s, until coming to the smallest, he thinks farther care
unnecessary, but draws them freely, and by chance. Having to put on the
foliage, he will make it flow properly in the direction of the tree's
growth, he will make all the extremities graceful, but will be
grievously plagued by finding them come all alike, and at last will be
obliged to spoil a number of them altogether, in order to obtain
opposition. They will not, however, be united in this their spoliation,
but will remain uncomfortably separate and individually ill-tempered. He
consoles himself by the reflection that it is unnatural for all of them
to be equally perfect.

Sec. 12. Laws of art, the safeguard of the unimaginative.

Now I suppose that through the whole of this process he has been able to
refer to his definite memory or conception of nature for every one of
the fragments he has successively added, that the details, color,
fractures, insertions, etc., of his boughs, are all either actual
recollections or based on secure knowledge of the tree, (and herein I
allow far more than is commonly the case with unimaginative painters.)
But as far as the process of combination is concerned, it is evident
that from beginning to end his laws have been his safety, and his plague
has been his liberty. He has been compelled to work at random, or under
the guidance of feeling only, whenever there was anything left to his
own decision. He has never been decided in anything except in what he
_must_ or _must not_ do. He has walked as a drunken man on a broad road,
his guides are the hedges; and between these limits, the broader the
way, the worse he gets on.

Sec. 13. Are by the imaginative painter despised. Tests of imagination.

The advance of the imaginative artist is precisely the reverse of this.
He has no laws. He defies all restraint, and cuts down all hedges. There
is nothing within the limits of natural possibility that he dares not
do, or that he allows the necessity of doing. The laws of nature he
knows, are to him no restraint. They are his own nature. All other laws
or limits he sets at utter defiance, his journey is over an untrodden
and pathless plain. But he sees his end over the waste from the first,
and goes straight at it, never losing sight of it, nor throwing away a
step. Nothing can stop him, nothing turn him aside; falcons and lynxes
are of slow and uncertain sight compared with his. He saw his tree,
trunk, boughs, foliage and all, from the