--three at the
outside--the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if
you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining
your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark.
It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and
darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next
supplementary light and dark.

Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you
have done by repetition or finish. _Let it alone._ You may not have
covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in
the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least
expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in
Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas
left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most
interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert,
Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of
foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great,
cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.

Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is
many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are
its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that
much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable,
not its point.

As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat,
_everything_. That there are some subjects better than others, I will
admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first,
especially if it be raining; and there is no question that it does
rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks
glisten under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of molten silver
escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background--and I
always do--of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the
haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else
in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start
your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab,
expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly
fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory
that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or
you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer
when I found myself in that most wonderful of a