nature
where all is soft and melting. 'Great inventors in all ages knew this.
Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by their line. Raphael and Michael
Angelo and Albert Duerer are known by this and this alone. How do we
distinguish the owl from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the
bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from
another but by the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and
movements? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the
definite and determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from
knavery but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the
actions and intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself;
and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out
upon it before man or beast can exist.' He even insisted that 'colouring
does not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light
and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline'--meaning, I
suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being in
light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding-line dividing
a form from its background, as one of his commentators has thought, but
the line that divides it from surrounding space, and unless you have an
overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true beauty at all, but only
'the beauty that is appended to folly,' a beauty of mere voluptuous
softness, 'a lamentable accident of the mortal and perishing life,' for
'the beauty proper for sublime art is lineaments, or forms and features
capable of being the receptacles of intellect,' and 'the face or limbs
that alter least from youth to old age are the face and limbs of the
greatest beauty and perfection.' His praise of a severe art had been
beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen, in the midst of its
enthusiasm for Correggio and the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for
Stothard; and yet in his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for
what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of
every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in
lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst
of his labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form
be half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself
a symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not
the Bacchus and Ariadne of T