We hear people say they know nothing of Art, but that they can judge as well as anybody whether a picture is like Nature or not.  No doubt Giotto’s contemporaries thought so, too, and they were grown men, with senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, “There was nothing in Nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, so like that it seemed not merely like, but the thing itself.”  We smile superior, but Giotto had as keen an eye and as ready a hand as any man since.  The lesson is, that we, too, have not come to the end of even the most familiar objects, but that to another age our view of them may seem as queer as his seems to us.  For the facts in Nature are not fixed, but transcendental quantities, and their value depends on the use that is made of them.  It is in this direction that the artist’s genius avails; his skill in execution is secondary and incidental.  The measure of his ability is the depth to which he has penetrated the world of matter, not the number or the accuracy of his facts.  Every landscape wears many faces, as many as there are men and different moods of the same man.  To one the forest is so many cords of wood; to another, an arboretum; to another, a workshop or a museum; to another, a poem.  What each sees is there; the forest exists for beauty and for firewood, and lends itself indifferently to either use.

Nature wears this air of impartiality, because her figures are only zeros, deriving all their significance from their position.  We do not require a like impartiality in the artist, because what he is to give is not Nature, but what Nature inspires.  His endeavor to be impartial would result only in giving us his opinions or the opinions of others, instead of the utterance of the oracle.  For Nature hides her secret, not by silence, but in a Babel of sweet voices, heard by each according to the fineness of his sense:  by one as mere noise, by another as a jangle of pleasing sounds, by the artist as harmony.  They are all of them Nature’s voices;—­he adds nothing and omits nothing, but hears with a preoccupied attention, the justification being that his hearing is thus most complete, as one who understands a language seizes the sense of words rapidly spoken better than he who from less acquaintance with it strives to follow all the sounds.

The test of “truth,” therefore, in the sense of fact, is insufficient.  The question is, Truth for whom?  Not for a child or a savage.  If we were to show a fine landscape to a Hottentot, it would be a mistake to say he saw it, though the image might be demonstrable on the retina of his eye.  He would not see what we mean when we speak of it, any more than we should see the footstep on the ground or hear the stirring in the grass that is plain enough to him, and hits our organs, too, though we are not trained to perceive it.  If the test of merit be the production of a likeness to something we see, then the artist should know no more of Nature than