THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 UCLA ART COUNCIL 
 
 BY 
 
 Estate of 
 Anne Hunter Temple 
 
 \
 
 THE NATURE OF LANDSCAPE
 
 HTia^ MAlJJiW' 
 
 jrigilrwT
 
 / 
 
 William Keith 
 
 Twilight
 
 The 
 Nature of Landscape 
 
 BY 
 
 Samuel Latta Kingan 
 
 ^^ Beyond the methods of painting there lies the 
 wider problem of the real expression of art.'' 
 
 Sir Alfred East 
 
 PRIVATELY PRINTED 
 
 1920
 
 
 TO THE 
 
 LANDSCAPE ARTISTS OF AMERICA 
 
 BY THEIR SINCERE ADMIRER 
 
 i'-y '-.'^ 
 
 /o^^o>
 
 Note. I do not pretend to have settled the 
 principles of landscape; much less do I offer 
 this essay, fragmentary as it is, and anything 
 but complete, as a presentation of the subject. 
 I have attempted merely to set forth some of 
 the elements which have appealed to me as 
 being foundational, and always indispensable, 
 and this too, quite without regard to the singu- 
 larities of composition, or manner of pub- 
 lication. If there be little here however of a 
 one and unerring formula, and nothing at all 
 of craftsmanship, there is something, I hope, 
 (especially for so inconsiderable a production) 
 of the real body and character of the art, afid-- 
 of-snds worthy to be achieved.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. Feeling, Fancy and Spirit ... 1 
 
 11. The Attendants Truth and 
 
 Beauty 41 
 
 III. The More Important Qualities 
 
 OF THE Materials 65
 
 LIST OF PICTURES 
 William Keith 
 
 ''Twilighf Frontispiece 
 
 Leonard Ochtman 
 
 ''Fall of the Leaf" 6 
 
 Gardner Symons 
 
 ''Snow, Ice and Light" 14 
 
 Ben Foster 
 
 "October Morning" 22 
 
 Henry W. Ranger 
 
 "Edge of the Woods" 28 
 
 William Ritschel 
 
 "Light on the Sea" 34 
 
 Charles H. Davis 
 
 "Clouds" 43 
 
 DWIGHT W. TrYON 
 
 "October's Close" 49 
 
 George Inness 
 
 "Sunset" 56 
 
 Charles Melville Dewey 
 
 " The Early Beams" 64
 
 Albert L. Groll 
 
 ''Harbingers of Rain" 72 
 
 BiRGE Harrison 
 
 ''Wintef 80 
 
 J. Francis Murphy 
 
 '' Hillside Farm'' 89 
 
 Ernest Lawson 
 
 " The Further Heights'' 96 
 
 The plates are from paintings in the writer's 
 collection.
 
 THE NATURE OF LANDSCAPE
 
 I 
 
 FEELING, FANCY AND 
 SPIRIT 
 
 I would have you detach yourself from the 
 world, conceive of it without you and your 
 kind, and from some far place, look down 
 into the vast. 
 
 Only the physical lies before you, the ma- 
 terial, the substantial. Earth rolls in her 
 course. The land is solid and fixed, the sea 
 liquid and never still, air sweeps in tempests, 
 or is quiet, and the light streams down. Ob- 
 serve more closely. The waters of the seas 
 heave and swell, and then lie smooth. Black 
 clouds hang over them, white mists trail and 
 bulge, and boundless stretches blaze back at 
 the sun. All of the seven seas are before you, 
 lashed by storm, or at peace. From frozen 
 north to frozen south, it is the same. The 
 land looms up, rocks, cliffs, strands, hills, val- 
 leys, plains, mountains, forests, morasses, 
 rivers and lakes. And over them are the stars 
 and the moon and the sun, and around and 
 about them blows the wind. Observe more 
 closely still. In the heavens above the sea 
 hangs the rainbow with its colors. Light
 
 [ 2 ] 
 
 Strikes the clouds, and the blackness bursts 
 into splendor. Breakers roll on yellow shores. 
 In the forests, the light filters down, swims 
 in long, dim glades, and glimmers on 
 stream and pool. Level spaces sweep to the 
 sky, and lakes lie deep among the hills. There 
 are valleys girt with mountains, blue and 
 violet and mauve, and rivers tumbling over 
 precipices. There is the sunrise and the sun- 
 set, on ocean, plain and mountain, and there 
 is the night. And, if you look yet again, you 
 will see what we have called the changes of 
 the seasons, winter and summer, autumn and 
 spring. 
 
 Such is nature, this visible world. You have 
 seen all of her. There is no heart buried in 
 her granite hills, no mood lying in her valleys, 
 no soul on her mountain tops. She is real and 
 palpable. The island is as sentient as the 
 river, the wave as the cloud, the air as the 
 light. 
 
 [ But if all be wholly physical, and the im- 
 press of the bigness of mountains, the roar of 
 winds, the greens of meadows, and the sump- 
 tuousnessof autumnal woods, be upon our phys- 
 ical selves, that is to say, upon nature herself, 
 so that the material is stamped upon the ma-
 
 [ 3 ] 
 
 terial, yet it does not follow, that our contact, 
 even in the most primary way, is altogether 
 physical. If in a larger sense we are not 
 a part of nature, up to our subtlest thought, 
 differing, but co-ordinate in the scheme, if we 
 are not another bloom in her inexhaustible 
 garden, but are in reality of diviner essence, still 
 the kinship is so close as to render complete 
 separation forever impossible. When we be- 
 hold form and color, although they know us 
 not, and are of themselves of the earth, and 
 reach us only through our corporeal frames, 
 we catch at the same instant, with our emo- 
 tional and intellectual eyes, those deep sig- 
 nificances, which cannot be other, or different 
 
 from, ourselves. J 
 
 When, in the days we now call primitive, men 
 imitated an object, it was not a tree, nor a hill, 
 nor a cloud. This was not because of lack of ob- 
 servation, nor yet of understanding altogether, 
 but for the reason in large part, that nature 
 was considered as a habitation, rather than as 
 belonging to the occupants themselves. For- 
 ests, waters, and mountains were peopled with 
 creatures similar to man, but even then, in 
 the very midst of nature, her availibility for 
 expression was not recognized— save perhaps
 
 [ 4 ] 
 
 by those inspired poets who from the begin- 
 ning appear to have divined the true relation- 
 ship—and it was generally thought, that no 
 form other than the human could express 
 man. It was a natural halting place, and like 
 many another, long tarried at. 
 
 That art which makes nature, her multitu- 
 dinous aspects and changing apparitions, an 
 only end, is universally inferior, if indeed, it 
 be art at all. It is not sufficient that art 
 should expose the appearance of man, or of 
 his implements, or surroundings; it must be 
 of him. A landscape is hardly given the hu- 
 man touch by inserting a plow, a horse, or a 
 house. Trees, water and light, and all the hosts 
 of nature, have art value, only when there is 
 cast upon them, and seemingly into them, some 
 quality of man's own, some insignia of relation- 
 ship. Not thatnature should be humanized; than 
 this, nothing could be more subversive or dis- 
 astrous. Emotions, as in truth they are, and 
 in full individuality, are imposed upon and 
 mingled with the elements of nature, as in 
 truth they are, and shorn of no single appur- 
 tenance, in order that man may find yet an- 
 other voice, yet another and wider range. 
 
 The contemptuous attitude of many great
 
 [ 5 ] 
 
 minds towards painting is easily understood. 
 Pictures have been classed as extraordinary, 
 chiefly because of flesh tints, sheen of silk, the 
 light on a haystack, some startling verisimili- 
 tude. If this be true, inevitably painters 
 are imitators, transcribers of the real into the 
 appearance of the real. Such was Hazlitt's 
 theory. How can such an art cope with poetry 
 or music? Where are those passions that 
 shake the soul, those fancies and moods that 
 charm and soothe, those far and lofty flights 
 with 'the gods? Men have small use for im- 
 itators and transcribers. Had those who 
 caviled understood the true object of paint- 
 ing, their contempt would have given way to 
 delight and laudation. 
 
 The arts of painting, literature and music 
 differ so radically in their first sensuous im- 
 press, that some appear to be of the opinion 
 that they are expressive of different sub- 
 stances. As there is but one man, and one 
 set of emotions, and as every art must spring 
 from this common source, it is difficult to 
 conceive of the arts, except as manifestations, 
 each in its particular way, of the same gener- 
 al thing. The greater adaptability of certain 
 mediums to the expression of certain emo-
 
 [ 6 ] 
 
 tions, relates to manner and method of utter- 
 ance, rather than to the nature of the utter- 
 ance, and happens within the confines of each 
 art, as well as between the arts themselves. 
 There is but one common font at which the 
 whole world drinks. When poet, housed, and 
 sequestered, or free in June meadows, tells 
 his tale, the wings that lift and emancipate, 
 are not the forms of his verse, the cities, the 
 plains, the hills, nor the valleys, not even the 
 men and women, of his fancy. It is the feel- 
 ing and [the spirit of a mighty soul. The 
 musician too, in pouring forth those sounds 
 that reach deep into the dark wells of the 
 hearts of men, relies, not on the contrivances 
 of his craft, not the trappings, the scenes of 
 Seigfried and of Faust, but upon emotion 
 flowing like a river. The painter is not a 
 mere depicter of the shell. His feet are swift 
 as the poet's; he goes as far afield. He also 
 hears the harmonies that fill the air. He 
 spreads on canvas, not that which others 
 have told in words or breathed in sounds, for 
 to them is their art, but the same feeling, 
 fancy and spirit, in different, and it may be, in 
 less or more befitting guise. All give the 
 means; you must see for yourself. If you
 
 Leonard Ochtman 
 
 Fall of the Leaf
 
 '/lAMTHOO xXHAAU^d^
 
 af 
 
 ^
 
 [ 7 ] 
 
 cannot see, there is no Hamlet, no Supper at 
 Emmaus, no forlorn Margarita. 
 
 It is common usage to say, that the land- 
 scape painter is an interpreter and translator 
 of nature, a sort of gifted intermediary, whose 
 office it is to exhibit the doings of river, wood 
 and hill, and if not to obliterate himself, at 
 least to remain unseen. In the sense that the 
 painter makes known existing facts in nature 
 which were hidden before, or reveals our 
 closer affinity with nature, he is an interpreter, 
 somewhat as the naturalist, the scientist, and 
 the inventor. But it is not the purpose of art to 
 disseminate a knowledge of facts. The painter 
 of figure is not concerned with anatomy as 
 such; he is not a chemist, nor a surgeon. He 
 paints passions, not bodies. It is for the land- 
 scape painter, not merely to render nature with 
 whatever intimacy and power he may attain, 
 but above all else, to depict and expose, to in- 
 terpret and translate man. If, in the execu- 
 tion, nature's so-called moods, and the real 
 moods and emotions of men, appear as blended 
 into a whole, it will be in the main, because 
 the dominant human elements have found 
 adequate vesture, and not because nature has 
 found utterance through human agency.
 
 [ 8 ] 
 
 In all of nature there is not a landscape, 
 but what an endless quantity and variety of 
 scenery! The difference between scenery and 
 landscape, I take it, is this: Scenery is the 
 real and actual appearance of some part of the 
 physical world, a forest, a plain, a reach of 
 water, or the sky. It is nature's exhibit, her 
 outward blazonry, and no whit different from 
 the muck on the floor of seas, and the rock 
 supporting a continent. LLandscape upon the 
 other hand, is the representation of an emo- 
 tion, and stems in man. A scene faithfully 
 painted is a statement of fact; a landscape 
 has no counterpart in fact, but is a creation, 
 designed and constructed to convey the in- 
 tangible. There is the difference between an 
 accurate description of the reality, and 
 
 "We were the first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea." 
 
 Let no one suppose that I am attempting 
 to belittle nature. That were occupation for 
 a fool. What I would emphasize is, that na- 
 ture, always, everywhere, is physical; that 
 art, always, whatever its form, and however 
 closely knit into the material, partakes of
 
 [ 9 ] 
 
 mentality, and is valuable only to the extent 
 of the artist's power and vision. 
 
 It cannot be said that most men are im- 
 pressed with or by nature save in a material 
 way, and pretty much in the same manner as 
 other animals; yet an oak, magnificent in 
 reach and verdure, a plain rolling to the 
 verge, a cloud on a mountain side, a little 
 blue flower in the shade of a dell, will call 
 from many of them, some kind of a response. 
 It is this answer, this awakening, however 
 feeble, that gives wherewithal! to hang an art. 
 The painter avails himself of oak, or plain, or 
 cloud, or flower, not to reproduce it, and thus 
 arouse the same sentiment as the original, 
 diminished as in the nature of things it must 
 be, but that he may, having some foundation, 
 and avenue of communication, burgeon out 
 with strength and beauty the primary emo- 
 tion. It is for him, through knowledge, and 
 by labor, and the use of those faculties by 
 right of which he may be called artist, to 
 clothe the emotion anew, to divine the form 
 and the color that will best display it, to im- 
 bue fact with fancy, sounds with symphony, 
 light and air and soil, with joy, or peace, or 
 hope, or serenity, the final and supreme qual-
 
 [ 10 ] 
 
 ities. Thus the visible and familiar may be 
 made to carry the invisible and not always 
 familar; the scene be transmuted into land- 
 scape. I 
 
 Nor is landscape, as has been indicated, 
 confined to color and line. The very feel of 
 a noble and powerful picture may be con- 
 veyed by words or music. Pictoric form 
 is not of the essence, but only one of 
 the methods of expression. If we may con- 
 ceive of an artist ambidextrous with pen, 
 brush, and musical instrument, the mood pro- 
 duced by writing, picture or melody, of the 
 same subject, would be similar. Consider this 
 familiar passage: 
 
 "Perhaps there is no more impressive scene 
 on earth than the solitary extent of the Cam- 
 pagna of Rome under evening light. Let the 
 reader imagine himself for a moment with- 
 drawn from the sounds and motion of the liv- 
 ing world, and sent forth alone into this wild 
 and wasted plain. The earth yields and crum- 
 bles beneath his foot, tread he never so light- 
 ly, for its substance is white, hollow and cari- 
 ous, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. 
 The long knotted grass waves and tosses fee- 
 bly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its
 
 [ 11 ] 
 
 motion shake feverishly along the banks of 
 ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight. 
 Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around 
 him, as if the dead beneath were struggling 
 in their sleep; scattered blocks of black stone, 
 four-square, remnants of mighty edifices, not 
 one left upon another, lie upon them to keep 
 them dov^n. A dull purple poisonous haze 
 stretches level along the desert, veiling its 
 spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose 
 rents the red light rests, like a dying fire on 
 defiled altars. The blue ridge of the Alban 
 Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of 
 green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark 
 clouds stand steadfastly along the promon- 
 tories of the Appennines. From the plain 
 to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, 
 pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, 
 like shadovv^ and countless troops of funeral 
 mourners, passing from a nation's grave." 
 
 I am not so certain that our progenitors, 
 those very early men, for all their ignorance, 
 lack of subjectiveness, and helplessness with 
 the abstract, and those too, whom we now 
 call the ancients, did not have, in some re- 
 spects, a truer conception of nature, than we 
 of today. Many of us like the show of her.
 
 [ 12 ] 
 
 the delicateness and the softness. We fall into 
 raptures over fields of flowers, brooks, birds, 
 tree-forms, and that sort of thing; but the 
 power, often malign and terrible, the deep 
 elemental forces, the gaunt, the haggard and 
 foreboding, seem to impress us lightly. We 
 are not to forget that the great gods of 
 heathendom, with sway over earth, had their 
 origin whatever their attributes in later days, 
 in man's attempt to escape from and survive 
 the thing; that waters have ever devastated 
 and destroyed, winds crushed and destroyed, 
 heat and cold blasted and destroyed, vol- 
 canoes spewed over plains, earthquakes rend- 
 ed and destroyed; that man crouched and 
 was afraid, when the physical, like some great 
 ogre, pounced on him; that he could not 
 match strength with strength, toss mountains 
 into sea, or swallow rivers at a gulp; that in 
 the power of the thing, he as a thing was 
 puny and grotesque, and that, whether driven 
 from Eden mature and lusty, or evolved from 
 slime into form and stature, earth has been bit- 
 ter in his mouth, and he has run his race in 
 fear and trembling. 
 
 Of those impenetrable ages lying beyond 
 the edge of time, at least we know, that na-
 
 [ 13 ] 
 
 ture then and now is the same, that every- 
 thing that has been, everlastingly is. From 
 the time the stars were hung in the heavens, 
 and the flames of the sun first kindled, there 
 has been no deviation, even though oceans 
 have dried up, and worlds have shrivelled and 
 died. Ceaselessly image changes to image, 
 but there is not one less nor one more atom 
 in the universe today than in the beginning, 
 and atoms to start with, they are atoms still. 
 Nature began with rocks, and water and trees 
 and air and light, or the things that compose 
 them, and she will end with them, or the 
 things that compose them. Time was old 
 when men learned, that beyond the fangs, the 
 face was not always malevolent. Before their 
 startled eyes must have loomed continually 
 their inexorable fate— not the kindly fate of 
 the flower or tree, slowly sinking back into 
 the loam, but the fate of the smitten, the 
 crushed, the overwhelmed, and also of the 
 lacerated, the disemboweled, and devoured. 
 For men were cruel as nature, and following 
 her teaching, fed upon themselves. No sun- 
 set then, no rainbow pulsing in the blue, no 
 night of stars or flushing dawn, awoke delight 
 in their fierce and sombre hearts.
 
 [ 14 ] 
 
 One who has not pushed into far wilder- 
 nesses, who has not lost himself in the depths 
 of great forests, who has not clambered over 
 mountains and felt their roughness, and fallen 
 headlong to stop at a precipice; who has not 
 felt the waters of ocean close over his head, 
 or the bruise of breakers on the rocks; who 
 has not crawled over desert sands and felt his 
 very blood dry up; who has not seen the 
 lightning strike before him and the tall pine 
 shattered into fragments, or seen the hurricane 
 smash its way; who has not been carried by rac- 
 ing stream to cataract or whirpool; who has 
 not felt the wring of nature at his throat, can 
 have but a dim conception of man's struggle. 
 Consider also his nakedness, his vulnerability, 
 the little thrust that spills his blood, the little 
 blow that stops his breathing. 
 
 We, on the hither side of things, look back, 
 and vaguely remember. We behold the fall- 
 ing night, and high on a slope, the cliff that 
 sheltered us; we remember looking over the 
 waste to the far black ranges against the 
 sky, and the terrors of closing darkness; we 
 remember the deep tangled forests, and how 
 we wandered there, and fought with the 
 beasts, and the tempests that rocked the
 
 Gardner Symons 
 Snow, Ice and Light
 
 rJH0MY8 HHUGHAO 
 id^ivl hrrn o')T v/onr!
 
 [ 15 ] 
 
 earth, and how we scurried into hollow trees, 
 or under some bank, or into a den, and hud- 
 dled together; we remember the shoreless 
 swamps, and the creatures there, and how 
 they swooped upon us from out of the sky 
 and seized us unawares; we remember the 
 rivers grown up with trees like grass, and the 
 brutes they harbored, and how they dragged 
 us down and away; we remember the endless 
 rains, the gloomy swollen skies, and the 
 hunger, and we remember the sea reaching 
 out to suck us back. And the nights of fire 
 and flame, when the earth fell away, and 
 mountains toppled into valleys, we remember 
 them; and the long, long time of ice and 
 snow, with its numbing misery, we remember 
 that. And we remember a later day, when it 
 was warm, and dappled over with sunlight, 
 we lay stretched under trees, and the delight 
 of it; and of other times, when the silvery 
 mists of morning made us smile, or the rich 
 glow of sunset caught our eye and charmed 
 us, or the moon soothed and quieted us, or 
 the wide rippling savannahs seemed to lift us, 
 and the winds brought us melodies. He 
 who would understand, must forever sleep on 
 the earth, forever hear the winds sough in the
 
 [ 16 ] 
 
 trees, forever see the young moon curve be- 
 yond the hills, forever remember the past and 
 the meaning of it, regardless of the palace he 
 dv^ells in, and the fine raiment on his back. 
 
 Often on some high and airy place, I have 
 watched the gray clouds, rampart upon ram- 
 part, streamers and banners, driven by the 
 tempestuous winds of the mountains; and 
 often I have lain under a mesquite tree and 
 looked through the thin, trembling leaves, 
 at the low-hung stars of the desert night. 
 And I have closed my eyes, and with lids 
 tight looked again, and beheld other sights 
 my eyes had never told me of. 
 
 Land, Sea and Sky! Beholding them we are 
 lost in adoration; feeling them we are bowed 
 with reverence. Fortunate in time, we have 
 escaped in part the bondage of our forbears, 
 and look forth with the gladness of freedom. 
 Gold of sun on mountain side, sweep of far 
 gray waters, sky blue from rim to rim, or 
 worked with star and cloud, how amazingly 
 wonderful ! Gloriously are we set in the bosom 
 of this world. The filthy Hottentot, grovel- 
 ling in wood or desert, can he behold the 
 Acropolian hill or Zeus in Olympus? With 
 every babe is bom a world different from all
 
 [ n ] 
 
 other worlds, and to no mortal is it given to 
 gaze beyond the horizon of his own soul. The 
 most beautiful spirit, will have the most 
 beautiful of worlds. 
 
 Narrow indeed is the path we tread. Con- 
 tinents rear their crests, and swing their en- 
 compassing shores; islands loom in tropic and 
 
 ft 
 
 snow; oceans roll everywhere; suns, moons 
 and stars are as dust for numbers. To roam 
 for a century, were to gather knowledge of 
 the actual all, as a pin point in night's im- 
 measurable dome. Our sight is pale, our 
 vision short, we grasp but a twig of the tree. 
 He who would see nature with truth of 
 fact, her absolutism, who would see the thing, 
 and not the result or effect of the thing upon 
 himself, nor the connecting tie, must cast 
 away his heart and soul, and sink to a cold 
 intelligence. No man can quite do this, how- 
 ever vapid his temperament, or overwhelming 
 his mentality; but there are those who, with 
 yardstick and scales, measure the lights of 
 day and night, and all the shifting scenes, 
 weigh the pearly clouds, and the throbbing 
 colors, set all down precisely in book or on 
 canvas, and call their work complete. He who 
 would see nature with truth of spirit, wide
 
 [ 18 ] 
 
 must he fling the reins of his passions. Above 
 all he must love earth, or what appears to him 
 to be earth, with all his heart and all his soul. 
 I speak of love of mountains, of forests, of 
 deserts, of rivers, of the sea, of the sky, of a 
 love melting and absorbing. He must live 
 the dawn, live the white noon, live sunset and 
 moonrise, live autumn in the hills and spring- 
 time in the valleys, he must make them essence 
 of his essence, core of his core. Without this 
 basal, ultimate and superlative power, the pow- 
 er to envelope, we might almost say permeate, 
 matter with emotion, landscape is impossible. 
 Of perishable things, the firm and defined 
 are most perishable, and only the seemingly 
 formless endures. Heights are washed and 
 blown into valleys, rivers change their course, 
 plains are heaved into precipices, forests 
 wither up. But the air remains, and heat 
 and cold and light, formless and immutable. 
 Of man and his works, only his ideas and emo- 
 tions, comparatively void of shape and sub- 
 stance, have perpetuity. Shall art ape the 
 perishable, as an end and consummation, 
 smirk over a painted tree, or a painted nude, 
 or shall it mount the rarer altitudes, and 
 breathe forth the everlasting? Like some lorn
 
 [ 19 ] 
 
 creature in a wood, we are enmeshed and en- 
 tangled in form. From cradle to grave we 
 blunder through the maze, form jostling form, 
 only to sink into the pit. Saddest of all, we 
 sometimes elevate the thing that has be- 
 fuddled us, and worship as Israelites of old 
 their calf. Strange would it be, if the spirit 
 of man, radiant and boundless, should be con- 
 tent with curve or angle of line, or satisfied 
 with any combination of lines. It is not true. 
 Nobler art always has been, and always will 
 be concerned, as the ultimate attainment, 
 with the formless, ever-living elements. As 
 with stones, you may build a temple of form, 
 but the deity of that temple, without which it 
 were never built, will be formless. 
 
 [But we see the intangible only through the 
 tangible, the invisible only by means of the 
 visible. Without the real there can be no 
 imagination, and our vision of the real, not 
 merely colors, but enters the structure of the 
 imaginative. We must begin at the begin- 
 ning, and that is the common ground of form, 
 known to men] Although we see differently as 
 individuals, as nations and races we see much 
 alike. This common vision of the physical, 
 the more or less general view of things, is the
 
 [ 20 ] 
 
 foundation of art. Fresh and new visions 
 concerning old things, do not in anywise 
 change the old things themselves. Classic 
 trees and Greek marbles, have not changed 
 mankind's conception of trees, or the human 
 form, however much they may have added 
 to ideality and esthetic pleasure. The com- 
 mon conception will always prevail, the dead 
 level of fact, known and accepted, and it is 
 not art's business to change it, but to adopt it 
 as a base. Every work of art partakes of the 
 commonplace, has in it some constituents 
 known to most men. Not only is this the 
 case with material objects, but with the emo- 
 tions as well. ^Artists do not deal with a 
 world, either of fact or fancy, different from 
 the world of other men. It is this world they 
 see, man's universal passions that stir them. 
 They are men among men; not foreign crea- 
 tures strangely endowed. They may see 
 more clearly, but not different things, they 
 may feel more deeply, but not different pas- 
 sions, they may speak more appealingly, but 
 not a different language. 
 
 The temples of Egypt, the Parthenon, the 
 Duomo of Milan, the Psalms of David, the 
 Gioconda, Hamlet and Don Quixote, are one
 
 [ 21 ] 
 
 and all, but arrangements and re-arrange- 
 ments of the frequent and familiar, effects 
 moulded and evolved out of the known and 
 understood. Obviously, the position of a 
 thing in relation to the position of other 
 things, before, behind and around it, makes 
 or mars not only it but the whole. The 
 place of the ordinary may make it extraor- 
 dinary. The granite of mountain pinnacles 
 is not different from the granite of valleys, 
 but it startles by its loftiness; and many a 
 line and many a stroke, owe their greatness to 
 place alone. Cluster of words of Milton or 
 Keats, constellation of notes of Chopin or 
 Beethoven, groupings of form and assem- 
 blings of color of Inness or Turner, what are 
 they all, but the marshalling of the known, 
 schemes, designs and patterns of the com- 
 mon, blazoned out anew? The ideas expressed 
 by means of art, are vastly different from art 
 itself, although confusedly we call them by 
 that name. The arts are only handmaidens, 
 running hither and yon, but the queen who 
 rules sits in her power. Should we give the 
 word the larger significance, and as compre- 
 hending idea as well as expression, still the 
 rule holds good, for never has artistic con-
 
 [ 22 ] 
 
 ception illumined the mind, that was not 
 composed and arranged out of the universal 
 passions. Even he, the topmost dramatic 
 figure of the world, but held up men, that 
 they might behold themselves.' 
 
 The approach to the external world, rutted 
 deep by millions of feet, would seem easy 
 enough to any but the blind; but paradox of 
 paradoxes, where the simple and unlearned 
 go straight to the goal, the skillful and pro- 
 ficient often stumble and fall. A curse of 
 the artistic is the inability to grasp the real, 
 as if art were some dilettante, afraid or 
 ashamed to thrust hands into wholesome 
 mud of reality. No artist distorts fact. He 
 looks with a sane and normal eye, with de- 
 sire to see the thing as it is, to realize and 
 know it, make it essentially his. Although he 
 have the imagination of a god, he will lock 
 fast the starry vault, and hand in hand with 
 his comrades, walk the beaten, dusty way. 
 Well he knows, that he must see as they see, 
 before they can see as he does. And in his 
 vision, when like a dawn he spreads it forth, 
 however lit and brilliant, however vivified and 
 astir with soul it may be, things of earth will 
 still be earthy,menwillbemen,and rocks rocks.
 
 Ben Foster 
 October Morning
 
 H3T80H una 
 gnimoM isdoloO
 
 [ 23 ] 
 
 Nor should the vision of the actual be con- 
 cerned alone with those aspects of nature 
 which please us most. Nature is a whole, 
 an indissoluble unit. He who would have 
 some glimpse and sense of her, who would 
 swing out of his orbit into hers, who would be in 
 accord and at one with her, must crawl into her 
 dark and noisome caves, bathe in the very 
 slime of her, as well as bask in the sun, or 
 revel under the moon. Nor is that vision of 
 the delicate or gossamer, of mist on moun- 
 tain side, of slanting light on far flung field, 
 of opalescent glint of wave, of any higher or 
 different order, than the vision of the rough 
 and harsh, a rocky isle, a dead tree, or a 
 festering swamp. How absurd, to attribute 
 the spiritual to water in a cloud, and deny it 
 to the muddy pool in the highway. 
 
 To see form and color, texture and bulk, 
 height and depth, distance and perspective, 
 atmosphere and light, to grasp somewhat of 
 them, is but the primary step, the alphabet of 
 landscape. Earth divorced of man, resplendent 
 in sun or swooned in night, is naught but a 
 mass in the void. No rhapsodizing can place 
 in nature's nostrils any breath but her own, 
 no sentimentalizing can give her qualities
 
 [ 24 ] 
 
 other than the fixed and solid attributes of 
 matter. What would they have, they who de- 
 mand that landscape should have none of 
 man, none of his personality, that it should 
 be wholly nature? Would they have feeling, 
 where in nature will they find it? Would they 
 have imagination, where in nature does it 
 dwell? Would they have spirit, where in na- 
 ture does it spread its glistening wings? 
 
 Man, having wandered in the forests and 
 over the plains, having seen the stars go their 
 ways, and the tides roll up and back, having 
 felt the winds stir around him, and drenched 
 himself in the sun, having sensed the colors 
 of day and night and searched out the dim, 
 misty places, finds awakening in him a pro- 
 found passion for the scene of his pilgrimage. 
 He hails the rising sun with upthrown arms 
 and a shout of joy, he dallies in brooks and 
 laughs with them, he lies under trees and 
 communes with the leaves, he rolls in mead- 
 ows, he would embrace the light of noon, 
 mountains are his familiars, and the sea is 
 his brother. Marvelous transformation! A 
 soaring and effulgent soul, encarnadines a 
 world. He sees generously, broadly, with a 
 swooping wholeness, and with a richness and
 
 [ 25 ] 
 
 warmth beyond all calculation. He gathers 
 the stars with the ease of apples on trees, and 
 when he lies down on mountain slope, or in 
 hidden valley, his upturned gaze captures the 
 infinite. Quickened and enraptured, he be- 
 holds anew. From the springboard of fact, 
 he leaps into the midair of fancy. 
 
 Contentment with nature were the death of 
 art. In such a case, the sovereign power, in- 
 stead of a brightness to worship and to won- 
 der at, would never mount its throne. No 
 significant art has been created in the pres- 
 ence of, or under the direct influence of na- 
 ture. To create, requires an isolation, a 
 separation and a detachment, from the ma- 
 terial worked with. The market inn is an 
 excellent place to meet friends, and pass the 
 time of day, and so is a battlefield, if you 
 would see blood spurt and legs carried off by 
 cannon; but if it be a comedy of ale and 
 humor and small talk, or a battle hymn, you 
 would have, then the closet must bring it forth. 
 How arose the belief that the dramatist, who 
 burrows deepest in men's natures, and the 
 poet, who walks the furtherest promontories 
 of knowledge, must hide themselves away, 
 far from men and sounds and scenes of earth,
 
 [ 26 ] 
 
 to dramatize or poetize or compose; but that 
 the painter must be always within sight or 
 touch of his subject? -Is it more difficult to 
 paint a tree than a soul? If it be advanced 
 that the arts are dissimilar, that the one deals 
 with the tangible and the others with the in- 
 tangible, may it not be answered, that words 
 are as intractible as paint, that both are but 
 tools of the trade, inductile and finite; that it 
 is not more difficult to remember and to 
 know the scenes of nature, than to remember 
 and to know, the country of the heart? Aside 
 from the performance of art, the gesture of it 
 so to speak, is there any difference in art? 
 Why should the painter gaze upon a moun- 
 tain to paint a mountain, or a sunset to paint 
 a sunset, any more than a dramatist upon the 
 bare bones of actual woe, to write tragedy? 
 Is one tied to the physical more than the 
 other? What is the attempt and adventure? 
 One moves about his men and women, the 
 other his clouds, and lights and colors ; but with 
 each, it is all a show and make believe, mere 
 craft and cunning, to body out the real drama 
 and the real picture. If artistry be raised to 
 creation, men and women, cloud, light and 
 color, alike, are swept away, and the oblivious
 
 [ 27 ] 
 
 Spectator, carried as by a tide, into the ocean 
 of feeling. Your true painter is one who 
 garners the aspects and effects of nature, 
 stores them away as so much treasure, pre- 
 cious paraphernalia of his craft, to await the 
 day when he shall have need of them. That 
 day will not find him in field or on hill. 
 
 It was John Burnett who said, in that old 
 book of his, after writing of measurement, 
 form, perspective, lines, diminution, angles, 
 circles, and chiaro oscuro: "Invention is the 
 great soul of painting, without which the be- 
 ing in possesion of an accumulation of studies, 
 is of little avail." To imagine, is more than 
 to remember. Go out into the midst of the 
 desert. The sun is just gone, and the plains 
 of the valley, vague and empurpled, swell 
 softly to the encircling ranges. The higher air 
 shot with gold and crimson, is a mist of radi- 
 ance, while in all the middle space, a pale 
 light drops, that fades as it falls. The ragged 
 eastern peaks, rose and pink, blur into mauve, 
 and then of a sudden all is gone, and the stars 
 are shining. Enter a forest in autumn, and 
 stand by a leaf-choked brook. The long 
 naked boughs of oaks reach out level with 
 the gray and yellow earth; the slender sassa-
 
 [ 28 ] 
 
 fras spreads its fanlike branches splashed 
 with blood-red leaves; the hazels, bare and 
 brown, have caught in their maze, yellow 
 leaves of pappaw and buckeye. There are 
 dead flower stalks in the open places, and 
 glints of green where the wind has blown the 
 leaves from the moss. A midmorning sun, 
 smouldering and remote, casts a tawny light 
 which is not so much light as a diffusion and 
 rarefaction of colors, that swims among the 
 tree trunks. Clamber over the rocks by the 
 sea, and at some frothy inlet, watch the 
 waves mount into foam and run blindly 
 along the walls of the inner caverns. Fogs 
 trail from far distances, and heave and swell 
 like great dim sails. Spots and bars and 
 blotches of a lighter gray appear, lost children 
 of the sun. All passes, and there is the 
 sparkling blue, the tufts of white, the shower- 
 ing splendor of a summer noon. These, with 
 innumerable other scenes, familiar and dear, 
 crowd our memories, hang on the walls of 
 past times, until it may be, on some fair day, 
 we turn about upon ourselves, and instead of 
 seeing and then feeling and later on remem- 
 bering, we feel first, find the light within, no 
 longer remember but conceive, throw out and
 
 V 
 
 Henry W. Ranger 
 
 Edge of the Woods
 
 ibooW arit "to 9^b3
 
 [ 29 ] 
 
 off, rather than take on and in, and hence 
 away into deserts and forests and by sound- 
 ing seas, never visioned by mortal eye 
 
 The artistic imagination has its origin in 
 feeling, and bursts from it as lightning from 
 clouds. It is inherent in this faculty, that it 
 adds truth to truth, not truth to falseness 
 The aggregate perfectness, the ideal of indi- 
 vidual and nation, is superimposed upon the 
 verity of fact. The diseased and freakish 
 fancy that sees or pretends to see nature, 
 wild and disordered, exaggerated and mis- 
 matched, is neither fish, flesh nor fowl. Bet- 
 ter a thousand times plain transcriptions of 
 nature, which at least are honest and whole- 
 some, than monstrosities that contain neither 
 truth of fact, nor truth of spirit. What ra- 
 tional being would change the color and form 
 of flowers, or of trees, or mountains, or mead- 
 ows, or of the sea, or dawn of day? Is not 
 the sunlight of earth bright enough, are not 
 the plains wide enough, the cliffs high enough, 
 the deep, dark forests mysterious enough, 
 for any vision? ^^'^bo, of all the poets, has 
 found it necessary to create a new language, 
 or to maltreat an old one, to express himself? 
 On the contrary, the artist has accepted the
 
 . [ 30 ] 
 
 tongue of his people, and given it dignity and 
 nobility. Poor, trembling, outcast things, 
 weak common everyday things, by reason of 
 love and understanding, if not veneration, 
 have been vitalized and empowered, and the 
 more commanding objects touched with sub- 
 limity. It is thus imagination lights her 
 fires. In landscape, whether consciously or 
 not, there is always the vista of this broad 
 and fruitful earth. As on a plain it is spread, 
 and the charmed wanderer in rustling grove 
 and by sunny stream, wants no lovelier sur- 
 roundings. Was ever so magnificenta language? 
 To learn it is to love it, and to love it is to be 
 inspired. Imagination is the lamp of the 
 passions Not only does it give cohesion and 
 presentation to the particular emotion, but it 
 bears up, sustains and carries on the theme 
 to a speaking and dramatic end. It works to a 
 certain consummation, a foreseen and calculat- 
 ed effect, and its supreme quality, as has been 
 said, is to display the emotions, in progress and 
 along their gusty ways, and at last in a strik- 
 ing conclusion. It plays upon nature as light 
 upon water, but its bright, shooting beamS^ 
 are from another sun. By its singleness of 
 motive and rareity of construction, it pro-
 
 [ 31 ] 
 
 duces a new appearance, an appearance of 
 life, and harmony of soul-the feeling that 
 lies at the bottom of it all It enables man 
 to project himself, initially by schooling and 
 arraying his emotions, and ultimately by 
 burgeoning them forth. This accomplished, 
 imagination has served its purpose, for al- 
 though both frame and covering, it is the 
 former rather than the latter. 
 
 The conception of a work of art is frequent- 
 ly more toilsome than its execution. There 
 have been instances, to be sure, where the 
 entire design was flashed by the imagination, 
 but they are exceptional. Faint as a star ray 
 struggling earthward out of the depths of 
 night, may be the first glimmer of some de- 
 tail or part of a masterpiece. In his exuber- 
 ance, man may believe that the universe is his 
 to do with as he will, but quickly he learns 
 his limitations, and falls crushed and broken. 
 But it is to mount again, for still he feels and 
 throbs, to once more try those upper virgin 
 realms of air. There is much sweat in Claude's 
 Jesus and the Fishermen, as well as exquisite- 
 ness. More often than not, imagination must 
 be driven, pelted by the will, spurred and be- 
 labored, and always it must be guided, for
 
 r 32 ] 
 
 never was so wayward and perverse a thing, 
 striking off to Boetian swamps, when the 
 course is to Helicon. Venus and Satyr, Para- 
 dise and Inferno, are aUke its creatures. And 
 Tantalus is its forbear. How often, how 
 pathetically often, has the artist after vigil 
 and travail, reached out his hands in hunger 
 and desire to grasp the shining image, to find 
 it is not there, or that what he believed to be 
 gold is tinsel. But none so indefatigable, so 
 pitiless of self, as he who has tasted the 
 sweets of creation. He will search the world, 
 aye all the worlds, and foot by foot, till he 
 find the treasure. Slowly the nebulous and 
 evanescent will take form, feeling be imaged 
 and vestured, and some old passion made to 
 smile, or blight anew. It is not a tree, nor a 
 cloud, nor a hill, nor a light, that imagination 
 seeks, not some particular glen, not some 
 particular shore, or city sky-line or abandoned 
 farm, but it is a cloud of clouds, a sea of seas, 
 a light of lights, a composite and fabrication, 
 but like in every feature, that will spell out 
 the emotion more poignantly and superbly. 
 This, the sublimation of truth, most bright- 
 ly beams of all] that meets our wondering 
 eyes.
 
 [ 33 ] 
 
 Sea, O Mountain, Sky, O Plain, are 
 you not mine, mine as my soul is mine? Am 
 I not around you, and in you, and of you? 
 Have I not found myself in you, mingled with 
 you, and possessed you? And the light that 
 breaks triumphantly upon you, that blazes by 
 day and caresses by night, is not that mine, 
 and am I not of it? In all of your power and 
 majesty and splendor am I not a part? Do I 
 not shine in evening star, glint on the wave, 
 glow in your glow? Is not my spirit every- 
 where, the color and the sheen and the warm 
 palpitating life of it? 
 
 1 rerftember to have seen in a Mexican 
 cathedral an old Spanish picture of the Vir- 
 gin. Her breast was open, showing the 
 heart, and in the midst of it was a lambent 
 flame. Very clear and steady it burned, 
 bathed in a rosy whiteness, and the beams, 
 pale and silvery, radiated to the golden frame. 
 It was not a picture of the Virgin so much, as 
 of a flame divinely placed. To me it was an 
 emblem of the spirit, alive in and illuminat- 
 ing the flesh. And those rays of light, had 
 the frame not intercepted them, would have 
 gone on and on, out of that dim and shadowy 
 nave, across the wastes of night, to find
 
 [ 34 ] 
 
 f- 
 
 lodgment in some other bosom. More pro- 
 found than feeling, more mounting than im- 
 agination, more intangible than thought, 
 spirit lies over against the infinite. It has 
 light, for we see it, warmth and cold, for we 
 feel them. It prevades like a perfume, and 
 surrounds like an atmosphere. All that we 
 see is tinged with it, all that we hear sounds 
 with it, all that we touch is imbued with it, 
 all that we know partakes of it. It is fine, and 
 pure and noble, and it is coarse, and base 
 and ignoble. It is ourselves; yet not neces- 
 sarily the selves we daily show the world, al- 
 though they too, of course, impart the subtle 
 emanation, but rather the secret and inner 
 selves that abide at the font of feeling and of 
 fancy. It is a sort of glamour and rarefied 
 habiliment, over and about the passions and 
 the imagination. It is singular and individual, 
 more so than feeling or imagination; they 
 
 may be similar, almost identical, in different 
 persons; but spirit is always peculiar and 
 idiosyncratic, and yet of so happy a quality, 
 that it blends best with the universal mind. 
 It ebbs and flows like the sea, today rising 
 and insurgent, tonight receding and sub- 
 missive. And its luminousness, ambient and
 
 William Ritschel 
 
 Light on the Sea
 
 j:iH08Tl51 I7IAIJJl¥/ 
 
 B98 9fi:r no IrlgiJ
 
 [ 35 ] 
 
 circumfusing, converts and transmutes thing 
 and matter into the incorporeal, to the end that 
 spirit holds and possesses nature, that nature 
 lives in the spirit, instead of the spirit in nature. 
 Feeling and fancy are but introduction and pro- 
 logue. As mountain and sea are swallowed 
 up in the splendor of sunset, are no longer 
 mountain and sea, but appendages of the 
 dominant resplendence, so infused and 
 pierced with light that they are light, and 
 for the moment severed from the gross rock 
 and water, existent alone in and as part of 
 the omnipotent brightness, so in the spirit 
 of man, all this teeming earth is transfused, 
 and has its being. Tree and field, hill and 
 valley, the sky, the air, the terrestrial whole, 
 live in us. Canvas and printed page, image 
 and description of image, are adumbrations 
 of spirit. As it is high or low, lofty or base, 
 strong or weak, so will be canvas or page, 
 treasure or dross. Feeling may be racial, 
 imagination tied to a people's knowledge, 
 but spirit is world wide, without confine or 
 barrier. 
 
 The ruck of men, as has been said, care 
 nothing for nature. She is a bed to lie in, a 
 table to satisfy hunger, and a sort of haber-
 
 [ 36 ] 
 
 dashery where hats and coats may be ob- 
 tained. Daily they see and feel and hear her, 
 as she affects their physical welfare, and they 
 are familiar in a general way, with her forms 
 and colors. They dwell in a perpetual twi- 
 light, ranging from the darkling and obscure 
 to the diaphanous and hazy. When they lift 
 their eyes to the sun, it is to learn the time 
 of day, and of the moon, they have made a 
 weather prognosticator. Indifference is the 
 rule, attentiveness the exception, and love 
 outside their sphere. World may have a 
 dozen meanings, but to most men it has only 
 one: themselves and their neighbors. Eve 
 is more captivating than Eden, Moses and 
 his tablet of laws more impressive than Sinai, 
 and John crying in the desert more inspiring 
 than the wild, lonely places of his roaming. 
 Men, the common and the average, loom big- 
 ger than the planets. Feeling, fancy and 
 spirit are theirs, not tokens of immortality 
 perhaps, but surely the crest and topping 
 pitch of life. The sea may not move us, nor 
 the stars stir our fancy, nor the scope of 
 heaven lift our spirits, but a cry of distress 
 will make us tingle, a speaking word fire our 
 fancy, and a Calvary etherealize us. To offer
 
 [ 37 ] 
 
 the generality of men, transcripts of trees 
 and ponds and clouds and hills and valleys, 
 is to offer them husks and stones. They want, 
 and will have, themselves. What quickens 
 feeling like feeling, touches imagination like 
 imagination, elicits spirit like spirit? The 
 master passions, imaginations and spirits, 
 those ultra-expressions of ourselves, are pools 
 of refreshment and delight. Small wonder 
 that the intimates of our being, the stuff and 
 fabric of us, should color our senses willy- 
 nilly, small wonder that when our weak beat 
 of feeling, our crawling fancy, and flickering 
 spirit, come in contact with tumultuous pas- 
 sion or deep sunk mood, the lift and swing 
 of surpassing imagination, or the white glow 
 of spirit, we are whelmed and immersed in 
 the higher powers, and become for the time 
 superior to ourselves. We see with eyes 
 other than our own, feel with a heart other 
 than ours, and stand forth in a vicarious 
 brightness. Thus we enter the upper cham- 
 bers, the ideal so-called, but in truth, merely 
 the realism of heart and soul. It may be a 
 gala under the myriad leaves of a forest, or 
 the destruction of a host in dark mountain 
 gorge, or desperate abordage in, "bleak dan-
 
 [ 38 ] 
 
 gerous sea-surroundings," that forms the 
 outer guise; that is subordinate, as secondary 
 as that northern castle where Hamlet met his 
 father's wraith, or the stream where poor 
 Ophelia perished. But feeling, fancy, spirit, 
 they are the zenith and the circumference, 
 the measure of life, and the field of art. 
 
 Some would have art an uncharted, rather 
 than an enchanted sea, and so bent are they 
 upon lifting a new world into view, they 
 voyage by the Isles without seeing them. Un- 
 discovered shores, brilliant birds in a land of 
 bloom, rivers that wind upon themselves with- 
 out source or mouth, cataracts tumbling out 
 of clouds, things curious, unfamiliar and 
 bizarre, allure them. Such is their heady 
 zeal, they do not consider, that the passion 
 driving them on, is the material of art, and 
 not the fantasia at the end of the world. 
 Change, they cry, is life, and flit from thing 
 to thing, enraptured with the novel because 
 it is novel, disdainful of the old because it is 
 old. Change is incessant, as of course, but it 
 is not universal; the primal and supreme 
 know it not. Their thousand aspects and ap- 
 parent alterations, are but phases. The 
 great things in our lives, are they not as
 
 [ 39 ] 
 
 various as the days, as diverse as the seasons, 
 and as constant? Art was art, when the 
 savage scrawled an aurochs on the smoky 
 wall of his cave, and when Millet painted the 
 Gleaners. The feelings of the tribesmen, 
 when with torch aloft, they looked at the 
 tremendous beast, were kindred to those of 
 the citizens, ages after, upon beholding the 
 women at their task. The savages saw the 
 chase, the charge, the trampled bodies of the 
 slain; the citizens their lives of toil. Each 
 gave and took their own. The cause, the 
 process and the result were the same. The 
 difference was mere growth, a widening out 
 and climbing up, and the incident of sur- 
 roundings. For art, always and everywhere, 
 is the imbuing of an object, or some tangible, 
 bodily thing, with the feeling, fancy and 
 spirit, characteristic of and belonging to the 
 period and the country, the embellishing of 
 the whole with what is thought to be beauti- 
 ful, and the casting upon all the semblance of 
 what is conceived to be truth. It is as simple 
 as a shaft of light on a bank. The quality of 
 the light will depend upon whether it be cast 
 by candle or sun; the quality of the art upon 
 whether it be cast by passions, fancies, and 
 
 X
 
 [ 40 ] 
 
 spirits, weak or powerful. And art is light, 
 opposed to the veiled and mysterious, ever 
 publishing and displaying. Verse may change 
 but poetry will not; music, but not melody; 
 the forms and methods of painting, but never 
 the subjects to be portrayed. No one is 
 fooled with dexterity of craft, or shifts and 
 tricks to cover emptiness, for men know 
 their city, and clamor without the walls 
 avails nothing. -We hunger for ourselves. It 
 is not change we crave, but a more complete 
 manifestation. Every day we look at the sky, 
 the field and the sea; we do not want another 
 sky, nor field, nor sea, but only, and bounteous- 
 ly are we served, new revelations of them.j 
 Our wondrous passage, the flare of earth 
 •f upon us, and our response, our amazing, ever- 
 opening, unsolvable selves, must be our chief- 
 est delight and deepest despair. Were we to 
 advance to the furthermost station, and scale 
 the ultimate height, there would be no de- 
 parture, no variance, but only a fuller com- 
 prehension. As well expect harvest at Christ- 
 mastide, or a show of strange stars on a sum- 
 mer's night, as an art not in harmony with the 
 primordial.]
 
 II 
 
 THE ATTENDANTS, TRUTH AND 
 BEAUTY 
 
 HAVING said that feeling, fancy and spirit 
 are the elements of landscape, I have 
 done no more I fear, than cry the hour from 
 the housetops, or declaim what every one 
 knows, that earth, atmosphere and light com- 
 prise the day, It is but a flourish, a pro- 
 vocative fanfaronade. Squirm as we may, 
 there is no denying, that our proud intellect, 
 with all its reasons why and causes for, oc- 
 cupies a narrower demesne than its humbler 
 relations, and only learns by hearsay, vague and 
 uncertain, of the out-region where they so 
 freely roam. It is there, across the confines, 
 the fountains break. Having with earnest- 
 ness contended that feeling, fancy and spirit 
 are components of landscape, I am now com- 
 pelled to admit, that I am in a great ignorance 
 concerning them, as I am of earth and at- 
 mosphere and light, but aver that I know 
 them well. Not for me to track the abyss, 
 or pioneer behind the sun; but the bright- 
 ness and the majesty are mine, notwithstand- 
 ing my incomprehension. And here is one
 
 [ 42 ] 
 
 of our mazes— a mystery not of art, for art 
 may display the sense of it well enough— that 
 we pass beyond analysis, classification and 
 definition, beyond the hard and fast of two 
 and two, and often enjoy most when we 
 reason least. But if the domain be wide, it 
 is not without its arbiters, who, if not as ex- 
 acting as those of the schools, are, if anything, 
 more difficult to please. 
 
 Bearing in mind that the purpose of art is 
 to enhance this present life, it is pertinent to 
 ask, what qualities toward this accomplish- 
 ment, may be added to or superimposed upon 
 those substances already considered. An 
 endeavor has been made to show, that the 
 objects of nature are but the materials. With- 
 out arrogance, but with conviction, we con- 
 sider this point maintained. It is equally 
 clear, that the human elements we have 
 been discussing, are also only materials, al- 
 though of a nobler order. A valley between 
 mountains, and opening to the sea, green 
 with the spring and roofed with azure, that 
 is one thing; the passion of spring, the joy 
 and the hope of it, all spangled out with fan- 
 cy, and the timid, sweet spirit that belongs to 
 it, that is another thing. And still there
 
 Charles H. Davis 
 
 Clouds
 
 8IVAG .H gaj^AHO 
 gbuoD 
 
 ^rr^ 
 
 .0
 
 [ 43 ] 
 
 is a lack. Valley, mountains, sea and sky, 
 joy and hope, the range of fancy, and spell of 
 spirit, one and all, are inadequate for the 
 complete presentment. Down the centuries, as 
 down some dark and labyrinthine way, emerg- 
 ing from the mists and slowly advancing, 
 and growing in brightness, as step by step 
 they come, even if now and then they cloak 
 their faces, are those two figures, toward 
 whom all men have held appealing hands, 
 and raised adoring eyes. As nature is lifted 
 up by the blending with her of feeling, fancy 
 and spirit, and becomes a charming go-be- 
 tween, so is the whole work and design, form, 
 color, mood and imagining, exalted and per- 
 fected by the gracious touch of Truth and 
 Beauty. 
 
 Of truth, there would appear to be two 
 main branches: that which we know by dem- 
 onstration of intellect, and that which we 
 feel by the exercise of other faculties. The one, 
 if indeed it be the truth, prevails everywhere, 
 and is the same at all times; the other, local in 
 character, may be truth today and falsity to- 
 morrow. The fine arts fall under the latter 
 division, and are subservient to as many 
 truths, as there are peoples scattered over the
 
 [ 44 ] 
 
 face of the earth. In art that is true which 
 is believed to be true. It matters not if it be 
 verity, if only it satisfies and convinces. As 
 it springs from life, it must conform to it; 
 not alone to that which is, but to that which 
 has been, and is remembered. That is truest, 
 which most nearly approaches the general 
 conception of what the true should be. It can 
 make no possible difference whether the con- 
 ception be true or not, measured by foreign 
 standards. Art is not a pathfinder in far 
 places, not a discoverer of the strange and 
 unheard of; but however it may go afield in 
 means and equipment, its steadfast purpose 
 is to manifest and exhibit, that which is al- 
 ready dimly sensed, and hence in a manner 
 known, but not realized; and to do it in such 
 fashion as to gratify and delight. It has 
 nothing to do with future generations or other 
 races; it is of its own day and its own peo- 
 ple. If at that time and to them it be true, 
 nothing else is of consequence. But I would 
 not be construed too closely; by time is not 
 meant the years of an artist's output, or by 
 people, a community or section; but more 
 largely, such as a cycle, and such as a coun- 
 try, with a common history and the same
 
 [ 45 ] 
 
 general outlook. It may come about that 
 distant nations, or remote times, may take 
 for their own another's standard, but this 
 would be indicative merely, that nations or 
 ages derived for the nonce, more satisfaction 
 from that specific ideal, and not that in a 
 thousand years or even a tittle of it, still a 
 truer might not be found and the old dis- 
 carded. Thus it is, that artistic truth is ever 
 in the flux, but ever tending and converging, 
 it must be, toward the final goal when 
 all the world will be one. Those old archi- 
 tects of the Nile, and of Babylonian palaces, 
 and they who chiseled the Attic porches, 
 who was nigher truth? or was it he who 
 dreamed the Taj Mahal? Certain it is, that 
 Egypt's truth was truth to her, and India's 
 to her, and as completely as ever was Greece's, 
 and that Egyptian and Indian arts were true 
 in those countries, however false they might 
 have been in Greece. 
 
 But although a people speak the voice will 
 be that of one man. The same thing may be 
 uttered by different persons, in different ways, 
 and given different appearances, and yet all 
 be true, for the general truth is made known, 
 only impressed by varying viewpoints and
 
 [ 46 ] 
 
 glossed by varying temperaments. A picture 
 of languorous clouds and slumberous hills, 
 curtained pillows of repose, is true; and a 
 picture of meadows, lulled and still, where 
 one might drowse himself away, is true. All 
 of the world's art is but the testimony of a 
 few, and all the truth declared their version 
 of it. While then, it may be correct to say 
 that truth is that which appears to be true to 
 a people, at or about the time of its produc- 
 tion, yet in a fuller and more complete sense, it 
 is the rendering by the individual, and as he 
 may feel and behold them, of the emotions 
 and conceptions of the many. The greater 
 artist will express the greater truth. - 
 
 To be an artist it is necessary to be a man, 
 and a downright worldly one at that. Never 
 yet has edifice reared its spires that was not 
 deeply foundationed. Those wan, ascetic 
 creatures, hermits and recluses, fearful of 
 life's plunge, have no place in art, for it is of 
 the stream with rush and swirl, and not the 
 shore. The artist is close product of the 
 soil, redolent of it, cheek by jowl with hussy 
 and knave, as well as virtue and worth, and 
 if his head be among the stars now and then, 
 be sure his feet are in the mire. Rhapsodists,
 
 [ 47 ] 
 
 souls cast from their moorings, and founder- 
 ing in their own illusions, are only pretenders 
 here. To the artist, life is not a spectacle, 
 but an occupation. Whatever he may add 
 to truth, by reason of his wider capacity and 
 profounder grasp, will not only be indigenous, 
 but broadly bottomed in the known and com- 
 mon. But it is a singularity of his cognizance 
 and a requirement of his profession that he 
 be engrossed, not so much with what a thing 
 is, as with what it appears to be. In a way, de- 
 ception lies at the root of the arts, for they 
 are all seeming. We are enamored of ap- 
 pearances. A mountain or forest or rolling 
 plain swims into view, and has a correct and 
 proper look, whether it be near or far, in 
 mist or sunshine. The appearance is true, be- 
 cause it is in accord with our teaching and 
 experience. We are aware, that mountain, 
 forest and plain, within and of themselves, 
 are of a different actuality, but we are ob- 
 livious of that, and tenacious only of the sem- 
 blance. So indurated and bitten into us is 
 the outward show, that we would believe 
 the substance itself false, rather than the 
 accustomed face of it. To this perdurable 
 and unyielding rule, the deeper verities lend
 
 [ 48 ] 
 
 their emphasis, all the more beguiling us with 
 their very potency; but as if to compensate for 
 the deceit, invariably the more intimate and 
 profound subtleties are distinguished, by the 
 more significant and enthralling appearances. 
 
 When in the contemplation of nature we 
 see fields, trees, rocks, skies, waters and light, 
 a consciousness is aroused of something ad- 
 ditional, of something quite beyond lake or 
 valley or desert or dawn, a compelling force 
 and power, and our kinship and affinity with 
 it. We catch the tremendous drift, at some 
 auroral hour feel the universal surge, know it 
 as our own and in unison go our way. It is 
 the exhibition of the appearances of such 
 concepts, the publication of those arrange- 
 ments whatever they may be, that most readi- 
 ly suggest them, which constitute truth indeed. 
 
 With feeling, fancy and spirit, (and like- 
 wise with that other attendant, for truth em- 
 braces all, and only the true can be beautiful) 
 it is the same. They also have appearances 
 whereby we know them. We look for the 
 familiar garb, and if we miss it, are as among 
 strangers. Our interest lies in the super- 
 ficies of the phenomena, and their harmony 
 with rule. A laugh, even if it be the apo-
 
 DWIGHT W. TRYON 
 
 October's Close
 
 <)V 
 
 'A0Y9{T .W THOIWQ
 
 [ 49 ] 
 
 theosis of grief, is nevertheless jocose. There 
 have grown in us by tradition and association, 
 perceptions not of the composition of feehng, 
 imagination and spirit, but of the appearance 
 of the results and effects of them; and if we 
 would be moved, our sense of the feel of these 
 appearances, must be reached. That only will 
 ring true which raises within us, something 
 kindred to our own preconceived notion of it. 
 With a world thus m.ade up, the painter 
 comes to his work. It is taken for granted 
 that he is familiar with the appearances of 
 nature, in detail and in mass, and the appear- 
 ances of feeling, fancy and spirit as observed 
 by most men. To these must be added, that 
 which is less definable and more subtle, some- 
 thing of knowledge, facileness and dexterity, 
 but more of an inborn gift and natural en- 
 dowment, a mastery of the commerce of thing 
 and emotion, the power to co-ordinate the one 
 with the other, so that the appearance of the 
 material will shadow out the appearance of the 
 immaterial, for the intangible has its aspects 
 no less than the substantial. Lastly, there 
 must be present, in the whole, the most enig- 
 matical of all, the personal touch, the deeper 
 and wider and more searching survey, that is
 
 [ 50 ] 
 
 the very scepter of truth. It is all as if some 
 loftier sun, might enlarge the horizon, and 
 cast an intenser light, and of different hue, 
 upon this same old earth. 
 
 More than once we have built about us 
 structures of such appalling magnitude, that 
 we have been lost in our own creations. The 
 simplicity of charm, like that of power has 
 given rise to theories, the most abstruse and 
 perplexing. When we consider the nations 
 who have fared from the primeval nest, their 
 manner of life, and the rim of their intelli- 
 gence, notwithstanding the lore that weighs 
 us down, little doubt can exist concerning the 
 causes of the beautitul, however great diver- 
 sity of opinion may prevail, as to what is or is 
 not, beautiful. Discover that which adorns 
 and delights, and beauty lies in your hand. 
 
 Whether it be ocean roaring from pole to 
 pole, or meteor flashing across the night, or 
 desert quivering in fiery heat, or summer's 
 tempest hurtling with ominous front to burst 
 in majesty on a world of green, or winter 
 rolling her sodden skies, or mountains linking 
 continent to continent and lifting their scar- 
 red and battled peaks, or rivers dashing in 
 glens, wetting the roots of pines, and grandly
 
 [ 51 ] 
 
 meeting the sea, or plains spreading endless- 
 ly, radiant with flowers, or tumbled with 
 wastage of another time, all is harmony, not 
 the smooth flow of the inane and complacent, 
 but the larger harmony which includes dis- 
 cord. Not clod, nor leaf of tree, nor wisp of 
 cloud, nor fleck of foam, but has its conflict; 
 but although shock and cataclysm may come, 
 there is never disaster; and warrings cruel 
 enough, only work the final peace. Nature 
 attains a consummate justness. Still she 
 carries with her the concord, and the perfect 
 unity of her source. 
 
 Of this general agreement and correspond- 
 ence man is part, swinging from his first 
 estate into the outer circles, and within the 
 lights of other worlds, yet never beyond 
 reach of ear. Civilization, with its glories 
 and deal of trumpery, has not estranged him. 
 Through bitter childhood, (bitter as wolf cub's 
 slaughtered in his hole) and freer maturity, 
 nature has passed with him, and never has 
 hand left hand. Compare the different stages 
 in their progress, and the relations in each, 
 and the beauty that burst from earth, and 
 blossomed over and over again along the 
 way.
 
 [ 52 ] 
 
 Far back in the beginnings, a land is 
 shouldered from the deep. Waves beat its 
 cliffs and froth on its desolate sands; forests, 
 dense and sombre, infested with beasts and 
 serpents, poisonous with vapors, gaudy with 
 bird and flower, stretch back from the sea; 
 level places, grown with rank grass, swept by 
 countless herds, and tracked by lords of prey, 
 succeed the forests; there are lakes and rivers 
 bordered with bamboo, and matted with rush, 
 fanned by a million wings; morasses, heaving 
 with wallowing creatures; mountains gapped 
 and chasmed, drenched with torrential rains; 
 and above a sky where tempests drive, and 
 lightnings dart, and over all, and in all, every- 
 where, the fierceness of the wild. Upon such 
 a theatre man sets his hesitating foot, and is 
 absorbed as flesh in new grass, or stream in 
 ocean. He prowls and stalks and fights, with 
 sole design to fill himself, clothe his naked- 
 ness against the cold, kill his enemies, and 
 escape the general doom. He lies on nature's 
 bosom, a savage tugging at a savage breast. 
 And yet there is beauty. Perhaps it is a 
 feather stuck in his tangled hair, perhaps the 
 tusk of an animal hung about his neck, a 
 pigment daubed on his cheeks, a shining
 
 [ 53 ] 
 
 Stone fashioned in lacerated ear or protruding 
 lip, the sheen of the sun on a pelt, or some 
 shape in stone or wood he has hid in the hol- 
 low of a tree. Whatever it may be, it adorns, 
 and is delightful to the extent that it embel- 
 lishes. All fits the universal scheme: in a 
 world of bale and ferocity, beauty takes the 
 common cast, and is as barbaric as the en- 
 yironment. 
 
 Far within the mountains, against the 
 northern sky, loom domes and peaks of 
 glistening white. In stately line they march 
 across the world. Southward they send out 
 tremendous buttresses, black with forest, 
 falling away in misty precipices, and rolling 
 in long, round, smooth hills, to the pasture 
 lands of the valley. Here, flowing eastward, 
 is a river, its waters jade-green. The rich 
 pastures run on into the south, rising to the 
 round, smooth hills, which in turn climb the 
 slopes and the beetling walls, and the forested 
 heights of another range, capped and pin- 
 nacled with white. The sun is in the west, 
 and swung across from northern to southern 
 bound, is the bright, resplendent blue of high 
 places. Birds of prodigious wing soar in the 
 central depths, and by the river, under trees,
 
 [ 54 ] 
 
 beasts lie at rest. Into the valley from the 
 east, pursuing the winding river, come for 
 the first time, herds of cattle and goats. 
 Long-haired tribesmen, half-naked and brown, 
 goad them on. Behind the herds are asses, 
 laden with red-clay pots, implements of agri- 
 culture, and for weaving, and household gear, 
 and following them, men and women, clothed 
 in loose white garments, and many children. 
 Straggling to the rear are other men and 
 women, of wilder look, with copper collars on 
 their necks, and bent low under burdens of 
 grain and tent stuffs. The mixed and heter- 
 ogeneous train melts into the scene, moves 
 under the blue sky, the white peaks, and by 
 the green river, with an appropriateness not 
 excelled by the herbage that is trampled 
 underfoot. A headman walks to one side, 
 looks about at the hills and mountains, and 
 in a level place near the water, thrusts his 
 spear into the ground. Slaves raise the tents, 
 fires are built, cattle, goats and asses graze 
 toward the high lands, and the smell of meat 
 on coals fills the air. Man has left the forests 
 and come out into the pastures. He is a mas- 
 ter of flocks, a cultivator of crops, weaver, 
 tanner, potter. He has departed from animal-
 
 [ 55 ] 
 
 ism, but not from nature, and the sun gone down 
 behind the western snows, leaves man and 
 valley locked in their eternal embrace. Beauty 
 has grown with him, changed as he changed, 
 mounted with his desires, and marvelous 
 transition, the world that was savage, is no 
 longer so. He wears the yellow tusk, but 
 now it is a jewel at his throat, the daub of 
 pigment has been worked into patterns for 
 tent and robe, the outline of wood or stone 
 is found in curve of vase, and for the light of 
 sun on fur, he has seen the shining hills. 
 Feeling he always had, but now there is charm 
 in the manner of it. Poetry has come, and 
 romance, crude and unformed as yet, but 
 truly themselves, and his life like the sky at 
 dusk, fills with a thousand stars. He beholds 
 the unseen, hears the unheard, catches some 
 little of the rhythm and unison between them 
 and things seen and heard daily, and dis- 
 covers, though as one groping in a mist and 
 peering for his course, that the delights of 
 earth which he has known, although losing 
 none of their delightfulness, are instrumentali- 
 ties to strange new lovlinesses, none the less 
 captivating because not grasped by hand or 
 visualized by eye.
 
 [ 56 ] 
 
 Where in old days the waves beat on des- 
 olate sands, a city rears its piles and throws 
 its banners to the winds. The harbor swarms 
 with craft, the marts are gay with fabrics 
 from far-off climes, lofty pillars carved and 
 fluted line the tumultuous streets, and the 
 houses, set one against the other, are painted 
 with every color. On what was once a shift- 
 ing dune, stands a noble temple. Back from 
 the city where the forests were, are fields of 
 wheat and barley, and meadows with cattle. 
 The morning sun glints on the harbor waters, 
 the metal-work of ships, the silks in the 
 booths, the windows and the roofs of build- 
 ings, the gold on the temple, and the pools of 
 water in lane and byway. The light strikes 
 ship and temple as kindly as sea and pool, 
 and tower and minaret swim serenely and at 
 one, in the opalescent air. Men are every- 
 where: in the rigging of ships, on the wharves 
 and strands, before the shops and the great 
 pillared buildings, in the streets, about the 
 temple, and in the green fields. They go in 
 crowds, even they who follow one in long 
 scarlet robe, and holding aloft an image, are 
 a crowd and motley jam. All is unrest and 
 turmoil, but befitting and in key. Man has
 
 George Inness 
 
 Sunset

 
 [ 57 ] 
 
 left the pastures and congregated in cities. 
 Again he has departed, but she who was with 
 him in jungle and in valley, is at his side. 
 Not wall, nor street, nor roof can part them, 
 nor can he so wrap about his soul with con- 
 vention, that she will not search it out. His 
 temples are but creatures of an hour, his 
 cities but caravansaries for the night, but she 
 is of all time. He passes from appurtenance 
 of earth to attribute of spirit, and she smiles 
 upon him, and voices his inmost thoughts. 
 From beauty to beauty he ascends, building 
 nobler edifices, conceiving sounds that ravish, 
 seeing sights beyond any earthly vision, con- 
 triving line and color into dream and passion, 
 and she takes him into her arms. Yellow 
 tusk, totem pole, dash of color and circlet of 
 silk, sparkling gem and sparkling eye, curve 
 of arch and sweep of line, depth of feeling, 
 richness of fancy, and purity of spirit, what 
 are they all, but lures of delight, adornments 
 and bedeckings, fruits of the communion be- 
 twixt man and nature, ordained in the first 
 design? 
 
 "Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads;
 
 [ 58 ] 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through 
 Thee, are fresh and strong.". 
 
 Of all the arts landscape lies closest to 
 nature. Not elsewhere may the living pres- 
 ence of earth be displayed so vividly, and 
 the mind be fitted with such matchless con- 
 joinder to its larger tenement. Other arts 
 may catch the spell of her, and in winged 
 words or glorious strains present her deep 
 significances, but it is a rendering once re- 
 moved, and hanging upon the subtlety of 
 another language. Landscape goes into field 
 and forest, and takes for her composition the 
 very forms and colors of nature. In whisper- 
 ing tree it is not words that whisper, but 
 stirring leaves; in light on pellucid waters, it 
 is not words that sparkle, but the light of the 
 sun; in ocean's beat it is not organ's roll or 
 orchestration, but the waves racing on the 
 sands, and dashing on the rocks. 
 
 In nature small things have small beauty. 
 A blade of grass, even with dew-drop pendant 
 from its tip, is not as beautiful as a meadow; 
 the leaf of a tree as the tree, nor the tree as 
 a forest; a rose, white as snow and half hid-
 
 [ 59 ] 
 
 den in greenery, is not as beautiful as the 
 bush, nor the bush as a cluster of bushes; a 
 wave is not as beautiful as a sea of waves, 
 nor a hill as a bed of them. The little cannot 
 escape their littleness, and are of import 
 chiefly in making up the big. The beauty 
 of the world lies in the broad spaces, in fields, 
 in forests, on the banks of rivers, the slopes 
 of mountains, in deserts, and by the sea. But 
 it is in a still wider realm we must look for 
 the ultimate. In those intangible paths 
 through the hollow kingdom of the sky, 
 where light holds sway imperially, it is there, 
 in tone and mass, beauty is royalist. Be it 
 ever so exquisite, how trivial is flower, or 
 bosky dell, or sequestered lake, and how far 
 down the scale fall forest and plain and even 
 the sea, compared with the pageantry of the 
 heavens, the strike of light and miracle of 
 air? Here from dawn to sunset the infinite 
 is displayed, leans furtherest earthwards, and 
 the night is as the day. Light and atmosphere, 
 they are the soul and heart of nature, her 
 etherial and diviner part, and although as 
 material and base as rock or bleaching bone, 
 they captivate and draw to themselves most 
 powerfully, those elements in us that more
 
 I 60 ] 
 
 nearly correspond to them. We attain with 
 them a completer harmony, and know a pro- 
 founder and more perfect beauty. 
 
 Beauty is never of one thing, but of this 
 and that, of little and of much, acting and re- 
 acting upon one another. The consumma- 
 tion may be attained only by the use of more 
 or less antagonistic parts, and oftener than 
 not, it will be the twanging note that lends 
 perfection. Great beauty in anything, whether 
 it be in poem, novel, cathedral or picture, or 
 in storm, summer, winter, dawn, sunset or 
 noon, is the supreme effect that may be 
 wrought out of the separate and distinct, and 
 if not conflicting, at least the opposing, ele- 
 ments employed. The midway passages, 
 phases of the turn, the drab monotonies of 
 the intervals, must always remain incon- 
 sequential. How we hearken and rise to the 
 mighty climaxes? In nature there must be 
 some tie, some kinship, some common sub- 
 stance, deeper and more intimate than we 
 know that binds us to her, so completely and 
 consummately do we, not merely join, but 
 unite with her. Hardly a mood but has its 
 counterpart, hardly a fancy that may not 
 garland itself, and never a spirit too rare, to
 
 [ 61 ] 
 
 commingle with and dissolve away in earthly 
 radiances. 
 
 Of the effects in nature which stir us deep- 
 est, are those of single appeal, simplicity in 
 complexity. Sunrise and sunset, light tri- 
 umphant, night, mountains, plains, the sea, 
 the profundities of air, the bending sky, 
 these, in their sovereign loneness, are the inap- 
 proachable. In all the plan, however mixed 
 and confounded, is order, regularity and sym- 
 metry. And next we perceive that eternal 
 youth of things, that newness out of the old, 
 that animation and movement that is life. 
 Continually we are opening our eyes, the 
 whole of us, in delightful realization of earth's 
 fecundity. There is no time, there is no 
 place, that life is not stronger than death. In 
 its processes is beauty perennial. All beauty 
 lives, is affirmative, and quickens with a 
 ravishing expectancy. 
 
 It is not possible for the senses to be 
 charmed separately from the emotions, nor 
 may they in turn know enjoyment except in 
 conjunction with the primary perceptions. 
 Only beauty conveys beauty. The lure of 
 thing is interwoven and intertwined with the 
 lure of thought, and the one cannot exist
 
 [ 62 ] ■ 
 
 without the other. Take, for instance, the 
 opening of morning, the flush, the Httle finger- 
 ings of Hght about the stars, the trembHngs 
 of things coming into life, and the flare of tri- 
 umph and conquest, is all this to be dis- 
 tinguished, from the amazed soul, that 
 mounts with each rosy ray, and swells into 
 a paean of joy and praise? 
 
 Beauty of feeling, fancy and spirit is beauty 
 added to beauty. Here are those fair wan- 
 derers in the pathway to the sun. Hardly 
 may we overestimate sensual beauty, not 
 alone for itself, and the gratification we re- 
 ceive from it, but for the reason that it opens 
 the way to other delights. But it is the wan- 
 derers, after all, that hold the compelling 
 charm, and not the path. Physical beauty 
 may start in motion those images and phan- 
 tasms of the mind, those trains of feeling and 
 fancy, that are more powerful than the things 
 seen or heard, but never do our hearts swell 
 to bursting, never are we so satiated with de- 
 light, as when directly fired by the beauty of 
 feeling, spirit and imagination. A further 
 and more delectable vista unfolds before us; 
 successions of ideas, and troops and proces- 
 sions of rare elusory beings that spring from
 
 [ 63 ] 
 
 the inmost and more imperishable parts of 
 us, move on and on, in fascinating pilgrimage; 
 we are caught in a sweet bewilderment, and 
 rouse from it as from a dream. 
 
 Up from and out of the all-pervading har- 
 mony of earth, beauty rises like a Venus from 
 the sea. As we may discern the melody, what- 
 ever the incarnation, be it of form or color, or 
 the winds that blow, may we know it. For 
 beauty resolves itself into music, no less of 
 eye than of ear. But rarely is it the giving- 
 off and breathing-forth of the substance of 
 things which comprise the charm, but rather 
 the effluence that comes from their bedeck- 
 ing, from that disposal and arrangement 
 which in itself is adornment, and the very 
 birth and fashioning of which in our apprecia- 
 tion, evokes delight. The concord and our 
 attunement, the union in bright image or 
 entrancing sensation, such is the beautiful. 
 In nature, this signal and isolated delight, is 
 found in the grace and richness of attire 
 which enfolds alike, particular object, and the 
 scene of its placement. In that beauty which 
 emanates from the seat and body of our life, 
 yet again the components seldom rest within, 
 but upon the surface. As in the things of
 
 [ 64 ] 
 
 earth, it is not that which is beautified that 
 enchants, but the allure of the apparel and the 
 position of it, the outward blazonry and not 
 the supporting frame, so in the other world, 
 it is not the fabric so much, nor aught that 
 comes from it, which wakes the ineffable 
 strain, but the visage of presentation, the ex- 
 quisiteness of guise. Here may or may not 
 be power, or height, or depth, or any of the 
 tremendous verities, but here of a surety, lies 
 delight. 
 
 We have one code for all. In littleness of 
 feeling, fancy and spirit, as in littleness of 
 grass-blade, or rose, or wave, or hill, and in 
 the little effects that may be compassed with 
 them, there can be but the modicum; only in 
 the compelling passions and sentiments, the 
 splendid flights of fancy, and the spirit that 
 exalts, as in the vast places, the light of the 
 sun, and the glory of the sky, may the master 
 results be worked and the ultimate attained. 
 Sadness may not be depicted on a leaf, nor 
 rapture on a pebble. 
 
 And as the beauty of light, sifting down in 
 forests, dancing on the waters, or breaking in 
 golden effulgence from black tempestuous 
 cloud, allures the eye and opens wide the in-
 
 Charles Melville Dewey 
 
 The Early Beams

 
 [ 65 ] 
 
 ner casements, so the beauty of feeling, fancy 
 and spirit, brooding in their recesses, laugh- 
 ing out their joys, bursting forth in unre- 
 strained power, captivates the heart, and 
 holds in spell each lesser ministrant.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE MORE IMPORTANT QUALITIES 
 OF THE MATERIALS 
 
 IF then, the material of the landscape 
 painter consists of the shapes and colors 
 of earth, and his work be to impress them 
 with feeling, fancy and spirit, all true and 
 beautiful and as part and component, those 
 qualities in both nature and man, that will 
 most strongly conduce to the highest attain^ 
 ment, must be of importance. Casting about 
 the world, and over the centuries that are 
 gone, prying into the lives of dead artists 
 and viewing their performances, we cannot 
 but ask. What is it all for? this tremendous 
 struggle, this amazing labor, and we cannot 
 otherwise than be convinced, that the thing that 
 at last compelled, that dominated life and made 
 toil pleasurable, was profounder and deeper- 
 seated, than the mere desire to organize and 
 develop form and color. Works of art, wrought 
 by the intellect, are but evidence, of the 
 mightier forces of our being. Like dark, 
 penetrable mists in deep solitudes, our emo- 
 tions lie within us, stirred and moved by 
 every questing air. Of the experiences
 
 [ 67 ] 
 
 of these, our more indeterminate selves, we 
 must speak. It is in the endeavor to expose 
 and publish them, to place outside that which 
 is within, more than to imitate and after 
 our manner perfect, that which is without, 
 that we seize upon form and color. Emotion 
 can but feel, and long for utterance, and then 
 mayhap, intellect will trap out with device 
 and cunning, that which it can never fully 
 understand, and never fully express. The stuff 
 of art is intangible, but the manufacture of it, 
 is matter of skill with the substantial. The ap- 
 proach is two-fold, emotional and intellectual. 
 I cannot conceive of an intellectual art, but 
 only of an intellectual display of it. The divina- 
 tion, the bloom, the cleaving joy, are substan- 
 tive and purely emotional; the control and the 
 portrayal, are operative and largely intellectual. 
 The way runs perilously close, and we have 
 the emptiness of craft, as in other arts there 
 is often naught but the ring and clash. Nor 
 would I be classed with those who languish 
 in emotion, and disparage if they do not dis- 
 dain, workmanship. To raise craft to ex- 
 pression is a task so prodigious, it is amaz- 
 ing, that the very stress and strain of it does 
 not destroy, more often than would appear to
 
 [ 68 ] 
 
 be the case, the idea or feeling that is sought 
 to be manifested. Who but the foolhardy 
 would deny, that all riches whatsoever, are 
 only fully valued, when they are dressed 
 and polished to men's desires. In this ma- 
 terial world, art must have a beautiful body, 
 as well as a beautiful soul, else the soul may 
 never speak. 
 
 When one seeks for the elements that will 
 best express his emotions, he discovers, that 
 as they are of a loose and flowing character, 
 vehicles of a similar kind, will most readily 
 lend themselves to their exposal. The emo- 
 tions, be they ever so potent, are attended by 
 a vagueness, a feeling of wandering in remote, 
 if familiar precincts. The purer the emotion, 
 the more removed from the sway of reason, 
 the less is the consciousness of definite shape 
 or form. We drift from a fixed coast of cer- 
 tain height and contour, upon a shoreless sea. 
 It can hardly be then, that emotion, being of 
 so fluid a composition, can find its freest ex- 
 pression, either within the set inclosures of 
 the curved or angular, or along their stiff, if 
 rhythmic course. 
 
 Line, however delicate and precious, in- 
 evitably leads to the diagram. Its prime func-
 
 [ 69 ] 
 
 tion, notwithstanding its esthetic power, 
 alike in art and mathematics, is to demon- 
 strate and hold; but color, sensuous and ec- 
 static, apprehends without deduction, and 
 eludes strict confines. By color I do not 
 mean the brilliant and gorgeous as contrasted 
 with the sombre and dull, but more the value 
 of things, volume without precision, masses, 
 which of themselves engross, and not so 
 much by intensity of hue, as by depth and 
 richness of suffusion of it, those interpenetra- 
 tions of tone with tone which appear to ab- 
 sorb one another in wondrous wholeness, like 
 notes in a song. As the arts progress, as they 
 abandon the staidness and rigidity of the intel- 
 lect, and cling to the warmer, if more erratic 
 emotions, from architecture to sculpture, and 
 thence to painting, poetry and music, line is 
 subjected and color placed in the ascendant. 
 Form and color are not so distinct and 
 separable as is commonly supposed. Noth- 
 ing, whether it be corporeal or incorporeal, ex- 
 ists without form, and form cannot exist with- 
 out color. To see at all, is to behold both. 
 What we call color, that is to say hue, 
 is a quality of form, and at all stages is form; 
 and what we call form, that is to say shape.
 
 [ 70 ] 
 
 is a quality of color, and at all stages is color. 
 Remove color from shape, and the whole dis- 
 appears; remove shape irom color, and all 
 vanishes. In the fine arts shape and color 
 are matter of employment, not of different 
 substances, but of the aspects and appear- 
 ances of one comprehensive thing. The re- 
 spective qualities may be so accentuated, that 
 color will predominate and shape be subjected, 
 as with light and air; or shape so advanced 
 that color will be subdued, as with trees 
 stripped of foliage, and masses of rocks. It 
 would almost appear that color is the living 
 element of form. In physical man shape is 
 so pronounced that color is secondary, and so 
 it is that the primitive and older art, which 
 deals with man, is largely dominated by line; 
 but in nature the opposite is true, and hence 
 the newer art which deals with nature, and 
 man as a part, is largely dominated by color. 
 It cannot be maintained, however, that shape 
 is the more striking characteristic of the in- 
 ner man, either of his soul by whatever name, 
 or of his general mental equipment. We are 
 more likely to conceive of the soul as a spark 
 cast from the central flame, and of the mind 
 as a force separated for a time from the
 
 [ 71 ] 
 
 eternal power, iridescent essences, color 
 aglow, than we are to conceive of them as 
 round or square, or oblong. If there be one 
 faculty of the mind more formful than an- 
 other, and more susceptible of concreteness 
 and shape, it is the intellect. Is there not 
 then, such a close agreement between the 
 make and composition of our spiritual and 
 emotional beings and the chromatic properties 
 of nature, especially of the deeper and ob- 
 scurer significances, that we flow out more 
 freely and find greater delight, in fields and 
 forests and oceans and skies of color, than in 
 those of shape? As shape is reduced to a 
 minimum in our spiritual and emotional 
 selves, and so as to be in a practical sense, 
 well-nigh absent, it must be that like qualities 
 in nature will appeal the most. As like to 
 like, intellect pricks her ears at shape, widens 
 her searching eyes, and grasps the mastery, 
 while spirit and emotion glide into color as 
 light freed from garish day, fades into the 
 dim translucent depths of still waters. 
 
 In landscape, whatever may be the case 
 elsewhere, it is chiaro oscuro or nothing— not 
 merely for the values, but because it is the 
 only means of so emphasizing color that
 
 [ 72 ] 
 
 shape may be adequate, and yet color para- 
 mount. Those scenes which whip us into 
 attention and keen observation, are they com- 
 parable with others, where there is no sense 
 of vision, no alertness, but only a falling 
 away in forge tfulness and feeling? Who re- 
 members the shape of sunrises or of sunsets, 
 or of moonlight on the fields, or of the woods 
 in spring or in autumn, or of distances, or of 
 starry nights? I know a plain, and a deep fir 
 wood, and a desert beside the sea. They lie 
 one above the other, the plain tipping to the 
 wood, the wood to the desert, but more ab- 
 ruptly, and it to the sea. Seen in the glare 
 of noon, or any strong light, either in part or 
 as a whole, they present a pattern stimulat- 
 ing principally to the intellect. Across the 
 eastern limits of the plain run black volcanic 
 mountains. The vast, bare expanse of upland, 
 broken with yellowing groves of aspen and 
 poplar, in patches of burned-up meadow, 
 spreads away, glittering in places where the 
 granite comes to the surface, but on the 
 whole, drab and gray. On their slope, the 
 firs mark a strip of green, with turrets of red 
 stone shooting high above the trees. Below, 
 tangles of manzanita and dwarf-oak, burnished
 
 Albert L. Groll 
 Harbingers of Rain
 
 jjohO .J THaajA 
 nft;5I to 8i9gnid"iBH
 
 [ 73 ] 
 
 like mirrors, shine amid wildernesses of fallen 
 rock. Far down and away is the sweep of 
 the desert, gashed with dry water courses, 
 and of a staring whiteness, and then the round 
 steely sea. The unflecked sky, a cope of 
 pure blue, closes around with the tightness 
 and precision of a lid screwed down. But 
 come among the firs. The huge trunks rise 
 in dusky luminousness to the twinkling roof. 
 A green twilight pervades the open places, 
 darkling down the forest isles into faint 
 misty blues, and vanishing in walls of ap- 
 parent black. Darts of light, warm and 
 vivid, strike the ferns, the rich brown bark 
 of the trees, and coves and nooks of shadow, 
 where they flash and are gone. A cluster of 
 pentstemon in full flower, caught for an in- 
 stant, glows fiery scarlet. Slantwise, from a 
 break in the roof, threads of yellow light, 
 soft and waning in the dimness, fall on a bank 
 of emerald green moss. Shadowy capes and 
 promontories, the darker adumbrations of 
 heavier bough or denser top, creep over the 
 ground, mount into the air, and approach and 
 recede from the central brightness. The 
 green of the fringy opening in the roof, the 
 green of the trees, and of the moss, and the
 
 [ 74 ] 
 
 brakes of fern, and of the pervading twilight, 
 fuse and interweave into a romance of greens, 
 and deep in all, with little sparkles coming 
 and going, and glints of gold, as if stray hairs 
 from the sun's great mane were caught and 
 hanging there, gleam the pendent rays. It is 
 on the plain, when the sun is gone, and on- 
 coming night invests earth and sky, that a 
 profounder note is struck. Over all that 
 sombre and solitary extent, hovering close to 
 the ground, as though sand, rock and scrub 
 were exhaling it, lies a fateful purple haze. 
 In long undulations it darkens away, and far 
 off in gloomy shades, are phantom lakes and 
 pools of mauve. The groves of aspen and 
 poplar, now half submerged in the purpureal 
 tide, like lost and foundered hulks, rest on 
 their shores. An uneasiness is abroad, por- 
 tentious of calamity, and as if at any moment 
 the plain might rouse and lift a face of utter 
 woe. Although night is in the sky, there is 
 no starry brilliance there. From the black 
 desert mountains, over the greater part of the 
 arc, sweep leaden clouds, with wisps of darker 
 hue, wind torn and ragged, passing beneath 
 them. A pale amber light from towering 
 vapors in the west, a light so wan and hag- 
 
 \
 
 [ 75 ] 
 
 gard as to seem the disembodied spirit of 
 light, falters and swoons away in the wind 
 blown rack, and the cavernous deep below. 
 The world is stark and cold. A few hours 
 later, from the desert shore, lift your eyes to 
 the east. Up an incline of shadow you gaze 
 into a lustrous dome. The sand dunes roll 
 from your feet into fields of blue; the steep 
 ascent of manzanita and fir and rocky pin- 
 nacles, now a bulwark of darker blues, and 
 violets soft as clouds, with long filmy alleys 
 where the canyons wind, looms unnaturally 
 high; beyond, over the invisible plain, a flood 
 of opaline light, mellow and smoky like in- 
 cense, fills the sky, with the tops of the moun- 
 tains just discernible, and above, the dwin- 
 dling moon. Silence broods upon the night, 
 and there is the peace of deep repose. And 
 then, from the highest pinnacle in the firs, 
 with sweep over plain, and wood, and desert, 
 and sea, behold the dawn. Like a resurrec- 
 tion it comes, glad and buoyant, and with 
 swiftness and might, launching beams into 
 the zenith, even among the stars, driving 
 darkness from the plain as with lashes, hurl- 
 ing spears among the firs, dashing like a red 
 host upon the turrets and pinnacles, striking
 
 [ 76 ] 
 
 with flights of arrows the last retreating 
 shadows on the desert, and thence out upon 
 the eager, expectant sea. All color, living, 
 creative, adorable color, the outward seeming 
 of what would appear to be, nature's bound- 
 less passion. 
 
 Arts principally dependent on line are for- 
 ever dead, gone with the ages that begot 
 them. Those mighty and well-nigh august 
 limners of old, architects, sculptors and design- 
 ers, are foregathered with the poets, drama- 
 tists and philosophers of their world. Men 
 are the same, everlastingly, but they wheel 
 with the centuries. Governments, religions, 
 sciences are discarded, and subtler schemes 
 devised. Can the wherewith of art which 
 charmed the Greek climbing his hill to 
 chiselled temple and chiselled gods, and the 
 Christian stretched before his cross, content 
 those of the present time who contemplate 
 the commingling, not merely of their dust 
 but of themselves, with the stars? Is it any 
 more remarkable or to be wondered at, that 
 architecture and sculpture should die as fine 
 arts, than that paganism should die or Chris- 
 tianity wane? Ever we tend from the deter- 
 minate, ever lean more closely toward the ab-
 
 [ 77 ] 
 
 stract. Arts incapable by reason of their na- 
 ture, of meeting changed conditions, and of 
 expressing the new hfe and the new vision, 
 must be thrown to the drift and wreckage of 
 the past. Despite that glorious spirit who 
 dreamed in line and sculptured in fresco, and 
 caught from heaven for Roman eyes the pan- 
 oply of a then triumphant faith, the day was 
 over and night was at hand. 
 V The ancients, and the moderns who sprang 
 up in the old fields like grain long after the 
 harvest was garnered, instead of beholding 
 nature blazing like a jewel, and man moving 
 in the splendor, applied the well-worn scale, 
 and saw angles, curves and pyramids. They 
 looked from man to nature, and not from 
 nature to man, and as a result saw detail of 
 line and not mass of color. The first attempts 
 at landscape showed the falseness of it all. 
 Color was reached through shape, whereas in 
 nature, shape is reached through color, and in 
 the loftier phases color exists without sense 
 of it. By color alone can the sensualness be 
 realized essential to art. Away with the cant 
 that teaches abhorrence of it. This world is 
 not better nor more delightful to the spirit 
 than to the flesh. That we might be eternally
 
 [ "78 ] 
 
 fresh and virile, and daily quaff to the dregs 
 the richness of it, that we might like nature 
 be ever new, ever rejuvenated, ever at full 
 throb and beat! Through the gate of the sen- 
 sual leads the way to paradise. There are 
 some who would believe that the white chaste 
 lily is not rooted in and does not draw its 
 sustenance from the reeking soil. The feeling 
 of the recent ages and of this, and those im- 
 pending, at once keenly alive to the physical 
 and its wholesomeness, and to the abstract 
 and the subjective, is too subtle and elusive 
 to be sufficiently incarnated in line. The 
 profound and intimate correspondence be- 
 tween soul and matter, the depth and bound- 
 lessness that we know is about us, the vague 
 up-merging of other worlds upon our ken- 
 sensations of these are more fully released 
 and suggested by a medium, limitless as the 
 sea and sky, loose and free as the air, and 
 bright as the sun. 
 
 To feel, to imagine, to manifest spirit, are 
 but the ordinary groundwork of existence, 
 and in their common apparel, no more to be 
 thought of than the passing day. If we are 
 to arrive at the qualities that give them dis- 
 tinction and pre-eminence, well-springs as
 
 [ 79 ] 
 
 deeply buried in obscurity as most origins, 
 must be looked into. Not color of skin, nor 
 form of nose, nor texture of hair, nor height 
 of stature, is further to seek or more indicative, 
 than color, form, texture and make-up of bowl, 
 of weapon, of banner and of temple. Out of 
 dark forests, deserts, fertile valleys, mountains, 
 plains, lands of gloom and sparkling sea-girt 
 isles, evolved mythologies, religions, com- 
 merces, domestic rites, and statecrafts as in- 
 evitably autochthanous as the minerals in the 
 earth, and the vegetation on its surface. He 
 who considers art superficial, of the outer 
 and superflous, and not of the blood that in- 
 vigorates and the thought that dominates, 
 has but to survey and in some degree com- 
 prehend the past. If when out of mists he 
 perceives this world, seaed and continented 
 and tremulous in light, and traces the zones 
 from band to band, perceives the nations go- 
 ing up and down and each growing unto 
 itself and putting on laws, practices, customs, 
 fit and peculiar, perceives cities here and 
 tents there, forests destroyed and fields plant- 
 ed, and again forests untouched but roamed 
 in and habited, follows caravans beyond the 
 curtains of the known and sails in ships be-
 
 [ 80 ] 
 
 yond the verge, sallies out with armies, hears 
 the shouts of victory and the moans of de- 
 feat, witnesses dynasties crumbling and new 
 lords crowned, perceives men flee from their 
 families as from the plague and taking up 
 abodes in caves and desert places, or bowing 
 to the sun, or in great chariots crushing the 
 blood out of victims like wine from grapes,— 
 if when the panorama moves before him, 
 from squalor to splendor, or it may be in 
 squalor still, he may gauge the aspirations 
 and the follies that made or undid each sev- 
 eral throng, he may with equal ease discern 
 the arts, for they will be upon the peoples 
 even as the garments that they wear. In 
 scroll and lyre and standard he may read. 
 And he cannot fail to discover out of the 
 thick and motley of it, how day by day, and 
 how from place to place, hand wrought for 
 mind, the one fashioning what the other de- 
 vised, how closely they accorded and twined 
 about each other, the strength of one being 
 the support of the other; nor can he help but 
 discover too, that that which was esteemed 
 the most, whether song or sword, was ever 
 the most adorned. 
 For the reason that the range of art is the
 
 BiRGE Harrison 
 
 Winter
 
 AUr'AHUJ .11 d.OAWl 
 
 istniW
 
 [ 81 ] 
 
 range of life, and the history of it the history 
 of mankind, perspective, composition and 
 coloring are not more important in its pro- 
 duction, than are the perspective, composi- 
 tion and coloring, that lie beneath and behind 
 it, for its understanding. We look too nar- 
 rowly at a part, even if it be compound and 
 residue of all. Those generous and luminous 
 intellects of science, do not gather truths by 
 peeping through their fingers, nor are last- 
 ing philosophies founded on segments and 
 extracts. In our enthusiasm we are not to 
 overlook that art is but parcel, and takes its 
 course and conduct from the general trend; 
 and that however lovely we may find it, it is 
 but image and shadow of deeper and wider 
 lovelinesses. As nature reared her mountains, 
 extended her plains, planted her forests and 
 blighted out her deserts, giving unto each 
 their peculiar attributes, so with like marvel- 
 ousness and as inexplicably, she endowed the 
 races doomed or privileged to dwell in them. 
 By one way and another, in the fullness of 
 time, the salient characteristics assumed place 
 and power. Life and death, the stormy pas- 
 sages, and the tranquil interludes, were com- 
 mon to all, but they spelled the mysteries
 
 [ 82 ] 
 
 with foreign tongues, saw with different eyes, 
 and heard with different ears. Like walled 
 gardens they grew, warmed by the same sun, 
 nourished by the same rain, but true to their 
 seeding; and if by chance some friendly wind 
 brought a fragrance from afar, it was only to 
 make more delightful the accustomed perfume. 
 The mandarin in Cathay, swathed in the web 
 he had spun about himself, and the Judean 
 slave, entangled in the mesh of his own in- 
 vention, were not farther removed in distance, 
 than were their canons of law and taste, and 
 the heavens that beckoned them, in character 
 and composition. From prayer to battle array 
 they surged divergent; and from their under- 
 worlds no song arose that was not cadenced 
 and in tune with them. 
 
 What therefore do we intend to express, 
 when we speak of depth of feeling, of power 
 of imagination, and of purity of spirit, of the 
 superlative, and truly great and noble in art? 
 Depth in what respect, power in what direc- 
 tion, and purity to what purpose? 
 
 If we are to arrive at the value of means, 
 we must consider the end. What are those 
 measuring cups that forever await the filling? 
 From this, the furtherest point of time I
 
 [ 83 ] 
 
 cannot help but see, like dimming stars in the 
 night, those who too have struggled toward 
 the ultimate urn, only to lose the way. But 
 if we be circumscribed about, and tethered to 
 a little plot, and shall never take the view be- 
 yond, we may at least turn our straining eyes 
 toward where we feel the dawn will break. 
 Of consummations, certainly those we hold, 
 or believe that we possess, and not those 
 which elude us, will control. Disguise it as 
 we may, and the attempt were idle, it cannot 
 be doubted that Jhe goal of every mortal is 
 some form of pleasure.^ Never a war, nor a 
 peace, nor a religion, nor a government, nor 
 a power, nor a wealth, nor a learning, never 
 a thing high or low, that did not in some- 
 wise pend upon it, and as for love, it nestles 
 in its folds. Always we desire, and pleasure 
 is fulfillment. Beauty and truth came into 
 the world, not separate and apart and of 
 themselves, but to make more pleasurable all 
 pleasure-giving things. For the essential 
 principle of beauty is neither more nor less, 
 than an accordance with our ideal of the de- 
 lightful, and the essential principle of artis- 
 tic truth, the gratification of our notion of 
 verity. It could not be that elements so
 
 [ 84 ] 
 
 potent would long remain auxiliary, and 
 times innumerable, beauty and truth have 
 been sought as ends of themselves, just as 
 religion and power and wealth and learning 
 and love have been sought. In this was 
 illusion and misconception, for beauty is al- 
 ways of, or belonging to, something else, 
 never of itself alone; and truth is but the 
 gauge and dimension of mightier things. 
 
 jThe business of this life of necessity lies 
 deeper than the gloss and polish of it. They 
 injure art who claim for it more than a bright- 
 ening of the flame. Surely the games at Elis 
 were more to the Greeks that the statues of 
 victors, the teachings of Osiris more to the 
 Egyptians, than all the colossi and sphinxes 
 that stare with stony eyes across the eternal 
 river. From the morning of the world, joy 
 has been more than song, victory than the 
 pageantry of triumph, religion than all its 
 glorious trappings. The pot was ever before 
 the vase, the passion before the poem. The 
 origin of art is use, and its test is usableness. 
 The art that does not further something al- 
 ready of value is worthless. In some parts of 
 the world by reason of climate, lack of nat- 
 ural endowment, or other untoward cause,
 
 [ 85 ] 
 
 art paused with the physical, but in more 
 favored regions it entered the altitudes of the 
 soul. But if its robes were more celestial, its 
 office was the same. There can be little dif- 
 ference in kind between the ornament on an 
 Etheopian warrior's shield, the figures on an 
 Etruscan tom.b, and a transfiguration of the 
 Renaissance; but merely the application of 
 a use to widening needs. As the subject 
 mounts, as it takes on preciousness and is 
 exalted in nobler manner, as it cleaves more 
 into the core and fibre of us, art too spreads 
 her wings and takes her supremer flights. 
 
 Subject is the vitalest thing in art. By sub- 
 ject is not meant the material objects set 
 forth, faces or figures, knickknacks of still 
 life, inanities of interiors, heaven piercing 
 mountains or loud resounding seas, but those 
 things upon which peoples feed and grow and 
 attain, those things which to them, more than 
 all else, are excellent and desirable. It lies 
 beyond the mere exercise of sight, the mere 
 largeness or grandeur of treatment, and has 
 to do with heart-beats and agitations of soul. 
 Better a work, mediocre in beauty and in 
 truth, on an important subject, than a work 
 great in beauty and in truth— if this may be—
 
 [ 86 ] 
 
 on a trivial one. For of what avail is beauty, 
 of what virility truth, if they be bound to the 
 inconsequent? What subjects shall be regard- 
 ed as capital by a people, is matter of ex- 
 perience, environment, temperament, char- 
 acter, and other causes, but once ascertained, 
 then depth of feeling is the most penetrating 
 sense of them, power of imagination their 
 fullest burgeoning and loftiest carrying out, 
 and purity of spirit, the elimination from them 
 of all dross. ' 
 
 To contend that modern man is further re- 
 moved from nature than his ancestry, is to 
 maintain that increase of knowledge and 
 freer communion have worked estrangement. 
 This, as between men themselves, is fallacy; 
 as between men and nature, condemnation. 
 Of what poor stuff are we, if having so mighty 
 a theme, we progress but to forsake and dis- 
 dain? It may be, that the disturbed and puz- 
 zled Thales, and the groping giants of follow- 
 ing times, in their search for that essence 
 out of which is all things, felt the force and 
 majesty of truths they could not unravel; but 
 always they looked, as from a vantage upon a 
 spectacle. Fire, water, air, were about them, 
 even of their composition, and of what they
 
 [ 87 ] 
 
 called "soul"; but there was no thought of 
 passage of the elements in them to the outer 
 elements, no thought of the fusing, or distilling 
 or dissolving of themselves in life, into and 
 with the mother flame, or the universal sea, 
 or the never-ending air; but an isolation was 
 preserved,— of like within like— an inviolate 
 inner presence. As exact knowledge grew 
 and beacon-like flashed higher, and it became 
 apparent, that laws were not less compre- 
 hensive than immutable, it was not past be- 
 lief, that men as well as star dust swirled in 
 indissoluble oneness. The emotions in their 
 dim and flickering realm, not alone perceived 
 the brightening central glow and in the 
 spreading radius, wandered into deeper and 
 remoter shadows, but long before the intel- 
 lect would award it, found true relationship 
 in what before had been regarded as only a 
 sameness. How delightful must have been 
 those first wild, shy venturings, those recon- 
 noissances, amid scenes that had once been 
 strange, but which now took on a singular 
 consanguinity? For long we have known that 
 this body of ours is more than a swaddle, 
 that however fleeting our stay, it is more 
 than an abode; but where about us shall we
 
 [ 88 ] 
 
 draw the circle, even to this day, and declare: 
 this is I, and this is not I? Not that heart or 
 mood, or any of the identities of us, is aught 
 but our own; but as they find lodgment in 
 the body, and partake of their habitation, and 
 it is nature's and as much so as any part of 
 her, what then in reality is the diameter and 
 where the circumference of us? Are we like 
 the rocks, crusted about and inescapably con- 
 fined, or like suns shooting their rays through 
 a universe? Is there not a transmigration, 
 temporary as are all our goings, a transmigra- 
 tion not of death but of life, a moving forth 
 of us outside of set bounds, so that in truth 
 we are citizens of nature's world, and not of 
 one principality, and too, that the particular 
 qualities which give us a constitution and pro- 
 claim us peculiar to ourselves, are never lost, 
 but remain to the end significant of us, and 
 not of the place where we may be? The recog- 
 nition, that nature now, in this our daily life, 
 is not external; that mountain, sea and sky 
 are not now severed from us by an impassable 
 barrier; that everything whatsoever is bound 
 to us and we to it, with living cords, what- 
 ever we may return to, or be, or become 
 after death, or were before our birth, and
 
 [ 89 ] 
 
 that wherever intellect may soar or emotion 
 pervade, there are we in the fullness and 
 power of individuality, is something not con- 
 ceived of, or if conceived not allowed, by the 
 older dogmatists, whether of the Mediter- 
 ranean's shores or Asia's desert plains. 
 
 Not that landscape is new, an improvisa- 
 tion of these latter days. The subject of it 
 is as old as humanity. He who wrote of a 
 world in making, holds before our eyes, not only 
 a firmament shot with lights, oceans in their 
 mists, and earth mantling with verdure, but 
 also something incomparably more excellent: 
 
 "And the Spirit of God moved upon 
 the face of the waters." 
 
 They too, who heard the morning stars 
 sing together, and the heavens and the moun- 
 tains break forth in joy, cast their invisible 
 selves into earth and sky and swung with the 
 revolving spheres. Have not men always 
 lived outside of themselves, and found their 
 being, not in a point, but in the range of their 
 comprehension? Those millions who have 
 run their span, hunters, shepherds, husband- 
 men, mierchants, soldiers, scholars, statesmen, 
 all men, everywhere, have they not felt, be it
 
 [ 90 ] 
 
 more or less, the rough cuffings and careless 
 maulings of nature, and her most voluptuous 
 enticements, and at the same time, and as if 
 superimposed upon the physical, terror or joy 
 or desolation or magnificance, qualities which, 
 whether recognized or not, were indubitably 
 human? If in their peregrinations they have 
 fallen upon certain attributes of matter, and 
 all unknowing endowed and clothed them 
 with properties and habiliments of their own, 
 mistaking in this wise the whole, sureJy this 
 is evidence, not of lack of knowledge of the 
 existence of a thing, but only of discernment 
 respecting it. Hardly would it be argued 
 that the law of gravitation is new, because 
 we have lately come to a clearer under- 
 standing of it. 
 
 But how long is the way, how tedious our 
 meanderings! Who may compass the arc 
 from dust to dust, from that primal garden, 
 to this our garden of the world? From our 
 earliest look into nature's eyes, how inter- 
 minable the period, to a knowledge of her 
 heart? Grass, flowers, trees, spread their 
 roots, sprang into the light, and availed them- 
 selves of every richness; beasts in sea and on 
 land, took utmost measure of well-being;
 
 t 91 ] 
 
 earth, air and sky knew completion with 
 creation; but such is the way with us, that 
 we come to our own tardily, and from sheer 
 inability to assimilate, are put to make-shifts 
 the most pitiable. How long was it after the 
 impulse to sing before there was a song (with 
 birds singing everywhere), how long after the 
 impulse to paint, before there was a picture 
 (with every plain and hill and wood hung with 
 them)? With what incalculable difficulty does 
 a people fabricate, with what labor deliver 
 themselves; and once they have an art, how 
 prodigious are the loads they heap upon 
 it, and through what diverse ways do they 
 drive it? Arts, one and all, are but divaga- 
 tions of the ancient stem of words. In words 
 man first fared outward, with them first came 
 to grip with the finite. His most intimate coin- 
 age, they were currency in every commerce. In 
 them he clothed the Pleiades, and with them 
 paid his rent. Here, statue, picture and 
 music found vesture before there was thought 
 of stone, or brush or instrument, and from 
 the common motherhood inherited common 
 strains. Sculpture was transmutation into con- 
 creter shape, painting into that same shape 
 with color more pronounced, and music into
 
 [ 92 ] 
 
 both shape and color, and measured sound. 
 But these things were more than words: 
 a language, they were new-voiced; fruits, they 
 were transcendent. They were a laying hold 
 and taking up of actual shapes, colors and 
 sounds in Heu of indicia; chords that trem- 
 bled, where the old were inarticulate or mute. 
 As with leading strings nature was drawing 
 us closer to her. From image in clay, to 
 that of wood, stone, bronze, marble, from de- 
 sign of crossed sticks to delineation in line 
 and color, from rude sound to rhythm and 
 melody, in it all we were accepting the in- 
 vitation to come forth of ourselves, and join 
 the universal throng. But the way was be- 
 set and encompassed about. Meanings were 
 to be arrived at and placed in becoming ap- 
 parel. There was none to remember the 
 fashioning of words, nor how they came to 
 their attributions. Thought and word ap- 
 peared twinborn, when they were centuries 
 apart. It was all very well for the poet to 
 sing and send out his words like doves to 
 their homing, but who was there to put love 
 in a look, or hate in a gesture, to tie senti- 
 ment to a smile or fix mood on a brow? And 
 then, after some fair command, came a time
 
 [ 93 ] 
 
 as amazing as any in the evolution of art. 
 With a poetry like some bright spirit greeting 
 the dawn, or flitting down forest isles, 
 or riding the storm, or venturing into those 
 dim and melancholy tracts where night holds 
 sway; with a painting raised to such perfec- 
 tion, that emotion was free as an angel in its 
 flight, man set himself amidst accessories, 
 stiff, foreign and removed. In those pictures 
 where hill or lake or grotto was to be found, 
 as with a knife you might separate the living 
 figure from the dead nature. That man in 
 poetry, should course through nature's veins, 
 that he should so depict his carnal frame that 
 soul reached soul, and at the same time, and 
 for so long a stretch, surround himself with 
 the strange and alien apparitions that back 
 and sometimes fill the older pictures, is not 
 less matter of wonderment, than mortifica- 
 tion. But so it is; we approach, only to fal- 
 ter at the door. 
 
 For the western world the door opened 
 full on the Adriatic. In that islanded city, 
 poised between sea and sky, wedded none the 
 less securely to heaven because in love with 
 earth, in that city where lagoon, palace and 
 cloud were invested with an atmosphere ten-
 
 [ 94 ] 
 
 der and sensuous as mother-of-pearl, and as 
 ethereal as the blues of star heraldings, in 
 that city of wealth of living, and from whose 
 every window enchantment piled on enchant- 
 ment, where magnificence of color overwhelm- 
 ed form, and emotion swelled in mastery, where 
 the whole splendid scheme was of a piece, 
 and abstract and concrete, thought and act- 
 uality, blended and interfused one with the 
 other, graphic landscape, as we understand 
 it, first came into being. 
 
 We have to consider then, the way we have 
 come, the valleys we have tarried in, and the 
 rough hills we have climbed, for more than the 
 artist is required for art. They who argue that 
 subject is of little consequence, and manner 
 more than component, appear to forget the 
 place of art. As art never has ruled the world, 
 but like some joyous captive followed the con- 
 queror, scarcely may it create or ordain subjects 
 of its own. Life is the sower and the reaper, 
 and art but a helper at the harvest. Is it to be 
 believed that men, aside from the struggle for 
 preferment and subsistence, benighted as to 
 their past, enamored of the present, and tor- 
 mented over the future, looking covetously here 
 and longingly there, have inclination for aught
 
 [ 95 ] 
 
 but that which nearly concerns them? will 
 place value on that which will not purchase 
 entrance into houses of desire? Who sets the 
 pace but the runners, and the prize, who 
 dictates that? Peoples proclaim subjects; the 
 arts but illustrate and adorn them. We are 
 the children of many fathers, the heritors of 
 fortunes innumerable. We reach into the 
 past like a stream into the mountains, made 
 of a thousand springs. For us are the poets 
 and prophets of Israel; the round-limbed 
 Greek with soil of earth in his hands, and 
 divinity in his eyes; the isolated and gloomy 
 Egyptian, deifying a beetle and comrading 
 with death; Gotama under the shade of a tree, 
 and Christ in a manger, Nirwana and life 
 everlasting; the fetishism of the Etruscan, the 
 sunworship of the Persian, the lasciviousness 
 of the Mohammedan, and the asceticism of 
 the hermits and cenobites of the Thebaid; the 
 sottish grounding and blind credulity of the 
 Middle Ages, and the return of the Renais- 
 sance, glad and glorious, like a spring after 
 many winters; for us all the voices of long 
 perished multitudes, the ornamentations that 
 like lamps brightened and eased the path, 
 the lovely twilights of spirit that still glow
 
 [ 96 ] 
 
 about us, and the wonderments of this world. 
 Out of the abundance, in part freely and in 
 part whether we would or not, we have 
 chosen; out of confusion and contrariety 
 shaped our creed. In love with earth as never 
 before, floating out upon it and losing our- 
 selves as clouds are lost in the sky, growing 
 out of rocks and loam with trees, and with 
 them mouldering back again, leaping with 
 the sunbeams and vanishing with them, glid- 
 ing down streams to unfathomed gulfs, im- 
 mersing in them and by them absorbed, peer- 
 ing into caverns fearsome and terrible, and 
 coalescing with the darkness, we still and at 
 the same time with it all, carry in our breasts 
 the radiant hope, that while we are creatures 
 of time, we are also, "nurslings of immortal- 
 ity." Many natures have but magnified Her, 
 many gods but glorified Him; by this we 
 swear; but although we have merged with 
 land and water, and claim kinship with the 
 Almighty, in sober reality, the essence that 
 is you and me, will it pass like the flame that is 
 blown? Our place here, and whither and 
 what? this bright fair wood of throstle and 
 brook, and those perilous ultimate seas? Our 
 lips are still praying, our eyes still searching,
 
 Ernest Lawson 
 The Further Heights
 
 fhAi 

 
 i
 
 [ 97 ] 
 
 as lips and eyes have always prayed and 
 searched. Closer to the heart, are the throbs 
 less inscrutable? full length on earth are the 
 trembles less mysterious? Are not our pro- 
 founder thoughts as of old, differing most 
 between now and then, in a falling away of 
 overweeningness, and a recognition of wider 
 brotherhood? In the midst of ocean, in the 
 broad and starry sky, in the light of the sun, 
 the uplift of mountains and the sweep of 
 plains, we have discovered ourselves, found 
 likenesses, not of feature or stature, but of 
 properties and constituents. In space and 
 color it is possible to find keen delightfulness 
 of existence, a satisfaction of our inordinate 
 craving, and an approach to the insoluble. 
 We look, not on a man, nor set of men, 
 isolated and confined, but with all the eyes 
 that have ever opened in our past, and upon 
 all that they have ever seen, upon one strong, 
 perpetual, all-pervading life, and our so 
 strange part throughout it. The portrayal, 
 in nature's garb, of what we see and feel, is 
 landscape. It comes in a hundred ways, joy, 
 peace, splendor, desolation, vastness, fear, 
 mystery, an unutterable vagueness, silence, 
 elegance, grace, hope, adoration, power, long-
 
 [ 98 ] 
 
 ing, ominousness, and a certain inexorable- 
 ness, sublimity, aspiration,— the perturbations, 
 strivings and exaltations of the individual in 
 touch with the universal and omnipotent. 
 
 "0 more than Moon! 
 
 Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, 
 Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear, 
 To teach the sea what it may do too soon." 
 
 To us, then, depth of feeling in landscape 
 is the lively realization, and as viewed in the 
 spectroscope of our peculiar experience, of 
 nature's aspects, meanings and imports; of 
 certain simple and fundamental emotions, 
 some of which have been mentioned, and of 
 their participation and relationship with them; 
 the furtherest reaching beyond the frontier 
 of that country where earth and sea and man, 
 appear as one; power of imagination is the 
 fitting incarnation of things seen and unseen, 
 the organization and arrangement of them, 
 the marshalling of the forces of the two 
 worlds, and the driving of them in full array 
 across the sky of the mind; and purity of 
 spirit is the delicate investiture of the clear 
 light or luminousness, that seems at once, 
 the soul of nature and of man.
 
 [ 99 ] 
 
 But, notwithstanding what has been said 
 of the material world, and of those faculties 
 of the mind I have so often referred to, and 
 the attendants that await upon both, it is only 
 in their proper combination that they are of 
 moment. Earth, air and light are but scenes, 
 and feeling, fancy and spirit, a company of 
 players. For the performance, all must be 
 got in place, perked up and set in unison. 
 Not only is there necessity for so arranging 
 the scenes that they will agree, one with an- 
 other, and of so adjusting the players among 
 themselves that they shall harmonize, but 
 there is the necessity, of weightier account, 
 of managing the whole in such fashion, that 
 the peculiarities of scenes and actors, while 
 singular enough, will, in a sense be lost sight 
 of, and the entirety gives aspects and qualities, 
 not attachable to any of the consistencies, but 
 belonging to the totality. Here, in the focus 
 of united presentment, the final agreement of 
 part with part, and of part with whole, lies the 
 unfolding volume. Viewed in a cursory way, 
 it may seem that the employment of the units 
 is more matter of accomplishment than of 
 substance, but I do not so regard it, for land- 
 scape is neither nature nor man, but a result
 
 [ 100 ] 
 
 produced by their union. Were they num- 
 bered one and two respectively, we might 
 number three something composed of both, 
 and yet of a distinct individuaHty. It was 
 only the other day there befell an occurrence, 
 which so satisfactorily expresses what is in 
 my mind, that I can do no better than speak 
 of it. I sat on the slope of a high mountain, 
 and at a place of such loftiness, that the oaks 
 and pines grew together. Before me, miles 
 away, lay a barren valley, wide and long and 
 almost flat, broken with sand washes, and 
 variegated with clumps of mesquite and creo- 
 sote bush, and groves of giant cactus. On 
 my left, somewhat advanced, and forming the 
 head of the valley, a solitary peak towered 
 above the timber of a cross range, and direct- 
 ly in front of me, across the valley, and at a 
 great distance, range soared above range and 
 peak above peak. At my right, and west- 
 wardly the valley broadened, and was lost in 
 a mountainous horizon. It was about half 
 past eight of a summer evening, the heat of 
 the day had been intense, and no rain had 
 fallen for months. As if by some conjuration, 
 the structure that was earth and sky began 
 to lose its stability and fixed design, and there
 
 [ 101 ] 
 
 did not appear to be any sky nor any earth. 
 Apparently coming from nowhere, for the 
 sun was gone, omnipresent, fiUing the bowl 
 before me, and that other bowl above, dis- 
 integrating and dissolving the ranges, blurring 
 out the floor of the valley, and bringing down 
 in falling clouds of richness the far reaches 
 of the sky, was a crimsoned, wine-tinctured 
 candescence, all warm and permeable and 
 translucent, a splendid roseate gloom— the 
 desert afterglow. I appeared to be in the 
 midst of it, and far sunk, as in a sea. Into 
 those profound depths I gazed, rapt with a 
 mystery and beauty inexplicable; and then, 
 as if no longer clogged and bound, and with 
 no thought, but only a longing, I ventured 
 forth upon, and into that intangible bright- 
 ness, and wandered there, light and free, ob- 
 livious of all vexed and fretful things, and 
 with a great joy throughout me, and ever 
 mounting and exulting, like one, 
 
 "endowed 
 With deathless life, that knows no touch of 
 age."
 
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