ture to be really a
fine work of color.

But if you will come up close to it, you will find that the herdsman has
brown sleeves, though he has a scarlet jacket; and that the shadows of
both are painted with precisely the same brown, and in several places
with continuous touches of the pencil. It is only in the light that the
scarlet is laid on.

This at once marks the picture as belonging to the lower or
chiaroscurist school, even if you had not before recognized it as such
by its pretty rendering of sunset effect.

24. You might at first think it a painting which showed greater skill
than that of the school of Giotto. But the skill is not the primary
question. The power of imagination is the first thing to be asked about.
This Italian work imagines, and requires you to imagine also, a St.
Elizabeth and St. Mary, to the best of your power. But this Dutch one
only wishes you to imagine an effect of sunlight on cow-skin, which is a
far lower strain of the imaginative faculty.

Also, as you may see the effect of sunlight on cow-skin, in reality, any
summer afternoon, but cannot so frequently see a St. Elizabeth, it is a
far less useful strain of the imaginative faculty.

And, generally speaking, the Dutch chiaroscurists are indeed persons
without imagination at all,--who, not being able to get any pleasure out
of their thoughts, try to get it out of their sensations; note, however,
also their technical connection with the Greek school of shade, (see my
sixth inaugural lecture, Sec. 158,) in which color was refused, not for the
sake of deception, but of solemnity.

25. With these final motives you are not now concerned; your present
business is the quite easy one of knowing, and noticing, the universal
distinction between the methods of treatment in which the aim is light,
and in which it is color; and so to keep yourselves guarded from the
danger of being misled by the, often very ingenious, talk of persons who
have vivid color sensations without having learned to distinguish them
from what else pleases them in pictures. There is an interesting volume
by Professor Taine on the Dutch school, containing a valuable historical
analysis of the influences which formed it; but full of the gravest
errors, resulting from the confusion in his mind between color and tone,
in consequence of which he imagines the Dutch painters to be colorists.

26. It is so important for you to be grounded securely in these first
elements of p