Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/191

Rh hand can follow. Those of its colours he will find in many cases, though governed always by a certain rude symmetry, yet irregular, blotched, imperfect, liable to all kinds of accidents and awkwardnesses. Look at the tracery of the lines on a camp shell, and see how oddly and awkwardly its tents are pitched. It is not indeed always so: there is occasionally, as in the eye of the peacock's plume, an apparent precision, but still a precision far inferior to that of the drawing of the filaments which bear that lovely stain; and in the plurality of cases a degree of looseness and variation, and, still more singularly, of harshness and violence in arrangement, is admitted in colour which would be monstrous in form. Observe the difference in the precision of a fish's scales and of the spots on them.

XXXVIII. Now, why it should be that colour is best seen under these circumstances I will not here endeavour to determine; nor whether the lesson we are to learn from it be that it is God's will that all manner of delights should never be combined in one thing. But the fact is certain, that colour is always by Him arranged in these simple or rude forms, and as certain that, therefore, it must be best seen in them, and that we shall never mend by refining its arrangements. Experience teaches us the same thing. Infinite nonsense has been written about the union of perfect colour with perfect form. They never will, never can be united. Colour, to o be perfect, must have a soft outline or a simple one: it cannot have a refined one; and you win never produce a good painted window with good figure-drawing in it. You will lose perfection of colour as you give perfection of line. Try to put in order and form the colours of a piece of opal.

XXXIX. I conclude, then, that all arrangements of colour, for its own sake, in graceful forms, are barbarous; and that, to paint a colour pattern with the lovely lines of a Greek leaf moulding, is an utterly savage procedure. I cannot find anything in natural