h 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 whe