THE THIRST OF SALTED WATER 639 



may be of more service in instructing us how to proceed than 

 any text-book : the counsel he gives may well be considered : 



There is hardly a roadside pond or pool which has not 

 as much landscape in it as above it. It is not the brown, muddy, 

 dull thing we suppose it to be ; it has a heart like ourselves and 

 in the bottom of that there are the boughs of the tall trees and 

 the blades of the shaking grass and all manner of hues of 

 variable, pleasant light out of the sky ; nay, the ugly gutter that 

 stagnates over the drain bars, in the heart of the foul city, is not 

 altogether base ; down in that, if you will look deep enough, you 

 may see the dark, serious blue of far-off sky and the passing of 

 pure clouds. It is at your will that you see in that despised 

 stream either the refuse of the street or the image of the sky— so 

 it is with almost all other things that we unkindly despise. 

 Now this far-seeing is just the difference between the great and 

 the vulgar painter ; the common man knows the roadside pool 

 is muddy and draws its mud ; the great painter sees beneath 

 and behind the brown surface what will take him a day's work 

 to follow but he follows it, cost what it will. And if painters 

 would only go out to the nearest common and take the nearest 

 dirty pool among the furze and draw that thoroughly, not 

 considering that it is water that they are drawing and that 

 water must be done in a certain way but drawing determinedly 

 what they see, that is to say, all the trees and their shaking 

 leaves and all the hazy passages of disturbing sunshine ; and 

 the bottom seen in the clearer little bits at the edge and the 

 stones of it and all the sky and the clouds far down in the 

 middle, drawn as completely and more delicately they must be 

 than the real clouds above, they would come home with such 

 a notion of water-painting as might save me and every one else 

 all trouble of writing more about the matter ; but now they do 

 nothing of the kind but take the ugly, round, yellow surface for 

 granted or else improve it and, instead of giving that refined, 

 complex, delicate but saddened and gloomy reflection in the 

 polluted water, they clear it up with coarse flashes of yellow and 

 green and blue and spoil their own eyes and hurt ours, and the 

 uninterrupted streams and maligned sea hiss shame upon us 

 from all their rocky beds and hollow shores. 



Have not we chemists done little more thus far than spoil 

 our own eyes and shut those of others for all appreciation of 

 water — have we not made it of little account by representing 

 it by the thin and unattractive symbol H 2 0— still more by 

 speaking of it with heartless vulgarity in these latter degenerate 

 days as Aitch-too-ohl Surely "the uninterrupted streams and 

 the maligned sea hiss shame " upon our science, deriding our 



