aware how much of what we see in Nature is due to pictures. Hardly any
man is so unsophisticated, but that, if he should try to sketch a
landscape, he would betray, in what he did or in what he omitted, that
he saw it more or less at second-hand, through the interpretations of
Art. A portfolio of Calame's or Harding's or Turner's drawings will give
us new eyes for the most familiar scenes.

But we are aided still more by our habit of looking at things
theoretically, apart from their immediate practical bearing. A savage
can comprehend a carved image, but not so readily a picture. An Indian
whom Catlin painted with half his face in shadow became the
laughingstock of the tribe, as "the man with half a face." It is not
necessary to suspect Mr. Catlin's chiaroscuro; what puzzled them was,
doubtless, the bringing together in one view what they had seen only
separate. They were accustomed to see the man in light and in shadow;
but what they cared for, and therefore what they saw, was only the
effect in making it more or less easy to recognize him and to ascertain
his state of mind, intentions, etc. His face was either visible or
obscured; if they could see enough for their purpose, they regarded only
that. For it to be both at once was possible only from a point of view
which they had not reached. A child takes the shading of the portrait
for dirt,--that being the form in which darkening of the face is
familiar to him. A carved image is easier comprehended, because it can
be handled, turned about, and looked at on different sides, and a
material connection thereby assured between the various aspects. To
transfer this connection to the mind--to see varying distances in one
vertical plane, so that mere gradations of light and shade shall suggest
all these aspects arranged and harmonized in one view--is a farther
step, and the difficulty increases with the variety embraced. Cicero was
struck with this superiority in the artists of his time. "How much," he
says, "do painters see in shadow and relief that we do not see!" Yet
their perception seems strangely limited to us. The ancients had little
notion of perspective. Their eyes were too sure and too well-practised
to overlook the effect of position in foreshortening objects, and they
were much experienced in the corrections required, and the effect of
converging lines in increasing apparent distance was taken advantage of
in their theatre-scenes. But they had not learned that the