picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
importance in a picture that it is in anything else,--no more. It is
well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
preaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was everything,
and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the courses
are indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.

222. It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork themselves,
but in execution also; and here I have a word to say to the
Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are working too hard. There is evidence
in failing portions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so
long upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that
the hand refused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there
are certain qualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness.
For, let them be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common
desire of men to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or
"bold," or "broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost
every other in this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever
mischief may have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this
facility of execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all
right if only it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the
truth remains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shall
torment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointed that
the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease and
decision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much of
sculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finely
finished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far more
vulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid to
the workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by all
men, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only be
represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there
are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and
in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but
by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what
example is taken; be it the most subtle and careful work of Le