detail. It is
astounding to the riper mind how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how
tedious; and, of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how
good and powerful. And yet never plain nor clear. He could not consent
to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and
thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude of crying and
incongruous details. There is but one art--to omit! O if I knew how to
omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would
make an _Iliad_ of a daily paper.

Your definition of seeing is quite right. It is the first part of
omission to be partly blind. Artistic sight is judicious blindness. Sam
Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy. He would turn a corner, look
for one-half or quarter minute, and then say, "This'll do, lad." Down he
sat, there and then, with whole artistic plan, scheme of colour, and the
like, and begin by laying a foundation of powerful and seemingly
incongruous colour on the block. He saw, not the scene, but the
water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty should so behold nature.
Where does he learn that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to nature for
facts, relations, values--material; as a man, before writing a
historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs
that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the
practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when
disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of
realistic and _ex facto_ art. He learns it in the crystallisation of
day-dreams; in changing, not in copying, fact; in the pursuit of the
ideal, not in the study of nature. These temples of art are, as you say,
inaccessible to the realistic climber. It is not by looking at the sea
that you get

"The multitudinous seas incarnadine,"

nor by looking at Mont Blanc that you find

"And visited all night by troops of stars."

A kind of ardour of the blood is the mother of all this; and according
as this ardour is swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art
expression flows clear, and significance and charm, like a moon rising,
are born above the barren juggle of mere symbols.

The painter must study more from nature than the man of words. By why?
Because literature deals with men's business and passions which, in the
game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to study; but painting with
relations of light, and colour, and significance