, because your feelings can detect no discrepancy in its
parts, but which he knows to derive its apparent truth from a
systematized falsehood. No; he will make you understand and feel that
art _cannot_ imitate nature--that where it appears to do so, it must
malign her, and mock her. He will give you, or state to you, such truths
as are in his power, completely and perfectly; and those which he cannot
give, he will leave to your imagination. If you are acquainted with
nature, you will know all he has given to be true, and you will supply
from your memory and from your heart that light which he cannot give. If
you are unacquainted with nature, seek elsewhere for whatever may happen
to satisfy your feelings; but do not ask for the truth which you would
not acknowledge and could not enjoy.

Sec. 11. This discrepancy less in Turner than in other colorists.

Sec. 12. Its great extent in a landscape attributed to Rubens.

Nevertheless the aim and struggle of the artist must always be to do
away with this discrepancy as far as the powers of art admit, not by
lowering his color, but by increasing his light. And it is indeed by
this that the works of Turner are peculiarly distinguished from those of
all other colorists, by the dazzling intensity, namely, of the light
which he sheds through every hue, and which, far more than their
brilliant color, is the real source of their overpowering effect upon
the eye, an effect so _reasonably_ made the subject of perpetual
animadversion, as if the sun which they represent were quite a quiet,
and subdued, and gentle, and manageable luminary, and never dazzled
anybody, under any circumstances whatsoever. I am fond of standing by a
bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments
of the crowd--"What a glaring thing!" "I declare I can't look at it!"
"Don't it hurt your eyes?"--expressed as if they were in the constant
habit of looking the sun full in the face, with the most perfect comfort
and entire facility of vision. It is curious after hearing people malign
some of Turner's noble passages of light, to pass to some really
ungrammatical and false picture of the old masters, in which we have
color given _without_ light. Take, for instance, the landscape
attributed to Rubens, No. 175, in the Dulwich Gallery. I never have
spoken, and I never will speak of Rubens but with the most reverential
feeling; and whatever imperfections in his art may have resulted from
his un