everence
for the facts themselves, or even for the moral meaning of them, so far
as it is consciously present in the artist's mind, is just so far from
the true intent of Art. This is the bane of the modern German school,
both in landscape and history. They are laborious, learned, accurate,
elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete
treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing,
grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest.
So the allegories in Albert Duerer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it
as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value as thoughts.

The moral meaning in a picture, and its fidelity to fact, may each serve
as measure of its merit _after it is done_. They must each be there, for
its aim is to express after its own fashion the reality that lurks in
every particle of matter. But it is for the spectator to see them, not
the artist, and it is talking at cross-purposes to make either the
motive,--to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an
inventory of the landscape. That five or ten million pines grow in a
Swiss valley is no reason why every one of them should be drawn. No
doubt every one of them has its reason for being there, and it is
conceivable that an exhaustive final statement might require them all
to be shown. But there are no final statements in this world, least of
all in Art. There are many things besides pines in the valley, and more
important, and they can be drawn meanwhile. Besides, if all the pines,
why not every pebble and blade of grass?

The earnestness that attracts us in mediaeval Art, the devout fervor of
the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the
painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as _history_, but it was
conditioned also by the limitations of that age. The mediaeval mind was
oppressed by a sense of the foreignness and profaneness of Nature. The
world is God's work, and ruled by Him; but it is not His dwelling-place,
but only His foot-stool. The Divine spirit penetrates into the world of
matter at certain points and to a certain depth, does not possess and
inhabit it now and here, but only elsewhere and at a future time, in
heaven, and at the final Judgment; and meantime the Church and the State
are to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as
they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him
down