oner or later come up with him, are
as good as he, and the work forthwith begins to tire. What is tiresome
is to have thrust upon us the dead surface of matter: this is the prose
of the world, which we come to Art to escape. It is prosaic, because it
is seen as the understanding sees it, as an aggregate only, apart from
its vital connection; it matters little whose the understanding is. The
artist must be alive only to the totality of the impression, blind and
deaf to all outside of that. He must believe that the idyl he sees in
the landscape is there because he sees it, and will appear in the
picture without the help of demonstration. The danger is, that from
weakness of faith he will fancy or pretend that he sees something else,
which may be there, but formed no part of the impression. It is simply a
question of natural attraction, magnetism, how much he can take up and
carry; all beyond that is hindrance, and any conscious endeavor of his
cannot help, but can only thwart.

The picturesque has its root in the mind's craving for totality. It is
Nature seen as a whole; all the characteristics and prerequisites of it
come back to this,--such as roughness, wildness, ruin, obscurity, the
gloom of night or of storm; whatever the outward discrepancy, wherever
the effect is produced, it is because in some way there is a gain in
completeness. On this condition everything is welcome,--without it,
nothing. Thus, a broken, weedy bank is more picturesque than the velvet
slope,--the decayed oak than the symmetry of the sapling,--the squalid
shanty by the railroad, with its base of dirt, its windows stuffed with
old hats, and the red shirts dependent from its eaves, than the neatest
brick cottage. They strike a richer accord, while the others drone on a
single note. Moonlight is always picturesque, because it substitutes
mass and breadth for the obtrusiveness of petty particulars. It is not
the pettiness, but the particularity, that makes them unpicturesque. No
impressiveness in the object can atone for exclusiveness. Niagara cannot
be painted, not because it is too difficult, but because it is no
landscape, but like a vast illuminated capital letter filling the whole
page, or the sublime monotony of the mosque-inscriptions, declaring in
thousandfold repetition that God is great. The soaring sublimity of the
Moslem monotheism comes partly from its narrowness and abstractness. Is
it because we are a little hard of hearing that it take