with some, and the violent blues and greens with others,
and the horizontal lines with the feeble, and the bright touches and
sparkles with the dexterous, and everything that is shallow and
commonplace with all. Now, the fact is, that there is hardly a roadside
pond or pool which has not as much landscape _in_ it as above it. It is
not the brown, muddy, dull thing we suppose it to be; it has a heart
like ourselves, and in the bottom of that there are the boughs of the
tall trees, and the blades of the shaking-grass, and all manner of hues,
of variable, pleasant light out of the sky; nay, the ugly gutter, that
stagnates over the drain bars, in the heart of the foul city, is not
altogether base; down in that, if you will look deep enough, you may see
the dark, serious blue of far-off sky, and the passing of pure clouds.
It is at your own will that you see in that despised stream, either the
refuse of the street, or the image of the sky--so it is with almost all
other things that we unkindly despise. Now, this farseeing is just the
difference between the great and the vulgar painter; the common man
_knows_ the roadside pool is muddy, and draws its mud; the great painter
sees beneath and behind the brown surface what will take him a day's
work to follow, but he follows it, cost what it will. And if painters
would only go out to the nearest common and take the nearest dirty pond
among the furze, and draw that thoroughly, not considering that it is
water that they are drawing, and that water must be done in a certain
way; but drawing determinedly what they _see_, that is to say, all the
trees, and their shaking leaves, and all the hazy passages of disturbing
sunshine; and the bottom seen in the clearer little bits at the edge,
and the stones of it, and all the sky, and the clouds far down in the
middle, drawn as completely, and more delicately they must be, than the
real clouds above, they would come home with such a notion of
water-painting as might save me and every one else all trouble of
writing more about the matter; but now they do nothing of the kind, but
take the ugly, round, yellow surface for granted, or else improve it,
and, instead of giving that refined, complex, delicate, but saddened and
gloomy reflection in the polluted water, they clear it up with coarse
flashes of yellow, and green, and blue, and spoil their own eyes, and
hurt ours; failing, of course, still more hopelessly in touching the
pure, inimitable li