what others have done, than in what you can yourself
do, and more in the strength that is for ever above you, than in that
you can never attain.

163. But you can attain much, if you will work reverently and patiently,
and hope for no success through ill-regulated effort. It is, however,
most assuredly at this point of your study that the full strain on your
patience will begin. The exercises in line-drawing and flat laying of
colour are irksome; but they are definite, and within certain limits,
sure to be successful if practised with moderate care. But the
expression of form by shadow requires more subtle patience, and involves
the necessity of frequent and mortifying failure, not to speak of the
self-denial which I said was needful in persons fond of colour, to draw
in mere light and shade. If, indeed, you were going to be artists, or
could give any great length of time to study, it might be possible for
you to learn wholly in the Venetian school, and to reach form through
colour. But without the most intense application this is not possible;
and practically, it will be necessary for you, as soon as you have
gained the power of outlining accurately, and of laying flat colour, to
learn to express solid form as shown by light and shade only. And there
is this great advantage in doing so, that many forms are more or less
disguised by colour, and that we can only represent them completely to
others, or rapidly and easily record them for ourselves, by the use of
shade alone. A single instance will show you what I mean. Perhaps there
are few flowers of which the impression on the eye is more definitely of
flat colour, than the scarlet geranium. But you would find, if you were
to try to paint it,--first, that no pigment could approach the beauty of
its scarlet; and secondly, that the brightness of the hue dazzled the
eye, and prevented its following the real arrangement of the cluster of
flowers. I have drawn for you here (at least this is a mezzotint from my
drawing), a single cluster of the scarlet geranium, in mere light and
shade (Edu. 32 B.), and I think you will feel that its domed form, and
the flat lying of the petals one over the other, in the vaulted roof of
it, can be seen better thus than if they had been painted scarlet.

164. Also this study will be useful to you, in showing how entirely
effects of light depend on delineation, and gradation of spaces, and not
on methods of shading. And this is the second g