The Venetian landscape, on the other hand, has in its
material conditions much which is hard, or harshly definite; but the
masters of the Venetian school have shown themselves little burdened by
them. Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements
only, of cool colour and tranquillising line; and they use its actual
details, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forest
arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the
presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or
essence only of a certain sort of landscape--a country of the pure
reason or half-imaginative memory.
Poetry, again, works with words addressed in the first instance to the
mere intelligence; and it deals, most often, with a definite subject or
situation. Sometimes it may find a noble and quite legitimate function
in the expression of moral or political aspiration, as often in the
poetry of Victor Hugo. In such instances it is easy enough for the
understanding to distinguish between the matter and the form, however
much the matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the mere
intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing, artistic spirit.
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