ance on
all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking
of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling
to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently
you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching,
as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work
(after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied.
For final result--if you are as great as Rembrandt--you will have most
likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the
first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have
a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,--instead of a face,
a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every
texture and form--ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and
manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful,
ignoble success.

Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of
etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way
to picturesqueness or to deformity--never to beauty. You can etch an old
woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl--nor,
unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a
gentleman.

82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their
choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on
unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind
is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of
men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and
vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get
his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the
by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices.
Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his
work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Duereresque manner. But
suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power--what are the
elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is
confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets,
but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is
in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible
picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base
concomitants. Huge walls