stinctive selection.
No two painters, though equipped with equal technical skill and
perhaps of like tastes and preferences, would or indeed could render
the same sweep of landscape in precisely similar fashion. Obviously,
to set down everything were at once an impossibility and an untruth,
for the detail of nature is infinite and the beholder does not see
everything. Each is bound to select such details as impress him, and
his selection will be determined by the way in which he as a unique
personality, an individual different from every other man in the
whole wide universe, feels about the bit of nature before him. In
expressing by his special medium what he feels about the landscape,
he aims, in the selection of material form and color, to detach and
render visible what of essential truth the landscape means to him, to
purge it of accidents, and register its eternal beauty. The painter will
not attempt, then, to reproduce the physical facts of nature,--the
topography, geology, botany, of the landscape,--but rather through
those facts in terms of color and form he tries to render its
_expression:_ its quality, as brilliance, tenderness; its mood, as joy,
mystery, setting down those salient aspects of it which combine to
give it character and meaning. For landscape--to recall the
exposition of a preceding page--has its expression as truly as the
human face. A man knows his friends not by the shape of the nose
or the color of the eyes, but by the character which these features
express, the personality which shines in the face and radiates from it
This effluence of the soul within is the essential man; people call it
the "expression." As with human life, so with the many aspects of
nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The
material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and
in man's reaction on his universe they come to take on a symbolic
emotional significance. Each manifestation of nature arouses in the
artist, more or less consciously on his part, some feeling toward it:
he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a
flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them
something in which he delights; he fashions the work of art in praise
of the thing he loves. To the clever technician who imitatively paints
the flower as he knows it to be,

"A primrose on the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him
And it is nothing more.