For this reason _plein-air_ painting has very few adepts, and the atmospheric influences which blunt the lines of objects, efface colours, and bring them nearer to each other, meet with little consideration. Things are given all the sharpness of their outlines, and the harmony, which in the French follows naturally from the observation of light and air saturating form and colour, is the more artificially attained by everything being brought into concord in a bright and delicate tone, which is almost too fine. The audacities of Impressionism are excluded, because painting which starts from a masterly seizure of total effect would seem too sketchy to English taste, which has been formed by Ruskin. Painting must be highly finished and highly elaborated; that is a _conditio sine qua non_ which English taste refuses to renounce in oil-painting as little as in water-colour, and in England they are more closely related than elsewhere, and have mutually influenced each other in the matter of technique. In fact, English water-colours seek to rival oil-painting in force and precision, and have therefore forfeited the charm of improvisation, the _verve_ of the first sketch, and the freshness and ease which they should have by their very character. Through a curious change of parts oil-painting has a fancy for borrowing from water-colours their effects and their processes. English pictures have no longer anything heavy or oily, but they likewise show nothing of the manipulation of the brush, rather resembling large water-colours, perhaps even pastels or wax-painting. The colours are chosen with reserve, and everything is subdued and softened like the quiet step of the footman in the mansion of a nobleman. The special quality in all English pictures--putting aside a preference for bright yellow and vivid red in the older period--consists in a bluish or greenish luminous general tone, to which every English painter seems to conform as though it were a binding social convention, and it even recurs in English landscapes. In fact, English painting differs from French as England from France.