lateable Savoyard word, for a place
down which stones and water fall in storms; it is perhaps deserving
of naturalization.

[10] I have just said, Sec. 12, that if, _quitting hold_ of this
original impression, the artist tries to compose something prettier
than he saw, it is all over with him; but, retaining the first
impression, he will, nevertheless, if he has invention,
instinctively modify many lines and parts of it--possibly all parts
of it--for the better; sometimes making them individually more
pictorial, sometimes preventing them from interfering with each
other's beauty. For almost all natural landscapes are redundant
treasures of more or less confused beauty, out of which the human
instinct of invention can by just choice arrange, not a better
treasure, but one more fitted to human sight and emotion, infinitely
narrower, infinitely less lovely in detail, but having this great
virtue, that there shall be absolutely nothing which does not
contribute to the effect of the whole; whereas in the natural
landscape there is a redundancy which impresses only as redundance,
and often an occurrence of marring features; not of ugliness only,
but of ugliness _in the wrong place_. Ugliness has its proper virtue
and use; but ugliness occurring at the wrong time (as if the negro
servant, instead of standing behind the king, in Tintoret's picture,
were to thrust his head in front of the noble features of his
master) is justly to be disliked and withdrawn.

"Why, this," exclaims the idealist, "is what _I_ have always been
saying, and _you_ have always been denying." No; I never denied
this. But I denied that painters in general, when they spoke of
improving Nature, knew what Nature was. Observe: before they dare as
much as to _dream_ of arranging her, they must be able to paint her
as she is; nor will the most skilful arrangement ever atone for the
slightest wilful failure in truth of representation; and I am
continually declaiming against arrangement, not because arrangement
is wrong, but because our present painters have for the most part
nothing to arrange. They cannot so much as paint a weed or a post
accurately; and yet they pretend to improve the forests and
mountains.

[11] For instance, even in my topographical etching, Plate 20, I
have given only a few lines of the thousands