, as they probably were, than upon those tones
and hues which best belong to the feeling which the action represented
is meant to convey: by which practice an unnaturalness is too often
the result; for there is forced upon the eye a vividness and variety
of colours, in dresses, accessories, and the scene, which one present
at the action would never have noticed--which, as the feeling would
have rejected, so would the obedient eye have left undistinguished;
and we know how the eye is obedient to the feelings and withholds
impressions, and in the midst of crowds, to use a common expression,
will "fix itself on vacancy." It will do even more; it will adopt the
colouring which the feeling suggests--will set aside what is, and
assume what is not. Thus, in reading some melancholy tale, the very
scene becomes

"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;"

and thus it is that actually the eye aids tile imagination while it

"Breathes a browner horror o'er the woods."

This neglect of colour as an end, as a means of narration, and as a
sympathy, is peculiar to modern art. And hence it is, that there is
less feeling among us for works of the Italian schools, than for those
less poetical, and too often mean and low ones of the Dutch and
Flemish. I mean not here to pass any censure on the colouring of the
Dutch and Flemish schools; it was admirable in its lucid and
harmonious, but mostly so in its imitative, character. Their subjects
seldom allowed scope for any high aim at sympathetic colouring: both
appealed to the eye,--not without exceptions, however,--to mention one
only, Rembrandt, whose colouring was generally ideal, and by it mostly
was the story told. But one perfection of colour they almost all of
them had, that agreeability, that gem-like lustre and richness, which
I spoke of as one of the essentials of good colouring. And in this,
even where modern art has professed to work upon the model of the
Flemish school, it has failed, and by endeavouring to go beyond that
school in brightness, has fallen very far short of its excellence; for
in the very light key that has been adopted, and the prevalence of
positive white, it has lost sight of that mellowness and illumination
which is so great a charm in the Dutch and Flemish pictures. It has,
too, mistaken lightness for brightness, and a certain chalkiness has
been the result. And artists who have fallen into this error,
perceiving, as they could not fail to do, t