grey brown
leaves; things of the summer which winter is burying to make room for
spring. Along the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars
are grey against the pale, palest blue sky; grey but with a warmth of
delicate brown, almost of rosiness. Grey also the shingle in the river
bed; the river itself either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with
pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous
throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic
sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it
into a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the impression
that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead.
And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked
only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish grey
spectre of the furthest poplar clumps.

This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces, nay, even a
southern winter, with those comparatively few and slight elements at its
disposal. We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness; but
while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that the habit of
noticing, nay, the power of perceiving such effects as this, is one of
those habits and powers which we possess, so to speak, only since
yesterday. The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like this
one; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce them, is scarcely as old
as our own century; it is, perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic
wishes and possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect
being perceived and reproduced by the painter, usually precedes--at
least where any kind of pictorial art already exists--the perception of
such effects by those who are not painters, and the attempt to reproduce
them by means of words. We do not care to admit that our grandfathers
were too unlike ourselves, lest ourselves should be found too unlike our
grandchildren. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man having always
been the same, and only his circumstances having changed; not admitting
that the very change of circumstances implies something new in the man
who altered them; and similarly we shrink from the thought of the many
things which we used never to notice, and which it has required a class
of men endowed with special powers of vision to find out, copy, and
teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there is scarcely one of us who has
not a debt towards s