ends, they show to us their distinct individual interpretations, unconsciously revealing, through the gift of imagination, the effect produced on their own feelings, and awakening a responsive echo in the observers. CHAPTER III VARIOUS OPINIONS ABOUT ART WE have seen in the first chapter that the earliest of the modern landscape painters were idealists, and by no means close copyists of nature. Since their day there have been frequent attempts to prove that realism is the true aim of art. The upholders of the art for art's sake theory in its crudest form have even gone so far as to say that subject in a picture is of no importance, and that it does not matter what is painted as long as the work is well done, and the design and the colour make a beautiful piece of decoration. The men who hold these views are usually artists, busily engaged in painting, who imagine that they are faithfully copying nature and doing nothing more than this. They think that they are not able to see more than the actual scene before them, or to do more than give as lifelike a rendering of it as their knowledge of art enables them to paint. Yet often some of these men do put their very thought into their work without consciously knowing it. At the same time they are still quite genuine in thinking that art is realistic, and is not determined by the individual mental endowment of the painter. Such artists, however, as Nicolas Poussin, Delacroix, Millet, and Fromentin see further into the heart of the matter, and having the gift of expression they have given their views. to the world. They believe that great art is ideal and subjective, and that nature is changed as its varied scenes pass through the alembic of the artist's imagination ere he bodies them forth on his canvas. There needs must be both realism and idealism in art, but the former should be subordinate to the latter. There must be realism; for the correct rendering of facts is the basis of all art, and it is the only means that the artist has to express himself. But the personal element comes in whenever the artist commences to work, and the only really important things in a picture are the charac |