becomes all in all. I leave the reader to
follow out the analogies of this.

Sec. 10. "Well, but," it is still objected, "if this be so, why is it
necessary to insist, as you do always, upon the most minute and careful
renderings of form?"

Because, though these gradations of light are indeed, as an object dies
in distance, the only things it can retain, yet as it lives its active
life near us, those very gradations can only be seen properly by the
effect they have on its character. You can only show how the light
affects the object, by knowing thoroughly what the object is; and noble
mystery differs from ignoble, in being a veil thrown between us and
something definite, known, and substantial; but the ignoble mystery is a
veil cast before chaos, the studious concealment of Nothing.

Sec. 11. There is even a way in which the very definiteness of Turner's
knowledge adds to the mystery of his pictures. In the course of the
first volume I had several times occasion to insist on the singular
importance of cast shadows, and the chances of their sometimes gaining
supremacy in visibility over even the things that cast them. Now a cast
shadow is a much more curious thing than we usually suppose. The strange
shapes it gets into--the manner in which it stumbles over everything
that comes in its way, and frets itself into all manner of fantastic
schism, taking neither the shape of the thing that casts it, nor of that
it is cast upon, but an extraordinary, stretched, flattened, fractured,
ill-jointed anatomy of its own--cannot be imagined until one is actually
engaged in shadow-hunting. If any of these wayward umbrae are faithfully
remembered and set down by the painter, they nearly always have an
unaccountable look, quite different from anything one would have
invented or philosophically conjectured for a shadow; and it constantly
happens, in Turner's distances, that such strange pieces of broken
shade, accurately remembered, or accurately invented, as the case may
be, cause a condition of unintelligibility, quaint and embarrassing
almost in exact proportion to the amount of truth it contains.

Sec. 12. I believe the reader must now sufficiently perceive that the right
of being obscure is not one to be lightly claimed; it can only be
founded on long effort to be intelligible, and on the present power of
_being_ intelligible to the exact degree which the nature of the thing
admits. Nor shall we, I hope, any more have difficulty