Up to the present, I have spoken only of Man as the proper subject of Ruler-Art. I have done this because Man is the highest subject of Art in general, and because the moment humanity ceases from holding the first place in our interest, something must be amiss, either with humanity, or with ourselves.
Still, there are degrees and grades among ruler-artists. All of them cannot aspire to the exposition of the highest human values. And just as some turn to design and to ornament, and thus, in a small way, arrange and introduce order into a small area of the world, so others —standing halfway between these designers and the valuers of humanity —apply their powers quite instinctively to Nature away from Man. They have a thought to express—let us say it is: "Order is the highest good," or "Power is the source of all pleasure and beauty," or "Anarchy contends in vain against the governing power of light which is genius," and in the case of this last thought they paint a rugged scene which they reveal as arranged, simplified and transfigured by the power of the sun. In each of these cases they use Nature merely as a symbol, or a vehicle, by means of which their thought or valuation is borne in upon their fellows; and they do not start out as actual admirers of mere scenery, wishing only to repeat it as carefully as possible.
Even when it uses Nature merely as a symbol or a vehicle, however, there can be little doubt that this kind of Ruler-Art is a degree lower in rank than the art which concerns itself with man; and when this kind of art becomes realistic, as it did with Constable and all his followers, it is literally superfluous. Only when the landscape is a minor element, serving but to receive and convey the mood or aspiration of the artist, is it a subject for Ruler-Art, and then the hand of man should be visible in it everywhere. With the artist's arranging, simplifying and transfiguring power observable in Nature, landscape painting, as Kant very wisely observed in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, becomes a process of pictorial gardening, and as such can teach very great lessons.
Still, all landscapes ought to be approached with caution by the lover of Ruler-Art; for unless they are treated with an extreme ruler-spirit, they point too imperatively away from man, to promise a development that can be wholesomely human.
When it is remembered that landscape painting only became a really important and serious branch of art when all the turmoil and contradiction which three successive changes of values had brought about were at their height—I refer to the blow levelled at Mediæval values by the Renaissance, to 'the blow levelled at the Renaissance by the Counter-Renaissance and Protestantism (in its German form of Evangelism and in its English form as Puritanism), and to the blow levelled at the artistic spirit of Europe in general by the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and when, therefore, doubt and confusion had already entered men's minds as to what was to be believed about Man and Life; when it is remembered also that it was precisely in the north, where, as we shall see, culture was less a matter of tradition than in the south, that landscape found its most energetic and most realistic exponents—from Joachim Patenier[6] to Ruysdael; and that it was in the north, even after the Renaissance, that the negative character of Christianity, in regard to humanity and to Life, found its strongest adherents; the importance of establishing a very severe canon in regard to all landscape painting, and of insisting upon very high ruler qualities in this branch of the art, ought to be clear to all who take this subject to heart.
For, difficult as it may seem to realize it, there is nothing whatsoever artistically beautiful in landscape.[7] Only sentimental[8] townspeople, compelled by their particular mode of existence to gaze daily on their own hideous homes and streets, ever manifest a senselessly ardent and determined affection for green fields and hills, for their own sake; and with English psychologists, it would be quite admissible here to say that all beauty that particular people believe to exist in country scenery, is the outcome of association. The ancients liked the sunlit and fruitful valley because of its promise of sustenance and wealth; but they showed no love of nature as such.[9]
Mr. S. H. Butcher,[10] for instance, points out how landscape painting only became a serious and independent branch of art among the Greeks after the fourth century B.C.—that is to say, long over a century after the date when, according to Freeman, the decline of Hellas began; and, in speaking of the Greeks in their best period, he says: "They do not attach themselves to nature with that depth of feeling, with that gentle melancholy, that characterizes the moderns.... Their impatient imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to the drama of human life." J. A. Symonds tells us that "Conciseness, simplicity and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing attributes of classical descriptive art—moreover, humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from the Greek unless it appeared before him in human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley's Ode to the West Wind gave birth in their imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions."[11] And Mahaffy and Mr. W. R. Hardie tell the same story.[12]
But even among sensible moderns, uninfected by sentimental fever, the love of nature is mostly of a purely utilitarian kind, as witness the love of cornfields, hayfields and orchards. The farmer at certain times gazes kindly at the purple hills behind his acres of cultivated land, because their colour indicates the coming rain. The cattle-breeder smiles as he surveys the Romney marshes, and thinks of the splendid pastureland they would make.