is words
as other blind devotees obeyed the Delphic Oracle--statements,
however, which are rejected by many of to-day who think for themselves
and who think clearly, having the world's work spread open before them
from which to judge.

Once in wandering around the Academia of Venice, taking in for the
fiftieth time Titian's masterpiece, I came across an Englishman who
had paused in his walk and was adjusting his long-distance
telescope--a monocle glued just under his left eyebrow. Mistaking my
red-backed sketch-book for a Baedeker, he said, in an apologetic tone:

"Pardon me--I've left mine at home--but will you be good enough to
tell me what Mr. Ruskin says about that picture?"

* * * * *

That I have personally refused to follow either Mr. Ruskin or the
example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle--I am now referring
entirely to their technic--is due to my having painted all my life
out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close
range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as
important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective,
and that the _staining of paper with washes of transparent color does
not and cannot give them_.

Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping light--a glint of the
sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of
a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky--ever be
achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of
paper--the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light.

Nor will a single dab of Chinese white produce the effect of it,
should it be the _only_ dab of opaque white in the composition. The
result in this case is still worse, for if transparent color has any
value when uniformly distributed it is in the expression of air and
perspective. The dab, then, is instantly out of plane, as it comes
nearer to the eye than the transparent wash about it, and the illusion
of distance is accordingly lost.

But another and quite a different thing occurs when the opaque color
_forms part_ of the whole, the two systems blending each with the
other. To illustrate, my own experience has taught me that in nature
whatever the sun shines _upon_ is opaque. The facade of a cathedral,
for instance, facing a sky where the rays of the sun strike it full is
opaque, while the angles of the architecture, casting shadows large
and small into