[Illustration: 9. LUCERNE AND LAKE FROM THE DREI LINDEN. Pilatus with storm breaking over mountain and town.]
I have borrowed the title of this chapter from that of an excellent book, recently published, called _How to Look at Pictures_. The natural man might suppose that such were questions on which there is nothing to say. The picture is before you, and all you have to do is to open your eyes and let the image of it fall on your retina. What can be more simple? Yet that is not all, because the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing. How much more one sees in the face of a friend than in that of a stranger! It is similar with all objects. In order to see aright and to see fully, the power of seeing must be acquired. Some learn more easily than others, but all must learn. It is admittedly so with music. The most self-satisfied person cannot refuse to admit that even a short tune is better grasped, better _heard_, on a second hearing than the first time. What is true of a simple tune is more obviously true of a complicated work. The most accomplished musician does not grasp a Wagner opera at a first hearing. Man is a creature with faculties that need training. He is not born with faculties fully trained by instinct.
To perceive beauty in a scene implies a power of selection. There is beauty in every view if you know how to find it, but the eye has to sift it out. Open your eyes at random. They are saluted by an infinite multitude of details. You can pass from one to another, but you cannot see them all at once. Looking at a tree, you can see a few leaves and twigs surrounded by a green spludge, which experience has taught you is made up of leaves or twigs, but you do not see all the leaves at once; so with blades of grass, flowers in a field, strata edges on a cliff, or crevasses in a glacier. In a broad effect of sunset you cannot be simultaneously conscious of more than a few forms and colours, and, of those you are simultaneously conscious of, one will be more important than the rest--one will give the key-note. Nor can you be equally conscious at one moment of forms and colours, or of colours and light and shade. If a view strikes you at all, it strikes you by some effect in it which you perceive, even though you may not be able to state in words what that effect is. It is clear, however, that any effect is the result of selection by the eye. The effect upon the eye would be unchanged if a quantity of details were blotted out, so long as none of those details formed part of the effect. Thus if you were attracted by the bright effulgence of a snow slope seen against a clear sky (to take a simple instance), and if your mind were concentrated upon that contrast, you would not notice the sudden obliteration of a crevasse in the slope. That detail would form no part of the effect.
