Angelo
complained that he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine--over his own
head, and blinded by his own paint. The _purpose_ that we speak of is
not his petty doings and intentions, but what he unintentionally
accomplishes. It is the spiritual alone that interests; and if later Art
seem, by comparison, wanting in spirituality, this is partly the effect
of its juster appreciation, that rendered direct expression hopeless,
but at the same time superfluous, by discovering the same import more
accessible elsewhere, as the higher indirect meaning of all material
things. Critics tell us that the charm of landscape is incomplete
without the presence of man,--that there must always be some hint, at
least, of human habitation or influence. Certainly it is always a human
interest, it is not the timber and the water, that moves us, but the
echo of a kindred mind. But in the "landscape and figures" it is hardly
a human interest that we take in the figures. The "dull victims of pipe
and mug" serve our turn perhaps better than the noblest mountaineers. It
is not to them that we look for the spirit of the landscape,--rather
anywhere else. It is the security of the perception that allows it to
dispense with pointed demonstration, and to delight rather in obscurer
intimations of its meaning.

The modern ideal is the Picturesque,--a beauty not detachable, belonging
to the picture, to the composition, not to the component parts. It has
no favorites; it is violated alike by the systematic glorification and
the systematic depreciation of particular forms. The Apollo Belvedere
would make as poor a figure in the foreground of a modern landscape as a
fisherman in jack-boots and red nightcap on a pedestal in the Vatican.
Claude's or Turner's figures may be absurd, when taken by themselves;
but the absurdity consists in taking them by themselves. Turner, it is
said, could draw figures well; Claude probably could not; (he is more
likely to have tried;) but each must have felt that anything that should
call attention to the figures would be worse than any bad drawing.
Nicolas Poussin was well called "the learned"; for it is his learning,
his study of the antique, of Raphael, of drapery and anatomy, that most
appears in his landscapes and gives his figures their plastic emphasis.
But this is no praise for a painter.

Of course the boundary-lines cannot be very exactly drawn; the genius of
a Delaroche or a Millais will give interest to a figu