142. But suppose, instead of a straight rod, you take a beautiful nude statue, and throw the piece of linen over that. You may encumber and conceal its form altogether; you may entirely conceal portions of the limbs, and show others; or you may leave indications, under the thin veil, of the contours which are hidden; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you will wish the drapery taken off again; you will feel that the folds are in some sort discrepant and harmful, and eagerly snatch them away. However passive the material, however softly accommodated to the limbs, the wrinklings will always look foreign to the form, like the drip of a heavy shower of rain falling off it, and will load themselves in the hollows uncomfortably. You will have to pull them about; to stretch them one way, loosen them in another, and supply the quantity of government which a living person would have given to the dress, before it becomes at all pleasing to you.
143. Doing your best, you will still not succeed to your mind, provided you have, indeed, a mind worth pleasing. No adjustment that you can make, on the quiet figure, will give any approximation to the look of drapery which has previously accommodated itself to the action which brought the figure into the position in which it stays. On a really living person, gracefully dressed, and who has paused from graceful motion, you will get, again and again, arrangements of fold which you can admire: but they will not remain to be copied, the first following movement alters all. If you had your photographic plate ready and could photograph--I don't know if it has been tried--girls, like waves, as they move, you would get what was indeed lovely; and yet, when you compared even such results with fine sculpture, you would see that there was something wanting;--that, in the deepest sense, _all_ was yet wanting.
144. Yet this is the most that the plurality of artists can do, or think of doing. They draw the nude figure with careful anatomy; they put their model or their lay figure into the required position; they arrange draperies on it to their mind, and paint them from the reality. All such work is absolutely valueless,--worse than valueless in the end of it, blinding us to the qualities of fine work.