is_ nature--Nonsense."--_E.
V. Rippingille_. I have not yet spoken of the difference--even in
what we commonly call Nature--between imperfect and ideal form: the
study of this difficult question must, of course, be deferred until
we have examined the nature of our impressions of beauty; but it may
not be out of place here to hint at the want of care in many of our
artists to distinguish between the real work of nature and the
diseased results of man's interference with her. Many of the works
of our greatest artists have for their subjects nothing but hacked
and hewn remnants of farm-yard vegetation, branded root and branch,
from their birth, by the prong and the pruning-hook; and the
feelings once accustomed to take pleasure in such abortions, can
scarcely become perceptive of forms truly ideal. I have just said
(423) that young painters should go to nature trustingly,--rejecting
nothing, and selecting nothing: so they should; but they must be
careful that it _is_ nature to whom they go--nature in her
liberty--not as servant-of-all-work in the hands of the
agriculturist, nor stiffened into court-dress by the landscape
gardener. It must be the pure, wild volition and energy of the
creation which they follow--not subdued to the furrow, and
cicatrized to the pollard--not persuaded into proprieties, nor
pampered into diseases. Let them work by the torrent-side, and in
the forest shadows; not by purling brooks and under "tonsile
shades." It is impossible to enter here into discussion of what man
can or cannot do, by assisting natural operations: it is an
intricate question: nor can I, without anticipating what I shall
have hereafter to advance, show how or why it happens that the
racehorse is _not_ the artist's ideal of a horse, nor a prize tulip
his ideal of a flower; but so it is. As far as the painter is
concerned, man never touches nature but to spoil;--he operates on
her as a barber would on the Apollo; and if he sometimes increases
some particular power or excellence,--strength or agility in the
animal--tallness, or fruitfulness, or solidity in the tree,--he
invariably loses that _balance_ of good qualities which is the chief
sign of perfect specific form; above all, he destroys the appearance
of free _volition_ and _felicity_, which, as I shall show hereafter,
is one of the ess