Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal sketch, covering and containing all a man can see—and he should neither record nor explain anything more—is not completely finished in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two years.
The George and Vulture Inn, London
For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament. It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual—his buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these are shown in the way he strikes his canvas—compelling it to talk back to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done, forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.
Courage, too, is a component part—not to be afraid to strike hard and fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent, beating nature into shape.
As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the repoussé around a goblet.
Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours—three at the outside—the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark. It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next supplementary light and dark.
Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you have done by repetition or finish. Let it alone. You may not have covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert, Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great, cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.
Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable, not its point.