| OCR Text |
Show 401 Johnson had the means to turn Muir into a national hero, and he used the forum of Century effectively in the early nineties. Though the idea of Muir as prophet was not new, it needed polishing. Much of what Muir had said in the seventies was prophetic, but that was not what William Keith referred to when he said, "We almost thought he was Jesus Christ. We fairly worshipped him!" Muir had a certain stature in the estimation of his acquaintances in San Francisco, the power of his presence coming from his moral uprightness which seemed not to need culture at all. In fact, people like Keith - artists and writers - were more likely to think of Muir as a Jeremiah, who warned that men who "worshipped the works of their own hands" were doomed to failure. As the Old Testament figure, the Jeremiah-Muir did battle against men who tried to re-create Nature in their own image. This was particularly true of his message to artists. While Muir admired a good deal of Keith's work, he favored those paintings which showed geographical accuracy. They had always argued about art, but when Keith began to move away from "realism" in the eighties, the battles over aesthetics increased. Muir liked the work of Thomas Hill, while most find him to be too "realistic." In a very literal Old Testament way, Muir distrusted artists who worshipped the works of their own hands. Even while he worked on Picturesque California, a dark voice growled beneath the surface, ready to burst forth as it had in "Bee Pastures." Nature could not be improved by art any more than Nevada Falls could be fixed by men. |
