the scene will
possess one or two predominant effects, it will produce also one or, at
most, two or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions. The art
which deals with impressions, which tries to seize the real relative
values of colours and tints at a given moment, is what you call
new-fangled: its doctrines and works are still subject to the reproach
of charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and it only, by
giving you a thing as it appears at a given moment, gives it you as it
really ever is; all the rest is the result of cunning abstraction, and
representing the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an
average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that in questions of
history we can proceed upon the principles of modern landscape painting:
we do not know what were the elevations which made perspective, what
were the effects of light which created scales of tints, in that far
distant country of the past; and it is safer certainly, and doubtless
much more useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as seen
neither from here nor from there, neither in this light nor that, and
let each man imagine his historical perspective and colour value to the
best of his powers. Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the
people who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other marvellous
diagram constructed on the principle of getting at the actual qualities
of things by analysis; that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a
series of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied schemes
of colour, according to the position of each individual, and the light
in which that individual viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those
various perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various
value-determining lights, would be to the last degree disastrous; we
should have valleys where there existed mountains, and brilliant warm
schemes of colour where there may have been all harmonies of pale and
neutral tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of individual
minds there must have been; and since it is not given to us to reproduce
those of the near spectator in a region which we can never enter, we may
yet sometimes console ourselves for the too melancholy abstractness and
averageness of scientific representations, by painting that distant
historic country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges and
shimmering plains really appear in their combination of form