re possible to generalize things generically
different. Of such common cant of criticism I extract a characteristic
passage from one of the reviews of this work, that in this year's
Athenaeum for February 10th: "He (the author) would have geological
landscape painters, dendrologic, meteorologic, and doubtless
entomologic, ichthyologic, every kind of physiologic painter united in
the same person; yet, alas, for true poetic art among all these learned
Thebans! No; landscape painting must not be reduced to mere portraiture
of inanimate substances, Denner-like portraiture of the earth's face.
* * * * * Ancient landscapists took a broader, deeper, higher view
of their art; they neglected particular traits, and gave only general
features. Thus they attained mass and force, harmonious union and simple
effect, the elements of grandeur and beauty."

To all such criticism as this (and I notice it only because it expresses
the feelings into which many sensible and thoughtful minds have been
fashioned by infection) the answer is simple and straightforward. It is
just as impossible to generalize granite and slate, as it is to
generalize a man and a cow. An animal must be either one animal or
another animal; it cannot be a general animal, or it is no animal; and
so a rock must be either one rock or another rock; it cannot be a
general rock, or it is no rock. If there were a creature in the
foreground of a picture, of which he could not decide whether it were a
pony or a pig, the Athenaeum critic would perhaps affirm it to be a
generalization of pony and pig, and consequently a high example of
"harmonious union and simple effect." But _I_ should call it simple bad
drawing. And so when there are things in the foreground of Salvator of
which I cannot pronounce whether they be granite or slate, or tufa, I
affirm that there is in them neither harmonious union nor simple effect,
but simple monstrosity. There is no grandeur, no beauty of any sort or
kind; nothing but destruction, disorganization, and ruin, to be obtained
by the violation of natural distinctions. The elements of brutes can
only mix in corruption, the elements of inorganic nature only in
annihilation. We may, if we choose, put together centaur monsters; but
they must still be half man, half horse; they cannot be both man and
horse, nor either man or horse. And so, if landscape painters choose,
they may give us rocks which shall be half granite and half slate; but
they ca