Greece, and put you wholly into a barbarous and frost-hardened land;
that once having its gloom defined he may show you all the more
intensely what pastoral purity and innocence of life, and loveliness
of nature, are underneath the banks and braes of Doune, and by every
brooklet that feeds the Forth and Clyde.

That is the main purpose of these two studies. How it is obtained by
various incidents in the drawing of stones, and trees, and figures, I
will show you another time. The chief element in both is the sadness
and depth of their effect of subdued though clear light in sky and
stream.

42. The sadness of their effect, I repeat. If you remember anything of
the Lectures I gave you through last year, you must be gradually
getting accustomed to my definition of the Greek school in art, as one
essentially Chiaroscurist, as opposed to Gothic color; Realist, as
opposed to Gothic imagination; and Despairing, as opposed to Gothic
hope. And you are prepared to recognize it by any one of these three
conditions. Only, observe, the chiaroscuro is simply the technical
result of the two others: a Greek painter likes light and shade,
first, because they enable him to realize form solidly, while color is
flat; and secondly, because light and shade are melancholy, while
color is gay.

So that the defect of color, and substitution of more or less gray or
gloomy effects of rounded gradation, constantly express the two
characters: first, Academic or Greek fleshliness and solidity as
opposed to Gothic imagination; and secondly, of Greek tragic horror
and gloom as opposed to Gothic gladness.

43. In the great French room in the Louvre, if you at all remember the
general character of the historical pictures, you will instantly
recognize, in thinking generally of them, the rounded fleshly and
solid character in the drawing, the gray or greenish and brownish
color, or defect of color, lurid and moonlight-like, and the gloomy
choice of subjects, as the Deluge, the Field of Eylau, the Starvation
on the Raft, and the Death of Endymion; always melancholy, and usually
horrible.

The more recent pictures of the painter Gerome unite all these
attributes in a singular degree; above all, the fleshliness and
materialism which make his studies of the nude, in my judgment,
altogether inadmissible into the rank of the fine arts.

44. Now you observe that I never speak of this Greek school but with a
certain dread. And yet I have told you that Tu