It seems to us easier to paint than to carve, and we might expect to find Painting the older art.  But the difficulty lies less in the execution than in the conception.  Painting is not a tinting of surfaces, but the power to see a complex subject in unity.  We may think we have no difficulty in seeing the landscape, but most persons, if called upon to state what they saw, pictorially, would show that they could not see the wood for the trees.  Beginners suppose it is some knack of the hand that they are to acquire, when they learn to draw; but that is a small part of the matter; the great difficulty is in the seeing.  Ordinary vision is piecemeal:  we see the parts; but not the picture, or only vaguely.  Even the degree of facility that is implied in any enjoyment of scenery is not so much a matter of course as it seems.  Caesar occupied himself, while crossing the Alps, with composing a grammatical treatise.  There is no evidence that there was anything odd in this.  Perhaps Petrarch was the first man that ever climbed a hill to enjoy the view.  We are not aware how much of what we see in Nature is due to pictures.  Hardly any man is so unsophisticated, but that, if he should try to sketch a landscape, he would betray, in what he did or in what he omitted, that he saw it more or less at second-hand, through the interpretations of Art.  A portfolio of Calame’s or Harding’s or Turner’s drawings will give us new eyes for the most familiar scenes.

But we are aided still more by our habit of looking at things theoretically, apart from their immediate practical bearing.  A savage can comprehend a carved image, but not so readily a picture.  An Indian whom Catlin painted with half his face in shadow became the laughingstock of the tribe, as “the man with half a face.”  It is not necessary to suspect Mr. Catlin’s chiaroscuro; what puzzled them was, doubtless, the bringing together in one view what they had seen only separate.  They were accustomed to see the man in light and in shadow; but what they cared for, and therefore what they saw, was only the effect in making it more or less easy to recognize him and to ascertain his state of mind, intentions, etc.  His face was either visible or obscured; if they could see enough for their purpose, they regarded only that.  For it to be both at once was possible only from a point of view which they had not reached.  A child takes the shading of the portrait for dirt,—­that being the form in which darkening of the face is familiar to him.  A carved image is easier comprehended, because it can be handled, turned about, and looked at on different sides, and a material connection thereby assured between the various aspects.  To transfer this connection to the mind—­to see varying distances in one vertical plane, so that mere gradations of light and shade shall suggest all these aspects arranged and harmonized in one view—­is a farther step, and the difficulty increases with the variety embraced.  Cicero was struck with this