us,--nay, I think it is commonly but a poor and miserable
truth which the human mind can walk all round, but at all events
they have one side by which we can lay hold of them, and feel that
they are downright adamant, and that their form, though lost in
cloud here and there, is unalterable and real, and not less real and
rocky because infinite, and joined on, St. Michael's mount-like to a
far mainland. So then, whatever the real imagination lays hold of,
as it is a truth, does not alter into anything else as the
imaginative part works at it and feels over it and finds out more of
it, but comes out more and more continually, all that is found out
pointing to and indicating still more behind, and giving additional
stability and reality to that which is discovered already. But if it
be fancy or any other form of pseudo-imagination which is at work,
then that which it gets hold of may not be a truth, but only an
idea, which will keep giving way as soon as we try to take hold of
it and turning into something else, so that as we go on copying it,
every part will be inconsistent with all that has gone before, and
at intervals it will vanish altogether, and leave blanks which must
be filled up by any means at hand. And in these circumstances, the
painter, unable to seize his thought, because it has not substance
nor bone enough to bear grasping, is liable to catch at every line
that he lays down, for help and suggestion, and to be led away by it
to something else, which the first effort to realize dissipates in
like manner, placing another phantom in its stead, until out of the
fragments of these successive phantoms he has glued together a
vague, mindless, involuntary whole, a mixture of all that was trite
or common in each of the successive conceptions, for that is
necessarily what is first caught a heap of things with the bloom off
and the chill on, laborious, unnatural, inane, with its emptiness
disguised by affectation, and its tastelessness salted by
extravagance.

Necessarily, from these modes of conception, three vices of
execution must result; and these are necessarily found in all those
parts of the work where any trust has been put in conception, and
only to be avoided in portions of actual portraiture (for a
thoroughly unimaginative painter can make no use of a study--all his