§ 1. We saw, in the course of the last chapter, with what kind of feeling an artist ought to regard the character of every object he undertakes to paint. The next question is, what objects he ought to undertake to paint; how far he should be influenced by his feelings in the choice of subjects; and how far he should permit himself to alter, or in the usual art language, improve, nature. For it has already been stated (Vol. III. Chap. III. § 21), that all great art must be inventive; that is to say, its subject must be produced by the imagination. If so, then great landscape art cannot be a mere copy of any given scene; and we have now to inquire what else than this it may be.

§ 2. If the reader will glance over that twenty-first, and the following three paragraphs of the same chapter, he will see that we there divided art generally into “historical” and “poetical,” or the art of relating facts simply, and facts imaginatively. Now with respect to landscape, the historical art is simply topography, and the imaginative art is what I have in the heading of the present chapter called Turnerian topography, and must in the course of it endeavour to explain.

Observe, however, at the outset, that, touching the duty or fitness of altering nature at all, the quarrels which have so wofully divided the world of art are caused only by want of understanding this simplest of all canons,—“It is always wrong to draw what you don't see.”