have not
come to the end of even the most familiar objects, but that to another
age our view of them may seem as queer as his seems to us. For the facts
in Nature are not fixed, but transcendental quantities, and their value
depends on the use that is made of them. It is in this direction that
the artist's genius avails; his skill in execution is secondary and
incidental. The measure of his ability is the depth to which he has
penetrated the world of matter, not the number or the accuracy of his
facts. Every landscape wears many faces, as many as there are men and
different moods of the same man. To one the forest is so many cords of
wood; to another, an arboretum; to another, a workshop or a museum; to
another, a poem. What each sees is there; the forest exists for beauty
and for firewood, and lends itself indifferently to either use.

Nature wears this air of impartiality, because her figures are only
zeros, deriving all their significance from their position. We do not
require a like impartiality in the artist, because what he is to give is
not Nature, but what Nature inspires. His endeavor to be impartial would
result only in giving us his opinions or the opinions of others, instead
of the utterance of the oracle. For Nature hides her secret, not by
silence, but in a Babel of sweet voices, heard by each according to the
fineness of his sense: by one as mere noise, by another as a jangle of
pleasing sounds, by the artist as harmony. They are all of them Nature's
voices;--he adds nothing and omits nothing, but hears with a preoccupied
attention, the justification being that his hearing is thus most
complete, as one who understands a language seizes the sense of words
rapidly spoken better than he who from less acquaintance with it strives
to follow all the sounds.

The test of "truth," therefore, in the sense of fact, is insufficient.
The question is, Truth for whom? Not for a child or a savage. If we were
to show a fine landscape to a Hottentot, it would be a mistake to say he
saw it, though the image might be demonstrable on the retina of his eye.
He would not see what we mean when we speak of it, any more than we
should see the footstep on the ground or hear the stirring in the grass
that is plain enough to him, and hits our organs, too, though we are not
trained to perceive it. If the test of merit be the production of a
likeness to something we see, then the artist should know no more of
Nature than we do. But