to the people of a thousand years ago.

It is because of this varying eye for natural scenery--which is the eye
of generations succeeding one another in the course of history--that
landscape painting, which conveys to us the most trustworthy information
of this variation of vision, does not belong solely to the sphere of the
esthetician; the historian of civilization must also study this most
subjective of all plastic representations.

It is well known that even the most beautiful region is not in itself a
real work of art. Man alone creates artistically; nature does not. A
landscape such as meets our gaze out of doors is not beautiful in
itself, it only possesses, possibly, the capability of being
spiritualized and refined into beauty in the eye of the spectator. Only
in so far is it a work of art as Nature has furnished the raw material
for such, while each beholder first fashions it artistically and endows
it with a soul in the mirror of his eye. Nature is made beautiful only
by the self-deception of the spectator.

Therefore does the peasant ridicule the city man who deceives himself to
the extent of becoming enthusiastic over the beauties of a region which
leaves the other quite cool. For he who has not something of the artist
about him, who cannot paint beautiful landscapes in his head, will never
see any outside. Beautiful nature, this most subjective of all works of
art, which is painted on the retina of the eye instead of on wood or
canvas, will differ every time according to the mental viewpoint of the
onlooker; and as it is with individuals so it is with whole generations.
The comprehension of the artistically beautiful is not half so dependent
upon great cultural presuppositions as the comprehension of the
naturally beautiful. With every great evolution of civilization a new
"vision" is engendered for a different kind of natural beauty.

This goes so far that one might even be deceived into thinking that the
different ages had gazed upon the beauty of nature not only with
differing mental eyes but also with a different faculty of seeing. Most
of the old masters have painted their landscapes with the eyes of a
far-sighted person; we think, as a rule, that we can attain far greater
natural truth if we paint our pictures, as it were, from the angle of
vision of a near-sighted person. A far-sighted painter will usually be
more inclined to paint a plastic landscape, while a near-sighted one
would make a mood-p