The light wind that has been moving all night is seen to
have not worked at random. It has shepherded some small flocks of cloud
afield and folded others. There's husbandry in Heaven. And the order
has, or seems to have, the sun for its midst. Not a line, not a curve,
but confesses its membership in a design declared from horizon to
horizon.
To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to look
for in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism that is unity
and life. It is the unity and life of painting. The Early Victorian
picture--(the school is still in full career, but essentially it belongs
to that triumphal period)--is but a dull sum of things put together, in
concourse, not in relation; but the true picture is _one_, however
multitudinous it may be, for it is composed of relations gathered
together in the unity of perception, of intention, and of light. It is
organic. Moreover, how truly relation is the condition of life may be
understood from the extinct state of the English stage, which resembles
nothing so much as a Royal Academy picture. Even though the actors may
be added together with something like vivacity (though that is rare),
they have no vitality in common. They are not members one of another.
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