Respecting which, after the various meditations
into which we have been led on the high duties and ideals of art, it
may not improbably occur to us first to ask,--whether it be worth
inquiring about at all.
That question, perhaps the reader thinks, should have been asked and
answered before I had written, or he read, two volumes and a half
about it. So I _had_ answered it, in my own mind; but it seems time
now to give the grounds for this answer. If, indeed, the reader has
never suspected that landscape-painting was anything but good, right,
and healthy work, I should be sorry to put any doubt of its being so
into his mind; but if, as seems to me more likely, he, living in this
busy and perhaps somewhat calamitous age, has some suspicion that
landscape-painting is but an idle and empty business, not worth all
our long talk about it, then, perhaps, he will be pleased to have such
suspicion done away, before troubling himself farther with these
disquisitions.
I should rather be glad, than otherwise, that he _had_ formed some
suspicion on this matter. If he has at all admitted the truth of
anything hitherto said respecting great art, and its choices of
subject, it seems to me he ought, by this time, to be questioning with
himself whether road-side weeds, old cottages, broken stones, and such
other materials, be worthy matters for grave men to busy themselves in
the imitation of.
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