ii2 April — French Dislike to Solitude, 



There are two quite opposite schools amongst artists and 

 poets in reference to this rather difficult and complicated 

 subject. Constable was entirely on the side of agricul- 

 ture, and plainly said that he liked the fields the farmers 

 worked in, and the work they did in them ; in short, the 

 Nature that Constable loved best was Nature modified 

 by man, and so he painted a well-cultivated country 

 with villages and mills, and village-steeples seen over the 

 hedges and between the permitted trees. This feeling 

 about Nature is a very common one in France, where 

 people will often tell you that such a place ' is delightful 

 for its scenery — you can count the steeples of eight vil- 

 lages, and you cannot drive two miles in any direction 

 without passing either a village or a country-house.' The 

 essence of .this feeling is the dislike to solitude, and a 

 sense of oppression when not relieved either by the com- 

 panionship of man or by visible evidence of his presence. 

 On the other hand there have been several modern land- 

 scape-painters, and a few writers, who believe in wild 

 Nature as an article of faith, being persuaded that nothing 

 that occurs in ' unspoiled Nature ' can by any possibility 

 be defective from the artistic point of view — a dogma 

 of natural religion which is seductive by reason of its 

 simplicity, and because it offers what man so much de- 

 sires, an infallible authority and guide. But supposing 

 that a thinker were to approach this subject armed with 

 a good deal of artistic taste and experience, yet not in 

 the least inclined to pin his faith to any absolute dogma 

 on one side or the other, what would he be likely to 

 decide ? He would say most probably that both Nature 



