whipster, but, as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in
which we figure, the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has
not been mirthfully conceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever
anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not
a copious spirit of enjoyment. Whether as man or artist, let the youth
make haste to Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to
the spirit of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from
studies, although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart
the gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo
the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the
concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to finish a
study and magniloquently ticket it a picture. The incommunicable thrill
of things, that is the tuning-fork by which we test the flatness of our
art. Here it is that Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs up to
further effort and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us blushing at
our ignorant and tepid works; and the more we find of these inspiring
shocks the less shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions.
In all sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling
human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio pictures,
it is a lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young painter go to
Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with studies that teach
him the mechanical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air, and
be a servant of mirth, and not pick and botanise, but wait upon the
moods of Nature. So he will learn--or learn not to forget--the poetry of
life and earth, which, when he has acquired his track, will save him
from joyless reproduction.

II

A NOTE ON REALISM

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does
not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the
one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom,
creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour
of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and
dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to
another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation
of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end
to end--these, which take