It is not enough to say merely that it was because they did not, as some landscapes seem to do, enter into competition with Nature. The spirit that raised and sculptured the Downs, that entered the beech and made a melody of its silent towering and branching, that kept the sky above alive and beautiful with the massiveness of mountains and the evanescence of foam, was also in this man’s fingers. He was a great lover of these things, and in his love for them combined the ecstasy of courtship with the understanding of marriage. But he loved them too well to draw and paint them. He was not of those who tear themselves from a mistress to write a sonnet on her face. No. He painted the images which they implanted--such was their love of him and his of them--in his brain. There many a metamorphosis as wonderful as Ovid’s was made. The beech-trees mingled with the fantasies of the brain and brought forth holes that are almost human forms, branches that are thoughts and roots that are more than wood. Often, I think, he hardly looked at Nature as he walked, except to take a careless pleasure in the thymy winds, in the drama of light and shade on the woods and hills, in the sound of leaves and birds and water. Within him these things lived a new life until they reached forms as different from their beginnings as we are from Palæolithic man. They attained to that beauty of which, as I have said, Nature was so little jealous, by this evolution. Some of his pictures of the leaf-dappled branch-work of beeches always remind me of the efflorescence of frost on a window-pane, and the comparison is not purely fantastic but has a real significance. And yet the landscapes of this metamorphosis are not, as might have been expected, decorations that have lost all smell of earth and light of sun and breath of breeze. Decorative they certainly are, and I know few pictures which are less open to the accusation of being scraps from Nature, which it is more impossible to think of extending beyond the limits of the frame. But such is the personality of the artist that all this refinement only made more powerful than ever the spirit of the motionless things, the trees, the pools, the hills, the clouds. Frankly, there is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the moment only, be called inhumanity in the artist, or he could not thus have reinforced or intensified the inhumanity of Nature. Consider, for example, his “Song of the Nightingale.” Those woods are untrodden woods as lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale’s song to rule in solitude under the crescent moon. No lovers walk there. Mortal who enters there must either a poet or a madman be.