genuine Middle Ages on the
other, in the degree of interest taken respectively by each in external
nature, the seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us into
closest contact with them both.

There is, of course, a considerable difference between the manner in
which the country, its aspects and occupations, are treated by the poets
of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them
of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a
modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth
or Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode; and is not
greater, I think, than the difference between the descriptions in the
"Allegro," and the descriptions in "Men and Women;" than the difference
between the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of the
country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the bushes, the
ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small creatures; and the pleasure
of our own contemporaries in the larger, more shifting, and perplexing
forms and colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The description
of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the attention and
appreciation given to them, are things of our own century, even as is
the power and desire of painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our
artists of to-day, is a very recent thing; so recent that even in the
works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest landscape painter in the
modern sense, we are forced to separate from the real rendering of real
effects, a great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are arranged and
distributed as a mere vast conventional piece of decoration. Nor could
it be otherwise. For, in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a
separate and substantive art only when the interest in the mere ins and
outs of human adventure, in the mere structure and movement of human
limbs, had considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or drama,
only for such little scraps of description as will make clearer, without
checking, the human action; as there is place, in a fresco of a miracle,
or a little picture of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian
dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim plain, or
blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in the gaps between head and
head, or figure and figure.

Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist between what would be
felt and written about the country and the seasons by an a