losing significance, painting must
proceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression
is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the
articulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as
Tintoretto's or Paolo Veronese's records impressions as a cultivated
sense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies the
sensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligent
expression of all those mechanisms, those situations and passions, with
which the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots,
meant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience,
meant to outshine the reality.

In order to reconstitute the image we may take an abstract
representation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and its
scope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he
adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant
rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their
texture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a
representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures
by furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the
artist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a
whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose
their separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or trees
in a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by their
interplay, and shining by a light which is mutually reflected.

[Sidenote: Essence of landscape-painting.]

When this transformation is complete the painting is essentially a
landscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may even
depict an interior, like Velasquez's Meninas. But the observer, even in
the presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by the
medium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens to
hold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature puts
before him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffused
material substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits of
substance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally and
by virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. If
this physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and morality
involved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus a