298 LANDSCAPE 



they dally not with metaphysic. Deeply as these men enjoy 

 the beauties of the world around us, subtly and profoundly 

 as they comprehend them with a far finer touch upon their 

 quality than those who have not sought to translate them 

 into pictures it is their duty and their pleasure to reproduce 

 aspects, not to penetrate mysteries. From the passion which 

 takes hold of poets and of mystics they are freed by the 

 conditions of their art, albeit they too may be mystics and 

 poets in the esoteric chambers of their soul. 



The landscape-painter stands in the same relation to nature 

 as the sculptor to the nude. Praxiteles, modelling a Venus, 

 runs less risk of personal disturbance than the poet, lover of 

 beauty, shut up for hours together with a living woman in a 

 studio. 



If this be the case, the founders of the modern schools of 

 landscape might repudiate the suggestion that their work is 

 in any way connected with the philosophical ideas which I 

 have analysed. Nevertheless, they were children of their age, 

 and obeyed its leading impulse. Art requires a spiritual 

 element to move in, and responds with elasticity to the con- 

 ditions of the faith men live by. So we may still regard 

 landscape-painting as a species vitally related to science, and 

 to religious mysticism modified by science. 



The ideality of any art depends, as I have previously 

 attempted to demonstrate, upon the thoughts common to the 

 artist and his audience, which the former seeks to express. 

 Sculpture was congenial to the anthropomorphic mythology 

 of Hellas. Painting was congenial to the more emotional 

 mythology of mediaeval Christendom. These two arts drew 

 abundant ideality from these two spheres of thought. But 

 when a new religious sense arose in Europe when theistic 

 conceptions, especially among the northern races, lost that 

 sensuous concreteness which is adapted to sesthetical present- 

 ment then it was found that the capacities of painting were 

 by no means exhausted. The same art, obeying the thought- 

 stress of the moving age, lent its powers to the nascent 

 enthusiasm for nature. Pictures of saints and martyrs were 

 succeeded by pictures of the world we live in. Painting ceased 



