usic be harsh or false; but, if the music be right, the poem may be
insipid or inharmonious, and still saved by the notes to which it is
wedded. But this is far more true of color. If that be wrong, all is
wrong. No amount of expression or invention can redeem an ill-colored
picture; while, on the other hand, if the color be right, there is
nothing it will not raise or redeem; and, therefore, wherever color
enters at all, anything _may_ be sacrificed to it, and, rather than it
should be false or feeble, everything _must_ be sacrificed to it: so
that, when an artist touches color, it is the same thing as when a poet
takes up a musical instrument; he implies, in so doing, that he is a
master, up to a certain point, of that instrument, and can produce sweet
sound from it, and is able to fit the course and measure of his words to
its tones, which, if he be not able to do, he had better not have
touched it. In like manner, to add color to a drawing is to undertake
for the perfection of a visible music, which, if it be false, will
utterly and assuredly mar the whole work; if true, proportionately
elevate it, according to its power and sweetness. But, in no case ought
the color to be added in order to increase the realization. The drawing
or engraving is all that the imagination needs. To "paint" the subject
merely to make it more real, is only to insult the imaginative power and
to vulgarize the whole. Hence the common, though little understood
feeling, among men of ordinary cultivation, that an inferior sketch is
always better than a bad painting; although, in the latter, there may
verily be more skill than in the former. For the painter who has
presumed to touch color without perfectly understanding it, not for the
color's sake, nor because he loves it, but for the sake of completion
merely, has committed two sins against us; he has dulled the imagination
by not trusting it far enough, and then, in this languid state, he
oppresses it with base and false color; for all color that is not
lovely, is discordant; there is no mediate condition. So, therefore,
when it is permitted to enter at all, it must be with the
predetermination that, cost what it will, the color shall be right and
lovely: and I only wish that, in general, it were better understood that
a _painter's_ business is _to paint_, primarily; and that all
expression, and grouping, and conceiving, and what else goes to
constitute design, _are of less importance than col