e, I lacked faith in that
world wherein I have found help and comfort.

* * * * *

ON THE RELATION OF ART TO NATURE.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART I.

The notion that Painting and Sculpture are concerned only with the
"imitation of Nature,"--that is, with copying the forms and colors of
existing things,--though so often expelled, as it were, with a
pitchfork, persistently recurs, not only in popular talk, but in
deliberate criticism, and in the practice of artists. There are periods
when this notion gets the upperhand, as at the end of the fifteenth
century, and again at the end of the eighteenth, when Rousseau
prescribed a return to Nature as the panacea for all defect, in Art as
elsewhere. Then Winckelmann and his successors triumphed over it for a
while,--showed at least the crudity of that statement. This is the
purpose of much of Sir Joshua Reynolds's lectures. Now it seems to be
coming up again,--thanks partly to Mr. Ruskin, though he might be quoted
on both sides,--and this time with some prospect of demonstrating, by
the aid of photography, what it does in fact amount to.

It is a very general opinion that photography has made painting
superfluous,--or, at least, that it will do so as soon as further
improvements in the process shall enable it to render color as well as
light and shade. And our artists seem to give in to this view, in the
deference they show to the subject, as if it mattered not so much what
it was, or how, as that it is _there_,--a pious tenderness towards barns
and rail-fences and stone walls and the confused monotony of the forest,
not as having any special fitness, not as beautiful, but because they
exist,--a scrupulous anxiety to give the every-day look of the objects
they portray, as any passer-by would see them, free from any distorting
personality. To do them justice, however, this submissiveness to the
matter-of-fact, with the more gifted at least, is a virtue that is
praised and starves. They do it lip-service, and suppose themselves
loyal; but when they come to paint, they are under a spell that does not
allow them to see in things only material qualities, but, without any
violence to Nature, raises it to a higher plane, where other values and
other connections prevail. Art, where it exists to any serious purpose,
follows Nature, but not the natural,--according to Raphael's maxim, that
"the artist's aim is to make things not as Nature makes them, but as