but a purple cap-string floating on a blue bosom,
or— my dear madam, what is that dark shade I
see just below your chin? It contrasts a little
awkwardly with the brilliants below and the
point-lace above; and do you not think it would
be as well to employ the chemistry of Brown
Windsor, and the dynamics of a Baden towel, to
try and remove its unpleasant suggestions?
That is a form of protruding elbowism not
infrequently seen with certain people not to the
manner of close seams and perfect material
born— is, indeed, rather an emblem and ensign
of the small beginnings which never thought it
worth while to learn the fit assignment of great
endings.

Such people as these have good horses badly
groomed, and a showy carriage with scratched
paint and a lining not impeccable; they have
large gardens growing a plentiful supply of
weeds; grand greenhouses and a lack of fruit;
many servants and scant service; and more cry
than wool on every occasion; they have drawing-
rooms crowded with furniture huddled about
as if dancing reels and jigs with the figure gone
astray; their ornaments of price are usually
fractured in some of their members, not even
riveted; chipped, not even cemented; they have
fine jewellery which they wear at small tea-
parties over dowdy dresses; they have wealth
and luxury and even beauty on the roll-call of
their possessions, and yet their whole surroundings
have that indescribable air of disorder and
unfitness which is the very soul of out-at-
elbowism, copper-plated or gold refined. Dirt,
confusion, disorder, are all so many elbows,
which the evil genii ever warring with the
better spirits that else would govern the world
of man, square defiantly before one's face. They
belong to no rank and are the inheritance of
no condition; being to be found sprawling
akimbo on the kitchen dresser and delicately
poised on the imperial throne alike, with pit-
holes convenient dug into the tables of every
degree intermediate.

There is the out-at-elbow look of the shut-up
house where everything seems afraid of the
daylight; and the out-at-elbow look of the
breezy house— the house which always has all its
doors and windows open, with never a chimney-
corner from garret to basement, Avhose inhabitants
are amphibious and catarrh-proof, and
where a headache is a misdemeanour, and
chilliness but a shade lighter than immorality. A
charming place to stay at, but as little Home
to the four-walls and close-window-loving
Englishman as a tent on a mountain-top, or one's
mattress spread in an Eastern khan; perhaps
as healthy and as free as both, or either, but
not a whit cozier— a perforated life, with
ventilating holes bored in every hat crown and
rents at every elbow point— free and easy and
healthful and breezy, and all that, but wanting
knitting up, and stitching together, and putting
into shape; wanting, in fact, its elbows covered
up in duffel and a comforter about its neck.

Then there is the out-at-elbow look of the
untidy middle-class house, where domestic refinement
is an exotic not grown, and with no seedbed.
This is the house where the ladies are for
ever found in a state of unpreparedness and
disorder; the drawing-room littered with stockings
to mend and flannel petticoats to make;
the hearth unswept; the luncheon crumbs upon
the floor; and my lady and her daughters muffled
up in old shawls and comfortable but unlovely
jackets, generally with colds in their heads
(untidy people are often afflicted with catarrh), and
always dreadfully busy, and dreadfully ashamed.

As a race, artists are of the out-at-elbow class:
for the most part jagged and unordered,
disconnected and in fragments; as if life was a series
of patchwork, no matter whether held together or
no, so long as each part is complete in itself.
What does it signify if but the hexagon is true
whether it is stitched into a counterpane, good
against the cold on winter nights, or left loose
in a box of odds and ends? The beauty of a
part, not the fitness of the whole, is what most
artists crave; and if a bit of scarlet is wanted
in the right-hand corner— why, paint that
protruding elbow scarlet, and let the dull critics
abuse you if they will for unfitness and misuse.
What matters? you have your bit of scarlet in
the right-hand corner, and your soul rests and
is satisfied.

Authors are sad sinners in this direction: that
is, as a class; for there are illustrious exceptions.
There are offices of literature where order is
kept; and officers of literature who are as
punctual and rational as other men of business;
men who can keep their books and attend to their
accounts— places where proofs issue clean and
to their time, where things are put straight
when they go awry, and where dust, crooked
lines, and topsiturviness generally, would be
official misdemeanours met with a severity not
to be lightly encountered. I know such an
office as this of my own experience: and a
pleasant office it is too, for business and other
matters. I also know an artist's studio— the
Italianised word is dying out, and study is
taking its place— which does not smell of stale
cigars, where the painter looks like a Christian
and not like a wild man of the woods lately dressed
in Holywell-street, and where Clytie and the
Milo Venus are in their natural colours and not
grimed an inch thick with dust; and, by-the-by,
why should artists' casts always be so grimed?
Is there an artistic value in the deepened
shadow, and more pronounced lines, which is of
ever so much greater worth than the snobbish
good of cleanliness and Mary's duster?

An artist's life is a strange out-at-elbowy kind
of existence altogether. The ideal artist of a
certain school knows nothing either of the two
and two, or of the final disappearance of the
eaten cake. He has been slow to learn the worth
of common sense indeed in most things; slow to
learn the value of well-clothed elbows slower
than any other class, undoubtedly; but he is
rationalising now, darning up his rents, and
stitching together his seams, and putting in both
patches and padding, as is needful to a working
world; specially against the knees and elbows.