pth of color in the scene, and that you are obliged to paint it paler.
If you paint all the colors proportionately paler, as if an equal
quantity of tint had been washed away from each of them, you still
obtain a harmonious, though not an equally forcible, statement of
natural fact. But if you take away the colors unequally, and leave some
tints nearly as deep as they are in Nature, while others are much
subdued, you have no longer a true statement. You cannot say to the
observer, "Fancy all those colors a little deeper, and you will have the
actual fact." However he adds in imagination, or takes away, something
is sure to be still wrong. The picture is out of harmony.

235. It will happen, however, much more frequently, that you have to
darken the whole system of colors, than to make them paler. You
remember, in your first studies of color from Nature, you were to leave
the passages of light which were too bright to be imitated, as white
paper. But, in completing the picture, it becomes necessary to put color
into them; and then the other colors must be made darker, in some fixed
relation to them. If you deepen all proportionately, though the whole
scene is darker than reality, it is only as if you were looking at the
reality in a lower light: but if, while you darken some of the tints,
you leave others undarkened, the picture is out of harmony, and will not
give the impression of truth.

236. It is not, indeed, possible to deepen _all_ the colors so much as
to relieve the lights in their natural degree, you would merely sink
most of your colors, if you tried to do so, into a broad mass of
blackness: but it is quite possible to lower them harmoniously, and yet
more in some parts of the picture than in others, so as to allow you to
show the light you want in a visible relief. In well-harmonized pictures
this is done by gradually deepening the tone of the picture towards the
lighter parts of it, without materially lowering it in the very dark
parts; the tendency in such pictures being, of course, to include large
masses of middle tints. But the principal point to be observed in doing
this, is to deepen the individual tints without dirtying or obscuring
them. It is easy to lower the tone of the picture by washing it over
with gray or brown; and easy to see the effect of the landscape, when
its colors are thus universally polluted with black, by using the black
convex mirror, one of the most pestilent inventions for falsif