she
intends them."

But these audacities, though they make their own excuse in the work
itself, do not pass in a statement without cavil at the arrogance that
would exalt the work of men's hands above the work of God. Shall we
strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of
form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made? What room for
Art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendors of the actual world?

But if that be all, how to account for the existence of Art as distinct
from upholstery? Why pile our mole-hills by the side of the mountains?
We can see the landscape itself any day;--whence this extraordinary
interest in seeing a bit of it painted,--except, indeed, as furniture
for the drawing-room, to be ordered with the frame at so much the yard
from the picture-dealer?

The root of the difficulty lies in this slippery phrase, Nature. We talk
of the facts of Nature, meaning the existence now and here of the hills,
sky, trees, etc., as if these were fixed quantities,--as if a house or a
tree must be the same at all times and to everybody. But in a child's
drawing we see that these things are not the same to us and to him. He
is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke,
the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the
divisions of the bricks and the window-panes: but for what is
characteristic and essential he has no eye. He gives what the house is
to him, merely _a house_ in general, any house; it would not help it,
but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the
lines. An artist, with fewer and more careless lines, would give more of
what we see in it; and if he be a man of high power, he may teach us in
turn the limitation of our seeing, by showing that the vague,
half-defined sentiment that attaches to it has also a visible
expression, if we knew where to look for it.

We hear people say they know nothing of Art, but that they can judge as
well as anybody whether a picture is like Nature or not. No doubt
Giotto's contemporaries thought so, too, and they were grown men, with
senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, "There was
nothing in Nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil,
the pen, or the brush, so like that it seemed not merely like, but the
thing itself." We smile superior, but Giotto had as keen an eye and as
ready a hand as any man since. The lesson is, that we, too,