ter and the harmony of colour that the mind of the artist gives to the facts of realism. John Ruskin and P. G. Hamerton in the latter part of the nineteenth century were the two best known writers on art subjects in England. If Hamerton had been endowed with more poetry and imagination, he would have been one of the best of critics. As it is he stands very high. Every person interested in scenery and in painting should be familiar with the very fine thirteenth chapter of his book on "Landscape." Although it reads as if he, a conscientious and painstaking artist by training, were somewhat annoyed that good, faithful, and honest work did not produce a great picture, yet he shows that he does see the higher truths about art, and he states them clearly. He writes in a very interesting manner and has published a number of instructive and entertaining books on art. Ruskin has the gift of poetic expression in a very high degree, and as a writer of magnificent English prose has scarcely an equal. He also has a vivid imagination and is often very daring, as in that beautiful passage "Modern Painters." Vol. IV. Page 349. quoted by Hamerton from "The Mountain Gloom." "Through the arches of this trelliswork the avenue of the great valley is seen in descending distance, enlarged with line upon line of tufted foliage, languid and rich, degenerating at last into leagues of grey Maremma, wild with the thorn and the willow; on each side of it, sustaining themselves in mighty slopes and unbroken reaches of colossal promontory, the great mountains secede into supremacy through rosy depths of burning air, and the crescents of snow gleam over their dim summits, as if there could be mourning, as once there was war, in Heaven - a line of waning moons might be set for lamps along the sides of some sepulchral chamber in the Infinite." But as a critic of art, while he holds many advanced views, his teaching is nearly altogether taken up with inculcating the necessity of such knowledge of science on the part of the artist as it would take a lifetime to acquire, and the supreme importance of painting in the most minute and faithful detail. For a logical and clear statement of what art really is, we do not know of anything so luminous and convincing, or couched in such well expressed terms, as the essays on art by John Addington Symonds and W. J. Stillman. We give in the appendix extracts from these essays, as some of them are out of print and difficult to find. They convey a great deal of information and are full of interest. Another beautifully written book is "The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland," by Eugène Fromentin, which presents some of the best and most truthful criticism to be found and well repays a careful study. In the present chapter we give a number of opinions from writers and artists, in support of the subjective view of art. And first let us quote the following passage, which forms an admirable introduction, from a course of lectures delivered to students at "Considthe Metropolitan Museum, New York, charming in their style, original in treatment and most instructive: "I remember, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists who were great friends, a passing effect upon the hills that lay before us. Our three sketches erations on were different in shape, the distance bore a different relation to the foreground, the clouds were treated with different precision and different attention. The drawing was the same, that is to say, the general make of things, but each man had involuntarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight. The colour of each painting was different, and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. We had not the first desire of expressing ourselves. We were each one true to nature. Of course there is no absolute nature; as with each slight shifting of the eye involuntarily we focus some part to the prejudice of others. You will see that the man is the main question, and that there can be no absolute view of nature. At some moment or other you will have brought before you that most important conflict of realism and its opposite. What I want you to notice is that though in abstraction there must be such a thing, yet in these realities with which we are concerned realism is a very evasive distinction. If ex |