“boys and blackbirds” have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful.  They have always cast about for the instruction of some one who professed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust that ends in sophistication.  They have fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been “amused and misled” (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) “by the false lights” of critical vanity and self-righteousness.  They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done.  Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they are taught to form themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves upon life.  The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce only the still-born, the academic.  They are not told to take their work into the public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, but to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any other test of their own work.  The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare’s men talked and looked, or Scott’s, or Thackeray’s, or Balzac’s, or Hawthorne’s, or Dickens’s; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them.  He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the scientist:  “I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it.  Now don’t waste your time and sin against culture in that way.  I’ve got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it’s a type.  It’s made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it’s perfectly indestructible.  It isn’t very much like a real grasshopper, but it’s a great deal nicer, and it’s served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism.  You may say that it’s artificial.  Well, it is artificial; but then it’s ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal.  You’ll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them.  The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn’t commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn’t been done before, you’ll have to admit that it’s photographic.”