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does the artist, in Coleridge’s words, ‘‘ pick nature’s pockets.’’ Na- 
ture is inimitable; for how can a little square of painted canvas 
convey the infinitude of mountain scenery whose power is revealed 
like a divine inspiration? Yet nature in her commoner moods, if 
still inimitable, is genial and accessible. She is odd and humorous 
at times, with a fancifulness full of grotesque irony. She does not 
hide her winsome face. She invites us to sit at her feet and learn 
of her. She will herself teach us. We cannot follow her instruc- 
tions too closely, nor imitate her too minutely. Not a leaf but is 
a map of the boldest and most complicated pattern. Nature fur- 
nished the originals of Greek forms of every sort. But the artist 
must go beneath the surface of things to the plastic laws of these 
forms, else imitation would be untrue. He must discover, as it 
were, nature’s own law of creation. A picture is an illusion, but it 
is not a delusion, for its end is not imitation, which would be some- 
thing unreal and an absurdity, but it is the production of similar 
effects of nature’s beauty and power so as to speak to the mind in 
some sense as nature speaks. While the artist is not to leave nature 
and lapse into a dreamland of his own, while he is to seek truth, 
yet by his thought, by separating the natural object from its acci- 
dental circumstances and conceiving it as a whole, by so painting 
the tree, the flower, the man, that the true form is seen, that the 
type is brought out in which the properties of the species are devel- 
oped and in which it is best fitted to discharge the functions for 
which it was made—this shows the highest skill ; for here is the ac- 
tion of the artist’s soul which gives to his works the appearance of 
fresh creations. This is the ideal in art. This is the law of mental 
selection and probably was coeval with the law of imitation even, and 
accompanied the earliest art, savage and archaic art, since no art, 
even the most primitive, could have been entirely imitative. 
‘In the effort to imitate the human figure the process of thought 
and sympathy becomes apparent ; and where this process of con- 
trolling power begins there the ideal in art begins. Whenever this 
isolated position, or scene, or action of nature is taken, it cannot 
be truly represented unless by an act of thought it is connected 
with the whole. The idea, or the whole, to which it belongs as a 
part, must enter into it and transfuse it.’’* 
Yet be it noted that the ideal does not exist without the real 
passing into it like a life, even as mind works on facts and molds 
*A.S. Murray, Hist. Gr. Sculpture. 
