of death, with body marred and soul a wreckage, but he pressed God's lamp to his breast. He saw the truth, and the seeing gave him means for a never ending progress. What he achieved was not a fixed salvation, but a tendency. All good is relative.

The accompaniment of evolution is struggle. Materials offer obstruction to spiritual possession. The artist finds his media intractable. He cannot mold the clay as he would; he shapes, re-shapes, adds, subtracts the stubborn materials, only to make a shape all unlike his desire. So life presents unscaled walls. Our purposes are balked. Nevertheless, there can be no peace. Browning sounds the call to battle. He does not avoid the evil, waiting for Nirvana, an ending in dream. Rather he welcomes the strife, grapples with the evil, endures the pain and defeat. That is the way of the world, not to be resisted.

Evolution is eternal. As love was at the beginning, so love continues in the process. There is no stoppage; there can be no stoppage. Love is exhaustless. Immortality is not a dogma-it is an experience. It is the consciousness of growth in love.

Starting with an esoteric philosophy, the principle of which works by inner evolutionary or esoteric means, the very outworking of this principle in his own life lead Browning to personalize his poetry and to follow the evolutionary or esoteric method in the forms of his art.

SUBJECTIVE LANDSCAPE ART: GEORGE

INNESS.

I.

"Some persons suppose," said George Inness, in one of his wonderfully suggestive conversations, "that landscape has no power to communicate human sentiment; but this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can, and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant." In these words, George Inness, whom I fain would believe the greatest among landscape artists, touches upon a discovery that the human mind has been long in making; the discovery of the essential unity and kinship of all living things, the discovery that landscape, sunshine and atmosphere yield a full and adequate response to human thought and feeling, that these have significance, not only in their own right, but also as defining and interpreting man's own subjectivity.

The stages of exploration whereby the world's painters have approached the monistic conception are three: the first, a transitional era, during which, having some faint perception of kinship with nature, men freed themselves from the theological dogma of dualism; the second, the stage of realism, when under the direction of materialistic science, painters looked outwardly and described phenomena in their superficial aspect; the third,

that of idealization, corresponding to the modern stage of monistic science, when the discovery was made that nature has its mystery, that there is something underlying the objective reality, that "something," perceived by Wordsworth, "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man," and which is further described as "a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things." The time of emancipation and first discovery was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and exactly coincided with the emancipatory movements inaugurated by Luther in the sphere of religion and by Copernicus and Galileo in the realm of knowledge. Nature, to be sure, had been employed to some extent by the early Italian masters, but simply as background. In the paintings of Fra Filippo Lippi and Botticelli and other members of the Renaissance group, even as early as Fra Angelico of the strictly pietisic and ethical school, appear charming little bits of landscape hidden away in the background of madonnas and saints, seen perhaps only through windows and open doors as if the caprice or accident of the moment. And in these dainty glimpses of clouds, woods, mountain and river the suggestion is stealthily made that saints and madonnas were not wholly heavenly minded, but lived environed by the facts of this our mundane sphere. "The world's no blot for us, nor blank," Browning makes Lippi say, "It means intensely and means good." The discoveries of science, the substitution of the sun for the earth as the center of the planetary system, destroyed forever the egotistic assumption of the centrality of man in the universe; and the history of

painting from that day to this might almost be said to consist in the disappearance of man as having sole and independent value, and in the advance of the backgrounds of the early painters into the foreground of art's canvas. By the seventeenth century, in the works of Reubens, the Poussins, Claude Lorraine, and Salvator Rosa, the independence of landscape is acknowledged. Nature, it is true, was treated by these painters with hardly a touch of realism. Their canvases are formal, pedantic and artificially composed. But their task was not to realize but to emancipate. There is even the need of com promise and in many paintings, whose chief interest is clearly that of the natural scene, some figure from the old scriptures or reminiscent of the mythologies would be included in deference to the traditions.

It belonged to the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, to the group about Hobbema and Ruisdael, to ascertain with accuracy the content of the objective vision. Certain aspects of nature, as the forms of trees, the manner of running water and moving clouds, occasionally the fugitive play of light, were understood by them as never before, and recorded with fidelity to the object. Their pictures bear signs of their penetrating observation; their objects are heavy with the pull of gravitation, but of inter-penetration, of the sense of relationship between the painter and the scene there is scarcely a token. In the Christian masters there was lacking the sense of the actual; even more do we miss in the work of the Dutch painters of this period the feeling of surmise. But after long centuries of neglect of nature, their task was to study, explore and record the objective world. To man and objects they gave equal

value. Their motive was realism; their merits were frankness and fidelity in handling the objects of vision.

Upon the Dutch painters and their honesty of report the idealists built their superstructure-or if this figure be too dualistic, let it be said that when Constable and Gainsborough saw how good the actual appeared when seen with the objective eye, they were emboldened to record the results of a more penetrating and sensitizing vision. The movement now begun in England and continued in France by the Barbizon painters has reference to the idealization of landscape, or more properly to the realization of the ideal or sensient element in landscape. Varied as are the actual forms of nature, the perception on the part of modern painters of the sensient life governing forms is even more various, the difference, however, being measured by relative depth of vision rather than by the presence or absence of humanizing capacity; for one and all are monistic in tendency and perceive that nature is passional and that passion is natural. Constable, a painter of the transition, carries still something of the material burden of the Dutch painters; but so delicate is Corot in sentiment that only the quiet morning or the evening, treated with Doric simplicity and harmony, measures his still nature. Less classic than Corot, Rousseau, whose symbols are distance, sky depth, and intricate woods, strikes deeper into nature's sentiency. In Delacroix the objects of nature appear almost altogether as symbols, so conscious is he of kinship in language. With George Inness the identities are well nigh perfected, with the emphasis laid perhaps a little too strongly upon his own impression: yet I would not call Inness―or indeed any painter of this group-an impressionist, but