People never could understand his attitude towards nature. When he spoke of the “unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset,” and how “the dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but the joy of the tourist is to recognize the traveller on the top,” he at once puzzled and irritated the lay mind, for is not the sunset beautiful? and the traveller on the highest peak of greater interest than the mountain? When a lady one day rushed up to him and enthusiastically exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Whistler, I have just been up the river, and it reminded me so much of your pictures.” And he replied: “Indeed! Then, Nature is looking up,”--people resented it as vanity. But it was not vanity. It was simply his attitude towards nature and art. If some one had said to Mendelssohn, “I have just been in the woods and heard sounds that were just like some of your “Songs without Words,” Mendelssohn would have been surprised, and might well have replied, “Then, the birds are doing better.” Concerning nature, Whistler said: “That nature is always right is an assertion artistically as untrue as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent, even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong. That is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all. “This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost blasphemous. So incorporated with our education has the supposed aphorism become, that its belief is held to be part of our moral being; and the words themselves have, in our ear, the ring of religion. Still, seldom does nature succeed in producing a picture.”[44] One should never confound art with nature; they are antithetical terms. There is no art in nature; there should be no nature in art. And what is art is not nature, and what is nature is not art. Nature is the raw material, art is the finished product; and art should no more resemble nature than a cave resembles a house. And to the extent that art slavishly imitates nature is it of the cave-dwelling variety. There is no color that is not found in nature. There is no combination of colors a hint of which cannot be found in nature. But it is the business of art to take the colors, accept the hints, and produce combinations and effects not found in nature. It is not the business of the artist to paint anything as it is, but everything as _he_ sees it.