Within the department of the pictorial arts want of precision in the use of terms has given rise to a confusion which is even greater than that which prevails with regard to poetry. It has been a natural result of intellectualistic views that in every painting the subject, the situation represented, has been considered as the most important element. As the endeavour to give an explanatory representation of external things and events has been assumed as essential to the artistic craving, so the essence of the artistic work, its real content, has been looked for in the things and events depicted. Especially when paintings are designated by a descriptive title, spectators will be apt to turn their attention solely to those situations or impressions which can be subsumed under the title. If they cannot find any emotional element in the subject, they declare the whole painting to be devoid of feeling. And for this misconception they may even find support in the utterances of the artists; for there are many painters who, fearing lest they might be confused with the melodramatic sensation-mongers, have emphatically pronounced their abhorrence of all emotional suggestion. For the unbiassed observer, however, it is evident that the painter’s joy over a colour or a nuance, or the melancholy which can be expressed, without any anthropomorphic element, by a mere relation between light and shadow, may be as emotional states as those which are embodied in the humorous or sentimental subjects of genre-painting. Every artistic representation, whether landscape, figure, or still-life, always conveys to us some emotional mood of the painter. If this feeling element has been conveyed in some pictures with greater distinctness than in others, this fact must not prevent us from acknowledging that it enters into every kind of art. We do not say, therefore, with Professor van Dyke, “Art to Phidias was a matter of form; to Titian a matter of colour; to Corot a matter of feeling;”[172] but we say, Art to Phidias was a matter of feeling expressed by form; to Titian a matter of feeling expressed by colour; and to Corot a matter of feeling expressed by lights.