noble. See Chap. XX. Sec.
20.

CHAPTER XVIII.

RESULTING FORMS:--FIFTHLY, STONES.

Sec. 1. It is somewhat singular that the indistinctness of treatment which
has been so often noticed as characteristic of our present art shows
itself always most when there is least apparent reason for it. Modern
artists, having some true sympathy with what is vague in nature, draw
all that is uncertain and evasive without evasion, and render faithfully
whatever can be discerned in faithless mist or mocking vapors; but
having no sympathy with what is solid and serene, they seem to become
uncertain themselves in proportion to the certainty of what they see;
and while they render flakes of far-away cloud, or fringes of
inextricable forest, with something like patience and fidelity, give
nothing but the hastiest indication of the ground they can tread upon or
touch. It is only in modern art that we find any complete representation
of clouds, and only in ancient art that, generally speaking, we find any
careful realization of Stones.

Sec. 2. This is all the more strange, because, as we saw some time back,
the _ruggedness_ of the stone is more pleasing to the modern than the
mediaeval, and he rarely completes any picture satisfactorily to himself
unless large spaces of it are filled with irregular masonry, rocky
banks, or shingly shores: whereas the mediaeval could conceive no
desirableness in the loose and unhewn masses; associated them generally
in his mind with wicked men, and the Martyrdom of St. Stephen; and
always threw them out of his road, or garden, to the best of his power.

Yet with all this difference in predilection, such was the honesty of
the mediaeval, and so firm his acknowledgment of the necessity to paint
completely whatever was to be painted at all, that there is hardly a
strip of earth under the feet of a saint, in any finished work of the
early painters, but more, and better painted, stones are to be found
upon it than in an entire exhibition full of modern mountain scenery.

Sec. 3. Not better painted in every respect. In those interesting and
popular treatises on the art of drawing, which tell the public that
their colors should neither be too warm nor too cold, and that their
touches should always be characteristic of the object they are intended
to represent, the directions given for the manufacture of stones usually
enforce "crispness of outline" and "roughness of texture." And,
accordingly, in