y
precipitation. It is gained only by caution; and gained in all sorts of
ways: for not only truth of form, but force of light, is always added by
an intelligent and shapely laying of the shadow colours. You may often
make a simple flat tint, rightly gradated and edged, express a
complicated piece of subject without a single retouch. The two Swiss
cottages, for instance, with their balconies, and glittering windows,
and general character of shingly eaves, are expressed in Fig. 30., with
one tint of grey, and a few dispersed spots and lines of it; all of
which you ought to be able to lay on without more than thrice dipping
your brush, and without a single touch after the tint is dry.

[Illustration: FIG. 30.]

Here, then, for I cannot without coloured illustrations tell you more, I
must leave you to follow out the subject for yourself, with such help as
you may receive from the water-colour drawings accessible to you; or
from any of the little treatises on their art which have been published
lately by our water-colour painters.[244] But do not trust much to works
of this kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to mixture of
colours; and here and there you will find a useful artifice or process
explained; but nearly all such books are written only to help idle
amateurs to a meretricious skill, and they are full of precepts and
principles which may, for the most part, be interpreted by their
_precise_ negatives, and then acted upon, with advantage. Most of them
praise boldness, when the only safe attendant spirit of a beginner is
caution;--advise velocity, when the first condition of success is
deliberation;--and plead for generalisation, when all the foundations of
power must be laid in knowledge of specialty.

And now, in the last place, I have a few things to tell you respecting
that dangerous nobleness of consummate art,--COMPOSITION. For though it
is quite unnecessary for you yet awhile to attempt it, and it _may_ be
inexpedient for you to attempt it at all, you ought to know what it
means, and to look for and enjoy it in the art of others.

Composition means, literally and simply, putting several things
together, so as to make _one_ thing out of them; the nature and goodness
of which they all have a share in producing. Thus a musician composes an
air, by putting notes together in certain relations; a poet composes a
poem; by putting thoughts and words in pleasant order; and a painter a
picture, by putting t