n of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to the
smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in the
middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for the
effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke to
the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning after
breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, and
went out to shoot.

Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters,
and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that if a great
thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them not
torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that, and
repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can compose
at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite of
himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept in
most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
picture. The marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that
they do not see that what they call "principles of composition," are
mere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures
and buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a
dinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point,
and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object.
A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is
a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
instinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.
Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the same
importance in a picture that it is in any thing else,--no more. It is
well that a man should say what he has to say in good order and
sequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go on
preaching to our pupils as if to have a pr