From the Elgin marbles, down to the lightest tendril that curls round a capital in the thirteenth century, every piece of stone that has been touched by the hand of a master, becomes soft with under-life, not resembling nature merely in skin-texture, nor in fibres of leaf, or veins of flesh; but in the broad, tender, unspeakably subtle undulation of its organic form.-L. A., VI., § 166.

37. THE NECESSITY OF INVENTION IN ART. -If you throw at random over a rod a piece of drapery of any material which will fall into graceful folds, you will get a series of sinuous folds in catenary curves; and any given disposition of these will be nearly as agreeable as any other; though, if you throw the stuff on the rod a thousand times, it will not fall twice alike.

But suppose, instead of a straight rod, you take a beautiful nude statue, and throw the piece of linen over that. You may encumber and conceal its form altogether; you may entirely conceal portions of the limbs, and show others; or you may leave indications, under the thin veil, of the contours which are hidden; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you will wish the drapery taken off again; you will feel that the folds are in some sort discrepant and harmful, and eagerly snatch them away. However passive the material, however softly accommodated to the limbs, the wrinklings will always look foreign to the form,

like the drip of a heavy shower of rain falling off it, and will load themselves in the hollows uncomfortably. You will have to pull them about; to stretch them one way, loosen them in another, and supply the quantity of government which a living person would have given to the dress, before it becomes at all pleasing to you.

Doing your best, you will still not succeed to your mind, provided you have, indeed, a mind worth pleasing. No adjustment that you can make, on the quiet figure, will give any approximation to the look of drapery which has previously accommodated itself to the action which brought the figure into the position in which it stays. On a really living person, gracefully dressed, and who has paused from graceful motion, you will get, again and again, arrangements of fold which you can admire: but they will not remain to be copied, the first following movement alters all. If you had your photographic plate ready and could photograph-I don't know if it has been tried-girls, like waves, as they move, you would get what was indeed lovely; and yet, when you compared even such results with fine sculpture, you would see that there was something wanting; -that, in the deepest sense, all was yet wanting. Yet this is the most that the plurality of artists can do, or think of doing. They draw the nude. figure with careful anatomy; they put their model or their lay figure into the required position; they

arrange draperies on it to their mind, and paint them from the reality. All such work is absolutely valueless,-worse than valueless in the end of it, blinding us to the qualities of fine work. . . .

What is true respecting these simple forms of drapery is true of all other inorganic form. It must become organic under the artist's hand by his invention. As there must not be a fold in a vestment too few or too many, there must not, in noble landscape, be a fold in a mountain, too few or too many. As you will never get from real linen cloth, by copying it ever so faithfully, the drapery of a noble statue, so you will never get from real mountains, copy them never so faithfully, the forms of noble landscape. Anything more beautiful than the photographs of the Valley of Chamouni, now in your print-sellers' windows, cannot be conceived. For geographical and geological purposes they are worth anything; for art purposes, worth-a good deal less than zero. You may learn much from them, and will mislearn more. But in Turner's "Valley of Chamouni" the mountains have not a fold too much, nor too little. There are no such mountains at Chamouni: they are the ghosts of eternal mountains, such as have been, and shall be, for evermore.-E. N., VII., § 141-147.

38. ART AND ANATOMY.-It may be disputable whether in order to draw a living Madonna,

one needs to know how many ribs she has; but it would have seemed indisputable that in order to draw a skeleton, one must know how many ribs it has.

Holbein is par excellence the draughtsman of skeletons. His painted Dance of Death was, and his engraved Dance of Death is, principal of such things, without any comparison or denial. He draws skeleton after skeleton, in every possible gesture; but never so much as counts their ribs! He neither knows nor cares how many ribs a skeleton has. There are always enough to rattle.

Monstrous, you think, in impudence,-Holbein for his carelessness, and I for defending him! Nay, I triumph in him; nothing has ever more pleased me than this grand negligence. Nobody wants to know how many ribs a skeleton has, any more than how many bars a gridiron has, so long as the one can breathe, and the other broil; and still less, when the breath and the fire are both out.

But is it only of the bones, think you, that Holbein is careless? Nay, incredible though it may seem to you,-but, to me, explanatory at once of much of his excellence,-he did not know anatomy at all! I told you Holbein studies the face first, the body secondarily; but I had no idea, myself, how completely he had refused the venomous science of his day. I showed you a

dead Christ of his, long ago.

Can you match it

with your academy drawings, think you? And yet he did not, and would not, know anatomy. He would not; but Dürer would, and did :-went hotly into it-wrote books upon it, and upon "proportions of the human body," etc., etc., and all your modern recipes for painting flesh. How did his studies prosper his art?

People are always talking of his Knight and Death, and his Melancholia, as if those were his principal works. They are his characteristic ones, and show what he might have been without his anatomy; but they were mere byeplay compared to his Greater Fortune, and Adam and Eve. Look at these. Here is his full energy displayed; here are both male and female forms drawn with perfect knowledge of their bones and muscles, and modes of action and digestion, and I hope you are pleased.

But it is not anatomy only that Master Albert studies. He has a taste for optics also; and knows all about refraction and reflection. What with his knowledge of the skull inside, and the vitreous lens outside, if any man in the world is to draw an eye, here's the man to do it, surely! With a hand which can give lessons to John Bellini, and a care which would fain do all so that it can't be done better, and acquaintance with every crack in the cranium, and every humour in the lens,-if we can't draw an eye,