some suspicion that
landscape-painting is but an idle and empty business, not worth all
our long talk about it, then, perhaps, he will be pleased to have such
suspicion done away, before troubling himself farther with these
disquisitions.

I should rather be glad, than otherwise, that he _had_ formed some
suspicion on this matter. If he has at all admitted the truth of
anything hitherto said respecting great art, and its choices of
subject, it seems to me he ought, by this time, to be questioning with
himself whether road-side weeds, old cottages, broken stones, and such
other materials, be worthy matters for grave men to busy themselves in
the imitation of. And I should like him to probe this doubt to the
deep of it, and bring all his misgivings out to the broad light, that
we may see how we are to deal with them, or ascertain if indeed they
are too well founded to be dealt with.

And to this end I would ask him now to imagine himself entering, for
the first time in his life, the room of the Old Water-Colour
Society:[51] and to suppose that he has entered it, not for the sake of
a quiet examination of the paintings one by one, but in order to seize
such ideas as it may generally suggest respecting the state and
meaning of modern, as compared with elder, art. I suppose him, of
course, that he may be capable of such a comparison, to be in some
degree familiar with the different forms in which art has developed
itself within the periods historically known to us; but never, till
that moment, to have seen any completely modern work. So prepared, and
so unprepared, he would, as his ideas began to arrange themselves, be
first struck by the number of paintings representing blue mountains,
clear lakes, and ruined castles or cathedrals, and he would say to
himself: "There is something strange in the mind of these modern
people! Nobody ever cared about blue mountains before, or tried to
paint the broken stones of old walls." And the more he considered the
subject, the more he would feel the peculiarity; and, as he thought
over the art of Greeks and Romans, he would still repeat, with
increasing certainty of conviction: "Mountains! I remember none. The
Greeks did not seem, as artists, to know that such things were in the
world. They carved, or variously represented, men, and horses, and
beasts, and birds, and all kinds of living creatures,--yes, even down
to cuttle-fish; and trees, in a sort of way; but not so much as the
outli