e where the subject is
professedly a fragment, as in near foliage, tree-trunks, stone-texture;
or where the mind's work is already done, and needs only to be
reflected, as in buildings, sculpture, and, to a certain extent,
portrait,--as far as the character has wrought itself into the clothes,
habitual attitude, etc. Is not the popularity of the small full-length
portrait-photographs owing to the predominance they give to this passive
imprint of the mind's past action upon externals over its momentary and
elusive presence? It is to the fillip received from the startling
likeness of trivial details, exciting us to supply what is deficient in
more important points, that is to be ascribed the leniency to the
photograph on the part of near relatives and friends, who are usually
hard to please with a painted likeness.

But all comparisons between the photograph and the hand-drawn picture
are apt to be vitiated by the confusion of various extraneous interests
with a purely artistic satisfaction resting in the thing itself. It is
the old fallacy, involved in all the comparisons of Art with Nature. Of
course, at bottom the interest is always that of the indwelling idea.
But the question is, whether we stop at the outside, the material
texture, or pass at once to the other extreme, the thought conveyed, or
whether the two sides remain undistinguished. In the latter case only is
our enjoyment strictly aesthetic, that is, attached to the bare
perception of this particular thing; in the others, it is not this thing
that prevails, but the physical or moral qualities, the class to which
it belongs. It is true all these qualities play in and influence or even
constitute the impression that particular works of Art make upon us. One
man admires a picture for its _handling_, its surface, the way in which
the paint is laid on; another, for its illustration of the laws of
physiognomy; another, because it reminds him of the spring he spent in
Rome, the pleasant people he met there, etc. We do not always care to
distinguish the sources of the pleasure we feel; but for any _criticism_
we must quit these accidents and personalities, and attend solely to
that in the work which is unique, peculiar to it, that in which it
suggests nothing, and associates itself with nothing, but refuses to be
classed or distributed. This may not be the most important aspect of the
thing represented, nor the deepest interest that a picture can have; but
here, stri