And from them he has learned to think of a landscape as a rosy
sunset, or as a country road with a church steeple and a silver moon.
One day he goes to the country, and for hours he does not see a single
landscape. Then the sun goes down looking rosy. At once he recognizes
a landscape and exclaims that it is beautiful. But two days later,
when he tries to recall what he saw, the odds are that he will
remember chiefly some landscape in a parlor.
Unless he has been drunk or dreaming or insane he did see a sunset,
but he saw in it, and above all remembers from it, more of what the
oil painting taught him to observe, than what an impressionist
painter, for example, or a cultivated Japanese would have seen and
taken away with him. And the Japanese and the painter in turn will
have seen and remembered more of the form they had learned, unless
they happen to be the very rare people who find fresh sight for
mankind. In untrained observation we pick recognizable signs out of
the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill
out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that
sunset; rather we notice that the thing is man or sunset, and then see
chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subjects.
3
There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly
and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting,
and among busy affairs practically out of the question.
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