What we want is the spirit of the place evoked in us
rather than the place itself. Art is neither pictured botany or geology.
A great landscape is the expression of a mood of the human mind as
definitely as music or poetry is. The artist is communicating his own
emotions. There is some mystic significance in the color he employs; and
then the doorways are opened, and we pass from sense into soul. We
are looking into a soul when we are looking at a Turner, a Carot, or a
Whistler, as surely as when in dream we find ourselves moving in strange
countries which are yet within us, contained for all their seeming
infinitudes in the little hollow of the brain. All this, I think, is
undeniable; but perhaps not many of you will follow me, though you
may understand me, if I go further and say, that in this, art is
unconsciously also reaching out to archetypes, is lifting itself up to
walk in that garden of the divine mind where, as the first Scripture
says, it created "flowers before they were in the field and every herb
before it grew." A man may sit in an armchair and travel farther than
ever Columbus traveled; and no one can say how far Turner, in his search
after light, had not journeyed into the lost Eden, and he himself may
have been there most surely at the last when his pictures had become a
blaze of incoherent light.

You may say now that I have objected to literature dominating the arts,
and yet I have drawn from pictures a most complicated theory. I have
felt a little, indeed, as if I was marching through subtleties to
the dismemberment of my mind, but I do not think I have anywhere
contradicted myself or suggested that an artist should work on these
speculations. These may rightly arise in the mind of the onlooker who
will regard a work of art with his whole nature, not merely with the
aesthetic sense, and who will naturally pass from the first delight
of vision into a psychological analysis. A profound nature will always
awaken profound reflections. There are heads by Da Vinci as interesting
in their humanity as Hamlet. When we see eyes that tempt and allure with
lips virginal in their purity, we feel in the face a union of things
which the dual nature of man is eternally desiring. It is the marriage
of heaven and hell, the union of spirit and flesh, each with their
uncurbed desires; and what is impossible in life is in his art, and is
one of the secrets of its strange fascination. It may seem paradoxical
to say of Wa