This is an exceedingly important point, and its value for art criticism cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of the artist's power. Looking at Rubens' "Ceres,"[53] in which the architecture is viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it. The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow-- which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to be arranged by tone composition--lie carefully disordered it by means of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it, which also included some cupids skilfully placed. All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of graphic art. [46] _W. P._, Vol. II, pp. 255, 256. [47] In regard to this point it is interesting to note that Kant, in his _Kritik der Urteilskraft_, actually called landscape-painting a process of gardening. [48] I do not mean to imply here that all the sentimental gushing that is given vent to nowadays over rugged and wild scenery is the outcome only of a confusion of the artist's and layman's standpoints. The influence of the Christian and Protestant worship of pointless freedom, together with that of their contempt of the work of man, is largely active here; and the sight of unhandseled and wild shrubs, and of tangled and matted grasses, cheers the heart of the fanatical believer in the purposeless freedom and anarchy which Christianity and Protestantism have done so much to honour and extol. That the same man who honours government and an aristocratic ideal may often be found to-day dilating upon the charms of chaotic scenery, only shows how muddle-headed and confused mankind has become. [49] The Brera at Milan. [50] The National Gallery, London. Raphael was very much infected with the people's point of view, hence the annoying stiltedness of many of his pictures. [51] Pinakothek, Munich.