peaking of truth only, to pass by his down scenes and moorland
showers, of some years ago, in which he produced some of the most
perfect and faultless passages of mist and rain-cloud which art has ever
seen. Wet, transparent, formless, full of motion, felt rather by their
shadows on the hills than by their presence in the sky, becoming dark
only through increased depth of space, most translucent where most
sombre, and light only through increased buoyancy of motion, letting the
blue through their interstices, and the sunlight through their chasms,
with the irregular playfulness and traceless gradation of nature
herself, his skies will remain, as long as their colors stand, among the
most simple, unadulterated, and complete transcripts of a particular
nature which art can point to. Had he painted five instead of five
hundred such, and gone on to other sources of beauty, he might, there
can be little doubt, have been one of our greatest artists. But it often
grieves us to see how his power is limited to a particular moment, to
that easiest moment for imitation, when knowledge of form may be
superseded by management of the brush, and the judgment of the colorist
by the manufacture of a color; the moment when all form is melted down
and drifted away in the descending veil of rain, and when the variable
and fitful colors of the heaven are lost in the monotonous gray of its
storm tones.[35] We can only account for this by supposing that there is
something radically wrong in his method of study; for a man of his
evident depth of feeling and pure love of truth ought not to be, cannot
be, except from some strange error in his mode of out-of-door practice,
thus limited in his range, and liable to decline of power. We have
little doubt that almost all such failures arise from the artist's
neglecting the use of the chalk, and supposing that either the power of
drawing forms, or the sense of their beauty, can be maintained
unweakened or unblunted, without constant and laborious studies in
simple light and shade, of form only. The brush is at once the artist's
greatest aid and enemy; it enables him to make his power available, but
at the same time, it undermines his power, and unless it be constantly
rejected for the pencil, never can be rightly used. But whatever the
obstacle be, we do not doubt that it is one which, once seen, may be
overcome or removed; and we are in the constant hope of seeing this
finely-minded artist shake off hi