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.

The rage for "realism," which is healthy in as far as it insists on
truth, has become unhealthy, in as far as it confounds truth with
familiarity, and predominance of unessential details. There are other
truths besides coats and waistcoats, pots and pans, drawlng-rooms and
suburban villas. Life has other aims besides these which occupy the
conversation of "Society." And the painter who devotes years to a work
representing modern life, yet calls for even more attention to a
waistcoat than to the face of a philosopher, may exhibit truth of
detail which will delight the tailor-mind, but he is defective in
artistic truth, because he ought to be representing something higher
than waistcoats, and because our thoughts on modern life fall very
casually and without emphasis on waistcoats. In Piloty's much-admired
picture of the "Death of Wallenstein" (at Munich), the truth with which
the carpet, the velvet, and all other accessories are painted, is
certainly remarkable; but the falsehood of giving prominence to such
details in a picture representing the dead Wallenstein--as if they were
the objects which could possibly arrest our attention and excite our
sympathies in such a spectacle--is a falsehood of the realistic school.
If a man