the business, which are by no means confined
to _first_ practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this letter
is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting of
correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only to
excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable from
directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me, even
though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work.

Very faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[199] (N. B. This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous or
curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are willing
to take the statement in the text on trust.)

The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We
_see_ nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of
experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the
dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the
object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of
painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the _innocence of
the eye_; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat
stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they
signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.

For instance; when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain
directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat
dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly
endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the
sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a
dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if there
were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was
another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should try
to gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from the
grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses;
and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was
really the cause of the colour in the one,--not in the other. We go
through such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; and
having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain
colours, we always suppose that we _see_ what we only know, and have
hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned
to interpret. Very few