Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So
that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for a
quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise,
or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral,
rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates.
When Mr. Tomkins--a person of Dickens's earliest invention--calls his
fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotion
shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouring
chimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the
humourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that the
chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than a
whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated
light of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers,
and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration
anything other than a sign of derogation--in a word, a pleasure in the
secondary thing.

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It is
a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is a
modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insolent in its
greater. And its chief ignobility is the love of marred, defiled,
disordered, dulled, and imperfect skies, the skies of cities.

Some will tell us that the unveiled light is too clear or sharp for art.
So much the worse for art; but even on that plea the limitations of art
are better respected by natural mist, cloudy gloom of natural rain,
natural twilight before night, or natural twilight--Corot's--before day,
than by the artificial dimness of our unlovely towns. Those, too, who
praise the "mystery" of smoke are praising rather a mystification than a