LANDSCAPE 



I 



A VOLUME might be devoted to landscape, if this subject 

 were to be exhaustively discussed. Nor could the task be 

 performed without full knowledge of the arts and extensive 

 familiarity with the work of innumerable painters in all 

 countries. My aim is not of this ambitious nature. In the 

 present essay I wish to indicate what it is in modern ways of 

 thinking and of feeling, which has given so great an import- 

 ance to scenery in our literature and figurative art. 



It is an error to suppose that the ancients were insensible 

 to the charm and beauty of external nature. Much has been 

 written about their attitude toward landscape and the parsi- 

 mony of picturesque description in their poetry. Yet sufficient 

 stress is rarely laid upon the difference between the Greeks 

 and the Romans in this matter. Nor has it been made clear 

 enough, perhaps, that classical literature in its later stages 

 exhibits more of what we may call the modern feeling than 

 we find in Homer and the Attic writers. 



The Greek way of regarding nature differed widely from 

 ours, and encouraged a different order of artistic symbolism. 

 In their religion the Greeks deified the powers of the universe 

 under concrete forms of human personality. When they 

 gazed upon sky, earth, and sea, the image of an idealised 

 man or woman intervened between their imaginative reason 

 and the natural object. The mystery of the woods and wilds 

 was Pan. Fauns and Hamadryads started from the leafy 

 shade of forest trees. Tritons blew blasts upon their conch- 

 shells, careering on the crests of stormy billows. Nereids 

 swam up from azure deeps to glide across the surface of calm 



