III. NATURALISM VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 215

§ 41. The third constituent element of the Gothic mind was stated to be NATURALISM; that is to say, the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws.

This characteristic of the style partly follows in necessary connection with those named above. For, so soon as the workman is left free to represent what subjects he chooses, he must look to the nature that is round him for material, and will endeavour to represent it as he sees it, with more or less accuracy according to the skill he possesses, and with much play of fancy, but with small respect for law. There is, however, a marked distinction between the imaginations of the Western and Eastern races, even when both are left free; the Western, or Gothic, delighting most in the representation of facts, and the Eastern (Arabian, Persian, and Chinese) in the harmony of colours and forms. Each of these intellectual dispositions has its particular forms of error and abuse, which, though I have often before stated,¹ I must here again briefly explain; and this the rather, because the word Naturalism is, in one of its senses, justly used as a term of reproach, and the questions respecting the real relations of art and nature are so many and so confused throughout all the schools of Europe at this day, that I cannot clearly enunciate any single truth without appearing to admit, in fellowship with it, some kind of error, unless the reader will bear with me in entering into such an analysis of the subject as will serve us for general guidance.

§ 42. We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition* of music, and entirely independent of the

* I am always afraid to use this word “Composition;” it is so utterly misused in the general parlance respecting art. Nothing is more common than to hear divisions of art into “form, composition, and colour,” or “light and shade and composition,” or “sentiment and composition,” or it matters

¹ [See, for instance, above, ch. iv. § § 43 seq., pp. 110 seq.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]