PRE-RAPHAELITISM 387

was above asserted,¹-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.² 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 anything 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

¹ [See p. 344.]

² [The subject had, however, been glanced at in Modern Painters, volumes i. and ii. (see, e.g., Vol. III. p. 334, Vol. IV. p. 231), and in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. pp. 215-216 n.). Ruskin afterwards dealt with it more fully in The Elements of Drawing, Letter iii., and Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. viii. ch. i.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]