th water, especially where there are buildings above to be
reflected, for the eye never understands the want of the reflection. But
it is the easiest and most agreeable thing in the world to give the
inverted image: it occupies a vast space of otherwise troublesome
distance in the simplest way possible, and is understood by the eye at
once. Hence Canaletto is glad, as any other inferior workman would be,
not to say obliged, to give the reflections in the distance. But when he
comes up close to the spectator, he finds the smooth surface just as
troublesome near, as the ripple would have been far off. It is a very
nervous thing for an ignorant artist to have a great space of vacant
smooth water to deal with, close to him, too far down to take
reflections from buildings, and yet which must be made to look flat and
retiring and transparent. Canaletto, with his sea-green, did not at all
feel himself equal to anything of this kind, and had therefore no
resource but in the white touches above described, which occupy the
alarming space without any troublesome necessity for knowledge or
invention, and supply by their gradual diminution some means of
expressing retirement of surface. It is easily understood, therefore,
why he should adopt this system, which is just what any awkward workman
would naturally cling to, trusting to the inaccuracy of observation of
the public to secure him from detection.

Sec. 19. Why unpardonable.

Now in all these cases it is not the mistake or the license itself, it
is not the infringement of this or that law which condemns the picture,
but it is the spirit and habit of mind in which the license is taken,
the cowardice or bluntness of feeling, which infects every part alike,
and deprives the whole picture of vitality. Canaletto, had he been a
great painter, might have cast his reflections wherever he chose, and
rippled the water wherever he chose, and painted his sea sloping if he
chose, and neither I nor any one else should have dared to say a word
against him; but he is a little and a bad painter, and so continues
everywhere multiplying and magnifying mistakes, and adding apathy to
error, until nothing can any more be pardoned in him. If it be but
remembered that every one of the surfaces of those multitudinous ripples
is in nature a mirror which catches, according to its position, either
the image of the sky or of the silver beaks of the gondolas, or of their
black bodies and scarlet draperie