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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: fancies that drawing does not exist, and that lines can render nothing
but geometric figures. That, of course, is not true; because with a
black line which has no color we can represent the human form. This
proves that our art is made up, like nature, of an infinite number of
elements. Drawing gives the skeleton, and color gives the life; but
life without the skeleton is a far more incomplete thing than the
skeleton without the life. But there is a higher truth still,--namely,
that practice and observation are the essentials of a painter; and
that if reason and poesy persist in wrangling with the tools, the
brushes, we shall be brought to doubt, like Frenhofer, who is as much
excited in brain as he is exalted in art. A sublime painter, indeed;
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