IV. CONCLUSION 219

and sweetness of the poem cannot save it, if the music be harsh or false: but if the music be right, the poem may be insipid or inharmonious, and still saved by the notes to which it is wedded. But this is far more true of colour. If that be wrong, all is wrong. No amount of expression or invention can redeem an ill-coloured picture; while, on the other hand, if the colour be right, there is nothing it will not raise or redeem; and, therefore, wherever colour enters at all, anything may be sacrificed to it, and, rather than it should be false or feeble, everything must be sacrificed to it: so that, when an artist touches colour, it is the same thing as when a poet takes up a musical instrument; he implies, in so doing, that he is a master, up to a certain point, of that instrument, and can produce sweet sound from it, and is able to fit the course and measure of his words to its tones, which, if he be not able to do, he had better not have touched it. In like manner, to add colour to a drawing is to undertake for the perfection of a visible music, which, if it be false, will utterly and assuredly mar the whole work; if true, proportionately elevate it, according to its power and sweetness. But, in no case ought the colour to be added in order to increase the realization. The drawing or engraving is all that the imagination needs. To “paint” the subject merely to make it more real, is only to insult the imaginative power, and to vulgarize the whole. Hence the common, though little understood feeling, among men of ordinary cultivation, that an inferior sketch is always better than a bad painting; although, in the latter, there may verily be more skill than in the former. For the painter who has presumed to touch colour without perfectly understanding it, not for the colour’s sake, nor because he loves it, but for the sake of completion merely, has committed two sins against us; he has dulled the imagination by not trusting it far enough, and then, in this languid state, he oppresses it with base and false colour; for all colour that is not lovely is discordant; there is no mediate condition. So, therefore, when it is permitted to enter at all, it must be

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