e weary
wayfarer must be seen sitting upon a broken column. He might
wear a toga and then be Marius among the ruins of Carthage. The
landscape without figures would have seemed meaningless; the
spectator would have sat in suspense awaiting something, as at
the theatre when the curtain rises on an empty stage. The
indeterminateness of the suggestions of an unhumanized scene was
then felt as a defect; now we feel it rather as an exaltation. We
need to be free; our emotion suffices us; we do not ask for a
description of the object which interests us as a part of ourselves.
We should blush to say so simple and obvious a thing as that to us
"the mountains are a feeling"; nor should we think of apologizing
for our romanticism as Byron did:

I love not man the less but nature more
From these our interviews, in which I steal,
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express.

This ability to rest in nature unadorned and to find entertainment in
her aspects, is, of course, a great gain. Aesthetic education consists
in training ourselves to see the maximum of beauty. To see it in the
physical world, which must continually be about us, is a great
progress toward that marriage of the imagination with the reality
which is the goal of contemplation.

While we gain this mastery of the formless, however, we should
not lose the more necessary capacity of seeing form in those things
which happen to have it. In respect to most of those things which
are determinate as well as natural, we are usually in that state of
aesthetic unconsciousness which the peasant is in in respect to the
landscape. We treat human life and its environment with the same
utilitarian eye with which he regards the field and mountain. That
is beautiful which is expressive of convenience and wealth; the rest
is indifferent. If we mean by love of nature aesthetic delight in the
world in which we casually live (and what can be more _natural_
than man and all his arts?), we may say that the absolute love of
_nature_ hardly exists among us. What we love is the stimulation
of our own personal emotions and dreams; and landscape appeals
to us, as music does to those who have no sense for musical form.

There would seem to be no truth in the saying that the ancients
loved nature less than we. They loved landscape less -- less, at
least, in proportion to their love of the definite things it c