icately,
with little ink in your pen, thickening or reinforcing them as they
need: you cannot give too much care to the facsimile. Then keep this
etched outline by you, in order to study at your ease the way in which
Turner uses his line as preparatory for the subsequent shadow;[223] it
is only in getting the two separate that you will be able to reason on
this. Next, copy once more, though for the fourth time, any part of this
etching which you like, and put on the light and shade with the brush,
and any brown colour that matches that of the plate;[224] working it
with the point of the brush as delicately as if you were drawing with
pencil, and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the
paper, till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving. In this
exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked to close
resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject carelessly
done. Not that in drawing afterwards from nature, you are to be obliged
to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having fully
accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will thenceforward
feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could otherwise have
conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out quickly and
clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which it would have
wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work. Nothing is more
strange in art than the way that chance and materials seem to favour
you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make yourself quite
independent of chance, get your result in spite of it, and from that day
forward all things will somehow fall as you would have them. Show the
camel's-hair, and the colour in it, that no bending nor blotting are of
any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade _shall_
finally be right, if it cost you a year's toil; and from that hour of
corrective conviction, said camel's-hair will bend itself to all your
wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border. If you
cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a photograph[225]
of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a village, or
picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water of varied
character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy any part
of it you like, in this same brown colour, working, as I have just
directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of the
brush.