[a] Art and Nature.
[NOTE 63. PAGE 200]
"The force of natural signs," says Lessing, "consists in their resemblance to the things they represent."[a] In a criticism upon the second part of Faust, G. H. Lewes writes[]:
The forms which are his (the artist's) materials, the symbols which are his language, must in themselves have beauty and an interest readily appreciable by those who do not understand the occult meaning. Unless they have this they cease to be art: they become hieroglyphs. Art is picture painting, not picture writing.
While this is generally true, beauty in the lesser signs of the poet is of greater importance than in those of the painter, because a painting is looked upon direct as a whole, while a poem has to be comprehended in its parts before it can be properly considered as a whole.
[a] Laocoon.
[] Life of Goethe, 2d edition.
[NOTE 64. PAGE 203]
Although those of the fifteenth-century artists who treated landscape seriously did not thoroughly understand perspective, yet they were seldom at a loss in representing distance, that is, in the clear atmosphere which they invariably used. They were diffident in attempting distance with unbroken level country, and till quite the end of the century there is no instance where middle and far distance are shown together, even with the assistance of hilly ground. The almost invariable practice of the leading painters who made landscape a feature in their works, was to introduce water leading back from the foreground, so that breaks therein could be used to indicate distance. More or less numerous jutting forks of low lying land were thrown into the stream from either side, this plan being successfully adopted in Italy,[a] Flanders,[] and Germany.[c]