LANDSCAPE 299 



to be the handmaid of the Church, because the Church was 

 losing hold upon the intellect. She became in turn the friend 

 and teacher of generations for whom the earth was growing 

 daily more divine. Now, in the work of the landscape- 

 painters, spirit still speaks to spirit ; the spirit of the artist 

 who perceives, interprets, and preserves the beauty of earth, 

 sea, and sky, to the spirit of men ready to receive it. What 

 we owe to these hierophants of nature is incalculable. They 

 are continually training our eyes to see, our minds to under- 

 stand the world. They show how sympathy, emotion, passion, 

 thought may be associated with inanimate things for a 

 masterpiece of landscape-painting, like a symphony in music, 

 is penetrated with the maker's thought and feeling. Having 

 passed through the artist's intellect, the scene becomes trans- 

 figured into a symbol of what the artist felt. His subjectivity 

 inheres in it for ever after. 



So vast is the field of nature, so comparatively little of 

 that field has as yet been subdued, that the resources of art 

 to be derived therefrom seem inexhaustible. Nor have we 

 any reason to apprehend that the religion of the future will 

 fail to supply this branch of art with ideality. 



