Go and look at
the real landscape, and take care of it; do not think you can get the
good of it in a black stain portable in a folio. But if you care for
human thought and passion, then learn yourselves to watch the course and
fall of the light by whose influence you live, and to share in the joy
of human spirits in the heavenly gifts of sunbeam and shade. For I tell
you truly, that to a quiet heart, and healthy brain, and industrious
hand, there is more delight, and use, in the dappling of one wood-glade
with flowers and sunshine, than to the restless, heartless, and idle
could be brought by a panorama of a belt of the world, photographed
round the equator.

LECTURE VII

COLOUR

173. To-day I must try to complete our elementary sketch of schools of
art, by tracing the course of those which were distinguished by faculty
of colour, and afterwards to deduce from the entire scheme advisable
methods of immediate practice.

You remember that, for the type of the early schools of colour, I chose
their work in glass; as for that of the early schools of chiaroscuro, I
chose their work in clay.

I had two reasons for this. First, that the peculiar skill of colourists
is seen most intelligibly in their work in glass or in enamel; secondly,
that Nature herself produces all her loveliest colours in some kind of
solid or liquid glass or crystal. The rainbow is painted on a shower of
melted glass, and the colours of the opal are produced in vitreous flint
mixed with water; the green and blue, and golden or amber brown of
flowing water is in surface glassy, and in motion "splendidior vitro."
And the loveliest colours ever granted to human sight--those of morning
and evening clouds before or after rain--are produced on minute
particles of finely-divided water, or perhaps sometimes ice. But more
than this. If you examine with a lens some of the richest colours of
flowers, as, for instance, those of the gentian and dianthus, you will
find their texture is produced by a crystalline or sugary frost-work
upon them. In the lychnis of the high Alps, the red and white have a
kind of sugary bloom, as rich as it is delicate. It is indescribable;
but if you can fancy very powdery and crystalline snow mixed with the
softest cream, and then dashed with carmine, it may give you some idea
of the look of it. There are no colours, either in the nacre of shells,
or the plumes of birds and insects, which are so pure as those of
clouds, opa