anything more than one of those average persons who take delight in a good picture and a fine scene. But the subject has very seldom been treated of,— hardly at all since Mr Ruskin wrote the first and fourth volumes of Modern Painters,' now from thirty to forty years ago,—and perhaps never by one who is by profession a geologist. If only on this account, there may be found an artist or two who may care to spend a vacant hour in listening to a geologist, who in pursuit of his profession spends a great part of his life among the scenes and inmost haunts of Nature, and who counts it as one of the grand acquirements of his life that he has learned to look upon Nature, however humbly, with something of the artist's eye. Of one thing, at least, I am sure in referring to painters I desire to speak with the greatest respect and deference-I might well speak of many of them with something like affection. -as of men whose works have been to me for years an abounding source of the purest pleasure.

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But it may be objected that science and the fine arts cannot be, and ought not to be, brought together. Science and poetry," it has been said, are to a nicety diametrically opposed;"1 and poetry is, of course, the atmosphere and breath of the fine arts.

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Certain it is that science and the art of the landscape-painter deal with different aspects of Nature, and assume different attitudes of mind. There will little work be done while the geologist is opening his heart to the beauties of the landscape; nor will the

1 Dr John Brown, Horæ Subsecivæ, pp. 229-231. See Appendix I.

picture gain in "feeling" while the artist is engaged in analysing the peaks of the mountains into cones. of denudation, or the rocks of the waterfall into rhombs and lozenges, defined by planes of stratification and jointing.

But I venture to demur to the statement that science and the fine arts, or science and poetry, are at opposite poles. There is a whole region in which, like the halves of the sphere, they inevitably come into contact. Science, however distasteful it may be to the young and the æsthetic, is only the careful investigation of the truth of Nature; and of the truth and the poetry of Nature the exquisite art of the landscape-painter is an expression. Science deals, as it were, with the body, the structure, the habits, and finds it impossible, happily, to forget the mind that informs them; art deals, as it were, with the face and the expression of the face. But do I assert too much if I say that in the study of landscape art, as in that of the human physiognomy, to understand the expression of the face you must know something of the body? Certain it is that without some knowledge of the body, its parts and habits, and what an old writer might term its humours, and needs, and cravings, as well as of the mind that informs it, and without a constant (though perhaps unconscious) reference to these, the human face would be an enigma, and physiognomy, whether as an instinct or a science, could have no existence. Is it pressing analogy too far to say that it is not altogether otherwise with the art of the landscapepainter, who is the student and interpreter of the face and expression of Nature? Can he show us

the face of Nature without any knowledge of her structure, and the expression of Nature without any knowledge of her ways? He is to delineate for us the stream, the cloud, the bird, the tree, the rock: can he delineate them in ignorance that this is flowing water, and that floating vapour? can he delineate them so well caring nothing for the habit of growth or kind of the tree, nor for the meaning of the lines that seam the iron front of the rock?

Such is not the teaching of art in any other of its departments. The historical painter cannot know too much of history, even of its springs and hidden sources it is not enough for him diligently to study costumes. The painter of life cannot know too many of the phases and deepest emotions of life. The portrait-painter will paint incomparably better portraits if he have a knowledge of men and their physiognomy that will confer on him the gift of reading the lines of the human countenance, -the signs of the habits and struggles, and noble or mean ambitions, that mould the character. It is only the landscape - painter who is advised to remain in healthful ignorance of all the deeper workings of the Nature which he studies, lest, forsooth, he should make geological structure-diagrams of his pictures, or mayhap come incontinently to despise the storm and the lightning as exhibitions merely of the electric spark or of a measurable wind-motion. I venture to say that, if he be not able to think and reason for himself upon the subjects with which he deals, he will by just so much be less the interpreter and more the copyist, and without extraordinary powers of faithful

observation will miss half the suggestions and half the refinements of the landscape. "A mere copier of Nature can never produce anything great."1

The truth is that the landscape-painter, like his brother artists, cannot know too much, if he know it aright. But it is also true that the artist, above all men—the poet alone excepted-has need to assimilate his knowledge perfectly. What in the preacher is but a touch of pedantry, and what in the good lawyer may only serve as an amusement to the bench, in the artist is dangerous, if not destructive, to pure artistic feeling. And thus instinctively the artist learns to wear his knowledge "lightly, like a flower"-or, rather, he learns to wear it not at all; for since his art is undoubtedly a magic synthesis of the objective and the subjective, of Nature with himself,-his knowledge, that it may not in any way intervene between Nature. and himself, becomes, as it were, a part of his own nature. And therefore it is true that science should be presented to him, not in its incomplete stages as inquiry and induction, but, so far as possible, as full and perfect knowledge. The laws of perspective will become to him- mere matter of common-sense; his knowledge of anatomy and geology and botany will bear the same relation to his mind that anatomy itself does to the human body,-being something entirely out of sight, the very fact of it forgotten-clothed upon with the beautiful. I cannot believe that science will rob the Academies of any eminent Associates or great works. Nature is greater than our knowledge of

Nature, by whatever name we call it; and looking into her unfathomable eyes-all the more intense in their meaning, all the more alluring, and all the more fathomless to him whose knowledge is great the true artist will no longer be conscious of his little knowledge, or the pride of his acquirements, but, abased in the hopelessness of showing her to us as she is revealed to him, will see only her transcendent and incommunicable beauty. "I could name half-a-dozen painters who have been ruined by science," says one who must have known hundreds of artists in his time, "but they were all men of feeble artistic gifts to begin with."1

Far be it from any one to apply pure truth or rigid science to the study of landscape. They who cry out for truth, nothing but truth, scarcely realise to what it would bring them. The human eye is not a surveyor's instrument. "Every hill," it has been said, with much truth in the seeming exaggeration, “is half the height it looks; every curve looks twice as round as it is; every interesting feature is insignificant." Exaggeration unconsciously mingles with every feeling of admiration, wonder, or awe. The human mind, I repeat, is not a mere clinometer or measurer of angles; nor are the hills, even to the geologist, masses solely consisting of beds of rock laid at ascertainable angles, with divisions and breaks called joints and faults, and having certain cognisable outward shapes, the result of denudation. Geology is not what we look for in landscape. We look for the soul of the truth, not the whole body, still less the skeleton.

1 P. G. Hamerton, 'Thoughts about Art,' p. 367.