ing alone, and sedulously
ignoring the others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing
descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion
from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works
and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however
crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,--the
soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,--showing
itself cognate, already friendly, and needing only to throw off the husk
of opposition. The defect is not that he defers too much to the purely
pictorial, that he postpones the facts or the story to beauty, but that
he does not defer enough, that he does not sufficiently trust his own
eyes, but by way of further assurance drags in architecture, ships,
mythological or Scripture stories, not caring for them himself, but
supposing the spectator cares, so that they remain unassimilated, a scum
floating on the surface and obscuring the work. Here is the "want of
faith" with which, if any, he is justly chargeable,--that beauty is not
enough for him, but he must make it pleasing. Pleasingness implies a
languid acceptance, in which the mind is spared the shock of fresh
suggestion or incitement. We call the Venus de' Medici, for instance, a
pleasing statue, but the Venus of Milo beautiful; because in the one we
find in fuller measure only what was already accepted and agreeable,
whilst in the other we feel the presence of an unexplored and formidable
personality, provoking the endeavor to follow it out and guess at its
range and extent.

This deference to the spectator marks the decline of Art from the
supremacy of its position as the interpreter of religion to mankind. The
work is no longer a revelation devoutly received by the artist and
piously transmitted to a believing world; but he is a cultivated man,
who gives what is agreeable to a cultivated society, where the Bible is
treated with decorum, but all enthusiasm is reserved for Plato and
Cicero. The earlier and greater men brought much of what they were from
the fifteenth century, but even Raphael is too academic. It is not a
Chinese deference to tradition, nor conformity to a fixed national
taste, such as ruled Greek Art as by an organic necessity. One knows not
whether to wonder most at the fancied need to attach to the work the
stamp of classic authority, or at the levity with which the venerable
forms of antiquity are treate