THE FAERY YEAR 



hand in pigment. Lavender, cobalt, indigo, and 

 lapis lazuli on which a fastidious painter may spend 

 money lavishly to get the real natural product fine 

 ground and prepared for his brush here they are 

 in perfection and profusion. And there is some- 

 thing here which, however fine his pigment and 

 skill, must remain his despair the dead straight 

 line. 



That gloriously long horizon of the sea may not 

 be dead straight ; rather, curved slightly to the eye ; 

 but it is absolutely severe in the clear air, ruled out 

 deep and strict. The scarcely shorter line of the 

 low coast, however, seen a few miles off from the 

 water, is to the eye dead-straight, bitten-out. Yet, 

 because the hard straight line in art is a failure, some 

 believe that in Nature it is never seen. In truth, few 

 things are more familiar than the distant lines which 

 in Nature are ruled clear and straight to the eye. 

 Solent perspective is full of such effects, often of 

 arresting beauty. Not only are sky-lines and coast- 

 lines ruled straight, but often the stripes and shades 

 of the sea. For hours and days together there is 

 no softening away of the straight line. It is only 

 when the heat or rain mist creeps over the horizon 

 or the low coast that the keenness and strictness of 

 the line is whitened out. The characteristic colour 

 and form effects of the Solent are, no doubt, those 

 of refined delicacy. It is not ordinarily a masculine 

 sea. But when the blue of the May sky is wholly 

 blotted with formless sullen cloud, a kind of con- 

 fused cross between stratus and the snow-capt 

 no 



