It is a very general opinion that photography has made painting superfluous,—­or, at least, that it will do so as soon as further improvements in the process shall enable it to render color as well as light and shade.  And our artists seem to give in to this view, in the deference they show to the subject, as if it mattered not so much what it was, or how, as that it is there,—­a pious tenderness towards barns and rail-fences and stone walls and the confused monotony of the forest, not as having any special fitness, not as beautiful, but because they exist,—­a scrupulous anxiety to give the every-day look of the objects they portray, as any passer-by would see them, free from any distorting personality.  To do them justice, however, this submissiveness to the matter-of-fact, with the more gifted at least, is a virtue that is praised and starves.  They do it lip-service, and suppose themselves loyal; but when they come to paint, they are under a spell that does not allow them to see in things only material qualities, but, without any violence to Nature, raises it to a higher plane, where other values and other connections prevail.  Art, where it exists to any serious purpose, follows Nature, but not the natural,—­according to Raphael’s maxim, that “the artist’s aim is to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she intends them.”

But these audacities, though they make their own excuse in the work itself, do not pass in a statement without cavil at the arrogance that would exalt the work of men’s hands above the work of God.  Shall we strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made?  What room for Art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendors of the actual world?

But if that be all, how to account for the existence of Art as distinct from upholstery?  Why pile our mole-hills by the side of the mountains?  We can see the landscape itself any day;—­whence this extraordinary interest in seeing a bit of it painted,—­except, indeed, as furniture for the drawing-room, to be ordered with the frame at so much the yard from the picture-dealer?

The root of the difficulty lies in this slippery phrase, Nature.  We talk of the facts of Nature, meaning the existence now and here of the hills, sky, trees, etc., as if these were fixed quantities,—­as if a house or a tree must be the same at all times and to everybody.  But in a child’s drawing we see that these things are not the same to us and to him.  He is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke, the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the divisions of the bricks and the window-panes:  but for what is characteristic and essential he has no eye.  He gives what the house is to him, merely a house in general, any house; it would not help it, but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the lines.  An artist, with fewer and more careless lines, would give more of what we see in it; and if he be a man of high power, he may teach us in turn the limitation of our seeing, by showing that the vague, half-defined sentiment that attaches to it has also a visible expression, if we knew where to look for it.