HJIPI pin Ml* I III au u J L MODERN PAINTERS. MODERN PAINTERS THEIR SUPERIORITY IN THE ART OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING TO ALL THE ANCIENT MASTEKS PROVED BY EXAMPLES OF Crue, tfte Beautiful, mxti tf)e Jutelleetual, FROM THE WORKS OF MODERN ARTISTS, ESPECIALLY FROM THOSE OF J. M. W. TURNER, ESQ., R.A. BY A GRADUATE OF OXFORD. c A A F U “ Accuse me not Of arrogance, If, having walked with nature. And offered, far as frailty would allow. My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth, I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, Whom I have served, that their Divinity Revolts, offended at the ways of men. Philosophers, who, though the human soul Be of a tliousand faculties composed. And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize This soul, and the transcendent universe No more than as a mirror that reflects To proud Self-love her own intelligence.” WORDSWOHTH. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 1843. PKINTED BY STEWART AND MURRAY, OLD BAILEY. WE GETTY U^luAnV TO THE LANDSCAPE AETISTS OF ENGLAND, CI)ti ^orfe IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, BV THEIIl SINCEKE ADMIRER, THE AUTHOR PREFACE. The work now laid before the public originated in indignation at the shallow and false criticisms of the periodicals of the day on the works of the great living artist to whom it principally refers. It was intended to be a short pamphlet, reprobating the matter and style of those critiques, and pointing out their perilous tendency, as guides of public feeling. But, as point after point presented itself for demon- stration, I found myself compelled to amplify what was at first a letter to the Editor of a Review, into something very like a treatise on art, to which I was obliged to give the more consistency and complete- ness, because it advocated opinions which, to the ordinary connoisseur, will sound heretical. I now scarcely know whether I should announce it as an Essay on Landscape Painting, and apologize for its frequent reference to the works of a particular master ; or, announcing it as a critique on particular works, apologize for its lengthy discussion of ge- Vlll Pr.EFACE. neral principles. But of whatever character the work may be considered, the motives which led me to undertake it must not be mistaken. No zeal for the reputation of any individual, no personal feeling of any kind, has the slightest weight or influence with me. The reputation of the great artist to whose works I have chiefly referred, is established on too legitimate grounds among all whose admira- tion is honourable, to be in any way affected by the ignorant sarcasms of pretension and affectation. But when public taste seems plunging deeper and deeper into degradation day by day, and when the press universally exerts such power as it possesses to direct the feeling of the nation more completely to all that is theatrical, affected and false in art ; while it vents its ribald buffooneries on the most exalted truth, and the highest ideal of landscape, that this or any other age has ever witnessed, it becomes the imperative duty of all who have any perception or knowledge of what is really great in art, and any desire for its advancement in England, to come fearlessly forward, regardless of such individual in- terests as are likely to be injured by the knowledge of what is good and right, to declare and demon- strate, wherever they exist, the essence and the authority of the Beautiful and the True. Whatever may seem invidious or partial in the execution of my task is dependent not so much on the tenour of the work, as on its incompleteness. PREFACE. IX I have not entered into systematic criticism of all the painters of the present day \ but I have illus- trated each particular excellence and truth of art by the works in which it exists in the highest degree, resting satisfied that if it be once rightly felt and enjoyed in these, it will be discovered and appreciated wherever it exists in others. And although I have never suppressed any conviction of the superiority of one artist over another, which I believed to be grounded on truth, and necessary to the understanding of truth, I have been cautious never to undermine positive rank, while I disputed relative rank. My uniform desire and aim has been, not that the present favourite should be admired less, but that the neglected master should be admired more. And I know that an increased perception and sense of truth and beauty, though it may interfere with our estimate of the comparative rank of painters, will invariably tend to increase our admiration of all who are really great ; and he who now places Stanfield and Callcott above Turner, will admire Stanfield and Callcott more than he does now, when he has learned to place Turner far above them both. In three instances only have I spoken in direct depreciation of the works of living artists, and these are all cases in which the reputation is so firm and extended, as to suffer little injury from the opinion of an individual, and where the blame has been X PREFACE. warranted and deserved by the desecration of tlie highest powers. Of the old masters 1 have spoken with far greater freedom ; but let it be remembered that only a portion of the work is now presented to the public, and it must not be supposed, because in that par- ticular portion, and with reference to particular excellencies, I have spoken in constant deprecia- tion, that I have no feeling of other excellencies of which cognizance can only be taken in future parts of the work. Let me not be understood to mean more than I have said, nor be made responsible for conclusions when I have only stated facts. I have said that the old masters did not give the truth of Nature ; if the reader chooses, thence, to infer that they were not masters at all, it is his conclusion? not mine. Whatever I have asserted throughout the work, I have endeavoured to ground altogether on demon- strations which must stand or fall by their own strength, and which ought to involve no more refer- ence to authority or character than a demonstration in Euclid. Yet it is proper for the public to know, that the writer is no mere theorist, but has been de- voted from his youth to the laborious study of prac- tical art. Whatever has been generally affirmed of the old PREFACE. XI schools of landscape-painting is founded on familiar acquaintance with every important work of art, from Antwerp to Naples. But it would be useless, where close and immediate comparison with works in our own Academy is desirable, to refer to the de- tails of pictures at Rome or Munich ; and it would be impossible to speak at once with just feeling, as regarded the possessor; and just freedom, as re- garded the public, of pictures in private galleries. Whatever particular references have been made for illustration, have been therefore confined, as far as was in my power, to works in the National and Dulwich Galleries. Finally, I have to apologise for the imperfection of a work which I could have wished not to have executed, but with years of reflection and revisal. It is owing to my sense of the necessity of such revisal, thut only a portion of the work is now pre- sented to the public ; but that portion is both com- plete in itself, and is more peculiarly directed against the crying evil which called for instant remedy. Whether I ever completely fulfil my in- tention, will partly depend upon the spirit in which the present volume is received. If it be attributed to an invidious spirit, or a desire for the advance- ment of individual interests, I could hope to effect little good by farther effort. If, on the contrary, its real feeling and intention be understood, I shall shrink from no labour in the execution of a task XU PREFACE. which may tend, however feebly, to the advance- ment of 'the cause of real art in England, and to the honour of those great living Masters whom we now neglect or malign, to pour our flattery into the ear of Death, and exalt, with vain acclamation, the names of those who neither demand our praise, nor regard our gratitude. The Author. SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. PART I. OF GENERAL PRINCIPLES. SECTION I. OF THE NATURE OF THE IDEAS CONVEYABLE BY ART. Chapter I. — Introductory. page § 1. Public opinion no criterion of excellence, except after long periods of time 1 § 2. And therefore obstinate when once formed 4 § 3. The author’s reasons for opposing it in particular instances . . 5 § 4. But only on points capable of demonstration G § 5. The author’s partiality to modern works excusable 7 Chapter II. — Definition of Greatness in Art. § 1 . Distinction between the painter’s intellectual power and tech- nical knowledge 9 § 2. Painting, as such, is nothing than language 9 § 3. “ Painter,” a term corresponding to “ versifier” 10 § 4. Example in a painting of E. Landseer’s 10 $ 6. Difficulty of fixing an exact limit between language and thought 11 $ 6. Distinction between decorative and expressive language .... 11 § 7. Instance in the Dutch and early Italian schools 12 § 8. Yet there are certain ideas belonging to language itself 13 $ 9. The definition 13 Chapter III. — Of Ideas of Power. § 1. What classes of ideas are conveyable by art 15 $ 2. Ideas of power vary much in relative dignity 15 $ 3. But are received from whatever has been the subject of power 16 XIV CONTENTS. § 4. What ia necessary to the distinguishing of excellence 18 § 5. The pleasure attendant on conquering difficulties is right .... 18 Chapter IV. — Of Ideas of Imitation. § 1 . False use of the term “ imitation” by many writers on art . . 20 § 2. Real meaning of the term 21 § 3. What is requisite to the sense of imitation 21 $ 4. The pleasure resulting from imitation the most contemptible that can be derived from art 22- § 5. Imitation is only of contemptible subjects 23 $6. Imitation is contemptible because it is easy 23 § 7. Recapitulation 24 Chapter V. — Of Ideas of Truth. §1. Meaning of the word “truth” as applied to art 25 § 2. First difference between truth and imitation 25 § 3. Second difference 25 § 4. Third difference 26 §5. No accurate truths necessary to imitation 26 § 6. Ideas of truth are inconsistent with ideas of imitation 29 Chapter VI. — Of Ideas of Beauty. § 1. Definition of the term “beautiful” 31 § 2. Definition of the term “ taste ” 32 §3. Distinction between taste and judgment 32 $ 4. How far beauty may become intellectual 32 $ 5. The high rank and function of ideas of beauty 33 § 6. Meaning of the term “ ideal beauty ” 33 Chapter VII. — Of Ideas of Relation. § 1. General meaning of the term 35 § 2. What ideas are to be comprehended under it 35 § 3. The exceeding nobility of these ideas 36 § 4. Why no subdivision of so extensive a class is necessary .... 37 SECTION II. OF POWER. Chapter I. — General Principles respecting Ideas of Power. § 1. No necessity for detailed study of ideas of imitation 38 § 2. Nor for separate study of ideas of power 38 § 3. Except under one particular form 39 § 4. There are two modes of receiving ideas of power, commonly inconsistent 39 $ 5. First reason of the inconsistency 40 CONTENTS. XV <5 0. Second reason for the inconsistency. 40 § 7. The sensation of power ought not to be sought in imperfect art 41 § 8. Instance in pictures of modern artists 41 § 9. Connection between ideas of power and modes of execution 42 Chapter II. — Of Ideas of Power, as they are dependent upon Execution. § 1 . Meaning of the term “ execution ” 43 § 2. The first quality of execution is truth 43 § 3. The second, simplicity 44 ^ 4. The third, mystery 44 § 5. The fourth, inadequacy ; and the fifth, decision 44 § 6. The sixth, velocity 44 § 7. Strangeness an illegitimate source of pleasure in execution. . 45 ^ 8. Yet even the legitimate sources of pleasure in execution are inconsistent with each other 46 § 9. And fondness for ideas of power leads to the adoption of the lowest 46 § 10. Therefore perilous 48 § 11. Recapitulation 48 Chapter III. — Of the Sublime. § 1. Sublimity is the effect upon the mind of anything above it. . 49 § 2. Burke’s theory of the nature of the sublime incorrect, and why 49 § 3. Danger is sublime, but not the fear of it 50 § 4. The highest beauty is sublime 50 § 5. And generally whatever elevates the mind 50 § 6. The former division of the subject is therefore sufficient 51 PART II. OF TRUTH. SECTION I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES RESPECTING IDEAS OF TRUTH. Chapter I. — Of Ideas of Truth in their Connection with those of Beauty and Relation. § 1 . The two great ends of landscape painting are the representa- tion of facts and thoughts 52 XVI CONTENTS. § 2. They induce a different choice of material subjects 5:3 § 3. The fitst mode of selection apt to produce sameness and repetition 53 $ 4. The second necessitating variety 54 § 5. Yet the first is delightful to all 54 ^ 6. The second only to a few 55 § 7. The first necessary to the second 55 § 8. The exceeding importance of truth 56 § 9. Coldness or want of beauty no sign of truth 57 § 10. How truth may be considered a just criterion of all art. . . . 57 Chapter II. — That the Truth of Nature is not to be discerned by the uneducated Senses. § 1. The common self-deception of men with respect to their power of discerning truth 59 § 2. Men usually see little of what is before their eyes GO 3. But more or less in proportion to their natural sensibility to what is beautiful 61 § 4. Connected with a perfect state of moral feeling 62 § 5. And of the intellectual powers 63 § 6. How sight depends upon previous knowledge 63 § 7. The difficulty increased by the variety of truths in nature . . 65 § 8. -We recognise objects by their least important attributes 66 Chapter III. — Of the relative Importance of Truths: — first, that particular Truths are more important than general ones. <5 1. Necessity of determining the relative importance of truths. . 69 § 2. Misapplication of the aphorism : “ General truths are more important than particular ones ” 69 § 3. Falseness of this maxim, taken without explanation 70 § 4. Generality important in this subject, particularly in the pre- dicate 76 § 5. The importance of truths of species is not owing to their generality 71 § 6. All truths valuable as they are characteristic 72 § 7. Otherwise truths of species are valuable, because beautiful . . 73 § 8. And many truths, valuable if separate, may be objectionable in connection with others 73 § 9. Recapitulation 74 Chapter IV. — Of the relative Importance of Truths : — Secondly, that rare Truths are more important than frequent ones. ^1. No accidental violation of nature’s principles should be re- presented 76 mmm CONTENTS. Xvii $ 2, But the cases in which those principles have been strikingly exemplified 77 § 3. Which are comparatively rare 77 § 4. All repetition is blameable 77 $ 5. The duty of the painter is the same as that of a preacher. . . . 78 Chapter V. — Of the relative Importance of Truths : — Thirdly, that Truths of Colour are the least im- portant of all Truths. § 1. Difference between primary and secondary qualities in bodies 79 § 2. The first are fully characteristic, the second imperfectly so . . 80 $ 3. Colour is a secondary quality, therefore less important than form 80 $ 4. Colour no distinction between objects of the same species. . . . 81 § 6. And different in association from what it is alone 81 § 6. It is not certain whether any two people see the same colour in things 81 § 7. Form, considered as an element of landscape, includes light and shade 82 § 8. Importance of light and shade in expressing the character of bodies, and unimportance of colour 82 $ 9. Recapitulation 83 Chapter VI. — Recapitulation. § 1. The importance of historical truths 84 § 2. Form, as explained by light and shade, the first of all truths. Tone, light, and colour, are secondary 85 § 3. And deceptive chiaroscuro the lowest of all 85 Chapter VII. — General Application of the foregoing Prin- ciples. $ 1. The different selection of facts consequent on the aim at imi- tation or at truth 86 § 2. The old masters, as a body, aim only at imitation 86 § 3. What truths they gave 87 § 4. The principles of selection adopted by modern artists 89 $ 5. General feeling of Claude, Salvator, and G. Poussin, contrasted with the freedom and vastness of nature 89 § 6. And with the feeling of modern artists 90 § 7. The character of Venice, as given by Canaletti 92 § 8. By Prout 94 $ 9. By Stanfield 95 §10. By Turner 95 § 11. The system to be observed in comparing works with reference to truth 96 §12. Difficulty of demonstration in such subjects 97 § 13. General plan of investigation 98 a XVlll CONTENTS. SECTION II. OF GENERAL TRUTHS. Chapteb I. — Of Truth of Tone. $1. Meanings of the word “ tone First, the right relation of objects in shadow to the principal light 99 § 2. Secondly, the quality of colour by which it is felt to owe part of its brightness to the hue of light upon it 99 f 3. Difference between tone in its first sense and aerial perspec- tive 100 § 4. The pictures of the old masters perfect in relation of middle tints to light 100 ^ 6. And consequently totally false in relation of middle tints to darkness 101 $ 6. General falsehood of such a system 102 § 7. The principle of Turner in this respect 103 § 8. Comparison of N. Poussin’s Phocion.” 104 $ 9. With Turner’s “ Mercury and Argus.’’ 105 $ 10. And with the “ Datur Hora Quieti.” 105 § 11. The second sense of the word “ tone.” 106 § 12. Remarkable difference in this respect between the paintings , and drawings of Turner 106 $ 13. Not owing to want of power over the material 107 § 14. The two distinct qualities of light to be considered ........ 108 § 15. Falsehoods by which Titian attains the appearance of quality in light 108 § 16. Turner will not use such means 109 § 17. But gains in essential truth by the sacrifice 109 § 18. The second quality of light 110 § 19. The perfection of Cuyp in this respect interfered with by nu- merous solecisms Ill § 20. Turner is not so perfect in parts — far more so in the whole 112 § 21. The power in Turner of uniting a number of tones 113 § 22. Recapitulation 114 Chapter II. — Of Truth of Colour. $ 1. Incompetence of the late critics of Turner’s colour 116 § 2. Observation on the colour of G. Poussin’s “ La Riccia.” .... 116 $ 3. As compared with the actual scene 117 §4. Turner himself is inferior in brilliancy to nature 118 § 5. Impossible colours of Salvator, Titian 119 § 6. Poussin, and Claude 120 § 7. Turner’-s. translation of colours 122 § 8. Notice of. effects in which no brilliancy of art can even ap- proach that of reality. 123 CONTENTS. XIX $ 9. Reasons for the usual incredulity of the observer with respect to their representation 124 $ 10. Colour of the “ Napoleon.” 126 $ 11. Necessary discrepancy between the attainable brilliancy of colour and light 127 § 12. This discrepancy less in Turner than in other colourists .... 128 $13. Its great extent in a landsoax>e attributed to Rubens 128 $ 14. Turner scarcely ever uses pure or vivid colour 129 $ 15. His great tenderness in all large spaces of colour 130 § 16. The basis of grey, under all his vivid hues 131 $ 17. The variety and fulness even of his most simple tones 132 § 18. Following the infinite and unapproachable variety of nature.. 133 § 19. His dislike of purple, and fondness for the opposition of yellow and black. The principles of nature in this respect 134 $ 20. His early works are false in colour 135 $ 21. His drawings invariably perfect 136 <§ 22. The perfection aiid importance of his greys. Recapitulation 136 $ 23. The subjection of his system of colour to that of chiaro- scuro 137 Chapter III. — Of Truth of Chiaroscuro. § 1. We are not at present to examine particular effects of light . . 140 3. And therefore the distinctness of shadows is the chief means of expressing vividness of light 141 § 4. Total absence of such, distinctness in the works of the Italian school 142 § 5. And partial absence in the Dutch 142 $ 6. The perfection of Turner’s works in this respect 143 The effect of his shadows upon the light 145 § 7. The distinction holds good between almost all the works of the ancient and modern schools 146 ^ 8. Second great principle of chiaroscuro. Both high light and deep shadow are used in equal quantity, and only in points 147 § 9. Neglect or contradiction of this principle by writers on art . . 148 § 10. And consequent misguiding of the student 149 §11. The great value of a simple chiaroscuro 149 § 12. The sharp separation of nature’s lights from her middle tint.. 150 § 13. General falsehood of the old masters in this respect. ... .... 151 § 14. Excellence of the chiaroscuro of M. Angelo, P. Veronese, and Rubens 152 §15. Errors of the landscape painters 153 § 16. The truth of Turner 153 § 17. Recapitulation 155 Chapter IV. — Of Truth of Space: — First, as dependent on the Focus of the Eye. § 1. Space is more clearly indicated by the drawing of objects than by their hue 156 a 2 XX CONTENTS. $ 2. It is impossible to see objects at unequal distances distinctly at one moment 157 . $ 3. Especially such as are both comparatively near 167 § 4, In painting, therefore, either the foreground or distance must he partially sacrificed 158 $ 6. Which not being done by the old masters, they could not ex- press space 169 $ 6. Exception in the landscapes of Kubens 159 § 7. But modern artists have succeeded in fully carrying out this principle 160 § 8. Especially Turner 162 § 9. Justification of the want of drawing in Turner’s figures .... 163 Chapter V. — Of Truth of Space: — Secondly, as its appear- ance is dependent on the Power of the Eye. $ 1. The peculiar indistinctness dependent on the retirement of objects from the eye 165 § 2. Causes confusion, but not annihilation of details 165 § 3. Instances in various objects 166 § 4. Two great resultant truths ; that nature is never distinct, and never vacant 167 § 5. Complete violation of both these principles by the old mas- ters. They are either distinct or vacant 168 § 6. Instances from Nicholas Poussin 168 § 7. From Claude 169 § 8. And G. Poussin 170 § 9. The imperative necessity, in landscape painting, of fulness and finish 171 $ 10. Breadth is not vacancy 172 $ 11. The fulness and mystery of Turner’s distances 173 § 12. Farther illustrations in architectural drawing 174 § 13. In near objects as well as distances 175 § 14. Vacancy and falsehood of Canaletti 176 § 15. Still greater fulness and finish in landscape foregrounds. . . . 176 $ 16. Space and size are destroyed alike by distinctness and by vacancy 177 § 17. Swift execution best secures perfection of details 177 § 18. Finish is far more necessary in landscape than in historical subjects 17g $ 19. Recapitulation of the section 179 SECTION III. OF TRUTH OF SKIES. Chapter I. — Of the Open Sky. ^ 1 . The peculiar adaptation of the sky to the pleasing and teach- ing of man jgj CONTENTS. XXI ^ 2. The carelessness with which its lessons are received 182 § 3. The most essential of these lessons are the gentlest 183 § 4. Many of our ideas of sky altogether conventional 183 § 5, Nature and essential qualities of the open blue 184 §6. Its connection with clouds 185 § 7. Its exceeding depth 185 $ 8. These qualities are especially given by modern masters 185 § 9. And by Claude 186 § 10. Total absence of them in Poussin. Physical errors in his general treatment of open sky • • • 186 ^11. Errors of Cuyp in graduation of colour 187 § 12. The exceeding value of the skies of the early Italian and Dutch schools. Their qualities are unattainable in modern times 189 ^ 13. Phenomena of visible sunbeams. Their nature and cause . . 189 § 14. They are only illuminated mist, and cannot appear when the sky is free from vapour, nor when it is without clouds .... 190 § 15. Erroneous tendency in the representation of such phenomena by the old masters 191 § 16. The ray which appears in the dazzled eye should not be represented 192 § 17. The practice of Turner. His keen perception of the more delicate phenomena of rays 192 § 18. The total absence of any evidence of such perception in the works of the old masters 193 § 19. Truth of the skies of modern drawings 193 § 20. Recapitulation. The best skies of the ancients are, in quality, inimitable, but in rendering of various truth, childish .... 194 Chapter II. — Of Truth of Clouds : — First, of the Region of the Cirrus. § 1. Difficulty of ascertaining wherein the truth of clouds consists 195 § 2. Variation of their character at different elevations. The three regions to which they may conveniently be considered as be- longing 195 $ 3. Extent of the upper region - 196 § 4. The symmetrical arrangement of its clouds 196 $ 5. Their exceeding delicacy 197 § 6. Their number 198 § 7. Causes of their peculiarly delicate colouring 198 § 8. Their variety of form 199 ^ 9. Total absence of even the slightest effort at their representa- tion, in ancient landscape 200 § 10. The intense and constant study of them by Turner 201 $ 11. His vignette, “ Sunrise on the Sea.” 202 $ 12. His use of the cirrus in expressing mist • • • 203 § 13. His consistency in every minor feature 204 XXll CONTENTS. $ 14. The colour of the upper clouds 205 § 15- Recapitulation 206 Chapter III. — Of Truth of Clouds : — Secondly, of the Cen- tral Cloud Region. § 1. Extent and typical character of the central cloud region .... 207 § 2. Its characteristic clouds, requiring no attention nor thought for their representation, are therefore favourite subjects with the old masters 207 § 3. The clouds of Salvator and Poussin 208 § 4. Their essential characters 208 $ 5. Their angular forms and general decision of outline 209 § 6. The composition of their minor curves 210 § 7. Their characters as given by S. Rosa 211 § 8. Monotony and falsehood of the clouds of the Italian school generally 212 § 9. Vast size of congregated masses of cloud 212 $10. Demonstrable by comparison with mountain ranges 213 $ 11. And consequent divisions and varieties of feature 214 $ 12. Not lightly to be omitted 214 $ 13. Imperfect conceptions of this size and extent in ancient landscape 215 $ 14. Total want of transparency and evanescence in the clouds of ancient landscape 216 $ 15. Farther proof of their deficiency in space 217 $ 16. Instance of perfect truth in the sky of Turner’s “ Babylon.” 218 $17. And in his “ Pools of Solomon.” 219 $18. Truths of outline and character in his “Como.”.. 220 $ 19. Compared with the clouds of Backhuysen 221 $ 20. The deep-based knowledge of the Alps in Turner’s “ Lake of Geneva.” 221 $21. Further principles of clond form exemplified in his “Amalfi.” 222 $ 22. Reasons for insisting on the infinity of Turner’s works. In- finity is almost an unerring test of all truth 223 $ 23. Instances of the total want of it in the works of Salvator . . 223 $ 24. And of the universal presence of it in those of Turner. The conclusions which may be arrived at from it 224 $ 25. The multiplication of objects, or increase of their size, will not give the impression of infinity, but is the resource of novices 225 $ 26. Farther instances of infinity in the grey skies of Turner. . . 225 $ 27. The excellence of the cloud-drawing of Stanfield 226 $ 28. The average standing of the English school 227 Chapter IY . — Of Truth of Clouds : Thirdly, of the Region of the Rain Cloud. $ 1 . The apparent difference in character between the lower and central clouds is dependent chiefly on proximity 229 CONTENTS. XXIU § 2. Their marked differences in colour 229 § 3. And in definiteness of form 230 $ 4. They are subject to precisely the same great laws 231 j, 5. Value, to the painter, of the rain cloud 232 $ 6. The old masters have not left a single instance of the painting of the rain cloud, and very few efforts at it. Gaspar Poussin’s storms 232 $ 7. The great power of the moderns in this respect. Works of Stanfield 234 $ 8. And of Copley Fielding 234 § 9. His peculiar truth 235 § 10. His weakness, and its probable cause 235 § 11. Impossibility of reasoning on the rain clouds of Turner from engravings 236 § 12. His rendering of Fielding’s particular moment in the “Jumieges” 237 § 13. Illustration of the nature of clouds in the opposed forms of smoke and steam 237 § 14. Moment of retiring rain in the “ Llanthony ” 238 § 15. And of commencing, chosen with peculiar meaning for “ Loch Coriskin ” 239 $ 16. Tlie drawing of transparent vapour in the “ Land’s-End”. . 240 § 17. The individual character of its parts 241 § 18. Deep-studied form of swift rain cloud in the “ Coventry ” . . 241 §19. Compared with forms given by Salvator 242 § 20. Entire expression of tempest by minute touches and cii’cum- stances in the “ Coventry ” 242 $21. Especially by contrast with a passage of extreme repose 243 § 22. The truth of this particular passage. Perfectly pure blue sky only seen after rain, and how seen 244 $ 23. Absence of this effect in the works of the old masters 244 § 24. Success of our water-colour artists in its rendering. Use of it by Turner 245 $26. Expression of near rain -cloud in the “ Gosport” and other works 245 $ 26. Contrasted with Gaspar Poussin’s rain cloud in the “ Dido and Eneas ” 246 $ 27. Turner’s power of rendering mist 247 $ 28. His effects of mist so perfect, that if not at once understood, they can no more be explained or reasoned on than nature herself 247 $ 29. Various instances 248 $ 30. Turner’s more violent effects of tempest are never rendered by engravers ^ 248 $ 31. General system of landscape engraving 249 $ 32. The storm in the “ Stonehenge” 249 XXIV CONTENTS. $ 33. General character of such effects as given by Turner. His expression of falling rain 250 § 34. Recapitulation of the section 250 § 35. Sketch of a few of the skies of nature, taken as a whole, com- pared with the works of Turner and of the old masters. Morning on the plains 251 $ 36. Noon with gathering storms 252 §37. Sunset in tempest. Serene midnight 253 § 38. And sunrise on the Alps 254 Chapter V. — Effects of Light rendered by Modern Art. § 1. Reasons for merely, at present, naming, without examining the particular effects of light rendered by Turner' 255 § 2. Hopes of the author for assistance in the future investigation of them 255 SECTION IV. OF TRUTH OF EARTH. Chapter I. — Of General Structure. § 1 . First laws of the organization of the earth, and their impor- tance in art 259 § 2. The slight attention ordinarily paid to them. Their careful study by modern artists • • • • 260 § 3. General structure of the earth. The hills are its action, the plains its rest 261 § 4. Mountains come out from underneath the plains, and are their support 261 § 5. Structure of the plains themselves. Their perfect level, when deposited by quiet water 262 § 6 . Illustrated by Turner’s “ Marengo.” 263 § 7. General divisions of formation resulting from this arrange- ment. Plan of investigation 264 Chapter II. — Of the Central Mountains. § 1. Similar character of the central peaks in all parts of the world 265 § 2. Their arrangements in pyramids or wedges, divided by vertical fissures 205 § 3. Causing groups of rock resembling an artichoke or rose .... 266 § 4. The faithful statement of these facts by Turner in his “ Alps at daybreak” 200 ^ 5. Vignette of the Andes and others 267 ^ 6 . Necessary distance, and consequent aerial effect on all such mountains 20 g CONTENTS. XXV § 7. Total want of any rendering of their phenomena in ancient art 268 § 8. The perfection of Turner’s vignette to “Jacqueline” 269 $ 9. Its peculiar expression of Alpine facts 269 § 10. Character of the representations of Alps in the distances of Claude 271 $ 11. Their total want of magnitude and aerial distance 271 § 12. And violation of specific form 272 §13. Even in his best works 273 § 14. Farther illustration of the distant character of mountain chains 274 § 15. Their excessive appearance of transparency 273 § 16. Illustrated from the works of Turner and Stanfield. The “ Borromean Islands” of the latter 275 § 17. Turner’s “Arona” 276 § 18. Extreme distance of large objects always characterized by very sharp outline 276 § 19. Want of this decision in Claude 278 § 20. The perpetual rendering of it by Turner 278 § 21. Review of the Alpine drawings of modern artists generally. The great excellence of J. D. Harding 279 § 22. The apparent carelessness of Stanfield in such subjects. Fine feeling of Copley Fielding 279 § 23. Average paintings of Switzerland. Its real spirit has scarcely yet been caught 280 Chapter III. — Of the Inferior Mountains. § 1 . The inferior mountains are distinguished from the central, by being divided into beds 282 § 2. Farther division of these beds by joints 283 § 3. And by lines of lamination 283 § 4. Variety and seeming uncertainty under which these laws are manifested 284 § 5. The perfect expression of them in Turner’s “ Loch Coriskin . . 285 § 6. “ Glencoe,” and other works 286 §7. Especially the “ Mount Lebanon ” 286 § 8. Compared with the work of Salvator 287 § 9. And of Poussin 288 § 10. Effects of external influence on mountain form 289 § 11. The gentle convexity caused by aqueous erosion 290 § 12. And the effect of the action of torrents 291 § 13. The exceeding simplicity of contour caused by these in- fluences 292 § 14. And multiplicity of feature 292 § 15. Both utterly neglected in ancient art 293 § 16. The fldelitj' of treatment in Turner’s “ Daphne and Leu- cippus” 293 i 17. And in the “ Avalanche and Inundation ” 294 XXVI CONTENTS. $ 18. The rarity among secondary hills of steep slopes or high precipices 295 § 19. And consequent expression of horizontal distance in their ascent 296 § 20. Full statement of all these facts in various works of Turner — “ Caudebec,” &c 296 § 21. The use of considering geological truths 298 § 22. Expression of retiring surface by Turner, contrasted with the work of Claude 298 § 23. The same moderation of slope in the contours of his higher hills 299 § 24. The peculiar difficulty of investigating the more essential truths of hill outline 300 § 25. Works of other modern artists.— Clarkson Stanfield 301 $ 26. Importance of particular and individual truth in hill drawing 302 § 27. Works of Copley Fielding. His high feeling 303 § 28. Works of J. D. Harding and others 304 Chapter IV. — Of the Foreground. ^ 1. What rocks were the cliief components of ancient landscape foreground 306 § 2. Salvator’s limestones. The real characters of the rock. Its fractures, and obtuseness of angles 307 $ 3. Salvator’s acute angles caused by the meeting of concave curves 307 § 4. The true outlines are all angular 308 § 5. Salvator’s are all curved 308 6. Peculiar distinctness of light and shade in the rocks of nature 308 § 7. Peculiar confusion of both in the rocks of Salvator 309 § 8. And total want of any expression of hardness or brittleness . . 309 §9. Instances in particular pictures 309 § 10. Compared with the work of Stanfield 310 § 11. Their absolute opposition in every particular 311 § 12. The rocks of J. D. Harding 311 § 13. Characters of loose earth and soil 312 § 14. Its exceeding grace and fulness of feature 313 <5 15. Tlie ground of Teniers 313 § 16. And of Copley Fielding 314 § 17. The foreground of Both 315 § 18. Importance of these minor parts and points 315 § 19. The observance of them is the real distinction between the master and the novice 316 §20. Ground of Cuyp 316 § 21. And of Claude 317 § 22. The entire weakness and childishness of the latter 317 § 23. Compared with the work of Turner 318 § 24. General features of Turner’s foreground 319 CONTENTS. xxvn $ 25. Geological structure of his rocks in the “ Fall of the Tees”. . 319 $ 26. Their convex surfaces and fractured edges 320 § 27. And perfect unity 320 § 28. Various parts whose history, is told us by the details of the drawing 321 § 29. Beautiful instance of an exception to the general rules in the “ Llanthony ” 322 § 30. Turner’s drawing of detached blocks of weathered stone .... 322 § 31. And of complicated foreground 323 § 32. And of loose soil 324 § 33. The unison of all in the ideal foregi’ounds of the Academy pictures 325 § 34. And the great lesson to be received from all 326 SECTION V. OF TRUTH OF WATER. Chapter I. — Of Water, as painted by the Ancients. $ 1. Sketch of the functions and infinite, agency of water 327 ^ 2. The ease with which a common representation of it may he given. The impossibility of a faithful one 328 § 3. Difficulty of properly dividing the subject 328 § 4. General rules which regulate the phenomena of water. First, its universality of reflection 328 § 5. How modified by ripple 329 $ 6. How prolonged and broken 329 § 7. How changed in relation of parts 329 § 8. Not affected by distance 330 § 9. Water receives no shadow 330 § 10. Works of Canaletti. His management of ripple equally false in near water 330 § 11. And in distant 331 §12. He erred not from ignorance, but impotence 332 § 13. His falseness of colour 333 § 14. Illustration from Turner, of the truth 333 § 15. The calms of Vandevelde 334 § 15. Their various violations of natural laws’ 334 § 17. Also proceeded from impotence, not from ignorance 335 § 18. Their painful effect even on unobservant eyes 335 § 19. Singular mistakes of Cuyp, in casting half-a-dozen reflec- tions from one object 336 § 20. And of Paul Potter, in casting no reflections from half-a- dozen objects 337 §21. Painting of water in motion. Ruysdael 337 XXYlll CONTENTS. § 22. Painting of rough seas. Vandevelde and Backhuysen 338 § 23, Their errors of colour and shadow 339 § 24. And powerless efforts at rendering spray 339 § 25. Their impossible insertion of vessels 340 § 26. And impossible curves of surge 340 § 27. The seas of Claude. Their truthfulness 341 Chapter II. — Of Water, as painted by the Moderns. § 1. General power of the moderns in painting quiet water. The lakes of Fielding 342 $ 2. The calm rivers of De Wint, J. Holland, &c 343 § 3. The character of bright and violent falling water 343 § 4. As given by Nesfield 344 § 5. The admirable water-drawing of J. D. Harding 346 § 6, His colour ; and painting of the sea 346 § 7. Tlie sea of Copley Fielding. Its exceeding grace and rapidity 347 § 8. Its high aim at character 345 § 9. But deficiency in the requisite quality of greys 347 § 10. Variety of the greys of nature 348 § 11., Works of Stanfield. His perfect knoAvledge and power .... 348 § 12. But want of feeling. General sum of truth presented by modern art 349 Chapter III. — Of Water, as painted by Turner. § 1. The difficulty of giving surface to smooth w'ater 361 § 2. Is dependent on the structure of the eye, and the focus by which the reflected rays are perceived 351 § 3. Morbid clearness occasioned in painting of water by distinct- ness of reflections 352 § 4. How avoided by Turner 353 § 5. All reflections on distant water are distinct 354 § 6. The error of Vandevelde 355 $ 7. Difference in arrangement of parts between the reflected object and its image 356 $ 8. Illustrated from the works of Turner 356 § 9. The boldness and judgment shown in the observance of it .. 357 $ 10. The texture of surface in Turner’s painting of calm water . . 358 § 11. Its united qualities 359 $ 12. Kelation of various circumstances of past agitation, &c., by the most trifling incidents, as in the “ Cowes.” 359 § 13. In scenes on the Loire and Seine 360 § 14, Expression of contrary waves caused by recoil from shore.. 361 § 15. Various other instances 362 $ 16. Turner’s painting of distant expanses of w'ater. — Calm, inter- rupted by ripple 362 $ 17. Aud rippled, crossed by sunshine 362 $ 18. His drawing of distant rivers 363 CONTENTS. XXIX § 19. And of surface associated with mist 364 § 20. His drawing of falling water, with peculiar expression of weight 364 § 21. The abandonment and plunge of great cataracts. How given by him 365 § 22, Difference in the action of water, when continuous and when interrupted. The interrupted stream fills the hollows of its bed 366 § 23. But the continuous stream takes the shape of its bed 367 $ 24. Its exquisite curved lines 368 § 25. Turner’s careful choice of the historical truth 368 $ 26. His exquisite drawing of the continuous torrent in the “ Llan- thony Abbey.” 369 § 27. And of the interrupted torrent in the “ Mercury and Argus.” 369 $ 28. Various cases 370 § 29. His drawing of the sea. The essential ideas characteristic of the ocean 371 § 30. Are recklessness, power, and breadth 371 $ 31. How Turner renders them in the “ Hero and Leander.” .... 372 $ 32. In the “ Langharne.” 372 § 33. With peculiar expression of weight 373 $ 34. Peculiar action of recoiling waves 374 § 35. And of the stroke of a breaker on the shore 374 $ 36. General character of sea on a rocky coast given by Turner in the “ Land’s-end.” 375 § 37. And of sea after a continued gale, in the “ Snow-storm.” 376 § 38. Turner’s noblest work, the painting of the deep open sea in the “ Slave-ship ” 377 $ 39. Its united excellencies and perfection, as a whole 378 SECTION VI. OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION.— CONCLUSION. Chapter I. — Of Truth of Vegetation. $ I. Extreme difficulty of representing foliage, and ease with which the truth of its representation may be determined 380 $ 2. Laws common to all forest trees. Their branches do not taper, but only divide 381 $ 3. Appearance of tapering caused by frequent buds 382 $ 4. And care of nature to conceal the parallelism 382 § 5. Tlie degree of tapering which may be represented as conti- nuous 383 $ 6. The trees of Gaspar Poussin 383 $ 7. And of the Italian school generally, defy this law 384 § 8. The truth, as it is given by J. D. Harding 384 XXX CONTENTS. § 9. Boughs, in consequence of this law, must diminish where they divide. Those of the old inastevs often do not . § 10. Boughs must multiply as they diminish. Those of the old masters do not 386 §11. All these errors especially shown in Claude’s sketches, and concentrated in a work of G. Poussin’s 387 § 12. Impossibility of the angles of boughs being taken out of them by wind 388 § 13. Unity of all truth in the works of Turner. “ Crossing the Brook r” 389 § 14. “ Chiefswood Cottage,” “ Chateau de la Belle Gabrielle,” &c. 390 § 15. Character of leafage. Its singular irregularity 390 § 16. Perfect regularity of Poussin 391 § 17. Exceeding intricacy of nature’s foliage 392 § 18. How contradicted by the tree patterns of G. Poussin 393 § 19. How followed by Creswick 393 § 20, Perfect unity in nature’s foliage 394 § 21. Total want of it in Both and Hobbima 395 § 22. How rendered by Turner 395 § 23. The near leafage of Claude. His middle distances are good 396 § 24. Universal termination of trees in symmetrical curves. Their ideal form 396 § 25. Altogether unobserved by the old masters. Always. given by Turner 397 §26. Connection in foliage between truth and beauty 398 § 27. Foliage of Harding, Fielding, and other modern painters . . 398 Chapter II. — General Remarks respecting the Truth of Turner. § 1. No necessity of entering into discussion of architectural truth 400 § 2. Because dependent only on the artist’s mode of execution and knowledge of general principles 400 § 3. Notice of a few characteristic examples of Turner’s architecture 401 § 4. Extreme difficulty of illustrating or explaining the highest truth 402 § 5. 'The positive rank of Turner is in no degree shown in the fore- going pages, but only his relative rank 403 § 6. The exceeding refinement of his truth 403 § 7, There is nothing in his works which can be enjoyed without knowledge 404 § 8. And nothing which knowledge will not enable us to enjoy . . 404 § 9. His former rank and progress 405 § 10. Standing of his present works. Their mystery is the conse- quence of their fulness 405 CONTENTS. XXXI Chapter III. — Conclusion. — Modern Art and Modern Criticism. § 1. The entire prominence hitherto given to the works of one artist caused only by our not being able to take cognizance of character 407 § 2. The feelings of different artists are incapble of full comparison 408 $ 3. But the fidelity and truth of each are capable of real com- parison 408 § 4. Especially because they are equally manifested in the treat- ment of all subjects 409 §5. No man draws one thing well, if he can draw nothing else .. 409 § 6. General conclusions to be derived from our past investigation 410 § 7. Truth, a standard of all excellence 411 ^ 8. Modern criticism. Changefulness of public taste 411 ^ 9. Yet associated with a certain degree of judgment 412 § 10. Duty of the press 412 § 11. Qualifications necessary for discharging it 412 $ 12. General incapability of modern critics 413 § 13. And inconsistency with themselves 413 § 14. How the press may really advance the cause of art 414 § 15. Morbid fondness at the present day for unfinished works. ... 415 § 16. By which the public defraud themselves 415 § 17. And in pandering to which, artists ruin themselves 416 § 18. Necessity of finishing works of art perfectly 416 $19. not sufficiently encouraged 417 § 20. Brilliancy of execution or efforts at invention not to be tole- rated in young artists 417 $ 21. The duty and after privileges of all students 418 $ 22. Necessity among our greater artists of more singleness of aim 418 § 23. What should be their general system 419 $ 24. Duty of the press with respect to the works of Turner .... 420 MODERN PAINTERS. PART I. OF GENERAL PRINCIPLES. SECTION 1. OF THE NATURE OF THE IDEAS CONVEYABLE BY ART. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. If it be true, and it can scarcely be disputed, that ^ V nothing has been for centuries consecrated by public teri^n ofTxcel- admiration, without possessing in a high degree some kind of sterling excellence, it is not because the average in tel- periods of time, lect and feeling of the majority of the public are com- petent in any way to distinguish what is really excellent, but because all erroneous opinion is inconsistent, and all ungrounded opinion transitory ; so that while the fancies and feelings which deny deserved honour and award what is undue have neither root nor strength sufficient to maintain consistent testimony for a length of time, the opinions formed on right grounds by those few who are in reality competent judges, being neces- sarily stable, communicate themselves gradually from B 2 INTRODUCTORY. [sect. I. mind to mind, descending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the whole lump, and rule by abso- lute authority, even where the grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacillating, depends the reputation of all that is highest in art and literature. For it is an insult to what is really great in either, to suppose that it in any way addresses itself to mean or uncultivated faculties. It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior. His inferior may over- estimate him, in enthusiasm ; or, as is more commonly the case, degrade him, in ignorance ; but he cannot form a grounded and just estimate. Without proving this, however, which it would take more space to do than I can spare, it is sufficiently evident that there is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multi- tude.* If I stand by a picture in the Academy, and hear twenty persons in succession admiring some paltry bit of mechanism, or imitation in the lining of a cloak, or the satin of a slipper, it is absurd to tell me that they reprobate collectively what they admire individually : or, if they pass with apathy by a piece of the most noble conception or most perfect truth, because it has in it no tricks of the brush nor grimace of expression, it is absurd to tell me that they collectively respect what they separately scorn, or that the feelings and know- ledge of such judges, by any length of time or com- parison of ideas, could come to any right conclusion with respect to what is really high in art. The question is not decided by them, but for them ; — decided at first * The opinion of a majority is right only when it is more probable with each individual that he should he right than that he should be wrong, as in the case of a jury. Where it is more probable, with respect to each individual, that he should be wrong than right, the opinion of the minority is the true one. Thus it is in art. INTRODUCTORY. 3 CHAP. I.] by few : by fewer in proportion as the merits of the work are of a higher order. From these few the decision is communicated to the number next below them in rank of mind, and by these again to a wider and lower circle ; each rank being so far cognizant of the supe- riority of that above it, as to receive its decision with respect; until, in process of time, the right and con- sistent opinion is communicated to all, and held by all as a matter of faith, the more positively in proportion as the grounds of it are less perceived.* * There are, however, a thousand modifying circumstances which render this process sometimes unnecessary, — sometimes rapid and cer- tain— sometimes impossible. It is unnecessary in rhetoric and the drama, because the multitude is the only proper judge of those arts whose end is to move the multitude, (though more is necessary to a fine play than is essentially dramatic, and it is only of the dramatic part that the multitude are cognizant). It is unnecessary, when, united with the higher qualities of a work, there are appeals to universal passion, to all the faculties and feelings which are general in man as an animal. The popularity is then as sudden as it is well grounded,— it is hearty and honest in every mind, but it is based in every mind on a different species of excellence. Such will often be the case with the noblest works of literature. Take Don Quixote for example. The lowest mind would find in it perpetual and brutal amusement in the misfortunes of the knight, and perpetual pleasure in sympathy with the squire. A mind of average feeling would perceive the satirical meaning and force of the book, would appreciate its wit, its elegance, and its truth. But only elevated and peculiar minds discover, in addition to all this, the full moral beauty of the love and truth which are the constant associates of all that is even most weak and erring in the character of its hero, and pass over the rude adventure and scurrile jest in haste — perhaps in pain, to penetrate beneath the rusty corslet, and catch from the wandering glance, the evidence and expression of fortitude, self-devotion, and universal love. So again, with the works of Scott and Byron ; popu- larity was as instant as it was deserved, because there is in them an appeal to those passions which are universal in all men, as well as an expression of such thoughts as can be received only by the few. But they are admired by the majority of their advocates for the weakest parts of their works, as a popular preacher by the majority of his con- gregation for the worst part of his sermon. The process is rapid and certain, when, though there may be little to catch the multitude at once, there is much which they can enjoy when their attention is authoritatively directed to it. So rests the reputation B 2 4 INTRODUCTORY. ^ 2. And there- fore obstinate when once formed. [sect. I. But when this process has taken place, and the work has become sanctified by time in the minds of men, it is impossible that any new work of equal merit can be impartially compared with it, except by minds not only educated and generally capable of appreciating merit, but strong enough to shake off the weight of prejudice and association, which invariably incline them to the older favourite. It is much easier, says Barry, to repeat the cha- racter recorded of Phidias, than to investigate the merits of Agasias. And when, as peculiarly in the case of painting, much knowledge of what is technical and practical is necessary to a right judgment, so that those alone are competent to pronounce a true verdict who are them- of Shakspeare. No ordinary mind can comprehend wherein his arbi- trary and undisputed superiority consists, but there is yet quite as much to amuse, thrill, or excite,— quite as much of what is in the strict sense of the word, dramatic, in his works as in any one else’s. They were received, therefore, when first written, with average approval, as works of common merit : but when the high decision was made, and the circle spread, the public took up the hue and cry conscientiously enough. Let them have daggers, ghosts, clowns, and kings, and with such real and definite sources of enjoyment, they will take the additional trouble to learn half-a-dozen quotations, without understanding them, and admit the superiority of Shakspeare without further demur. No- thing, perhaps, can more completely demonstrate the total ignorance of the public of all that is great or valuable in Shakspeare than their universal admiration of Maclise’s “ Hamlet.” The process is impossible when there is in the work nothing to attract and something to disgust the vulgar mind. Neither their intrinsic ex- cellence, nor the authority of those who can judge of it, will ever make the poems of Wordsworth or George Herbert popular, in the sense in which Scott and Byron are popular, because it is to the vulgar a labour instead of a pleasure to read them ; and there are parts in them which to such judges cannot but be vapid or ridiculous. Most works of the highest art, — those of Raffaelle, M. Agnolo, or Da Vinci, — stand as Shakspeare does, — that which is commonplace and feeble in their excellence being taken for its essence by the uneducated, imagination assisting the impression, (for we readily fancy that we feel, when feeling is a matter of pride or conscience,) and affectation and pretension in- creasing the noise of the rapture, if not its degree. Giotto, Cimabue, Fra Bartolomeo, Perugino, stand, like George Herbert, only with the few. Wilkie becomes popular, like Scott, because he touches passions which all feel, and expresses truths which all can recognize. INTRODUCTORY. 5 CHAP. 1.] selves the persons to be judged, and who therefore can give no opinion, centuries may elapse before fair comparison can be made between two artists of different ages ; while the patriarchal excellence exercises during the interval a tyrannical — perhaps, even a blighting, influence over the minds, both of the public and of those to whom, properly understood, it should serve for a guide and example. In no city of Europe is painting in so hopeless a state of degradation as in Rome ; because there, among all students, the authority of their prede- cessors in art is supreme and without appeal, and the mindless copyist studies Raffaelle, but not what Raffaelle studied. It thus becomes the duty of every one capable § 3. The au- of demonstrating any definite points of superiority in mo- for opposing^it dern art, and who is in a position in which his doing so particular will not be ungraceful, to encounter without hesitation whatever opprobrium may fall upon him from the ne- cessary prejudice even of the most candid minds, and from the far more virulent opposition of those who have no hope of maintaining their own reputation for discern- ment but in the support of that kind of consecrated merit which may be applauded without an incon- venient necessity for reasons. It is my purpose, therefore, believing that there are certain points of su- periority in modern artists, and especially in one or two of their number, which have not yet been fully understood, except by those who are scarcely in a position admitting the declaration of their conviction, to institute a close comparison between the great works of ancient and modern landscape art, to raise, as far as possible, the deceptive veil of imaginary light through which we are accustomed to gaze upon the patriarchal work, and to show the real relations, whether favourable or otherwise, subsisting between it and our own. I am fully aware that this is not to be done lightly or rashly ; that it is the part of every one proposing to undertake such a task, strictly to examine 6 INTRODUCTORY. ^ 4. But only on points ca- pable of de- monstration. [sect. I. with prolonged doubt and severe trial, every opinion in any way contrary to the sacred verdict of time, and to advance nothing which does not, at least in his own conviction, rest on surer ground than mere feeling or taste. I have accordingly advanced nothing in the following pages but with accompanying demonstration, which may indeed be true or false — complete or con- ditional, but which can only be met on its own grounds, and can in no way be borne down or affected by mere authority of great names. Yet even thus I should scarcely have ventured to speak so decidedly as I have, but for my full conviction that in all questions respecting the art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centu- ries, we ought not to class the historical and landscape painters together, as possessing any thing like equal rank in their respective walks of art. It is because I look with the most devoted veneration upon M. Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, that I do not distrust the principles which induce me to look with contempt on Claude, Salvator, and Caspar Poussin. Had I dis- liked all, I should have believed in and bowed before all ; but in my admiration of the greater, I consider myself as having warrant for the repudiation of the less. I feel assured that they cannot with reason be admired together, — that the principles of art on which they worked are totally opposed, and that the land- scape painters of the old school have been honoured only because they had in them a shadow and sem- blance of the manner of the nobler historical painters, whose principles in all important points they directly reversed. But be this as it may, let it be understood, that whenever hereafter I speak depreciatingly of the old masters as a body, I refer to none of the historical painters, for whom I entertain a veneration, which though I hope reasonable in its grounds, is almost superstitious in degree. Neither, unless he be par- ticularly mentioned, do I intend to include Nicholas CHAP. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 7 Poussin, whose landscapes have a separate and elevated character, which renders it necessary to consider them apart from all others. Speaking generally of the old masters, I refer only to Claude, Caspar Poussin, Sal- vator Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Teniers (in his landscapes), P. Potter, Canaletti, and the various Van somethings, and Back somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea. It will of course be necessary for me in the com- mencement of the work to state briefly those prin- ciples on which I conceive all right judgment of art must be founded. These introductory chapters I should wish to be read carefully, because all criticism must be useless when the terms or grounds of it are in any degree ambiguous ; and the ordinary language of connoisseurs and critics, granting that they under- stand it themselves, is usually mere jargon to others, from their custom of using technical terms, by which everything is meant and nothing is expressed. And if, in the application of these principles, in spite § 5. The of my endeavour to render it impartial, the feeling and fondness which I have for some works of modern art dem works escape me sometimes where it should not, let it be pardoned as little more than a fair counterbalance to that peculiar veneration with, which the work of the older master, associated as it has ever been in our ears with the expression of whatever is great or perfect, must be usually regarded by the reader. I do not say that this veneration is wrong, nor^that we should be less attentive to the repeated words of time : but let us not forget, that if honour be for the dead, gratitude can only be for the living. He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant’s pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest 8 INTRODUCTORY. [SECT. I. CHAP. I. measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkind- ness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart, which can only be discharged to the dust. But the lesson which men receive as individuals, they do not learn as nations. Again and again they have seen their noblest descend into the grave, and have thought it enough to garland the tombstone when they had not crowned the brow, and to pay the honour to the ashes, which they had denied to the spirit. Let it not dis- please them that they are bidden, amidst the tumult and the dazzle of their busy life, to listen for the few voices, and watch for the few lamps, which God has toned and lighted to charm and to guide them, that they may not learn their sweetness by their silence, nor their light by their decay. CHAPTER II. DEFINITION OP GREATNESS IN ART. In the 15th Lecture of Sir Joshua Reynolds, inci- $ i. Distinc- dental notice is taken of the distinction between those pai^^er’s excellences in the painter which belong to him as intellectual^ such, and those which belong to him in common with technical all men of intellect, the general and exalted powers of which art is the evidence and expression, not the subject. But the distinction is not there dwelt upon as it should be, for it is owing to the slight attention ordinarily paid to it, that criticism is open to every form of coxcombry, and liable to every phase of error. It is a distinction on which depend all sound judgment of the rank of the artist, and all just appreciation of the dignity of art. Painting, or art generally, as such, with all its tech- § 2. Painting, nicalities, difficulties, and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the than language, vehicle of thought, but by itself, nothing. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed. He has done just as much towards being that which we ought to respect as a great painter, as a man who has learned how to express himself grammatically and melodiously has towards being a great poet. The language is, in- 10 DEFINITION OF [SECT. I. deed, more difficult of acquirement in the one case than in the other, and possesses more power of delight- ing the sense, while it speaks to the intellect, but it is, nevertheless, nothing more than language, and all those excellences which are peculiar to the painter as such, are merely what rhythm, melody, precision and force are in the words of the orator and the poet, ne- cessary to their greatness, but not the tests of their greatness. It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally determined. §3. “Painter,” Speaking with strict propriety, therefore, we should a term corres- g great painter only as he excelled in pre- ponding to /*T 1 “ versifier.” cision and force m the language ot lines, and a great versifier, as he excelled in precision or force of the language of words. A great poet would then be a term strictly, and in precisely the same sense applicable to both, if warranted by the character of the images or thoughts which each in their respective languages con- veyed. § 4. Example Take, for instance, one of the most perfect poems E Lmids*ee?s°^ pictures (I use the word as synonymous) which modern times have seen : — the “ Old Shepherd’s chief- mourner.” Here the exquisite execution of the glossy and crisp hair of the dog, the bright sharp touching of the green bough beside it, the clear painting of the wood of the coffin and the folds of the blanket, are language- language clear and expressive in the highest degree. But the close pressure of the dog’s breast against the wood, the convulsive clinging of the paws, which has dragged the blanket off the trestle, the total power- lessness of the head laid, close and motionless, upon its folds, the fixed and tearful fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin- lid, the quietness and gloom of the chamber, the spec- GREATNESS IN ART. 11 CHAP. II.] tacles marking the place where the Bible was last closed, indicating how lonely has been the life — how unwatched the departure of him who is now laid soli- tary in his sleep ; — these are all thoughts — thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from hundreds of equal merit, as far as mere painting goes, by which it ranks as a work of the highest art, and stamps its author, not as the neat imitator of the texture of a skin, or the fold of a drapery, but as the Man of Mind. It is not, however, always easy, either in painting or § 5 . Difficulty- literature, to determine where the influence of language exa^^^imitlie- stops, and where that of thought begins. Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are thought, clothed, that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed. But the highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its independency of language or expression. A composition is indeed usually most per- fect, when to such intrinsic dignity is added all that expression can do to attract and adorn ; but in every case of supreme excellence this all becomes as nothing. We are more gratified by the simplest lines or words which can suggest the idea in its own naked beauty, than by the robe or the gem which conceal while they decorate ; we are better pleased to feel by their absence how little they could bestow, than by their presence how much they can destroy. There is therefore a distinction to be made between § 6 . Distinction 1,. 11.* • between de- what IS ornamental in language and what is expressive, corative and That part of it which is necessary to the embodyino: 1 • 111* 1 p language. and conveying the thought is worthy of respect and attention as necessary to excellence, though not the test of it. But that part of it which is decorative has little more to do with the intrinsic excellence of the picture than the frame or the varnishing of it. And 12 DEFINITION OF [sect. I. this caution in distinguishing between the ornamental and the expressive is peculiarly necessary in painting ; for in the language of words it is nearly impossible for that which is not expressive to be beautiful, except by mere rhythm or melody, any sacrifice to which is im- mediately stigmatised as error. But the beauty of mere language in painting is not only very attractive and entertaining to the spectator, but requires for its attainment no small exertion of mind and devotion of time by the artist. Hence, in art, men have frequently fancied that they were becoming rhetoricians and poets when they were only learning to speak melodiously, and the judge has over and over again advanced to the honour of authors those who were never more than ornamental writing-masters. § 7. Instance Most pictures of the Dutch school, for instance, except- and^eariy ^“8 always those of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt, Italian schools, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist’s power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and sense- less words: while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants. It is not by ranking the former as more than mechanics, or the latter as less than artists, that the taste of the multitude, always awake to the lowest pleasures which art can bestow, and blunt to the highest, is to be formed or elevated. It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to distinguish what is language, and what is thought, and to rank and praise pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally inferior excel- lence, and one which cannot be compared with nor weighed against thought in any w^ay nor in any degree whatsoever. The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed. No weight, nor mass nor beauty of execu- GREATNESS IN ART. 13 CHAP. II.] tion can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought. Three penstrokes of Raffaelle are a greater and a better picture than the most finished work that ever Carlo Dolci polished into inanity. A pencil scratch of Wilkie’s on the back of a letter is a greater and a better picture, — and I use the term picture in its full sense, — than the most laboured and luminous canvass that ever left the easel of Gerard Dow. A finished work of a great artist is only better than its sketch, if the sources of pleasure belonging to colour and chiaroscuro — valuable in themselves, are so employed as to increase the impressiveness of the thought. But if one atom of thought has vanished, all colour, all finish, all execution, all ornament, are too dearly bought. Nothing but thought can pay for thought, and the instant that the increasing refinement or finish of the pieture begins to be paid for by the loss of the faintest shadow of an idea, that instant all refinement or finish is an excrescence, and a deformity. Yet although in all our speculations on art, language ^8. Yet there is thus to be distinguished from, and held subordinate ML^befonging to, that which it conveys, we must still remember that there are certain ideas inherent in language itself, and that strictly speaking, every pleasure connected with art has in it some reference to the intellect. The mere sensual pleasure of the eye, received from the most brilliant piece of colouring, is as nothing to that which it receives from a crystal prism, except as it depends on our perception of a certain meaning and intended arrangement of colour, which has been the subject of intellect. Nay, the term idea, according to Locke’s definition of it, will extend even to the sensual impressions themselves as far as they are “ things which the mind occupies itself about in thinking,” that is, not as they are felt by the eye only, but as they are received by the mind through the eye. So that, if I say that § 9. The defini- the greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind 14 GREATNESS IN ART. [SECT. I. CHAP. II. of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas, I have a definition which will include as subjects of comparison every pleasure which art is capable of conveying. If I were to say, on the contrary, that the best picture was that which most closely imitated nature, I should assume that art could only please by imitating nature, and I should, cast out of the pale of criticism those parts of works of art which are not imitative, that is to say, intrinsic beauties of colour and form, and those works of art wholly, which like the Arabesques of Raphael in the Loggias, are not imita- tive at all. Now I want a definition of art wide enoush to include all its varieties of aim : I do not say therefore that the art is greatest which gives most pleasure, be- cause perhaps there is some art whose end is to teach, and not to please. I do not say that the art is greatest which teaches us most, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to please and not to teach. I do not say that the art is greatest which imitates best, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to create, and not to imitate. But I say that the art is greatest, which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas, and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received. If this then be the definition of great art, that of a great artist naturally follows. He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas. CHAPTER III. OF IDEAS OF POWER. The definition of art which I have just given, requires § i- What « • • t cIrssgs of IcIgcIs me to determine what kinds of ideas can be received are conveyabie from works of art, and which of these are the greatest, before proceeding to any practical application of the test. I think that all the sources of pleasure, or any other good, to be derived from works of art, may be referred to five distinct heads. I. Ideas of Power. — The perception or conception of the mental or bodily powers by which the work has been produced. II. Ideas of Imitation. — The perception that the thing produced resembles something else. III. Ideas of Truth. — The perception of faithfulness in a statement of facts by the thing produced. IV. Ideas of Beauty. — The perception of beauty, either in the thing produced, or in what it suggests or resembles. V. Ideas of Relation. — The perception of intellectual relations, in the thing produced, or in what it suggests or resembles. I shall briefly distinguish the nature and effects of each of these classes of ideas. I. Ideas of Power. — These are the simple percep- § 2. ideas of tion of the mental or bodily powers exerted in the much in^reia- production of any work of art. According to the dignity. 16 OF IDEAS OF POWER. [sect. I. ^ 3. But are received from whatever has been the sub- ject of power. dignity and degree of the power perceived is the dignity of the idea; but the whole class of ideas is received by the intellect, and they excite the best of the moral feelings, veneration, and the desire of exertion. As a species, therefore, they are one of the noblest con- nected with art ; but the differences in degree of dignity among themselves are infinite, being corres- pondent with every order of power, — from that of the fingers to that of the most exalted intellect. Thus, when we see an Indian’s paddle carved from the handle to the blade, we have a conception of prolonged manual labour, and are gratified in proportion to the supposed expenditure of time and exertion. These are, indeed, powers of a low order, yet the pleasure arising from the conception of them enters very largely indeed into our admiration of all elaborate ornament, architectural decoration, &c. The delight with which we look on the fretted front of Rouen Cathedral depends in no small degree on the simple perception of time employed and labour expended in its production. But it is a right, that is, an ennobling pleasure, even in this its lowest phase ; and even the pleasure felt by those per- sons who praise a drawing for its ^‘finish,” or its ‘^work,” which is one precisely of the same kind, would be right, if it did not imply a want of perception of the higher powers which render work unnecessary. If to the evidence of labour be added that of strength or dex- terity, the sensation of power is yet increased; if to strength and dexterity be added that of ingenuity and judgment, it is multiplied tenfold, and so on, through all the subjects of action of body or mind, we receive the more exalted pleasure from the more exalted power. So far the nature and effects of ideas of power cannot but be admitted by all. But the circumstance which I wish especially to insist upon, with respect to them, is one which may not, perhaps, be so readily allowed, namely. CHAP. III.] OF IDEAS OF POWER. 17 that they are independent of the nature or worthiness The meaning of the object from which thev are received, and that cxcbIIghcg whatever has been the subject of a great power, whether there be intrinsic and apparent worthiness in itself or not, bears with it the evidence of having been so, and is capable of giving the ideas of power, and the conse- quent pleasures, in their full degree. For observe, that a thing is not properly said to have been the result of a great power, on which only some part of that power has been expended. A nut may be cracked by a steam- engine, but it has not, in being so, been the subject of the power of the engine. And thus it is falsely said of great men, that they waste their lofty powers on un- worthy objects : the object may be dangerous or useless, but, as far as the phrase has reference to difficulty of performance, it cannot be unworthy of the power which it brings into exertion, because nothing can become a subject of action to a greater power which can be accomplished by a less, any more than bodily strength can be exerted where there is nothing to resist it. So then, men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects ; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object. Consequently, wherever power of any kind or degree has been exerted, the marks and evidence of it are stamped upon its results : it is impossible that it should be lost or wasted, or without record, even in the “ esti- mation of a hair and therefore, whatever has been the subject of a great power, bears about with it the image of that which created it, and is what is commonly called excellent.” And this is the true meaning of the word excellent, as distinguished from the terms, “ beautiful,” ‘‘ useful,” ‘‘ good,” &c. ; and we shall always, in future, use the word excellent, as signifying that the thing to c ^ 4. What is necessary to the distin- guishing of ex- cellence. § 5. The plea- sure attendant on conquering difficulties is right. 18 OF IDEAS OF POWER. [PART li which it is applied required a great power for its pro- duction.* The faculty of perceiving what powers are required for the production of a thing, is the faculty of perceiving excellence. It is this faculty in which men, even of the most cultivated taste, must always be wanting, unless they have added practice to reflection ; because none can estimate the power manifested in victory, unless they have personally measured the strength to be over- come. Though, therefore, it is possible, by the cultiva- tion of sensibility and judgment, to become capable of distinguishing what is beautiful, it is totally impossible, without practice and knowledge, to distinguish or feel what is excellent. The beauty or the truth of Titian’s flesh-tint may be appreciated by all ; but it is only to the artist, whose multiplied hours of toil have not reached the slightest resemblance of one of its tones, that its excellence is manifest. Wherever, then, difficulty has been overcome, there is excellence : and therefore, in order to prove a work excellent, we have only to prove the difficulty of its production : whether it be useful or beautiful is another question ; its excellence depends on its difficulty alone. Nor is it a false or diseased taste which looks for the overcoming of difficulties, and has pleasure in it, even without any view to resultant good. It has been made * Of course the word “ excellent” is primarily a mere synonym with “ surpassing,” and when applied to persons, has the general meaning given by Johnson — “ the state of abounding in any good quality.’* But when applied to things, it has always reference to the power by which they are produced. We talk of excellent music or poetry, because it is difficult to compose or write such, but never of excellent flowers, because all flowers being the result of the same power, must be equally excellent. We distinguish them only as beautiful or useful, and there- fore, as there is no other one word to signify that quality of a thing pro- duced by which it pleases us merely as the result of power, and as the term “ excellent” is more frequently used in this sense than in any other, I choose to limit it at once to this sense, and I wish it, when I use it in future, to be so understood. OF IDEAS OF POWER. 19 SEC. I. CHAP. III.] part of our moral naturo that we should have a pleasure in encountering and conquering opposition, for the sake of the struggle and the victory, not for the sake of any after result ; and not only our own victory, but the per- ception of that of another, is in all cases the source of pure and ennobling pleasure. And if we often hear it said, and truly said, that an artist has erred by seeking rather to show his skill in overcoming technical diffi- culties, than to reach a great end, be it observed that he is only blamed because he has sought to conquer an inferior difficulty rather than a great one ; for it is much easier to oveicome technical difficulties than to reach a great end. Whenever the visible victory over diffi- culties is found painful or in false taste, it is owing to the preference of an inferior to a great difficulty, or to the false estimate of what is difficult and what is not. It is far more difficult to be simple than to be compli- cated ; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately. We shall find, in the course of our investigation, that beauty and difficulty go together j and that they are only mean and paltry difficulties which it is wrong or contemptible to wrestle with. Be It remembered then— Power is never wasted. Whatever power has been employed, produces excellence in pro- portion to its own dignity and exertion ; and the faculty of perceiving this exertion, and appreciating this dignity, is the faculty of perceiving excellence. 20 [part I. CHAPTER IV. OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. ^ 1 False use ^'^SELi, in his lectures, and many other persons of of the term equally just and accurate habits of thought, (among mSySm’’ others, S. T. Coleridge,) make a distinction between mart imitation and copying, representing the first as the legitimate function of art — the latter as its corruption ; but as such a distinction is by no means warranted, or explained by the common meaning of the words them- selves, it is not easy to comprehend exactly in what sense they are used by those writers. And though, reasoning from the context, I can understand what ideas those words stand for in their minds, I cannot allow the terms to be properly used as symbols of those ideas, which (especially in the case of the word Imitation) are exceedingly complex, and totally different from what most people would understand by the term. And by men of less accurate thought, the word is used still more vaguely or falsely. For instance, Burke (Treatise on the Sublime, part i. sect. 16 .) says, “ When the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then we may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation'^ We may be sure of the contrary : for if the object be undesirable in itself, the closer the imitation the less will be the pleasure. The real pleasure may be in what we have been just speaking ofi SEC. I. CHAP. IV.] OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. 21 the dexterity of the artist’s hand ; or it may be in a beautiful or singular arrangement of colours, or a thoughtful chiaroscuro, or in the pure beauty of certain forms which art forces on our notice, though we should not have observed them in the reality ; and I conceive that none of these sources of pleasure are in any way expressed or intimated by the term “ imitation.” But there is one source of pleasure in works of art totally different from all these, which I conceive to be properly and accurately expressed by the word “ imita- tion:” one which, though constantly confused in rea- soning, because it is always associated in fact, with other means of pleasure, is totally separated from them in its nature, and is the real basis of whatever complicated or various meaning may be afterwards attached to the word in the minds of men. I wish to point out this distinct source of pleasure clearly at once, and only to use the word “imitation” in reference to it. Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the §2. Realmean^ resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable ex- citement of mind, exactly the same in its nature as that which we receive from juggling. Whenever we perceive this in something produced by art, that is to say, whenever the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of imitation. Why such ideas are pleasing, it would be out of our present purpose to enquire ; we only know that there is no man who does not feel pleasure in his animal nature from gentle surprise, and that such surprise can be excited in no more distinct man- ner than by the evidence that a thing is not what it appears to be. Now two things are requisite to our §3. What is complete and most pleasurable perception of this: sensrof^ first, that the resemblance be so perfect as to amount to tion. a deception; secondly, that there be some means of 22 OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. [part I, f § 4. The plea- sure resulting proving at the same moment that it is a deception. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation are, therefore, when one sense is contradicted by another, both bearing as positive evidence on the subject as each is capable of alone ; as when the eye says a thing is round, and the finger says it is flat ; they are, there- fore, never felt in so high a degree as in painting, where appearance of projection, roughness, hair, velvet, &c. are given with a smooth surface, or in wax-work, where the first evidence of the senses is perpetually contradicted by their experience ; but the moment we come to marble, our definition checks us, for a marble fiffure does not look like what it is not : it looks like O marble, and like the form of a man, but then it is marble, and it is the form of a man. It does not look like a man, which it is not, but like the form of a man, which it is. Form is form, hona Jide and actual, whether in marble or in flesh— not an imitation or re- semblance of form, but real form. The chalk outline of the bough of a tree on paper, is not an imitation, it looks like chalk and paper — not like wood, and that which it suggests to the mind is not properly said to be like the form of a bough, it is the form of a bough. Now, then, we see the limits of an idea of imitation; it extends only to the sensation of trickery and de- ception occasioned by a thing being intentionally dif- ferent from what it seems to be ; and the degree of the pleasure depends on the degree of difference and the perfection of the resemblance, not on the nature of the thing resembled. The simple pleasure in the imitation is precisely of the same degree (if the accuracy be equal), whether the subject be a Madonna or a lemon- peel. There are other collateral sources of pleasure which are necessarily associated with this, but that part of the pleasure which depends on the imitation is the same in both. Ideas of imitation, then, act by producing the simple SEC. I. CHAP. IV.] OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. 23 pleasure of surprise, and that not of surprise in its from imitation higher sense and function, but of the mean and paltry temj^ibleTha't surprise which is felt in jugglery. These ideas and ca'fi derived pleasures are the most contemptible which can be received from art ; first, because it is necessary to their enjoyment that the mind should reject the impression and address of the thing represented, and fix itself only upon the reflection that it is not what it seems to be. All high or noble emotion or thought are thus rendered physically impossible, while the mind exults in what is very like a strictly sensual pleasure, and one precisely of the same order and degree, whether it be received from the bristles of a boar or the tears of a Magdalen. We may consider tears as a result of agony or of art, whichever we please, but not of both at the same moment. If we are surprised by them as an attainment of the one, it is impossible we can be moved by them as a sign of the other. Ideas of imitation are contemptible in the second ^ place, because not only do they preclude the spectator temptible sub- from enjoying inherent beauty in the subject, but they can only be received from mean and paltry subjects, because it is impossible to imitate anything really great. We can “ paint a cat or a fiddle, so that they look as if we could take them up but we cannot imitate the ocean, or the Alps. We can imitate fruit, but not a tree ; flowers, but not a pasture ; cut-glass, but not the rainbow. All pictures in which deceptive powers of imitation are displayed are therefore either of contemptible subjects, or have the imitation shown in contemptible parts of them, bits of dress, jewels, fur- niture, &c. Thirdly, these ideas are contemptible, because no ^ g. imitation ideas of power are associated with them : to the igno- contemptible . . . , T ° because it is rant, imitation, indeed, seems diflficult, and its success easy. praiseworthy, but even they can by no possibility see more in the artist than they do in a juggler, who 24 OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. [part I. § 7. Recapitu- lation. arrives at a strange end by means with which they are unacquainted. To the instructed, the juggler is by far the more respectable artist of the two, for they know sleight of hand to be an art of immensely more difficult acquirement, and to imply more ingenuity in the artist than a power of deceptive imitation in painting, which requires nothing more for its attain- ment than a true eye, a steady hand, and some in- dustry — qualities which in no degree separate the imi- tative artist from a watch-maker, pin-maker, or any Other neat-handed artificer. These remarks do not apply to the art of the Diorama, or the stage, where the pleasure is not dependent on the imitation, but is the same which we should receive from nature herself, only far inferior in degree. It is a noble pleasure ; but we shall see in the course of our investigation, both that it is inferior to that which we receive when there is no deception at all, and why it is so. Whenever then in future, I speak of ideas of imi- tation, I wish to be understood to mean the imme- diate and present perception that something produced by art is not what it seems to be. I prefer saying ‘‘ that it is not what it seems to be,” to saying, « that it seems to be what it is not,” because we perceive at once what it seems to be, and the idea of imitation, and the consequent pleasure, result from the subse- quent perception of its being something else — flat, for instance, when we thought it was round. CHAPTER V. OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. The word truth, as applied to art, signifies the faithful § i. Meaning statement, either to the mind or senses, of any fact of « truth” as nature. applied to art. We receive an idea of truth, then, when we perceive the faithfulness of such a statement. The diiference between ideas of truth and of imita- tion lies chiefly in the following points. First, — Imitation can only be of something material, § 2. First dif- but truth has reference to statements both of the tween^trutii qualities of material things, and of emotions, impres- imitation, sions, and thoughts. There is a moral as well as material truth, — a truth of impression as well as of form, — of thought as well as of matter ; and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more important of the two. Hence, truth is a term of uni- versal application, but imitation is limited to that narrow field of art which takes cognizance only of material things. Secondly, — Truth may be stated by any signs or § 3. Second symbols which have a definite signification in the minds of those to whom they are addressed, although such signs be themselves no image nor likeness of anything. Whatever can excite in the mind the conception of certain facts, can give ideas of truth, though it be in no degree the imitation or resemblance of those facts. If § 4. Third dif- ference. § 5. No accu- rate truths necessary to imitation. 26 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH- [PART I. there be — we do not say there is, — but if there be in painting anything which operates, as words do, not by resembling anything, but by being taken as a symbol and substitute for it, and thus inducing the effect of it, then this channel of communication can convey uncor- rupted truth, though it do not in any degree resemble the facts whose conception it induces. But ideas of imitation, of course, require the likeness of the object. They speak to the senses only : truth to the mind. Thirdly, and in consequence of what is above stated, an idea of truth exists in the statement of one attribute of anything, but an idea of imitation only in the resemblance of as many attributes as we are usually cognizant of in its real presence. A pencil outline of the bough of a tree on white paper is a statement of a certain number of facts of form. It does not yet amount to the imitation of anything. The idea of that form is not given in nature by lines at all, still less by black lines with a white space between them. But those lines convey to the mind a distinct impression of a certain number of facts, which it recognizes as agree- able with its previous impressions of the bough of a tree; and it receives, therefore, an idea of truth. If, instead of two lines, we give a dark form with the brush, we convey information of a certain relation of shade between the bough and sky, recognizable for another idea of truth ; but we have still no imitation, for the white paper is not the least like air, nor the black shadow like wood. It is not until after a certain number of ideas of truth have been collected together, that we arrive at an idea of imitation. Hence it might at first sight appear, that an idea of imitation, inasmuch as several ideas of truth were united in it, was nobler than a simple idea of truth. And if it were necessary that the ideas of truth should be perfect, or should be subjects of contemplation as such, it would be so. But, observe, we require to produce the effect SEC. I. CHAP. V.] OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 27 of imitation only so many and such ideas of truth as the senses are usually cognizant of. Now the senses are not usually, nor unless they be especially devoted to the service, cognizant, with accuracy, of any truths but those of space and projection. It requires long study and attention before they give certain evidence of even the simplest truths of form. For instance, the quay on which the figure is sitting, with his hand at his eyes, in Claude’s seaport. No. 14, in the National Gallery, is egregiously out of perspective. The eye of this artist, with all his study, had thus not acquired the power of taking cognizance of the form even of a simple parallel- epiped. How much less of the complicated forms of boughs, leaves, or limbs ? Although, therefore, some- thing resembling the real form is necessary to decep- tion, this something is not to be called a truth of form • for, strictly speaking, there are no degrees of truth, there are only degrees of approach to it; and an ap- proach to it, whose feebleness and imperfection would instantly offend and give pain to a mind really capable of distinguishing truth, is yet quite sufficient for all the purposes of deceptive imitation. It is the same with regard to colour. If we were to paint a tree sky-blue, or a dog rose-pink, the discernment of the public would be keen enough to discover the falsehood ; but, so that there be just so much approach to truth of colour as may come up to the common idea of it in men’s minds, that is to say, if the trees be all bright green, and flesh unbroken buff, and ground unbroken brown, though all the real and refined truths of colour be wholly omitted, or rather defied and contradicted, there is yet quite enough for all purposes of imitation. The only facts then, w'hich we are usually and certainly cognizant of, are those of distance and projection, and if these be tolerably given, with something like truth of form and colour to assist them, the idea of imitation is complete. I would undertake to paint an arm, with every muscle 28 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 28 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. [pART I. out of its place, and every bone of false form and dislo- cated articulation, and yet to obsersm certain coarse and broad resemblances of true outline, which, with careful shading, would induce deception, and draw down the praise and delight of the discerning public. The other day, at Bruges, while I was endeavouring to set down in my note-book something of the ineffable expression of the Madonna in the cathedral, a French amateur came up to me, to inquire if I had seen the modern French pictures in a neighbouring church. I had not, but felt little inclined to leave my marble for all the canvass that ever suffered from French brushes. My apathy was attacked with gradually increasing energy of praise. There never had been such pictures painted since the time of Apelles ; Bubens never executed — Titian never coloured anything like them. I thought this highly probable, and still sat quiet. The voice continued at my ear. “ Parbleu, Monsieur, Michel Ange n’a rien produit de plus beau !” “ De plus heau repeated I, wishing to know what particular excel- lences of Michael Angelo were to be intimated by this expression. “Monsieur, on ne pent plus — c’est un tableau admirable— inconcevable ; Monsieur,” said the Frenchman, lifting up his hands to heaven, as he concentrated in one conclusive and overwhelm- ing proposition the qualities which were to outshine Rubens and overpower Buonaroti, — “ Monsieur, il SORT ! ” Had I wished to know if the anatomy of the limbs was faithfully marked — if their colour was truly ex- pressive of light, and beautiful in itself— if the com- position of the picture was perfect, or its conception great— I might as well have inquired of one of the Flanders mares in the stable at the Fleur de Ble, as of this gentleman. He could only perceive two truths — flesh colour and projection. These constituted his notion of the perfection of painting; because they unite OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 29 SEC. I. CHAP. V.] all that is necessary for deception. He was not there- fore cognizant of many ideas of truth, though perfectly cognizant of ideas of imitation. We shall see, in the course of our investigation ofi6. Ideas of ideas of truth, that ideas of imitation not only do not consistent with imply their presence, but even are inconsistent with it ; nmta- and that pictures which imitate so as to deceive, are never true. But this is not the place for the proof of this ; at present we have only to insist on the last and greatest distinction between ideas of truth and of imita- tion — that the mind, in receiving one of the former, dwells upon its own conception of the fact, or form, or feeling stated, and is occupied only with the qualities and character of that fact or form, considering it as real and existing, being all the while totally regardless of the signs or symbols by which the notion of it has been conveyed. These signs have no pretence, nor hypo- crisy, nor legerdemain about them ; — there is nothing to be found out, or sifted, or surprised in them ; — they bear their message simply and clearly, and it is that message which the mind takes from them and dwells upon, regardless of the language in which it is delivered. But the mind, in receiving an idea of imitation, is wholly occupied in finding out that what has been suggested to it is not what it appears to be : it does not dwell on the suggestion, but on the perception that it is a false suggestion : it derives its pleasure, not from the contemplation of a truth, but from the discovery of a falsehood. So that the moment ideas of truth are grouped together, so as to give rise to an idea of imita- tion, they change their very nature — lose their essence as ideas of truth — and are corrupted and degraded, so as to share in the treachery of what they have produced. Hence, finally, ideas of truth are the foundation, and ideas of imitation, the destruction, of all art. We shall be better able to appreciate their relative dignity after the investi- gation which we propose of the functions of the former ; 30 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. [PART I. but we may as well now express the conclusion to which we shall then be led — that no picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true. SEC. I.] 31 CHAPTER VI. OF IDEAS OP BEAUTY. Any material object which can give us pleasure in the § i. Definition simple contemplation of its qualities without any direct ^/beauUfuT’’ and definite exertion of the intellect, I call in some way, or in some degree, beautiful. Why we receive pleasure from some forms and colours, and not from others, is no more to be asked or answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood. The utmost subtlety of investigation will only lead us to ultimate instincts and principles of human nature, for which no further reason can be given than the simple will of the Deity that we should be so created. We may, indeed, perceive, as far as we are acquainted with His nature, that we have been so constructed as, when in a healthy and cultivated state of mind, to derive pleasure from whatever things are illustrative of that nature ; but we do not receive pleasure from them because they are illustrative of it, nor from any perception that they are illustrative of it, but instinctively and necessarily, as we derive sensual pleasure from the scent of a rose. On these primary principles of our nature, education and accident operate to an unlimited extent, they may be cultivated or checked, directed or diverted, gifted by right guidance with the most acute and faultless sense, or subjected by neglect to every phase of error and disease. He who has followed up these natural laws of aversion and desire, rendering them 32 OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. [part I. § 2. Definition of the term “ taste.” §3 Distinction between taste and judgment. § 4. How far beauty may become intel- lectual. more and more authoritative by constant obedience, so as to derive pleasure always from that which God ori- ginally intended should give him pleasure, and who derives the greatest possible sum of pleasure from any given object, is a man of taste. This, then, is the real meaning of this much disputed word. Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection. He who receives little pleasure from these sources, wants taste ; he who receives pleasure from any other sources, has false or bad taste. And it is thus that the term taste is to be distin- guished from that of “judgment,” with which it is constantly confounded. Judgment is a general term, expressing definite action of the intellect, and appli- cable to every kind of subject which can be submitted to it. There may be judgment of congruity, judgment of truth, judgment of justice, and judgment of diffi- culty and excellence. But all these exertions of the intellect are totally distinct from taste, properly so called, which is the instinctive and instant preferring of one material object to another without any obvious reason, except that it is proper to human nature in its perfection so to do. Observe, however, 1 do not mean by excluding direct exertion of the intellect from ideas of beauty, to assert that beauty has no effect upon, nor connection with the intellect. All our moral feelings are so inwoven with our intellectual powers, that we cannot affect the one without in some degree addressing the other ; and in all high ideas of beauty, it is more than probable that much of the pleasure depends on delicate and untraceable perceptions of fitness, propriety, and re- lation, which are purely intellectual, and through which we arrive at our noblest ideas of what is commonly and rightly called “ intellectual beauty.” But there is yet 33 SEC. r. CHAP. VI. J OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. no immediate exertion of the intellect, that is to say, if a person receiving even the noblest ideas of simple beauty be asked why he likes the object exciting them, he will not be able to give any distinct reason, nor to trace in his mind any formed thought, to which he can appeal as a source of pleasure. He will say that the thing gratifies, fills, hallows, exalts his mind, but he will not be able to say why, or how. If he can, and if he can show that he perceives in the object any expression of distinct thought, he has re- ceived more than an idea of beauty — it is an idea of relation. Ideas of beauty are among the noblest which can be §5. The high presented to the human mind, invariably exalting and purifying it according to their degree, and it would ap- beauty, pear that we are intended by the Deity to be constantly under their influence, because there is not one single object in nature which is not capable of conveying them, and which to the rightly perceiving mind, does not present an incalculably greater number of beautiful than of deformed parts, there being in fact, scarcely any thing in pure, undiseased nature like positive deformity, but only degrees of beauty, or such slight and rare points of permitted contrast as may ren- der all around them more valuable by their opposi- tion, spots of blackness in creation, to make its colours felt. But although everything in nature is more or less § 6. Meaning beautiful, every species of object has its own kind and » degree ot beauty, some being in their own nature more beautiful than others, and few, if any, individuals pos- sessing the utmost degree of beauty of which the species is capable. This utmost degree of specific beauty, necessarily coexistent with the utmost perfection of the object in other respects, is the ideal of the object. A 34 OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. [PART I. Ideas of beauty then, be it remembered, are the sub- jects of moral, but not of intellectual perception. By the investigation of them we shall be led to the know- ledge of the ideal subjects of art. SEC. I.] 35 CHAPTER VII. OF IDEAS OF RELATION. I USE this term rather as one of convenience than as § i. General adequately expressive of the vast class of ideas which I wish to be comprehended under it, namely, all those conveyable by art, which are the subjects of distinct intellectual perception and action, and which are there- fore worthy of the name of thoughts. But as every thought, or definite exertion of intellect, implies two subjects, and some connection or relation inferred be- tween them, the term “ ideas of relation ” is not incor- rect, though it is inexpressive. Under this head must be arranged everything pro- § 2. What ideas ductive of expression, sentiment, and character, whether prehraded^°™~ in figures or landscapes, (for there may be as much under it. definite expression and marked carrying out of particu- lar thoughts in the treatment of inanimate as of animate nature,) everything relating to the conception of the sub- ject and to the congruity and relation of its parts ; not as they enhance each other’s beauty by known and con- stant laws of composition, but as they give each other expression and meaning, by particular application, re- quiring distinct thought to discover or to enjoy ; the choice, for instance, of a particular lurid or appalling light, to illustrate an incident in itself terrible, or of a particular tone of pure colour to prepare the mind for the expression of refined and delicate feeling, and, in a still higher sense, the invention of such incidents and D 2 36 OF IDEAS OF RELATION. [part I. thoughts as can be expressed in words as well as on canvass, and are totally independent of any means of art but such as may serve for the bare suggestion of them. The principal object in the foreground of Turner’s “ Building of Carthage ” is a group of children sailing toy boats. The exquisite choice of this incident, as expressive of the ruling passion, which was to be the source of future greatness, in preference to the tumult of busy stonemasons or arming soldiers, is quite as appreciable when it is told as when it is seen, — it has nothing to do with the technicalities of painting, a scratch of the pen would have conveyed the idea and spoken to the intellect as much as the elaborate realiza- tions of colour. Such a thought as this is something far above all art, it is epic poetry of the highest order. Claude, in subjects of the same kind, commonly intro- duces people carrying red trunks with iron locks about, and dwells, with infantine delight, on the lustre of the leather and the ornaments of the iron. The intellect can have no occupation here, we must look to the imitation or to nothing. Consequently, Turner rises above Claude in the very first instant of the conception of his picture, and acquires an intellectual superiority which no powers of the draughtsman or the artist (sup- posing that such existed in his antagonist) could ever wrest from him. ^ 3 . The exceed- Such is the function and force of ideas of relation. ing nobility of ^re what I have asserted in the second chapter tilicsG idc&s* ^ of this section to be the noblest subjects of art. De- pendent upon it only for expression, they cause all the rest of its complicated sources of pleasure to take in comparison with them, the place of mere language or decoration ; nay even the noblest ideas of beauty sink at once beside these into subordination and subjection. It would add little to the influence of Landseer’s picture above instanced. Chap. II. § 4, that the form of the dog should be conceived with every perfection of curve 37 SEC. I. CHAP. VII.] OF IDEAS OF RELATION. and colour which its nature was capable of, and that the ideal lines should be carried out with the science of a Praxiteles, nay, the instant that the beauty so obtained interfered with the impression of agony and desolation, and drew the mind away from the feeling of the animal to its outward form, that instant would the picture be- come monstrous and degraded. The utmost glory of the human body is a mean subject of contemplation, compared to the emotion, exertion and character of that which animates it ; the lustre of the limbs of the Aphrodite is faint beside that of the brow of the Ma- donna, and the divine form of the Greek god, except as it is the incarnation and expression of divine mind, is. degraded beside the passion and the prophecy of the vaults of the Sistine. Ideas of relation are of course, with respect to art § 4. Why no generally, the most extensive as the most important go^xtmsive^a source of pleasure, and if we proposed entering upon class is neces- the criticism of historical works, it would be absurd to attempt to do so without further subdivision and arrangement. But the old landscape painters got over so much canvass without either exercise of, or appeal to, the intellect, that we shall be little troubled with the subject as far as they are concerned, and whatever subdivision we may adopt, as it will therefore have par- ticular reference to the works of modern artists, will be better understood when we have obtained some know- ledge of them in less important points. By the term " ideas of relation,” then, I mean in future to express all those sources of pleasure, which involve and require at the instant of their perception, active exertion of the intellectual powers. 38 [part I. §1. No neces- sity for detailed study of ideas of imitation. ^ 2. Nor for se- parate study of ideas of power. SECTION II. OF POWER. CHAPTER I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES RESPECTING IDEAS OF POWER. We have seen in the last section, what classes of ideas may be conveyed by art, and we have been able so far to appreciate their relative worth as to see, that from the list, as it is to be applied to the purposes of legitimate criticism, we may at once throw out the ideas of imita- tion; first, because, as we have shown, they are un- worthy the pursuit of the artist ; and secondly, because they are nothing more than the result of a particular as- sociation of ideas of truth. In examining the truth of art, therefore, we shall be compelled to take notice of those particular truths, whose association gives rise to the ideas of imitation. We shall then see more clearly the meanness of those truths, and we shall find ourselves able to use them as tests of vice in art, saying of a picture, — “ It deceives, therefore it must be bad.” Ideas of power, in the same way, cannot be com- pletely viewed as a separate class, not because they are mean or unimportant, but because they are almost al- ways associated with, or dependent upon, some of the higher ideas of truth, beauty, or relation, rendered with decision or velocity. That power which delights us in the chalk sketch of a great painter is not one of the OF IDEAS OF POWER. 39 SEC. II. CHAP. I.] fingers, not like that of the writing-master, mere dexterity of hand. It is the accuracy and certainty of the knowledge, rendered evident by its rapid and fear- less expression, which is the real source of pleasure; and so upon each difficulty of art, whether it be to know, or to relate or to invent, the sensation of power is attendant, when we see that difficulty totally and swiftly vanquished. Hence, as we determine what is otherwise desirable in art, we shall gradually develope the sources of ideas of power, and if there be anything difficult which is not otherwise desirable, it must be afterwards considered separately. But it will be necessary at present to notice a par- §3. Except ticular form of the ideas of power, which is partially independent of knowledge of truth, or difficulty, and which is apt to corrupt the judgment of the critic, and debase the work of the artist. It is evident that the conception of power which we receive from a calcula- tion of unseen difficulty, and an estimate of unseen strength, can never be so impressive as that which we receive from the present sensation or sight of the one resisting, and the other overwhelming. In the one case the power is imagined, and in the other felt. Sup- posing ourselves even capable of ascertaining in our own persons, the truth of what is often by sculptors affirmed of the Laocoon, that the knowledge deve- loped in it must have taken a life-time to accumulate, we should yet scarcely receive from that statue the same sensation of power with which we are at once impressed by him who hurled the mighty prostration of the limbs of the Jonah along the arch of the Sistine. There are thus two modes in which we re- § 4. There are . o ,1 . • . two modes of ceive the conception oi power ; one, the most just, receiving ideas when by a perfect knowledge of the difficulty to be power, com- , 1 IT P . 1 monly mcon- overcome, and the means employed, we form a right sistent. estimate of the faculties exerted ; the other, when without possessing such intimate and accurate know- § 6. First rea- son of the inconsistency. §6. Second reason for the inconsistency. 40 OF GENERAL PRINCIPLES RESPECTING [PART I. ledge, we are impressed by a sensation of power in visible action. If these two modes of receiving the im- pression agree in the result, and if the sensation be equal to the estimate, we receive the utmost possible idea of power. But this is the case perhaps with the works of only one man out of the whole circle of the fathers of art, of him to whom we have just referred, Michael Angelo. In others the estimate and the sensation are constantly unequal, and often contradictory. The first reason of this inconsistency is, that in order to receive a sensation of power, we must see it in opera- tion. Its victory, therefore, must not be achieved, but achieving, and therefore imperfect. Thus we re- ceive a greater sensation of power from the half-hewn limbs of the Notte e Giorno, of the Cappella Medici, than even from the divine inebriety of the Bacchus in the gallery — greater from the life dashed out along the Friezes of the Parthenon, than from the polished limbs of the Apollo, — greater from the ink sketch of the head of Raffaelle’s St. Catherine, than from the perfection of its realization. Another reason of the inconsistency is, that the sen- sation of power is in proportion to the apparent in- adequacy of the means to the end, so that the impres- sion is much greater from a partial success attained with slight effort, than from perfect success attained with greater proportional effort. Now, in all art, every touch or effort does individually less in proportion as the work approaches perfection. The first five chalk touches bring a head into existence out of nothing. No five touches in the whole course of the work will ever do so much as these, and the difference made by each touch is more and more imperceptible as the work approaches completion.' Consequently, the ratio between the means employed and the effect produced is con- stantly decreasing, and therefore the least sensation of power is received from the most perfect work. OF IDEAS OF POWER. 41 SEC. II, CHAP. I.] It is thus evident that there are sensations of §7. The sensa- power about imperfect art, so that it be right art as far ought^noTto^ as it goes, which must always be wanting in its per- fection, and that there are sources of pleasure in the hasty sketch and the rough hewn block, which are partially wanting in the tinted canvass and the polished marble. But it is nevertheless wrong to prefer the sensation of power to the intellectual perception of it. There is in reality greater power in the completion than in the commencement, and though it be not so manifest to the senses, it ought to have higher influence on the mind, and therefore in praising pictures for the ideas of power they convey, we must not look to the keenest sensation, but to the highest estimate, accompanied with as much of the sensation as is compatible with it, and thus we shall consider those pictures as conveying the highest ideas of power which attain the most perfect end with the slightest possible means ; not, observe, those in which, though much has been done with little, all has not been done, but from the picture, in which all has been done, and yet not a touch thrown away. The quantity of work in the sketch is necessarily less in pro- portion to the effect obtained than in the picture, but yet the picture involves the greater power, if, out of all the additional labour bestowed on it, not a touch has been lost. For instance, there are few drawings of the present §8. instance day that involve greater sensations of power than those mod^ernTAisL. of Frederick Tayler. Every dash tells, and the quantity of effect obtained is enormous, in proportion to the apparent means. But the effect obtained is not com- plete. Brilliant, beautiful, and right, as a sketch ; the work is still far from perfection, as a drawing. On the contrary, there are few drawings of the present day that bear evidence of more labour bestowed, or more compli- cated means employed, than those of John Lewis. The result does not, at first, so much convey an impression ^9. Connection between ideas of power with modes of exe- cution. 42 GENERAL PRINCIPLES, ETC. [PART I. of inherent power as of prolonged exertion : but the result is complete. Water-colour drawing can be carried no further ; nothing has been left unfinished or untold. And on examination of the means employed, it is found and felt that not one touch out of the thousands em- ployed has been thrown away ; — that not one dot nor dash could be spared without loss of effect ; — and that the exertion has been as swift as it has been prolonged — as bold as it has been persevering. The power involved in such a picture, and the idea and pleasure following on the estimate of it, are unquestionably far higher than can legitimately be traced in, or received from, the works of any other mere water-colour master now living. But there is still farther ground for caution in pursuing the sensation of power, connected with the particular characters and modes of execution. This we shall be better able to understand by briefly reviewing the various excellences which may belong to execution, and give pleasure in it ; though the full determination of what is desirable in it, and the critical examination of the exe- cution of different artists, must be deferred, as will be immediately seen, until we are more fully acquainted with the principles of truth. SEC. II.] 43 CHAPTER II. OF IDEAS OF POWER, AS THEY ARE DEPENDENT UPON EXECUTION. By the term “ Execution,” I understand the right § i. Meaning mechanical use of the means of art to produce a given « execution.” end. All qualities of execution, properly so called, are ^2.^ The first influenced by, and in a great degree dependent on, a far cutiorfis tru^L higher power than that of mere execution, — knowledge of truth. For exactly in proportion as an artist is certain of his end, will he be swift and simple in his means ; and as he is accurate and deep in his knowledge, will he be refined and precise in his touch. The first merit of manipulation, then, is that delicate and ceaseless ex- pression of refined truth which is carried out to the last touch, and shadow of a touch, and which makes every hair’s-breadth of importance, and every gradation full of meaning. It is not, properly speaking, execution ; but it is the only source of difference between the execution of a common-place and of a perfect artist. The lowest draughtsman, if he have spent the same time in handling the brush, may be equal to the highest in the other qualities of execution (in swiftness, simplicity, and decision) ; but not in truth. It is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line that the claim to immortality is laid. And if this truth of truths be pre- sent, all the other qualities of execution may well be spared; and to those artists who wish to excuse their 44 OF IDEAS OF POWER, §3. The second, simplicity. §4. The third, mystery. §.5. The fourth, inadequacy ■ and the fifth, decision. §6. The sixth, velocity. [part I. ignorance and inaccuracy by a species of execution which is a perpetual proclamation, '^qu’ils n’ont de- meure qu’un quart d’heure a le faire,” we may reply with the truthful Alceste, “ Monsieur, le temps ne fait rien a I’affaire.” , The second quality of execution is simplicity. The more unpretending, quiet, and retiring the means, the more impressive their effect. Any ostentation, bril- liancy, or pretension of touch ; — any exhibition of power or quickness, merely as such; — above all, any attempt to render lines attractive at the expense of their meaning, is vice. The third is mystery. Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable. That execution w^hich is the most incomprehensible, and which therefore defies imitation (other qualities being supposed alike), is the best. The fourth is inadequacy. The less sufficient the means appear to the end, the greater (as has been already noticed) wall be the sensation of power. The fifth is decision : the appearance, that is, that whatever is done, has been done fearlessly and at once ; because this gives us the impression that both the fact to be represented, and the means necessary to its repre- sentation, were perfectly known. The sixth is velocity. Not only is velocity, or the appearance of it, agreeable as decision is, because it gives ideas of power and knowledge ; but of two touches, as nearly as possible the same in other respects, the quickest will invariably be the best. Truth being sup- posed equally present in the shape and direction of both, there will be more evenness, grace, and variety, in the quick one than in the slow" one. It will be more agreeable to the eye as a touch or line, and will possess more of the qualities of the lines of nature — gradation, uncertainty, and unity. SEC. II. CHAP, n.] AS DEPENDENT ON EXECUTION. 45 These six qualities are the only perfectly legitimate § 7. Strange- sources of pleasure in execution ; but I might have mate^sourcf of added a seventh — strangeness, which in many cases is Pleasure in productive of a pleasure not altogether mean or de- grading, though scarcely right. Supposing the other higher qualities first secured, it adds in no small degree to our impression of the artist’s knowledge, if the means used be such as we should never have thought of, or should have thought adapted to a contrary effect. Let us, for instance, compare the execution of the bull’s head in the left hand lowest corner of the Adoration of the Magi, in the Museum at Antwerp, with that in Berghem’s landscape. No. 132 in the Dulwich Gallery. Rubens first scratches horizontally over his canvass a thin greyish brown, transparent and even, very much the colour of light wainscot ; the horizontal strokes of the bristles being left so evident, that the whole might be taken for an imitation of wood, were it not for its trans- parency. On this ground the eye, nostril, and outline of the cheek are given with two or three rude, brown touches (about three or four minutes’ work in all), though the head is colossal. The back-ground is then laid in with thick, solid, warm white, actually projecting all round the head, leaving it in dark intaglio. Finally, five thin and scratchy strokes of very cold bluish white are struck for the high light on the forehead and nose, and the head is complete. Seen within a yard of the canvass, it looks actually transparent — a flimsy, meaning- less, nistant shadow ; while the back-ground looks solid, projecting, and near. From the right distance (ten or twelve yards off, whence alone the whole of the picture ' can be seen), it is a complete, rich, substantial, and living realization of the projecting head of the animal ; while the back-ground falls far behind. Now there is no slight nor mean pleasure in perceiving such a result attained by means so strange. By Berghem, on the other hand, a dark back-ground is first laid in with ex- 46 OF IDEAS OF POWER, [part I. quisite delicacy and transparency, and on this the cow’s head is actually modelled in luminous white, the separate locks of hair projecting from the canvass. No surprise, nor much pleasure of any kind, would be attendant on this execution, even were the result equally successful ; and what little pleasure we had in it, vanishes, when on retiring from the picture, we find the head shining* like a distant lantern, instead of substantial or near. Yet strangeness is not to be considered as a legitimate source of pleasure. That means which is most conducive to the end, should always be the most pleasurable ; and that which is most conducive to the end, can be strange only to the ignorance of the spectator. This kind of pleasure is illegitimate, therefore, because it implies and requires, in those who feel it, ignorance of art. § 8. Yet even The legitimate sources of pleasure in execution are s^LSofplea therefore truth, simplicity, mystery, inadequacy, de- sure in execu- cision, and velocity. But of these, be it observed, some Stent witr""' are so far inconsistent with others, that they cannot be each other. united in high degrees. Mystery with inadequacy, for instance, since to see that the means are inadequate, we must see what they are. Now the first three are the great qualities of execution, and the last three are the attractive ones, because on them are chiefly at- tendant the ideas of power. By the first three the attention is withdrawn from the means and fixed on the result : by the last three, withdrawn from the result and fixed on the means. To see that execution is swift or that it is decided, we must look away from its crea- tion to observe it in the act of creating ; we must think more of the pallet than of the picture, but simplicity and mystery compel the mind to leave the means and ^ 9. And fond- fix itself on the conception. Hence the danger of too pow/rleads to^g’^eat fondness for those sensations of power which are the adoption of associated with the three last qualities of execution, for the owest. although it is most desirable that these should be pre- sent as far as they are consistent with the others, and SEC.II.CHAP.il.] AS DEPENDENT ON EXECUTION. 47 though their visible absence is always painful and wrong, yet the moment the higher qualities are sacrificed to them in the least degree, we have a brilliant vice. Berg- hem and Salvator Rosa are fine instances of vicious execution dependent on too great fondness for sensa- tions of power, vicious because intrusive and attractive in itself, instead of being subordinate to its results and for- gotten in them. There is perhaps no greater stumbling- block in the artist’s way, than the tendency to sacrifice truth and simplicity to decision and velocity,* capti- vating qualities, easy of attainment, and sure to attract attention and praise, while the delicate degree of truth which is at first sacrificed to them is so totally un- appreciable by the majority of spectators, so difficult of attainment to the artist, that it is no wonder that efforts so arduous and unrewarded should be abandoned. * I have here noticed only noble vices, the sacrifices of one excellence to another legitimate, but inferior one. There are, on the other hand, qualities of exeeution which are often sought for and praised, though scarcely by the class of persons for whom I am writing, in which everything is sacrificed to illegitimate and contemptible sources of plea- sure, and these are vice throughout, and have no redeeming quality nor excusing aim. Such is that which is often thought so desirable in the Drawing-master, under the title of boldness, meaning that no touch is ever to be made less than the tenth of an inch broad ; such is every efirort on the part of the engraver to give roughness or direction of sur- face by wriggling or peculiarly directed lines, and such the softness and smoothness which are the great attraction of Carlo Dolci. These are the exhibition of particular powers, and tricks of the hand and fingers, in total forgetfulness of any end whatsoever to be attained thereby, and would scarcely deserve the pains of criticism were it not for the unaccountable delusion that makes men even of taste and feeling sup- pose that to be right in an engraving, which they would cry out against as detestable and intolerable in a drawing. How long are our engravers to be allowed to go on murdering the foregrounds of our great artists, twisting and wriggling and hatching and scratching over the smooth stones and glossy leaves, until St. Lawrence’s gridiron is a jest to the martyrdom of the eye, “ making out ” everything that the artist intentionally con- cealed, and smothering everything that he made refined or conspicuous ? When shall we have an engraver who will touch his steel as if he had fingers and feeling ! 48 OF IDEAS OF POWER, ETC. [part r. § 10. Therefore jgut if the temptation be once yielded to, its conse- perilous. quences are fatal ; there is no pause in the fall. I could name a celebrated modern artist — once a man of the highest power and promise, who is a glaring in- stance of the peril of such a course. Misled by the undue popularity of his swift execution, he has sacri- ficed to it, first precision, and then truth, and her asso- ciate, beauty. What was first neglect of nature, has become contradiction of her; what was once imperfec- tion, is now falsehood ; and all that was meritorious in his manner, is becoming the worst, because the most attractive of vices, decision without a foundation, and swiftness without an end. § 11. Recapi- Such are the principal modes in which the ideas of power may become a dangerous attraction to the artist — a false test to the critic. But in all cases where they lead us astray it will be found that the error is caused by our preferring victory over a small apparent difficulty to victory over a great, but concealed one, and so that we keep this distinction constantly in view, (whether with reference to execution or to any other quality of art,) between the sensation and the intellectual estimate of power, we shall always find the ideas of power a just and high source of pleasure in every kind and grade of art. SEC. I.] 49 CHAPTER HI. OF THE SUBLIME. It may perhaps be wondered that in the division we § i. Sublimity have made of our subject, we have taken no notice of , the sublime in art^ and that in our explanation of that anything division we have not once used the word. nhe fact is, that sublimity is not a specific term, — not a term descriptive of the effect of a particular class of ideas. Any thing which elevates the mind is sublime, and elevation of mind is produced by the contemplation of greatness of any kind ; but chiefly, of course, by the greatness of the noblest things. Sublimity is there- fore only another word for the effect of greatness upon the feelings. Greatness of matter, space, powder, virtue, or beauty, are thus all sublime ; and there is perhaps no desirable quality of a work of art, which in its per- fection is not in some way or degree sublime. I am fully prepared to allow of much ingenuity in § 2. Burke’s Burke’s theory of the sublime, as connected with self- rni . nature of the pieservation. ifiere are few things so great as death; sublime incor- and there is perhaps nothing which banishes all little- ness of thought and feeling in an equal degree with its contemplation. Everything, therefore, which in any way points to it, and, therefore, most dangers and powers over which we have little control, are in some degree sublime. But it is not the fear, observe, but the con- templation of death ; not the instinctive shudder and struggle of self-preservation, but the deliberate mea- E 50 OF THE SUBLIME. [part I § 3. Danger is sublime, but not the fear of it. ^ 4. The high- est beauty is sublime. § 5. And gene rally whetever elevates the mind. surement of the vast doom, which are really great or sublime in feeling. It is not while we shrink, but while we defy, that we receive or convey the highest con- ceptions of the fate. There is no sublimity in the agony of terror. Whether do we trace it most in the cry to the mountains, “fall on us,” and to the hills, “ cover us,” or in the calmness of the prophecy— “ And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God ?” A little reflection will easily convince any one, that so far from the feelings of self- preservation being necessary to the sublime, their greatest action is totally destructive of it; and that there are few feelings less partaking of its nature than those of a coward. But the simple conception or idea of greatness of suffering or extent of destruction is sublime, whether there be any connection of that idea with ourselves or not. If we were placed beyond the reach of all peril or pain, the perception of these agencies in their influence on others ivould not be less sublime, not because peril or pain are sublime in their own nature, but because their contemplation, exciting compassion or fortitude, elevates the mind, and renders meanness of thought impossible. Beauty is not so often felt to be sublime ; because, in many kinds of purely material beauty there is some truth in Burke’s assertion, that “littleness” is one of its elements. But he who has not felt that there may be beauty without littleness, and that such beauty is a source of the sublime, is yet ignorant of the meaning of the ideal in art. I do not mean, in tracing the source of the sublime to greatness, to hamper myself with any fine-spun theory. I take the widest possible ground of investigation, that sublimity is found wherever anything elevates the mind ; that is, wherever it contemplates anything above itself, and perceives it to be so. This is the simple philological signification of the word derived from suhlirnis ; and will serve us much more easily, and be a far clearer and SEC. I. CHAP. HI.] OF THE SUBLIME. 51 more evident ground of argument than any mere meta- physical or more limited definition, while the proof of its justness will be naturally developed by its application to the different branches of art. As, therefore, the sublime is not distinct from what § 6. The former is beautiful, nor from other sources of pleasure in art, ^ut^ecHs°therL but is only a particular mode and manifestation of fore sufficient, them, my subject will divide itself into the investigation of ideas of truth, beauty, and relation ; and to each of these classes of ideas I destine a separate part of the work. The investigation of ideas of truth will enable us to determine the relative rank of artists as followers and historians of nature. That of ideas of beauty will lead us to compare them in their attainment, first of what is agreeable in techni- cal matters, then in colour and composition, finally and chiefly, in the purity of their conceptions of the ideal. And that of ideas of relation will lead us to compare them as originators of new and just thought; as it is new, leading us to observe the powers of fancy and imagination ; as it is just, the force of moral truth. 52 [part II. ^ 1. The two great, ends of landscape painting are the representa- tion of facts and thoughts. PART II. OF TRUTH. SECTION I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES RESPECTING IDEAS OF TRUTH. CHAPTER I. OF IDEAS OF TRUTH IN THEIR CONNECTION WITH THOSE OF BEAUTY AND RELATION. It cannot but be evident from the above division of the ideas conveyable by art, that the landscape painter must always have two great and distinct ends ; the first, to induce in the spectator’s mind the faithful conception of any natural objects whatsoever ; the second, to guide the spectator’s mind to those objects most worthy of its contemplation, and to inform him of the thoughts and feelings with which these were regarded by the artist himself. In attaining the first end the painter only places the spectator where he stands himself; he sets him before the landscape and leaves him. The spectator is alone. He may follow out his own thoughts as he would in the natural solitude, or he may remain untouched, un- reflecting and regardless, as his disposition may incline him. But he has nothing of thought given to him, no OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 53 SEC. I. CHAP. I.] new ideas, no unknown feelings, forced on his attention or his heart. The artist is his conveyance, not his companion, — his horse, not his friend. But in attain- ing the second end, the artist not only places the spec- tator, but talks to him, makes him a sharer in his own strong feelings and quick thoughts, hurries him away in his own enthusiasm, guides him to all that is beautiful, snatches him from all that is base, and leaves him more than delighted, — ennobled and instructed, under the sense of having not only beheld a new scene, but of having held communion with a new mind, and having been endowed for a time with the keen perception and the impetuous emotion of a nobler and more pene- trating intelligence. Each of these different aims of art will necessitate § 2. They a different system of choice of objects to be repre- sented. The first does not indeed imply choice at all, of material but it is usually united with the selection of such ob- jects as may be naturally and constantly pleasing to all men, at all times, and this selection when perfect and careful, leads to the attainment of the pure ideal. But the artist aiming at the second end, selects his objects for their meaning and character, rather than for their beauty, and uses them rather to throw light upon the particular thought he wishes to convey, than as in them- selves objects of unconnected admiration. Now, although the first mode of selection, when ^3. The first guided by deep reflection, may rise to the production of “o°nlpt works possessing a noble and ceaseless influence on the produce same- human mind, it is likely to degenerate into, or rather, in nine cases out of ten it never goes beyond, a mere appeal to such parts of our animal nature as are constant and common — shared by all, and perpetual in all ; such, for instance, as the pleasure of the eye in the opposition of a cold and warm colour, or of a massy form with a delicate one. It also tends to induce constant repetition of the same ideas, and use of the same principles ; it 54 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. [part II. gives rise to those rules of art which propesrly excited Reynolds’s indignation when applied to its higher efforts ; it is the source of, and the apoloigy for, that host of technicalities and absurdities which in all ages has been the curse of art and the crown of the con- noisseur ; and of those “ standard ” pictures with which half the walls of Europe are covered, and foir the manu- facture of which recipes are to be found in most works on art. Take one-eighth light, three-eighths middle tint, four-eighths shadow ; mix carefully, flavour with cochineal, cool with ultramarine, and serve up with sentiment.” Nay, even where a high ideail has been sought for, the search seldom produces more than one good picture, on which a few clever but monotonous changes are rung by the artist himself, and innumerable discords by his imitators, ending in the multiplication ad nauseam of the legitimate landscape ragout, com- posed of a large tree, a bridge, a city, a river, and a fisherman. §4. The second But art, in its second and highest aim, is not an ySy appeal to constant animal feelings, but an expression and awakening of individual thought ; it is therefore as various and as extended in its efforts as the compass and grasp of the directing mind ; and we feel, in each of its results, that we are looking, not at a specimen of a tradesman’s wares, of which he is ready to make us a dozen to match, but at one coruscation of a perpetually active mind, like which there has not been, and will not be another. § 5. Yet the Hence, although there can be no doubt which of first is delight- branches of art is the highest, it is equally evident ^ that the first will be the most generally felt and appre- ciated. For the simple statement of the truths of nature must in itself be pleasing to every order of mind ; be- cause every truth of nature is more or less beautiful ; and if there be just and right selection of the more im- portant of these truths— based, as above explained, on SEC. I. CHAP. I.] OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 55 feelings and desires common to all mankind — the facts so selected must, in some degree, be delightful to all, and their value appreciable bj all ; more or less, indeed, as their senses and instinct have been rendered more or less acute and accurate by use and study ; but in some degree by all, and in the same way by all. But the highest § 6. The second , 1 . , 1 c T *1 only to a few. art, being based on sensations oi peculiar minds, sensa- tions occurring to them only at particular times, and to a plurality of mankind perhaps never, and being ex- pressive of thoughts which could only rise out of a mass of the most extended knowledge, and of dispositions modified in a thousand ways by peculiarity of intellect — can only be met and understood by persons having some sort of sympathy with the high and solitary minds which produced it — sympathy only to be felt by minds in some degree high and solitary themselves. He alone can appreciate the art, who could comprehend the con- versation of the painter, and share in his emotion, in moments of his most fiery passion and most original thought. And whereas the true meaning and end of his art must thus be sealed to thousands, or misunder- stood by them ; so also, as he is sometimes obliged, in working out his own peculiar end, to set at defiance those constant laws which have arisen out of our lower and changeless desires, that whose purpose is unseen, is frequently in its means and parts displeasing. But this \vant of extended influence in high art, be § 7. The first it especially observed, proceeds from no want of truth theTeo>nd in the art itself, but from a want of sympathy in the spectator with those feelings in the artist which prompt him to the utterance of one truth rather than of another. For (and this is what I wish at present especially to insist upon) although it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the repre- sentation of facts, without reaching the second, the re- presentation of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the second without having previously reached 56 OF IDEAS OF TROTH. [part II. ^ 8. The ex- ceeding impor- tance of truth. the first. I do not say that a man cannot think, having false basis and material for thought ; but that a false thought is worse than the want of thought, and there- fore is not art. And this is the reason w hy, though I consider the second as the real and only important end of all art, I call the representation of facts the first end ; because it is necessary to the other and must be at- tained before it. It is the foundation of all art; like real foundations it may be little thought of when a brilliant fabric is raised on it ; but it must be there : and as few buildings are beautiful unless every line and column of their mass have reference to their foundation, and are suggestive of its existence and strength, so nothing can he beautiful in art which does not in all its parts suggest and guide to the foundation, even where no undecorated portion of it is visible ; W'hile the noblest edifices of art are built of such pure and fine crystal that the foundation may all be seen through them; and then many, while they do not see what is built upon that first story, yet much admire the solidity of its brickwork ; thinking they understand all that is to be understood of the matter: wdiile others stand beside them, looking not at the low story, but up into the heaven at that building of crystal in which the builder’s spirit is dwelling. And thus, though we want the thoughts and feelings of the artist a(3 well as the truth, yet they must be thoughts arising out of the knowledge of truth, and feelings arising od^ of the con- templation of truth. We do not want his finnll to be as a badly blown glass, that distorts wdiat w'e see through it ; but like a glass of sweet and strange colour, that gives new tones to what we see through it ; and a glass of rare strength and clearness too, to let us see more than we could ourselves, and bring nature up to us and near to us. Nothing can atone for the want of truth, not the most brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy, the most pure feeling, (supposing that feeling SEC. 1. CHAP. I.] OF IDEAS OF TRUTH 57 could be pure and false at the same time) not the most exalted conception, nor the most comprehensive grasp of intellect, can make amends for the w'ant of truth, and that for two reasons ; first, because falsehood is in itself revolting and degrading; and secondly, because nature is so immeasurably superior to all that the human mind can conceive, that every departure from her is a fall beneath her, so that there can be no such thing; as an ornamental falsehood. All falsehood must be a blot as well as a sin, an injury as well a deception. We shall, in consequence, find that no artist can be §9* Coldness graceful, imaginative, or original, unless he be truthful ; bLuty no^sign and that the pursuit of beauty, instead of leading away from truth, increases the desire for it and the ne- cessity of it tenfold ; so that those artists who are really great in imaginative power, will be found to have based their boldness of conception on a mass of knowledge far exceeding that possessed by those who pride them- selves on its accumulation without regarding its use. Coldness and want of passion in a picture, are not signs of the accuracy, but of the paucity of its statements ; true vigour and brilliancy are not signs of audacity, but of knowledge. Hence it follows that it is in the power of all, with §10. How care and time, to form something like a just judgment of conMdS the relative merits of artists; for although with respect criterion to the feeling Hnd passion of pictures it is often as im- ° ' possible to criticise as to appreciate, except to such as are in some degree equal in powers of mind, and in some respects the same in modes of mind, with those whose works they judge ; yet, with respect to the repre- sentation of facts, it is possible for all, by attention, to form a right judgment of the respective powers and at- tainments of every artist. Truth is a bar of comparison at which they may all be examined, and according to the rank they take in this examination, will almost in- variably be thitt which, if capable of appreciating them 58 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. [part II. in every respect, we should be just in assigning them, so strict is the connection, so constant the relation between the sum of knowledge and the extent of thought, between accuracy of perception and vividness of idea. I shall endeavour, therefore, in the present portion of the work, to enter with care and impartiality into the investigation of the claims of the schools of ancient and modern landscape to faithfulness in repre- senting nature. I shall pay no regard whatsoever to what may be thought beautiful, or sublime, or ima- ginative. I shall look only for truth, bare, clear, down- right statement of facts; showing in each particular, as far as I am able, what the truth of nature is, and then seeking for the plain expression of it, and for that alone. And I shall thus endeavour, totally regardless of fervour of imagination or brilliancy of effect, or any other of their more captivating qualities, to examine and to judge the works of the great living painter, who is, I believe, imagined by the majority of the public, to paint more falsehood and less fact than any other known master. We shall see with what reason. SEC. I.J 59 CHAPTER II. THAT THE TRUTH OF NATURE IS NOT TO BE DISCERNED BY THE UNEDUCATED SENSES. It may be here inquired by the reader, with much ap-M- The com- pearance of reason, why I think it necessary to devote ^cep\fon of a separate portion of the work to the showing of what “en with is truthful in art. “ Cannot we,” say the public, “ see powSVf” what nature is with our own eyes, and find out for our- kerning truth, selves what is like her ?” It will be as well to determine this question before we go farther, because if this were possible, there would be little need of criticism or teach- ing with respect to art. Now I have just said that it is possible for all men, by care and attention, to form a just judgment of the fidelity of a^rtists to nature. To do this no peculiar powers of n^ind are required, no sympathy with par- ticular feelirigs, nothing which every man of ordinary intellect does not in some degree possess, — powers, namely, of observation and intelligence, which by cul- tivation may be brought to a high degree of perfection and acuteness. But until this cultivation has been bestowed, and until the instrument thereby perfected has been employed in a consistent series of careful ob- servation, it is as absurd as it is audacious to pretend to form any judgment whatsoever respecting the truth of art : and my first business, before going a step farther, must be to combat the nearly universal error of belief among the thoughtless and unreflecting, that they know either §2. Men usually see little of what is before their eyes. 60 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. [PART II. what nature is, or what is like her, that they can dis- cover truth instinct, and that their minds are such pure Venice glass as to be shocked by all treachery. I have to prove to them that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their phi- losophy, and that the truth of nature is a part of the truth of God ; to him who does not search it out, dark- ness, as it is to him who does, infinity. The first great mistake that people make in the mat- ter, is the supposition that they must see a thing if it be before their eyes. They forget the great truth told them by Locke, Book ii. chap. 9. § 3. — “ This is cer- tain, that whatever alterations are made in the body, if they reach not the mind, whatever impressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception. Tire may burn our bodies, with no other effect than it does a billet, unless the motion be continued to the brain, and there the sense of heat or idea of pain be produced in the mind, wherein consists actual perception. How often may a man observe in himself, that whilst his mind is intently employed in the contemplation of some subjects and curiously surveying some ideas that are there, it takes no notice of impressions of sounding bodies, made upon the organ of hearing, with the same attention that uses to be for the producing the ideas of sound ? A suf- ficient impulse there may be on the organ, but it not reaching the observation of the mind, there follows no perception, and though the motion that uses to produce the idea of sound be made in the ear, yet no sound is heard.” And what is here said, which all must feel by their own experience to be true, is more remarkably and necessarily the case with sight than with any other of the senses, for this reason, that the ear is not ac- customed to exercise constantly its functions of hearing, it is accustomed to stillness, and the occurrence of a sound of any kind whatsoever is apt to aw^ake attention, SEC. I. CHAP. II.] TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 61 and be followed with perception, in proportion to the degree of sound ; but the eye during our waking hours, exercises constantly its function of seeing; it is its con- stant hahit; we always, as far as the bodily organ is con- cerned, see something, and we always see in the same de- gree, so that the occurrence of sight, as such, to the eye, is only the continuance of its necessary state of action, and awakes no attention whatsoever, except by the par- ticular nature and quality of the sight. And thus, unless the minds of men are particularly directed to the impres- sions of sight, objects pass perpetually before the eyes without conveying any impression to the brain at all, and so pass actually unseen, not merely unnoticed, but in the full clear sense of the word, unseen. And numbers of men being pre-occupied with business or care of some description, totally unconnected with the impressions of sight, such is actually the case with them, they receiving from nature only the inevitable sensations of blueness, redness, darkness, light, &c., and except at particular and rare moments, no more whatsoever. The degree of ignorance of external nature in which § 3 . But more men may thus remain, depends therefore, partly on the portfoVto^their number and character of the subiects with which their . 11* • 1 1 lity to what is minds may be otherwise occupied, and partly on a natu- beautiful, ral want of sensibility to the power of beauty of form, and the other attributes of external objects. I do not think that there is ever such absolute incapacity in the eye for distinguishing and receiving pleasure from cer- tain forms and colours, as there is in persons who are technicallv said to have no ear, for distino-uishino- notes, but there is naturally every degree of hluntness and acuteness, both for perceiving the truth of form, and for receiving pleasure from it when perceived. And although I believe even the lowest degree of these faculties can he expanded almost unlimitedly by culti- vation, the pleasure received never rewards the labour necessary, and the pursuit is abandoned. So that while 62 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. [PART II. in those whose sensations are naturally acute and vivid, the call of external nature is so strong that it must be obeyed, and is ever heard louder as the approach to her is nearer, — in those whose sensations are naturally blunt, the call is overpowered at once by other thoughts, and their faculties of perception, weak originally, die §4. Connected of disuse. With this kind of bodily sensibility to rtateoSSS colour and form is intimately connected that higher feeling. sensibility which we revere as one of the chief at- tributes of all noble minds, and as the chief spring of real poetry. I believe this kind of sensibility may be entirely resolved into the acuteness of bodily sense of which I have been speaking, associated with love, love I mean in its infinite and holy functions, as it em- braces divine and human and brutal intelligences, and hallows the physical perception of external objects by association, gratitude, veneration, and other pure feelings of our moral nature. And although the discovery of truth is in itself altogether intellectual, and dependent merely on our powers of physical perception and ab- stract intellect, wholly independent of our moral nature, yet these instruments (perception and judgment) are so sharpened and brightened, and so far more swiftly and effectively used, when they have the energy and passion of our moral nature to bring them into action— percep- tion is so quickened by love, and judgment so tempered by veneration, that, practically, a man of deadened moral sensation is always dull in his perception of truth, and thousands of the highest and most divine truths of nature are wholly concealed from him, however con- stant and indefatigable may be his intellectual search. Thus then, the farther we look, the more we are limited in the number of those to whom we should choose to appeal as judges of truth, and the more we perceive how great a number of mankind may be partially in- capacitated from either discovering or feeling it. SEC. I. CHA.P. II.] TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNEDo 63 Next to sensibility, which is necessary for the percep- § of tii® tion of facts, come reflection and memory, which are powers.*^'^^^ necessary for the retention of them, and recognition of their resemblances. For a man may receive impression after impression, and that vividly and with delight, and yet, if he take no care to reason upon those impressions and trace them to their sources, he may remain totally ignorant of the facts that produced them; nay, may attribute them to facts with which they have no con- nection, or may coin causes for them that have no existence at all. And the more sensibility and imagina- tion a man possesses, the more likely will he be to fall into error ; for then he will see whatever he expects, and admire and judge with his heart, and not with his eyes. How many people are misled, by what has been said and sung of the serenity of Italian skies, to suppose they must be more blue than the skies of the north, and think that they see them so ; whereas the sky of Italy is far more dull and grey in colour than the skies of the north, and is distinguished only by its intense repose of light. And this is confirmed by Benvenuto Cellini, who, I remember, on his first entering France, is especially struck by the clearness of the sky, as con- trasted with the mist of Italy. And what is more strange still, when people see in a painting what they suppose to have been the source of their impressions, they will affirm it to be truthful, though they feel no such impression resulting from it. Thus, though day after day they may have been impressed by the tone and warmth of an Italian sky, yet not having traced the feeling to its source, and supposing themselves impressed by its blueness, they will affirm a blue sky in a painting to be truthful;^ and reject the most faithful rendering of all the real attributes of Italy as cold or dull. And this § 6. How sight influence of the imagination over the senses, is pecu- liarly observable in the perpetual disposition of mankind knowledge, to suppose that they see Avhat they know, and vice versa 64 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. [PART II. in their not seeing what they do not know. Thus, if a child be asked to draw the corner of a house, he will lay down something in the form of the letter T. He has no conception that the two lines of the roof, which he knows to be level, produce on his eye the impression of a slope. It requires repeated and close attention before he detects this fact, or can be made to feel that his lines on the paper are false. And the Chinese, children in all things, suppose a good perspective draw- ing to be as false as we feel their plate patterns to be, or wonder at the strange buildings which come to a point at the end. And all the early works, whether of nations or of men, show, by their want of shade, how little the eye, without knowledge, is to be depended upon to discover truth. The eye of a Red Indian, keen enough to find the trace of his enemy or his prey, even in the unnatural, turn of a trodden leaf, is yet so blunt to the impressions of shade, that Mr. Catlin mentions his once having been in great danger from having painted a portrait with the face in half light, which the untutored observers imagined and affirmed to be the painting of half a face. Barry, in his sixth lecture, takes notice of the same want of actual sight in the early painters of Italy. “ The imitations,” he says, “ of early art are like those of children, — nothing is seen in the spectacle before us, unless it be previously known and sought for : and numberless observable differences between the age of ignorance and that of knowledge, show how^ much the contraction or extension of our sphere of vision depends upon other considerations than the mere returns of our natural optics. The people of those ages only saw so much, and admired it, because they knew no more.” And the deception which takes place so broadly in cases like these, has infinitely greater influence over our judgment of the more intricate and less tangible truths of nature. We are constantly sup- posing that we see what experience only has shown us. SEC. I. CHAP. II,] TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 65 or can show us, to have existence, constantly missing the sight of what we do not know beforehand to be visible : and painters, to the last hour of their lives, are apt to fall in some degree into the error of painting what exists, rather than what they can see. I shall prove the extent of this error more completely hereafter. Be it also observed, that all these difficulties would §7. The diffi- lie in the way, even if the truths of nature were always by the vSy** the same, constantly repeated and brought before us. But the truths of nature are one eternal change — one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush ; — there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same net- work, nor two leaves on the same tree whieh could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike. And out of this mass of various, yet agreeing beauty, it is by long attention only that the conception of the constant character — the ideal form — hinted at by all, yet assumed by none, is fixed upon the imagination for its standard of truth. It is not singular, therefore, nor in any way dis- graceful, that the majority of spectators are totally incapable of appreciating the truth of nature, when fully set before them ; but it is both singular and disgraceful that it is so difficult to convince them of their own incapability. Ask a connoisseur, who has scampered over all Europe, the shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to one that he cannot tell you ; and yet he will be voluble of criticism on every painted landscape from Dresden to Madrid, and pretend to tell you whether they are like nature or not. Ask an enthusiastic chatterer in the Sistine Chapel how many ribs he has, and you get no answer ; but it is odds that you do not get out of the door without his informing you that he considers such and such a figure badly drawn ! F 66 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. [PART II. ^ B. We recog- nize objects by their least important attributes. Compare Part I. Sect. I. chap. 4. A few such interrogations as these might indeed con- vict, if not convince the mass of spectators of incapa- bility, were it not for the universal reply, that they can recognize what they cannot describe, and feel what is truthful, though they do not know what is truth. And this is, to a certain degree, true : a man may recognise the portrait of his friend, though he cannot, if you ask him apart, tell you the shape of his nose or the height of his forehead ; and every one could tell Nature her- self from an imitation ; why not then, it will be asked, what is like her from what is not ? For this simple reason, that we constantly recognise things by their least important attributes, and by help of very few of those : and if these attributes exist not in the imitation, though there may be thousands of others far higher and more valuable, yet if those be wanting, or imperfectly rendered, by which we are accustomed to recognise the object, we deny the likeness ; while if these be given, though all the great and valuable and important attri- butes may be wanting, we affirm the likeness. Recog- nition is no proof of real and intrinsic resemblance. We recognise our books by their bindings, though the true and essential characteristics lie inside. A man is known to his dog by the smell — to his tailor by the coat — to his friend by the smile : each of these know him, but how little, or how much, depends on the dig- nity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man, is known only to God. One portrait of a man may possess exact accuracy of feature, and no atom of expression ; it may be, to use the ordinary terms of admiration bestowed on such por- traits by those whom they please, “ as like as it can stare.” Every body, down to his cat, would know this. Another portrait may have neglected or misrepresented the features, but may have given the flash of the eye, and the peculiar radiance of the lip, seen on him only in 67 SEC. I. CHAP. II.] TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. his hours of highest mental excitement. None but his friends would know this. Another may have given none of his ordinary expressions, but one w^hich he wore in the most excited instant of his life, when all his secret passions and all his highest powers were brought into play at once. None but those who had then seen him might recognise this as like. But which would be the most truthful portrait of the man ? The first gives the accidents of body — the sport of climate, and food, and time — which corruption inhabits, and the worm waits for. The second gives the stamp of the soul upon the flesh ; but it is the soul seen in the emotions which it shares with many — which may not be characteristic of its essence — the results of habit, and education, and accident — a gloze, whether purposely worn or uncon- sciously assumed, perhaps totally contrary to all that is rooted and real in the mind that it conceals. The third has caught the trace of all that was most hidden and most mighty, when all hypocrisy, and all habit, and all petty and passing emotion — the ice, and the bank, and the foam of the immortal river — were shivered, and broken, and swallowed up in the awakening of its in- ward strength ; when the call and claim of some divine motive had brought into visible being those latent forces and feelings which the spirit’s own volition could not summon, nor its consciousness comprehend ; which God only knew, and God only could awaken, the depth and the mystery of its peculiar and separating attributes. And so it is with external Nature : she has a body and a soul like man ; but her soul is the Deity. It is possible to represent the body without the spirit ; and this shall be like to those whose senses are only cognizant of body. It is possible to represent the spirit in its ordinary and inferior manifestations ; and this shall be like to those who have not watched for its moments of power. It is possible to represent the spirit in its secret and high F 2 68 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. [PART II. operations ; and this shall be like only to those to whose watching they have been revealed. All these are truth ; but according to the dignity of the truths he can repre- sent or feel, is the power of the painter, and the justice of the judge. SEC. I.] 69 CHAPTER III. OF THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS t — FIRST, THAT PARTICULAR TRUTHS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN GENERAL ONES. I HAVE in the last chapter affirmed that we usually re- §i. Necessity cognize obiects by their least essential characteristics. determining ^ ^ the relative This very naturally excites the enquiry what I consider importance of their important characteristics, and why I call one truth more important than another. And this question must be immediately determined, because it is evident, that in judging of the truth of painters, we shall have to consider not only the accuracy with which individual truths are given, but the relative importance of the truths themselves ; for as it constantly happens that the powers of art are unable to render all truths, that artist must be considered the most truthful who has preserved the most important at the expense of the most trifling. Now, if we are to begin our investigation in Aristotle’s ^ 2. Misappii- way, and look at the ^aivojxeva of the subject, we shall nation of the immediately stumble over a maxim which is in every- “^General" body’s mouth, and which, as it is understood in practice, importanV^T^ is true and useful, as it is usually applied in argument, particular false and misleading. ‘‘General truths are more im- portant than particular ones.” Often, when in conver- sation, I have been praising Turner for his perpetual variety, and for giving so particular and separate a cha- racter to each of his compositions, that the mind of the 70 OF THE RELATIVE [PART' II. painter can only be estimated by seeing all liat he lias ever done, and that nothing can be propiesied of a picture coming into existence on his easel, but that it will be totally different in idea from all that he has ever done before ; and when I have opposed this in- exhaustible knowledge or imagination, whictever it may be, to the perpetual repetition of some half-dozen con- ceptions by Claude and Poussin, I have leen met by the formidable objection, enunciated with much dignity and self-satisfaction on the part of my antagonist — “ That is not painting general truths, that is painting §3. Falseness particular truths.” Now there must be something take^withcmt wrong in that application of a principle which would explanation, make the variety and abundance which we look for as the greatest sign of intellect in the writer, the greatest sign of error in the painter ; and we shall accordingly see, by an application of it to other matters, that taken without limitation, the whole proposition is utterly false. For instance, Mrs, Jameson somewhere mentions the exclamation of a lady of her acquaintance, more desirous to fill a pause in conversation than abundant in sources of observation. “ What an excellent book the Bible is !” This was a very general truth indeed ; a truth predicable of the Bible in common with many other books, but it certainly is neither striking nor im- portant. Had the lady exclaimed — “ How evidently is the Bible a divine revelation!” she would have ex- pressed a particular truth, one predicable of the Bible only ; but certainly far more interesting and important. Had she, on the contrary, informed us that the Bible was a book, she would have been still more general, and still less entertaining. If I ask any one who somebody else is, and receive for answer that he is a man, I get little satisfaction for my pains ; but if I am told that he is Sir Isaac Newton, I immediately thank my neighbour ^4. Generality for his information. The fact is, and the above instances the^subjecC Serve at once to prove it if it be not self-evident. SEC. I. CHAP. III.] IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. 7 1 that generality gives importance to the subject, and limi- particularity in tation or particularity to the 'predicate. If I say that predicate, such and such a man in China is an opium eater, I say nothing very interesting, because my subject (such a man) is particular. If I say that all men in China are opium eaters, I say something interesting, because my subject (all men) is general. If I say that all men in China eat, I say nothing interesting, because my predi- cate (eat) is general. If I say that all men in China eat opium, I say something interesting, because my predicate (eat opium) is particular. Noav almost everything which (with reference to a given subject) a painter has to ask himself whether he shall represent or not, is a predicate. Hence in art, particular truths are usually more important than gene- ral ones. How is it then that anything so plain as this should be contradicted by one of the most universally received aphorisms respecting art ? A little reflection will show us under what limitations this maxim may be true in practice. It is self-evident that when we are painting or de-§5. Theim- scribing anything, those truths must be the most im- truUisofspecies portant which are most characteristic of what is to be told or represented. Now that which is first and most generality, broadly characteristic of a thing is that which distin- guishes its genus, or which makes it what it is. For instance, that which makes drapery be drapery, is not its being made of silk or worsted or flax, for things are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery, the properties which, when inhe- rent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non- elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery, as much as silk or woollen stuff is. So that these ideas separate drapery in our minds from everything else ; they are peculiarly characteristic § 6. All truths valuable as they are characteristic. 72 OF THE RELATIVE [PART II. of it, and therefore are the most important group of ideas connected with it; and so with everything else, that which makes the thing what it is, is the most im- portant idea, or group of ideas connected with the thing. But as this idea must necessarily be common to all individuals of the species it belongs to, it is a general idea with respect to that species ; while other ideas, which are not characteristic of the species, and are therefore in reality general (as black or white are terms applicable to more things than drapery), are yet particular with respect to that species, being predicable only of certain individuals of it. lienee it is carelessly and falsely said tliat general ideas are more important than particular ones ; carelessly and falsely, I say, be- cause the so called general idea is important, not because it is common to all the individuals of that species, but because it separates that species from everything else. It is the distinctiveness, not the universality of the truth, which renders it important. And the so called particular idea is unimportant, not because it is not predicable of the whole species, but because it is pre- dicable of things out of that species. It is not its in- dividuality, but its generality which renders it unim- portant. So then, truths are important just in pro- portion as they are characteristic, and are valuable, primarily, as they separate the species from all other created things ; secondarily, as they separate the indivi- duals of that species from one another : thus “ silken ” or “ woollen ” are unimportant ideas with respect to drapery because they neither separate the species from other things, nor even the individuals of that species from one another, since though not common to the whole of it, they are common to indefinite numbers of it ; but the particular folds into which any piece of drapery may happen to fall, being different in many particulars from those into which any other piece of drapery will fall, are expressive not only of the 73 SEC. I. CHAP. III.] IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. characters of the species, (flexibility, non- elasticity, &c.), but of individuality and definite character in the case immediately observed, and are consequently most important and necessary ideas. So in a man, to be short-legged or long-nosed or anything else of acci- dental quality, does not distinguish him from other short-legged or long-nosed animals, but the important truths respecting a man are, first, the marked develop- ment of that distinctive organization which separates him as man from other animals, and secondly that group of qualities which distinguish the individual from all other men, which make him Paul or Judas, Newton or Shakspeare. Such are the real sources of importance in truths as § 7 . otherwise far as they are considered with reference merely to their cies are°va^^~ being general, or particular; but there are other sources because of importance which give farther weight to the ordinary opinion of the greater value of those which are general, and which render this opinion right in practice ; I mean the intrinsic beauty of the truths themselves, a quality which it is not here the place to investigate, but which must just be noticed, as invariably adding value to truths of species rather than to those of individuality. The qualities and properties which characterise man or any other animal as a species, are the perfection of his or its form and mind, almost all individual differences arising from imperfections ; hence a truth of species is the more valuable to art, because it must always be a beauty, while a truth of individuals is commonly in some sort or way, a defect. Again, a truth which may be of great interest, when § 8. And many an object is viewed by itself, may be objectionable when luabiehf sepa- it is viewed in relation to other objects. Thus if we rate, may be were painting a piece of drapery as our whole subject, i?'’coMeTtion it would be proper to give in it every source of enter- others, tainment, which particular truths could supply, to give it varied colour and delicate texture ; but if w^e paint 74 OF THE RELATIVE [part II. ^9. Recapitu- lation, this same piece of drapery, as part of the dress of a Madonna, all these ideas of richness or texture become thoroughly contemptible, and unfit to occupy the mind at the same moment with the idea of the Virgin. The conception of drapery is then to be suggested by the simplest and slightest means possible, and all notions of texture and detail are to be rejected with utter re- probation ; but this, observe, is not because they are particular or general or anything else, with respect to the drapery itself, but because they draw the attention to the dress instead of the saint, and disturb and degrade the imagination and the feelings; hence we ought to give the conception of the drapery in the most unob- trusive way possible, by rendering those essential quali- ties distinctly, which are necessary to the very existence of drapery, and not one more. With these last two sources of the importance of truths, we have nothing to do at present, as they are dependent upon ideas of beauty and relation : I merely allude to them now, to show that all that is alleged by Sir .T. Reynolds and other scientific writers respecting the kind of truths proper to be represented by the painter or sculptor is perfectly just and right, w^hile yet the principle on which they base their selection (that general truths are more important than particular ones) is altogether false. Canova’s Perseus in the Vatican is entirely spoiled by an unlucky tassel in the folds of the mantle (which the next admirer of Canova who passes would do well to knock off), but it is spoiled not because this is a particular truth, but because it is a contemptible, unnecessary, and ugly truth. The button which fastens the vest of the Daniel is as much a particular truth as this, but it is a necessary one, and the idea of it is given by the simplest possible means ; hence it is right and beautiful. Finally, then, it is to be remembered that all truths, as far as their being particular or general affects their SEC. I. CHAP. III.] IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. 75 value at all, are, valuable in proportion as they are par- ticular, and valueless in proportion as they are general, or to express the proposition in simpler terms, every truth is valuable in proportion as it is characteristic of the thing of which it is affirmed. 76 [part II . ^ 1. No acci- dental viola- tion of nature' principles should be re- presented. CHAPTER IV. OF THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS 1 — SECONDLY, THAT RARE TRUTHS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FREQUENT ONES. It will be necessary next for us to determine how far ’s frequency or rarity can affect the importance of truths, and whether the artist is to be considered the most truthful who paints what is common or what is unusual in nature. Now the whole determination of this question de- pends upon whether the unusual fact be a violation of nature’s general principles, or the application of some of those principles in a peculiar and striking way. Nature sometimes, though very rarely, violates her own principles; it is her principle to make every thing beautiful, but now and then for an instant, she permits what, compared with the rest of her works, might be called ugly : it is true that even these rare blemishes are permitted, as I have above said, for a good purpose, (Part I. Sec. I. Chap. 5.), they are valuable in nature, and used as she uses them, are equally valuable (as instan- taneous discords) in art ; but the artist who should seek after these exclusively, and paint nothing else, though he might be able to point to something in nature as the original of every one of his uglinesses, would yet be, in the strict sense of the word, false, — false to nature, and disobedient to her laws. For instance, it is the practice SEC. I. CHAP. IV.] RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. 77 of nature to give character to the outlines of her clouds by perpetual angles and right lines. Perhaps once in a month, by diligent watching, we might be able to see a cloud altogether rounded and made up of curves, but the artist who paints nothing but curved clouds must yet be considered thoroughly and inexcusably false. But the case is widely different, when instead of a 2. But the principle violated, we have one extraordinarily carried those out or manifested under unusual circumstances. Though ^ave nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her exempii^d!^^^ highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent. She is constantly §3. Which arc doing something beautiful for us, but it is something ^o“P^^3.tiveiy which she has not done before and will not do again ; some exhibition of her general powers in particular cir- cumstances which, if we do not catch at the instant it is passing, will not be repeated for us. Now they are these evanescent passages of perfected beauty, these perpetually varied examples of utmost power, which the artist ought to seek for and arrest. No supposition can be more albsurd than that effects or truths frequently exhibited are more characteristic of nature than those which are equally necessary by her laws, though rarer in occurrence. Both the frequent and the rare are parts of the same great system, to give either exclusively is imperfect truth, and to repeat the same effect or thought in two pictures is wasted life. What should we think § 4. All repeti- of a poet who should keep all his life repeating the blame- same thought in different words ? and why should we be more lenient to the parrot-painter who has learned one lesson from the page of nature, and keeps stammer- ing it out with eternal repetition without turning the leaf? Is it less tautology to describe a thing over and ^ 5. The duty of the painter is the same as that of a preacher. 78 relative IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. [PART II. over again with lines, than it is with words? The teaching of nature is as varied and infinite as it is con- stant ; and the duty of the painter is to watch for every one of her lessons, and to give (for human life will admit of nothing more) those in which she has mani- fested each of her principles in the most peculiar and striking way. The deeper his research and the rarer the phenomena he has noted, the more valuable will his works be ; to repeat himself, even in a single instance, is treachery to nature, for a thousand human lives would not be enough to give one instance of the perfect manifestation of each of her powers, and as for com- bining or classifying them, as well might a preacher ex- pect in one sermon to express and explain every divine truth which can be gathered out of God’s revelation, as a painter expect in one composition to express and il- lustrate every lesson which can be received from God’s creation. Both are commentators on infinity, and the duty of both is to take for each discourse one essential truth, seeking particularly and insisting especially on those which are less palpable to ordinary observation, and more likely to escape an indolent research, and to impress that, and that alone, upon those whom they address, with every illustration that can be furnished by their knowledge, and every adornment attainable by their power. And the real truthfulness of the painter is in proportion to the number and variety of the facts he has so illustrated, those facts being always, as above observed, the realization, not the violation of a general principle. The quantity of truth is in proportion to the number of such facts, and its value and instructiveness in proportion to their rarity. All really great pictures, therefore, exhibit the general habits of nature, mani- fested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way. SEC. I.] 79 CHAPTER V. OF THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS: — THIRDLY, THAT TRUTHS OF COLOUR ARE THE LEAST IMPORTANT OF ALL TRUTHS. In the two last chapters, we have pointed out general ^ Difference tests of the importance of all truths, which will be maJ^and^^* sufficient at once to distinguish certain classes of pro» perties in bodies, as more necessary to be told than bodies, others, because more characteristic, either of the par- ticular thing to be represented, or of the principles of nature. According to Locke, Book ii. chap. 8, there are three sorts of qualities in bodies: first, the “bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of their solid parts : those that are in them, whether we perceive them or not.” These he calls primary qualities. Secondly, “ the power that is in any body to operate after a peculiar manner on any of our senses ” (sensible qualities). And thirdly, “ the power that is in any body to make such a change in another body as that it shall operate on our senses differently from what it did before : these last being usually called powers^ Hence he proceeds to prove that those which he calls primary qualities are indeed part of the essence of the body, and characteristic of it ; but that the two other kinds of qualities, which together he calls secondary, are neither of them more than powers of producing on other objects, or in us, certain effects and sensations. 80 OF THE RELATIVE [part II. § 2. The first are fully characteristic, the second imperfectly so. § 3. Colour is a secondary quality, there- fore less im- portant than form. Now a power of influence is always equally characteristic of two objects — the active and passive ; for it is as much necessary that there should be a power in the object suffering to receive the impression, as in the object acting, to give the impression. (Compare Locke, Book ii. chap. 21, sect. 2.) Lor supposing two people, as is frequently the case, perceive different scents in the same flower, it is evident that the power in the flower to give this or that depends on the nature of their nerves, as well as on that of its own particles ; and that we are as correct in saying it is a power in us to perceive, as in the object to impress. Every power, therefore, being characteristic of the nature of two bodies, is imperfectly and incompletely characteristic of either separately ; but the primary qualities, being characteristic only of the body in which they are inherent, are the most important truths connected with it. For the question, what the thing is, must precede, and be of more importance than the question, what can it do. Now, by Locke’s definition above given, only bulk, figure, situation, and motion or rest of solid parts, are primary qualities. Hence all truths of colour sink at once into the second rank. He, therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth of colour has neg- lected a greater truth for a less one. And that colour is indeed a most unimportant charac- teristic of objects, will be farther evident on the slightest consideration. The colour of plants is constantly changing with the season, and of everything with the quality of light falling on it ; but the nature and essence of the thing is independent of these changes. An oak is an oak, whether green with spring or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia, whether it be yellow or crimson, and if some monster-hunting botanist should ever frighten the flower blue with soap-suds, still it will be a dahlia ; but let one curve of the petals — one groove of the stamens be wanting, and the flower ceases to be the 81 SEC. I. CHAP. V.] IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. same. Let the roughness of the bark and the angles of the boughs be smoothed or diminished, and the oak ceases to be an oak ; but let it retain its inward struc- ture and outward form, and though its leaves grew white, or pink, or blue, or tricolor, it would be a white oak, 01 a pink oak, or a republican oak, but an oak still. Again, colour is hardly ever even a distinction §4. Colour no between two objects of the same species. Two trees, of the same kind, at the same season, and of the same age, same are of absolutely the same colour; but they are not of the same form, nor anything like it. There can be no difference in the colour of two pieces of rock broken from the same place ; but it is impossible they should be of the same form. So that form is not only the chief characteristic of species, but the only characteristic of individuals of a species. Again, a colour, in association with other colours, is a § 5 . And dif- totally different thing from the same colour seen bv icseii. it Has a distinct and peculiar power upon the what it is alone, retina dependent on its association. Consequently, the colour of any object is not .more dependent upon the nature of the object itself, and the eye beholding it, than on the colour of the objects near it ; in this respect also, therefore, it is no characteristic . And so great is the uncertainty with respect to those §6. it is not qualities or powers which depend as much on the nature of the object suffering as of the object acting, that it is peopieYeeTL totally impossible to prove that one man sees in the S XSgs"" same thing the same colour that another does, though he may use the same name for it. One man may see yellow where another sees blue, but as the effect is constant, they agree in the term to be used for it, and both call it blue, or both yellow, having yet totally dif- ferent ideas attached to the term. And yet neither can be said to see falsely, because the colour is not in the thing, but in the thing and them together. But if they see forms differently, one must see falsely, because the G 82 OF THE RELATIVE [part it- ^ 7. Form, considered as an element of landscape, in- cludes light and shade. ^ 8. Impor- tance of light and shade in expressing the character of bodies, and unimportance of colour. form is positive in the object. My friend may see boars blue for anything I know, but it is impossible iie should see them with paws instead of hoofs, unless his eyes or brain are diseased. (^Compare Locke, Book ii. chap, xxxii. § 15.) But I do not speak of this un- certainty as capable of having any effect on art, because, though perhaps Landseer sees dogs of the colour which I should call blue, yet the colour he puts on the canvass, being in the same way blue to him, will still be brown or dog-colour to me ; and so we may argue on points of colour just as if all men saw alike, as indeed in all pro- bability they do, but I merely mention this uncertainty to show farther the vagueness and unimportance of colour as a characteristic of bodies. Before going farther, however, I must explain the sense in which I have used the word “ form,” because painters have a most inaccurate and careless habit of confining this term to the outline of bodies, whereas it necessarily implies light and shade. It is true that the outline and the chiaroscuro must be separate subjects of investigation with the student ; but no form whatsoever can be known to the eye in the slightest degree without its chiaroscuro, and, therefore, in speaking of form gene- rally as an element of landscape, I mean that perfect and harmonious unity of outline with light and shade, by which all the parts and projections and proportions of a body are fully explained to the eye, being never- theless perfectly independent of sight or power in other objects, the presence of light upon a body being a posi- tive existence, whether we are aware of it or not, and in no degree dependent upon our senses. This being understood, the most convincing proof of the unim- portance of colour lies in the accurate observation of tho way in which any material object impresses itself on the mind. If we look at nature carefully, we shall find that her colours are in a state of perpetual con- fusion and indistinctness, while her forms, as told by. 83 SEC. I. CHAP. V.] IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. light and shade, are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above ; the bushes receive greys and yellows from the ground ; every hair’s breadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue of the sky or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local colour; this local colour, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the lij^ht, or quenched in the grey of the shadow, and the confusion and blending of tint is alto- gether so great, that were we left to find out what objects were by their colours only, we could scarcely in places distinguish the boughs of a tree from the air be- yond them, or the ground beneath them. I know that people unpractised in art will not believe this at first, but if they have accurate powers of observation, they may soon ascertain it for themselves ; they will find that while they can scarcely ever determine the exact hue of anything, except when it occurs in large masses, as in a green field or the blue sky, the form, as told by light and shade, is always decided and evident, and the source of the chief character of every object. Light and shade indeed so completely conquer the distinctions of local colour, that the diflference in hue between the illumined parts of a white and a black object is not one- half so great as the difference (in sunshine) between the illumined and dark side of either separately. We shall see hereafter, in considering ideas of beauty, §9. Recapitu- that colour, even as a source of pleasure, is mean and feeble compared to form ; but this we cannot insist upon at present, we have only to do with simple truth, and the observations we have made are sufficient to prove that the artist who sacrifices or forgets a truth of form in the pursuit of a truth of colour, sacrifices what is definite to what is uncertain, and what is essential to what is accidental. G 2 84 [part II. CHAPTER VI. RECAPITULATION. ^ 1 . The impor- It ought further to be observed respecting truths in tance ofhis- o-eneral, that those are always most valuable which are torical truths. & i , . , • i n i most historical, that is, which tell us most about the past and future states of the object to which they belong. In a tree, for instance, it is more important to give the appearance of energy and elasticity in the limbs which is indicative of growth and life, than any particular character of leaf, or texture of bough. It is more important that we should feel that the uppermost sprays are creeping higher and higher into the sky, and be impressed with the current of life and motion which is animating every fibre, than that we should know the exact pitch of relief with which those fibres are thrown out against the sky. For the first truths tell us tales about the tree, about what it has been, and will be, while the last are characteristic of it only in its present state, and are in no way talkative about themselves. Talkative facts are always more interesting and more important than silent ones. So again the lines in a crag which mark its stratification, and how it has been washed and rounded by water, or twisted and drawn out in fire, are more important, because they tell more, than the stains of the lichens which change year by year, and the accidental fissures of frost or decomposition, not but that both of these are historical, but historical in a less distinct manner, and for shorter periods. 85 SEC. I. CHAP. VI.] RECAPITULATION. Hence in general the truths of specific form are the §2. Form, as first and most important of all, and next to them, those truths of chiaroscuro which are necessary to make us shade, the first understand every quality and part of forms, and the ^on^hgit,'' relative distances of objects among each other, and in colour, are consequence their relative bulks. Altogether lower than these, as truths, though often most important as beauties, stand all effects of chiaroscuro which are pro- ductive merely of imitatious of light and tone, and all effects of colour. To make us understand the space of the sky, is an end worthy of the artist’s highest powers, to hit its particular blue or gold is an end to be thought of when we have accomplished the first, and not till then. Finally, far below all these come those particular § 3. And de- accuracies or tricks of chiaroscuro which cause obiects c^aros. to look projecting from the canvass, not worthy of the all. name of truths, because they require for their attain- ment the sacrifice of all others, for not having at our disposal the same intensity of light by which nature illustrates her objects, we are obliged, if we would have perfect deception in one, to destroy its relation to the rest. (Compare Sect. II. Chap. V.) And thus he who throws one object out of his picture, never lets the spectator into it. Michael Angelo bids you follow his phantoms into the abyss of heaven, but a modern French painter drops his hero out of the picture frame. This solidity or projection then, is the very lowest truth that art can give; it is the painting of mere matter, giving that as food for the eye which is properly only the subject of touch ; it can neither instruct nor exalt, nor please, except as jugglery; it addresses no sense of beauty nor of power, and wherever it charac- terises the general aim of a picture, it is the sign and the evidence of the vilest and lowest mechanism which art can be insulted by giving name to. 86 [part II. CHAPTER VII. GENERAL APPLICATION OP THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. § I. The dif- We have seen, in the preceding chapters, some proof ferent selection before asserted, that the truths necessary of fftcts consG"* quent on the for deceptive imitation are not only few, but of the very aim at imita- j^^gg^ order. We thus find painters ranging themselves truth. into two great classes, one aiming at the development of the exquisite truths of specific form, refined colour, and setherial space, and content with the clear and impressive suggestion of any of these, by whatsoever means obtained, and the other casting all these aside, to attain those particular truths of tone and chiaroscuro, which may trick the spectator into a belief of reality. The first class, if they have to paint a tree, are intent upon giving the exquisite designs of intersecting undu- lation in its boughs, the grace of its leafage, the in- tricacy of its organization, and all those qualities which make it lovely or affecting of its kind. The second endeavour only to make you believe that you are look- ing at wood. They are totally regardless of truths or beauties of form ; a stump is as good as a trunk for all their purposes, so that they can only deceive the eye into the supposition that it is a stump and not canvass. § 2. Tiie old To which of these classes the great body of the old only 1^'i^‘^scape painters belonged, may be partly gathered at imitation, from the kind of praise which is bestowed upon them by those who admire them most, which either refers to technical matters, dexterity of touch, clever oppositions SEC. I. CHAP. VII.] THE APPLICATION. 87 of colour, &c., or is bestowed on the power of the painter to deceive. M. de Marmontel, going into a connoisseur’s gallery, pretends to mistake a fine Berghem for a window. This, he says, was affirmed by its pos- sessor to be the greatest praise the picture had ever received. Such is indeed the notion of art which is at the bottom of the veneration usually felt for the old landscape painters; it is of course the palpable, first idea of ignorance ; it is the only notion which people unacquainted with art can by any possibility have of its ends, the only test by which people unacquainted with nature, can pretend to form anything like judg- ment of art. ‘‘We have no eye for colour — we per- ceive no intention in composition — we do not know anything about form — we cannot estimate excellence — we do not care for beauty, but — we know whether it deceives.” It is a strange thing that, with the great historical painters of Italy before them, who had broken so boldly and indignantly from the trammels of this notion, and shaken the very dust of it from their feet, the succeeding landscape painters should have wasted their lives in jugglery : but so it is, and so it will be felt, the more we look into their works, that the decep- tion of the senses was the great and first end of all their art. To attain this they paid deep and serious § 3. What attention to effects of light and tone, and to the exact degree of relief which material objects take against light and atmosphere ; and sacrificing every other truth to these, not necessarily, but because thev required no others for deception, they succeeded in rendering these particular facts with a fidelity and force which, in the pictures that have come down to us uninjured, are as yet unequalled, and never can be surpassed. They painted their foregrounds with laborious industry, cover- ing them with details so as to render them deceptive to the ordinary eye, regardless of beauty or truth in the details themselves ; they painted their trees with care- 88 THE APPLICATION. [PART II. ful attention to tlieir pitch of shade against the sky, utterly regardless of all that is beautiful or essential in the anatomy of their foliage and boughs : they painted their distances with exquisite use of transparent colour and aerial tone, totally neglectful of all facts and forms which nature uses such colour and tone to relieve and adorn. They had neither love of nature, nor feel- ing of her beauty ; they looked for her coldest and most common-place effects, because they were easiest to imi- tate, and for her most vulgar forms, because they were most easily to be recognised by the untaught eyes of those whom alone they could hope to please ; they did it, like the Pharisee of old, to be seen of men, and they had their reward. They do deceive and delight the unpractised eye ; — they will to all ages, as long as their colours endure, be the standards of excellence with all, who, ignorant of nature, claim to be thought learned in art. And they will to all ages be, to those who have thorough love and knowledge of the creation which they libel, instructive proofs of the limited number and low character of the truths which are necessary, and the accumulated multitude of pure, broad, bold false- hoods which are admissible, in pictures meant only to deceive. There is of course more or less accuracy of know- ledge and execution combined with this aim at effect, according to the industry and precision of eye pos- sessed by the master, and more or less of beauty in the forms selected, according to his natural taste ; but both the beauty and truth are sacrificed unhesitatingly where they interfere with the great effort at deception. Claude had, if it had been cultivated, a fine feeling for beauty of form, and is seldom ungraceful in his foliage; but his picture, when examined with reference to essential truth, is one mass of error from beginning to end. Cuyp, on the other hand, could paint close truth of everything, except ground and water, with decision and 89 SEC. I. CHAP. VII.] THE APPLICATION. success, but then he has not the slightest idea of the meaning of the word “beautiful.” Caspar Poussin, more ignorant of truth than Claude, and almost as dead to beauty as Cuyp, has yet a perception of the feeling and moral truth of nature which often redeems the picture ; but yet in all of them, everything that they can do is done for deception, and nothing for the sake or love of what they are painting. Modern landscape painters have looked at nature § 4. The prin- with totally different eyes, seeking not for what is adopted ' easiest to imitate, but for what is most important to tell, .modem Rejecting at once all idea of dona Jide imitation, they think only of conveying the impression of nature into the mind of the spectator, and chiefly of forcing upon his feelings those delicate and refined truths of specific form, which are just what the careless eye can least detect or enjoy, because they are intended by the Deity to be the constant objects of our investigation, that they may be the constant sources of our pleasure. And there is in consequence, a greater sum of valuable, es- sential, and impressive truth in the works of two or three of our leading modern landscape painters, than in those of all the old masters put together, and of truth too, nearly unmixed with definite or avoidable falsehood ; while the unimportant and feeble truths of the old masters are choked with a mass of perpetual defiance of the most authoritative laws of nature. I do not expect this assertion to be believed at § 5. General present, it must rest for demonstration on the examina- ScS°Lva- tion we are about to enter upon ; yet, even without and g. reference to any intricate or deep-laid truths, it appears frasteTS' strange to me, that any one familiar with nature, and freedom vastness of tond ol her, should not grow weary and sick at heart nature, among the melancholy and monotonous transcripts of her which alone can be received from the old school of art. A man accustomed to the broad, wild sea-shore, with its bright breakers, and free winds, and sounding 90 THE APPLICATION. [part II. rocks, and eternal sensation of tameless power, can scarcely but be angered when Claude bids him stand still on some paltry, chipped and chiselled quay, with porters and wheelbarrows running against him, to watch a weak, rippling, bound and barriered water, that has not strength enough in one of its waves to upset the flower-pots on the wall, or even to fling one jet of spray over the confining stone. A man accustomed to the strength and glory of God’s mountains, with their soaring and radiant pinnacles, and surging sweeps of measureless distance, kingdoms in their valleys, and climates upon their crests, can scarcely but be angered when Salvator bids him stand still under some con- temptible fragment of splintery crag, which an Alpine snow-wreath would smother in its first swell, with a stunted bush or two growing out of it, and a Dudley or Halifax-like volume of manufactory smoke for a sky. A man accustomed to the grace and infinity of nature’s foliage, with every vista a cathedral, and every bough a revelation, can scarcely but be angered when Poussin mocks him with a black round mass of impene- trable paint, diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick instead of a trunk. Who, that has one spark of feeling for what is beautiful or true, would not turn to be refreshed by the pure and extended realizations of modern art ! How many have we — how various in their aim and sphere — embracing one by one every feeling and lesson of the creation ! §G. And with David Cox, whose pencil never falls but in dew — modtrnSts. simple-minded as a child, gentle, and loving all things that are pure and lowly — content to lie quiet among the rustling leaves, and sparkling grass, and purple-cushioned heather, only to watch the soft white clouds melting with their own motion, and the dewy blue dropping through them like rain, so that he may but cast from him as pollution all that is proud, and artificial, and un- quiet, and worldly, and possess his spirit in humility SEC. I. CHAP. VII.] THE APPLICATION. 91 and peace. Copley Fielding, casting his whole soul into- space— exulting like a wild deer in the motion of the swift mists, and the free far surfaces of the untrodden hills— now wandering with the quick, pale, fitful sun- gleams over the dim swells and sweeps of grey downs and shadowy dingles, until, lost half in light and half in vapour, they melt into the blue of the plain as the cloud does into the sky — now climbing with the purple sunset along the aerial slopes of the quiet mountains, only known from the red clouds by their stillness— now flying with the wild wind and sifted spray along the white, driving, desolate sea; but always with the passion for nature’s freedom burning in his heart, so that every leaf in his foreground is a wild one, and every line of his hills is limitless. J. D. Harding, brilliant and vigorous, and clear in light, as nature’s own sunshine- deep in knowledge— exquisite in feeling of every form that nature falls into — following with his quick, keen dash the sunlight into the crannies of the rocks, and the wind into the tangling of the grass, and the bright colour into the fall of the sea foam — various, universal in his aim— master alike of all form and feature of crag, or torrent, or forest, or cloud ; but English, all English at his heart, returning still to rest under the shade of some spreading elm, where the fallow deer butt among the bending fern, and the quiet river glides noiselessly by its reedy shore, and the yellow corn sheaves glow along the flanks of the sloping hills. Clarkson Stanfield, firm, and fearless, and unerring in his knowledge — stern and decisive in his truth — perfect and certain in com- position shunning nothing, concealing nothing, and falsifying nothing — never affected, never morbid, never failing conscious of his strength, but never ostentatious of it — acquainted with every line and hue of the deep sea chiselling his waves with unhesitating knowledge of every curve of their anatomy, and every moment of their motion — building his mountains rock by rock. 92 THE APPLICATION. [part II. with wind in every fissure, and weight in every stone — and modelling the masses of his sky with the strength of tempest in their every fold. And Turner — glorious in conception — unfathomable in knowledge — solitary in power — with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and the morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of His universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand. ^7. The char- But I must not anticipate my subject — what I have as*giveu by asserted must be proved by deliberate investigation of Canaletti. facts, and in no way left dependent upon feeling or imagination. Yet I may perhaps, before proceeding into detail, illustrate my meaning more completely by a comparison of the kind of truths impressed upon us in the painting of Venice, by Canaletti, Prout, Stanfield, and Turner. The effect of a fine Canaletti is, in its first impression, dioramic. We fancy we are in our beloved Venice again, with one foot by mistake in the clear, invisible film of water lapping over the marble steps of the fore- ground. Every house has its proper relief against the sky — every brick and stone its proper hue of sunlight and shade — and every degree of distance its proper tone of retiring air. Presently, however, we begin to feel that it is lurid and gloomy, and that the painter, com- pelled by the lowness of the utmost light at his disposal to deepen the shadows, in order to get the right relation, has lost the flashing, dazzling, exulting light which was one of our chief sources of Venetian happiness. But we pardon this, knowing it to be unavoidable, and begin to look for something of that in which Venice differs from Rotterdam, or any other city built beside canals. We know that house, certainly ; we never passed it without stopping our gondolier, for its arabesques were as rich SEC. I. CHAP. VII.] THE APPLICATION. 93 as a bank of flowers in spring, and as beautiful as a dream. What has Canaletti given us for them? Five black dots. Well : take the next house. We remember that too ; it was mouldering inch by inch into the canal, and the bricks had fallen away from its shattered marble shafts, and left them white and skeleton-like, yet with their fretwork of cold flowers wreathed about them still, untouched by time ; and through the rents of the wall behind them there used to come long sunbeams, greened by the weeds through which they pierced, which flitted and fell one by one round those grey and quiet shafts, catching here a leaf and there a leaf; and gliding over the illumined edges and delicate fissures until they sank into the deep dark hollow between the marble blocks of the sunk foundation, lighting every other moment one isolated emerald lamp on the crest of the intermittent waves, when the wild sea-weeds and crimson lichens drifted and crawled with their thousand colours and fine branches over its decay, and the black, clogging, accumulated limpets hung in ropy clusters from the dripping and tinkling stone. What has Canaletti given us for this ? One square red mass, com- posed of— let me count — five and fifty — no; six and fifty — no ; I was right at first — five and fifty bricks, of precisely the same size, shape, and colour, one great black line for the shadow of the roof at the top, and six similar ripples in a row at the bottom! And this is what people call ‘‘ painting nature ! ” It is indeed paint- ing nature — as she appears to the most unfeeling and untaught of mankind. The bargeman and the brick- layer probably see no more in Venice than Canaletti gives — heaps of earth and mortar, with water between ; and are just as capable of appreciating the facts of sun- light and shadow, by which he deceives us, as the most educated of us all. But what more there is in Venice than brick and stone — what there is of mystery and death, and memory and beauty — what there is to be THE APPLICATION. f 8. By Prout. 94 [part II. learned or lamented, to be loved or wtpt — wt only does nature surpass us in power to darkness, of obtaining light as much as the sun surpasses white paper, but she aho infinitely surpasses us in her power of shade. Her deepest shades are void spaces from which no light Tvhatever is reflected to the eye ; ours are black surfacss from which, paint as black as we may, a great deal of light is still reflected, and which, placed against one of nature’s deep bits of gloom, would tell as distinct light. Here we are then, with white paper for our highest light, and visible illumined sur- face for our deepest shadow, set to run the gauntlet against nature, with the sun for her light, and vacuity for her gloom. It is evident that she can well afford to throw her material objects dark against the brilliant aerial tone of her sky, and yet give in those objects themselves a thousand intermediate distances and tones before she comes to black, or to anything like it — all the illumined surfaces of her objects being as distinctly and vividly brighter than her nearest and darkest shadows, as the sky is brighter than those illumined surfaces. But if we, against our poor, dull obscurity of yellow paint, instead of sky, insist on having the same relation of shade in material objects, we go down to the bottom of our scale at once ; and what in the world are we to do then ? Where are all our intermediate distances to come from? — how are we to express the aerial relations among the parts themselves, for instance, of foliage, whose most distant boughs are already almost black ? — ■ how are we to come up from this to the foreground, § 6. General falsehood of such a system. 102 OF TRUTH OF TONE. [PART II. and when we have done so, how are we to express the distinction between its solid parts, already as dark as we can make them, and its vacant hollows, which nature has marked sharp and clear and black, among its lighted surfaces ? It cannot but be evident at a glance, that if to any one of the steps from one distance to another, we give the same quantity of difference in pitch of shade which nature does, we must pay for this expen- diture of our means by totall^r missing half a dozen distances, not a whit less important or marked, and so sacrifice a multitude of truths, to obtain one. And this accordingly was the means by which the old masters obtained their (truth?) of tone. They chose those steps of distance which are the most conspicuous and noticeable, that for instance from sky to foliage, or from clouds to hills, and they gave these their precise pitch of difference in shade with exquisite accuracy of imitation. Their means were then exhausted, and they were obliged to leave their trees flat masses of mere filled-up outline, and to omit the truths of space in every individual part of their picture by the thousand. But this they did not care for ; it saved them trouble ; they reached their grand end, imitative effect ; they thrust home just at the places where the common and careless eye looks for imitation, and they attained the broadest and most faithful appearance of truth of tone which art can exhibit. But they are prodigals, and foolish prodigals, in art ; they lavish their whole means to get one truth, and leave themselves powerless when they should seize a thousand. And is it indeed worthy of being called a truth, when we have a vast history given us to relate, to the fulness of which neither our limits nor our language are adequate, instead of giving all its parts abridged in the order of their importance, to omit or deny the greater part of them, that we may dwell with verbal fidelity on two or three ? Nay, the very truth 103 SEC. II. CHAP. I.] OF TRUTH OF TONE. to which the rest are sacrificed is rendered falsehood by their absence, the relation of the tree to the sky is marked as an impossibility by the want of relation of its parts to each other. Turner starts from the beginning with a totally dif- § 7. The prin- ferent principle. He boldly takes pure white, (and in^this^rJspe"t! justly, for it is the sign of the most intense sunbeams) for his highest light, and lamp-black for his deepest shade, and between these he makes every degree of shade indicative of a separate degree of distance,* giving each step of approach, not the exact difference in pitch which it would have in nature, but a difference bearing the same proportion to that, which his sum of possible shade bears to the sum of nature’s shade, so that an object half way between his horizon and his foreground, will be exactly in half tint of force, and every minute division of intermediate space will have just its proportionate share of the lesser sum, and no more. Hence where the old masters expressed one distance, he expresses a hundred, and where they said furlongs, he says leagues. Which of these modes of procedure be most agreeable with truth, I think I may safely leave the reader to decide for himself. He will see in this very first instance, one proof of what we above asserted, that the deceptive imitation of nature is inconsistent with real truth, for the very means by which the old masters attained the apparent accuracy of tone which is so satisfying to the eye, com- pelled them to give up all idea of real relations of re- tirement, and to represent a few successive and marked stages of distance, like the scenes of a theatre, instead of the imperceptible, multitudinous, symmetrical re- * Of course I am not speaking here of treatment of chiaroscuro, but of that quantity of depth of shade by which, c 1 ness dependent press the adaptation ot the eye to one or other oi them ; on theretire- we have now to examine that kind of indistinctness from the eye. which is dependent on real retirement of the object even when the focus of the eye is fully concentrated upon it. The first kind of indecision is that which belongs to all objects which the eye is not adapted to, whether near or far olF : the second is that consequent upon the want of power in the eye to receive a clear image of objects at a great distance from it, however attentively it may regard them. Draw on a piece of white paper, a square and a circle, each about a twelfth or eighth of an inch in diameter, and blacken them so that their forms may be very distinct ; place your paper against the wall at the end of tfie room, and retire from it a greater or less distance according as you have drawn the figures larger or smaller. You will come to a point where, though you can see both the spots with perfect plainness, you can- not tell which is the square and which the circle. Now this takes place of course with every object in ^ Causes a landscape, in proportion to its distance and size. The confusion, but definite forms of the leaves of a tree, however sharply tion of details, and separately they may appear to come against the $ 3. Instances in various ob- jects. 166 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [PART II. sky, are quite indistinguishable at fifty yards off, and the form of everything becomes confused before we finally lose sight of it. Now if the character of an object, say the front of a house, be explained by a variety of forms in it, as the shadows in the tops of the windows, the lines of the architraves, the seams of the masonry, &c. ; these lesser details, as the object falls into distance, become confused and undecided, each of them losing their definite forms, but all being perfectly visible as something, a white or a dark spot or stroke, not lost sight of, observe, but yet so seen that we cannot tell what they are. As the distance increases, the con- fusion becomes greater, until at last the whole front of the house becomes merely a flat, pale space, in which, however, there is still observable a kind of richness and chequering, caused by the details in it, which, though totally merged and lost in the mass, have still an influ- ence on the texture of that mass, until at last the whole house itself becomes a mere light or dark spot which we can plainly see, but cannot tell what it is, nor dis- tinguish it from a stone or any other object. Now what I particularly wish to insist upon, is the state of vision in which all the details of an object are seen, and yet seen in such confusion and disorder that we cannot in the least tell what they are, or what they mean. It is not mist between us and the object, still less is it shade, still less is it want of character ; it is a confusion, a mystery, an interfering of undecided lines with each other, not a diminution of their numW; window and door, architrave and frieze, all are there; it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and rich and abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is. Observe your friend’s face as he is coming up to you ; first it is nothing more than a white spot; now it is a face, but you cannot see the two eyes, nor the mouth, even as spots ; you see a confusion of lines, a something which you know from 167 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE. expcriGiice to be indicative of a face, and yet you can- not tell how. Now he is nearer, and you can see the spots for the eyes and mouth, but they are not blank spots neither ; there is detail in them ; you cannot see the lips nor the teeth, nor the brows, and yet you see more than mere spots ; it is a mouth and an eye, and there is light and sparkle and expression in them, but nothing distinct. Now he is nearer still, and you can see that he is like your friend, but you cannot tell whether he is or not i there is a vagueness and inde- cision of line still. Now you are sure, but even yet there are a thousand things in his face which have their effect in inducing the recognition, but which you cannot see so as to know what they are. Changes like these, and states of vision corresponding § 4. Two great to them, take place with each and all of the objects of truths ; that nature, and two great principles of truth are deducible from their observation. First, place an object as close never vacant, to the eye as you like, there is always something in it which you cannot see, except in the hinted and mys- terious manner above described. You can see the texture of a piece of dress, but you cannot see the indi- vidual threads which compose it, though they are all felt, and have each of them influence on the eye. Secondly, place an object as far from the eye as you like, and until it becomes itself a mere spot, there is always something in it which you can see, though only in the hinted manner above described. Its shadows and lines and local colours are not lost sight of as it retires, they get mixed and indistinguishable, but they are still there, and there is a difference always per- ceivable between an object possessing such details and a flat or vacant space. The grass blades of a meadow a mile off, are so far discernible that there will be a marked difference between its appearance and that of a piece of wood painted green. And thus nature is never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, 168 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [part II. but always abundant, you always see something but you never see ail. And thus arises that exijuisite finish and fulness which God has appointed to be the perpetual source of fresh pleasure to the cultivated and observant eye, a finish which no distance can render invisible, and no nearness comprehensible, which in every stone, every bough, every cloud, and every wave is multiplied around us, for ever presented, and for ever exhaustless. And hence in art, every space or touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false. Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing. ^Sj^Compiete Now, I would not wish for any more illustrative or both these marked examples of the total contradiction of these throidmastos. principles, than the landscape works of the They are old masters, taken as a body : — the Dutch masters fur- S*trca“'* seeing everything, and the Italians of seeing nothing. The rule with both is indeed the same, differently applied. “You shall see the bricks in the wall, and be able to count them, or you shall see nothing but a dead flat;” but the Dutch give you the bricks, and the Italians the flat. Nature’s rule being the precise reverse “ You shall never be able to count the bricks, but you shall never see a dead space.” frLSolS instance, the street in the centre of the Poussin. really great landscape of Poussin (great in feeling at least) marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery. The houses are dead square masses, with a light side and a dark side, and black touches for windows. The light side is blank. No. 1, the dark side is blank. No. 2, and the windows are blanks. Nos. 3, 4, 5. There is not a shadow of a suggestion of anything whatsoever in either of the spaces, the light wall is dead grey, with no change in it, the dark wall dead grey, with no change in it, and 169 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE. the windows dead black, with no change in it. How differently would nature have treated you. She would have let you see the Indian corn hanging on the walls, and the image of the Virgin at the angles, and the sharp, broken, broad shadows of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall, and the white and blue stripes of the mattrasses stuffed out of the windows, and the flapping corners of the mat blinds. All would have been there ; not as such, not like corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not to be comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black spots and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow, microscopic in its minuteness, and filling every atom and part of space with mystery, out of which would have arranged itself the general impression of truth and life. Again, take the distant city on the right bank of §7. From the river in Claude’s ‘‘ Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca,” in the National Gallery. Now, I have seen a good many cities in my life, and drawn not a few ; and I have seen a good many fortifications, fancy ones included, which frequently supply us with very new ideas indeed, especially in matters of proportion ; but I do not remember ever having met with either a city or a fortress entirely composed of round towers of various heights and sizes, all facsimiles of each other, and absolutely agreeing in the number of battlements. I have, indeed, some faint recollection of having deli- neated such an one in the first page of a spelling-book when I was four years old, but, somehow or other, the dignity and perfection of the ideal was not appreciated, and I do not think the volume was considered to be increased in value by the frontispiece. Without, how- ever, venturing to doubt the entire sublimity of the same ideal as it occurs in Claude, let us consider how nature, if she had been fortunate enough to originate so perfect a conception, would have managed it in its 170 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [part II. details. Claude has permitted you to see every battle- ment, and the first impulse you feel upon looking at the picture is to count how many there are. Nature would have given you a peculiar confused roughness of the upper lines, a multitude of intersections and spots, which you would have known from experience was indicative of battlements, but which you might as well have thought of creating as of counting. Claude has given you the walls below in one dead void of uniform grey. There is nothing to be seen, nor felt, nor guessed at in it ; it is grey paint or grey shade, which- ever you may choose to call it, but it is nothing more. Nature would have let you see, nay, would have com- pelled you to see, thousands of spots and lines, not one to be absolutely understood or accounted for, but yet all characteristic and different from each other; breaking lights on shattered stones, vague shadows from waving vegetation, irregular stains of time and weather, mouldering hollows, sparkling casements — all would have been there — none, indeed, seen as such, none comprehensible or like themselves, but all visible ; little shadows and sparkles, and scratches, making that whole space of colour a transparent, palpitating, various in- finity. ^ 8. And Or take one of Poussin’s extreme distances, such as G. Poussin. “Sacrifice of Isaac.” It is luminous, retiring, delicate and perfect in tone, and is quite complete enough to deceive and delight the careless eye to which all distances are alike ; nay, it is perfect and masterly, and absolutely right, if we consider it as a sketch, — as a first plan of a distance, afterwards to be carried out in detail. But we must remember that all these alternate spaces of grey and gold are not the landscape itself, but the treatment of it— not its substance, but its light and shade. They are just what nature would cast over it, and write upon it with every cloud, but which she would cast in play, and without carefulness, as 171 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE. matters of the very smallest possible importance. All her work and her attention would be given to bring out from underneath this, and through this, the forms and the material character which this can only be valuable to illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those broad spaces she would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you fresh lessons in every hair’s-breadth of it, and pouring her fulness of invention into it, until the mind lost itself in following her, — now fringing the dark edge of the shadow with a tufted line of level forest — now losing it for an instant in a breath of mist — then breaking it with the white gleaming angle of a narrow brook — then dwelling upon it again in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft, crowded light, with the hedges, and the paths, and the sprinkled cottages and scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in one beautiful, delicate, impe- netrable mystery — sparkling and melting, and passing away into the sky, without one line of distinctness, or one instant of vacancy. Now it is, indeed, impossible for the painter to fol- § 9. The im- . perative neces- low all this — he cannot come up to the same degree land- and order of infinity— but he can give us a lesser kind of infinity. He has not one -thousandth part of the finish, space to occupy which nature has ; but he can, at least, leave no part of that space vacant and unprofitable. If nature carries out her minutiae over miles, he has no excuse for generalizing in inches. And if he will only give us all he can, if he will give us a fulness as com- plete and as mysterious as nature’s, we will pardon him for its being the fulness of a cup instead of an ocean. But we will not pardon him, if, because he has not the mile to occupy, he will not oceupy the inch, and be- cause he has fewer means at his command, will leave half of those in his power unexerted. Still less will we pardon him for mistaking the sport of nature for her 172 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 4 [part II. labour, and for following her only in her hour of rest, without observing how she has worked for it. After spending centuries in raising the forest, and guiding the river, and modelling the mountain, she exults over her work in buoyancy of spirit, with playful sunbeam and flying cloud ; but the painter must go through the same labour, or he must not have the same recreation. Let him chisel his rock faithfully, and tuft his forest delicately, and then we will allow him his freaks of light and shade, and thank him for them ; but we will not be put off with the play before the lesson — with the ad- junct instead of the essence — with the illustration instead of the fact. ^ 10. Breadth I am somewhat anticipating my subject here, because i can scarcely help answering the objections which I know must arise in the minds of most readers, especially of those who are partially artistical, respecting ‘‘generalization,” « breadth,” « effect,” &c. It were to be wished that our writers on art would not dwell so frequently on the necessity of breadth, without explain- ing what it means ; and that we had more constant reference made to the principle which I can only remem- ber having seen once clearly explained and insisted on, that breadth is not vacancy. Generalization is unity, not destruction of parts; and composition is not annihi- lation, but arrangement of materials. The breadth which unites the truths of nature with her harmonies, is meritorious and beautiful: but the breadth which annihilates those truths by the million, is not painting nature, but painting over her. And so the masses which result from right concords and relations of details, are sublime and impressive; but the masses which re- sult from the eclipse of details are contemptible and painful.* And we shall show, in following parts of the * Of course much depends upon the kind of detail so lost. An artist may generalize the trunk of a tree, where he only loses lines of bark and do us a kindness j but he must not generalize the details of a cham- 173 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE. ■work, that distances like these of Poussin are mere meaningless tricks of clever exeeution, which, when once discovered, the artist may repeat over and over again, with mechanical contentment and perfect satis- faction, both to himself and to his superfieial admirers, with no more exertion of intelleet nor awakening of feel- ing than any tradesman has in multiplying some orna- mental pattern of furniture. Be this as it may, however, (for we cannot enter upon the discussion of the question here,) the falsity and imperfection of such distances ad- mits of no dispute. Beautiful and ideal they may be ; true they are not: and in the same way we might go through every part and portion of the works of the old masters, showing throughout, either that you have every leaf and blade of grass staring defiance to the mystery of nature, or that you have dead spaces of absolute vaeuity, equally determined in their denial of her fulness. And even if we ever find (as here and there, in their better pictures, we do) changeful passages of agreeable playing colour, or mellow and transparent modulations of myste- rious atmosphere, even here the touches, though satis- factory to the eye, are suggestive of nothing, — they are characterless, — they have none of the peculiar expressive- ness and meaning by which nature maintains the variety and interest even of what she most conceals. She always tells a story, however hintedly and vaguely; each of her touches is different from all the others ; and we feel with every one, that though we cannot tell what it is, it can- not be anything ; while even the most dextrous dis- tances of the old masters pretend to secresy without having anything to conceal, and are ambiguous, not from the concentration of meaning, but from the want of it. And now, take up one of Turner’s distanees, it mat-§ii. Tiie ters not which, or of what kind, — drawing or painting, mystery of Turner’s dis- paign, in which there is a history of creation. The full discussion of tances. the subject belongs to a future part of our investigation. § 12, Farther illustrations in architectural drawing. 174 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [PART II. small or great, done thirty years ago, or for last year’s Academy, as you like ; say that of the “ Mercury and Argus,” and look if every fact which I have just been pointing out in nature be not carried out in it. Abun- dant, beyond the power of the eye to embrace or fol- low, vast and various, bc3mnd the power of the mind to comprehend, there is yet not one atom in its whole extent and mass which does not suggest more than it represents, nor does it suggest vaguely, but in such a manner as to prove that the conception of each indi- vidual inch of that distance is absolutely clear and complete in the master’s mind, a separate picture fully worked out : but yet, clearly and fully as the idea is formed, just so much of it is given, and no more, as nature would have allowed you to feel or see, just so much as would enable a spectator of experience and knowledge to understand almost every minute frag- ment of separate detail, but appears, to the unpractised and careless eye, just what a distance of nature’s own would appear, an unintelligible mass. Not one line out of the millions there is without meaning, yet there is not one which is not affected and disguised by the dazzle and indecision of distance. No form is made out, and yet no form is unknown. Perhaps the absolute truth and accuracy of this sys- tem of drawing is better to be understood by observing the distant character of rich architecture, than of any other object. Go to the top of Highgate Hill on a clear summer morning at five o’clock, and look at Westminster Abbey. You will receive an impression of a building enriched with multitudinous vertical lines. Try to distinguish one of those lines all the way down from the one next to it: You cannot. Try to count them : You cannot. Try to make out the be- ginning or end of any one of them : You cannot. Look at it generally, and it is all symmetry and ar- rangement. Look at it in its parts, and it is all inex- 175 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE. tricable confusion. Am not I, at this moment, de- scribing a piece of Turner’s drawing, with the same words by which I describe nature ? And what would one of the old masters have done with such a building as this in his distance ? Either he would only have given the shadows of the buttresses, and the light and dark sides of the two towers, and two dots for the windows, or if more ignorant and more ambitious, he had attempted to render some of the detail, it would have been done by distinct lines, — would have been broad carieature of the delicate building, felt at once to be false, ridiculous, and offensive. His most successful effort would only have given us, through his carefully toned atmosphere, the effect of a colossal parish church, without one line of carving on its economic sides. Turner, and Turner only, would follow and render on the canvass that mystery of decided line, — that distinct, sharp, visible, but unintelligible and inextricable riehness, whieh, ex- amined part by part, is to the eye nothing but confusion and defeat, w'hich, taken as a whole, is all unity, sym- metry, and truth * Nor is this mode of representation true only with § 13. in near , objects as well respect to distances. Every object, however near the ag distances, eye, has something about it which you cannot see, and which brings the mystery of distance into action even in every part and portion of what we suppose ourselves to see most distinetly. Stand in the Piazza di St. Marco, at Venice, as close to the church as you can, without losing sight of the top of it. Look at the capitals of the small columns which form the balustrade on the first story above the round arches. You see that they are exquisitely rich, carved all over. Tell me * Vide, for illustration, “ Fontainbleau,” in the Illustrations to Scott ; Vignette at opening of “ Human Life,” in Rogers’ Poems ; “ Venice,” in the Italy ; “ Chateau de Blois the “ Rouens” and “ Pont Neuf, Paris,” in the Rivers of France. The distances of all the Academy pictures of Venice, especially the “ Shylock,” are most instructive. 176 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [part II. § 14. Vacancy and falsehood of Canaletti. §15. Still greater fulness and finish in landscape fore- grounds. their patterns. You cannot. Tell me the direction of a single line in them. You cannot. Yet you see a multitude of lines, and you have so much feeling of a certain tendency and arrangement in those lines, that you are quite sure the capitals are beautiful, and that they are all different from each other. But I defy you to make out one single line in any one of them. Now go to Canaletti’s painting of this church, in the Palazzo Pisani, taken from the very spot on which you stood. Plow much has he represented of all this ? A black dot under each capital for the shadow, and a yellow one for the light. There is not a vestige nor indication of carving or decoration of any sort or kind. Now this may be fine painting perhaps, but it is not truth, neither will it ever have the effect of truth upon the mind. Very different from this, but erring on the other side, is the ordinary drawing of the architect, who gives the principal lines of the design with delicate clearness and precision, but with no uncertainty or mystery about them, which mystery being removed, all space and size are destroyed with it, and we have a drawing of a model, not of a building. But in the capital lying on the foreground in Turner’s “Daphne hunting with Leucippus,” we have the perfect truth. Not one jag of the acanthus leaves is absolutely visible, the lines are all disorder, but you feel in an instant that all are there. And so it will invariably be found through every portion of detail in his late and most perfect works. But if there be this mystery and inexhaustible finish merely in the more delicate instances of architectural decoration, how much more in the ceaseless and incom- parable decoration of nature. The detail of a single weedy bank laughs the carving of ages to scorn. Every leaf and stalk has a design and tracery upon it, — every knot of grass an intricacy of shade which the labour of years could never imitate, and which, if such 177 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE, labour could follow it out even to the last fibres of the leaflets, would yet be falsely represented, for, as in all other cases brought forward, it is not clearly seen, but confusedly and mysteriously. That which is nearness for the bank, is distance for its details ; and however near it may be, the greater part of those details are still a beautiful incomprehensibility. Hence, throughout the picture, the expression of § 16. Space and size are space and size is dependent upon obscurity, united with, destroyed alike or rather resultant from, exceedinjr fulness. We destroy by distinctness o ^ and by va- both space and size, either by the vacancy, which affords cancy. us no measure of space, or by the distinctness, which gives us a false one. The distance of Poussin, having no indication of trees, nor of meadows, nor of character of any kind, may be fifty miles off, or may be five ; we cannot tell — we have no measure, and in consequence, no vivid impression. But a middle distance of Hobbima’s involves a contradiction in terms ; it states a distance by perspective, which it contradicts by distinctness of de- tail. Of all errors, therefore, too much making out is the most vicious ; because it in fact involves every other kind of error, denying one half of the truths to be stated, while it misrepresents those which it pretends to state. He who pretends to draw all the leaves of an oak, de- nies five while he expresses three, and expresses those three falsely. He alone who defines none, can suggest all. We shall see hereafter, in examining the qualities ^ 17. Swift of execution, that one of its chiefest attractions is the secures^perfec^- power of rightly expressing wjinity ; and that the plea- tion of details, sure which we take in the swift strokes of a great master is not so much dependent on the swiftness or decision of them, as on the expression of infinite mystery by the mere breaking, crumbling, or dividing of the touch, which the labour of months could not have reached, if devoted to separate details. One of Landseer’s breaking, scratchy touches of light is far more truly expressive of the infinity of hair, than a week’s work could make a 178 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [part II. ^ 18 . Finish is far more ne- cessary in painting of particular hairs ; and a single dusty roll of Turner’s brush is more truly expressive of the infinity of foliage, than the niggling of Hobbima could have rendered his canvass, if he had worked on it till dooms- day. And thus, while the mind is kept intent upon wholeness of effect, the hand is far more likely to give faithful images of details, than if mind and hand be both intent on the minutiae. What Sir J. Reynolds says of the misplaced labour of his Roman acquaintance on separate leaves of foliage, and the certainty he expresses that a man who attended to general character would in five minutes produce a more faithful representation of a tree, than the unfortunate mechanist in as many years, is thus perfectly true and well founded ; but this is not because details are undesirable, but because the}'^ are best given by swift execution, and because individually, they cannot be given at all. But it should be observed (though we shall be better able to insist landscape than upon this point in future) that much harm and error has arisen from the supposition and assertions of swift and brilliant historical painters, that the same principles of execution are entirely applicable to landscape, which are right for the figure. The artist who falls much into extreme delicacy of detail in drawing the human form, is apt to become disgusting rather than pleasing. It is more agreeable that a nostril or an ear should be suggested by a single dash of the pencil, than that they should be made out with microscopic accuracy, — more agreeable that the general outline and soft hues of flesh should alone be given, than its hairs, and veins, and lines of intersection. And the most rapid and generalizing expression of the human body, if directed by perfect knowledge, and rigidly faithful in drawing, will com- monly omit very little of what is agreeable or impres- sive ; it will lose only what is monotonous and unin- teresting, if not disagreeable. But the exclusively generalizing landscape painter omits the whole of what 179 SEC. II. CHAP. V.] OF TRUTH OF SPACE. is valuable in his subject, — omits thoughts, designs, and beauties by the million, everything, indeed, which can furnish him with variety or expression. A distance in Lincolnshire, or in Lombardy, might both be gene- ralised into such blue and yellow stripes as we see in Poussin, but whatever there is of beauty or character in either, depends altogether on our understanding the details, and feeling the difference between the morasses and ditches of the one, and the rolling sea of mulberry trees of the other. And so in every part of the subject, I have no hesitation in asserting that it is impossible to go too fine, or think too much about details in land- scape, so that they be rightly arranged and rightly massed, but that it is equally impossible to render any thing like the fulness or the space of nature, except by that mystery and obscurity of execution which she herself uses, and in which Turner only has followed her. And thus we have two great classes of error in landscape painting ; the first, the attempting to give all details dis- tinctly, which is the error of children, mechanics, and the Dutch school; the second, the omitting details al- together, which is commonly the error of an impetuous, intellectual, but uncultivated mind, and is found in whatever is best of the Italian school. (Claude’s fore- grounds come under the same category with the Dutch.) Both destroy space and beauty, but the first error is a falsehood, the second only an imperfection. We have now rapidly glanced at such general truths $ 19. Recapi- „ , . ‘ 1 ^ ^ -I 1 tulation of the of nature as can be investigated without much know- section. ledge of what is beautiful. Questions of arrangement, massing, and generalization, I prefer leaving untouched, until we know something about details, and something about what is beautiful. All that is desirable, even in these mere technical and artificial points, is based upon truths and habits of nature ; but we cannot understand those truths until we are acquainted with the specific forms and minor details which they affect, or out of N 2 180 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. [part II. which they arise. I shall, therefore, proceed to exa- mine the invaluable and essential truths of specific character and form — briefly and imperfectly, indeed, as needs must be, but yet at length sufficient to enable the reader to pursue, if he will, the subject for himself. Let me, however, point back for a moment, to the result of our present examination of general truths. We have found the old masters excel us in one parti- cular quality of colour — probably the result merely of some technical secret, and in one deceptive effect of tone, gained at the expence of a thousand falsehoods and omissions. We have found them false in aerial perspective, false in colour, false in chiaroscuro, false in space, false in detail ; and we have found one of our modern artists faithful in every point, and victorious in every struggle, and all of them aiming at the highest class of truths. For which is the most important truth in a painting, — for instance, of St, Mark’s at Venice — the exact quality of relief against the sky, which it shares with every hovel and brick-kiln in Italy; or the intricacy of detail and brilliancy of colour which distinguish it from every other building in the world ? Or with respect to the street of Poussin, is it of more importance that we should be told the exact pitch of blackness which its chimneys assume against the sky ; or that we should perceive the thousands of intri- cate and various incidents which in nature would have covered every cottage with history of Italian life and character ? Our feelings might answer for us in an in- stant ; but let us use our determined tests. The one truth is uncharacteristic, unhistorical, and of the secon- dary class ; the others are characteristic, historical, and of the primary class. How incalculably is the balance already in favour of modern art ! SEC. III.] 181 SECTION III. OF TRUTH OF SKIES. CHAPTER I. OF THE OPEN SKY. It is a strange thing how little in general people know § i. The pe- about the sky. It is the part of creation in which t^n^o/thei^ky nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, to the pleasing more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization ; but every essential purpose of the sky might, as far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly black rain cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other 182 OF OPEN SKY. [part II. § 2. The care- lessness with which its les- sons are received. sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few ; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them, he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them ; but the sky is for all ; bright as it is, it is not too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food,” it is fitted in all its functions for the per- petual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the sooth- ing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Some- times gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it is surely meant for the chief teacher of what is immortal in us, as it is the chief minister of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations ; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, but as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its pheno- mena do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and another, it has been windy, and another, it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday ? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain ? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sun- 183 SEC. III. CHAP. I.] OF OPEN SKY. light left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves ? All has passed, unre- gretted as unseen ; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what is extraordinary, when the heavens force them- selves on our attention with some blaze of fire, or black- ness of thunder, or awaken the curiosity of idleness, because the sun looks like a frying-pan, or the moon like a fool. But it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations § 3 . of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, these lessons nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest charac- are the gentlest, ters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lamp- black and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued pas- sages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual, — that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood, — things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting, and never repeated, which are to be found always, yet each found but once ; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beautv given. These are what the artist of§4- Many of ^ ... 1 1 oar ideas of highest aim must study ; it is these, by the combination g]^y altogether of which his ideal is to be created ; these, of which so conventional, little notice is ordinarily taken by common observers, that I fully believe, little as people in general are con- cerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are derived from pictures than from reality, and that if we could examine the conception formed in the minds of most educated persons when we talk of clouds, it would fre- quently be found composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters, representative of round, cushion-like swellings and protuberances, associated in a very anomalous and unintelligible man- 184 OF OPEN SKY. [part II. ner, with legs, arms, and cart wheels ; or if this be say- ing too much, at least the beauty of the natural forms is so little studied, that such representations are re- ceived either for truth, or for something better than truth. Whatever there may be in them of the poetical, I believe I shall be able to show that there is a slight violation of the true. And I shall enter upon the examination of what is true in sky at greater length, because it is the only part of a picture of which all, if they will, may be compe- tent judges. Its other component parts of subject can be open to the criticism of comparatively but few. What I may have to assert respecting the rocks of Salvator, or the boughs of Claude, I can scarcely prove, except to those whom I can immure for a month or two in the fastnesses of the Apennines, or guide in their summer walks again and again through the ravines of Sorrento. But what I say of the sky can be brought to an immediate test by all, and I write the more deci- sively, in the hope that it may be so. § 5. Nature, Let US begin then with the simple open blue of the qualities of tiie sky. This is of course the colour of the pure atmo- open blue. spheric air, not the aqueous vapour, but the pure azote and oxygen, and it is the total colour of the whole mass of that air between us and the void of space. It is modified by the varying quantity of aqueous vapour suspended in it, whose colour, in its most imperfect, and therefore most visible, state of solution, is pure white, (as in steam,) which receives, like any other white, the warm hues of the rays of the sun, and, according to its quantity and imperfect solution, makes the sky paler, and at the same time more or less grey, by mixing warm tones with its blue. This grey aqueous vapour, when very decided, becomes mist, and when local, cloud. Hence the sky is to be considered as a transpa- rent blue liquid, in which, at various elevations, clouds are suspended, those clouds being themselves only par- 185 SEC. III. CHAP, I,] OF OPEN SKY. ticular visible spaces of a substance with, which the whole mass of this liquid is more or less impregnated. Now, we all know this perfectly well, and yet we so far § 6. Its con- forget It in practice, that we little notice the constant douds. connection kept up by nature between her blue and her clouds, and we are not offended by the constant habit of the old masters, of considering the blue sky as totally distinct in its nature, and far separated from the vapours which float in it. With them, cloud is cloud, and blue is blue, and no kind of connection between them is ever hinted at. The sky is thought of as a clear, high, material dome, the clouds as separate bodies suspended beneath it, and in consequence, however delicate and exquisitely removed in tone their skies may be, you always look at them, not through them. Now if there ^7. Its ex- be one characteristic of the sky more valuable or neces- sary to be rendered than another, it is that which Words- worth has given in the second book of the Excursion : The chasm of sky above my head Is Heaven’s profoundest azure. No domain For fickle, short-lived clouds, to occupy. Or to pass through hut rather an abyss In which the everlasting stars abide. And whose soft gloom, and boundless depth, might tempt The curious eye to look for them by day. And, in his American Notes, I remember Dickens notices the same truth, describing himself as lying drowsily on the barge deck, looking not at, but through the sky. And if you look intensely at the pure blue of a serene sky, you will see that there is a variety and fulness in its very repose. It is not flat dead colour, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air, in which you trace or imagine short, falling spots of deceiving light, and dim shades, faint, veiled ves- tiges of dark vapour ; and it is this trembling trans- parency which our great modern master has especially § 8. These aimed at and given. His blue is never laid on in given by mo- dern masters. ^ 9. And by Claude. § 10. Total absence of them in Poussin. 186 OF OPEN SKY. [part II. smooth coats, but in breaking, mingling, melting hues, a quarter of an inch of which, cut off from all the rest of the picture, is still spacious, still infinite and immeasurable in depth. It is a painting of the air, something into which you can see, through the parts which are near you, into those which are far off ; something which has no surface, and through which we can plunge far and farther, and without stay or end, into the profundit}^ of space ; — whereas, with all the old landscape painters, except Claude, you may indeed go a long way before you come to the sky, but you will knock your head against it at last. A perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude is indeed most perfect, and beyond praise, in all qualities of air, though even with him, I often feel rather that there is a great deal of pleasant air between me and the firmament, than that the firmament itself is only air. I do not mean, how- ever, to say a word against such skies as that of the “ Enchanted Castle,” or that marked 30 in the National Gallery, or one or two which I remember at Rome ; but how little and by how few these fine passages of Claude are appreciated, is sufficiently proved by the sufferance of such villanous and unpalliated copies as we meet with usually all over Europe, like the “ Mar- riage of Isaac,” in our own Gallery, to remain under his name. In fact, I do not remember above ten pictures of Claude’s, in which the skies, whether repainted or altogether copies, or perhaps from Claude’s hand, but carelessly laid in, like that marked 241, Dulwich Gal- lery, were not fully as feelingless and false as those of other masters; while, with the Poussins, there are no favourable exceptions. Their skies are systematically wrong ; take, for instance, the sky of the Sacrifice of Isaac.” It is here high noon, as is shown by the shadow of the figures ; and what sort of colour is the sky at the top of the picture ? Is it pale and grey with heat, full of 187 SEC. III. CHAP. I.] OF OPEN SKY. sunshine, and unfathomable in depth ? On the contrary, Physical errors it IS of a pitch of darkness which, except on the JVIont ^j*0atinent of Blanc or Chimborazo, is as purely impossible as colour open sky. can be. He might as well have painted it coal black ; and it is laid on with a dead coat of flat paint, having no one quality or resemblance of sky about it. It cannot have altered, because the land horizon is as delicate and tender in tone as possible, and is evidently unchanged ; and to complete the absurdity of the M^hole thing, this colour holds its own, without graduation or alteration, to within three or four degrees of the horizon, where it suddenly becomes bold and unmixed yellow. Now the horizon at noon may be yellow when the whole sky is covered with dark clouds, and only one open streak of light left in the distance from which the whole light proceeds ; but with a clear, open sky, and opposite the sun, at noon, such a yellow horizon as this is physically impossible. Even supposing that the upper part of the sky were pale and warm, and that the transition from the one hue to the other were effected imperceptibly and gradually, as is invariably the case in reality, in- stead of taking place within a space of two or three degrees ; — even then, this gold yellow would be alto- gether absurd ; but as it is, we have in this sky (and it is a fine picture — one of the best of Gaspar’s that I know), a notable example of the truth of the old masters — two impossible colours impossibly united! Find such a colour in Turner’s noon-day zenith as the blue at the top, or such a colour at a noon-day horizon as the yellow at the bottom, or such a connection of any colours whatsoever as that in the centre, and then you may talk about his being false to nature if you will. Nor is this a solitary instance ; it is Gaspar Poussin’s favourite and characteristic effect. I remember twenty such, most of them worse than this, in the downright surface and opacity of blue. And, by the by, while we ^ ii. Errors of are talking of graduations of colour, look at the large duatio'n of colour. 188 OF OPEN SKY. [part II. Cuyp in the Dulwich Gallery, which Mr. Hazlitt con- siders the “ finest in the world,” and of w^hich he very complimentarily says, « The tender green of the vallies, the gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills, have an effect like the down on an unripe nectarine ! ” I ought to have apologised before now, for not having studied sufficiently in Covent-garden to be provided with terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to observe, the other day, that Claude was “ pulpy ; another added the yet more gratifying in- formation that he was juicy and it is now happily discovered that Cuyp is “ dowmy.” Now I dare say that the sky of this first-rate Cuyp is very like an un- ripe nectarine : all that I have to say about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. The blue remains unchanged and ungraduated over three-fourths of it, down to the horizon, while the sun, in the left-hand corner, is surrounded with a halo, first of yellow and then of crude pink, both being separated from each other, and the last from the blue, as sharply as the belts of a rainbow, and both together not ascending ten degrees in the sky. Now it is difficult to con- ceive how any man calling himself a painter could impose such a thing on the public, and still more how the public can receive it, as a representation of that sun- set purple which invariably extends its influence to the zenith, so that there is no pure blue anywhere, but a purple increasing in purity gradually down to its point of greatest intensity (about forty-five degrees from the horizon), and then melting imperceptibly into the gold, the three colours extending their influence over the whole sky ; so that throughout the whole sweep of the heaven, there is no one spot where the colour is not in an equal state of transition — passing from gold into orange, from that into rose, from that into purple, from that into blue, with absolute equality of change, so that in no place can it be said, “here it changes,” and in no 189 SEC, III. CHAP. I.] OF OPEN SKY. place, “ here it is unchanging.” This is invariably the case. There is no such thing — there never was, and never will be such a thing, while God’s heaven remains as it is made — as a serene, sunset sky, with its purple and rose in belts about the sun. Yet people call such an absurdity as this, “truth;” and laugh at Turner, because he paints crimson clouds ! Such bold, broad examples of ignorance as these ^ 12. The ex- would soon set aside all the claims of the professed oruie skies^of landscape painters to truth, with whatever delicacy of the early ita- - "i*,! iT.T-r» han and Dutch colour or manipulation they may be disguised. ±>ut schools. there are some skies, of the Dutch school, in which qualities are unattain- clearness and coolness have been aimed at, instead of able in modern depth ; and some introduced merely as backgrounds to the historical subjects of the older Italians, which there is no matching in modern times: one would think angels had painted them, for all is now clay and oil in com- parison. It seems as if we had totally lost the art, for surely otherwise, however little our painters might aim at it or feel it, they would touch the chord sometimes by accident ; but they never do, and the mechanical incapacity is still more strongly evidenced by the muddy struggles of the unhappy Germans, who have the feeling, partially strained, artificial, and diseased, indeed, but still genuine enough to bring out the tone, if they had the mechanical means and technical knowledge. But, however they were obtained, the clear tones of this kind of the older Italians are glorious and enviable in the highest degree ; and we shall show, when we come to speak of the beautiful, that they are one of the most just grounds of the fame of the old masters. But there is a series of phenomena connected with § ^3. Pheno- , nil 1*1 1 of visible the open blue ot the sky, winch we must take especial sunbeams. notice of, as it is of constant occurrence in the works of ‘‘ ^ and cause. Turner and Claude, the effects, namely, of visible sun- beams. It will be necessary for us thoroughly to under- ^14. They are only illumi- nated mist, and cannot appear when the sky is free from vapour, nor when it is without clouds. 190 OF OPEN SKY. [part II. Stand the circumstances under which such effects take place.* Aqueous vapour or mist, suspended in the atmo- sphere, beeomes visible exactly as dust does in the air of a room. In the shadows you not only cannot see the dust itself, because unillumined, but you can see other objects through the dust without obscurity, the air being thus actually rendered more transparent by a deprivation of light. Where a sunbeam enters, every particle of dust becomes visible, and a palpable inter- ruption to the sight, so that a transverse sunbeam is a real obstacle to the vision, you cannot see things clearly through it. In the same way, wherever vapour is illuminated by transverse rays, there it becomes visible as a whiteness or mistiness more or less affecting the purity of the blue, and destroying it exactly in proportion to the degree of illumination. But where vapour is in shade, it has very little effect on the sky, perhaps making it a little deeper and greyer than it otherwise would be, but not itself, unless very dense, distinguishable or felt as mist. The appearance of mist or whiteness in the blue of the sky, is thus a circumstance which more or less ac- companies sunshine, and whieh, supposing the quantity of vapour constant, is greatest in the brightest sunlight. When there are no clouds in the sky, the whiteness, as it affects the whole sky equally, is not particularly noticeable. But when there are clouds between us and the sun, the sun being low, those clouds cast shadows * I shall often be obliged, in the present portion of the work, to enter somewhat tediously into the examination of the physical causes of phenomena, in order that in future, when speaking of the beautiful, I may not be obliged to run every now and then into physics, but may be able to assert a thing fearlessly to be right or wrong, false or true, with reference for proof to principles before developed. I must be allowed, therefore, at present, to spend sometimes almost more time in the investigation of nature than in the criticism of art. 191 SEC. III. CHAP. I.] OF OPEN SKY, along and through the mass of suspended vapour. Within the space of these shadows, the vapour, as above stated, becomes transparent and invisible, and the skj appears of a pure blue. But where the sunbeams strike, the vapour becomes visible in the form of the beams, oc- casioning those radiating shafts of light which are one of the most valuable and constant accompaniments of a low sun. The denser the mist, the more distinct and sharp edged will these rays be ; when the air is very clear, they are mere vague, flushing, graduated passages of light ; when it is very thick, they are keen edged and decisive in a very high degree. We see then, first, that a quantity of mist dispersed through the whole space of the sky, is necessary to this phenomenon ; and secondly, that what we usually think of as beams of greater brightness than the rest of the sky, are in reality only a part of that sky in its natural state of illumination, cut off and rendered brilliant by the shadows from the clouds, — that these shadows are in reality the source of the appearance of beams, — that, therefore, no part of the sky can present such an ap- pearance, except when there are broken clouds between it and the sun ; and lastly, that the shadows cast from such clouds are not necessarily grey or dark, but very nearly of the natural pure blue of a sky destitute of vapour. Now, as it has been proved that the appearance of §15. Erroneous beams can only take place in a part of the sky which r^preTen^ation^ has clouds between it and the sun, it is evident that no of such pheno- appearance of beams can ever begin from the orb itself, except when there is a cloud or solid body of some kind between us and it; but that such appearances will almost invariably begin on the dark side of some of the clouds around it, the orb itself remaining the centre of a broad blaze of united light. Wordsworth has given us in two lines, the only circumstances under which rays can ever appear to have origin in the orb itself : — 192 OF OPEN SKY. [part II §16. The ray which appears in the dazzled eye should not be represented. §17. The prac- tice of Turner. His keen per- ception of the more delicate phenomena of rays. But rays of light, Now suddenly diverging from the orb, Retired behind the mountain tops, or veiled By the dense air, shot upwards. Excursion, Book IX. And Turner has given us the effect magnificently in the “ Dartmouth ” of the River Scenery. It is frequent among the old masters, and constant in Claude ; though the latter, from drawing his beams too fine, represents the effect upon the dazzled eye rather than the light which actually exists, and approximates very closely to the ideal which we see in the sign of the “ Rising Sun nay, I am nearly sure that I remember cases in which he has given us the diverging beam, without any cloud or hill interfering with the orb. It may, per- haps, be somewhat difficult to say how far it is allow- able to represent that kind of ray which is seen by the dazzled eye. It is very certain that we never look to- wards a bright sun without seeing glancing rays issue from it ; but it is equally certain that those rays are no more real existences than the red and blue circles which we see after having been so dazzled, and that if we are to represent the rays we ought also to cover our sky with pink and blue circles. I should on the whole consider it utterly false in principle to represent the visionary beam, and that we ought only to show that M'hich has actual existence. Such we find to be the constant practice of Turner. Even where, owing to interposed clouds, he has beams appearing to issue from the orb itself, they are broad bursts of light, not spiky rays ; and his more usual practice is to keep all near the sun in one simple blaze of intense light, and from the first clouds to throw beams to the zenith, though he often does not permit any appearance of rays until close to the zenith itself. Open at the 80 th page of the Illustrated edition of Rogers’s Poems. You have there a sky blazing with sunbeams ; but they all begin a long way from the sun, and they are accounted SEC. III. CHAP. 1.] OF OPEN SKY. 193 for by a mass of dense clouds surrounding the orb itself. Turn to the Tth page. Behind the old oak, where the sun is supposed to be, you have only a blaze of undistinguished light ; but up on the left, over the edge of the cloud, on its dark side, the sun- beam. Turn to page 192, — blazing rays again, but all beginning where the clouds do, not one can you trace to the sun ; and observe how carefully the long shadow on the mountain is accounted for by the dim dark promontory projecting out near the sun. I need not multiply examples; you will find various § 18. The total modifications and uses of these effects throughout his evfdenL^of^^^ works. But you will not find a single trace of them such percep- in the old masters. They give you the rays issuing works of the from behind black clouds, because they are a coarse masters, and common effect which could not possibly escape their observation, and because they are easily imitated. They give you the spiky shafts issuing from the orb itself, because these are partially symbolical of light, and assist a tardy imagination, as two or three rays scratched round the sun with a pen would, though they would be rays of darkness instead of light. But of the most beautiful phenomenon of all, the appearance of the delicate ray far in the sky, threading its way among the thin, transparent clouds, while all around the sun is unshadowed fire, there is no record nor example what- soever in their works. It was too delicate and spiritual for them ; probably their blunt and feelingless eyes never perceived it in nature, and their untaught imagi- nations were not likely to originate it in the study. Of the perfect and deeply based knowledge of such phe- nomena which is traceable in all the works of Turner, we shall see farther instances in the following chapter. Little is to be said of the skies of our other land- $ 19. Truth of scape artists. In paintings, they are commonly tone- modern drL- less, crude, and wanting in depth and transparency ; mp- but in drawings, some very perfect and delicate ex- o 194 OF OPEN SKY. [part II. amples have been produced by Copley Fielding, J. D. Harding, George Barret, David Cox, and one or two others; but with respect to the qualities of which we are at present speaking, it is not right to compare drawings with paintings, as the wash, or spunging, or other artifices peculiar to water colour, are capable of producing an appearance of quality which it needs much higher art to produce in oils. ^20. Recapi- Taken generally, the open skies of the moderns are best skies of inferior in quality to picked and untouched skies of the the ancients o-reatest of the ancients, but far superior to the average inimitable, but class of pictures whicli we have every day fathered various^truth”^ reputation. Nine or ten skies of Claude childish, might be named which are not to be contended with, in their way, and as many of Cuyp, Teniers has given some very wonderful passages, and the clear- ness of the early Italian and Dutch schools is beyond all imitation. But the common blue daubing which we hear every day in our best Galleries attributed to Claude and Cuyp, and the genuine skies of Salvator, and of both the Poussins, are not to be compared for an instant with the best works of modern times, even in quality and transparency ; while in all matters re- quiring delicate observation or accurate science, — in all which was not attainable by technicalities of art, and which depended upon the artist’s knowledge and understanding of nature, all the works of the ancients are alike the productions of mere children, sometimes manifesting great sensibility, but proving at the same time, feebly developed intelligence, and ill regulated observation. SEC. III. CHAP. II.J 195 CHAPTER II. OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS: — FIRST, OF THE REGION OF THE CIRRUS. Our next subject of investigation must be the specific ^ i. Difficulty- character of clouds, a species of truth which is espe- ^iierdn cially neglected by artists ; first, because as it is within truth of clouds the limits of possibility that a cloud may assume almost any form, it is difficult to point out, and not always easy to feel wherein error consists ; and secondly, because it is totally impossible to study the forms of clouds from nature with care and accuracy, as a change in the sub- ject takes place between every touch of the following pencil, and parts of an outline sketched at different in- stants cannot harmonize, nature never having intended them to come together. Still if artists were more in the habit of sketching clouds rapidly, and as accurately as possible in the outline, from nature, instead of daubing down what they call “ effects ” with the brush, they would soon find there is more beauty about their forms than can be arrived at by any random felicity of in- vention, however brilliant, and more essential character than can be violated without incurring the charge of falsehood, — falsehood as direct and definite, though not as traceable as error in the less varied features of organic form. The first and most important part of the character of § 2. Variation clouds, is dependent on the different altitudes at which tlr ardfffere^t they are formed. The atmosphere may be conveniently elevations. o 2 196 OF THE REGION The three regions to which they may conve- niently be considered as belonging. § 3. Extent of the upper region. $ 4. The sym- metrical ar- rangement of its clouds. [part II. considered as divided into three spaces, each inhabited by clouds of specific character altogether different, though, in reality, there is no distinct limit fixed between them by nature, clouds being formed at every altitude, and partaking according to their altitude, more or less of the characters of the upper or lower regions. The scenery of the sky is thus formed of an infinitely graduated series of systematic forms of cloud, each of which has its own region in which alone it is formed, and each of which has specific characters which can only be properly determined by comparing them as they are found clearly distinguished by intervals of con- siderable space. I shall therefore consider the sky as divided into three regions, the upper region, or region of the cirrus; the central region, or region of the stratus; the lower region, or the region of the rain- cloud. The elouds which I wish to consider as included in the upper region, never touch even the highest moun- tains of Europe, and may therefore be looked upon as never formed below' an elevation of at least 15,000 feet ; they are tlie motionless multitudinous lines of delicate vapour with w’hich the blue of the open sky is com- monly streaked or speckled after several days of fine weather. I must be pardoned for giving a detailed description of their specific characters as they are of constant occurrence in the works of modern artists, and I shall have occasion to speak frequently of them in future parts of the work. Their chief characters arc — first, symmetry : they are nearly always arranged in some definite and evident order, commonly in long ranks reaching sometimes from the zenith to the horizon, each rank composed of an infinite number of transverse bars of about the same length, each bar thickest in the middle, and terminating in a traceless vaporous point at each side, the ranks are in the direction of the w'ind, and the bars of course at right angles to it, these latter are 197 SEC. III. CHAP. II.] OF THE CIRRUS. commonly slightly bent in the middle, the convex side to the wind. Frequently two systems of this kind, indi- cative of two currents of wind, at different altitudes intersect one another, forming a netwmrk. Another frequent arrangement is in groups of excessive!}^ fine, silky, parallel fibres, commonly radiating, or having a tendency to radiate from one of their extremities, and terminating in a plumy sweep at the other: — these are vulgarly knowm as mares’ tails.” The plumy and ex- panded extremity of these is often bent upwards, some- times back, and up again, giving an appearance of great flexibility and unity at the same time, as if the clouds were tough, and would hold together however bent. The narrow extremity is invariably turned to the wind, and the fibres are parallel with its direction. The upper clouds always fall into some modifieation of one or other of these arrangements. They thus differ from all other clouds, in having a plan and system, whereas other clouds, though there are certain laws which they cannot break, have yet perfect freedom from any- thing like a relative and general system of government. The upper clouds are to the lowmr, wdiat soldiers on parade are to a mixed multitude ; no men walk on their heads or their hands, and so there are certain laws which no clouds violate ; but there is nothing except in the upper clouds resembling symmetrical discipline. 2ndly. Sharpness of edge. The edges of the bars of § Their the upper clouds which are turned to the wind, are ^ often the sharpest which the sky shows; no outline whatever of any other kind of cloud, however marked and energetic, ever approaches the delicate decision of these edges. The outline of a black thunder-cloud is striking, from the great energy of the colour or shade of the general mass ; but as a line, it is soft and indis- tinct, compared with the edge of the cirrus, in a clear sky wuth a brisk breeze. On the other hand, the edge of the bar turned away from the wind is always soft, § 6. Their number. $ 7. Causes of their peculiarly delicate colour- ing. 198 OF THE REGION [PART II. often imperceptible, melting into the blue interstice between it and its next neighbour. Commonly the sharper one edge is, the softer is the other, and the clouds look flat, and as if they slipped over each other like the scales of a fish. When both edges are soft, as is always the case when the sky is clear and wind- less, the cloud looks solid, round, and fleecy. 3rd. Multitude. The delicacy of these vapours is sometimes carried into such an infinity of division, that no other sensation of number that the earth or heaven can give is so impressive. Number is always most felt when it is symmetrical, (vide Burke on Sub- lime,” Part ii. sect. 8,) and, therefore, no sea-waves nor fresh leaves make their number so evident or so impressive as these vapours. Nor is nature content with the infinite of bars or lines alone — each bar is in its turn severed into a number of small undulatory masses, more or less connected according to the violence of the w'ind. When this division is merely effected by undulation the cloud exactly resembles sea-sand ribbed by the tide ; but when the division amounts to real separation we have the mottled or mackerel skies. Commonly, the greater the division of its bars, the broader and more shapeless is the rank or field, so that in the mottled sky it is lost altogether, and we have large irregular fields of equal size, masses like flocks of sheep ; such clouds are three or four thousand feet be- low the legitimate cirrus. I have seen them cast a shadow on the Mont Blanc at sunset, so that they must descend nearly to within fifteen thousand feet of the earth. 4th. Purity of colour. The nearest of these clouds — those over the observer’s head, being at least three miles above him, and nearly all entering the or- dinary sphere of vision, farther from him still, — their dark sides are much greyer and cooler than those of other clouds, owing to their distance. They are com- 199 SEC. III. CHAP. II.] OF THE CIRRUS. posed of the purest aqueous vapour, free from all foul- ness of earthy gases, and of this in the lightest and most eetherial state in which it can be, to be visible. Further, they receive the light of the sun in a state of far greater intensity than lower objects, the beams being transmitted to them through atmospheric air far less dense, and wholly unaffected by mist, smoke, or any other impurity. Hence their colours are the most pure and vivid, and their wdiite the most unsullied and perfect of all clouds. Lastlv, Variety. Variety is never so conspicuous, as ^8. Their va- 1 riety ofform. when It IS united with symmetry. Ihe perpetual change of form in other clouds, is monotonous in its very dissimilarity, nor is difference striking where no connexion is implied; but if through a range of barred clouds, crossing half the heaven, all governed by the same forces and falling into one general form, there be yet a marked and evident dissimilarity between each member of the great mass — one more finely drawn, the next more delicately moulded, the next more gracefully bent— each broken into differently modelled and vari- ously numbered groups, the variety is doubly striking, because contrasted with the perfect symmetry of which it forms a part. Hence, the importance of the truth, that nature never lets one of the members of even her most disciplined groups of cloud, be like another ; but though each is adapted for the same function, and in its great features resembles all the others, not one, out of the millions with which the sky is chequered, is without a separate beauty and character, appearing to have had distinct thought occupied in its conception, and distinct forces in its production ; and in addition to this per- petual invention, visible in each member of each system, we ' find systems of separate cloud intersecting one another, the sweeping lines mingled and interwoven wuth the rigid bars, these in their turn melting into banks of sand-like ripple and flakes of drifted and irre- 200 OF THE REGION [part II. § 9. Total ab- sence of even the slightest effort at their representation, in ancient landscape. gular foam, under all, perhaps, the massy outline of some lower cloud moves heavily across the motionless buoy- ancy of the upper lines, and indicates at once their elevation and their repose. Such are the great attributes of the upper cloud region ; whether they are beautiful, valuable, or im- pressive, it is not our present business to decide, nor to endeavour to discover the reason of the some- what remarkable fact, that the w^hole field of ancient landscape art affords, as far as we remember, but one instance of any effort whatever to represent the character of this cloud region. That one instance is the landscape of Rubens in our own gallery, in which the mottled or fleecy sky is given with perfect truth and exquisite beauty. To this should perhaps be added, some of the backgrounds of the historical painters, where horizontal lines were required, and a few level bars of white or warm colour cross the serenity of the blue. These, as far as they go, are often very perfect, and the elevation and repose of their effect might, we should have thought, have pointed out to the landscape painters that there was something (I do not say much, but cer- tainly something) to be made out of the high clouds. Not one of them, however, took the hint. To whom, among them all, can we look for the slightest realization of the fine and faithful descriptive passage of the “ Excursion,” already alluded to; — But rays of light. Now suddenly diverging from the orh. Retired behind the mountain tops, or, veiled By the dense air, shot upwards to the crown Of the blue firmament — aloft — and wide : And multitudes of little floating clouds. Ere we, who saw, of change were conscious, pierced Through their ethereal texture, had become Vivid as fire, — clouds separately poised. Innumerable multitude of forms Scattered through half the circle of the sky ; And giving back, and shedding each on each. 201 SEC. III. CHAP. II.] OF THE CIRRUS. With prodigal communion, the bright hues Which from the unapparent fount of glory They had imbibed, and ceased not to receive. That which the heavens displayed the liquid deep Repeated, but with unity sublime. There is but one master whose works we can think § lO. The in- of while we read this; one alone has taken notice of consLn^utudy the neglected upper sky ; it is his peculiar and favourite field ; he has watched its every modification, and given its every phase and feature ; at all hours, in all seasons, he has followed its passions and its changes, and has brought down and laid open to the world another apocalypse of Heaven. There is scarcely a painting of Turner’s, in which serenity of sky and intensity of light are aimed at together, in which these clouds are not used, though there are not two cases in which they are used alto- gether alike. Sometimes they are crowded together in masses of mingling light, as in the Shylock;” every part and atom sympathising in that continuous expres- sion of slow movement which Shelley has so beautifully touched : — Underneath the young grey dawn A multitude of dense, white fleecy clouds. Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains. Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind. At other times they are blended with the sky itself, felt only here and there by a ray of light calling them into existence out of its misty shade, as in the “ Mercury and Argus ; ” sometimes, where great repose is to be given, they appear in a few detached, equal, rounded flakes, which seem to hang motionless, each like the shadow of the other, in the deep blue of the zenith, as in the ‘‘ Acro-Corinth sometimes they are scattered in fiery flying fragments, each burning with separate energy, as in the “Temeraire;” sometimes woven to- gether with fine threads of intermediate darkness, melt- ing into the blue, as in the “ Napoleon.” But in all 202 OF THE REGION [part II. cases the exquisite manipulation of the master gives to each atom of the multitude its cwn character and ex- pression. Though they be countless as leaves, each has its portion of light, its shadow, its reflex, its peculiar and separating form. $ 11. iHs vig- Take for instance the illustrated edition of Rogers’ O^the Poems,* and open it at the 80 th page, and observe how every attribute which I have pointed out in the upper sky, is there rendered with the faithfulness of a mirror ; the long lines of parallel bars, the delicate curvature from the wind, which the inclination of the sail shows you to be from the west ; the excessive sharpness of every edge which is turned to the wind, the faintness of every opposite one, the breaking up of each bar into rounded masses, and finally, the inconceivable variety with which individual form has been given to every member of the multitude, and not only individual form, but round ness and substance even where there is scarcely a hair’s breadth of cloud to express it in. Observe, above everything, the varying indication of space and depth in the whole, so that you may look through and through from one cloud to another, feeling not merely how they retire to the horizon, but how they melt back into the recesses of the sky, every inter- val being filled with absolute air, and all its spaces so melting and fluctuating, and fraught with change as with repose, that as you look, you will fancy that the rays shoot higher and higher into the vault of light, and that the pale streak of horizontal vapour is melting away from the cloud that it crosses. Now w'atch for the next barred sunrise, and take this vignette to the window, and test it by nature’s * I use this work frequently for illustration, because it is the only one I know in which the engraver has worked with delicacy enough to give the real forms and touches of Turner. I can reason from these plates, (in questions of form only,) nearly as well as I could from the drawings. V. SEC. III. CHAP. II.] OF THE CIRRUS. 203 own clouds, among which you will find forms and pas- sages, I do not say merely like, but apparently the actual originals of parts of this very drawing. And with whom will you do this, except with Turner ? Will you do it with Claude, and set that blank square yard of blue, with its round, white, flat fixtures of similar cloud, beside the purple infinity of nature, with her countless multitude of shadowy lines, and flaky waves, and folded veils of variable mist ? Will you do it with Poussin, and set those massy steps of unyielding solidity, with the chariot- and-four driving up them, by the side of the delicate forms which terminate in threads too fine for the eye to follow them, and of texture so thin woven that the earliest stars shine through them ? Will you do it with Salvator, and set that volume of violent and restless manufactory smoke beside those calm and quiet bars, which pause in the heaven as if they would never leave it more? And yet you will say that these men painted nature, and that Turner does not! Now we have iust seen how this great artist uses the § 12 . His use sharp-edged cirri, when he aims at giving great trans- expressing parency of air. But it was shown in the preceding chapter that sunbeams, or the appearance of them, are always sharper in their edge in proportion as the air is more misty, as they are most defined in a room where there is most dust flying about in it. Consequently, in the vignette we have been just noticing, where trans- parency is to be given, though there is a blaze of light, its beams are never edged ; a tendency to rays is visible, but you cannot in any part find a single marked edge of a rising sunbeam, the sky is merely more flushed in one place than another. Now let us see what Turner does when he wants mist. Turn to the “ Alps at Daybreak,” p. 193, in the same book. Here we have the cirri used again, but now they have no sharp edges, they are all fleecy and mingling with each other, though every one of them has the most exquisite indication of 204 OF THE REGION § 13. His con- sistency in every minor feature. [part II. individual fornij and thoy melt back, not till they are lost in exceeding light, as in the other plate, hut into a mysterious, fluctuating, shadowy sky, of which, though the light penetrates through it all, you perceive every part to be charged with vapour. Notice particularly the half-indicated forms even where it is most serene, behind the snowy mountains. And now, how are the sunbeams drawn ? No longer indecisive, flushing, palpi- tating, every one is sharp and clear, and terminated by definite shadow; note especially the marked lines on the upper clouds ; finally, observe the difference in the mode of indicating the figures, which are here misty and indistinguishable, telling only as shadows, though they are near and large, while those in the former vignette came clear upon the eye, though they were so far off as to appear mere points. Now is this perpetual consistency in all points, this concentration of every fact which can possibly bear upon what we are to be told, this watchfulness of the entire meaning and system of nature, which fills every part and space of the picture with coincidences of witness, which come out upon us, as they would from the reality, more fully and deeply in proportion to the knowledge we possess and the attention we give, admirable or not ? I could go on writing page after page on every sky of Turner’s, and pointing out fresh truths in every one. In the “ Havre,” for instance, of the Rivers of France, we have a new fact pointed out to us with respect to these cirri, namely, their being so faint and transparent as not to be distinguishable from the blue of the sky, (a frequent case,) except in the course of a sunbeam, which, however, does not illumine their edges, they being not solid enough to reflect light, but penetrates their whole substance, and renders them flat, luminous forms in its path, instantly and totally lost at its edge. And thus a separate essay would be required by every picture, to make fully understood the 205 SEC. III. CHAP. II.] OF THE CIRRUS. new phenomena which it treated and illustrated. But after once showing what are the prevailing characteris- tics of these clouds, we can only leave it to the reader to trace them wherever they occur. There are some fine and characteristic passages of this kind of cloud given by Stanfield, though he dares not use them in multitude, and is wanting in those refined qualities of form which it is totally impossible to explain in words, but which, perhaps, by simple outlines, on a large scale, se- lected from the cloud forms of various artists, I may in following portions of the work illustrate with the pencil. Of the colours of these clouds I have spoken before, § 14. The co- (Sec. I. Chap. II.); but though I then alluded to their upper clouds, purity and vividness, I scarcely took proper notice of their variety; there is indeed in nature variety in all things, and it wmuld be as absurd as vain to point it out fully in each case, yet the colours of these clouds are so marvellous in their changefulness, that they require particular notice. If you w'atch for the next sunset, when there are a considerable number of these cirri in the sky, you will see, especially at the zenith, that the sky does not remain of the same colour for two inches together ; one cloud has a dark side of cold blue, and a fringe of milky white ; another, above it, has a dark side of purple and an edge of red ; another, nearer the sun, has an under-side of orange and an edge of gold ; these you will find mingled with, and passing into the blue of the sky, which in places you will not be able to distinguish from the cool grey of the darker clouds, and which will be itself full of graduation, now pure and deep, now faint and feeble ; and all this is done, not in large pieces, nor on a large scale, but over and over again in every square yard, so that there is no single part nor portion of the whole sky which has not in itself variety of colour enough for a separate picture, and yet no single part which is like 206 § 15. Recapi- tulation. OF THE REGION OF THE CIRRUS. [PART II. another, or which has not some peculiar source of beauty, and some peculiar arrangement of colour of its own. Now, instead of this, you get in the old masters — Cuyp, or Claude, or whoever they may be — a field of blue, delicately, beautifully, and uniformly shaded down to the yellow sun, with a certain number of similar clouds, each with a dark side of the same grey, and an edge of the same yellow. I do not say that nature never does anything like this, but I say that her principle is to do a great deal more, and that what she does more than this, — what I have above described, and what you may see in nine sunsets out of ten, — has been observed, attempted, and rendered by Turner only, and by him with a fidelity and force which pre- sents us with more essential truth, and more clear ex- pression and illustration of natural laws, in every wreath of vapour, than composed the whole stock of heavenly information, which lasted Cuyp and Claude their lives. We close then our present consideration of the upper clouds, to return to them when we know what is beauti- ful ; we have at present only to remember that of these clouds, and the truths connected with them, none before Turner had taken any notice whatsoever; that had they therefore been even feebly and imperfectly represented by him, they would yet have given him a claim to be considered more extended and universal in his state- ment of truths than any of his predecessors ; how much more when we find that deep fidelity in his studied and perfect skies which opens new sources of delight to every advancement of our knowledge, and to every added moment of our contemplation. SEC. III. CHAP. III.] 207 CHAPTER III. OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS : — SECONDLY, OF THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION. We have next to investigate the character of the Central § i. Extent Cloud Region, which I consider as including all clouds character of which are the usual characteristic of ordinary serene the central weather, and which touch and envelope the mountains ^ ’region, of Switzerland, but never alFect those of our own island ; they may therefore be considered as occupying a space of air ten thousand feet in height, extending from five to fifteen thousand feet above the sea. These clouds, according to their elevation, appear with great variety of form, often partaking of the streaked or mottled character of the higher region, and as often, when the precursors of storm, manifesting forms closelj' connected with the lowest rain clouds ; but the species especially characteristic of the central region is a white, ragged, irregular, and scattered vapour. which has little form and less colour, and of which a good example may be seen in the largest landscape of Cuyp, in the Dulwich Gallery. When this vapour col- lects into masses, it is partially rounded, clumsy, and ponderous, as if it would tumble out of the sky, shaded with a dull grey, and totally devoid of any appearance of energy or motion. Even in nature, these clouds are §2. its charac- scarcely worth raising our heads to look at ; and on can- vass, they are valuable only as a means of introducing attention nor light, and breaking the monotony of blue; yet they are, thei^^repre^sen- 208 OF THE CENTRAL [part II. tation, are perhaps, beyond all others the favourite clouds of the old favourite sub- masters. Whether they had any motive for the adoption jects with the of such materials, beyond the extreme facility with o masters, acres of canvass might thus be covered without any troublesome exertion of thought ; or any temptation to such selections beyond the impossibility of error where nature shows no form, and the impossibility of deficiency where she shows no beauty, it is not here the place to determine. Such skies are happily beyond the reach of criticism, for he who tells you nothing cannot tell you a falsehood. A little flake-white, glazed with a light brush over the carefully toned blue, permitted to fall into whatever forms chance might determine, with the single precaution that their edges should be tolerably irregular, supplied, in hundreds of instances, a sky quite good enough for all ordinary purposes — quite good enough for cattle to graze, or boors to play at nine-pins under — and equally devoid of all that could gratify, inform, or offend. §3. The clouds But although this kind of cloud is, as I have said, Poussin^”^ typical of the central region, it is not one which nature is fond of. She scarcely ever lets an hour pass without some manifestation of finer forms, sometimes approach- ing the upper cirri, sometimes the lower cumulus. And then in the lower outlines, we have the nearest approximation which nature ever presents to the clouds of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin, to the characters of which I must request especial attention, as it is here onl}’^ that we shall have a fair opportunity of comparing their skies with those of the modern school. I shall, as before, glance rapidly at the great laws of specific form, and so put it in the power of the reader to judge for himself of the truth of representation. $4- Their es- Clouds, it is to be remembered, are not so much ^ntial charac- bodies borne irregularly before the wind, as they are the wind itself, rendered visible in parts of its pro- gress by a fall of temperature in the moisture it con- SEC. nr. cirAP. in.] cloud region. 209 tains. Thus a cloud, whose parts are in constant motion, will hover on a snowy mountain, pursuing con- stantly the same channel on its flanks, and yet remain- ing of the same size, the same form, and in the same place, for half a day together. No matter how violent or how capricious the wind may be, the instant it approaches the spot where the chilly influence of the snow extends, the moisture it carries becomes visible, and then and there the cloud forms on the instant, apparently maintaining its form against the wind, though the careful and keen ej’e can see all its parts in the most rapid motion across the mountain. The outlines of such a cloud are of course not determined by the irregular impulses of the wind, but by the fixed lines of radiant heat which regulate the temperature of the atmosphere of the mountain. It is terminated, therefore, not by changing curves, but by steady right lines of more or less decision, often exactly correspon- dent with the outline of the mountain on which it is formed, and falling therefore into grotesque peaks and precipices. I have seen the marked and angular out- line of the Grandes Jorasses, at Chamonix, mimicked in its every jag by a line of clouds above it. What in such cases takes place palpably and remarkably, is more or less a law of formation in all clouds what- soever, they being bounded rather by lines expressive of changes of temperature in the atmosphere, than by the impulses of the currents of wind in which those changes take place. Even when in rapid and visible motion across the sky, the variations which take place in their outlines are not so much alterations of position and arrangement of parts, as they are the alternate forma- tion and disappearance of parts. There is, therefore, § 5. Their an- usually a parallelism and consistency in their great an^^gjneral outlines, which gives system to the smaller curves of rtedsion of which they are composed ; and if these great lines be taken, rejecting the minutiae of variation, the resultant p 210 OF THE CENTRAL [part I § 6. The com- position of their minor curves. form will almost always be angular, and full of charac- ter and decision. In the Hock-like fields of equal masses, each individual mass has the effect, not of an ellipse or circle, but of a rhomboid ; the sky is crossed and chequered, not honey-combed; in the lower cu- muli, even though the most rounded of all clouds, the groups are not like balloons or bubbles, but like towers or mountains. And the result of this arrange- ment in masses more or less angular, varied with, and chiefly constructed of, curves of the utmost freedom and beauty, is that appearance of exhaustless and fan- tastic energy which gives every cloud a marked charac- ter of its own, suggesting resemblances to the specific outlines of organic objects. I do not say that such accidental resemblances are a character to be imitated ; but merely that they bear witness to the originality and vigour of separate conception in cloud forms, which gives to the scenery of the sky a force and variety no less delightful than that of the changes of mountain outline in a hill district of great elevation ; and that there is added to this a spirit-like feeling, a capricious, mocking imagery of passion and life, totally different from any effects of inanimate form that the earth can show. The minor contours, out of which the larger outlines are composed, are indeed beautifully curvilinear; but they are never monotonous in their curves. First comes a concave line, then a convex one, then an angular jag, breaking off into spray, then a downright straight line, then a curve again, then a deep gap, and a place where all is lost and melted away, and so on ; display- ing in every inch of the form renewed and ceaseless in- vention, setting off grace with rigidity, and relieving flexibility with force, in a manner scarcely less admi- rable, and far more changeful than even in the muscu- lar forms of the human frame. Nay, such is the exqui- site composition of all this, that you may take any 211 SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. single fragment of any cloud in the sky, and you will find it put together as if there had been a year’s thought over the plan of it, arranged with the most studied inequality — with the most delicate symmetry — with the most elaborate contrast, a picture in itself. You may try every other piece of cloud in the heaven, and you will find them every one as perfect, and yet not one in the least like another. Now it may, perhaps, for anything we know, or § 7. Their have yet proved, be highly expedient and proper, in g^ven^by^s art, that this variety, individuality, and angular cha- racter of nature should be changed into a mass of convex curves, each precisely like its neighbour in all respects, and unbroken from beginning to end ; — it may be highly original, masterly, bold, whatever you choose to call it; but it \s false. I do not intend at present to dispute that circular sweeps of the brush, leaving con- centric lines distinctly indicative of every separate horse hair of its constitution, ma^^ be highly indicative of masterly handling. I do not dispute that the result may be graceful and sublime in the highest degree, especiall}’^ when I consider the authority of those vaporescent flourishes, precisely similar in character, with which the more sentimental of the cherubs are adorned and encompassed in models of modern pen- manship; nay, I do not take upon me to assert that the clouds which in ancient Germany were more especially and peculiarly devoted to the business of catching princesses off desert islands, and carrying them to en- chanted castles, might not have possessed something of the pillowy organization which we may suppose best adapted for functions of such delicacy and dispatch. But I do mean to say that the clouds which God sends upon his earth as the ministers of dew, and rain, and shade, and with which he adorns his heaven, setting them in its vault for the thrones][of his spirits, have not in one instant or atom of their existence, one feature p 2 212 OF THE CENTRAL § 8. Monotony and falsehood of the clouds of the Italian school generally. §9. Vast size of congregated masses of cloud. [part II. in common with such conceptions and creations. And there are, beyond dispute, more direct and unmitigated falsehoods told, and more laws of nature set at open defiance in one of the “ rolling ” sides of Salvator, such as that marked 159 in the Dulwich Gallery, than were ever attributed, even by the ignorant and unfeeling, to all the wildest flights of Turner put together. And it is not as if the error were only occasional. It is systematic and constant in all the Italian masters, and in most of the Dutch. They looked at clouds, as at everything else which did not particularly help them in their great end of deception, with utter carelessness and bluntness of feeling, — saw that there were a great many rounded passages in them, — found it much easier to sweep circles than to design beauties, and sat down contented in their studies, to flourish away again and again, Avith perpetual repetitions of the same spherical conceptions, having about the same relation to the clouds of nature, that a child’s carving of a turnip has to the head of the Apollo. Look at the round things about the sun in the bricky Claude, the smallest of the three Sea-ports, in the National Gallery. They are a great deal more like half-crowns than clouds. Take the ropy tough-looking wreath in the sacrifice of Isaac, and find one part of it, if you can, which is not the repeti- tion of every other part of it, all together being as round and vapid as the brush could draw them ; or take the two cauliflower-like protuberances in No. 220, of the Dulwich Gallery, and admire the studied similarity between them ; you eannot tell which is which : or take the attributed Nicholas Poussin, No. 212, Dulwich Gallery, in which, from the brown trees to the right hand side of the picture, there is not one line which is not physically impossible. But it is not the outline only which is thus syste- matically false. The drawing of the solid form is worse still, for it is to be remembered that althougch clouds of 213 SEO. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. course arrange themselves more or less into broad masses, with a light side and dark side, both their light and shade are invariably composed of a series of divided masses, each of which has in its outline as much variety and character as the great outline of the cloud, presenting therefore, a thousand times repeated, all that I have described as characteristic of the gene- ral form. Nor are these multitudinous divisions a truth of slight importance in the character of sky, for they are dependent on, and illustrative of, a quality which is usually in a great degree overlooked, — the enormous retiring spaces of solid clouds. Between the illumined edge of a heaped cloud, and that part of its body which turns into shadow, there will generally be a clear distance of several miles, more or less of course, according to the general size of the cloud, but in such large masses as in Poussin and others of the old masters, occupy the fourth or fifth of the visible sky, the clear illumined breadth of vapour, from the edge to the shadow, involves at least a distance of five or six miles. We are little apt, in watching the changes § lO. Demon- of a mountainous range of cloud, to reflect that the comparison masses of vapour which compose it, are huger and mountain higher than any mountain range of the earth, and the ^ distances between mass and mass are not yards of air traversed in an instant by the flying form, but valleys of changing atmosphere leagues over ; that the slow mo- tion of ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a boiling energy of exulting vapour rushing into the heaven a thousand feet in a minute, and that the toppling angle whose sharp edge almost escapes notice in the multitudinous forms around it, is a nodding precipice of storms 30C0 feet from base to summit. It is not until we have actually compared the forms of the sky with the hill ranges of the earth, and seen the soaring Alp overtopped and buried in one surge of the sky, that we begin to conceive or appreciate the colossal scale of the §11. And con- sequent divi- sions and varieties of feature. §12. Not lightly to be omitted. 214 OF THE CENTRAL [PART II. phenomena of the latter. But of this there can be no doubt in the mind of any one accustomed to trace the forms of clouds among hill ranges — as it is there a demonstrable and evident fact, that the space of vapour visibly extended over an ordinarily cloudy sky, is not less, from the point nearest to the observer, to the horizon, than twenty leagues ; that the size of every mass of separate form, if it be at all largely divided, is to be expressed in terms of miles ; and that every boil- ing heap of illuminated mist in the nearer sky, is an enormous mountain, fifteen or tnewty thousand feet in height, six or seven miles over in illuminated surface, furrowed by a thousand colossal ravines, torn by local tempests into peaks and promontories, and changing its features with the majestic velocity of the volcano. To those who have once convinced themselves of these proportions of the heaven, it will be immediately evi- dent, that though we might, without much violation of truth, omit the minor divisions of a cloud four yards over, it is the veriest audacity of falsehood to omit those of masses where for yards we have to read miles, first, because it is physically impossible that such a space should be without many and vast divisions; secondly, because divisions at such distances must be sharply and forcibly marked by aerial perspective, so that not only they must be there, but they must be visible and evident to the eye; and thirdly, because these multitudinous divisions are absolutely necessary, in order to express this space and distance, which can- not but be fully and imperfectly felt, even with every aid and evidence that art can give of it. Now if an artist taking for his subject a chain of vast mountains, several leagues long, were to unite all their varieties of ravine, crag, chasm, and precipice, into one solid, unbroken mass, with one light side and one dark side, looking like a white ball or parallel opiped two yards broad, the words “ breadth,” “ boldness,” or. 215 SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION generalization,” would scarcely be received as a suffi- cient apology for a proceeding so glaringly false, and so painfully degrading. But when, instead of the really large and simple forms of mountains, united, as they commonly are, by some great principle of common organization, and so closely resembling each other as often to correspond in line, and join in effect; when instead of this, we have to do with spaces of cloud twice as vast, broken up into a multiplicity of forms necessary to, and characteristic of, their very nature— those forms subject to a thousand local changes, having no asso- ciation with each other, and rendered visible in a thou- sand places by their own transparency or cavities, where the mountain forms would be lost in shade, — that this far greater space, and this far more complicated ar- rangement, should be all summed up into one round dumpling, with one swell of white, and one flat side of unbroken grey, is considered an evidence of the sub- limest powers in the artist of generalization and breadth. Now it may be broad, it may be grand, it may be beautiful, artistical, and in every way desirable. I don’t say it IS not — I merely say it is a concentration of every kind of falsehood : it is depriving heaven of its space, clouds of their buoyancy, winds of their motion, and distance of its blue. This is done, more or less, by all the old masters, without an exception. Their idea of clouds was altogether similar ; more or less perfectly carried out, according to their power of hand and accuracy of eye, but universally the same in conception. It was the idea of a compara- tively small, round, puffed-up white body, irregularly associated with other round and puffed-up white bodies, each with a white light side, and a grey dark side, and a soft reflected light, floating a great way below a blue dome. Such is the idea of a cloud formed by most peo- ple ; it is the first, general, uncultivated notion of what we see every day. People think of the clouds as about § 13. Imper- fect concep- tions of this size and extent in ancient landscape. 216 OF THE CENTRAL §14. Total ■want of trans- parency and evanescence in the clouds of ancient land- scape. [part IL as big as they look— forty yards over, perhaps ; they see generally that they are solid bodies, subject to the same laws as other solid bodies, roundish, w^hitish, and apparently suspended a great way under a high blue concavity. So that these ideas be tolerably given with nice smooth paint, they are content, and call it “ nature.” How different it is from anything that nature ever did, or ever will do, I have endeavoured to show ; but I can- not, and do not, expect the contrast to be fully felt, unless the reader will actually go out on days when, either before or after rain, the clouds arrange themselves into vigorous masses, and after arriving at something like a conception of their distance and size, from the mode in which they retire over the horizon, will for himself trace and watch their varieties of form and outline, as mass rises over mass in their illuminated bodies. Let him climb from step to step over their craggy and broken slopes, let him plunge into the long vistas of immeasurable perspective, that guide back to the blue sky ; and when he finds his imagination lost in their immensity, and his senses confused with their mul- titude, let him go to Claude, to Berghem, to Cuyp, or to Poussin, and ask them for a like space, or like infinity. But perhaps the most grievous fault of all, in the clouds of these painters, is the utter want of transpa- rency. Not in her most ponderous and lightless masses will nature ever leave us without some evidence of transmitted sunshine ; and she perpetually gives us passages in which the vapour becomes visible only by the sunshine which it arrests and holds within itself, not caught on its surface, but entangled in its mass — floating fleeces, precious with the gold of heaven ; and this translucency is especially indicated on the dark sides even of her heaviest wreaths, which possess opal- escent and delicate hues of partial illumination, far more dependent upon the beams which pass through them than on those which are reflected upon them. 217 SEC. III. CUAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more painfully and ponderously opaque than the clouds of the old masters universally. However far removed in aerial distance, and however brilliant in light, they never appear filmy or evanescent, and their light is always on them, not in them. And this effect is much increased by the positive and persevering determination on the part of their out- lines not to be broken in upon, nor interfered, with in the slightest degree, by any presumptuous blue, or impertinent winds. Stulz could not be more averse to the idea of being ragged. There is no inequality, no variation, no losing or disguising of line, no melting into nothingness, nor shattering into spray ; edge succeeds edge with imperturbable equanimity, and nothing short of the most decided interference on the part of tree-tops, or the edge of the picture, prevents us from being able to follow them all the way round, like the coast of an island. And be it remembered that all these faults and defi- § 15. Farther ciencies are to be found in their drawing merely of the defideM^^n^ separate masses of the solid cumulus, the easiest drawn space, of all clouds. But nature scarcely ever confines her- self to such masses, they form but the thousandth part of her variety of effect. She builds up a pyramid of their boiling volumes, bars this across like a mountain with the grey cirrus, envelopes it in black, ragged, drift- ing vapour, covers the open part of the sky with mottled horizontal fields, breaks through these with sudden and long sunbeams, tears up their edges with local winds, scatters over the gaps of blue the infinity of multitude of the high cirri, and melts even the un- occupied azure into palpitating shades. And all this is done over and over again in every quarter of a mile. Where Poussin or Claude have three similar dumplings, nature has fifty pictures, made up each of millions of minor thoughts — fifty aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the Shechinah of the blue — fifty hollow ways 218 OF THE CENTRAL [part II. among bewildered hills — each with their own nodding rocks, and cloven precipices, and radiant summits, and robing vapours, but all unlike each other, except in beauty, all bearing witness to the unwearied, exhaustless opera- tion of the Infinite Mind. Now, in cases like these espe- cially, as we observed before of general nature, though it is altogether hopeless to follow out in the space of any one picture this incalculable and inconceivable glory, yet the painter can at least see that the space he has at his command, narrow and confined as it is, is made com- plete use of, and that no part of it shall be without en- tertainment and food for thought. If he could sub- divide it by millionths of inches, he could not reach the multitudinous majesty of nature, but it is at least in- cumbent upon him to make the most of w’^hat he has, and not, by exaggerating the proportions, banishing the variety and repeating the forms of his clouds, to set at defiance the eternal principles of the heavens — fitful- § 16. Instance ness and infinity. And now let us, keeping in memory ofperfect truth hat we have seen of Poussin and Salvator, take up one of Turner’s skies, and see whether he is as narrow in his conception, or as niggardly in his space. It does not matter which we take, his sublime “Babylon”* is a fair example for our present purpose. Ten miles away, down the Euphrates, where it gleams last along the plain, he gives us a drift of dark elongated vapour, melting beneath into a dim haze which embraces the hills on the horizon. It is exhausted with its own motion, and broken up by the wind in its own body into numberless groups of billowy and tossing frag- ments, which, beaten by the weight of storm down to the earth, are just lifting themselves again on wearied wings, and perishing in the effort. Above these, and far beyond them, the eye goes back to a broad sea of white, illu- minated mist, or rather cloud melted into rain, and ab- sorbed again before that rain has fallen, but penetrated * Engraved in Finden’s Bible Illustrations. Turner’s “ Babylon 219 SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. throughout, whether it be vapour or whether it be dew, with soft sunshine, turning it as white as snow. Gra- dually as it rises, the rainy fusion ceases, you cannot tell where the film of blue on the left begins — but it is deepening, deepening still, — and the cloud, with its edge first invisible, then all but imaginary, then just felt when the eye is not fixed on it, and lost when it is, at last rises, keen from excessive distance, but soft and mantling in its body, as a swan’s bosom fretted by faint wind, heaving fitfully against the delicate deep blue, with white waves, whose forms are traced by the pale lines of opalescent shadow, shade only because the light is within it, and not upon it, and which break with their own swiftness into a driven line of level spray, win- nowed into threads by the wind, and flung before the following vapour like those swift shafts of arrowy water which a great cataract shoots into the air beside it, trying to find the earth. Beyond these, again, rises a colossal mountain of grey cumulus, through whose shadowed sides the sunbeams penetrate in dim, sloping, rain-like shafts, and over which they fall in a broad burst of streaming light, sinking to the earth, and show- ing through their own visible radiance the three suc- cessive ranges of hills which connect its desolate plain with spaee. Above, the edgy summit of the cumulus, broken into fragments, recedes into the sky, which is peopled in its serenity with quiet multitudes of the white, soft, silent cirrus, and under these again, drift near the zenith, disturbed and impatient shadows of a darker spirit, seeking rest and finding none. Now this is nature I It is the exhaustless living energy with which the universe is filled ; and what will you set beside it of the works of other men ? Show me a single picture, in the whole compass of ancient art, in which I can pass from cloud to cloud, from region to region, from first to second and third heaven, as I can here, and you may talk of § 17. And in his “ Pools of Solomon.” 220 OF THE CENTRAL [PART II. Turner’s want of truth. Turn to the “Pools of Solo- mon,” and walk through the passages of mist as they melt on the one hand into those stormy fragments of fiery cloud, or, on the other, into the cold solitary shadows that compass the sweeping hill, and when you find an inch without air and transparency, and a hair’s- breadth without changefulness and thought, and when you can count the torn waves of tossing radiance that gush from the sun, as you can count the fixed, white, insipidities of Claude, or when you can measure the modulation and the depth of that hollow mist, as you can the flourishes of the brush upon the canvass of Salvator, talk of Turner’s want of truth ! But let us take up simpler and less elaborate works, for there is too much in these to admit of being analysed. § 18. Truths of In the vignette of the liake of Como, in Rogers’s Italy, charTcter i^ ^^te space is SO Small that the details have been partially his “Como.” Jost by the engraver; but enough remain to illustrate the great principles of cloud from which we have en- deavoured to explain. Observe first the general angu- lar outline of the volumes on the left of the sun. If you mark the points where the direction of their out- line changes, and connect those points by right lines, the cloud will touch, but will not cut, those lines throughout. Yet its contour is as graceful as it is full of character — toppling, ready to change — fragile as enormous — evanescent as colossal. Observe how, where it crosses the line of the sun, it becomes luminous, illustrating what has been observed of the visibility of mist in sunlight. Observe, above all, the multiplicity of its solid form, the depth of its shadows in perpetual transition ; it is not round and swelled, half light and half dark, but full of breaking irregular shadow and transparency — variable as the wind, and melting im- perceptibly above into the haziness of the sun-lighted atmosphere, contrasted in all its vast forms with the SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. 221 delicacy and the multitude of the brightly-touched cirri. Nothing can surpass the truth of this ; the cloud is as gigantic in its simplicity as the Alp which it opposes ; but how various, how transparent, how in- finite in its organization ! It is instructive to compare with this such a sky as§i9- Com- that of Backhuysen, No. 75, Dulwich Gallery, where we have perfectly spherical clusters of grape-like, smooth, Backhuysen. opaque bodies, w>^hich are evidently the results of the artist’s imaginative powers, strained to their highest pitch in his study, perhaps, however, modified and rendered more classical and ideal by his feeling of the beautiful in the human form, at least in that part of it which is in Dutchmen most peculiarly developed. There are few pictures which are so evidently in-door work as this, so completely in every part bearing wit- ness to the habit of the artist of shutting his eyes and soul to every impression from without, and repeating for ever and ever, without a sensation of imperfection, a hope or desire of improvement, or a single thought of truth or nature, the same childish, contemptible, and impossible conception. It is a valuable piece of work, as teaching us the abasement into which the human mind may fall when it trusts to its owm strength, and delights in its owm imaginations. But turn back to the first vignette in the Italy. The § 20. The deep *7 b s d. Icriow angular outlines and variety of modulation in the clouds ofTiie" above the sail, and the delicate atmosphere of morning Tur- mist into which they arc dissolved about the breathing Geneva.” hills, require no comment ; but one part of this vignette demands especial notice ; it is the repetition of the out- line of the snowy mountain by the light eloud above it. The eause of this I have already explained, and its oc- eurrence here is especially valuable as bearing witness to the thorough and scientific knowledge thrown by Turner into his slightest works. The thing cannot be seen once in six months ; it would not have been $ 2] . Further principles of cloud form exemplified in his “ Amalfi.” 222 OF THE CENTRAL [PART II. noticed, much less introduced bj an ordinary artist, and to the public it is a dead letter, or an offence. Ninety-nine persons in a hundred would not have ob- served this pale wreath of parallel cloud above the hill, and the hundredth in all probability says it is unnatural. It requires the most intimate and accurate knowledge of the Alps before such a piece of refined truth can be understood. At the 216th page we have another and a new case, in which clouds in perfect repose, unaffected by wind, or any influence but that of their own elastic force, boil, rise, and melt in the heaven with more approach to globular form than under any other circumstances is possible. But even here the great outline of the mass is terminated by severe right lines, four sides of an ir- regular hexagon, and the lesser cloud is peaked like a cliff. But I name this vignette, not only because it is most remarkable for the buoyancy and aetherial elas- ticity of inward energy, indicated in spite of the most ponderous forms, and because it is as faithful as it is bold in the junction of those weighty masses with the delicate, horizontal lines of the lower air, but because it is a characteristic example of Turner’s use of one of the facts of nature not hitherto noticed, that the edge of a partially transparent body is often darker than its central surface, because at the edge the light' penetrates and passes through, which from the centre is reflected to the eye. The sharp, cutting edge of a wave, if not broken into foam, frequently appears for an instant almost black, and the outlines of these massy clouds, where their projecting forms rise against the light of their bodies, are almost always marked clearly and firmly by very dark edges. Hence we have frequently, if not constantly, multitudinous forms indicated only by outline, giving character and solidity to the great masses of light, without breaking their breadth. And Turner avails himself of these boldly and constantly, — outlining SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. 223 forms with the brush of which no other indication is given. All the grace and solidity of the white cloud on the right-hand side of the vignette before us, de- pends upon such outlines. As I before observed of mere execution, that one of § 22 . Reasons the best tests of its excellence was the expression of infinity y so it may be noticed with respect to the painting Tumer’sworks, of details generally, that more difference lies between almost an un- one artist and another, in the attainment of this quality, than in any other of the efforts of art ; and that if we wish, without reference to beauty of composition, or any other interfering circumstances, to form a judgment of the truth of painting, perhaps the very first thing we should look for, whether in one thing or another — foliage, or clouds, or waves, should be the expression of infinity always and everywhere, in all parts and divisions of parts. For we may be quite sure that what is not infinite, cannot be true ; it does not, indeed, follow that what is infinite, always is true, but it can very rarely be false, for this simple reason, that it is a most difficult, if not impossible thing, for mortal mind to compose an infinity of any kind for itself, or to form an idea of per- petual variation, and to avoid all repetition, merely by its own resources, that is to say, by combinations of its ideas unexampled in nature. I believe the moment that we trust to ourselves, we repeat ourselves, and that therefore the moment we see in a work of any kind whatsoever, the expression of infinity, we may be all but certain that the workman has gone to nature for it ; while, on the other hand, the moment we see repeti- tion, or want of infinity, we may be absolutely certain that the workman has not gone to nature for it. For instance, in the picture of Salvator before noticed, § 23. Instances No. 220 in the Dulwich Gallery, as we see at once that want^of^R^in the two masses of cloud absolutely repeat each other in the works of ^ S&lv3itOI* every one of their forms, and that each is composed of about twelve white sweeps of the brush, all forming the 224 OF THE CENTRAL § 24. And of the universal presence of it in those of Turner. The conclu- sions which may be arrived at from it. [part ir. same curve, and all of the same length, and as we can count these, and measure their common diameter, and by stating the same to anybody else, convey to him a full and perfect idea and knowledge of that sky in all its parts and proportions, — as we can do this, we may be absolutely certain, without reference to the real sky, or to any other part of nature, without even knowing what the white things were intended for, we may be certain that they cannot possibly resemble anything ; that what- ever they were meant for, they can be nothing but a violent contradiction of all nature’s principles and forms. When, on the other hand, we take up such a sky as that of Turner’s “Rouen, seen from St. Catherine’s Hill,” in the Rivers of France, and find, in the first place, that he has given us a distance over the hills in the horizon, into which, when we are tired of penetrating, we must turn and come back again, there being not the remotest chance of getting to the end of it ; and when we see that from this measureless distance up to the zenith, the whole sky is one ocean of alternate waves of cloud and light, so blended together that the eye cannot rest on any one without being guided to the next, and so to a hundred more, till it is lost over and over again in every wreath — that if it divides the sky into quarters of inches, and tries to count or comprehend the component parts of any single one of those divisions, it is still as utterly defied and defeated by the part as by the whole — that there is not one line out of the millions there which re- peats another, not one which is unconnected with another, not one which does not in itself convey his- tories of distance and space, and suggest new and changeful form; then we may be all but certain, though these forms are too mysterious and too delicate for us to analyse — though all is so crowded and so connected that it is impossible to test any single part by particular laws — yet without any such tests, we may be sure that this infinity can only be based on truth — that it 225 SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUD REGION. must be nature, because man could not have originated it, and that every form must be faithful, because none is like another. And therefore it is that I insist so constantly on this great quality of landscape painting, as it appears in Turner, because it is not merely a constant and most important truth in itself, but it almost amounts to a demonstration of every other truth. And it will be found a far rarer attainment §25. Themui- in the works of other men than is commonlv sun- j. j , . , . . Jr objects, or in- posed, and the sign, wherever it is really found, of the crease of their very highest art. For we are apt to forget that the the\m- greatest number is no nearer infinity than the least, if it Passion of be definite number ; and the vastest bulk is no nearer ih^^'refourcVof infinity than the most minute, if it be definite bulk ; so that a man may multiply his objects for ever and ever, and be no nearer infinity than he had reached with one, if he do not vary them and confuse them ; and a man may reach infinity in every touch and line, and part, and unit, if in these he be truthfully various and obscure. And we shall find, the more we examine the works of the old masters, that always, and in all parts, they are totally wanting in every feeling of in- finity, and therefore in all truth ; and even in the works of the moderns, though the aim is far more just, we shall frequently perceive an erroneous choice of means, and a substitution of mere number or bulk for real in- finity, ending, as in the works of one of our artists most celebrated for sublimity of conception, (the general admiration of whose works, however ill-founded, I can perfectly understand, for I once admired them myself,) in morbid and meaningless tautology. And therefore, in concluding our notice of the central § 26 . Farther cloud region, I should wish to dwell particularly on instances of those skies of Turner’s, in which we have the whole grey sLes of space of the heaven covered with the delicate dim flakes of gathering vapour which are the intermediate link between the central region and that of the rain- ^ 27. The ex- cellence of the cloud-drawing of Stanfield. 226 OF THE CENTRAL [PART II. cloud, and which assemble and grow out of the air, shutting up the heaven with a grey interwoven veil, before the approach of storm, faint, but universal, letting the light of the upper sky pass pallidly through their body, but never rending a passage for the ray. We have the first approach and gathering of this kind of sky most gloriously given in the vignette at p. 115 of Rogers’ Italy, which is one of the most perfect pieces of feeling (if I may transgress my usual rules for an instant) extant in art, owing to the extreme grandeur and stern simplicity of the strange and ominous forms of level cloud behind the building. In that at page 223, there are passages of the same kind, of exceeding perfeetion. The sky through which the dawn is break- ing in the “Voyage of Columbus,” and that with the “Moonlight under the Rialto,” in Rogers’ Poems, the skies of the “ Bethlehem,” and the “ Pyramids” in Pinden’s Bible series, and among the Academy pictures, that of the “ Hero and Leander,” and “ Flight into Egypt,” are characteristic and noble examples, as far as any in- dividual works can be characteristic of the universality of this mighty mind. I ought not to forget the magni- ficent solemnity and fulness of the wreaths of gather- ing darkness in the “ Folkestone.” We must not pass from the consideration of the central cloud region without noticing the general high quality of the cloud-drawing of Stanfield. He is limited in his range, and is apt in extensive compo- sitions to repeat himself, neither is he ever very re- fined, but his cloud-form is firmly and fearlessly chiselled, with perfect knowledge, though usually with some want of feeling. As far as it goes, it is very grand and very tasteful, beautifully developed in the space of its solid parts, and full of action. Next to Turner, he is incomparably the noblest master of cloud- form of all our artists; in fact, he is the only one among them who really can draw a cloud. For it is a SEC. III. CHAP. III.] CLOUJ> REGION. 227 very different thing to rub out an irregular white spaee § 28. The neatly with the handkerchief, or to leave a bright little bit of paper in the middle of a w'^ash, and to give the English school, real anatomy of cloud-form with perfect articulation of chiaroscuro. We have multitudes of painters, who can throw a light bit of straggling vapour across their sky, or leave in it delicate and tender passages of breaking light; but this is a very different thing from taking up each of those bits or passages, and giving it structure, and parts, and solidity. The eye is satisfied with exceedingly little, as an indication of cloud, and a few clever sweeps of the brush on wet paper may give all that it requires; but this is not drawing clouds, nor will it ever appeal fully and deeply to the mind, ex- cept when it occurs only as a part of a higher system. And there is not one of our modern artists, except Stanfield, who can do much more than this. As soon as they attempt to lay detail upon their clouds, they appear to get bewildered, forget that they are dealing with forms regulated by precisely the same simple laws of light and shade as more substantial matter, over- charge their colour, confuse their shadows and dark sides, and end in mere ragged confusion. I believe the evil arises from their never attempting to render clouds except with the brush; other objects, at some period of study, they take up with the chalk or lead, and so learn something of their form ; but they appear to consider clouds as altogether dependent on cobalt and camel’s hair, and so never understand any- thing of their real anatomy. But whatever the cause, I cannot point to any central clouds of the moderns, except those of Turner and Stanfield, as really showing much knowledge of, or feeling for, nature, though all are incomparably superior to the conventional and nar- row conceptions of the ancients. We are all right as far as we go, our work may be incomplete, but it is not false ; and it is far better, far less injurious to the mind, Q 2 228 OF THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION. [PART II. that we should be little attracted to the skj, and taught to be satisfied with a light suggestion of truthful form, than that we should be drawn to it by violently pronounced outline and intense colour, to find in its finished falsehood everything to displease or to mislead — to hurt our feelings, if we have foundation for them, and corrupt them, if we have none. SEC. HI. CHAP. IV. J 229 CHAPTER IV. OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS: THIRDLY, OF THE REGION OF THE RAIN CLOUD. The clouds which I wish to consider as characteristic ^ i. The appa- of the lower, or rainy region, differ not so much in [n^character^ their real nature from those of the central and upper- between the most regions, as in appearance, owing to their greater tral clouds is nearness. For the central clouds, and perhaps even the high cirri, deposit moisture, if not distinctly rain, proximity. as is sufficiently proved hy the existence of snow on the highest peaks of the Himaleh, and when, on any such mountains, we are brought into close contact with the central clouds,* we find them little differing from the ordinary rain cloud of the plains, except by being slightly less dense and dark. But the apparent difi ferences, dependent on proximity, are most marked and important. In the first place, the clouds of the central region § 2 . Their have, as has been before observed, pure and aerial greys ^re^ces in^' for their dark sides, owing to their necessary distance colour, from the observer ; and as this distance permits a mul- titude of local phenomena capable of influencing colour, * I am unable to say to what height the real rain-cloud may extend j perhaps there are no mountains which rise altogether above storm. I have never been in a violent storm at a greater height than between 8,000 and 9,000 feet above the level of the sea. There the rain-cloud is exceedingly light, compared to the ponderous darkness of the lower air. § 3. And in definiteness of form. 230 OF THE REGION OF [PART II. such as accidental sunbeams, refractions, transparencies, or local mists and showers, to be collected into a space apparently small, the colours of these clouds are al- ways changeful and palpitating, and whatever degree of grey or of gloom may be mixed with them is invariably pure and aerial. But the nearness of the rain-cloud rendering it impossible for a number of phenomena to be at once visible, makes its hue of grey monotonous, and (by losing the blue of distance) warm and brown compared to that of the upper clouds. This is especi- ally remarkable on any part of it which may happen to be illumined, which is of a brown, bricky, ochreous tone, never bright, always coming in dark outline even on the more subdued lights of the central clouds. But it is seldom that this takes place, and when it does, never over large spaces, little being usually seen of the rain-cloud but its under and dark side. This, when the cloud above is dense, becomes of an inky and cold grey, and sulphureous and lurid if there be thunder in the air. With these striking differences in colour, it presents no fewer nor less important in form, chiefly from losing almost all definiteness of character and outline. It is sometimes nothing more than a thin mist, whose outline cannot be traced, rendering the landscape locally indis- tinct or dark ; if its outline be visible, it is ragged and torn ; rather a spray of cloud, taken off its edge and sifted by the wind, than an edge of the cloud itself. In fact, it rather partakes of the nature, and assumes the appearance of real water in the state of spray, than of elastic vapour. This appearance is enhanced by the usual presence of formed rain, carried along with it in a columnar form, ordinarily, of course, reaching the ground like a veil, but very often suspended with the cloud, and hanging from it like a jagged fringe, or over it in light, rain being always lighter than the cloud it falls from. These columns, or fringes, of rain are often 231 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. waved and bent by the wind, or twisted, sometimes even swept upwards from the cloud. The velocity of these vapours, though not necessarily in reality greater than that of the central clouds, appears greater, owing to their proximity, and, of course, also to the usual presence of a more violent wind. They are also apparently much more in the power of the wind, having less elastic force in themselves ; but they are precisely subject to the same great laws of form which regulate the upper clouds. They are not solid bodies borne about with the wind, ^ 4. They are but they carry the wind with them, and cause it; they s^me are the visible form of the wind itself. Every one knows, who has ever been out in a storm, that the time when it rains heaviest is precisely the time when he cannot hold up his umbrella; that the wind is carried with the cloud, and lulls when it has passed. Every one who has ever seen rain in a hill country, knows that a rain-cloud, like any other, may have all its parts in rapid motion, and yet, as a whole, remain in one spot. I remember once, when in crossing the T^te Noire, I had turned up the valley towards Trient, I noticed a rain cloud forming on the Glacier de Trient. With a west wind, it proceeded towards the Col de Balme, being followed by a prolonged wreath of vapour, always form- ing exactly at the same spot over the glacier. This long, serpent-like line of cloud went on at a great rate till it reached the valley leading down from the Col de Balme, under the slate rocks of the Croix de Eer. There it turned sharp round, and came down this valley, at right angles to its former progress, and finally directly contrary to it, till it came down within five hundred feet of the village, where it disappeared ; the line behind always advancing, and always disappearing, at the same spot. This continued for half an hour, the long line describing the curve of a horse-shoe ; always coming into existence, and always vanishing at exactly the same places ; traversing the space between with enormous § 5. Value, to the painter, of the rain cloud. $ 6. The old masters have not left a single instance of the painting of the rain cloud, and very few ef- forts at it. Gas- par Poussin’s storms. 232 OF THE REGION OF [PART II. swiftness. This cloud, ten miles off, would have looked like a perfectly motionless wreath, in the form of a horse-shoe, hanging over the hills. To the region of the rain- cloud belong also all those phenomena of drifted smoke, heat-haze, local mists in the morning or evening, in valleys, or over water, mirage, white steaming vapour rising in evaporation from moist and open surfaces, and everything which visibly affects the condition of the atmosphere without actually assuming the form of cloud. These phe- nomena are as perpetual in all countries as they are beautiful, and afford by far the most effective and valuable means which the painter possesses, for modifi- cation of the forms of fixed objects. The upper clouds are distinct and comparatively opaque, they do not modify, but conceal; but through the rain-cloud, and its accessory phenomena, all that is beautiful may be made manifest, and all that is hurtful concealed ; what is paltry may be made to look vast, and what is ponderous, aerial; mystery may be obtained without obscurity, and decoration without disguise. And ac- cordingly, nature herself uses it constantly, as one of her chief means of most perfect effect; not in one country, nor another, but everywhere — everywhere at least, where there is anything worth calling landscape. I cannot answer for the desert of the Sahara, but I know that there can be no greater mistake than supposing that delicate and variable effects of mist and rain- cloud are peculiar to northern climates. I have never seen in any place or country such perfect effects of mists as in the Campagna of Rome, and among the hills of Sorrento. It is therefore matter of no little marvel to me, and I conceive that it can scarcely be otherwise to any reflecting person, that throughout the whole range of ancient landscape art, there occurs no instance of the painting of a real rain-cloud, still less of any of the more delicate phenomena characteristic of 233 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. the region. “ Storms ” indeed, as the innocent public persist in calling such abuses of nature and abortions of art as the two windy Caspars in our National Gallery, are common enough ; massive concretions of ink and indigo, wrung and twisted very hard, apparently in a vain effort to some moisture out of them ; bearing up courageously and successfully against a wind whose effects on the trees in the foreground can be accounted for only on the supposition that they are all of the Indian-rubber species. Enough of this in all conscience, we have, and to spare 5 but as to the legitimate rain- cloud, with its ragged and spray-like edge, its veily transparency, and its columnar burden of blessing, neither it, nor anything like it, or approaching it, occurs in any painting of the old masters that I have ever seen, and I have seen enough to warrant my affirming that if it occur anywhere, it must be through accident rather than intention. Nor is there stronger evidence of any perception on the part of these much respected artists, that there were such things in the world as mists or vapours. If a cloud under their direction, ever touches a mountain, it does it effectually and as if it meant to do it. There is no mystifying the matter, here is a cloud, and there is a hill, if it is to come on at all, it comes on to some purpose, and there is no hope of its ever going off again. We have, therefore, little to say of the efforts of the old masters, in any scenes which might naturally have been connected with the clouds of the lowest region, except that the faults of form specified in considering the central clouds, are, by way of being energetic or sublime, more glaringly and audaciously committed in their “ storms,” — that what is a wrong form among clouds possessing form, is there given with increased generosity of fiction to clouds which have no form at all, and that the result, however admirable or desirable it may perhaps, on principles hitherto undeveloped, be hereafter proved, is in all 234 OF THE REGION OF [part II. cases, and from all hands, as far as the representation of nature is concerned, something which onl^ ought not to amuse by its absurdity, because it ought to dis- gust by its falsehood. power^f^he * Supposing that we had nothing to show in modern moderns in 3'Pb of the region of the rain cloud, but the dash of WoTsTf Stan- the spongy breadth of Cat- field. termole, or even the ordinary stormy skies of the body of our inferior water-colour painters, we might yet laugh all efforts of the old masters to utter scorn. The works of Stanfield, here, as in all other points, based on perfect knowledge, would enable us to illustrate almost every circumstance of storm, and should be our text book, were it not that all he has done has been farther carried by a mightier hand. But one, among our water-colour artists, deserves especial notice— before we ascend the steps of the solitary throne — as having done in his peculiar walk, what for faithful and pure truth, truth indeed of a limited range and unstudied application, but yet most faithful and most pure, will ^ 8. And of remain unsurpassed if not unrivalled, — Coplev Field- ing. mg- We are well aware how much of what he has done depends in a great degree upon particular tricks of execution, or on a labour somewhat too mechanical to be meritorious ; that it is rather the texture than the plan of his sky which is to be admired, and that the greater part of what is pleasurable in it will fall rather under the head of dextrous imitation than of definite thought. But whatever detractions from his merit we may be compelled to make on these grounds, in con- sidering art as the embodying of beauty, or the channel of mind, it is impossible, v'^hen we are speaking of truth only, to pass by his down scenes and moorland showers of some five or six years ago. Since that time, we fear, he has been thinking of himself, instead of nature, and has partly lost both nature and himself ; but he then produced some of the most perfect and faultless pas- 235 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] the rain CLOUD. sages of the external, obvious, and lower* truths of the mist and the rain cloud, which art has ever seen. Wet, transparent, formless, full of motion, felt rather §9. ms^pecu- by their shadows on the hills than by their presence in the sky, becoming dark only through increased depth of space, most translucent where most sombre, and light only through increased buoyancy of motion, letting the blue through their interstices, and the sunlight through their chasms, with the irregular playfulness and traceless gradation of nature herself, his skies left nothing to be desired, but an umbrella, and must remain, as long as their colours stand, among the most simple, unadul- terated, and complete transcripts of a particular nature which art can point to. Had he painted five instead of five hundred such, and gone on to other sources of beauty, he might, there can be little doubt, have been one of our greatest artists. But it often grieves us to see how his power is limited to a particular moment, probable cause, to that easiest moment for imitation, when knowledge of form may be superseded by management of the brush, and the judgment of the colourist by the manufacture of a colour, the moment when all form is melted down and drifted away in the descending veil of rain, and when the variable and fitful colours of the heaven are lost in the monotonous grey of its storm tones ; so surely as Copley Fielding attempts the slightest hint at cloud form, beyond the edgeless rag which is tossed and twisted in the drift of the rain, does he become liny, hard, and expressionless, — so surely as he leaves the particular greys and browns whose harmony can scarcely be imperfect, and attempts the slightest passage of real colour, much more when he plunges into the difficulties of elaborate and elevated composi- tion, does he become affected, false, and feeble. We can only account for this by supposing that there is * External and obvious, as being mere truths of imitation — statements of the materials and means of nature, not of her mind. 236 OF THE REGION OF [fart II. something radically wrong in his method of study, for a man of his evident depth of feeling and pure love of truth ought not to be, cannot be, except from some strange error in his mode of out-of-door practice, thus limited in his range, and liable to decline of power. We have little doubt that almost all such failures arise from the artist’s neglecting the use of the chalk, and supposing that either the power of drawing forms, or the sense of their beauty, can be maintained un- weakened or unblunted, without constant and laborious studies in simple light and shade, of form only. The brush is at once the artist’s greatest aid and enemy; it enables hm to make his power available, but at the same time, it undermines his power, and unless it be constantly rejected for the pencil, never can be rightly used.^ But whatever the obstacle be, we do not doubt that It IS one which, once seen, may be overcome or removed, and we are in the constant hope of seeing this finely-minded artist shake off his lethargy, break the shackles of habit, seek in extended and right study the sources of real power, and become, what we have full faith in his capability of being, one of the leading artists of his time. biiu^ orrer'" of oor greatest modern mas- soning on the t^r, it must be premised that the qualities which consti- El™ ” from ' part of the truth of the rain cloud, engravings. are in no degree to be rendered by engraving. Its in- definiteness of torn and transparent form is far beyond the power of even our best engravers ; I do not say be- yond their possible power, if they would make themselves artists as well as workmen, but far beyond the power they actually possess ; while the depth and delicacy of the greys which Turner employs or produces, as well as the refinement of his execution, are, in the nature of things, utterly beyond all imitation by the opaque and lifeless darkness of the steel. What we say of his works, there- fore, must be understood as referring only to the original 237 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. drawings, though we may name one or two instances in which the engraver has, to a certain degree, succeeded in distantly following the intention of the master. ‘‘ Jumieges,” in the Rivers of France, ought perhaps, after what we have said of Fielding, to be our first ob- ing’s particular ject of attention, because it is a rendering by Turner of Fielding’s particular moment, and the only one existing, for Turner never repeats himself. One picture is allotted to one truth ; the statement is perfectly and gloriously made, and he passes on to speak of a fresh portion of God’s revelation.* The haze of sunlit rain of this most magnificent picture, the gradual retirement of the dark wood into its depth, and the sparkling and evanescent light which sends its variable flashes on the abbey, figures, foliage, and foam, require no comment — they speak home at once ; but let it be especially ob- served how we have, added to all this, just where the rainbow melts away, the wreath of swift and delicate cloud-form, left in decisive light, which Fielding could only have rendered in darkness, and even then with little more than the bare suggestion of imperfect out- line ; while Turner has given us, in every flake, a separate study of beautiful and substantial form. But there is yet added to this noble composition an incident ture of clouds which may serve us at once for a farther illustration of form^f^moke the nature and forms of cloud, and for a final proof how and steam, deeply and philosophically Turner has studied them. We have on the right of the picture, the steam and the smoke of a passing steamboat. Now steam is nothing but an artificial cloud in the process of dissipa- tion, it is as much a cloud as those of the sky itself, that is, a quantity of moisture rendered visible in the air by imperfect solution. Accordingly, observe how exquisitely irregular and broken are its forms, how sharp and spray-like, but with all the facts observed * Compare Sect. I. Chap. IV. § 6. 238 OF THE REGION OF [part II. ■which were pointed out in Chap. II. of this Section, the convex side to the wind, the sharp edge on that side, the other soft and lost. Smoke, on the contrary, is an actual substance existing independently in the air, a solid opaque body, subject to no absorption nor dissi- pation but that of tenuity. Observe its volumes; there is no breaking up nor disappearing here ; the wind carries its elastic globes before it, but does not dissolve nor break them.* Equally convex and void of angles on all sides, they are the exact representatives of the clouds of the old masters, and serve at once to show the ignorance and falsehood of these latter, and the accuracy of study which has guided Turner to the truth. § 13. Moment From this picture we should pass to the ‘‘ Llanthony,”f I°n “ Llai- which is the rendering of the moment immediately fol- thony.” lowing that given in the “ Jumieges.” The shower is here half exhausted, half passed by, the last drops are rattling faintly through the glimmering hazel boughs, the white torrent, swelled by the sudden storm, flings up its hasty jets of springing spray to meet the return- ing light, and these, as if the heaven regretted what it had given, and were taking it back, pass, as they leap, into vapour, and fall not again, but vanish in the shafts of the sunlight,! that hurrying, fitful, wind- woven sun- * It does not do so until the volumes lose their density by inequality of motion, and by the expansion of the warm air which conveys them. They are then, of course, broken into forms resembling those of clouds. t No conception can be formed of this picture from the engraving. It is perhaps the most marvellous piece of execution and of grey colour existing, except perhaps the drawing presently to be noticed, “ Land’s End.” Nothing else can be set beside it, even of Turner’s own works — much less of any other man’s. t I know no effect more strikingly characteristic of the departure of a storm than the smoking of the mountain torrents. The exhausted air is so thirsty of moisture, that every jet of spray is seized upon by it, and converted into vapour as it springs, and this vapour rises so densely from the surface of the stream as to give it the exact appearance of boiling water. I have seen the whole course of the Arve at Chamonix 239 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. light, which glides through the thick leaves and paces along the pale rocks like rain, half conquering, half quenched % the very mists which it summons itself from the lighted pastures as it passes, and gathers out of the drooping herbage and from the streaming crags, sending them with messages of peace to the far summits of the yet unveiled mountains whose silence is still broken by the sound of the rushing rain. With this noble work we should compare one of ^ ^ , commencing, which we can better judge by the engraving — the chosen with ' “ Loch Coriskin,” in the illustrations to Scott, because fngfop «™och it introduces us to another and a most remarkable Coriskin.” instance of the artist’s vast and varied knowledge. When rain falls on a mountain composed chiefly of barren rocks, their surfaces, being violently heated by the sun, whose most intense warmth always precedes rain, occasion sudden and violent evaporation, actually converting the first shower into steam. Consequently, upon all such hills, on the commencement of rain, white volumes of vapour are instantaneously and uni- versally formed, which rise, are absorbed by the atmo- sphere, and again descend in rain, to rise in fresh volumes until the surfaces of the hills are cooled. Where there is grass or vegetation, this effect is di- minished ; where there is foliage it scarcely takes place at all. Now this effect has evidently been especially chosen by Turner for “Loch Coriskin,” not only because it enabled him to relieve its jagged forms with veiling vapour, but to tell the tale which no pencilling could, the story of its utter absolute barrenness of unlichened, dead, desolated rock : The wildest glen, but this, can show Some touch of nature’s genial glow. one line of dense cloud, dissipating as soon as it had risen ten or twelve feet from the surface, but entirely concealing the water from an observer placed above it. 240 OF THE REGION OF [part II. $16. The draw- ing of transpa- rent vapour in the “ Land’s End.” On high Benmore green mosses grow, And heath bells bud in deep Gleneoe, And copse on Cruchan Ben ; But here, above, around, below, On mountain, or in glen, Nor tree, nor plant, nor shrub, nor flower, Nor aught of vegetative power. The wearied eye may ken ; But all is rocks at random thrown, Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone. Ii07'd of the Isles, Canto III. Here again, we see the absolute necessity of scienti- fic and entire acquaintance with nature, before this great artist can be understood. That which, to the ignorant, is little more than an unnatural and meaning- less confusion of steam-like vapour, is to the experi- enced such a full and perfect expression of the charac- ter of the spot, as no means of art could have otherwise given. The Long Ships Lighthouse, Land’s-End,” is, perhaps, a finer instance of the painting of the rain- cloud than any yet given. Taken as a whole, it is, perhaps, the noblest drawing of Turner’s existing. The engraving is good, as a plate, but conveys not the slightest idea of the original. We have here clouds without rain — at twilight —enveloping the cliffs of the coast, but concealing nothing, every outline being visi- ble through their gloom ; and not only the outline — for it is easy to do this — but the surface. The bank of rocky coast approaches the spectator inch by inch, felt clearer and clearer as it withdraws from the garment of cloud — not by edges more and more defined, but by a surface more and more unveiled. We have thus the painting, not of a mere transparent veil, like Fielding’s rain, but of a solid body of cloud, every inch of whose increasing distance is marked and felt. But the great wonder of the picture is the intensity of gloom which is attained in pure warm grey, without either black- ness or blueness. It is a gloom, dependent rather on 241 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. the enormous space and depth indicated, than on actual pitch of colour, distant by real drawing, without a grain of blue, dark by real substance, without a stroke of blackness ; and with all this, it is not formless, but full of indications of character, wild, irregular, shat- tered, and indefinite— full of the energy of storm, fiery in haste, and yet flinging back out of its motion the fitful swirls of bounding drift, of tortured vapour tossed up like men’s hands, as in defiance of the tempest, the jets of resulting whirlwind, hurled back from the rocks into the face of the coming darkness ; which, beyond all other characters mark the raised passion of the elements. It is this untraceable, unconnected, perpetual form — this fulness of character absorbed in ter of its parts, the universal energy — which distinguish nature and Turner from all their imitators. To roll a volume of smoke before the wind, to indicate motion or violence by monotonous similarity of line and direction, is for the multitude ; but to mark the independent passion, the tumultuous separate existence of every wreath of writhing vapour, yet swept away and overpowered by one omnipotence of storm, and thus to bid us Be as a Presence or a motion — one Among the many there while the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of an instrument, — this belongs only to nature and to him. The drawing of Coventry ” may be particularised as § 18. Deep a farther example oi this fine suggestion ot Hregularity g^jf-t^am-doud and fitfulness, through very constant parallelism of iii “ Co- direction, both in rain and clouds. The great mass of cloud, which traverses the whole picture, is characterised throughout by severe right lines, nearly parallel wdth each other, into which every one of its wreaths has a tendency to range itself ; but no one of these right lines R 242 OF THE REGION OF § 19. Com- pared with forms given by Salvator. § 20. Entire expression of tempest by minute touches and circum- stances in the “ Coventry.” -- ..... [part II. is actually and entirely parallel to any other, but all have a certain tendency, more or less defined in each, which impresses the mind with the most distinct idea of parallelism. Neither are any of the lines actually straight and unbroken; on the contrary, they are all made up of the most exquisite and variable curves, and it is the imagined line which joins the apices of these — a tangent to them all, which is in reality straight.* They are suggested, not represented, right lines ; but the whole volume of cloud is visibly and totally bounded by them ; and, in consequence, its whole body is felt to be dragged out and elongated by the foree of the tem- pest which it carries with it, and every one of its wreaths to be (as was before explained) not so much something borne before or by the wind, as the visible form and pre- sence of the wind itself. We could not possibly point out a more magnificent piece of drawing as a contrast to such works of Salvator as that before alluded to (159 Dulwich Gallery). Both are rolling masses of connected cloud; but in Burner’s, there is not one curve that repeats another, nor one curve in itself monotonous, nor without character, and yet every part and portion of the cloud is rigidly subjected to the same straightforward, inevitable influence of storm. In Salvator’s, every curve repeats its neighbour, every curve is monotonous in itself, and yet the whole cloud is curling about hither and thither, evidently without the slightest notion where it is going to, and unregulated by any general influence whatsoever. I could not bring together two finer or more instructive examples, the one of every thing that is perfect, the other of every thing that is childish or abominable, in the representation of the same facts. But there is yet more to be noticed in this noble sky of Turner’s. Not only are the lines of the rolling cloud thus irregular in their parallelism, but those of the falling rain are equally varied in their direction, indicating the * Note especially the dark uppermost outline of the mass. 243 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. gusty changefulness of the wind, and yet kept so straight and stern in their individual descent, that we are not suffered to forget its strength. This impression is still farther enhanced by the drawing of the smoke, which blows every way at once, yet turning perpetually in each of its swirls back in the direction of the wind, but so suddenly and violently, as almost to assume the angular lines of lightning. Farther, to complete the im- pression, be it observed that all the cattle, both upon the near and distant hill-side, have left off grazing, and are standing stock still and stiff, with their heads down and their backs to the wind ; and finally, that we may be told not only what the storm is, but what it has been, the gutter at the side of the road is gushing in a com- plete torrent, and particular attention is directed to it by the full burst of light in the sky being brought just above it, so that all its waves are bright with the reflection. Find me such a magnificent statement of all truth as this among the old masters, and I will say their works are worth something. But I have not quite done with this noble picture yet. Impetuous clouds, twisted rain, flickering sunshine, fleeting shadow, gush- ing water, and oppressed cattle, all speak the same story of tumult, fitfulness, power, and velocity. Only one thing is wanted, a touch of repose to contrast with it all, and it is given. High and far above the dark volumes of the swift rain-cloud, are seen on the left, through their opening, the quiet, horizontal, silent flakes of the highest cirrus, resting in the repose of the deep sky. Of all else that we have noticed in this drawing, some faint idea can he formed from the en- graving ; but not the slightest of the delicate and soft forms of these pausing vapours, and still less of the ex- quisite depth and palpitating tenderness of the blue with which they are islanded. R 2 ^ 21. Espe- cially by con- trast with a passage of ex- treme repose. 244 OF THE REGION OF [PART II. ^ 22. Tiie truth To appreciate the full truth of this passage, we must cuiar passage, understand another effect peculiar to the rain cloud, that Perfectly pure its openings always exhibit the purest and most perfect blue sky only , , i i i i ^ seen after rain, blue wliicli the sky ever shows, hor, as we saw in the and how seen. chapter of this section, that aqueous vapour always turns the sky more or less grey, it follows that we never can see the azure so intense or perfect as when the greater part of this vapour has just fallen in rain. Then, and then only, pure blue sky becomes visible in the first openings, distinguished especially by the man- ner in which the clouds melt into it, their edges pass- ing off in faint white threads and fringes, through which the blue shines more and more intensely, till the last trace of vapour is lost in its perfect colour. It is only the upper white clouds, however, which do this, or the last fragments of rain-clouds, becoming white as they dis- appear, so that the blue is never corrupted by the cloud, but only paled and broken with pure white, the purest white which the sky ever shows. Thus we have a melting and palpitating colour, never the same for two inches together, deepening and broadening here and there into intensity of perfect azure, then drifted and dying away through every tone of pure pale sky, into the snow white of the filmy cloud. Over this roll the determined edges of the rain-clouds, throwing it all far ^ 23 . Absence back, as a retired scene, into the upper sky. Of this the*^ wOT^^^of masters, as far as I remember, have taken the old mas- no cognizance whatsoever ; all with them is, as we par- tially noticed before, either white cloud or pure blue, they have no notion of any double dealing or middle measures. They bore a hole in the sky, and let you up into a pool of deep, stagnant blue, marked off by the clear round edges of imperturbable, impenetrable cloud on all sides — beautiful in positive colour, but totally des- titute of that exquisite gradation and change, that fleet- ing, panting, hesitating effort, with which the first 245 SEC. III. CHAP. IV.] THE RAIN CLOUD. glance of the natural sky is shed through the turbulence of the earth-storm. They have some excuse, however, for not attempt- ^ Success , , * ^ of our water- ing this in the nature of their material, as one ac- colour artists cidental dash of the brush with water-colour on a piece ing^^*use*^. p all truth in the to do than to name the most characteristic pictures, tor works of Tur- the truths I have been pointing out are so palpable and BrS!*’ evident that the reader can decide for himself in a mo- ment where they exist, and where they are wanting. The “ Crossing of the Brook ” will probably be the first which will occur to the minds of those best ac- quainted with Turner’s works, and indeed the stems on the extreme left of the picture, especially the fainter ones entangled behind the dark tree, and the vistas of interwoven boughs which retire in the centre are above all praise for grace and truth. These, and the light branches on the left in the “ Mercury and Argus,” may be given as standards of the utmost possible refine- ment and fidelity in tree-drawing, carried out to the last fibres of the leaflets. I am desirous, however, when it is possible, to give references to engravings as well as to original works, and neither of these have been so well rendered by the engraver as a little passage of thicket on the right in the “ Chain-bridge over the Tees,” of the England series. This piece of drawing is peculiarly expressive of the complexity, entanglement, and aerial relation of which we have just been speak- ing. The eye is lost in its exquisite multiplicity, yet you can go through among the boughs, in and out, catching a leaf here and a sunbeam there, — now a shadow, and now a stem, until you come out at the cliff on the other side, and there is not one of those countless stems at the same distance with another, not one that you do not leave behind you before you get to the next, how'ever confused and entangled you may be with their inter- sections and their multitude. Compare this with Caspar’s tree in the “ La Riccia,” and decide for your- self which is truth. One, infinite, graceful, penetrable, interwoven, sun-lighted, alive ; the other, three brown §14. “Chiefs- wood Cottage,’ “ Chateau de la Belle Ga- brielle,” &c. §15. Character of leafage. Its singular irre- gularity. 390 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. [PART II. strokes of paint, at precisely the same distance from the eye, without one intersection, without one cast shadow, and without one ramification to carry the foliage. The vignette of “ Chiefswood Cottage,” in the illus- trations to Scott, is peculiarly interesting as an illustra- tion of all that we have been saying of the tapering of trunks. One stem, on the left, is made to taper in perspective, by receding from the eye, as w^ell as by sending off quantities of brushwood at its base, and ob- serve how it contrasts with and sets off the forms of all the others. Look at the stems of the dark trees on the right, how they rise without the least diminution, al- though so tall, till they fork, note the exquisite observ- ance of proportion in the diminution of every spray at the very instant of dividing, the inconceivable and countless complexity, depth, aerial recession, and grace of the sprays themselves. This vignette, and the “ Chateau de la Belle Gabrielle ” always appear to me about the two most finished pieces of bough-drawing that Turner has produced. We should, however, asso- ciate with them the group of waving willows in the “Warwick,” (England series), the “Dartmouth Cove,” with its dark, gnarled trunk and delicate springing stems above the flag, (also a picture to be closely studied with reference to bough anatomy;) the branching stems above the river in the “ Durham,” the noble group of full- grown trees in the “ Kelso,” and, perhaps grander than all, the tall mass of foliage in the “ Bolton Abbey.” Such being the truth of the stems and branches, as represented by modern painters, let us see whether they are equally faithful in foliage, and whether the old masters atone by the leaves for the errors of the stems. Nature’s great aim, in arranging her leaves, as in every thing else, is to get symmetry and variety together, to make the symmetry be felf, but only the variety seen. Consequently, though she ranges her leaves on their 391 SEC. VI. CHAP. I.] OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. individual sprays with exquisite regularity, she always contrives to disguise that regularity in their united effect. For as in every group of leaves, some are seen sideways, forming merely long lines, some foreshortened, some crossing each other, every one differently turned and placed from all the others, the forms of the leaves, though in themselves similar, give rise to a thousand strange and differing forms in the group, and the shadows of some, passing over the others, still farther disguise and confuse the mass, until the eye can distinguish nothing but a graceful and flexible disorder of innume- rable forms, with here and there a perfect leaf on the extremity, or a symmetrical association of one or two, just enough to mark the specific character and to give unity and grace, but never enough to repeat in one group, what was done in another, never enough to pre- vent the eye from feeling that however regular and mathematical may be the structure of parts, w^hat is composed out of them is as various and infinite as any other part of nature. Nor does this take place in general effect only. Break off an elm bough, three feet long, in full leaf, and lay it on the table before you, and try to draw it, leaf for leaf. It is ten to one if in the whole bough (provided you don’t twist it about as you work) you find one form of a leaf exactly like another ; perhaps jmu will not even have one complete. Every leaf will be oblique, or foreshortened, or curled, or crossed by another, or shaded by another, or have something or other the matter with it, and though the whole bough will look graceful and symmetrical, you will scarcely be able to tell how or why it does so, since there is not one line of it like another. Now go to § 16 . Perfect Caspar Poussin, and take one of his sprays where they Pouss^!^ come against the sky : you may count it all round, one, two, three, four, one bunch ; five, six, seven, eight, two bunches ; nine, ten, eleven, twelve, three bunches ; with four leaves each, — and such leaves ! every one pre- 392 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. [PART II. cisely the same as its neighbour, blunt and round at the end (where every forest leaf is sharp, except that of the fig-tree), tied together by the roots, and so fastened on to the demoniacal claws above described, one bunch to each claw, and behold a tree ! Lg^inWcTcy of nature is so various when you have a bough nature’sfoliage. on the table before you, what must she be when she retires from you, and gives you her whole mass and multitude ? The leaves then at the extremities become as fine as dust, a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky, a confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf. This, as it comes down into the body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque ; it is alw'ays transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky; then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single leaf on the extremities; then, under these, you get deep passages of broken, irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty hollows, the twisted stems glancing through them in their pale and en- tangled infinity, and the shafted sunbeams, rained from above, running along the lustrous leaves for an instant, then lost, then caught again on some emerald bank or knotted root, to be sent up again with a faint reflex on the white under sides of dim groups of drooping foliage, the shadows of the upper boughs running in grey network down the glossy stems, and resting in quiet chequers upon the glittering earth, but all penetra- ble and transparent, and in proportion, inextricable and incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and the mystery of the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless large leaves, the type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but can never see. 393 SEC. VI. CHAP. I.] OF TRUTH OF VEGEGATION. Now, with thus much of nature in your mind, go to §18. Howcon- Gaspar Poussin’s View near Albano,” in the National tree pattern of Gallery. It is the very subject to unite all these effects, G- Poussin. — a sloping bank shaded with intertwined forest ; — and what has Gaspar given us ? A mass of smooth, opaque, varnished brown, without one interstice, one change of hue, or any vestige of leafy structure in its interior, or in those parts of it, I should say, which are intended to represent interior ; but out of it, over it rather, at regular intervals, we have circular groups of greenish touches, always the same in size, shape, and distance from each other, containing so exactly the same number of touches each, that you cannot tell one from another. There are eight or nine and thirty of them, laid over each other like fish-scales, the shade being most care- fully made darker and darker as it recedes from each until it comes to the edge of the next, against which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins to decline again, until the canvass is covered, with about as much intelligence or feeling of art as a house -painter has in marbling a wainscot, or a weaver in repeating an ornamental pattern. What is there in this, which the most determined prejudice in favour of the old masters can for a moment suppose to resemble trees? It is exactly what the most ignorant beginner, trying to make a complete drawing, would lay down,-— exactly the con- ception of trees which we have in the works of our worst drawing-masters, where the shade is laid on with the black lead and stump, and every human power exerted to make it look like a kitchen-grate well polished. Oppose to this the drawing even of our somewhat § 19* How foi- inferior tree-painters. I will not insult Harding by ^ick^ mentioning his work after it, but take Creswick, for instance, and match one of his sparkling bits of green leafage with this tree pattern of Poussin’s. I do not say there is not a dignity and impressiveness about the § 20. Perfect unity in na- ture’s foliage. 394 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. [PART II. old landscape, owing to its simplicity ; and I am very far from calling Creswick’s good tree-painting, it is false in colour and deficient in mass and freedom, and has many other defects, but it is the work of a man who has sought earnestly for truth ; and who, with one thought or memory of nature in his heart, could look at the two landscapes, and receive Poussin’s with ordinary patience ? Take Creswick in black and white, where he is unembarrassed by his fondness for pea- green, the illustrations for instance to the “ Nut-brown Maid,” in the Book of English Ballads. Look at the intricacy and fulness of the dark oak foliage where it bends over the brook, see how you can go through it, and into it, and come out behind it to the quiet bit of sky. Observe the grey, aerial transparency of the stunted copse on the left, and the entangling of the boughs where the light near foliage detaches itself. Above all, note the forms of the masses of light. Not things like scales or shells, sharp at the edge and flat in the middle, but irregular and rounded, stealing in and out accidentally from the shadow, and presenting, as the masses of all trees do, in general outline, a re- semblance to the specific forms of the leaves of which they are composed. Turn over the page, and look into the weaving of the foliage and sprays against the dark night-sky, how near they are, yet how untraceable ; see how the moonlight creeps up underneath them, trembling and shivering on the silver boughs above ; note also, the descending bit of ivy on the left, of which only two leaves are made out, and the rest is confusion, or tells only in the moonlight like faint flakes of snow. But nature observes another principle in her foliage more important even than its intricacy. She always secures an exceeding harmony and repose. She is so intricate that her minuteness of parts becomes to the eye, at a little distance, one united veil or cloud of leaves, to destroy the evenness of which is perhaps a SEC. VI. CHAP. 1.] OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 395 greater fault than to destroy its transparency. Look at Creswick’s oak again, in its dark parts. Intricate as it is, all is blended into a cloud-like harmony of shade, which becomes fainter and fainter, as it retires, with the most delicate flatness and unity of tone. And it is by this kind of vaporescence, so to speak, by this flat, misty unison of parts, that nature, and her faithful followers, are enabled to keep the eye in perfect repose in the midst of profusion, and to display beauty of form, wherever they choose, to the greatest possible advantage, by throwing it across some quiet, visionary passage of dimness and rest. Now it is here that Hobbima and Both fail. They § 21. Total can paint oak leafage faithfully, but do not know where Both and Hob to stop, and by doing too much, lose the truth of all, — lose the very truth of detail at which they aim, for all their minute work only gives two leaves to nature’s twenty. They are evidently incapable of even thinking of a tree, much more of drawing it, except leaf by leaf ; they have no notion nor sense of simplicity, mass, or obscurity, and when they come to distance, where it is totally impossible that leaves should be separately seen, yet being incapable of conceiving or rendering the grand and quiet forms of truth, they are reduced to paint their bushes with dots and touches expressive of leaves three feet broad each.* Nevertheless there is a genuine aim in their works, and their failure is rather to be attributed to ignorance of art, than to such want of sense for nature as we find in Claude or Poussin ; and w'hen they come close home, we sometimes receive from them fine passages of mechanical truth. But let us oppose to their works the group of trees ^ 22. How ren on the left in Turner’s “ Marly.” We have there ^ perfect and ceaseless intricacy to oppose to Poussin, — perfect and unbroken repose, to oppose to Hobbima ; and in the unity of these the perfection of truth. This * Compare Sec. II., Chap. IV., § 16. 396 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. [pART II. group may be taken as a fair standard of Turner’s tree- painting. We have in it the admirably drawn stems, instead of the claws or the serpents ; full, transparent, boundless intricacy, instead of the shell pattern, and misty depth of intermingled light and leafage, instead of perpetual repetition of one mechanical touch. §23. The near j have already spoken (Sec. II. Ch. IV. § 15) of the 168,13 g*G or , 1 • 1 T • • Claude. His way in which mystery and intricacy are carried even tam:es^aregood nearest leaves of the foreground, and noticed the want of such intricacy even in the best works of the old masters. Claude’s are particularly deficient, for by representing every particular leaf of them, or trying to do so, he makes nature finite, and even his nearest bits of leafage are utterly false, for they have neither shadows modifying their form, (compare Sec. II. Chap. III. § 7.) nor sparkling lights, nor confused intersec- tions of their own forms and lines, and the perpetual repetition of the same shape of leaves and the same ar- rangement, relieved from a black ground, is more like an ornamental pattern for dress than the painting of a foreground. Nevertheless, the foliage of Claude, in his middle distances, is the finest and truest part of his pictures, and on the whole, affords the best example of good drawing to be found in ancient art. It is always false in colour, and has not boughs enough amongst it, and the stems commonly look a great deal nearer than any part of it, but it is still graceful, flexible, abundant, intricate ; and in all but colour and connection with stems, very nearly right. Of the perfect painting of thick, leafy foreground. Turner’s “ Mercury and Argus,” and “ Okehampton,” are the standards. §24. Universal The last and most important truth to be observed re- trees in symme- specting trees, is that their boughs always, in finely trical curved, grown individuals, bear among themselves such a ratio Their ideal .... form. of length as to describe with their extremities a sym- metrical curve, constant for each species, and within this curve all the irregularities, segments, and divisions 397 SEC. VI. CHAP. I.] OP TRUTH OF VEGETATION. of the tree are included, each hough reaching the limit with its extremity, but not passing it. When a tree is perfectly grown, each bough starts from the trunk with just so much wood as, allowing for constant ramification, will enable it to reach the terminal line, or if by mistake, it start with too little, it will proceed without ramifying till within a distance where it may safely divide ; if on the contrary it start with too much, it will ramify quickly and constantly, or, to express the real operation more accurately, each bough, growing on so as to keep even with its neighbours, takes so much wood from the trunk as is sufficient to enable it to do so, more or less in proportion as it ramifies fast or slowly. In badly grown trees, the boughs are apt to fall short of the curve, or at least, there are so many jags and openings that its symmetry is interrupted, and in young trees, the impatience of the upper shoots frequently breaks the line ; but in perfect and mature trees, every bough does its duty completely, and the line of curve is quite filled up, and the mass within it unbroken, so that the tree assumes the shape of a dome, as in the oak, or, in tall trees, of a pear, with the stalk downmost. This §25. Altogether then is the ideal or perfect form of a tree, that to which theoWmastew all approximate, while few attain. The old masters paid Always given . 1 1 • . • • 1 Turner. no attention whatsoever to this great principle, ihey swing their boughs about, anywhere and everywhere ; each stops or goes on just as it likes, nor will it be possible, in any of their works, to find a single example in which any symmetrical curve is indicated by the ex- tremities. * * Perhaps, in some instances, this may he the case with the trees of Nicholas Poussin ; but even with him, the boughs only touch the line of limit with their central points of extremity, and are not sectors of the great curve — forming a part of it with expanded extremities, as in nature. Draw a few straight lines, from the centre to the circumference of a circle. The forms included between them, are the forms of the indi- vidual boughs of a fine tree, with all their ramifications (only the external curve is not a circle, but more frequently two parabolas — which, I be- 398 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. [PART II. § 26. Connec- tion in foliage between truth and beauty. ^ 27. Foliage of Harding, Fielding, and other modern painters. But I need scarcely tell any one in the slightest degree acquainted with the works of Turner, how rigidly and constantly he adheres to this principle of nature ; taking in his highest compositions the perfect ideal form, every spray being graceful and varied in itself, but inevitably terminating at the assigned limit, and filling up the curve without break or gap ; in his lower works, taking less perfect form, but invariably hinting the constant tendency in all, and thus, in spite of his abundant complexity, he arranges his trees under simpler and grander forms than any other artist, even among the moderns. The tree in the “ Mercury and Argus ” is the most perfect example I remember of the pure ideal form. Let me then close the investigation of the truth of nature with this link between the true and the beauti- ful, for we may always assume that the ideal or perfect form of any object is the most beautiful it can possibly assume, and that it can be only diseased taste in us which dislikes it, if we ever find ourselves doing so. And I shall prove hereafter that this perfect form of trees is not only the most beautiful which they can assume, but one of the most perfect which can be pre- sented to the eye by any means or object. And espe- cially in foliage, nothing can be true which is not beautiful, so that we shall be far better able to trace the essential qualities of truth in tree-drawing, and especially the particular power of Turner, when we are enabled to speak of grace as well as of accuracy. We have before expressed our admiration of the works of J. D. Harding for general drawing of trees, and we may once again refer to them as an illustration of every truth we have been pointing out in foliage. We only wish they were cari;ied a little farther and lieve, it is in the oak — or an ellipse). But each bough of the old masters is club-shaped, and broadest, not at the outside of the tree, but a little way towards its centre. 399 SEC. VI. CHAP. I.] OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. finer. We should enjoy a little more of the making out which we find in Claude’s foreground, to give greater value to his brilliant execution ; and we should like a little more attention paid to specific character of trees, and to the designing of the boughs. Harding’s boughs are always right, always flexible and growing ; but they are not always so put together, that v^e wonder how anything so beautiful could ever have been conceived. There is not a distinct design of perfect beauty in every spray, which there always is in nature. Callcott’s foliage is very refined and ideal, very fault- less, though apt to be dreadfully cold in colour. Stan- field is sometimes awkward, though not exactly wrong ; he inserted his stone-pine into the road at Pozzuoli like a sign-post. Copley Fielding is very wild, intricate, and graceful, wanting only in dignity; he should also remember that leaves, here and there, both have and show sharp edges. Creswick I have already noticed. Cattermole is very grand in his conception of form ; and many others of our water-colour painters have pro- duced instructive passages.* * It may not, perhaps, be out of place to protest against the mode in which the foliage is executed in Mr. Moon’s publication of Roberts’s Eastern Sketches. So magnificent a work should have been put only into first-rate hands, and there is much about it unsatisfactory in every way; partly from attempting too much, but chiefiyfrom the incapability of the hands employed on the landscape. No one but Harding should have executed the foliage ; and, at any rate, a good draughtsman should have been secured for the foregrounds. I know not whose work they are ; but they are a libel on Mr. Roberts, whose foliage is always beauti- ful and artistical, if not very carefully studied. 400 [part II. CHAPTER n. GENERAL REMARKS RESPECTING THE TRUTH OF TURNER. ^ 1. No neces- We have now arrived at some general conception of ki to extent of Turner’s knowledge, and the truth of his practice, by the deliberate examination of the charac- teristics of the four great elements of landscape, — sky, earth, water and vegetation. I have not thought it ne- cessary to devote a chapter to architecture, because there is nothing in the nature of the thing itself, with which the ordinary observer is not sufficiently acquainted to be capable of forming a pretty accurate judgment of the truth of its representation ; and the difference be- tween one artist and another, in architectural drawing, does not depend so much upon knowledge of actual form, in which it is here impossible grossly to err, as on the representation of that form with more able appli- cation of the general laws of chiaroscuro and colour, or with greater precision and delicacy of execution. The difference betw'ecn Roberts and Turner, as architectu- ral draughtsmen, does not depend on any greater know- ledge in one or another of the channelling of triglyphs, or the curvature of volutes, but on the application of general principles of art to develope and adorn such § 2. Because truths. The execution which is good and desirable in dependent only drawing a stone on the ground channelled by frost, is mode of execu- equally good and desirable m drawing a stone in a ledge^o^genmi building channelled by the chisel. He who can do the principles. 401 SEC. \'I. CHAP. II.] GENERAL REMARKS, ETC. one can far more easilj’do the other, for architecture requires only a simple and straight-forward application of those rules of which every other material object of a landscape has required a most difficult and complicated application. Consequently its general truths are within the reach of even the most inferior draughtsmen, and are at the fingers’ ends of every engineer’s apprentice. It is disgraceful to misrepresent them, but it is no honour to draw them well. It is disgraceful, for in- stance, that any man should commit such palpable and atrocious errors in ordinary perspective as are seen in the quay in Claude’s sea-piece. No. 14, National Gallery, or in the curved portico of No. 30 j but still these are not points to be taken into consideration as having anything to do with artistical rank, just as, though we should say it was disgraceful if a great poet could not spell, we should not consider such a defect as in any way taking from his poetical rank. There is nothing particularly belonging to architecture, as such, w'hich it is any credit to an artist to observe or repre- sent, it is only a simple and clear field for the manifesta- tion of his knowledge of general laws. Any surveyor or engineer could have drawn the steps and balustrade in the “ Hero and Leander,” as well as Turner has ; but there is no man living but himself who could have thrown the accidental shadows upon them. I may, however, refer to what has already been said § 3. Notice of a upon the subject in Sect. II. Chap. IV. § 6, 12, 13, (and note) and 14, and I may point for general illustra- of Turner’s ar- ciiitcctur 0 tion of Turner’s power as an architectural draughtsman to the front of “ Rouen Cathedral,” engraved in the Rivers of France, and to the “ Ely” in the England. I know nothing in art which can be set beside the former of these for overwhelming grandeur and simpli- city of effect, and inexhaustible intricacy of parts. The ‘‘ Modern Italy” may be adduced as a standard of the drawing of architectural distance. But so much of the D D § 4. Extreme difficulty of il- lustrating or explaining the highest truth. 402 GENERAL REMARKS RESPECTING [PART II. excellence of all these pictures depends, partly on con- siderations of principles of beauty, not yet developed, partly on expression of local character, and systematized illustration of part by part, of which we cannot yet take cognizance, that we should only do harm by entering upon close criticism of these works at present. I have only therefore a few remarks to make upon the general character of all those truths which we have been hi- therto endeavouring to explain and illustrate. The difference in the accuracy of the lines of the Torso of the Vatican, (the Maestro of M. Angelo,) from those in one of M. Angelo’s finest works, could perhaps scarcely be appreciated by any eye or feeling undisciplined by the most perfect and practical anatomical knowledge. It rests on points of such traceless and refined delicacy, that though we feel them in the result, we cannot follow them in the details. Yet they are such and so great, as to place the Torso alone in art, solitary and supreme, while the finest of M. Angelo’s works, con- sidered with respect to truth alone, are said to be only on a level with antiques of the second class, under the Apollo and the Venus, that is, two classes or grades below the Torso. But suppose the best sculptor in the world, possessing the most entire appreciation of the excellence of the Torso, were to sit down, pen in hand, to try and tell us, wherein the peculiar truth of each line consisted? Could any words that he could use, make us feel the hair’s-breadth of depth and distance on which all depends ? or end in anything more than bare assertions of the inferiority of this line to that, which if we did not perceive for ourselves, no explanation could ever illustrate to us. He might as well endea- vour to explain to us by words some taste or other sub- ject of sense, of which we had no experience. And so it is with all truths of the highest order ; they are sepa- rated from those of average precision by points of extreme delicacy, which none but the cultivated eye 403 SEC. VI. CHAP. II.] THE TRUTH OF TURNER. can in the least feel, and to express which, all words are absolutely meaningless and useless. Consequently 5 5- The^osi- in all that I have been saying of the truth of artists, I TumeTis hi no have been able to point out only coarse, broad and degree shown explicable matters ; I have been perfectly unable to ex- ing^pages,^but press (and indeed I have made no endeavour to express) the finely drawn and distinguished truth in which all the real excellence of art consists. All those truths which I have been able to explain and demonstrate in Turner, are such as any artist of ordinary powers of observation ought to be capable of rendering. It is disgraceful to omit them; but it is no very great credit to observe them. I have in- deed proved that they have been neglected, and disgrace- fully so, by those men who are commonly considered the Fathers of Art ; but in showing that they have been observed by Turner, I have only proved him to be above other men in knowledge of truth, I have not given any conception of his own positive rank as a Painter of Nature. But it stands to reason, that the men, who in broad, simple, and demonstrable matters are perpetually violating truth, will not be particularly accurate or care- ful in carrying out delicate and refined, and undemon- strable matters ; and it stands equally to reason, that the man, who, as far as argument or demonstration can go, is found invariably truthful, will, in all probability, be truthful to the last line, and shadow of a line. And § 6. The ex- such is, indeed, the case with every touch of this con- menrof summate artist; the essential excellence — all that con- truth, stitutes the real and exceeding value of his works, is beyond and above expression : it is a truth inherent in every line, and breathing in every hue, too delicate and exquisite to admit of any kind of proof, nor to be ascer- tained except by the highest of tests — the keen feeling attained by extended knowledge and long study. Two lines are laid on canvass ; one is right and another Wrong. There is no difference between them appreci- able by the compasses — none appreciable by the ordi- D D 2 § 7. There is nothing in his works which can he enjoyed without know- ledge. ^ 8. And no- thing which knowledge will not enable us to enjoy. 404 GENEHAL REMARKS RESPECTING [PART II- nary eye — none which can be pointed out, if it is not seen. One person feels it : — another does not ; but the feeling or sight of the one can by no words be commu- nicated to the other : it would be unjust if it could, for that feeling and sight have been the reward of years of labour. And there is, indeed, nothing in Turner, — not one dot nor line, whose meaning can be understood without knowledge ; because he never aims at sensual impressions, but at the deep final truth, which only meditation can discover, and only experience recognize. There is nothing done or omitted by him, which does not imply such a comparison of ends, such rejection of the least worthy (as far as they are incompatible with the rest), such careful selection and arrangement of all that can be united, as can only be enjoyed by minds capable of going through the same process, and disco- vering the reasons for the choice. And, as there is nothing in his works which can be enjoyed without knowledge, so there is nothing in them which know- ledge will not enable us to enjoy. There is no test of our acquaintance with Nature, so absolute and unfail- ing, as the degree of admiration we feel for Turner’s painting. Precisely as we are shallow in our know- ledge, vulgar in our feeling, and contracted in our views of principles, will the works of this artist be stumbling- blocks or foolishness to us : — precisely in the degree in which we are familiar with Nature, constant in our observation of her, and enlarged in our understanding of her, will they expand before our eyes into glory and beauty. In every new insight which we obtain into the works of God, in every new idea which we receive from His creation, we shall find ourselves possessed of an interpretation and a guide to something in Turner’s works which we had notkefore understood. We may range over Europe, from shore to shore ; and from every rock that we tread upon, every sky that passes over ^ our heads, every local form of vegetation or of soil, we SEC. VI. CHAP. II.] THE TRUTH OF TURNER. 405 shall receive fresh illustration of his principles — fresh confirmation of his facts. We shall feel, wherever we go, that he has been there before us — whatever we see, that he has seen and seized before us ; and we shall at last cease the investigation, with a well-grounded trust, that whatever we have been unable to account for, and what we still dislike in his works, has reason for it, and foundation like the rest ; and that even where he has failed or erred, there is a beauty in the failure, which none are able to equal, and a dignity in the error, which none are worthy to reprove. There has been marked and constant progress in his § 9. His former mind ; he has not, like some few artists, been without childhood, his course of study has been as evidently as it has been swiftly, progressive, and in different stages of the struggle, sometimes one order of truth, some- time another, has been aimed at or omitted. But from the beginning to the present height of his career, he has never sacrificed a greater truth to a less. As he advanced, the previous knowledge or attainment was absorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if in- compatible, and never abandoned without a gain ; and § lo. standing his present works present the sum and perfection of his worksf^^Th^ir accumulated knowledge, delivered with the impatience mystery is the^ and passion of one who feels too much, and knows too thek fidnesl ° much, and has too little time to say it in, to pause for expression or ponder over his syllables. There is in them the obscurity, but the truth, of prophecy ; the in- stinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered more, which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand, and the vain- ness of the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of his life ; he knoAvs her now too well, he cannot palter over 406 GENERAL, REMARKS, ETC. [part II. the material littlenesses of her outward form, he must give her soul, or he has done nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, and the earth, and the oil. “ I cannot gather the sunbeams out of the east, or I would make them tell you what I have seen ; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night-sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read this and interpret this, and let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me ; for I will give you no patient mockery, no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am and whom I serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me ; but remember, that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery,” 407 SEC. VI.] CHAPTER III. CONCLUSION. — MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. We have only, in conclusion, to offer a few generaH i- The entire 1 . T .17 • prominence remarks respecting modern art and modern criticism. hitherto given We wish, in the first place, to remove the appearance the works of the examination of what is beautiful and expressive in art, we shall frequently find distinctive qualities in the minds even of inferior artists, which have led them to the pursuit and embodying of particular trains of thought, altogether different from those which direct the compositions of other men, and incapable of com- parison with them. Now, when this is the case, we should consider it in the highest degree both invidious and illogical, to say of such different modes of exertion of the intellect, that one is in all points greater or nobler than another. We shall probably find some- thing, in the working of all minds, which has an end and a power peculiar to itself, and which is deserving of free and full admiration, without any reference whatsoever to what has, in other fields, been accom- plished by other modes of thought, and directions of aim. We shall, indeed, find a wider range and grasp in one man than in another ; but yet it will be our own minence ffiven in the present portion of the work to being able D ^ r 1 ^ to take cogm- the productions of one artist, can scarcely fail of bear- zance of c/ta- ing in the minds of most readers. When we pass to racier. 408 MODERN ART AND [part II § 2. The feel- ings of different artists are inca- pable of full comparison. § 3. But the fidelity and truth of each are capable of real compari- son. fault if we do not discover something in the most limited range of mind, which is different from, and in its way, better than any thing presented to us by the more grasping intellect. We all know that the night- ingale sings more nobly than the lark ; but who, there- fore, would wish the lark not to sing, or would deny that it had a character of its own, w^hich bore a part among the melodies of creation no less es- sential than that of the more richly-gifted bird ? And thus we shall find and feel that whatever difference may exist between the intellectual powers of one artist and another, yet wherever there is any true genius, (true sensibility, that is,) there will be some peculiar lesson which even the humblest will teach us more sweetly and perfectly than those far above them in prouder at- tributes of mind ; and we should be as mistaken as we should be unjust and invidious, if we refused to receive this their peculiar message with gratitude and venera- tion, merely because it was a sentence and not a volume. But the case is different when we examine their rela- tive fidelity to given facts. That fidelity depends on no peculiar modes of thought or habits of character, it is the result of keen sensibility, combined with high powers of memory and association. These qualities, as such, are the same in all men ; character or feeling may direct their choice to this or that object, but the fidelity with which they treat either the one or the other, is de- pendent on those simple powers of sense and intellect which are like and comparable in all, and of which we can always say that they are greater in this man, or less in that, without reference to the character of the indi- vidual. Those feelings which direct Cox to the paint- ing of wild, weedy banks and cool, melting skies, and those which directed Barret to the painting of glowing foliage and melancholy twilight, are both just and beautiful in their way, and are both worthy of high praise and gratitude, without necessity, nay, without SEC. VI, CHAP. III.] MODERN CRITICISM. 409 proper possibility of comparing one with the other. But the degree of fidelity with which the leaves of the one, and the light of the other, are rendered, depends upon faculties of sight, sense, and memory common to both, and perfectly comparable, and we may say fearlessly, and without injustice, that one or the other, as the case may be, is more faithful in that which they have chosen to represent. It is also to be remembered that these § 4. Especially faculties of sense and memory are not partial in their are equaiiy^ma- effect, they will not induce fidelity in the rendering of one class of object, and fail of doing so in another, subjects. They act equally, and with equal results, whatever may be the matter subjected to them; the same delicate sense which perceives the utmost grace of the fibres of a tree, wull be equally unerring in tracing the character of cloud ; and the quick memory which seizes and re - tains the circumstances of a flying effect of shadow or colour, will be equally effectual in fixing the impression of the instantaneous form of a moving figure or a breaking wave. There are indeed one or two broad distinctions in the nature of the senses, — a sensibility to colour, for instance, being very different from a sensi- bility to form ; so that a man may possess one without the other, and an artist may succeed in mere imitation of what is before him, of air, sunlight, &c., without pos- sessing sensibility at all. But wherever we have, in the drawing of any one object, sufficient evidence of real intellectual power, of the sense which perceives the es- sential qualities of a thing, and the judgment which arranges them so as to illustrate each other, we may be quite certain that the same sense and judgment will operate equally on whatever is subjected to them, and that the artist will be equally great and masterly in his drawing of all that he attempts. Hence we may be § 5. No man quite sure that wherever an artist appears to he truthful he^can^ in one branch of art, and not in another, the apparent nothing truth is either owing to some trickery of imitation, or 410 MODERN ART AND [part II. is not SO great as we suppose it to be. In nine cases out of ten, people who are celebrated for drawing only one thing, and can only draw one thing, draw that one thing worse than anybody else. An artist may indeed confine himself to a limited range of subject, but if he be really true in his rendering of this, his power of doing more will be perpetually showing itself in acces- saries and minor points. There are few men, for instance, more limited in subject than Hunt, and yet I do not think there is another man in the old water- colour, with so keen an eye for truth, or with power so universal. And this is the reason for the exceeding prominence which in the foregoing investigation one or two artists have always assumed over the rest, for the habits of accurate observation and delicate powers of hand which they possess, have equal effect, and main- tain the same superiority in their works, to whatever class of subject they may be directed. And thus w^e have been compelled, however unwillingly, to pass hastily by the works of many gifted men, because, how- ever pure their feeling, or original their conceptions, they were w^anting in those faculties of the hand and mind which ensure perfect fidelity to nature : it will be only hereafter, when we are at liberty to take full cogni- zance of the thought, however feebly it may be clothed in language, that we shall be able to do real justice to the disciples either of modern or of ancient art. $ 6. General But as far as we have gone at present, and with re- conclusions to , , • 7 i ^ be derived from spect onlj to the material truths which is all that we tigaUon! investigate, the conclusion to which w^e must be led is as clear as it is inevitable, that modern artists, as a body, are far more just and full in their views of material things than any landscape painters whose works are extant, — but that J. M. W. Turner is the only man who has ever given an entire transcript of the whole system of nature, and is, in this point of SEC. VI. CHAP. III.] MODERN CRITICISM. 411 view, the only perfect landscape painter whom the world has ever seen. Nor are we disposed to recede from our assertion § 7. Truth, a made in Sec. I. Ch. I. § 10, that this material truth is exceUence!^ indeed a perfect test of the relative rank of painters, though it does not in itself constitute that rank. We shall be able to prove that truth and beauty, knowledge and imagination, invariably are associated in art, and we shall be able to show that not only in truth to nature, but in all other points. Turner is the greatest landscape painter who has ever lived. But his superi- ority is, in matters of feeling, one of kind, not of degree. Superiority of degree implies a superseding of others, superiority of kind only sustaining a more important, but not more necessary, part, than others. If truth were all that we required from art, all other painters might cast aside their brushes in despair, for all that they have done, he has done more fully and accurately; but when we pass to the higher require- ments of art, beauty and character, their contributions are all equally necessary and desirable, because diffe- rent, and however inferior in position or rank, are still perfect of their kind ; their inferiority is only that of the lark to the nightingale, or of the violet to the rose. Such then is the rank and standing of our modern §8. Modem • • criticism * artists. We have, living with us, and painting for us, changefulness the greatest painter of all time; a man with whose supremacy of power no intellect of past ages can be put in comparison for a moment. Let us next enquire what is the rank of our critics. Public taste, I believe, as far as it is the encourager and supporter of art, has been the same in all ages, — a fitful and vacillating current of vague impression, perpetually liable to change, sub- ject to epidemic desires, and agitated by infectious passion, the slave of fashion, and the fool of fancy, but yet always distinguishing with singular clear- sightedness, between that which is best and that which 412 MODERN ART AND [PART II. is worst of the particular class of food which its morbid appetite may call for ; never failing to distinguish that which is produced by intellect, from that which is not, though it may be intellect degraded by ministering to § 9. Yet asso- jfg misguided will. Public taste may thus degrade a dated with a iir.ii., ® certain degree race ot men Capable of the highest efforts in art, into of judgment, portrait painters of ephemeral fashions, but it will yet not fail of discovering who, among these portrait painters, is the man of most mind. It will separate the man who would have become Buonaroti from the man who would have become Bandinelli, though it will employ both in painting curls, and feathers, and bracelets. Hence, generally speaking, there is no comparative injustice done, no false elevation of the fool above the man of mind, provided only that the man of mind will condescend to supply the par- ticular article which the public chooses to want. Of course a thousand modifying circumstances interfere with the action of the general rule, but, taking one case with another, we shall very constantly find the price which the picture commands in the market a pretty fair standard of the artist’s rank of intellect. §^10. Duty of The press, therefore, and all who pretend to lead the ^ public taste, have not so much to direct the multitude whom to go to, as what to ask for. Their business is not to tell us which is our best painter, but to tell us whether we are making our best painter do his best. $ 11 . Qualifica- Now none are capable of doing this, but those whose foTdischrrgln^ principles of judgment are based both on thorough it- practical knowledge of art, and on broad general views of what is true and right, without reference to what has been done at one time or another, or in one school or another. Nothing can be more perilous to the cause of art, than the constant ringing in our painters’ ears of the names of great predecessors, as their examples or masters. I had rather hear a great poet, entirely origi- nal in his feeling and aim, rebuked or maligned for not 413 SEC. VI. CHAP. HI.] MODERN CRITICISM, being like Wordsworth or Coleridge, than a great painter criticised for not putting us in mind of Claude or Poussin. But such references to former excellence are the only refuge and resource of persons endeavouring to be critics, without being artists. They cannot tell you whether a thing is right or not ; but they can tell you whether it is like something else or not. And the § 12. General whole tone of modern criticism — as far as it is worthy modern^crkicl of being called criticism — sufficiently shows it to pro- ceed entirely from persons altogether unversed in prac- tice, and ignorant of truth, but possessing just enough of feeling to enjoy the solemnity of ancient art, who, not distinguishing that which is really exalted and valuable in the modern school, nor having any just idea of the real ends or capabilities of landscape art, consider no- thing right which is not based on the conventional principles of the ancients, and nothing true, which has more of nature in it than of Claude. But it is a strange § 13- And in- thing, that while the noble and unequalled works of^ithth^- modern landscape painters are thus maligned and mis- selves, understood, our historical painters — such as we have — are permitted to pander more fatally every year to the vicious English taste, which can enjoy nothing but what is theatrical, entirely unchastised, nay, encouraged and lauded by the very men who endeavour to hamper our great landscape painters with rules derived from consecrated blunders. The very critic who has just passed one of the noblest works of Turner — that is to say, a masterpiece of art, to which Time can show no parallel — with a ribald jest, and who can find nothing better to say of a perfect composition of Callcott, but that its trees have the “ wav^ look of Claude’s,” will yet stand gaping in admiration before the next piece of dramatic glitter and grimace, suggested by the society, and adorned with the appurtenances of the green room,* • We have very great respect for Mr. Maclise’s power as a draughts- man , and if we thought that his errors proceeded from weakness, we should $ 14. How the press may real- ly advance the cause of art. 414 MODERN ART AND [PART II. which he finds hung low upon the wall as a brilliant example of the ideal of English art. It is natural enough indeed, that the persons who are disgusted by what is pure and noble, should be delighted with what is vicious and degraded ; but it is singular that those who are constantly talking of Claude and Poussin, should never even pretend to a thought of Raffaelle. We could excuse them for not comprehending Turner, if they only would apply the same cut-and-dried criti- cisms where they might be applied with truth, and productive of benefit ; but we endure not the paltry compound of ignorance, false taste, and pretension, which assumes the dignity of classical feeling, that it may be able to abuse whatever is above the level of its understanding, but bursts into genuine rapture with all that is meretricious, if sufficiently adapted to the calibre of its comprehension. To notice such criticisms, however, is giving them far more importance than they deserve. They can lead none astray but those whose opinions are absolutely valueless, and we did not begin this chapter with any intent of wasting our time on these small critics, but in the hope of pointing out to the periodical press what kind of criticism is now most required by our school of landscape art, and how it may be in their power, if they will, to regulate its impulses, without checking its energies, and really to advance both the cause of the artist, and the taste of the public. not allude to them ; but we most devoutly wish that he would let Shakespeare alone. If the Irish ruffian who appeared in “ Hamlet” last year had been gifted with a stout shillelagh ; and if his state of prostra- tion had been rationally accounted for, by distinct evidence of a recent ‘'compliment ” on the crown ; or if the maudlin expression of the young lady christened “ Ophelia” had been properly explained by an empty gin-bottle on her lap ; we should have thanked him for his powerful delineation both of character and circumstance. But we cannot permit him thus to mislead the English public (unhappily too easily led by any grinning and glittering fantasy), in all their conceptions of the intention of Shakespeare. SEC. VI. CHAP. III.] MODERN CRITICISM. 415 One of the most morbid symptoms of the general $ 15, Morbid . ,1 •, c fondness at the taste 01 the present day, is a too great fondness for un- present day for finished works. Brilliancy and rapidity of execution are unfinished everywhere sought as the highest good, and so that a picture be cleverly handled as far as it is carried, little regard is paid to its imperfection as a whole. Hence some artists are permitted, and others compelled, to con- fine themselves to a manner of working altogether de- structive of their powers, and to tax their energies, not to concentrate the greatest quantity of thought on the least possible space of canvass, but to produce the greatest quantity of glitter and clap-trap in the shortest possible time. To the idler and the trickster in art, no system can be more advantageous ; but to the man who is really desirous of doing something worth having lived for — to a man of industry, energy, or feeling, w'e believe it to be the cause of the most bitter discouragement. If ever, working upon a favourite subject, or a beloved idea, he is induced to tax his powers to the utmost, and to spend as much time upon his picture as he feels ne- cessary for its perfection, he will not be able to get so high a price for the result, perhaps, of a twelvemonth’s thought, as he might have obtained for half-a-dozen sketches with a forenoon’s work in each, and he is com- pelled either to fall back upon mechanism, or to starve. Now the press should especially endeavour to convince § 16. By which the public that by this purchase of imperfect pictures fraud'them-^' they not only prevent all progress and developement of selves; high talent, and set tricksters and mechanics on a level with men of mind, but defraud and injure themselves. For there is no doubt whatever that, estimated merely by the quantity of pleasure it is capable of conveying, a well-finished picture is worth to its possessor half-a- dozen incomplete ones, and that a perfect drawing is, simply as a source of delight, better worth a hundred guineas than a drawing half as finished is worth thirty. § 17- And in On the other hand the body of our artists should be whichrartists kept in mind, that by indulging the public with rapid 416 MODERN ART AND [PART II. and unconsidered work, they are not only depriving themselves of the benefit, which each picture ought to render to them, as a piece of practice and study, but they are destroying the refinement of general taste, and rendering it impossible for themselves ever to find a market for more careful works, supposing that they were inclined to execute them. Nor need any single artist be afraid of setting the example and producing laboured works, at advanced prices, among the cheap, quick drawings of the day. The public will soon find the value of the complete work, and will be more ready to give a large sum for that which is inexhaustible, than a quota of it for that which they are wearied of in a month. The artist who never lets the price com- mand the picture, will soon find the picture command $ 18 . Necessity the price. And it ought to be a rule with every works*of”a^t painter never to let a picture leave his easel, while it is perfectly. yet capable of improvement, or of having more thought put into it. The general effect is often perfect and pleasing, and not to be improved upon, when the de- tails and facts are altogether imperfect and unsatis- factorjr. It may be difficult — perhaps the most difficult task of art — to complete these details, and not to hurt the general effect ; but until the artist can do this, his art is imperfect and his picture unfinished. That only is a complete picture, which has both the general wholeness and effect of nature, and the inexhaustible perfection of nature’s details. And it is only in the effort to unite these that a painter really improves. By aiming only at details, he becomes a mechanic; by aiming only at generals, he becomes a trickster: his fall in both cases is sure. Two questions the artist has, therefore, always to ask himself, — first, Is my whole right?” Secondly, “ Can my details be added to? Is there a single space in the picture where I can crowd in another thought? Is there a curve in it which I can modulate — a line which I can graduate — a vacancy I can fill ? Is there a single spot which the SEC. VI. CHAP. III.] MODERN CRITICISM. 417 eye by any peering or prying, can fathom or exhaust ? If so, my picture is imperfect; and if, in modulating the line or filling the vacancy, I hurt the general effect, my art is imperfect.” But, on the other hand, though incomplete pictures § 19. Sketches ought neither to be produced nor purchased, careful and real sketches ought to be valued much more highly than they are. Studies in chalk, of landscape, should form a part of every exhibition, and a room should be allotted to drawings and designs of figures in the Academy. We should be heartily glad to see the room which is now devoted to bad drawings of incorporeal and imaginary architecture — of things which never were, and which, thank Heaven ! never will be — oc- cupied instead, by careful studies for -historical pictures; not blots of chiaroscuro, but delicate outlines with the pen or crayon. From young artists, in landscape, nothing ought to § 20 . Brilliancy , , . ,, r j. of execution or be tolerated but simple, bona hde imitation of nature. — efforts at in- They have no business to ape the execution of masters, — to utter weak and disjointed repetitions of other men s young artists, words, and mimick the gestures of the preacher, with- out understanding his meaning, or sharing in his emo- tions. We do not want their crude ideas of composition, their unformed conceptions of the Beautiful, their un- systematized experiments upon the Sublime. We scorn their velocity ; for it is without direction : we reject their decision ; for it is without grounds : we contemn their composition ; for it is without materials : we re- probate their choice ; for it is without comparison. — Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor ima- gine, nor experimentalize ; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of Nature, and tracing the finger of God. Nothing is so bad a symptom, in the work of young artists, as too much dexterity of handling; for it is a sign that they are satisfied with their work, and have tried to do nothing more than E E 418 MODERN ART AND [PART II. were able to do. Their work should be full of $ 21. The duty failures; for these are the signs of efforts. They should an^tli- keep to quiet colours — greys and browns ; and, making dents. the early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to be their object of emulation, should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruc- tion, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing ; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth. Then, when their memo- ries are stored, and their imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads are made of. We will follow them wherever they choose to lead ; we will check at nothing ; they are then our masters, and are fit to be so. They have placed themselves above our criticism, and we will listen to their words, in all faith and humility ; but not unless they themselves have bowed before, in the same submission, to a higher Authority and Master. $ 22. Necessity Among our greater artists, the chief want, at the greatCT artists pi’Gsent day, is that of solemnity and definite purpose. of more single- We have too much picture-manufacturing, too much ness of aim. , . i ^ i making up of lay figures with a certain quantity of foliage, and a certain quantity of sky, and a certain quantity of water, — a little bit of all that is pretty, a little sun, and a little shade, — a touch of pink, and a touch of blue, — a little sentiment, and a little sublimity, and a little humour, and a little antiquarianism, — all very neatly associated in a very charming picture, but not working together for a definite end. Or if the aim be higher, as in the case of Barrett and Varley, we are generally put off with stale repetitions of eternal com- position, — a great tree, and some goats, and a bridge and a lake, and the temple at Tivoli, &c. Now we should like to see our artists working out, with all exertion of their 419 SEC. VI. CHAP. III.] MODERN CRITICISM. concentrated powers, and application of their most exten- sive knowledge, such hints of simple and marked indivi- dual sentiment as they may get from nature at all places, and at all times. Let them take for their subiects some ^ ^3. What p 1 • 1 should be their touch of single, unadulterated feeling, out of the simple general system, and serious parts of nature, looking generally for peace and solemnity rather than for action or magnificence, and let each of their subjects so chosen be different from all the others, but yet part of the same system with all the others, having a planned connection with them, as the sonnets of Wordsworth have among themselves ; and then let each of these chants or sonnets be worked out wdth the most laborious completeness, making separate studies of every inch of it, and going to nature for all the important passages, for she will always supply us with what we want a thousand times better than we can ourselves ; and let only seven or eight such pic- tures be painted in the year, instead of the forty or fifty careless repetitions which we see our more prolific water-colour painters produce at present ; and there can be little doubt that the public will soon understand the thing, and enjoy it, and be quite as willing to give one hundred guineas for each complete and studied poem, as they are now to give twenty for a careless and meaningless sketch. And artists who worked on such a principle would soon find that both their artistical powers, and their fancy, and their imagination, were incalculably strengthened by it, and that they acquired by the pursuit of what was simple, solemn, and individual, the power of becoming when they chose, truly mag- nificent and universal. With respect to the great artist whose works have $ 24. Duty of formed the chief subject of this treatise, the duty of the rerpecr^The press is clear. He is above all criticism, beyond all ofTur- animadversion, and beyond all praise. His works are not to be received as in any way subjects or matters of opinion; but of Faith. We are not to approach them 420 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. [PART II. to be pleased ; but to be taught : not to form a judg- ment ; but to receive a lesson. Our periodical writers, therefore, may save themselves the trouble either of blaming or praising: their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years ; but to impress upon the pub- lic the respect with which they are to be received, and to make request to him, on the part of the people of England, that he would now touch no unimportant work — that he would not spend time on slight or small pictures, but give to the nation a series of grand, con- sistent, systematic, and completed poems, using no means nor vehicle capable of any kind of change. We do not presume to form even so much as a wish, or an idea, respecting the manner or matter of anything pro- ceeding from his hand. We desire only that he would follow out his own thoughts and intents of heart, with- out reference to any human authority. 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They have, in consequence, been undertaken on a scale worthy of the high patronage thus received, and are offered to the public at a much lower price than would otherwise have been possible. 1 . By Ihe Authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Preparing for Publication, in Royal Quarto Parts, Price 10s. each, with beautifully Coloured Plates. THE ZOOLOGY OF THE VOYAGE OE H. M. S. SULPHUE, Under the Command of CAPTAIN SIR EDWARD BELCHER, R.N., C.B., F.R.A.S., &c. Edited and Superintended by RICHARD BRINSLEY HINDS, Esq., Surgeon, R.N., attached to the Expedition. The extensive and protracted Voyage of Her Majesty’s Ship “ Sulphur,” having been produc- tive of many new and valuable additions to Natural History, many of which are of conside- rable scientific interest, it has been determined to publish them in a collected form, with illustrations of such as are hitherto new or unfigured. The collection has been assembled from a variety of countries, embraced within the limits of a voyage prosecuted along the shores of North and South America, among the Islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans and in the circumnavigation of the globe. In many of these, no doubt, the industry and research of previous navigators may have left no very prominent objects unobserved, yet in others there will for some time remain abundant scope for the Naturalist. Among the countries visited by the “ Sulphur,” and which in the present state of science are invested with more particular interest, may be mentioned the Californias, Columbia River, the Northwest coast of America, the Feejee Group (a portion of the Friendly Islands ) New Zealand, New Ireland, New Guinea, China, and Madagascar. ’ Animated by a devotion to science, the following gentlemen have liberally engaged to undertake those departments with which each respectively is best acquainted. The Mammalia will thus be described by Mr. J. E. Gray ; Birds, by Mr. Gould; Fish,' by Dr Richardson ; Crustacea, by Mr. Bell; Shells, by Jlr. Hinds; Radiata, by Mr. J. E. Gray.' PLAN OF PUBLICATION. I. The work will extend to about Twelve Parts, one of which will appear on the 1st of every third month. II. The Parts will be published at the uniform price of Ten Shillings, and it is in- tended that each department shall, as far as possible, be complete in itself. Part L, containing MAMMALIA, by J. E. Gray, Esq., F.R.S., &c., will be published on the 1st of April. 2 . In Royal 4to. Parts, Price 10s. and 12s. each, containing on an average Ten beautifully Coloured Engravings, with descriptive Letterpress, ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ZOOLOGY OE SOUTH AFEICA: Comprising Figures of all the new species of Quadrupeds, Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes, obtained during the Expedition fitted out by “ The Cape of Good Hope Association for exploring Central Africa,” in the years 1834, 1835, and 1836, with Letterpress Descrip- tions, and a Summary of African Zoology. By ANDREW SMITH, M.D., Surgeon to the Forces, and Director of the Expedition. The whole of the Plates are engraved in the highest style of Art, from the Original Drawings taken expressly for this work, and beautifully coloured after Nature. 17 Parts are now published. SIVXITK, £Ii3>£% AWD CO., CORNHIXi£. 11 S(gH31M'S’E]FII(g WOIEIEi Uniform with the ■preceding. THE ZOOLOGY OF THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. BEAGLE, UNDER THE COMMAND OF CAPTAIN FITZROY, R.N. DURING THE YEARS 1832 to 1836, Edited and superintended by CHARLES DARWIN, Esq., M.A, F.R.S. Sec. G.S. Naturalist to the Expedition. Comprising highly-finished representations of the most novel and interesting objects in Natural History, collected during the voyage of the Beagle, witli descriptive Letterpress, and a general Sketch of the Zoology of the Southern Part of South America. Figures are given of many species of animals hitherto unknown or but imperfectly described, together with an account of their habits, ranges, and places of habitation. Tlie collections were chieflv made in the provinces bordering on the Rio Plata, in Patagonia, the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego, Chili, and the Galapagos Archipelago in the Pacific. 18 Parts are now published, containing as under. Nos. 1, 7, 8, and 13. FOSSIL MAMMALIA. By Richard Owen, Esq., F.R.S., Professor of Anatomy and Physiology to the Royal College of Surgeons, London. 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