n, it is the subject of the writer, and not his
skill,--his passion, not his power, on which our minds are fixed. We see
as he sees, but we see not him. We become part of him, feel with him,
judge, behold with him; but we think _of_ him as little as of ourselves.
Do we think of Aeschylus while we wait on the silence of Cassandra,[G] or
of Shakspeare, while we listen to the wailing of Lear? Not so. The power
of the masters is shown by their self-annihilation. It is commensurate
with the degree in which they themselves appear not in their work. The
harp of the minstrel is untruly touched, if his own glory is all that it
records. Every great writer may be at once known by his guiding the mind
far from himself, to the beauty which is not of his creation, and the
knowledge which is past his finding out.

And must it ever be otherwise with painting, for otherwise it has ever
been. Her subjects have been regarded as mere themes on which the
artist's power is to be displayed; and that power, be it of imitation,
composition, idealization, or of whatever other kind, is the chief
object of the spectator's observation. It is man and his fancies, man
and his trickeries, man and his inventions,--poor, paltry, weak,
self-sighted man,--which the connoisseur forever seeks and worships.
Among potsherds and dunghills, among drunken boors and withered
beldames, through every scene of debauchery and degradation, we follow
the erring artist, not to receive one wholesome lesson, not to be
touched with pity, nor moved with indignation, but to watch the
dexterity of the pencil, and gloat over the glittering of the hue.

I speak not only of the works of the Flemish School--I wage no war with
their admirers; they may be left in peace to count the spiculae of
haystacks and the hairs of donkeys--it is also of works of real mind
that I speak,--works in which there are evidences of genius and workings
of power,--works which have been held up as containing all of the
beautiful that art can reach or man conceive. And I assert with sorrow,
that all hitherto done in landscape, by those commonly conceived its
masters, has never prompted one holy thought in the minds of nations. It
has begun and ended in exhibiting the dexterities of individuals, and
conventionalities of systems. Filling the world with the honor of Claude
and Salvator, it has never once tended to the honor of God.

Does the reader start in reading these last words, as if they were those