facility and clearness; but
while we do so we can see nothing in the foreground beyond a vague and
indistinct arrangement of lines and colors; and that if, on the
contrary, we look at any foreground object, so as to receive a distinct
impression of it, the distance and middle distance become all disorder
and mystery.

Sec. 4. In painting, therefore, either the foreground or distance must be
partially sacrificed.

And therefore, if in a painting our foreground is anything, our distance
must be nothing, and _vice versa_; for if we represent our near and
distant objects as giving both at once that distinct image to the eye,
which we receive in nature from each, when we look at them
separately;[24] and if we distinguish them from each other only by the
air-tone; and indistinctness dependent on positive distance, we violate
one of the most essential principles of nature; we represent that as
seen at once which can only be seen by two separate acts of seeing, and
tell a falsehood as gross as if we had represented four sides of a cubic
object visible together.

Sec. 5. Which not being done by the old masters, they could not express
space.

Sec. 6. But modern artists have succeeded in fully carrying out this
principle.

Sec. 7. Especially of Turner.

Now, to this fact and principle, no landscape painter of the old school,
as far as I remember, ever paid the slightest attention. Finishing their
foregrounds clearly and sharply, and with vigorous impression on the
eye, giving even the leaves of their bushes and grass with perfect edge
and shape, they proceeded into the distance with equal attention to what
they could see of its details--they gave all that the eye can perceive
in a distance, when it is fully and entirely devoted to it, and
therefore, though masters of aerial tone, though employing every
expedient that art could supply to conceal the intersection of lines,
though caricaturing the force and shadow of near objects to throw them
close upon the eye, they _never_ succeeded in truly representing space.
Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the
foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to
express immediate proximity to the spectator, without giving anything
like completeness to the forms of the near objects. This is not done by
slurred or soft lines, observe, (always the sign of vice in art,) but by
a decisive imperfection, a firm, but parti