individually being just as essential a truth, as its unity of
growth with its companions in the radiating group.

[Illustration: FIG. 24.]

It does not matter how small or apparently symmetrical the cluster may
be, nor how large or vague. You can hardly have a more formal one than
_b_ in Fig. 9. p. 276., nor a less formal one than this shoot of Spanish
chestnut, shedding its leaves, Fig. 24.; but in either of them, even the
general reader, unpractised in any of the previously recommended
exercises, must see that there are wandering lines mixed with the
radiating ones, and radiating lines with the wild ones: and if he takes
the pen and tries to copy either of these examples, he will find that
neither play of hand to left nor to right, neither a free touch nor a
firm touch, nor any learnable or describable touch whatsoever, will
enable him to produce, currently, a resemblance of it; but that he must
either draw it slowly, or give it up. And (which makes the matter worse
still) though gathering the bough, and putting it close to you, or
seeing a piece of near foliage against the sky, you may draw the entire
outline of the leaves, yet if the spray has light upon it, and is ever
so little a way off, you will miss, as we have seen, a point of a leaf
here, and an edge there; some of the surfaces will be confused by
glitter, and some spotted with shade; and if you look carefully through
this confusion for the edges or dark stems which you really _can see_,
and put only those down, the result will be neither like Fig. 9. nor
Fig. 24., but such an interrupted and puzzling piece of work as Fig.
25.[228]

Now, it is in the perfect acknowledgment and expression of these _three_
laws that all good drawing of landscape consists. There is, first, the
organic unity; the law, whether of radiation, or parallelism, or
concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees, of rocks,
and clouds, and waves; secondly, the individual liberty of the members
subjected to these laws of unity; and, lastly, the mystery under which
the separate character of each is more or less concealed.

I say, first, there must be observance of the ruling organic law. This
is the first distinction between good artists and bad artists. Your
common sketcher or bad painter puts his leaves on the trees as if they
were moss tied to sticks; he cannot see the lines of action or growth;
he scatters the shapeless clouds over his sky, not perceiving the sweeps
o