the trees with tenderest detail of light and form and colour; the Realism that paints storm and driving mist or dazzling floods of light in masses quite textureless and almost formless to those who see not with the painter's watchful eyes. Not that Angelo It is thus that Art progresses. excelled Phidias, or that Turner surpassed Raphael; not that the poets of our age write better than did the masters of the great schools. The disciple does not begin where the master ends. There is none that can take up the palette of Raphael after his too early death; and the hundred years of Titian did not suffice for him to impart his power to another. The poet or the painter dies, and— Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And yet there is progress in Art. The Assyrian, with everything to concentrate his thoughts on war and human action, learned to depict the human form, while still utterly ignorant of Landscape Art. The Greek, absorbed in the realisation of ideal forms of beauty, and the Mediævalist in the realisation of the life of human passion, missed altogether any adequate conception of that other life, the life of Nature, where only we find beauty without sensuality, and passion without suffering or sin. Thus the theme of Assyrian Art was Action; the theme of Greek Art was Beauty; the theme of Mediæval Art was Passion: each school not copying its predecessor, but adding a new domain to the Empire of Art. If Greek Art limited itself to a few grand types of human beauty, and Medieval Art added new types in heroism and saintly virtue, it remains for the Modern school to show that the theme of Art should be as limitless as is the splendour of the creation. I have only to add that in Landscape Art the Poet and the Painter now stand side by side-no longer blinding each other's eyes by filling Nature with little gods, Apollos, Cupids, and Nymphs. Apollos, Cupids, and Nymphs might have inspired the Greek, but they came a thousand years too late when Claude put them into Italian landscape, or when Dryden, Cowley, or Spenser made them dance to English verse. But if we dismiss this doubtful company have we anything better with which to fill their places? Better a thousand times, nobler and truer, as the living passion of our life-its love, its hopes, its fears, are more real than the dead sentimentality of their fictitious amours. We have seen that Nature is glorious for her own sake, without such adventitious aids. We have seen that in Landscape Art there is place for graceful imagination, for playful fancy, for sweetest, saddest memory, for deepest sympathy, for earnest passion and grave thought. For in Landscape Art there is rest and peace and hope. Such peace as Milton found in thinking of the Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm. Such hope as Dante must have known in dreaming of the Apple Tree again in blossom, with hues More than the rose, less than the violet. Such rest as we may find every day in the King's Garden, which includes all the Cornfields that lie between the trees of the lost Paradise and the white rose of the Paradise to come. |