e same difficult conditions. Try it fairly.
Take the commonest, closest, most familiar thing, and strive to draw it
verily as you see it. Be sure of this last fact, for otherwise you will
find yourself continually drawing, not what you _see_, but what you
_know_. The best practice to begin with is, sitting about three yards,
from a bookcase (not your own, so that you may _know_ none of the titles
of the books), to try to draw the books accurately, with the titles on
the backs, and patterns on the bindings, as you see them. You are not to
stir from your place to look what they are, but to draw them simply as
they appear, giving the perfect look of neat lettering; which,
nevertheless, must be (as you find it on most of the books) absolutely
illegible. Next try to draw a piece of patterned muslin or lace (of
which you do not know the pattern), a little way off, and rather in the
shade; and be sure you get all the grace and _look_ of the pattern
without going a step nearer to see what it is. Then try to draw a bank
of grass, with all its blades; or a bush, with all its leaves; and you
will soon begin to understand under what a universal law of obscurity we
live, and perceive that all _distinct_ drawing must be _bad_ drawing,
and that nothing can be right, till it is unintelligible.

Sec. 8. "How! and Pre-Raphaelitism and Durerism, and all that you have been
talking to us about for these five hundred pages!"

Well, it is all right; Pre-Raphaelitism is quite as unintelligible as
need be (I will answer for Durerism farther on). Examine your
Pre-Raphaelite painting well, and you will find it is the precise
fulfilment of these laws. You can make out your plantain head and your
pine, and see entirely what they are; but yet they are full of mystery,
and suggest more than you can see. So also with Turner, the true head of
Pre-Raphaelitism. You shall see the spots of the trout lying dead on the
rock in his foreground, but not count them. It is only the Germans and
the so-called masters of drawing and defining that are wrong, not the
Pre-Raphaelites.[28]

Not, that is to say, so far as it is _possible_ to be right. No human
skill can get the absolute truth in this matter; but a drawing by Turner
of a large scene, and by Holman Hunt of a small one, are as close to
truth as human eyes and hands can reach.

Sec. 9. "Well, but how of Veronese and all the firm, fearless draughtsmen
of days gone by?"

They are indeed firm and fearless