79 



inspire them. Nature is revealed to them. You -walk 

 into their pictures as into a garden or a field, every 

 minute part is felt and well given. Our art is thin, dis- 

 tant objects are faint, not far ; modelling, linear perspec- 

 tives, relations of tint, tone, texture, color ; sense of form, 

 reflected lights, aerial perspectives ; are ignored or not 

 known. The whole is flat. These relations are "values," 

 an inestimable word. The French level spaces, shrubs, 

 trees and ground, shy pools and furtive grasses or weeds, 

 carefully rendered as they are, are worth legions of rocky 

 mountains and hearts of the Andes done in this shallow, 

 conventional way. With its blended outline, French art 

 gives us what we feel when we see, not what we see 

 without reeling, which is our key, and that with half an 

 eye. Our landscape is optical, theirs mental. 



Japanese art has the same integrity, never opens its 

 ej^es but it sees a picture ; more through a window pane 

 indeed than another can see in a whole life ; for art is not 

 the seeing, the physical sense, but the significance every 

 object bears to the artistic eye. The Belgians, Dutch, 

 are where the French are, one with nature as she is with- 

 out adornment. Constable, an Englishman, originated 

 the school but left no following in England. The English 

 are painstaking but unideal ; metallic, positive, over bril- 

 liant in color. No subtle harmony, or subdued feeling, 

 or gray tones. Wordsworth is yet to be grown up to in 

 art there. German art is stilted when not influenced by 

 the French school. Like English or American painting, 

 it is lost without a subject, a factitious element or motive 

 in the composition other than nature. • It must have inci- 

 dent or association, as if nature were not enough. Art 

 in these countries is where poetry was in the last century, 

 artificial or uninspired. It studied form, we study feeling. 



In visiting galleries we must watch the mood, not have 



