As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.  The painter can only put into his pictures what he sees in Nature; and what he sees will be different from what another sees.  A poetical mind sees noble and affecting suggestions in details which the prosaic mind will interpret prosaically.  And the true meaning of Idealism is precisely this vision of realities in their highest and most affecting forms, not in the vision of something removed from or opposed to realities.  Titian’s grand picture of “Peter the Martyr” is, perhaps, as instructive an example as could be chosen of successful Idealism; because in it we have a marvellous presentation of reality as seen by a poetic mind.  The figure of the flying monk might have been equally real if it had been an ignoble presentation of terror—­the superb tree, which may almost be called an actor in the drama, might have been painted with even greater minuteness, though not perhaps with equal effect upon us, if it had arrested our attention by its details—­the dying martyr and the noble assassin might have been made equally real in more vulgar types—­but the triumph achieved by Titian is that the mind is filled with a vision of poetic beauty which is felt to be real.  An equivalent reality, without the ennobling beauty, would have made the picture a fine piece of realistic art.  It is because of this poetic way of seeing things that one painter will give a faithful representation of a very common scene which shall nevertheless affect all sensitive minds as ideal, whereas another painter will represent the same with no greater fidelity, but with a complete absence of poetry.  The greater the fidelity, the greater will be the merit of each representation; for if a man pretends to represent an object, he pretends to represent it accurately:  the only difference is what the poetical or prosaic mind sees in the object.

Of late years there has been a reaction against conventionalism which called itself Idealism, in favour of DETAILISM which calls itself Realism.  As a reaction it has been of service; but it has led to much false criticism, and not a little false art, by an obtrusiveness of Detail and a preference for the Familiar, under the misleading notion of adherence to Nature.  If the words Nature and Natural could be entirely banished from language about Art there would be some chance of coming to a rational philosophy of the subject; at present the excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism.  The pots and pans of Teniers and Van Mieris are natural; the passions and humours of Shakspeare and Moliere are natural; the angels of Fra Angelico and Luini are natural; the Sleeping Fawn and Fates of Phidias are natural; the cows and misty marshes of Cuyp and the vacillations of Hamlet are equally natural.  In fact the natural means truth of kind.  Each kind of character, each kind of representation, must be judged by itself.  Whereas the vulgar error of criticism is to judge of one kind by another, and generally to judge the higher by the lower, to remonstrate with Hamlet for not having the speech and manner of Mr. Jones, to wish that Fra Angelico could have seen with the eyes of the Carracci, to wish verse had been prose, and that ideal tragedy were acted with the easy manner acceptable in drawing-rooms.