not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and
the impression that has not learned to express itself -- all of which
are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible
soul.

Our age is given to this sort of self-indulgence, and on both the
grounds mentioned. Our public, without being really trained, -- for
we appeal to too large a public to require training in it, -- is well
informed and eagerly responsive to everything; it is ready to work
pretty hard, and do its share towards its own profit and
entertainment. It becomes a point of pride with it to understand and
appreciate everything. And our art, in its turn, does not overlook
this opportunity. It becomes disorganized, sporadic, whimsical,
and experimental. The crudity we are too distracted to refine, we
accept as originality, and the vagueness we are too pretentious to
make accurate, we pass off as sublimity. This is the secret of
making great works on novel principles, and of writing hard books
easily.

_Example of landscape._

Sec. 33. An extraordinary taste for landscape compensates us for this
ignorance of what is best and most finished in the arts. The natural
landscape is an indeterminate object; it almost always contains
enough diversity to allow the eye a great liberty in selecting,
emphasizing, and grouping its elements, and it is furthermore rich
in suggestion and in vague emotional stimulus. A landscape to be
seen has to be composed, and to be loved has to be moralized. That
is the reason why rude or vulgar people are indifferent to their
natural surroundings. It does not occur to them that the work-a-day
world is capable of aesthetic contemplation. Only on holidays,
when they add to themselves and their belongings some unusual
ornament, do they stop to watch the effect. The far more beautiful
daily aspects of their environment escape them altogether. When,
however, we learn to apperceive; when we grow fond of tracing
lines and developing vistas; when, above all, the subtler influences
of places on our mental tone are transmuted into an expressiveness
in those places, and they are furthermore poetized by our
day-dreams, and turned by our instant fancy into so many hints of a
fairyland of happy living and vague adventure, -- then we feel that
the landscape is beautiful. The forest, the fields, all wild or rural
scenes, are then full of companionship and entertainment.

This is a beauty dependent on reverie, fancy,