ADDRESSES ON DECORATIVE COLOUR 487

II. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF OUTLINE

[Delivered Saturday, November 25th, 1854]

14. THE subject of this lecture was the general principle of outline; and the points which it was the purpose of Mr. Ruskin to illustrate, as stated in the syllabus, were-”Wherein dignity of outline consists; probability that many persons are possessed of outline talent who are incapable of drawing in the full sense of the term; and natural objects, how to be studied with a view to skill in illumination.”

He commenced by observing that, as it was probable there were many persons present who had not attended the previous lecture, it would be necessary for him to repeat what he had then said-viz., that he had come there to tell working people plain things in a plain way, and that he must be pardoned, therefore, if his so-called lecture-which, however, was not really a lecture, but a talk-was less entertaining than it would perhaps otherwise be. The business of that morning would be to ascertain, as far as possible, the real nature and merits of outline. First, however, it was necessary to agree upon the important point of what that which was generally called outline really was. The first thing they knew about it was, that it was something that did not exist in nature. There was no such thing as outline in nature, and for this simple reason, that every object, whether placed near to or at a distance from the eye, had something which could not be clearly appreciated or described. On looking at a leafy tree, at first sight you would think you saw its form clearly and sharply defined against the sky; but try and count the leaves, and you found that what appeared to be an outline was but a mere mist of dots, expressible by no lines or series of lines you could lay down. Go farther still, and examine a forest of trees, and you would find that if the single tree had no outline, still less had the aggregate of trees, of which the forest was composed, anything like outline. The grey mountain ridge appeared at first sight to form a distinct line against the background of the sky: examine it more closely, and the apparent outline resolves itself into the verdure of countless blades of grass and mosses, which no pen can trace, no line describe. The vast forest had no outline, nor had the leaves which grew on its lordly trees, nor the cattle which were sheltered beneath their shade. There were blades of grass, leaves, hairs, and fibres in infinite number, but nothing that could be accurately expressed by a line; and it was the same with everything in nature that had any organic structure-there was something which the eye recognised, but nothing that it could accurately define or the hand trace; nothing that could be expressed by human skill or human art. When a man, by the exercise of great ingenuity, succeeded in making an ugly thing like the specimen in his hand (showing the frame of a drawing), even that was not an outline-it was like a line traced against a background; but if they attempted to describe any objects in nature by means of a black line, they put down something that there was not.

15. What, then, was an outline? It was not a fact-it was simply the

[Version 0.04: March 2008]