powers will be still more and more fixed by rules.

But by whatever strides criticism may gain ground, we need be under no
apprehension that invention will ever be annihilated or subdued, or
intellectual energy be brought entirely within the restraint of written
law. Genius will still have room enough to expatiate, and keep always
the same distance from narrow comprehension and mechanical performance.

What we now call genius begins, not where rules, abstractedly taken, end,
but where known vulgar and trite rules have no longer any place. It must
of necessity be that even works of genius, as well as every other effect,
as it must have its cause, must likewise have its rules; it cannot be by
chance that excellences are produced with any constancy, or any
certainty, for this is not the nature of chance, but the rules by which
men of extraordinary parts, and such as are called men of genius work,
are either such as they discover by their own peculiar observation, or of
such a nice texture as not easily to admit handling or expressing in
words, especially as artists are not very frequently skilful in that mode
of communicating ideas.

Unsubstantial, however, as these rules may seem, and difficult as it may
be to convey them in writing, they are still seen and felt in the mind of
the artist, and he works from them with as much certainty as if they were
embodied, as I may say, upon paper. It is true these refined principles
cannot be always made palpable, like the more gross rules of art; yet it
does not follow but that the mind may be put in such a train that it
shall perceive, by a kind of scientific sense, that propriety which
words, particularly words of unpractised writers such as we are, can but
very feebly suggest.