a strong gleam of light strike on your hand, and light it considerably on its dark side. This light is _reflected_ light. It is thrown back from the paper (on which it strikes first in coming from the window) to the surface of your hand, just as a ball would be if somebody threw it through the window at the wall and you caught it at the rebound. Next, instead of the note-paper, take a red book, or a piece of scarlet cloth. You will see that the gleam of light falling on your hand, as you wave the book is now reddened. Take a blue book, and you will find the gleam is blue. Thus every object will cast some of its own colour back in the light that it reflects. Now it is not only these books or papers that reflect light to your hand: every object in the room, on that side of it, reflects some, but more feebly, and the colours mixing all together form a neutral[209] light, which lets the colour of your hand itself be more distinctly seen than that of any object which reflects light to it; but if there were no reflected light, that side of your hand would look as black as a coal. Objects are seen, therefore in general, partly by direct light, and partly by light reflected from the objects around them, or from the atmosphere and clouds. The colour of their light sides depends much on that of the direct light, and that of the dark sides on the colours of the objects near them. It is therefore impossible to say beforehand what colour an object will have at any point of its surface, that colour depending partly on its own tint, and partly on infinite combinations of rays reflected from other things. The only certain fact about dark sides is, that their colour will be changeful, and that a picture which gives them merely darker shades of the colour of the light sides must assuredly be bad. Now, lay your hand flat on the white paper you are drawing on. You will see one side of each finger lighted, one side dark, and the shadow of your hand on the paper. Here, therefore, are the three divisions of shade seen at once. And although the paper is white, and your hand of a rosy colour somewhat darker than white, yet you will see that the shadow all along, just under the finger which casts it, is darker than the flesh, and is of a very deep grey. The reason of this is, that much light is reflected from the paper to the dark side of your finger, but very little is reflected from other things to the paper itself in that chink under your finger. In general, for this reason, a shadow, or, at any rate, the part of the shadow nearest the object, is darker than the dark side of the object. I say in general, because a thousand accidents may interfere to prevent its being so. Take a little bit of glass, as a wine-glass, or the ink-bottle, and play it about a little on the side of your hand farthest from the window; you will presently find you are throwing gleams of light all over the dark side of your hand, and in some positions of the glass the reflection from it will annihilate the shadow altogether, and you will see your hand dark on the white paper. Now a stupid painter would represent, for instance, a drinking-glass beside the hand of one of his figures, and because he had been taught by rule that "shadow was darker than the dark side," he would never think of the reflection from the glass, but paint a dark grey under the hand, just as if no glass were there. But a great painter would be sure to think of the true effect, and paint it; and then comes the stupid critic, and wonders why the hand is so light on its dark side. Thus it is always dangerous to assert anything as a _rule_ in matters of art; yet it is useful for you to remember that, in a general way, a shadow is darker than the dark side of the thing that casts it, supposing the colours otherwise the same; that is to say, when a white object casts a shadow on a white surface, or a dark object on a dark surface: the rule will not hold if the colours are different, the shadow of a black object on a white surface being, of course, not so dark, usually, as the black thing casting it. The only way to ascertain the ultimate truth in such matters is to _look_ for it; but, in the meantime, you will be helped by noticing that the cracks in the stone are little ravines, on one side of which the light strikes sharply, while the other is in shade. This dark side usually casts a little darker shadow at the bottom of the crack; and the general tone of the stone surface is not so bright as the light bank of the ravine. And, therefore, if you get the surface of the object of a uniform tint, more or less indicative of shade, and then scratch out a white spot or streak in it of any shape; by putting a dark touch beside this white one, you may turn it, as you choose, into either a ridge or an incision, into either a boss or a cavity. If you put the dark touch on the side of it nearest the sun, or rather, nearest the place that the light comes from, you will make it a cut or cavity; if you put it on the opposite side, you will make it a ridge or mound: and the complete success of the effect depends less on depth of shade than on the rightness of the drawing; that is to say, on the evident correspondence of the form of the shadow with the form that casts it. In drawing rocks, or wood, or anything irregularly shaped, you will gain far more by a little patience in following the forms carefully, though with slight touches, than by laboured finishing of textures of surface and transparencies of shadow. When you have got the whole well into shape, proceed to lay on the stains and spots with great care, quite as much as you gave to the forms. Very often, spots or bars of local colour do more to express form than even the light and shade, and they are always interesting as the means by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into her lights, an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speaking of composition. Fig. 5. is a rough sketch of a fossil sea-urchin, in which the projections of the shell are of black flint, coming through a chalky surface. These projections form dark spots in the light; and their sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller whitish spots in the dark. You may take such scattered lights as these out with the penknife, provided you are just as careful to place them rightly, as if you got them by a more laborious process. When you have once got the feeling of the way in which gradation expresses roundness and projection, you may try your strength on anything natural or artificial that happens to take your fancy, provided it be not too complicated in form. I have asked you to draw a stone first, because any irregularities and failures in your shading will be less offensive to you, as being partly characteristic of the rough stone surface, than they would be in a more delicate subject; and you may as well go on drawing rounded stones of different shapes for a little while, till you find you can really shade delicately. You may then take up folds of thick white drapery, a napkin or towel thrown carelessly on the table is as good as anything, and try to express them in the same way; only now you will find that your shades must be wrought with perfect unity and tenderness, or you will lose the flow of the folds. Always remember that a little bit perfected is worth more than many scrawls; whenever you feel yourself inclined to scrawl, give up work resolutely, and do not go back to it till next day. Of course your towel or napkin must be put on something that may be locked up, so that its folds shall not be disturbed till you have finished. If you find that the folds will not look right, get a photograph of a piece of drapery (there are plenty now to be bought, taken from the sculpture of the cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres, which will at once educate your hand and your taste), and copy some piece of that; you will then ascertain what it is that is wanting in your studies from nature, whether more gradation, or greater watchfulness of the disposition of the folds. Probably for some time you will find yourself failing painfully in both, for drapery is very difficult to follow in its sweeps; but do not lose courage, for the greater the difficulty, the greater the gain in the effort. If your eye is more just in measurement of form than delicate in perception of tint, a pattern on the folded surface will help you. Try whether it does or not; and if the patterned drapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if it helps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans, and simple chequered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and even though it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a pattern occasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modifications of it among the folds with scrupulous care. Neither must you suppose yourself condescending in doing this. The greatest masters are always fond of drawing patterns; and the greater they are, the more pains they take to do it truly.[210] Nor can there be better practice at any time, as introductory to the nobler complication of natural detail. For when you can draw the spots which follow the folds of a printed stuff, you will have some chance of following the spots which fall into the folds of the skin of a leopard as he leaps; but if you cannot draw the manufacture, assuredly you will never be able to draw the creature. So the cloudings on a piece of wood, carefully drawn, will be the best introduction to the drawing of the clouds of the sky, or the waves of the sea; and the dead leaf-patterns on a damask drapery, well rendered, will enable you to disentangle masterfully the living leaf-patterns of a thorn thicket, or a violet bank. Observe, however, in drawing any stuffs, or bindings of books, or other finely textured substances, do not trouble yourself, as yet, much about the woolliness or gauziness of the thing; but get it right in shade and fold, and true in pattern. We shall see, in the course of after-practice, how the penned lines may be made indicative of texture; but at present attend only to the light, and shade, and pattern. You will be puzzled at first by _lustrous_ surfaces, but a little attention will show you that the expression of these depends merely on the right drawing of their light, and shade, and reflections. Put a small black japanned tray on the table in front of some books; and you will see it reflects the objects beyond it as in a little black rippled pond; its own colour mingling always with that of the reflected objects. Draw these reflections of the books properly, making them dark and distorted, as you will see that they are, and you will find that this gives the lustre to your tray. It is not well, however, to draw polished objects in general practice; only you should do one or two in order to understand the aspect of any lustrous portion of other things, such as you cannot avoid; the gold, for instance, on the edges of books, or the shining of silk and damask, in which lies a great part of the expression of their folds. Observe, also, that there are very few things which are totally without lustre: you will frequently find a light which puzzles you, on some apparently dull surface, to be the dim image of another object. And now, as soon as you can conscientiously assure me that with the point of the pen or pencil you can lay on any form and shade you like, I give you leave to use the brush with one colour,--sepia, or blue-black, or mixed cobalt and blue-black, or neutral tint; and this will much facilitate your study, and refresh you. But, preliminarily, you must do one or two more exercises in tinting. EXERCISE IX. Prepare your colour as before directed. Take a brush full of it, and strike it on the paper in any irregular shape; as the brush gets dry sweep the surface of the paper with it as if you were dusting the paper very lightly; every such sweep of the brush will leave a number of more or less minute interstices in the colour. The lighter and faster every dash the better. Then leave the whole to dry, and as soon as it is dry, with little colour in your brush, so that you can bring it to a fine point, fill up all the little interstices one by one, so as to make the whole as even as you can, and fill in the larger gaps with more colour, always trying to let the edges of the first and of the newly applied colour exactly meet, and not lap over each other. When your new colour dries, you will find it in places a little paler than the first. Retouch it, therefore, trying to get the whole to look quite one piece. A very small bit of colour thus filled up with your very best care, and brought to look as if it had been quite even from the first, will give you better practice and more skill than a great deal filled in carelessly; so do it with your best patience, not leaving the most minute spot of white; and do not fill in the large pieces first and then go to the small, but quietly and steadily cover in the whole up to a marked limit; then advance a little farther, and so on; thus always seeing distinctly what is done and what undone. EXERCISE X. Lay a coat of the blue, prepared as usual, over a whole square of paper. Let it dry. Then another coat over four-fifths of the square, or thereabouts, leaving the edge rather irregular than straight, and let it dry. Then another coat over three-fifths; another over two-fifths; and the last over one-fifth; so that the square may present the appearance of gradual increase in darkness in five bands, each darker than the one beyond it. Then, with the brush rather dry (as in the former exercise, when filling up the interstices), try, with small touches, like those used in the pen etching, only a little broader, to add shade delicately beyond each edge, so as to lead the darker tints into the paler ones imperceptibly. By touching the paper very lightly, and putting a multitude of little touches, crossing and recrossing in every direction, you will gradually be able to work up to the darker tints, outside of each, so as quite to efface their edges, and unite them tenderly with the next tint. The whole square, when done, should look evenly shaded from dark to pale, with no bars; only a crossing texture of touches, something like chopped straw, over the whole.[211] Next, take your rounded pebble; arrange it in any light and shade you like; outline it very loosely with the pencil. Put on a wash of colour, prepared _very_ pale, quite flat over all of it, except the highest light, leaving the edge of your colour quite sharp. Then another wash, extending only over the darker parts, leaving the edge of that sharp also, as in tinting the square. Then another wash over the still darker parts, and another over the darkest, leaving each edge to dry sharp. Then, with the small touches, efface the edges, reinforce the darks, and work the whole delicately together, as you would with the pen, till you have got it to the likeness of the true light and shade. You will find that the tint underneath is a great help, and that you can now get effects much more subtle and complete than with the pen merely. The use of leaving the edges always sharp is that you may not trouble or vex the colour, but let it lie as it falls suddenly on the paper; colour looks much more lovely when it has been laid on with a dash of the brush, and left to dry in its own way, than when it has been dragged about and disturbed; so that it is always better to let the edges and forms be a _little_ wrong, even if one cannot correct them afterwards, than to lose this fresh quality of the tint. Very great masters in water-colour can lay on the true forms at once with a dash, and _bad_ masters in water-colour lay on grossly false forms with a dash, and leave them false; for people in general, not knowing false from true, are as much pleased with the appearance of power in the irregular blot as with the presence of power in the determined one; but _we_, in our beginnings, must do as much as we can with the broad dash, and then correct with the point, till we are quite right. We must take care to be right, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find we can be right with freedom. I have hitherto limited you to colour mixed with two or three teaspoonfuls of water; but in finishing your light and shade from the stone, you may, as you efface the edge of the palest coat towards the light, use the colour for the small touches with more and more water, till it is so pale as not to be perceptible. Thus you may obtain a _perfect_ gradation to the light. And in reinforcing the darks, when they are very dark, you may use less and less water. If you take the colour tolerably dark on your brush, only always liquid (not pasty), and dash away the superfluous colour on blotting-paper, you will find that, touching the paper very lightly with the dry brush, you can, by repeated touches, produce a dusty kind of bloom, very valuable in giving depth to shadow; but it requires great patience and delicacy of hand to do this properly. You will find much of this kind of work in the grounds and shadows of William Hunt's drawings.[212] As you get used to the brush and colour, you will gradually find out their ways for yourself, and get the management of them. Nothing but practice will do this perfectly; but you will often save yourself much discouragement by remembering what I have so often asserted,--that if anything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be refinement that is wanting, not force; and connexion, not alteration. If you dislike the state your drawing is in, do not lose patience with it, nor dash at it, nor alter its plan, nor rub it desperately out, at the place you think wrong; but look if there are no shadows you can gradate more perfectly; no little gaps and rents you can fill; no forms you can more delicately define: and do not _rush_ at any of the errors or incompletions thus discerned, but efface or supply slowly, and you will soon find your drawing take another look. A very useful expedient in producing some effects, is to wet the paper, and then lay the colour on it, more or less wet, according to the effect you want. You will soon see how prettily it gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can reinforce it with delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also, while the colour is still damp on the paper, by drying your brush thoroughly, and touching the colour with the brush so dried, you may take out soft lights with great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of experiments of this kind, noticing how the colour behaves; but remembering always that your final results must be obtained, and can only be obtained, by pure work with the point, as much as in the pen drawing. You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated subjects, that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer than yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything _like_ all, the gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case, determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black inkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass, the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass; and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so as to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a dark-coloured object with little light, and in a light-coloured object with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of the great masses. And this observe, not because masses are grand or desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a _fact_ that things do so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper, book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles, or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, therefore, at once, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is in the reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minor markings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature, you are sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this find that you cannot get the _projection_ of things sufficiently shown; but never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project, but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more or less bad; a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a slight tendency towards _flatness_. Observe, on the other hand, that however white an object may be, there is always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You must therefore have a slight tone of grey over everything in your picture except on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, in your subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are a thousand chances to one against its being so) it should all be turned so as fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the white objects in any pictures accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian, you will soon understand this.[213] As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing with the brush the undulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed to draw more complicated and beautiful things.[214] And first, the boughs of trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take the first bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cut off the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole only about a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bit of branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and draw it thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, above all things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the fork of the branch. When once you have mastered the tree at its _armpits_, you will have little more trouble with it. Always draw whatever the background happens to be, exactly as you see it. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever is behind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light and shade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want of the background. And this general law is to be observed in all your studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which you may not get useful practice. Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with four or five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of light-coloured or white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be relieved in dark from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape carefully with pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be sure that all their masses and interstices are right in shape before you begin shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the manner of Fig. 6., which is a young shoot of lilac. [Illustration: FIG. 6.] You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at first puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or colour in the nearer parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not attempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves, shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the point of one of the leaves against, and so sketch the whole bough as you see it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never can be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with _both_ eyes,[215] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen with one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these terms. In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take a single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as you can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted to know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each position, and you will soon find out how it must be. Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters; and practise, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements, not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you do this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures, that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of the great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied, brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too intricate, to be thus dealt with. [Illustration: FIG. 7. a b c] You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of execution, capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first, you must understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards' distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see, mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the edge turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for, supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7., this, when removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at _b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the woodcut, that the stalk and point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye, have yet some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they exist, and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which remains visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by two layers of colour, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next drawing the broken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully indicating the greater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the under side of the leaf is. This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reach such accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of the foliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice. Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long. Fix it firmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put it about eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put a sheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw very carefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up with ink, every leaf, mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as you see them against the paper: Fig. 8. is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Do not be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they come together; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes of such masses are when seen against the sky. [Illustration: FIG. 8.] Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common tree--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, &c.; in fact, if you are good, and industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for this reason--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and the side view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organisation of branches from that seen in the view from above. They are generally seen more or less in profile, as you look at the whole tree, and Nature puts her best composition into the profile arrangement. But the view from above or below occurs not unfrequently, also, and it is quite necessary you should draw it if you wish to understand the anatomy of the tree. The difference between the two views is often far greater than you could easily conceive. For instance, in Fig. 9., _a_ is the upper view, and _b_ the profile, of a single spray of Phillyrea. Fig. 8. is an intermediate view of a larger bough; seen from beneath, but at some lateral distance also. [Illustration: FIG. 9.] When you have done a few branches in this manner, take one of the _drawings_, and put it first a yard away from you, then a yard and a half, then two yards; observe how the thinner stalks and leaves gradually disappear, leaving only a vague and slight darkness where they were, and make another study of the effect at each distance, taking care to draw nothing more than you really see, for in this consists all the difference between what would be merely a _miniature_ drawing of the leaves seen _near_, and a _full-size_ drawing of the same leaves at a distance. By full size, I mean the size which they would really appear of if their outline were traced through a pane of glass held at the same distance from the eye at which you mean to hold your drawing. You can always ascertain this full size of any object by holding your paper upright before you, at the distance from your eye at which you wish your drawing to be seen. Bring its edge across the object you have to draw, and mark upon this edge the points where the outline of the object crosses, or goes behind, the edge of the paper. You will always find it, thus measured, smaller than you supposed. When you have made a few careful experiments of this kind on your own drawings, (which are better for practice, at first, than the real trees, because the black profile in the drawing is quite stable, and does not shake, and is not confused by sparkles of lustre on the leaves,) you may try the extremities of the real trees, only not doing much at a time, for the brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex your sight. And this brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the outline itself; at least the chemical action of the light in a photograph extends much within the edges of the leaves, and, as it were, eats them away so that no tree extremity, stand it ever so still, nor any other form coming against bright sky, is truly drawn by a photograph; and if you once succeed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you will find the result much more lovely and interesting than any photograph can be. All this difficulty, however, attaches to the rendering merely the dark form of the sprays as they come against the sky. Within those sprays, and in the heart of the tree, there is a complexity of a much more embarrassing kind; for nearly all leaves have some lustre, and _all_ are more or less translucent (letting light through them); therefore, in any given leaf, besides the intricacies of its own proper shadows and foreshortenings, there are three series of circumstances which alter or hide its forms. First, shadows cast on it by other leaves--often very forcibly. Secondly, light reflected from its lustrous surface, sometimes the blue of the sky, sometimes the white of clouds, or the sun itself flashing like a star. Thirdly, forms and shadows of other leaves, seen as darkness _through_ the translucent parts of the leaf; a most important element of foliage effect, but wholly neglected by landscape artists in general. The consequence of all this is, that except now and then by chance, the form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvellous and quaint confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable, part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out in fac simile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or less imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and mystery of Nature, without absolute delineation of detail. Now I have led you to this conclusion by observation of tree form only, because in that the thing to be proved is clearest. But no natural object exists which does not involve in some part or parts of it this inimitableness, this mystery of quantity, which needs peculiarity of handling and trick of touch to express it completely. If leaves are intricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur and hair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds. And although methods and dexterities of handling are wholly useless if you have not gained first the thorough knowledge of the form of the thing; so that if you cannot draw a branch perfectly, then much less a tree; and if not a wreath of mist perfectly, much less a flock of clouds; and if not a single grass blade perfectly, much less a grass bank; yet having once got this power over decisive form, you may safely--and must, in order to perfection of work--carry out your knowledge by every aid of method and dexterity of hand. But, in order to find out what method can do, you must now look at Art as well as at Nature, and see what means painters and engravers have actually employed for the expression of these subtleties. Whereupon arises the question, what opportunity have you to obtain engravings? You ought, if it is at all in your power, to possess yourself of a certain number of good examples of Turner's engraved works: if this be not in your power, you must just make the best use you can of the shop windows, or of any plates of which you can obtain a loan. Very possibly, the difficulty of getting sight of them may stimulate you to put them to better use. But, supposing your means admit of your doing so, possess yourself, first, of the illustrated edition either of Rogers's Italy or Rogers's Poems, and then of about a dozen of the plates named in the annexed lists. The prefixed letters indicate the particular points deserving your study in each engraving.[216] Be sure, therefore, that your selection includes, at all events, one plate marked with each letter--of course the plates marked with two or three letters are, for the most part, the best. Do not get more than twelve of these plates, nor even all the twelve at first. For the more engravings you have, the less attention you will pay to them. It is a general truth, that the enjoyment derivable from art cannot be increased in quantity, beyond a certain point, by quantity of possession; it is only spread, as it were, over a larger surface, and very often dulled by finding ideas repeated in different works. Now, for a beginner, it is always better that his attention should be concentrated on one or two good things, and all his enjoyment founded on them, than that he should look at many, with divided thoughts. He has much to discover; and his best way of discovering it is to think long over few things, and watch them earnestly. It is one of the worst errors of this age to try to know and to see too much: the men who seem to know everything, never in reality know anything rightly. Beware of _hand-book_ knowledge. These engravings are, in general, more for you to look at than to copy; and they will be of more use to you when we come to talk of composition, than they are at present; still, it will do you a great deal of good, sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate texture, or gradations of tone; as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt to incline too much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For instance, the texture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its tiled roof, in the vignette at p. 227. of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite as work can possibly be; and it will be a great and profitable achievement if you can at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at all imitate the dark distant country at p. 7., or the sky at p. 80., of the same volume, or the foliage at pp. 12. and 144., it will be good gain; and if you can once draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9. of the "Italy," or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25., or the moonlight at p. 223., you will find that even Nature herself cannot afterwards very terribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or moonlight. You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect. And if you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to think that engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you to draw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by the difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless habit of thinking that engraving is a mere _business_, easy enough when one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it at certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less a habit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are trying to copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--that is, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made is white instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge of what you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good for you, because it will awaken you to the real labour and skill of the engraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, in this world, who have really to _do_ anything in it. Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a model--far from it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as well[217] before you think of doing better, and you will find many little helps and hints in the various work of it. Only remember that _all_ engravers' foregrounds are bad; whenever you see the peculiar wriggling parallel lines of modern engravings become distinct, you must not copy; nor admire: it is only the softer masses, and distances; and portions of the foliage in the plates marked _f_, which you may copy. The best for this purpose, if you can get it, is the "Chain bridge over the Tees," of the England series; the thicket on the right is very beautiful and instructive, and very like Turner. The foliage in the "Ludlow" and "Powis" is also remarkably good. Besides these line engravings, and to protect you from what harm there is in their influence, you are to provide yourself, if possible, with a Rembrandt etching, or a photograph of one (of figures, not landscape). It does not matter of what subject, or whether a sketchy or finished one, but the sketchy ones are generally cheapest, and will teach you most. Copy it as well as you can, noticing especially that Rembrandt's most rapid lines have steady purpose; and that they are laid with almost inconceivable precision when the object becomes at all interesting. The "Prodigal Son," "Death of the Virgin," "Abraham and Isaac," and such others, containing incident and character rather than chiaroscuro, will be the most instructive. You can buy one; copy it well; then exchange it, at little loss, for another; and so, gradually, obtain a good knowledge of his system. Whenever you have an opportunity of examining his work at museums, &c., do so with the greatest care, not looking at _many_ things, but a long time at each. You must also provide yourself, if possible, with an engraving of Albert Durer's. This you will not be able to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer to it as a standard of precision in line. If you can get one with a _wing_ in it, it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the skull and satyr, and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but any will do. Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two masters, Rembrandt and Durer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague; and Durer has little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If you can see anywhere a drawing by Leonardo, you will find it balanced between the two characters; but there are no engravings which present this perfection, and your style will be best formed, therefore, by alternate study of Rembrandt and Durer. Lean rather to Durer; it is better for amateurs to err on the side of precision than on that of vagueness: and though, as I have just said, you cannot copy a Durer, yet try every now and then a quarter of an inch square or so, and see how much nearer you can come; you cannot possibly try to draw the leafly crown of the "Melancholia" too often. If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Durer, you may still learn much by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, or Leech's woodcuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's and Richter's[218] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need to notice the following points: When either the material (as the copper or wood) or the time of an artist, does not permit him to make a perfect drawing,--that is to say, one in which no lines shall be prominently visible,--and he is reduced to show the black lines, either drawn by the pen, or on the wood, it is better to make these lines help, as far as may be, the expression of texture and form. You will thus find many textures, as of cloth or grass or flesh, and many subtle effects of light, expressed by Leech with zigzag or crossed or curiously broken lines; and you will see that Alfred Rethel and Richter constantly express the direction and rounding of surfaces by the direction of the lines which shade them. All these various means of expression will be useful to you, as far as you can learn them, provided you remember that they are merely a kind of shorthand; telling certain facts, not in quite the _right_ way, but in the only possible way under the conditions: and provided in any after use of such means, you never try to show your own dexterity; but only to get as much record of the object as you can in a given time; and that you continually make efforts to go beyond shorthand, and draw portions of the objects rightly. And touching this question of _direction_ of lines as indicating that of surface, observe these few points: [Illustration: FIG. 10.] If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they _can_ indicate any thing by their direction, they should explain rather than oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece of woodcut from Titian, Fig. 10., the lines are serviceable by expressing, not only the shade of the trunk, but partly also its roundness, and the flow of its grain. And Albert Durer, whose work was chiefly engraving, sets himself always thus to make his lines as _valuable_ as possible; telling much by them, both of shade and direction of surface: and if you were always to be limited to engraving on copper (and did not want to express effects of mist or darkness, as well as delicate forms), Albert Durer's way of work would be the best example for you. But, inasmuch as the perfect way of drawing is by shade without lines, and the great painters always conceive their subject as complete, even when they are sketching it most rapidly, you will find that, when they are not limited in means, they do not much trust to direction of line, but will often scratch in the shade of a rounded surface with nearly straight lines, that is to say, with the easiest and quickest lines possible to themselves. When the hand is free, the easiest line for it to draw is one inclining from the left upward to the right, or _vice versâ_, from the right downwards to the left; and when done very quickly, the line is hooked a little at the end by the effort at return to the next. Hence, you will always find the pencil, chalk, or pen sketch of a _very_ great master full of these kind of lines; and even if he draws carefully, you will find him using simple straight lines from left to right, when an inferior master will have used curved ones. Fig. 11. is a fair facsimile of part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters very distinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shaded most commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as a point increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master if you find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or lips, shaded with straight lines. [Illustration: FIG. 11.] But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonest dealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Figure 11., and pass them for the work of great masters; and how the power of determining the genuineness of a drawing depends entirely on your knowing the _facts_ of the object drawn, and perceiving whether the hasty handling is _all_ conducive to the expression of those truths. In a great man's work, at its fastest, no line is thrown away, and it is not by the rapidity, but the _economy_ of the execution that you know him to be great. Now to judge of this economy, you must know exactly what he meant to do, otherwise you cannot of course discern how far he has done it; that is, you must know the beauty and nature of the thing he was drawing. All judgment of art thus finally founds itself on knowledge of Nature. But farther observe, that this scrawled, or economic, or impetuous execution is never _affectedly_ impetuous. If a great man is not in a hurry, he never pretends to be; if he has no eagerness in his heart, he puts none into his hand; if he thinks his effect would be better got with _two_ lines, he never, to show his dexterity, tries to do it with one. Be assured, therefore (and this is a matter of great importance), that you will never produce a great drawing by imitating the _execution_ of a great master. Acquire his knowledge and share his feelings, and the easy execution will fall from your hand as it did from his; but if you merely scrawl because he scrawled, or blot because he blotted, you will not only never advance in power, but every able draughtsman, and every judge whose opinion is worth having, will know you for a cheat, and despise you accordingly. Again, observe respecting the use of outline: All merely outlined drawings are bad, for the simple reason, that an artist of any power can always do more, and tell more, by quitting his outlines occasionally, and scratching in a few lines for shade, than he can by restricting himself to outline only. Hence the fact of his so restricting himself, whatever may be the occasion, shows him to be a bad draughtsman, and not to know how to apply his power economically. This hard law, however, bears only on drawings meant to remain in the state in which you see them; not on those which were meant to be proceeded with, or for some mechanical use. It is sometimes necessary to draw pure outlines, as an incipient arrangement of a composition, to be filled up afterwards with colour, or to be pricked through and used as patterns or tracings; but if, with no such ultimate object, making the drawing wholly for its own sake, and meaning it to remain in the state he leaves it, an artist restricts himself to outline, he is a bad draughtsman, and his work is bad. There is no exception to this law. A good artist habitually sees masses, not edges, and can in every case make his drawing more expressive (with any given quantity of work) by rapid shade than by contours; so that all good work whatever is more or less touched with shade, and more or less interrupted as outline. [Illustration: FIG. 12.] Hence, the published works of Retsch, and all the English imitations of them, and all outline engravings from pictures, are bad work, and only serve to corrupt the public taste, and of such outlines, the worst are those which are darkened in some part of their course by way of expressing the dark side, as Flaxman's from Dante, and such others; because an outline can only be true so long as it accurately represents the form of the given object with _one_ of its edges. Thus, the outline _a_ and the outline _b_, Fig. 12., are both _true_ outlines of a ball; because, however thick the line may be, whether we take the interior or exterior edge of it, that edge of it always draws a true circle. But _c_ is a false outline of a ball, because either the inner or outer edge of the black line must be an untrue circle, else the line could not be thicker in one place than another. Hence all "force," as it is called, is gained by falsification of the contours; so that no artist whose eye is true and fine could endure to look at it. It does indeed often happen that a painter, sketching rapidly, and trying again and again for some line which he cannot quite strike, blackens or loads the first line by setting others beside and across it; and then a careless observer supposes it has been thickened on purpose; or, sometimes also, at a place where shade is afterwards to enclose the form, the painter will strike a broad dash of this shade beside his outline at once, looking as if he meant to thicken the outline; whereas this broad line is only the first instalment of the future shadow, and the outline is really drawn with its inner edge. And thus, far from good draughtsmen darkening the lines which turn away from the light, the _tendency_ with them is rather to darken them towards the light, for it is there in general that shade will ultimately enclose them. The best example of this treatment that I know is Raphael's sketch, in the Louvre, of the head of the angel pursuing Heliodorus, the one that shows part of the left eye; where the dark strong lines which terminate the nose and forehead towards the light are opposed to tender and light ones behind the ear, and in other places towards the shade. You will see in Fig. 11. the same principle variously exemplified; the principal dark lines, in the head and drapery of the arms, being on the side turned to the light. All these refinements and ultimate principles, however, do not affect your drawing for the present. You must try to make your outlines as _equal_ as possible; and employ pure outline only for the two following purposes: either (1.) to steady your hand, as in Exercise II., for if you cannot draw the line itself, you will never be able to terminate your shadow in the precise shape required, when the line is absent; or (2.) to give you shorthand memoranda of forms, when you are pressed for time. Thus the forms of distant trees in groups are defined, for the most part, by the light edge of the rounded mass of the nearer one being shown against the darker part of the rounded mass of a more distant one; and to draw this properly, nearly as much work is required to round each tree as to round the stone in Fig. 5. Of course you cannot often get time to do this; but if you mark the terminal line of each tree as is done by Durer in Fig. 13., you will get a most useful memorandum of their arrangement, and a very interesting drawing. Only observe in doing this, you must not, because the procedure is a quick one, hurry that procedure itself. You will find, on copying that bit of Durer, that every one of his lines is firm, deliberate, and accurately descriptive as far as it goes. It means a bush of such a size and such a shape, definitely observed and set down; it contains a true "signalement" of every nut-tree, and apple-tree, and higher bit of hedge, all round that village. If you have not time to draw thus carefully, do not draw at all--you are merely wasting your work and spoiling your taste. When you have had four or five years' practice you may be able to make useful memoranda at a rapid rate, but not yet; except sometimes of light and shade, in a way of which I will tell you presently. And this use of outline, note farther, is wholly confined to objects which have _edges_ or _limits_. You can outline line a tree or a stone, when it rises against another tree or stone; but you cannot outline folds in drapery, or waves in water; if these are to be expressed at all it must be by some sort of shade, and therefore the rule that no good drawing can consist throughout of pure outline remains absolute. You see, in that woodcut of Durer's, his reason for even limiting himself so much to outline as he has, in those distant woods and plains, is that he may leave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more by the dark sky and the dark village spire; and the scene becomes real and sunny only by the addition of these shades. [Illustration: FIG. 13.] Understanding, then, thus much of the use of outline, we will go back to our question about tree drawing left unanswered at page 60. [Illustration: FIG. 14.] [Illustration: FIG. 15.] We were, you remember, in pursuit of mystery among the leaves. Now, it is quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder, to any extent; but the difficulty is to keep organisation in the midst of mystery. And you will never succeed in doing this unless you lean always to the definite side, and allow yourself rarely to become quite vague, at least through all your early practice. So, after your single groups of leaves, your first step must be to conditions like Figs. 14. and 15., which are careful facsimiles of two portions of a beautiful woodcut of Durer's, the Flight into Egypt. Copy these carefully,--never mind how little at a time, but thoroughly; then trace the Durer, and apply it to your drawing, and do not be content till the one fits the other, else your eye is not true enough to carry you safely through meshes of real leaves. And in the course of doing this, you will find that not a line nor dot of Durer's can be displaced without harm; that all add to the effect, and either express something, or illumine something, or relieve something. If, afterwards, you copy any of the pieces of modern tree drawing, of which so many rich examples are given constantly in our cheap illustrated periodicals (any of the Christmas numbers of last year's _Illustrated News_ or _Times_ are full of them), you will see that, though good and forcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in by thousands without special intention, and might just as well go one way as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all together a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a little careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near the same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, will imitate so much as one leaf of Durer's. Yet there is considerable intricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vine leaves of his, as well as of the grass. [Illustration: FIG. 16.] When you have got familiarised to this firm manner, you may draw from Nature as much as you like in the same way, and when you are tired of the intense care required for this, you may fall into a little more easy massing of the leaves, as in Fig. 10. p. 66. This is facsimiled from an engraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in manner, the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough model for your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even so far as this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig. 16.,[219] taking care always to have thorough command over your hand; that is, not to let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran glibly over the paper, but because in nature it has actually a free and noble shape, and you have faithfully followed the same. And now that we have come to questions of _noble_ shape, as well as true shape, and that we are going to draw from nature at our pleasure, other considerations enter into the business, which are by no means confined to _first_ practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this letter is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting of correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only to excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable from directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me, even though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work. Very faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: [199] (N. B. This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous or curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are willing to take the statement in the text on trust.) The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We _see_ nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the _innocence of the eye_; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight. For instance; when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if there were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should try to gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from the grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses; and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was really the cause of the colour in the one,--not in the other. We go through such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; and having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain colours, we always suppose that we _see_ what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret. Very few people have any idea that sunlighted grass is yellow. Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the colours of nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at once in the sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that form its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish green barred with gold. Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great fact about sight. This, in your hand, which you know by experience and touch to be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch of white, variously gradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by experience you know to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of brown, variously darkened and veined; and so on: and the whole art of Painting consists merely in perceiving the shape and depth of these patches of colour, and putting patches of the same size, depth, and shape on canvas. The only obstacle to the success of painting is, that many of the real colours are brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas: we must put darker ones to represent them. [200] Stale crumb of bread is better, if you are making a delicate drawing, than India-rubber, for it disturbs the surface of the paper less: but it crumbles about the room and makes a mess; and, besides, you waste the good bread, which is wrong; and your drawing will not for a long while be worth the crumbs. So use India-rubber very lightly; or, if heavily pressing it only, not passing it over the paper, and leave what pencil marks that will not come away so, without minding them. In a finished drawing the uneffaced penciling is often serviceable, helping the general tone, and enabling you to take out little bright lights. [201] What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom" is the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand is so thoroughly disciplined, that when pressed for time he can let it fly as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great master at real _work_ is _never_ free: its swiftest dash is under perfect government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret could pause within a hair's breadth of any appointed mark, in their fastest touches; and follow, within a hair's breadth, the previously intended curve. You must never, therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that it should be free, but that it should be _right_: in time you will be able to do right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense; but there is no merit in doing _wrong_ easily. These remarks, however, do not apply to the lines used in shading, which, it will be remembered, are to be made as _quickly_ as possible. The reason of this is, that the quicker a line is drawn, the lighter it is at the ends, and therefore the more easily joined with other lines, and concealed by them; the object in perfect shading being to conceal the lines as much as possible. And observe, in this exercise, the object is more to get firmness of hand than accuracy of eye for outline; for there are no outlines in Nature, and the ordinary student is sure to draw them falsely if he draws them at all. Do not, therefore, be discouraged if you find mistakes continue to occur in your outlines; be content at present if you find your hand gaining command over the curves. [202] If you can get any pieces of _dead_ white porcelain, not glazed, they will be useful models. [203] Artists who glance at this book may be surprised at this permission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that the pupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the relations of curve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely true, than that he should practice drawing straight lines. But also, I believe, though I am not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_ to be able to draw a straight line. I do not believe a perfectly trained hand ever can draw a line without some curvature in it, or some variety of direction. Prout could draw a straight line, but I do not believe Raphael could, nor Tintoret. A great draughtsman can, as far as I have observed, draw every line _but_ a straight one. [204] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused quick touches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of twigs round the main branches; but do not take much trouble about them. [205] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in colour, a narrow gradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as with the pen, to make the gradation go _far_. [206] Of course, all the columns of colour are to be of equal length. [207] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given colour is always indicated by the colour of the solid cake in the box. [208] The figure _a_, Fig. 5., is very dark, but this is to give an example of all kinds of depth of tint, without repeated figures. [209] Nearly neutral in ordinary circumstances, but yet with quite different tones in its neutrality, according to the colours of the various reflected rays that compose it. [210] If we had any business with the reasons of this, I might, perhaps, be able to show you some metaphysical ones for the enjoyment, by truly artistical minds, of the changes wrought by light, and shade, and perspective in patterned surfaces; but this is at present not to the point; and all that you need to know is that the drawing of such things is good exercise, and moreover a kind of exercise which Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, and Turner, all enjoyed, and strove to excel in. [211] The use of acquiring this habit of execution is that you may be able, when you begin to colour, to let one hue be seen in minute portions, gleaming between the touches of another. [212] William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour Society. [213] At Marlborough House, among the four principal examples of Turner's later water-colour drawing, perhaps the most neglected is that of fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of his most wonderful works, though unfinished. If you examine the larger white fishing-boat sail, you will find it has a little spark of pure white in its right-hand upper corner, about as large as a minute pin's head, and that all the surface of the sail is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this sail once or twice, and you will begin to understand Turner's work. Similarly, the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the National Gallery is focussed to two little grains of white at the top of it. The points of light on the white flower in the wreath round the head of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplify the same thing. [214] I shall not henceforward _number_ the exercises recommended; as they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty of subject, not by difference of method. [215] If you understand the principle of the stereoscope you will know why; if not, it does not matter; trust me for the truth of the statement, as I cannot explain the principle without diagrams and much loss of time. [216] If you can, get first the plates marked with a star. The letters mean as follows:-- _a_ stands for architecture, including distant grouping of towns, cottages, &c. _c_ clouds, including mist and aërial effects. _f_ foliage. _g_ ground, including low hills, when not rocky. _l_ effects of light. _m_ mountains, or bold rocky ground. _p_ power of general arrangement and effect. _q_ quiet water. _r_ running or rough water; or rivers, even if calm, when their line of flow is beautifully marked. _From the England Series._ _a c f r._ Arundel. _a f l._ Ashby de la Zouche. _a l q r._ Barnard Castle.* _f m r._ Bolton Abbey. _f g r._ Buckfastleigh.* _a l p._ Caernarvon. _c l q._ Castle Upnor. _a f l._ Colchester. _l q._ Cowes. _c f p._ Dartmouth Cove. _c l q._ Flint Castle.* _a f g l._ Knaresborough.* _m r._ High Force of Tees.* _a f q._ Trematon. _a f p._ Lancaster. _c l m r._ Lancaster Sands.* _a g f._ Launceston. _c f l r._ Leicester Abbey. _f r._ Ludlow. _a f l._ Margate. _a l q._ Orford. _c p._ Plymouth. _f._ Powis Castle. _l m q._ Prudhoe Castle. _f l m r._ Chain Bridge over Tees.* _m q._ Ulleswater. _f m._ Valle Crucis. _From the Keepsake._ _m p q._ Arona. _m._ Drachenfells. _f l._ Marley.* _p._ St. Germain en Laye. _l p q._ Florence. _l m._ Ballyburgh Ness.* _From the Bible Series._ _f m._ Mount Lebanon. _m._ Rock of Moses at Sinai. _a l m._ Jericho. _a c g._ Joppa. _c l p q._ Solomon's Pools.* _a l._ Santa Saba. _a l._ Pool of Bethesda. _From Scott's Works._ _p r._ Melrose. _f r._ Dryburgh.* _c m._ Glencoe. _c m._ Loch Coriskin. _a l._ Caerlaverock. _From the "Rivers of France."_ _a q._ Château of Amboise, with large bridge on right. _l p r._ Rouen, looking down the river, poplars on right.* _a l p._ Rouen, with cathedral and rainbow, avenue on the left. _a p._ Rouen Cathedral. _f p._ Pont de l'Arche. _f l p._ View on the Seine, with avenue. _a c p._ Bridge of Meulan. _c g p r._ Caudebec.* [217] As _well_;--not as minutely: the diamond cuts finer lines on the steel than you can draw on paper with your pen; but you must be able to get tones as even, and touches as firm. [218] See, for account of these plates, the Appendix on "Works to be studied." [219] This sketch is not of a tree standing on its head, though it looks like it. You will find it explained presently. LETTER II. SKETCHING FROM NATURE. MY DEAR READER:-- The work we have already gone through together has, I hope, enabled you to draw with fair success, either rounded and simple masses, like stones, or complicated arrangements of form, like those of leaves; provided only these masses or complexities will stay quiet for you to copy, and do not extend into quantity so great as to baffle your patience. But if we are now to go out to the fields, and to draw anything like a complete landscape, neither of these conditions will any more be observed for us. The clouds will not wait while we copy their heaps or clefts; the shadows will escape from us as we try to shape them, each, in its stealthy minute march, still leaving light where its tremulous edge had rested the moment before, and involving in eclipse objects that had seemed safe from its influence; and instead of the small clusters of leaves which we could reckon point by point, embarrassing enough even though numerable, we have now leaves as little to be counted as the sands of the sea, and restless, perhaps, as its foam. In all that we have to do now, therefore, direct imitation becomes more or less impossible. It is always to be aimed at so far as it _is_ possible; and when you have time and opportunity, some portions of a landscape may, as you gain greater skill, be rendered with an approximation almost to mirrored portraiture. Still, whatever skill you may reach, there will always be need of judgment to choose, and of speed to seize, certain things that are principal or fugitive; and you must give more and more effort daily to the observance of characteristic points, and the attainment of concise methods. I have directed your attention early to foliage for two reasons. First, that it is always accessible as a study; and secondly, that its modes of growth present simple examples of the importance of leading or governing lines. It is by seizing these leading lines, when we cannot seize _all_, that likeness and expression are given to a portrait, and grace and a kind of _vital_ truth to the rendering of every natural form. I call it _vital_ truth, because these chief lines are always expressive of the past history and present action of the thing. They show in a mountain, first, how it was built or heaped up; and secondly, how it is now being worn away, and from what quarter the wildest storms strike it. In a tree, they show what kind of fortune it has had to endure from its childhood; how troublesome trees have come in its way, and pushed it aside, and tried to strangle or starve it; where and when kind trees have sheltered it, and grown up lovingly together with it, bending as it bent; what winds torment it most; what boughs of it behave best, and bear most fruit; and so on. In a wave or cloud, these leading lines show the run of the tide and of the wind, and the sort of change which the water or vapour is at any moment enduring in its form, as it meets shore, or counterwave, or melting sunshine. Now remember, nothing distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their always, whether in life or in art, _knowing the way things are going_. Your dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so--the animal in its motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course, the mountain in its wearing away. Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate, and will have power over its futurity. Those are its _awful_ lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss. Thus, the leafage in Fig. 16. (p. 291.) grew round the root of a stone pine, on the brow of a crag at Sestri, near Genoa, and all the sprays of it are thrust away in their first budding by the great rude root, and spring out in every direction round it, as water splashes when a heavy stone is thrown into it. Then, when they have got clear of the root, they begin to bend up again; some of them, being little stone pines themselves, have a great notion of growing upright, if they can; and this struggle of theirs to recover their straight road towards the sky, after being obliged to grow sideways in their early years, is the effort that will mainly influence their future destiny, and determine if they are to be crabbed, forky pines, striking from that rock of Sestri, whose clefts nourish them, with bared red lightning of angry arms towards the sea; or if they are to be goodly and solemn pines, with trunks like pillars of temples, and the purple burning of their branches sheathed in deep globes of cloudy green. Those, then, are their fateful lines; see that you give that spring and resilience, whatever you leave ungiven: depend upon it, their chief beauty is in these. [Illustration: FIG. 17.] [Illustration: FIG. 18.] [Illustration: FIG. 19.] So in trees in general and bushes, large or small, you will notice that, though the boughs spring irregularly and at various angles, there is a tendency in all to stoop less and less as they near the top of the tree. This structure, typified in the simplest possible terms at _c_, Fig. 17., is common to all trees, that I know of, and it gives them a certain plumy character, and aspect of unity in the hearts of their branches, which are essential to their beauty. The stem does not merely send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches share in one great fountain-like impulse; each has a curve and a path to take which fills a definite place, and each terminates all its minor branches at its outer extremity, so as to form a great outer curve, whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species; that is to say, the general type or idea of a tree is not as _a_, Fig. 17., but as _b_, in which, observe, the boughs all carry their minor divisions right out to the bounding curve; not but that smaller branches, by thousands, terminate in the heart of the tree, but the idea and main purpose in every branch are to carry all its child branches well out to the air and light, and let each of them, however small, take its part in filling the united flow of the bounding curve, so that the type of each separate bough is again not _a_ but _b_, Fig. 18.; approximating, that is to say, so far to the structure of a plant of broccoli as to throw the great mass of spray and leafage out to a rounded surface; therefore, beware of getting into a careless habit of drawing boughs with successive sweeps of the pen or brush, one hanging to the other, as in Fig. 19. If you look at the tree-boughs in any painting of Wilson's, you will see this structure, and nearly every other that is to be avoided, in their intensest types. You will also notice that Wilson never conceives a tree as a round mass, but flat, as if it had been pressed and dried. Most people, in drawing pines, seem to fancy, in the same way, that the boughs come out only on two sides of the trunk, instead of all round it; always, therefore, take more pains in trying to draw the boughs of trees that grow _towards_ you, than those that go off to the sides; anybody can draw the latter, but the foreshortened ones are not so easy. It will help you in drawing them to observe that in most trees the ramification of each branch, though not of the tree itself, is more or less flattened, and approximates, in its position, to the look of a hand held out to receive something, or shelter something. If you take a looking-glass, and hold your hand before it slightly hollowed, with the palm upwards, and the fingers open, as if you were going to support the base of some great bowl, larger than you could easily hold, and sketch your hand as you see it in the glass, with the points of the fingers towards you, it will materially help you in understanding the way trees generally hold out their hands; and if then you will turn yours with its palm downwards, as if you were going to try to hide something, but with the fingers expanded, you will get a good type of the action of the lower boughs in cedars and such other spreading trees. [Illustration: FIG. 20.] Fig. 20. will give you a good idea of the simplest way in which these and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy it carefully, you will be surprised to find how the touches all group together, in expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the springing of the bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the ground: note the careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers of the little mound on the left.[220] It is facsimiled from an etching of Turner's, and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure and firm lines; it will also show you how the particular action in foliage, or anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may be intensified by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look more tall and upright still, because their line is continued below by the figure of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the bank are made to look more rounded because their line is continued in one broad sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the wall. These figures are placed entirely with this object, as we shall see more fully hereafter when we come to talk about composition; but, if you please, we will not talk about that yet awhile. What I have been telling you about the beautiful lines and action of foliage has nothing to do with composition, but only with fact, and the brief and expressive representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your looking forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III. of the "Law of Radiation," and reading what it said there about tree growth: indeed it would in some respects have been better to have said it here than there, only it would have broken up the account of the principles of composition somewhat awkwardly. Now, although the lines indicative of action are not always quite so manifest in other things as in trees, a little attention will soon enable you to see that there _are_ such lines in everything. In an old house roof, a bad observer and bad draughtsman will only see and draw the spotty irregularity of tiles or slates all over; but a good draughtsman will see all the bends of the under timbers, where they are weakest and the weight is telling on them most, and the tracks of the run of the water in time of rain, where it runs off fastest, and where it lies long and feeds the moss; and he will be careful, however few slates he draws, to mark the way they bend together towards those hollows (which have the future fate of the roof in them), and crowd gradually together at the top of the gable, partly diminishing in perspective, partly, perhaps, diminished on purpose (they are so in most English old houses) by the slate-layer. So in ground, there is always the direction of the run of the water to be noticed, which rounds the earth and cuts it into hollows; and, generally, in any bank, or height worth drawing, a trace of bedded or other internal structure besides. The figure 20. will give you some idea of the way in which such facts may be expressed by a few lines. Do you not feel the depression in the ground all down the hill where the footsteps are, and how the people always turn to the left at the top, losing breath a little, and then how the water runs down in that other hollow towards the valley, behind the roots of the trees? Now, I want you in your first sketches from nature to aim exclusively at understanding and representing these vital facts of form; using the pen--not now the steel, but the quill--firmly and steadily, never scrawling with it, but saying to yourself before you lay on a single touch,--"_That_ leaf is the main one, _that_ bough is the guiding one, and this touch, _so_ long, _so_ broad, means that part of it,"--point or side or knot, as the case may be. Resolve always, as you look at the thing, what you will take, and what miss of it, and never let your hand run away with you, or get into any habit or method of touch. If you want a continuous line, your hand should pass calmly from one end of it to the other, without a tremor; if you want a shaking and broken line, your hand should shake, or break off, as easily as a musician's finger shakes or stops on a note: only remember this, that there is no general way of doing _any_ thing; no recipe can be given you for so much as the drawing of a cluster of grass. The grass may be ragged and stiff, or tender and flowing; sunburnt and sheep-bitten, or rank and languid; fresh or dry; lustrous or dull: look at it, and try to draw it as it is, and don't think how somebody "told you to _do_ grass." So a stone may be round and angular, polished or rough, cracked all over like an ill-glazed teacup, or as united and broad as the breast of Hercules. It may be as flaky as a wafer, as powdery as a field puff-ball; it may be knotted like a ship's hawser, or kneaded like hammered iron, or knit like a Damascus sabre, or fused like a glass bottle, or crystallised like a hoar-frost, or veined like a forest leaf: look at it, and don't try to remember how anybody told you to "do a stone." As soon as you find that your hand obeys you thoroughly and that you can render any form with a firmness and truth approaching that of Turner's and Durer's work,[221] you must add a simple but equally careful light and shade to your pen drawing, so as to make each study as complete as possible: for which you must prepare yourself thus. Get, if you have the means, a good impression of one plate of Turner's Liber Studiorum; if possible, one of the subjects named in the note below.[222] If you cannot obtain, or even borrow for a little while, any of these engravings, you must use a photograph instead (how, I will tell you presently); but, if you can get the Turner, it will be best. You will see that it is composed of a firm etching in line, with mezzotint shadow laid over it. You must first copy the etched part of it accurately; to which end put the print against the window, and trace slowly with the _greatest_ care every black line; retrace this on smooth drawing-paper; and, finally, go over the whole with your pen, looking at the original plate always, so that if you err at all, it may be on the right side, not making a line which is too curved or too straight already in the tracing, _more_ curved or _more_ straight, as you go over it. And in doing this, never work after you are tired, nor to "get the thing done," for if it is badly done, it will be of no use to you. The true zeal and patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and inattentive labour of a whole day. If you have not made the touches right at the first going over with the pen, retouch them delicately, with little ink in your pen, thickening or reinforcing them as they need: you cannot give too much care to the facsimile. Then keep this etched outline by you, in order to study at your ease the way in which Turner uses his line as preparatory for the subsequent shadow;[223] it is only in getting the two separate that you will be able to reason on this. Next, copy once more, though for the fourth time, any part of this etching which you like, and put on the light and shade with the brush, and any brown colour that matches that of the plate;[224] working it with the point of the brush as delicately as if you were drawing with pencil, and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the paper, till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving. In this exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked to close resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject carelessly done. Not that in drawing afterwards from nature, you are to be obliged to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having fully accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will thenceforward feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could otherwise have conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out quickly and clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which it would have wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work. Nothing is more strange in art than the way that chance and materials seem to favour you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make yourself quite independent of chance, get your result in spite of it, and from that day forward all things will somehow fall as you would have them. Show the camel's-hair, and the colour in it, that no bending nor blotting are of any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade _shall_ finally be right, if it cost you a year's toil; and from that hour of corrective conviction, said camel's-hair will bend itself to all your wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border. If you cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a photograph[225] of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a village, or picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water of varied character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy any part of it you like, in this same brown colour, working, as I have just directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of the brush. You are under a twofold disadvantage here, however; first, there are portions in every photograph too delicately done for you at present to be at all able to copy; and secondly, there are portions always more obscure or dark than there would be in the real scene, and involved in a mystery which you will not be able, as yet, to decipher. Both these characters will be advantageous to you for future study, after you have gained experience, but they are a little against you in early attempts at tinting; still you must fight through the difficulty, and get the power of producing delicate gradations with brown or grey, like those of the photograph. Now observe; the perfection of work would be tinted shadow, like photography, _without_ any obscurity or exaggerated darkness; and as long as your effect depends in anywise on visible _lines_, your art is not perfect, though it may be first-rate of its kind. But to get complete results in tints merely, requires both long time and consummate skill; and you will find that a few well-put pen lines, with a tint dashed over or under them, get more expression of facts than you could reach in any other way, by the same expenditure of time. The use of the Liber Studiorum print to you is chiefly as an example of the simplest shorthand of this kind, a shorthand which is yet capable of dealing with the most subtle natural effects; for the firm etching gets at the expression of complicated details, as leaves, masonry, textures of ground, &c., while the overlaid tint enables you to express the most tender distances of sky, and forms of playing light, mist or cloud. Most of the best drawings by the old masters are executed on this principle, the touches of the pen being useful also to give a look of transparency to shadows, which could not otherwise be attained but by great finish of tinting; and if you have access to any ordinarily good public gallery, or can make friends of any print-sellers who have folios of old drawings, or facsimiles of them, you will not be at a loss to find some example of this unity of pen with tinting. Multitudes of photographs also are now taken from the best drawings by the old masters, and I hope that our Mechanics' Institutes, and other societies organized with a view to public instruction, will not fail to possess themselves of examples of these, and to make them accessible to students of drawing in the vicinity; a single print from Turner's Liber, to show the unison of tint with pen etching, and the "St. Catherine," lately photographed by Thurston Thompson, from Raphael's drawing in the Louvre, to show the unity of the soft tinting of the stump with chalk, would be all that is necessary, and would, I believe, be in many cases more serviceable than a larger collection, and certainly than a whole gallery of second-rate prints. Two such examples are peculiarly desirable, because all other modes of drawing, with pen separately, or chalk separately, or colour separately, may be seen by the poorest student in any cheap illustrated book, or in shop windows. But this unity of tinting with line he cannot generally see but by some especial enquiry, and in some out of the way places he could not find a single example of it. Supposing that this should be so in your own case, and that you cannot meet with any example of this kind, try to make the matter out alone, thus: Take a small and simple photograph; allow yourself half an hour to express its subjects with the pen only, using some permanent liquid colour instead of ink, outlining its buildings or trees firmly, and laying in the deeper shadows, as you have been accustomed to do in your bolder pen drawings; then, when this etching is dry, take your sepia or grey, and tint it over, getting now the finer gradations of the photograph; and finally, taking out the higher lights with penknife or blotting-paper. You will soon find what can be done in this way; and by a series of experiments you may ascertain for yourself how far the pen may be made serviceable to reinforce shadows, mark characters of texture, outline unintelligible masses, and so on. The more time you have, the more delicate you may make the pen drawing, blending it with the tint; the less you have, the more distinct you must keep the two. Practice in this way from one photograph, allowing yourself sometimes only a quarter of an hour for the whole thing, sometimes an hour, sometimes two or three hours; in each case drawing the whole subject in full depth of light and shade, but with such degree of finish in the parts as is possible in the given time. And this exercise, observe, you will do well to repeat frequently whether you can get prints and drawings as well as photographs, or not. And now at last, when you can copy a piece of Liber Studiorum, or its photographic substitute, faithfully, you have the complete means in your power of working from nature on all subjects that interest you, which you should do in four different ways. First. When you have full time, and your subject is one that will stay quiet for you, make perfect light and shade studies, or as nearly perfect as you can, with grey or brown colour of any kind, reinforced and defined with the pen. Secondly. When your time is short, or the subject is so rich in detail that you feel you cannot complete it intelligibly in light and shade, make a hasty study of the effect, and give the rest of the time to a Dureresque expression of the details. If the subject seems to you interesting, and there are points about it which you cannot understand, try to get five spare minutes to go close up to it, and make a nearer memorandum; not that you are ever to bring the details of this nearer sketch into the farther one, but that you may thus perfect your experience of the aspect of things, and know that such and such a look of a tower or cottage at five hundred yards off means _that_ sort of tower or cottage near; while, also, this nearer sketch will be useful to prevent any future misinterpretation of your own work. If you have time, however far your light and shade study in the distance may have been carried, it is always well, for these reasons, to make also your Dureresque and your near memoranda; for if your light and shade drawing be good, much of the interesting detail must be lost in it, or disguised. Your hasty study of effect may be made most easily and quickly with a soft pencil, dashed over when done with one tolerably deep tone of grey, which will fix the pencil. While this fixing colour is wet, take out the higher lights with the dry brush; and, when it is quite dry, scratch out the highest lights with the penknife. Five minutes, carefully applied, will do much by these means. Of course the paper is to be white. I do not like studies on grey paper so well; for you can get more gradation by the taking off your wet tint, and laying it on cunningly a little darker here and there, than you can with body-colour white, unless you are consummately skilful. There is no objection to your making your Dureresque memoranda on grey or yellow paper, and touching or relieving them with white; only, do not depend much on your white touches, nor make the sketch for their sake. Thirdly. When you have neither time for careful study nor for Dureresque detail, sketch the outline with pencil, then dash in the shadows with the brush boldly, trying to do as much as you possibly can at once, and to get a habit of expedition and decision; laying more colour again and again into the tints as they dry, using every expedient which your practice has suggested to you of carrying out your chiaroscuro in the manageable and moist material, taking the colour off here with the dry brush, scratching out lights in it there with the wooden handle of the brush, rubbing it in with your fingers, drying it off with your sponge, &c. Then, when the colour is in, take your pen and mark the outline characters vigorously, in the manner of the Liber Studiorum. This kind of study is very convenient for carrying away pieces of effect which depend not so much on refinement as on complexity, strange shapes of involved shadows, sudden effects of sky, &c.; and it is most useful as a safeguard against any too servile or slow habits which the minute copying may induce in you; for although the endeavour to obtain velocity merely for velocity's sake, and dash for display's sake, is as baneful as it is despicable; there _are_ a velocity and a dash which not only are compatible with perfect drawing, but obtain certain results which cannot be had otherwise. And it is perfectly safe for you to study occasionally for speed and decision, while your continual course of practice is such as to ensure your retaining an accurate judgment and a tender touch. Speed, under such circumstances, is rather fatiguing than tempting; and you will find yourself always beguiled rather into elaboration than negligence. [Illustration: FIG. 21.] Fourthly. You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making memoranda of the shapes of shadows. You will find that many objects of no essential interest in themselves, and neither deserving a finished study, nor a Dureresque one, may yet become of singular value in consequence of the fantastic shapes of their shadows; for it happens often, in distant effect, that the shadow is by much a more important element than the substance. Thus, in the Alpine bridge, Fig. 21., seen within a few yards of it, as in the figure, the arrangement of timbers to which the shadows are owing is perceptible; but at half a mile's distance, in bright sunlight, the timbers would not be seen; and a good painter's expression of the bridge would be merely the large spot, and the crossed bars, of pure grey; wholly without indication of their cause, as in Fig. 22. _a_; and if we saw it at still greater distances, it would appear, as in Fig. 22. _b_ and _c_, diminishing at last to a strange, unintelligible, spider-like spot of grey on the light hill-side. A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances, continually reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts; and the singular, and to many persons unaccountable, effect of the confused touches in Turner's distances, is owing chiefly to this thorough accuracy and intense meaning of the shadow abstracts. [Illustration: FIG. 22.] Studies of this kind are easily made when you are in haste, with an F. or HB. pencil: it requires some hardness of the point to ensure your drawing delicately enough when the forms of the shadows are very subtle; they are sure to be so somewhere, and are generally so everywhere. The pencil is indeed a very precious instrument after you are master of the pen and brush, for the pencil, cunningly used, is both, and will draw a line with the precision of the one and the gradation of the other; nevertheless, it is so unsatisfactory to see the sharp touches, on which the best of the detail depends, getting gradually deadened by time, or to find the places where force was wanted look shiny, and like a fire-grate, that I should recommend rather the steady use of the pen, or brush, and colour, whenever time admits of it; keeping only a small memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut, sheathed pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being without this. Thus much, then, respecting the _manner_ in which you are at first to draw from nature. But it may perhaps be serviceable to you, if I also note one or two points respecting your _choice_ of subjects for study, and the best special methods of treating some of them; for one of by no means the least difficulties which you have at first to encounter is a peculiar instinct, common, as far as I have noticed, to all beginners, to fix on exactly the most unmanageable feature in the given scene. There are many things in every landscape which can be drawn, if at all, only by the most accomplished artists; and I have noticed that it is nearly always these which a beginner will dash at; or, if not these, it will be something which, though pleasing to him in itself, is unfit for a picture, and in which, when he has drawn it, he will have little pleasure. As some slight protection against this evil genius of beginners, the following general warnings may be useful: 1. Do not draw things that you love, on account of their associations; or at least do not draw them because you love them; but merely when you cannot get anything else to draw. If you try to draw places that you love, you are sure to be always entangled amongst neat brick walls, iron railings, gravel walks, greenhouses, and quickset hedges; besides that you will be continually led into some endeavour to make your drawing pretty, or complete, which will be fatal to your progress. You need never hope to get on, if you are the least anxious that the drawing you are actually at work upon should look nice when it is done. All you have to care about is to make it _right_, and to learn as much in doing it as possible. So then, though when you are sitting in your friend's parlour, or in your own, and have nothing else to do, you may draw any thing that is there, for practice; even the fire-irons or the pattern on the carpet: be sure that it _is_ for practice, and not because it is a beloved carpet, nor a friendly poker and tongs, nor because you wish to please your friend by drawing her room. Also, never make presents of your drawings. Of course I am addressing you as a _beginner_--a time may come when your work will be precious to everybody; but be resolute not to give it away till you know that it is worth something (as soon as it is worth anything you will know that it is so). If any one asks you for a present of a drawing, send them a couple of cakes of colour and a piece of Bristol board: those materials are, for the present, of more value in that form than if you had spread the one over the other. The main reason for this rule is, however, that its observance will much protect you from the great danger of trying to make your drawings pretty. 2. Never, by choice, draw anything polished; especially if complicated in form. Avoid all brass rods and curtain ornaments, chandeliers, plate, glass, and fine steel. A shining knob of a piece of furniture does not matter if it comes in your way; but do not fret yourself if it will not look right, and choose only things that do not shine. 3. Avoid all very neat things. They are exceedingly difficult to draw, and very ugly when drawn. Choose rough, worn, and clumsy-looking things as much as possible; for instance, you cannot have a more difficult or profitless study than a newly-painted Thames wherry, nor a better study than an old empty coal-barge, lying ashore at low-tide: in general, everything that you think very ugly will be good for you to draw. 4. Avoid, as much as possible, studies in which one thing is seen _through_ another. You will constantly find a thin tree standing before your chosen cottage, or between you and the turn of the river; its near branches all entangled with the distance. It is intensely difficult to represent this; and though, when the tree _is_ there, you must not imaginarily cut it down, but do it as well as you can, yet always look for subjects that fall into definite masses, not into network; that is, rather for a cottage with a dark tree _beside_ it, than for one with a thin tree in front of it; rather for a mass of wood, soft, blue, and rounded, than for a ragged copse, or confusion of intricate stems. 5. Avoid, as far as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps nothing in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque and unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge, with trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed straight at the cattle line. Still, do not be discouraged if you find you have chosen ill, and that the subject overmasters you. It is much better that it should, than that you should think you had entirely mastered _it_. But at first, and even for some time, you must be prepared for very discomfortable failure; which, nevertheless, will not be without some wholesome result. As, however, I have told you what most definitely to avoid, I may, perhaps, help you a little by saying what to seek. In general, all _banks_ are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes. If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy mill-dams, &c. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; better in form and colour than high chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with the flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study: a not very thick trunk, say nine inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy running up it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject. Large nests of buildings in the middle distance are always beautiful, when drawn carefully, provided they are not modern rows of pattern cottages; or villas with Ionic and Doric porticos. Any old English village, or cluster of farm-houses, drawn with all its ins and outs, and haystacks, and palings, is sure to be lovely; much more a French one. French landscape is generally as much superior to English as Swiss landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty of component lines. In drawing villages, take great pains with the gardens; a rustic garden is in every way beautiful. If you have time, draw all the rows of cabbages, and hollyhocks, and broken fences, and wandering eglantines, and bossy roses: you cannot have better practice, nor be kept by anything in purer thoughts. Make intimate friends of all the brooks in your neighbourhood, and study them ripple by ripple. Village churches in England are not often good subjects; there is a peculiar meanness about most of them, and awkwardness of line. Old manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in England from which it is possible to obtain _one_ subject for an impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring vergerism about them. If you live in a mountain or hill country, your only danger is redundance of subject. Be resolved, in the first place, to draw a piece of rounded rock, with its variegated lichens, quite rightly, getting its complete roundings, and all the patterns of the lichen in true local colour. Till you can do this, it is of no use your thinking of sketching among hills; but when once you have done this, the forms of distant hills will be comparatively easy. When you have practised for a little time from such of these subjects as may be accessible to you, you will certainly find difficulties arising which will make you wish more than ever for a master's help: these difficulties will vary according to the character of your own mind (one question occurring to one person, and one to another), so that it is impossible to anticipate them all; and it would make this too large a book if I answered all that I _can_ anticipate; you must be content to work on, in good hope that nature will, in her own time, interpret to you much for herself; that farther experience on your own part will make some difficulties disappear; and that others will be removed by the occasional observation of such artists' work as may come in your way. Nevertheless, I will not close this letter without a few general remarks, such as may be useful to you after you are somewhat advanced in power; and these remarks may, I think, be conveniently arranged under three heads, having reference to the drawing of vegetation, water, and skies. And, first, of vegetation. You may think, perhaps, we have said enough about trees already; yet if you have done as you were bid, and tried to draw them frequently enough, and carefully enough, you will be ready by this time to hear a little more of them. You will also recollect that we left our question, respecting the mode of expressing intricacy of leafage, partly unsettled in the first letter. I left it so because I wanted you to learn the real structure of leaves, by drawing them for yourself, before I troubled you with the most subtle considerations as to _method_ in drawing them. And by this time, I imagine, you must have found out two principal things, universal facts, about leaves; namely, that they always, in the main tendencies of their lines, indicate a beautiful divergence of growth, according to the law of radiation, already referred to;[226] and the second, that this divergence is never formal, but carried out with endless variety of individual line. I must now press both these facts on your attention a little farther. You may perhaps have been surprised that I have not yet spoken of the works of J. D. Harding, especially if you happen to have met with the passages referring to them in "Modern Painters," in which they are highly praised. They are deservedly praised, for they are the only works by a modern draughtsman which express in any wise the energy of trees, and the laws of growth, of which we have been speaking. There are no lithographic sketches which, for truth of general character, obtained with little cost of time, at all rival Harding's. Calame, Robert, and the other lithographic landscape sketchers are altogether inferior in power, though sometimes a little deeper in meaning. But you must not take even Harding for a model, though you may use his works for occasional reference; and if you can afford to buy his "Lessons on Trees,"[227] it will be serviceable to you in various ways, and will at present help me to explain the point under consideration. And it is well that I should illustrate this point by reference to Harding's works, because their great influence on young students renders it desirable that their real character should be thoroughly understood. You will find, first, in the title-page of the "Lessons on Trees," a pretty woodcut, in which the tree stems are drawn with great truth, and in a very interesting arrangement of lines. Plate 1. is not quite worthy of Mr. Harding, tending too much to make his pupil, at starting, think everything depends on black dots; still the main lines are good, and very characteristic of tree growth. Then, in Plate 2., we come to the point at issue. The first examples in that plate are given to the pupil that he may practise from them till his hand gets into the habit of arranging lines freely in a similar manner; and they are stated by Mr. Harding to be universal in application; "all outlines expressive of foliage," he says, "are but modifications of them." They consist of groups of lines, more or less resembling our Fig. 23.; and the characters especially insisted upon are, that they "tend at their inner ends to a common centre;" that "their ends terminate in [are enclosed by] ovoid curves;" and that "the outer ends are most emphatic." [Illustration: FIG. 23.] Now, as thus expressive of the great laws of radiation and enclosure, the main principle of this method of execution confirms, in a very interesting way, our conclusions respecting foliage composition. The reason of the last rule, that the outer end of the line is to be most emphatic, does not indeed at first appear; for the line at one end of a natural leaf is not more emphatic than the line at the other: but ultimately, in Harding's method, this darker part of the touch stands more or less for the shade at the outer extremity of the leaf mass; and, as Harding uses these touches, they express as much of tree character as any mere habit of touch _can_ express. But, unfortunately, there is another law of tree growth, quite as fixed as the law of radiation, which this and all other conventional modes of execution wholly lose sight of. This second law is, that the radiating tendency shall be carried out only as a ruling spirit in reconcilement with perpetual individual caprice on the part of the separate leaves. So that the moment a touch is monotonous, it must be also false, the liberty of the leaf individually being just as essential a truth, as its unity of growth with its companions in the radiating group. [Illustration: FIG. 24.] It does not matter how small or apparently symmetrical the cluster may be, nor how large or vague. You can hardly have a more formal one than _b_ in Fig. 9. p. 276., nor a less formal one than this shoot of Spanish chestnut, shedding its leaves, Fig. 24.; but in either of them, even the general reader, unpractised in any of the previously recommended exercises, must see that there are wandering lines mixed with the radiating ones, and radiating lines with the wild ones: and if he takes the pen and tries to copy either of these examples, he will find that neither play of hand to left nor to right, neither a free touch nor a firm touch, nor any learnable or describable touch whatsoever, will enable him to produce, currently, a resemblance of it; but that he must either draw it slowly, or give it up. And (which makes the matter worse still) though gathering the bough, and putting it close to you, or seeing a piece of near foliage against the sky, you may draw the entire outline of the leaves, yet if the spray has light upon it, and is ever so little a way off, you will miss, as we have seen, a point of a leaf here, and an edge there; some of the surfaces will be confused by glitter, and some spotted with shade; and if you look carefully through this confusion for the edges or dark stems which you really _can see_, and put only those down, the result will be neither like Fig. 9. nor Fig. 24., but such an interrupted and puzzling piece of work as Fig. 25.[228] Now, it is in the perfect acknowledgment and expression of these _three_ laws that all good drawing of landscape consists. There is, first, the organic unity; the law, whether of radiation, or parallelism, or concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees, of rocks, and clouds, and waves; secondly, the individual liberty of the members subjected to these laws of unity; and, lastly, the mystery under which the separate character of each is more or less concealed. I say, first, there must be observance of the ruling organic law. This is the first distinction between good artists and bad artists. Your common sketcher or bad painter puts his leaves on the trees as if they were moss tied to sticks; he cannot see the lines of action or growth; he scatters the shapeless clouds over his sky, not perceiving the sweeps of associated curves which the real clouds are following as they fly; and he breaks his mountain side into rugged fragments, wholly unconscious of the lines of force with which the real rocks have risen, or of the lines of couch in which they repose. On the contrary, it is the main delight of the great draughtsman to trace these laws of government; and his tendency to error is always in the exaggeration of their authority rather than in its denial. [Illustration: FIG. 25.] Secondly, I say, we have to show the individual character and liberty of the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks. And herein the great masters separate themselves finally from the inferior ones; for if the men of inferior genius ever express law at all, it is by the sacrifice of individuality. Thus, Salvator Rosa has great perception of the sweep of foliage and rolling of clouds, but never draws a single leaflet or mist wreath accurately. Similarly, Gainsborough, in his landscape, has great feeling for masses of form and harmony of colour; but in the detail gives nothing but meaningless touches; not even so much as the species of tree, much less the variety of its leafage, being ever discernable. Now, although both these expressions of government and individuality are essential to masterly work, the individuality is the _more_ essential, and the more difficult of attainment; and, therefore, that attainment separates the great masters _finally_ from the inferior ones. It is the more essential, because, in these matters of beautiful arrangement in visible things, the same rules hold that hold in moral things. It is a lamentable and unnatural thing to see a number of men subject to no government, actuated by no ruling principle, and associated by no common affection: but it would be a more lamentable thing still, were it possible to see a number of men so oppressed into assimilation as to have no more any individual hope or character, no differences in aim, no dissimilarities of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in which no man could help another, since none would be feebler than himself; no man admire another, since none would be stronger than himself; no man be grateful to another, since by none he could be relieved; no man reverence another, since by none he could be instructed; a society in which every soul would be as the syllable of a stammerer instead of the word of a speaker, in which every man would walk as in a frightful dream, seeing spectres of himself, in everlasting multiplication, gliding helplessly around him in a speechless darkness. Therefore it is that perpetual difference, play, and change in groups of form are more essential to them even than their being subdued by some great gathering law: the law is needful to them for their perfection and their power, but the difference is needful to them for their _life_. And here it may be noted in passing, that if you enjoy the pursuit of analogies and types, and have any ingenuity of judgment in discerning them, you may always accurately ascertain what are the noble characters in a piece of painting, by merely considering what are the noble characters of man in his association with his fellows. What grace of manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial composition. What power is in liberty or relaxation to strengthen or relieve human souls; that power, precisely in the same relative degree, play and laxity of line have to strengthen or refresh the expression of a picture. And what goodness or greatness we can conceive to arise in companies of men, from chastity of thought, regularity of life, simplicity of custom, and balance of authority; precisely that kind of goodness and greatness may be given to a picture by the purity of its colour, the severity of its forms, and the symmetry of its masses. You need not be in the least afraid of pushing these analogies too far. They cannot be pushed too far; they are so precise and complete, that the farther you pursue them, the clearer, the more certain, the more useful you will find them. They will not fail you in one particular, or in any direction of enquiry. There is no moral vice, no moral virtue, which has not its _precise_ prototype in the art of painting; so that you may at your will illustrate the moral habit by the art, or the art by the moral habit. Affection and discord, fretfulness and quietness, feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and modesty, and all other such habits, and every conceivable modification and mingling of them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness, by conditions of line and colour; and not merely these definable vices and virtues, but also every conceivable shade of human character and passion, from the righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king, to the innocent or faultful simplicity of the shepherd boy. The pursuit of this subject belongs properly, however, to the investigation of the higher branches of composition, matters which it would be quite useless to treat of in this book; and I only allude to them here, in order that you may understand how the utmost nobleness of art are concerned in this minute work, to which I have set you in your beginning of it. For it is only by the closest attention, and the most noble execution, that it is possible to express these varieties of individual character, on which all excellence of portraiture depends, whether of masses of mankind, or of groups of leaves. Now you will be able to understand, among other matters, wherein consists the excellence, and wherein the shortcoming, of the tree-drawing of Harding. It is excellent in so far as it fondly observes, with more truth than any other work of the kind, the great laws of growth and action in trees: it fails--and observe, not in a minor, but in a principal point--because it cannot rightly render any one individual detail or incident of foliage. And in this it fails, not from mere carelessness or incompletion, but of necessity; the true drawing of detail being for evermore _impossible_ to a hand which has contracted a _habit_ of execution. The noble draughtsman draws a leaf, and stops, and says calmly--That leaf is of such and such a character; I will give him a friend who will entirely suit him: then he considers what his friend ought to be, and having determined, he draws his friend. This process may be as quick as lightning when the master is great--one of the sons of the giants; or it may be slow and timid: but the process is always gone through, no touch or form is ever added to another by a good painter without a mental determination and affirmation. But when the hand has got into a habit, leaf No. 1. necessitates leaf No. 2.; you cannot stop, your hand is as a horse with the bit in its teeth; or rather is, for the time, a machine, throwing out leaves to order and pattern, all alike. You must stop that hand of yours, however painfully; make it understand that it is not to have its own way any more, that it shall never more slip from, one touch to another without orders; otherwise it is not you who are the master, but your fingers. You may therefore study Harding's drawing, and take pleasure in it;[229] and you may properly admire the dexterity which applies the habit of the hand so well, and produces results on the whole so satisfactory: but you must never copy it, otherwise your progress will be at once arrested. The utmost you can ever hope to do, would be a sketch in Harding's manner, but of far inferior dexterity; for he has given his life's toil to gain his dexterity, and you, I suppose, have other things to work at besides drawing. You would also incapacitate yourself from ever understanding what truly great work was, or what Nature was; but by the earnest and complete study of facts, you will gradually come to understand the one and love the other more and more, whether you can draw well yourself or not. I have yet to say a few words respecting the third law above stated, that of mystery; the law, namely, that nothing is ever seen perfectly, but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity.[230] This last fact renders the visible objects of Nature complete as a type of the human nature. We have, observe, first, Subordination; secondly, Individuality; lastly, and this not the least essential character, Incomprehensibility; a perpetual lesson in every serrated point and shining vein which escape or deceive our sight among the forest leaves, how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, the rents and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men's actions or spirits, which we at first think we understand, a closer and more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be either fathomed or withdrawn. [Illustration: FIG. 26.] [Illustration: FIG. 27.] The expression of this final character in landscape has never been completely reached by any except Turner; nor can you hope to reach it at all until you have given much time to the practice of art. Only try always when you are sketching any object with a view to completion in light and shade, to draw only those parts of it which you really see definitely; _preparing_ for the after development of the forms by chiaroscuro. It is this preparation by isolated touches for a future arrangement of superimposed light and shade which renders the etchings of the Liber Studiorum so inestimable as examples and so peculiar. The character exists more or less in them exactly in proportion to the pains that Turner has taken. Thus the Æsacus and Hespérie was wrought out with the greatest possible care; and the principal branch on the near tree is etched as in Fig. 26. The work looks at first like a scholar's instead of a master's; but when the light and shade are added, every touch falls into its place, and a perfect expression of grace and complexity results. Nay even before the light and shade are added, you ought to be able to see that these irregular and broken lines, especially where the expression is given of the way the stem loses itself in the leaves, are more true than the monotonous though graceful leaf-drawing which, before Turner's time, had been employed, even by the best masters, in their distant masses. Fig. 27. is sufficiently characteristic of the manner of the old woodcuts after Titian; in which, you see, the leaves are too much of one shape, like bunches of fruit; and the boughs too completely seen, besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawing of the Caracci and other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28., about the worst which it is possible to get into the habit of using, though an ignorant person might perhaps suppose it more "free," and therefore better than Fig. 26. Note, also, that in noble outline drawing, it does not follow that a bough is wrongly drawn, because it looks contracted unnaturally somewhere, as in Fig. 26., just above the foliage. Very often the muscular action which is to be expressed by the line, runs into the _middle_ of the branch, and the actual outline of the branch at that place may be dimly seen, or not at all; and it is then only by the future shade that its actual shape, or the cause of its disappearance, will be indicated. [Illustration: FIG. 28.] One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In the minds of our ordinary water-colour artists, a distant tree seems only to be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other masses, and giving cool colour to the landscape, but differing nowise, in _texture_, from the blots of other shapes, which these painters use to express stones, or water, or figures. But as soon as you have drawn trees carefully a little while, you will be impressed, and impressed more strongly the better you draw them, with the idea of their _softness_ of surface. A distant tree is not a flat and even piece of colour, but a more or less globular mass of a downy or bloomy texture, partly passing into a misty vagueness. I find, practically, this lovely softness of far-away trees the most difficult of all characters to reach, because it cannot be got by mere scratching or roughening the surface, but is always associated with such delicate expressions of form and growth as are only imitable by very careful drawing. The penknife passed lightly _over_ this careful drawing, will do a good deal; but you must accustom yourself, from the beginning, to aim much at this softness in the lines of the drawing itself, by crossing them delicately, and more or less effacing and confusing the edges. You must invent, according to the character of tree, various modes of execution adapted to express its texture; but always keep this character of softness in your mind and in your scope of aim; for in most landscapes it is the intention of nature that the tenderness and transparent infinitude of her foliage should be felt, even at the far distance, in the most distinct opposition to the solid masses and flat surfaces of rocks or buildings. * * * * * II. We were, in the second place, to consider a little the modes of representing water, of which important feature of landscape I have hardly said anything yet. Water is expressed, in common drawings, by conventional lines, whose horizontality is supposed to convey the idea of its surface. In paintings, white dashes or bars of light are used for the same purpose. But these and all other such expedients are vain and absurd. A piece of calm water always contains a picture in itself, an exquisite reflection of the objects above it. If you give the time necessary to draw these reflections, disturbing them here and there as you see the breeze or current disturb them, you will get the effect of the water; but if you have not patience to draw the reflections, no expedient will give you a true effect. The picture in the pool needs nearly as much delicate drawing as the picture above the pool; except only that if there be the least motion on the water, the horizontal lines of the images will be diffused and broken, while the vertical ones will remain decisive, and the oblique ones decisive in proportion to their steepness. A few close studies will soon teach you this: the only thing you need to be told is to watch carefully the lines of _disturbance_ on the surface, as when a bird swims across it, or a fish rises, or the current plays round a stone, reed, or other obstacle. Take the greatest pains to get the _curves_ of these lines true; the whole value of your careful drawing of the reflections may be lost by your admitting a single false curve of ripple from a wild duck's breast. And (as in other subjects) if you are dissatisfied with your result, always try for more unity and delicacy: if your reflections are only soft and gradated enough, they are nearly sure to give you a pleasant effect. When you are taking pains, work the softer reflections, where they are drawn out by motion in the water, with touches as nearly horizontal as may be; but when you are in a hurry, indicate the place and play of the images with vertical lines. The actual _construction_ of a calm elongated reflection is with horizontal lines: but it is often impossible to draw the descending shades delicately enough with a horizontal touch; and it is best always when you are in a hurry, and sometimes when you are not, to use the vertical touch. When the ripples are large, the reflections become shaken, and must be drawn with bold undulatory descending lines. I need not, I should think, tell you that it is of the greatest possible importance to draw the curves of the shore rightly. Their perspective is, if not more subtle, at least more stringent than that of any other lines in Nature. It will not be detected by the general observer, if you miss the curve of a branch, or the sweep of a cloud, or the perspective of a building;[231] but every intelligent spectator will feel the difference between a rightly drawn bend of shore or shingle, and a false one. _Absolutely_ right, in difficult river perspectives seen from heights, I believe no one but Turner ever has been yet; and observe, there is NO rule for them. To develope the curve mathematically would require a knowledge of the exact quantity of water in the river, the shape of its bed, and the hardness of the rock or shore; and even with these data, the problem would be one which no mathematician could solve but approximatively. The instinct of the eye can do it; nothing else. If, after a little study from Nature, you get puzzled by the great differences between the aspect of the reflected image and that of the object casting it; and if you wish to know the law of reflection, it is simply this: Suppose all the objects above the water _actually_ reversed (not in appearance, but in fact) beneath the water, and precisely the same in form and in relative position, only all topsy-turvy. Then, whatever you can see, from the place in which you stand, of the solid objects so reversed under the water, you will see in the reflection, always in the true perspective of the solid objects so reversed. If you cannot quite understand this in looking at water, take a mirror, lay it horizontally on the table, put some books and papers upon it, and draw them and their reflections; moving them about, and watching how their reflections alter, and chiefly how their reflected colours and shades differ from their own colours and shades, by being brought into other oppositions. This difference in chiaroscuro is a more important character in water painting than mere difference in form. When you are drawing shallow or muddy water, you will see shadows on the bottom, or on the surface, continually modifying the reflections; and in a clear mountain stream, the most wonderful complications of effect resulting from the shadows and reflections of the stones in it, mingling with the aspect of the stones themselves seen through the water. Do not be frightened at the complexity; but, on the other hand, do not hope to render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see, and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be, first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by refraction, so that if the general structure of the stone shows straight parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the water crosses and interferes with the part that is seen through it, so that you can hardly tell which is which; and wherever the reflection is darkest, you will see through the water best, and _vice versâ_. Then the real shadow of the stone crosses both these images, and where that shadow falls, it makes the water more reflective, and where the sunshine falls, you will see more of the surface of the water, and of any dust or motes that may be floating on it: but whether you are to see, at the same spot, most of the bottom of the water, or of the reflection of the objects above, depends on the position of the eye. The more you look down into the water, the better you see objects through it; the more you look along it, the eye being low, the more you see the reflection of objects above it. Hence the colour of a given space of surface in a stream will entirely change while you stand still in the same spot, merely as you stoop or raise your head; and thus the colours with which water is painted are an indication of the position of the spectator, and connected inseparably with the perspective of the shores. The most beautiful of all results that I know in mountain streams is when the water is shallow, and the stones at the bottom are rich reddish-orange and black, and the water is seen at an angle which exactly divides the visible colours between those of the stones and that of the sky, and the sky is of clear, full blue. The resulting purple obtained by the blending of the blue and the orange-red, broken by the play of innumerable gradations in the stones, is indescribably lovely. All this seems complicated enough already; but if there be a strong colour in the clear water itself, as of green or blue in the Swiss lakes, all these phenomena are doubly involved; for the darker reflections now become of the colour of the water. The reflection of a black gondola, for instance, at Venice, is never black, but pure dark green. And, farther, the colour of the water itself is of three kinds: one, seen on the surface, is a kind of milky bloom; the next is seen where the waves let light through them, at their edges; and the third, shown as a change of colour on the objects seen through the water. Thus, the same wave that makes a white object look of a clear blue, when seen through it, will take a red or violet-coloured bloom on its surface, and will be made pure emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its edges. With all this, however, you are not much concerned at present, but I tell it you partly as a preparation for what we have afterwards to say about colour, and partly that you may approach lakes and streams with reverence, and study them as carefully as other things, not hoping to express them by a few horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous blots.[232] Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots, when you know precisely what you mean by them, as you will see by many of the Turner sketches, which are now framed at the National Gallery; but you must have painted water many and many a day--yes, and all day long--before you can hope to do anything like those. * * * * * III. Lastly. You may perhaps wonder why, before passing to the clouds, I say nothing special about _ground_.[233] But there is too much to be said about that to admit of my saying it here. You will find the principal laws of its structure examined at length in the fourth volume of "Modern Painters;" and if you can get that volume, and copy carefully Plate 21., which I have etched after Turner with great pains, it will give you as much help as you need in the linear expression of ground-surface. Strive to get the retirement and succession of masses in irregular ground: much may be done in this way by careful watching of the perspective diminutions of its herbage, as well as by contour; and much also by shadows. If you draw the shadows of leaves and tree trunks on any undulating ground with entire carefulness, you will be surprised to find how much they explain of the form and distance of the earth on which they fall. Passing then to skies, note that there is this great peculiarity about sky subject, as distinguished from earth subject;--that the clouds, not being much liable to man's interference, are always beautifully arranged. You cannot be sure of this in any other features of landscape. The rock on which the effect of a mountain scene especially depends is always precisely that which the roadmaker blasts or the landlord quarries; and the spot of green which Nature left with a special purpose by her dark forest sides, and finished with her most delicate grasses, is always that which the farmer ploughs or builds upon. But the clouds, though we can hide them with smoke, and mix them with poison, cannot be quarried nor built over, and they are always therefore gloriously arranged; so gloriously, that unless you have notable powers of memory you need not hope to approach the effect of any sky that interests you. For both its grace and its glow depend upon the united influence of every cloud within its compass: they all move and burn together in a marvellous harmony; not a cloud of them is out of its appointed place, or fails of its part in the choir: and if you are not able to recollect (which in the case of a complicated sky it is impossible you should) precisely the form and position of all the clouds at a given moment, you cannot draw the sky at all; for the clouds will not fit if you draw one part of them three or four minutes before another. You must try therefore to help what memory you have, by sketching at the utmost possible speed the whole range of the clouds; marking, by any shorthand or symbolic work you can hit upon, the peculiar character of each, as transparent, or fleecy, or linear, or undulatory; giving afterwards such completion to the parts as your recollection will enable you to do. This, however, only when the sky is interesting from its general aspect; at other times, do not try to draw all the sky, but a single cloud: sometimes a round cumulus will stay five or six minutes quite steady enough to let you mark out his principal masses: and one or two white or crimson lines which cross the sunrise will often stay without serious change for as long. And in order to be the readier in drawing them, practise occasionally drawing lumps of cotton, which will teach you better than any other stable thing the kind of softness there is in clouds. For you will find when you have made a few genuine studies of sky, and then look at any ancient or modern painting, that ordinary artists have always fallen into one of two faults: either, in rounding the clouds, they make them as solid and hard-edged as a heap of stones tied up in a sack, or they represent them not as rounded at all, but as vague wreaths of mist or flat lights in the sky; and think they have done enough in leaving a little white paper between dashes of blue, or in taking an irregular space out with the sponge. Now clouds are not as solid as flour-sacks; but, on the other hand, they are neither spongy nor flat. They are definite and very beautiful forms of sculptured mist; sculptured is a perfectly accurate word; they are not more _drifted_ into form than they are _carved_ into form, the warm air around them cutting them into shape by absorbing the visible vapour beyond certain limits; hence their angular and fantastic outlines, as different from a swollen, spherical, or globular formation, on the one hand, as from that of flat films or shapeless mists on the other. And the worst of all is, that while these forms are difficult enough to draw on any terms, especially considering that they never stay quiet, they must be drawn also at greater disadvantage of light and shade than any others, the force of light in clouds being wholly unattainable by art; so that if we put shade enough to express their form as positively as it is expressed in reality, we must make them painfully too dark on the dark sides. Nevertheless, they are so beautiful, if you in the least succeed with them, that you will hardly, I think, lose courage. Outline them often with the pen, as you can catch them here and there; one of the chief uses of doing this will be, not so much the memorandum so obtained as the lesson you will get respecting the softness of the cloud-outlines. You will always find yourself at a loss to see where the outline really is; and when drawn it will always look hard and false, and will assuredly be either too round or too square, however often you alter it, merely passing from the one fault to the other and back again, the real cloud striking an inexpressible mean between roundness and squareness in all its coils or battlements. I speak at present, of course, only of the cumulus cloud: the lighter wreaths and flakes of the upper sky cannot be outlined--they can only be sketched, like locks of hair, by many lines of the pen. Firmly developed bars of cloud on the horizon are in general easy enough, and may be drawn with decision. When you have thus accustomed yourself a little to the placing and action of clouds, try to work out their light and shade, just as carefully as you do that of other things, looking _exclusively_ for examples of treatment to the vignettes in Rogers's Italy and Poems, and to the Liber Studiorum, unless you have access to some examples of Turner's own work. No other artist ever yet drew the sky: even Titian's clouds, and Tintoret's, are conventional. The clouds in the "Ben Arthur," "Source of Arveron," and "Calais Pier," are among the best of Turner's storm studies; and of the upper clouds, the vignettes to Rogers's Poems furnish as many examples as you need. And now, as our first lesson was taken from the sky, so, for the present, let our last be. I do not advise you to be in any haste to master the contents of my next letter. If you have any real talent for drawing, you will take delight in the discoveries of natural loveliness, which the studies I have already proposed will lead you into, among the fields and hills; and be assured that the more quietly and single-heartedly you take each step in the art, the quicker, on the whole, will your progress be. I would rather, indeed, have discussed the subjects of the following letter at greater length, and in a separate work addressed to more advanced students; but as there are one or two things to be said on composition which may set the young artist's mind somewhat more at rest, or furnish him with defence from the urgency of ill-advisers, I will glance over the main heads of the matter here; trusting that my doing so may not beguile you, my dear reader, from your serious work, or lead you to think me, in occupying part of this book with talk not altogether relevant to it, less entirely or Faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: [220] It is meant, I believe, for "Salt Hill." [221] I do not mean that you can approach Turner or Durer in their strength, that is to say, in their imagination or power of design. But you may approach them, by perseverance, in truth of manner. [222] The following are the most desirable plates: Grande Chartreuse. Æsacus and Hespérie. Cephalus and Procris. Source of Arveron. Ben Arthur. Watermill. Hindhead Hill. Hedging and Ditching. Dumblane Abbey. Morpeth. Calais Pier. Pembury Mill. Little Devil's Bridge. River Wye (_not_ Wye and Severn). Holy Island. Clyde. Lauffenbourg. Blair Athol. Alps from Grenoble. Raglan. (Subject with quiet brook, trees, and castle on the right.) If you cannot get one of these, any of the others will be serviceable, except only the twelve following, which are quite useless:-- 1. Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above. 2. Interior of church. 3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing a pipe. 4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine. 5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church seen through them. 6. Fifth Plague of Egypt. 7. Tenth Plague of Egypt. 8. Rivaulx Abbey. 9. Wye and Severn. 10. Scene with castle in centre, cows under trees on the left. 11. Martello Towers. 12. Calm. It is very unlikely that you should meet with one of the original etchings; if you should, it will be a drawing-master in itself alone, for it is not only equivalent to a pen-and-ink drawing by Turner, but to a very careful one: only observe, the Source of Arveron, Raglan, and Dumblane were not etched by Turner; and the etchings of those three are not good for separate study, though it is deeply interesting to see how Turner, apparently provoked at the failure of the beginnings in the Arveron and Raglan, took the plates up himself, and either conquered or brought into use the bad etching by his marvellous engraving. The Dumblane was, however, well etched by Mr. Lupton, and beautifully engraved by him. The finest Turner etching is of an aqueduct with a stork standing in a mountain stream, not in the published series; and next to it, are the unpublished etchings of the Via Mala and Crowhurst. Turner seems to have been so fond of these plates that he kept retouching and finishing them, and never made up his mind to let them go. The Via Mala is certainly, in the state in which Turner left it, the finest of the whole series: its etching is, as I said, the best after that of the aqueduct. Figure 20., above, is part of another fine unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, Æsacus, Cephalus, and Stone Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the more generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth, are also very desirable. [223] You will find more notice of this point in the account of Harding's tree-drawing, a little farther on. [224] The impressions vary so much in colour that no brown can be specified. [225] You had better get such a photograph, even if you have a Liber print as well. [226] See the closing letter in this volume. [227] Bogue, Fleet Street. If you are not acquainted with Harding's works (an unlikely supposition, considering their popularity), and cannot meet with the one in question, the diagrams given here will enable you to understand all that is needful for our purposes. [228] I draw this figure (a young shoot of oak) in outline only, it being impossible to express the refinements of shade in distant foliage in a woodcut. [229] His lithographic sketches, those, for instance, in the Park and the Forest, and his various lessons on foliage, possess greater merit than the more ambitious engravings in his "Principles and Practice of Art." There are many useful remarks, however, dispersed through this latter work. [230] On this law you will do well, if you can get access to it, to look at the fourth chapter of the fourth volume of "Modern Painters." [231] The student may hardly at first believe that the perspective of buildings is of little consequence: but he will find it so ultimately. See the remarks on this point in the Preface. [232] It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue in water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue: fill a large white basin with the solution, and put anything you like to float on it, or lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of flowers, &c. Then study the effects of the reflections, and of the stems of the flowers or submerged portions of the floating objects, as they appear through the blue liquid; noting especially how, as you lower your head and look along the surface, you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you raise your head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems clearly. [233] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of Prout in the Appendix. LETTER III. ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION. MY DEAR READER:-- If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in colour, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or blue, or grey. You _ought_ to love colour, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may colour well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in colour, unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and masterly drawings in light and shade. But to colour well, requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by the addition of colour to your work. For the chances are more than a thousand to one against your being right both in form and colour with a given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely increased--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that, while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly _relative_. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put a hotter colour in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colours beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and great genius besides, can make a colourist. But though you cannot produce finished coloured drawings of any value, you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other people, by occasionally sketching with a view to colour only; and preserving distinct statements of certain colour facts--as that the harvest-moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by clouds of such and such a rosy grey; that the mountains at evening were in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for colour; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy colour. And, though of course you should always give as much form to your subject as your attention to its colour will admit of, remember that the whole value of what you are about depends, in a coloured sketch, on the colour _merely_. If the colour is wrong, everything is wrong: just as, if you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true the words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you colour at all, you must colour rightly. Give up _all_ the form, rather than the slightest part of the colour: just as, if you felt yourself in danger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never mind though your houses are all tumbling down--though your clouds are mere blots, and your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like crooked sixpences--so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon, are of the right colours. Of course, the discipline you have gone through will enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest sweep of the brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when you begin to make coloured memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its colour, take its colour, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous, half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colours all wrong, and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit of considering the coloured work merely as supplementary to your other studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a coloured memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however, bears chiefly on large and distant subjects; in foregrounds and near studies, the colour cannot be had without a good deal of definition of form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you will not have the right quantity of colour in each bit of moss pattern, and then none of the colours will look right; but it always simplifies the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied, when necessary, to fail of all but that. Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting colouring, which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope at present to set you pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely. And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colours, not moist colours: grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning, keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colours to be used in broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be able always to get good and pure colour when you need it; and force yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colours. The two best colourists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[234] afford us, I am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice. Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colours have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result of it with Rossetti is, that, though his colours are safe, he has sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again. William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour, is very neat in his practice; so, I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the more particular you are about your colours the more you will get into a deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true _speed_ in colouring comes of this deliberation. Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colours in order to pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to shape your masses more quietly, and play the colours about with more ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time. This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque, constitutes _body_-colour drawing as opposed to _transparent_-colour drawing and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this body-colour is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting, being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of atmosphere without tenfold labour. And if you hear it said that the body-colour looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent colour, those glows and glooms are _not_ the noblest aim of art. After many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in Italy, and of body-colour and transparent colour in England, I am now entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art must be done in dead colour. The habit of depending on varnish or on lucid tints transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colours amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[235] and to enjoy, in general, quality of colour more than grandeur of composition, and confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been reached in dead colour, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and Veronese are those which are likest frescos. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and coarse-looking, body-colour is, in a sketch, infinitely liker nature than transparent colour: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_ accurately, I think, by _nothing_ else); and for ground, rocks, and buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can ever be. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of colour are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle or method of colour which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good colour in oil, water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one, perhaps: you may have to ground with one colour; to touch it with fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and to reinforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them, knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down to the white ground, and beginning again. The drawing in body-colour will tend to teach you all this, more than any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly ruined our modern water-colour school of art. There are sometimes places in which a skilful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he could otherwise; and sometimes a skilfully rased piece of paper will, in the midst of transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky body-colour in representing the surfaces of rocks or buildings. But artifices of this kind are always treacherous in a tyro's hands, tempting him to trust in them; and you had better always work on white or grey paper as smooth as silk;[236] and never disturb the surface of your colour or paper, except finally to scratch out the very highest lights if you are using transparent colours. I have said above that body-colour drawing will teach you the use of colour better than working with merely transparent tints; but this is not because the process is an easier one, but because it is a more _complete_ one, and also because it involves _some_ working with transparent tints in the best way. You are not to think that because you use body-colour you may make any kind of mess that you like, and yet get out of it. But you are to avail yourself of the characters of your material, which enable you most nearly to imitate the processes of Nature. Thus, suppose you have a red rocky cliff to sketch, with blue clouds floating over it. You paint your cliff first firmly, then take your blue, mixing it to such a tint (and here is a great part of the skill needed), that when it is laid over the red, in the thickness required for the effect of the mist, the warm rock-colour showing through the blue cloud-colour, may bring it to exactly the hue you want; (your upper tint, therefore, must be mixed colder than you want it;) then you lay it on, varying it as you strike it, getting the forms of the mist at once, and, if it be rightly done, with exquisite quality of colour, from the warm tint's showing through and between the particles of the other. When it is dry, you may add a little colour to retouch the edges where they want shape, or heighten the lights where they want roundness, or put another tone over the whole; but you can take none away. If you touch or disturb the surface, or by any untoward accident mix the under and upper colours together, all is lost irrecoverably. Begin your drawing from the ground again if you like, or throw it into the fire if you like. But do not waste time in trying to mend it.[237] This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque colour has, however, led us a little beyond the point where we should have begun; we must go back to our palette, if you please. Get a cake of each of the hard colours named in the note below[238] and try experiments on their simple combinations, by mixing each colour with every other. If you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of pasteboard, and put the pure colours in columns at the top and side; the mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters standing for colours): b c d e f &c. a ab ac ad ae af b -- bc bd be bf c -- -- cd ce cf d -- -- -- de df e -- -- -- -- ef &c. This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints of two colours only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colours, either by putting a third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the third into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you the effects that colours have on each other when thus put over, or beside, each other. [Illustration: FIG. 29.] When you have got a little used to the principal combinations, place yourself at a window which the sun does not shine in at, commanding some simple piece of landscape; outline this landscape roughly; then take a piece of white cardboard, cut out a hole in it about the size of a large pea; and supposing _R_ is the room, _a d_ the window, and you are sitting at _a_, Fig. 29., hold this cardboard a little outside of the window, upright, and in the direction _b d_, parallel a little turned to the side of the window, or so as to catch more light, as at _a d_, never turned as at _c d_, or the paper will be dark. Then you will see the landscape, bit by bit, through the circular hole. Match the colours of each important bit as nearly as you can, mixing your tints with white, beside the aperture. When matched, put a touch of the same tint at the top of your paper, writing under it: "dark tree colour," "hill colour," "field colour," as the case may be. Then wash the tint away from beside the opening, and the cardboard will be ready to match another piece of the landscape.[239] When you have got the colours of the principal masses thus indicated, lay on a piece of each in your sketch in its right place, and then proceed to complete the sketch in harmony with them, by your eye. In the course of your early experiments, you will be much struck by two things: the first, the inimitable brilliancy of light in sky and in sunlighted things: and the second, that among the tints which you can imitate, those which you thought the darkest will continually turn out to be in reality the lightest. Darkness of objects is estimated by us, under ordinary circumstances, much more by _knowledge_ than by sight; thus, a cedar or Scotch fir, at 200 yards off, will be thought of darker green than an elm or oak near us; because we know by experience that the peculiar colour they exhibit, at that distance, is the _sign_ of darkness of foliage. But when we try them through the cardboard, the near oak will be found, indeed, rather dark green, and the distant cedar, perhaps, pale gray-purple. The quantity of purple and grey in Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery. Well, having ascertained thus your principal tints, you may proceed to fill up your sketch; in doing which observe these following particulars: 1. Many portions of your subject appeared through the aperture in the paper brighter than the paper, as sky, sunlighted grass, &c. Leave these portions, for the present, white; and proceed with the parts of which you can match the tints. 2. As you tried your subject with the cardboard, you must have observed how many changes of hue took place over small spaces. In filling up your work, try to educate your eye to perceive these differences of hue without the help of the cardboard, and lay them deliberately, like a mosaic-worker, as separate colours, preparing each carefully on your palatte, and laying it as if it were a patch of coloured cloth, cut out, to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next patch; so that the _fault_ of your work may be, not a slurred or misty look, but a patched bed-cover look, as if it had all been cut out with scissors. For instance, in drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there will be probably white high lights, then a pale rosy grey round them on the light side, then a (probably greenish) deeper grey on the dark side, varied by reflected colours, and over all, rich black strips of bark and brown spots of moss. Lay first the rosy grey, leaving white for the high lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then lay the grey for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy grey of the light, leaving also in this darker grey the white paper in the places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colours separately for each spot, and lay each in the white place left for it. Not one grain of white, except that purposely left for the high lights, must be visible when the work is done, even through a magnifying-glass, so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your background colours, and put them on each side of the tree-trunk, fitting them carefully to its edge. Fine work you would make of this, wouldn't you, if you had not learned to draw first, and could not now draw a good outline for the stem, much less terminate a colour mass in the outline you wanted? Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first begin to paint in this way, and before you can modify it, as I shall tell you presently how; but never mind; it is of the greatest possible importance that you should practice this separate laying on of the hues, for all good colouring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary, and sometimes desirable, to lay one colour and form boldly over another: thus, in laying leaves on blue sky, it is impossible always in large pictures, or when pressed for time, to fill in the blue through the interstices of the leaves; and the great Venetians constantly lay their blue ground first, and then, having let it dry, strike the golden brown over it in the form of the leaf, leaving the under blue to shine through the gold, and subdue it to the olive green they want. But in the most precious and perfect work each leaf is inlaid, and the blue worked round it: and, whether you use one or other mode of getting your result, it is equally necessary to be absolute and decisive in your laying the colour. Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper colour struck upon it in perfect form, for ever, thenceforward, unalterable; or else the two colours must be individually put in their places, and led up to each other till they meet at their appointed border, equally, thenceforward, unchangeable. Either process, you see, involves _absolute_ decision. If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or try this way and that with your colour, it is all over with it and with you. You will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the Venetians, by daubing their colours about, and retouching, and finishing, and softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead them farther into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a Veronese in the Louvre, which gives the copyist much employment. He has a dark ground behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then when it was dry, or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair over it with some half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once, and forever. Had one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been wrong forever; no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists daub in first some background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch the background, then the hair, work for hours at it, expecting it always to come right to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for centuries at it, and they will never do it. If they can do it with Veronese's allowance of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the dark background, well; if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it will ever come right, and get true answer from him--on Launce's conditions: "If he say 'ay,' it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing, it will." Whenever you lay on a mass of colour, be sure that however large it may be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No colour exists in Nature under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not see this, it is the fault of your inexperience; you _will_ see it in due time, if you practise enough. But in general you may see it at once. In the birch trunk, for instance, the rosy grey _must_ be gradated by the roundness of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the shaded side is gradated by reflected, light. Accordingly, whether by adding water, or white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you will do at pleasure, according to the texture you wish to produce), you must, in every tint you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than another, and get an even gradation between the two depths. This is very like laying down a formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is merely the assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically impossible to meet with an ungradated piece of colour, but it is so supremely improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking yourself invariably, when you are going to copy a tint,--not "_Is_ that gradated?" but "_Which way_ is it gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of colour may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not merely because the natural fact is so, that your colour should be gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the colour itself depends more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to colours just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types, expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and ungradated colour, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of rose-colour on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the delicacy and quantity of its colour gradations, all other flowers being either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed. 4. But observe, it is not enough in general that colour should be gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another. Generally colour _changes_ as it _diminishes_, and is not merely _darker_ at one spot, but also _purer_ at one spot than anywhere else. It does not in the least follow that the darkest spot should be the purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them, however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of colour until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a large spot; and must be gradated from that into less pure blue--greyish blue, or greenish blue, or purplish blue, over all the rest of the space it occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while the colour is wet, mix it with the colour which is to subdue it, adding gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the colour is quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another colour over it, leaving only a point of the first tint visible: or else, lay the subduing tints on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of each of these methods I have something to tell you separately: but that is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without once more pressing upon you the preëminent necessity of introducing it everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like _habit_ of hand, and yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to get into a habit of never touching paper with colour, without securing a gradation. You will not in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six or seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of colour as large as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that brilliancy of hue, and vigour of light, and even the aspect of transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from _equality_ of colour than from nature of colour. Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of those colours unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth. 5. Next note the three processes by which gradation and other characters are to be obtained: A. Mixing while the colour is wet. You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colours distinctly oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though in reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light, gradually one into the other: and, after being laid separately on, will need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk; and it is easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it often happens that the whole beauty of two colours will depend on the one being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of it: blue and green often do so in water: blue and grey, or purple and scarlet, in sky; in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and truthful results may be obtained by laying one colour into the other while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-colour; only observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the colour you lay into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint. B. Laying one colour over another. If you lay on a solid touch of vermilion, and, after it is quite dry, strike a little very wet carmine quickly over it, you will obtain a much more brilliant red than by mixing the carmine and vermilion. Similarly, if you lay a dark colour first, and strike a little blue or white body-colour lightly over it, you will get a more beautiful grey than by mixing the colour and the blue or white. In very perfect painting, artifices of this kind are continually used; but I would not have you trust much to them; they are apt to make you think too much of quality of colour. I should like you to depend on little more than the dead colours, simply laid on, only observe always this, that the _less_ colour you do the work with, the better it will always be:[240] so that if you have laid a red colour, and you want a purple one above, do not mix the purple on your palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower the red, but take a little thin blue from your palette, and lay it lightly over the red, so as to let the red be seen through, and thus produce the required purple; and if you want a green hue over a blue one, do not lay a quantity of green on the blue, but a _little_ yellow, and so on, always bringing the under colour into service as far as you possibly can. If, however, the colour beneath is wholly opposed to the one you have to lay on, as, suppose, if green is to be laid over scarlet, you must either remove the required parts of the under colour daintily first with your knife, or with water; or else, lay solid white over it massively, and leave that to dry, and then glaze the white with the upper colour. This is better, in general, than laying the upper colour itself so thick as to conquer the ground, which, in fact, if it be a transparent colour, you cannot do. Thus, if you have to strike warm boughs and leaves of trees over blue sky, and they are too intricate to have their places left for them in laying the blue, it is better to lay them first in solid white, and then glaze with sienna and ochre, than to mix the sienna and white; though, of course, the process is longer and more troublesome. Nevertheless, if the forms of touches required are very delicate, the after glazing is impossible. You must then mix the warm colour thick at once, and so use it: and this is often necessary for delicate grasses, and such other fine threads of light in foreground work. C. Breaking one colour in small points through or over another. This is the most important of all processes in good modern[241] oil and water-colour painting, but you need not hope to attain very great skill in it. To do it well is very laborious, and requires such skill and delicacy of hand as can only be acquired by unceasing practice. But you will find advantage in noting the following points: (_a._) In distant effects of rich subjects, wood, or rippled water, or broken clouds, much may be done by touches or crumbling dashes of rather dry colour, with other colours afterwards put cunningly into the interstices. The more you practise this, when the subject evidently calls for it, the more your eye will enjoy the higher qualities of colour. The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the principle of separate colours to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of colour in juxtaposition, instead of large spaces. And note, in filling up minute interstices of this kind, that if you want the colour you fill them with to show brightly, it is better to put a rather positive point of it, with a little white left beside or round it in the interstice, than to put a pale tint of the colour over the whole interstice. Yellow or orange will hardly show, if pale, in small spaces; but they show brightly in firm touches, however small, with white beside them. (_b._) If a colour is to be darkened by superimposed portions of another, it is, in many cases, better to lay the uppermost colour in rather vigorous small touches, like finely chopped straw, over the under one, than to lay it on as a tint, for two reasons: the first, that the play of the two colours together is pleasant to the eye; the second, that much expression of form may be got by wise administration of the upper dark touches. In distant mountains they may be made pines of, or broken crags, or villages, or stones, or whatever you choose; in clouds they may indicate the direction of the rain, the roll and outline of the cloud masses; and in water, the minor waves. All noble effects of dark atmosphere are got in good water-colour drawing by these two expedients, interlacing the colours, or retouching the lower one with fine darker drawing in an upper. Sponging and washing for dark atmospheric effect is barbarous, and mere tyro's work, though it is often useful for passages of delicate atmospheric light. (_c._) When you have time, practice the production of mixed tints by interlaced touches of the pure colours out of which they are formed, and use the process at the parts of your sketches where you wish to get rich and luscious effects. Study the works of William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower completely, but laying the ground colour of one petal, and painting the spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of lilies, geraniums, tulips, &c., numbered with proper reference to their position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds besides those of art. Be careful to get the _gradated_ distribution of the spots well followed in the calceolarias, foxgloves, and the like; and work out the odd, indefinite hues of the spots themselves with minute grains of pure interlaced colour, otherwise you will never get their richness of bloom. You will be surprised to find, as you do this, first the universality of the law of gradation we have so much insisted upon; secondly, that Nature is just as economical of _her_ fine colours as I have told you to be of yours. You would think, by the way she paints, that her colours cost her something enormous: she will only give you a single pure touch just where the petal turns into light; but down in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in the showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look close, only dusty grey, or green, or purple, or every colour in the world at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the centre of it. And so with all her colours. Sometimes I have really thought her miserliness intolerable: in a gentian, for instance, the way she economises her ultramarine down in the bell is a little too bad. Next, respecting general tone. I said, just now, that, for the sake of students, my tax should not be laid on black or on white pigments; but if you mean to be a colourist, you must lay a tax on them yourselves when you begin to use true colour; that is to say, you must use them little and make of them much. There is no better test of your colour tones being good, than your having made the white in your picture precious, and the black conspicuous. I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or brilliant; it is easy to scratch white seagulls out of black clouds and dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but, when white is well managed, it ought to be strangely delicious--tender as well as bright--like inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours. This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few points of chief lustre. Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some _colour_--never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among them; never occurring except in a black object, or in small points indicative of intense shade in the very centre of masses of shadow. Shadows of absolutely negative grey, however, may be beautifully used with white, or with gold; but still though the black thus, in subdued strength, becomes _spacious_, it should always be _conspicuous_; the spectator should notice this grey neutrality with some wonder, and enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold colour and the white which it relieves. Of all the great colourists Velasquez is the greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than most other people's crimson. It is not, however, only white and black which you must make valuable; you must give rare worth to every colour you use; but the white and black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black, and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You may melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue and your blue into green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should, however, try, as I said, to give _preciousness_ to all your colours; and this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work, and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine colouring, like fine drawing, is _delicate_; and so delicate that if, at last, you _see_ the colour you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of colour which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of any colour in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom hurts it. Notice also, that nearly all good compound colours are _odd_ colours. You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently, you feel that it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will always find your colour too warm or too cold--no colour in the box will seem to have any affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it were laid at a single touch with a single colour. As to the choice and harmony of colours in general, if you cannot choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible colour, you may find plenty given in treatises upon colouring, to illustrate the laws of harmony; and if you want to colour beautifully, colour as best pleases yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor to look as if it were clever or difficult to colour in that way, but so that the colour may be pleasant to you when you are happy, or thoughtful. Look much at the morning and evening sky, and much at simple flowers--dog-roses, wood hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather, and such like--as Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever any scientific person tells you that two colours are "discordant," make a note of the two colours, and put them together whenever you can. I have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the two colours which Nature seems to intend never to be separated and never to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a peacock's neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green lights though it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours. If you have a good eye for colours, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts purple and green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow and neutral grey, and the like; and how she strikes these colour-concords for general tones, and then works into them with innumerable subordinate ones; and you will gradually come to like what she does, and find out new and beautiful chords of colour in her work every day. If you _enjoy_ them, depend upon it you will paint them to a certain point right: or, at least, if you do not enjoy them, you are certain to paint them wrong. If colour does not give you _intense_ pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it, you are only tormenting the eyes and senses of people who feel colour, whenever you touch it; and that is unkind and improper. You will find, also, your power of colouring depend much on your state of health and right balance of mind; when you are fatigued or ill you will not see colours well, and when you are ill-tempered you will not choose them well: thus, though not infallibly a test of character in individuals, colour power is a great sign of mental health in nations; when they are in a state of intellectual decline, their colouring always gets dull.[242] You must also take great care not to be misled by affected talk about colour from people who have not the gift of it: numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably never in all their lives received one genuine colour-sensation. The modern religionists of the school of Overbeck are just like people who eat slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and purer than strawberries and plums. Take care also never to be misled into any idea that colour can help or display _form_; colour[243] always disguises form, and is meant to do so. 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 "aërial 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 "aërial 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 aërial 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 preëminence. [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 preëminence, 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 § 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. § 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, Æschylus, 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 Æschylus 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.