69 
He who begins to study nature, who observes trees or a single leaf, 
who looks closely at the minute grass-spires under his feet that cover 
the whole earth, who notices the tricksy. play of light and shadow, 
who watches the sky, ‘‘sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, 
sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together, almost 
human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost 
divine in its infinity,’’ he must believe that there is in nature that 
which is designed to convey thoughts to the human soul beyond 
those of mere sense. Art interprets this higher truth. ‘‘ The aim 
of art,’’ says Taine, ‘‘is to manifest the essence of things.’’ Art, 
indeed, seeks for the means of the highest effects. It dependsona 
penetrative study of nature’s principles, and here it still may be 
original. Here the Yankee artist has as good a chance as the 
Greek. Here American art may'prove its claim to originality as 
truly as Dutch art has done. ‘The artist, to be an interpreter, must 
have knowledge, whether gained by study or instinct. He goes 
lovingly whére nature leads him, and enters this kingdom of art by 
becoming a little child, until, through long discipline and patient 
watching, he sees ‘‘ the most essential quality of things ;’’ he grows 
into such intimacy with nature that he comes to interpret the 
thoughts of nature and also the thoughts of the human heart. The 
group of the ‘‘ Niobe’’ came out of the profoundest depth of human 
experience—there is, morally, nothing more suggestive than this 
sculpture in modern art—as the Greek poet, Meleager, in his poem 
on the ‘‘ Niobe,’’ believed and proved this in ancient art. There 
is a fragment of the Reformation in the works of the satiric, keen- 
eyed painter, Holbein. There is much of the splendid but corrupt 
sensuousness of the neo-pagan Renaissance period, under Christian 
forms of humanity, represented in Titian’s voluptuous pictures ; for 
art is a reflection of life and its multiform phases, fascinating or 
terrible as the ages march on, and of the life of the soul. 
3. Art finds its laws and principles primarily in nature. It can- 
not go astep independently of these and remain art. Michael Angelo 
seemed to lose his creative power, and virtue went out of him the 
moment he left nature and began to work from a dry scheme of 
abstract form. 
There is, for instance, the fundamental law of truth, which in- 
volves the idea upon which the universe was built. There must be 
a sensitive relation in the artist’s mind to this law, without which 
art is artifice or sham. But art, as has been said, is not nature, nor 
