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 L162 
 
THE WORKS 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN PAINTERS, Vols. I and 11. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER 
 1885 
 
MoDERisr Painters 
 
 BT 
 
 A GEADUATE OF OXFORD 
 
 " Accuse me not 
 Of arrogance, .... 
 If, having walked witli 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 thousand 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 inteUigence." 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 Part I.— II. 
 
 VOLUME I. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER, 
 1S85. 
 
TROWS 
 
 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, 
 NEW YORK. 
 
7 <r6. 1 
 
 r 
 
 o 
 
 THE LANDSCAPE ARTISTS OF ENGLAND 
 
 THIS WORK 
 is respectfully dedicated 
 by their sincere admirer 
 
 The Author 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 The work now laid before the public originated in indig- 
 nation at the shallow and false criticism 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 dem- 
 onstration, 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 completeness, because it advo- 
 cated opinions which, to the ordinary connoisseur, will sound 
 heretical. I now scarcely know whether I should announce 
 it is 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 disscussion of general 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 admiration is honorable, to be in any way 
 affected by the ignorant sarcasms of pretension and affecta- 
 tion. But when public taste seems plunging deeper and 
 deeper into degradation day by day, and when the press 
 
6 
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 universally exerts such power as it possesses to direct the 
 feeling of the nation more completely to all that is theatri- 
 cal, affected, and false in art ; while it vents its ribald buf- 
 fooneries on the most exalted truth, and the hio^hest ideal 
 of landscape, that this or any other age has ever witnessed, 
 it becomes the imperative duty of all who have any percep- 
 tion 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 interests as are likely 
 to be injured by the knowledge of what is good and right, to 
 declare and demonstrate, 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 tenor of the 
 work, as on its incompleteness. I have not entered into 
 systematic criticism of all the painters of the present day ; 
 but I have illustrated 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 have been, not that the present 
 favorite should be admired less, but that the neglected 
 master should be admired more, iind I know that an in- 
 creased 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 Call- 
 cott 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 deprecia- 
 tion of the works of living artists, and these are all cases in 
 which the reputation is so firm and extended, as to suffer 
 
PBEFAGE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 7 
 
 little injury from the opinion of an individual, and where 
 the blame has been warranted and deserved by the desecra- 
 tion of the highest powers. 
 
 Of the old masters I have spoken with far greater free- 
 dom ; but let it be remembered that only a portion of the 
 work is now presented to the public, and it must not be sup- 
 posed, because in that particular portion, and with reference 
 to particular excellencies, I have spoken in constant depre- 
 ciation, 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 
 endeavored to ground altogether on demonstrations which 
 must stand or fall by their own strength, and which ought 
 to involve no more reference 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 
 devoted from his youth to the laborious study of practical 
 art. 
 
 Whatever has been generally affirmed of the old 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 compari- 
 son with works in our own Academy is desirable, to refer to 
 the details 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 regarded the public, of pict- 
 ures 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 Dul- 
 wich Galleries. 
 
 Finally, I have to apologize for the imperfection of a 
 work which I could have wished not to have executed, but 
 
8 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 
 
 with years of reflection and revisal. It is owing to my sense 
 of the necessity of such revisal, that only a portion of the 
 work is now presented to the public ; but that portion is 
 both complete in itself, and is more peculiarly directed 
 against the crying evil which called for instant remedy. 
 Whether I ever completely fulfil my intention, will partly 
 depend upon the spirit in which the present volume is re- 
 ceived. If it be attributed to an invidious spirit, or a desire 
 for the advancement 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 labor in the execution of a task which may tend, however 
 feebly, to the advancement of the cause of real art in Eng- 
 land, and to the honor 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 grati- 
 tude. 
 
 The Author. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 It is allowed by the most able writers on naval and mil- 
 itary tactics, that although the attack by successive divis- 
 ions absolutely requires in the attacking party such an in- 
 herent superiority in quality of force, and such conscious- 
 ness of that superiority, as may enable his front columns, or 
 his leading ships, to support themselves for a considerable 
 period against overwhelming numbers ; it yet insures, if 
 maintained with constancy, the most total ruin of the oppos- 
 ing force. Convinced of the truth, and therefore assured of 
 the ultimate prevalence and victory of the principles which 
 I have advocated, and equally confident that the strength of 
 the cause must give weight to the strokes of even the weak- 
 est of its defenders, I permitted myself to yield to a some- 
 what hasty and hot-headed desire of being, at whatever 
 risk, in the thick of the fire, and began the contest with a 
 part, and that the weakest and least considerable part, of 
 the forces at my disposal. And I now find the volume thus 
 boldly laid before the public in a position much resembling 
 that of the Royal Sovereign at Trafalgar, receiving, unsup- 
 ported, the broadsides of half the enemy's fleet, while unfore- 
 seen circumstances have hitherto prevented, and must yet 
 for a time prevent, my heavier ships of the line from taking 
 any part in the action. I watched the first moments of the 
 struggle with some anxiety for the solitary vessel, — an 
 anxiety which I have now ceased to feel, — for the flag of 
 truth waves brightly through the smoke of the battle, and 
 my antagonists, wholly intent on the destruction of the lead- 
 
10 FEEFAGE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 ing ship, have lost their position and exposed themselves in 
 defenceless disorder to the attack of the following columns. 
 
 If, however, I have had no reason to regret my hasty ad- 
 vance, as far as regards the ultimate issue of the struggle, I 
 have yet found it to occasion much misconception of the 
 character, and some diminution of the influence, of the pres- 
 ent essay. For though the w^ork has been received as only 
 in sanguine moments I had ventured to hope, though I have 
 had the pleasure of knovs^ing that in many instances its prin- 
 ciples have carried with them a strength of conviction 
 amounting to a demonstration of their truth, and that, even 
 w^here it has had no other influence, it has excited interest, 
 suggested inquiry, and prompted to a just*and frank com- 
 parison of Art with Nature ; yet this effect would have been 
 greater still, had not the work been supposed, as it seems to 
 have been by many readers, a completed treatise, containing 
 a systematized statement of the whole of my views on the 
 subject of modern art. Considered as such, it surprises me 
 that the book should have received the slightest attention. 
 For what respect could be due to a writer who pretended to 
 criticise and classify the works of the great painters of land- 
 scape, without developing, or even alluding to, one single 
 principle of the beautiful or sublime ? So far from being a 
 completed essay, it is little more than the introduction to the 
 mass of evidence and illustration which I have yet to bring 
 forward ; it treats of nothing but the initiatory steps of art, 
 states nothing but the elementary rules of criticism, touches 
 only on merits attainable by accuracy of eye and fidelity of 
 hand, and leaves for future consideration every one of the 
 eclectic qualities of pictures, all of good that is prompted by 
 feeling, and of great that is guided by judgment ; and its 
 function and scope should the less have been mistaken, be- 
 cause I have not only most carefully arranged the subject 
 in its commencement, but have given frequent references 
 throughout to the essays by which it is intended to be suc- 
 ceeded, in which I shall endeavor to point out the significa- 
 tion and the value of those phenomena of external nature 
 which I have been hitherto compelled to describe without 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 11 
 
 reference either to their inherent beauty, or to the lessons 
 which may be derived from them. 
 
 Yet, to prevent such misconception in future, I may per- 
 haps be excused for occupying the reader's time w^ith a fuller 
 statement of the feelings vs^ith which the work was under- 
 taken, of its general plan, and of the conclusions and posi- 
 tions which I hope to be able finally to deduce and maintain. 
 
 Nothing, perhaps, bears on the face of it more appearance 
 of folly, ignorance, and impertinence, than any attempt to 
 diminish the honor of those to whom the assent of many 
 generations has assigned a throne ; for the truly great of 
 later times have, almost without exception, fostered in oth- 
 ers the veneration of departed power which they felt them- 
 selves, satisfied in all humility to take their seat at the feet 
 of those whose honor is brightened by the hoariness of time, 
 and to wait for the period when the lustre of many departed 
 days may accumulate on their own heads, in the radiance 
 which culminates as it recedes. The envious and incompe- 
 tent have usually been the leaders of attack, content if, like 
 the foulness of the earth, they may attract to themselves 
 notice by their noisomeness, or, like its insects, exalt them- 
 selves by virulence into visibility. While, however, the envy 
 of the vicious, and the insolence of the ignorant, are occa- 
 sionally shown in their nakedness by futile efforts to degrade 
 the dead, it is worthy of consideration whether they may 
 not more frequently escape detection in successful efforts to 
 degrade the living, — whether the very same malice may not 
 be gratified, the very same incompetence demonstrated in 
 the unjust lowering of present greatness, and the unjust ex- 
 altation of a perished power, as, if exerted and manifested 
 in a less safe direction, would have classed the critic with 
 Nero and Caligula, with Zoilus and Perrault. Be it remem- 
 bered, that the spirit of detraction is detected only when 
 unsuccessful, and receives least punishment where it effects 
 the greatest injury ; and it cannot but be felt that there is 
 as much danger that the rising of new stars should be con- 
 cealed by the mists which are unseen, as that those throned in 
 heaven should be darkened by the clouds which are visible. 
 
12 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 There is, I fear, so much malice in the hearts of most men, 
 that they are chiefly jealous of that praise which can give 
 the greatest pleasure, and are then most liberal of eulogium 
 when it can no longer be enjoyed. They grudge not the 
 whiteness of the sepulchre, because by no honor they can 
 bestow upon it can the senseless corpse be rendered an ob- 
 ject of envy ; but they are niggardly of the reputation 
 which contributes to happiness, or advances to fortune. 
 They are glad to obtain credit for generosity and humility 
 by exalting those who are beyond the reach of praise, and 
 thus to escape the more painful necessity of doing homage 
 to a living rival. They are rejoiced to set up a standard of 
 imaginary excellence, which may enable them, by insisting 
 on the inferiority of a contemporary w^ork to the things that 
 have been, to withdraw the attention from its superiority to 
 the things that are. The same undercurrent of jealousy 
 operates in our reception of animadversion. Men have com- 
 monly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in 
 that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity 
 which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes, than of that which 
 falls impotently on the grave. 
 
 And thus well says the good and deep-minded Richard 
 Hooker: " To the best and wisest, while they live, the world 
 is continually a froward opposite ; and a curious observer of 
 their defects and imperfections, their virtues afterwards it as 
 much admireth. And for this cause, many times that which 
 deserveth admiration would hardly be able to find favor, if 
 they which propose it were not content to profess themselves 
 therein scholars and followers of the ancient. For the world 
 will not endure to hear that we are w^iser than any have been 
 which went before." — Book v. ch. vii. 3. He, therefore, who 
 would maintain the cause of contemporary excellence against 
 that of elder time, must have almost every class of men ar- 
 rayed against him. The generous, because they would not 
 find matter of accusation against established dignities ; the 
 envious, because they like not the sound of a living man's 
 praise ; the wise, because they prefer the opinion of centu- 
 ries to that of days ; and the foolish, because they are in- 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 13 
 
 capable of forming an opinion of their own. Obloquy so 
 universal is not lightly to be risked, and the few who make 
 an effort to stem the torrent, as it is made commonly in 
 favor of their own works, deserve the contempt which is 
 their only reward. Nor is this to be regretted, in its influ- 
 ence on the progress and preservation of things technical 
 and communicable. Respect for the ancients is the 'salvation 
 of art, though it sometimes blinds us to its ends. It in- 
 creases the power of the painter, though it diminishes his 
 liberty; and if it be sometimes an incumbrance to the essays 
 of invention, it is of tener a protection from the consequences 
 of audacity. The w^hole system and discipline of art, the 
 collected results of the experience of ages, might, but for the 
 fixed authority of antiquity, be sw^ept away by the rage of 
 fashion, or lost in the glare of novelty; and the knowledge 
 which it had taken centuries to accumulate, the principles 
 which mighty minds had arrived at only in dying, might be 
 overthrown by the frenzy of a faction, and.abandoned in the 
 insolence of an hour. 
 
 Neither, in its general application, is the persuasion of the 
 superiority of former works less just than useful. The greater 
 number of them are, and must be, immeasurably nobler than 
 any of the results of present effort, because that which is 
 best of the productions of four thousand years must neces- 
 sarily be, in its accumulation, beyond all rivalry from the 
 works of any given generation ; but it should always be re- 
 membered that it is improbable that many, and impossible 
 that all, of such works, though the greatest yet produced, 
 should approach abstract perfection ; that there is certainly 
 something left for us to carry farther, or complete ; that any 
 given generation has just the same chance of producing some 
 individual mind of first-rate calibre, as any of its predeces- 
 sors ; and that if such a mind should arise, the chances are, 
 that with the assistance of experience and example, it would, 
 in its particular and chosen path, do greater things than had 
 been before done. 
 
 We must therefore be cautious not to lose sight of the real 
 use of what has been left us by antiquity, nor to take that 
 
14 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIOK 
 
 for a model of perfection which is, in many cases, ^^^J a 
 guide to it. The picture which is looked to for an interpre- 
 tation of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is taken 
 as a substitute for nature, had better be burned; and the 
 young artist, while he should shrink with horror from the 
 iconoclast who would tear from him every landmark and 
 light which has been bequeathed him by the ancients, and 
 leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally certain of 
 being betrayed by those who would give him the power and 
 the knowledge of past time, and then fetter his strength 
 from all advance, and bend his eyes backward on a beaten 
 path — who would thrust canvas between him and the sky, 
 and tradition between him and God. 
 
 And such conventional teaching is the more to be dreaded, 
 because all that is highest in art, all that is creative and 
 imaginative, is formed and created by every great master for 
 himself, and cannot be repeated or imitated by others. We 
 judge of the excellence of a rising writer, not so much by 
 the resemblance of his works to what has been done before, 
 as by their difference from it; and while we advise him, in 
 his first trials of strength, to set certain models before him 
 with respect to inferior points, — one for versification, another 
 for arrangement, another for treatment, — we yet admit not 
 his greatness until he has broken away from all his models, 
 and struck forth versification, arrangement, and treatment 
 of his own. 
 
 Three points, therefore, I would especially insist upon as 
 necessary to be kept in mind in all criticism of modern art. 
 First, that there are few, very few of even the best produc- 
 tions of antiquity, which are not visibly and palpably imper- 
 fect in some kind or way, and conceivably improvable by 
 farther study; that every nation, perhaps every generation, 
 has in all probability some peculiar gift, some particular 
 character of mind, enabling it to do something different from, 
 or something in some sort better than what has been before 
 done; and that therefore, unless art be a trick, or a manu- 
 facture, of which the secrets are lost, the greatest minds of 
 existing nations, if exerted with the same industry, passion, 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 15 
 
 and honest aim as those of past time, have a chance in their 
 particular walk of doing something as great, or, taking the 
 advantage of former example into account, even greater and 
 better. It is difficult to conceive by what laws of logic some 
 of the reviewers of the following Essay have construed its 
 first sentence into a denial of this principle, — a denial such 
 as their own conventional and shallow criticism of modern 
 works invariably implies. I have said that ^' nothing has 
 been for centuries consecrated by public admiration without 
 possessing in a high degree some species of sterling excel- 
 lence." Does it thence follow that it possesses in the highest 
 degree every species of sterling excellence ? Yet thus," 
 says the sapient reviewer, " he admits the fact against which 
 he mainly argues, — namely, the superiority of these time- 
 honored productions." As if the possession of an abstract 
 excellence of some kind necessarily implied the possession of 
 an incomparable excellence of every kind ! There are few 
 works of man so perfect as to admit of no conception of 
 their being excelled,* — there are thousands which have been 
 for centuries, and will be for centuries more, consecrated by 
 public admiration, which are yet imperfect in many respects, 
 and have been excelled, and may be excelled again. Do my 
 opponents mean to assert that nothing good can ever be 
 bettered, and that what is best of past time is necessarily best 
 of all time ? Perugino, I suppose, possessed some species of 
 sterling excellence, but Perugino was excelled by Raffaelle; 
 and so, Claude possesses some species of sterling excellence, 
 but it follows not that he may not be excelled by Turner. 
 
 The second point on which I would insist is that if a mind 
 were to arise of such power as to be capable of equalling or 
 excelling some of the greatest works of past ages, the pro- 
 ductions of such a mind would, in all probability, be totally 
 different in manner and matter from all former productions; 
 
 * One or two fragments of Greek sculpture, the works of Michael 
 Angelo, considered with reference to their general conception and 
 power, and the Madonna di St. Sisto, are all that I should myself put 
 into such a category, not that even these are without defect, but their 
 defects are such as mortality could never hope to rectify. 
 
16 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 for the more powerful the intellect, the less will its works 
 resemble those of other men, whether predecessors or con- 
 temporaries. Instead of reasoning, therefore, as we com- 
 monly do, in matters of art, that because such and such a 
 work does not resemble that which has hitherto been a 
 canon, therefore it must be inferior and wrong in principle; 
 let us rather admit that there is in its very dissimilarity an 
 increased chance of its being itself a new, and perhaps, a 
 higher canon. If any production of modern art can be shown 
 to have the authority of nature on its side, and to be based 
 on eternal truths, it is all so much more in its favor, so much 
 farther proof of its power, that it is totally different from all 
 that have been before seen.* 
 
 The third point on which I would insist, is that if such a 
 mind were to arise, it would necessarily divide the world of 
 criticism into two factions; the one, necessarily the largest 
 and loudest, composed of men incapable of judging except 
 by precedent, ignorant of general truth, and acquainted only 
 with such particular truths as may have been illustrated or 
 pointed out to them by former works, which class would of 
 course be violent in vituperation, and increase in animosity 
 as the master departed farther from their particular and pre- 
 conceived canons of right, — thus wounding their vanity by 
 impugning their judgment; the other, necessarily narrow of 
 number, composed of men of general knowledge and unbiassed 
 haVjits of thought, who would recognize in the work of the 
 daring innovator a record and illustration of facts before un- 
 
 * This principle is dangerous, but not the less true, and necessary to 
 be kept in mind. There is scarcely any truth which does not admit of 
 being wrested to purposes of evil, and we must not deny the desirable- 
 ness of originality, because men may err in seeking for it, or because a 
 pretence to it may be made, by presumption, a cloak for its incompe- 
 tence. Nevertheless, originality is never to be sought for its own sake — 
 otherwise it will be mere aberration — it should arise naturally out of hard, 
 independent study of nature ; and it should be remembered that in many 
 things technical, it is impossible to alter without being inferior, for 
 therein, as says Spencer, "Truth is one, and right is ever one;" but 
 wrongs are various and multitudinous. ** Vice," says Byron, in Marino 
 Faliero, " must have variety; but Virtue stands like the sun, and all 
 which rolls around drinks lii'e from her aspect.'* 
 
PBEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 17 
 
 seized, who would justly and candidly estimate the value of 
 the truths so rendered, and would increase in fervor of ad- 
 miration as the master strode farther and deeper, and more 
 daringly into dominions before unsearched or unknown; yet 
 diminishing in multitude as they increased in enthusiasm: 
 for by how much their leader became more impatient in his 
 step — more impetuous in his success — more exalting in his 
 research, by so much must the number capable of following 
 him become narrower, until at last, supposing him never to 
 pause in his advance, he might be left in the very culminat- 
 ino; moment of his consummate achievement, with but a 
 faithful few by his side, his former disciples fallen away, his 
 former enemies doubled in numbers and virulence, and the 
 evidence of his supremacy only to be wrought out by the 
 devotion of men's lives to the earnest study of the new 
 truths he had discovered and recorded. 
 
 Such a mind has arisen in our days. It has gone on from 
 strength to strength, laying open fields of conquest peculiar 
 to itself. It has occasioned such schism in the schools of 
 criticism as was beforehand to be expected, and it is now at 
 the zenith of its power, and, consequently, in the last phase 
 of declining popularity. 
 
 This I know, and can prove. No man, says Southey, was 
 ever yet convinced of any momentous truth without feeling 
 in himself the power, as well as the desire of communicating 
 it. In asserting and demonstrating the supremacy of this 
 great master, I shall both do immediate service to the cause 
 of right art, and shall be able to illustrate many principles of 
 landscape painting which are of general application, and 
 have hitherto been unacknowledged. 
 
 For anything like immediate effect on the public mind, I 
 do not hope. " We mistake men's diseases," says Richard 
 Baxter, " when we think there needeth nothing to cure 
 them of their errors but the evidence of truth. Alas! there 
 are many distempers of mind to be removed before they re- 
 ceive that evidence." Nevertheless, when it is fully laid 
 before them, my duty will be done. Conviction will follow 
 in due time. 
 
 Vol. L— 2 
 
18 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SEOOWB EDITION, 
 
 I do not consider myself as in any way addressing, or hav« 
 ing to do with, the ordinary critics of the press. Their writ- 
 ings are not the guide, but the expression, of public opinion. 
 A writer for a newspaper naturally and necessarily endeav- 
 ors to meet, as nearly as he can, the feelings of the ma- 
 jority of his readers ; his bread depends on his doing so. 
 Precluded by the nature of his occupations from gaining 
 any knowledge of art, he is sure that he can gain credit for 
 it by expressing the opinions of his readers. He mocks the 
 picture which the public pass, and bespatters with praise the 
 canvas which a crowd concealed from him. 
 
 Writers like the present critic of Blackwood's Magazine * 
 deserve more respect — the respect due to honest, hopeless, 
 helpless imbecility. There is something exalted in the inno- 
 cence of their feeblemindedness : one cannot suspect them 
 of partiality, for it implies feeling ; nor of prejudice, for it 
 implies some previous acquaintance^ with their subject. I 
 do not know that even in this age of charlatanry, I could 
 point to a more barefaced instance of imposture on the sim- 
 plicity of the public, than the insertion of these pieces of 
 criticism in a respectable periodical. We are not insulted 
 with opinions on music from persons ignorant of its notes ; 
 nor with treatises on philology by persons unacquainted 
 with the alphabet ; but here is page after page of criticism, 
 which one may read from end to end, looking for something 
 which the writer knows, and finding nothing. Not his own 
 language, for he has to look in his dictionary, by his own 
 
 * It is with regret that, in a work of this nature, I take notice of 
 criticisms, which, after all, are merely intended to amuse the careless 
 reader, and be forgotten as soon as read ; but I do so in comphance 
 with wishes expressed to me since the publication of this work, by per- 
 HODs who have the interests of art deeply at heart, and who, I find, 
 attach more importance to the matter than I should have been disposed 
 to do. I have, therefore, marked two or three passages which may 
 enable the public to judge for themselves of the quality of these cri- 
 tiques ; and this I think a matter of justice to those who might other- 
 wise have been led astray by them — more than this I cannot consent to 
 do. I should have but a hound's office if I had to tear the tabard from 
 every Rouge Sanglier of the arts — with bell and bauble to back him. 
 
PBEFAGE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 19 
 
 confession, for a word * occurring in one of the most im- 
 portant chapters of his Bible ; not the commonest traditions 
 of the schools, for he does not know why Poussin was called 
 " learned ; " f not the most simple canons of art, for he pre- 
 fers Lee to Gainsborough ; J not the most ordinary facts of 
 
 * Chrysoprase (Vide No. for October, 1842, p. 502.) 
 
 f Every school- boy knows that this epithet was given to Poussin in 
 allusion to the profound classical knowledge of the painter. The re- 
 viewer, hov\-ever (September, 1841), informs us that the expression re- 
 fers to his skill in " Composition." 
 
 t Critique on Royal Academy, 1842. *'He" (Mr. Lee) often re- 
 minds us of Gainsborough's best manner; hut h.Q superior to him 
 always in subject, composition, and variety." — Shade of Gainsborough ! 
 — deep-thoughted, solemn Gainsborough — forgive us for re- writing this 
 sentence ; we do so to gibbet its perpetrator forever, — and leave him 
 swinging in the winds of the Fool's Paradise. It is with great pain 
 that I ever speak with severity of the works of living masters, espe- 
 cially v/hen, like Mr. Lee's, they are well-intentioned, simple, free from 
 affectation or imitation, and evidently painted with constant reference 
 to nature. But I believe that these qualities will always secure him 
 that admiration which he deserves — that there will be many unsophis- 
 ticated and honest minds always ready to follow his guidance, and 
 answer his efforts with delight; and therefore, that I need not fear to 
 point out in him the want of those technical qualities which are more 
 especially the object of an artist's admiration. Gainsborough's power 
 of color (it is mentioned by Sir Joshua as his peculiar gift) is capable 
 of taking rank beside that of Rubens ; he is the purest colorist — Sir 
 Joshua himself not excepted — of the whole English school ; with him, 
 in fact, the art of painting did in great part die, and exists not now in 
 Europe. J^vidence enough will be seen in the following pages of my 
 devoted admiration of Turner ; but I hesitate not to say, that in 
 management and quality of single and particular tint, in the purely 
 technical part of painting, Turner is a child of Gainsborough. Now, 
 Mr. Lee never aims at color ; he does not make it his object in the 
 slightest degree — the spring green of vegetation is all that he desires ; 
 and it would be about as rational to compare his works with studied 
 pieces of coloring, as the modulation of the Calabrian pipe to the har- 
 mony of a full orchestra. Gainsborough's hand is as light as the sweep 
 of a cloud— as swift as the flash of a sunbeam ; Lee's execution is 
 feeble and spotty. Gainsborough's masses are as broad as the first 
 division in hpaven of lisrht from darkness ; Lee's (perhaps necessarily, 
 con=;ideriug the effects of flickering sunlight at which he aims) are as 
 fragmentary as his leaves, and as numerous. Gamsborough's forms 
 
20 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 nature, for we find him puzzled by the epithet " silver," as 
 applied to the orange blossom, — evidently never having 
 seen anything silvery about an orange in his life, except a 
 spoon. Nay, he leaves us not to conjecture his calibre from 
 internal evidence ; he candidly tells us (Oct. 1842) that he 
 has been studying trees only for the last week, and bases 
 his critical remarks chiefly on his practical experience of 
 birch. More disinterested than our friend Sancho, he would 
 disenchant the public from the magic of Turner by virtue of 
 his own flagellation ; Xanthias-like, he would rob his master 
 of immortality by his own powers of endurance. What is 
 Christopher North about ? Does he receive his critiques 
 from Eaton or Harrow — based on the experience of a 
 week's birds'-nesting and its consequences? How low 
 must art and its interests sink, when the public mind is 
 inadequate to the detection of this effrontery of incapacity ! 
 In all kindness to Maga, we warn her, that, though the 
 nature of this work precludes us from devoting space to the 
 exposure, there may come a time when the public shall be 
 themselves able to distinguish ribaldry from reasoning, and 
 
 are grand, simple, and ideal ; Lee's are small, confused, and unse- 
 lected. Gainsborough never loses sight of his picture as a whole ; Lee 
 is but too apt to be shackled by its parts. In a word, Gainsborough is 
 an immortal painter ; and Lee, though on the right road, is yet in the 
 early stages of his art ; and the man who could imagine any resem- 
 blance or point of comparison between them, is not only a novice in 
 art, but has not capacity ever to be anything more. He may be par- 
 doned for not comprehending Turner, for long preparatiod and disci- 
 pline are necessary before the abstract and profound philosophy of that 
 artist can be met ; but Gainsborough's excellence is based on principles 
 of art long acknowledged, and facts of nature universally apparent ; 
 and I insist more particularly on the reviewer's want of feeling for his 
 works, because it proves a truth of which the public ought especially 
 to be assured that those who lavish abuse on the great men of modern 
 times, are equally incapable of perceiving the real excellence of estab- 
 lished canons, are ignorant of the commonest and most acknowledged 
 principia of the art, blind to the most palpable and comprehensible of 
 its beauties, incapable of distinguishing, if left to themselves, a 
 master's work from the vilest school copy, and founding their applause 
 of those great works which they praise, either in pure hypocrisy, or in 
 admiration of their defects. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 21 
 
 may require some better and higher qualifications in their 
 critics of art, than the experience of a school-boy, and the 
 capacities of a buffoon. 
 
 It is not, however, merely to vindicate the reputation of 
 those whom writers like these defame, which would but be to 
 anticipate by a few years the natural and inevitable reaction 
 of the public mind, that I am devoting years of labor to the 
 development of the principles on which the great produc- 
 tions of recent art are based. I have a higher end in view 
 — one which may, I think, justify me, not only in the sacrifice 
 of my own time, but in calling on my readers to follow me 
 through an investigation far more laborious than could be 
 adequately rewarded by mere insight into the merits of a par- 
 ticular master, or the spirit of a particular age. 
 
 It is a question which, in spite of the claims of Painting 
 to be called the Sister of Poetry, appears to me to admit of 
 considerable doubt, whether art has ever, except in its 
 earliest and rudest stages, possessed anything like efficient 
 moral influence on mankind. Better the state of Rome when 
 
 magnorum artificum frangebat pocula miles, ut phaleris 
 gauderet equus," than when her walls flashed^ with the 
 marble and the gold, " nec cessabat luxuria id agere, ut quam 
 plurimum incendiis perdat." Better the state of religion in 
 Italy^ before Giotto had broken on one barbarism of the 
 Byzantine schools, than when the painter of the Last Judg- 
 ment, and the sculptor of the Perseus, sat revelling side by 
 side. It appears to me that a rude symbol is oftener more 
 efficient than a refined one in touching the heart, and that 
 as pictures rise in rank as works of art, they are regarded 
 with less devotion and more curiosity. 
 
 But, however this may be, and whatever influence we may 
 be disposed to admit in the great works of sacred art, no 
 doubt can, I think, be reasonably entertained as to the utter 
 inutility of all that has been hitherto accomplished by the 
 painters of landscape. No moral end has been answered, no 
 permanent good effected, by any of their works. They may 
 have amused the intellect, or exercised the ingenuity, but 
 they never have spoken to the heart. Landscape art has 
 
22 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 never taught us one deep or holy lesson ; it has not recorded 
 that which is fleeting, nor penetrated that which was hidden, 
 nor interpreted that which was obscure ; it has never made 
 us feel the wonder, nor the power, nor the glory, of the 
 universe ; it has not prompted to devotion, nor touched 
 with awe ; its power to move and exalt the heart has been 
 fatally abused, and perished in the abusing. That which 
 > ought to have been a witness to the omnipotence of God, 
 has become an exhibition of the dexterity of man, and that 
 which should have lifted our thoughts to the throne of the 
 Deity, has encumbered them with the inventions of his 
 creatures. 
 
 If we stand for a little time before any of the more cele- 
 brated works of landscape, listening to the comments of the 
 passers-by, we shall hear numberless expressions relating to 
 the skill of the artist, but very few relating to the perfection 
 of nature. Hundreds will be voluble in admiration, for one 
 who will be silent in delight. Multitudes will laud the com- 
 position, and depart with the praise of Claude on their lips, — 
 not one will feel as if it were no composition, and depart 
 with the praise of God in his heart. 
 
 These are the signs of a debased, mistaken, and false 
 school of painting. The skill of the artist, and the perfec- 
 tion of his art, are never proved until both are forgotten. 
 The artist has done nothing till he has concealed himself, — 
 the art is imperfect which is visible, — the feelings are but 
 feebly touched, if they permit us to reason on the methods 
 of their excitement. In the reading of a great poem, in the 
 hearing of a noble oration, it is the subject of the writer, 
 and not his skill, — his passion, not his power, on which our 
 minds are fixed. We see as he sees, but we see not him. 
 We become part of him, feel with him, judge, behold with 
 him ; but we think of him as little as of ourselves. Do we 
 think of JEschylus while we wait on the silence of Cas- 
 sandra,* or of Shakspeare, while we listen to the wailing of 
 
 * There is a fine touch in the Frogs in Aristophanes, alhiding 
 probably to this part of the Agamemnon. '£701 8' exai'Pov rri a-Kairri 
 KoX /ue TovT eTtpirei/ ovk '^ttov fj vvu 6l AaAoOx^res." The tauio remark 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 23 
 
 Lear ? Not so. The power of the masters is shown by their 
 self-annihilation. It is commensurate with the degree in 
 which they themselves appear not in their work. The -harp 
 of the minstrel is untruly touched, if his own glory is all 
 that it records. Every great writer may be at once known 
 bv his guiding the mind far from himself, to the beauty 
 which is not of his creation, and the knowledge which is 
 past his finding out. 
 
 And must it ever be otherwise with painting, for other- 
 wise it has ever been. Her subjects have been regarded as 
 mere themes on which the artist's power is to be displayed ; 
 and that power, be it of imitation, composition, idealization, 
 or of whatever other kind, is the chief object of the specta- 
 tor's observation. It is man and his fancies, man and his 
 trickeries, man and his inventions, — poor, paltry, weak, self- 
 sighted man, — which the connoisseur forever seeks and wor- 
 ships. Among potsherds and dunghills, among drunken 
 boors and withered beldames, through every scene of de- 
 bauchery^ and degradation, we follow the erring artist, not to 
 receive one wholesome lesson, not to be touched with pity, 
 nor moved with indignation, but to watch the dexterity of 
 the pencil, and gloat over the glittering of the hue. 
 
 I speak not only of the works of the Flemish school — I 
 wage no war with their admirers ; they may be left in peace 
 to count the spiculse of haystacks and the hairs of donkeys 
 — it is also of works of real mind that I speak, — works in 
 which there are evidences of genius and workings of power, 
 — works which have been held up as containing all of the 
 beautiful that art can reach or man conceive. And I assert 
 with sorrow, that all hitherto done in landscape, by those 
 commonly conceived its masters, has never prompted one 
 
 might be well applied to the seemingly vacant or incomprehensible 
 portions of Turner's canvas. In their mysterious and intense fire, 
 there is much correspondence between the mind of ^schylus and that 
 of our great painter. They share at least one thing in common — un- 
 popularity, dyjfxos aye^oa Kpl(Tiv iroiui/ HA. h rcoi/ Travovpyooy'^ AI. ur) At. 
 ovpauiou y octov* EA. /u€t' hla'x^)\ov 5* ovk fjaay erepoL (rujjif.i.axoi AI. 
 
24 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIOK 
 
 holy thought in the minds of nations. It has begun and 
 ended in exhibiting the dexterities of individuals, and con- 
 ventionalities of systems. Filling the world with the honor 
 of Claude and Salvator, it has never once tended to the 
 honor of God. 
 
 Does the reader start in reading these last words, as if 
 they were those of wild enthusiasm, — as if I were lowering 
 the dignity of religion by supposing that its cause could be 
 advanced by such means ? His surprise proves my position. 
 It does sound like wild, like absurd enthusiasm, to expect 
 any definite moral agency in the painters of landscape ; but 
 ought it so to sound ? Are the gorgeousness of the visible 
 hue, the glory of the realized form, instruments in the 
 artist's hand so ineffective, that they can answer no nobler 
 purpose than the amusement of curiosity, or the engage- 
 ment of idleness ? Must it not be owing to gross neglect or 
 misapplication of the means at his command, that while 
 words and tones (means of representing nature surely less 
 powerful than lines and colors) can kindle and purify the 
 very inmost souls of men, the painter can only hope to en- 
 tertain by his efforts at expression, and must remain forever 
 brooding over his incommunicable thoughts ? 
 
 The cause of the evil lies, I believe, deep-seated in the 
 system of ancient landscape art ; it consists, in a word, in 
 the painter's taking upon him to modify God's works at his 
 pleasure, casting the shadow of himself on all he sees, con- 
 stituting himself arbiter where it is honor to be a disciple, 
 and exhibiting his ingenuity by the attainment of combina- 
 tions whose highest praise is that they are impossible. We 
 shall not pass through a single gallery of old art, without 
 hearing this topic of praise confidently advanced. The 
 sense of artificialness, the absence of all appearance of 
 reality, the clumsiness of combination by which the meddling 
 of man is made evident, and the feebleness of his hand 
 branded on the inorganization of his monstrous creature, is 
 advanced as a proof of inventive power, as an evidence of 
 abstracted conception ; — nay, the violation of specific form, 
 the utter abandonment of all organic and individual charac- 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 25 
 
 ter of object, (numberless examples of which from the works 
 of the old masters are given in the following pages,) is con- 
 stantly held up by the unthinking critic as the foundation of 
 the grand or historical style, and the first step to the attain- 
 ment of a pure ideal. Now, there is but one grand style, in 
 the treatment of all subjects whatsoever, and that style is 
 based on the perfect knowledge, and consists in the simple, 
 unencumbered rendering, of the specific characters of the 
 given object, be it man, beast, or flower. Every change, 
 caricature, or abandonment of such specific character, is as 
 destructive of grandeur as it is of truth, of beauty as of 
 propriety. Every alteration of the features of nature has 
 its origin either in powerless indolence or blind audacity, in 
 the folly which forgets, or the insolence which desecrates, 
 works which it is the pride of angels to know, and their 
 privilege to love. 
 
 We sometimes hear such infringement of universal laws 
 justified on the plea, that the frequent introduction of myth- 
 ological abstractions into ancient landscape requires an im- 
 aginary character of form in the material objects with which 
 they are associated. Something of this kind is hinted in 
 Reynolds's 14th Discourse ; but nothing can be more false 
 than such reasoning. If there be any truth or beauty in the 
 original conception of the spiritual being so introduced, there 
 must be a true and real connection between that abstract idea* 
 
 * I do not know any passage in ancient literature in which this con- 
 nection is more exquisitely illustrated than in the lines, burlesque though 
 they be, descriptive of the approach of the chorus in the Clouds of 
 Aristophanes — a writer, by the way, who, I believe, knew and felt more 
 of the noble landscape character of his country than any whose works 
 have come down to us except Homer. The individuality and distinct- 
 ness of conception — the visible cloud character which every word of 
 this particular passage brings out into more dewy and bright existence, 
 are to me as refreshing as the real breathing of mountain winds. The 
 line * * 5ta Twi/ KoiAwK KaX toou 5a(T6cyj/, irxdyiai,^'' could have been written 
 by none but an ardent lover of hill scenery — one who had watched, 
 hour after hour, the peculiar oblique, side-long action of descending 
 clouds, as they form along the hollows and ravines of the hills. There 
 are no lumpish solidities — no pillowy protuberances here. All is melt- 
 ing, drifting, evanescent — full of air, and light, and dew. 
 
26 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 and the features of nature as she was and is. The woods 
 and waters which were peopled by the Greek with typical 
 life were not different from those which now wave and mur- 
 mur by the ruins of his shrines. With their visible and 
 actual forms was his imagination filled, and the beauty of its 
 incarnate creatures can only be understood among the pure 
 realities which originally modelled their conception. If di- 
 vinity be stamped upon the features, or apparent in the form 
 of the spiritual creature, the mind will not be shocked by its 
 appearing to ride upon the whirlwind, and trample on the 
 storm ; but if mortality, no violation of the characters of the 
 earth will forge one single link to bind it to the heaven. 
 
 Is there then no such thing as elevated ideal character of 
 landscape ? Undoubtedly; and Sir Joshua, with the great mas- 
 ter of this character, Nicolo Poussin, present to his thoughts, 
 ought to have arrived at more true conclusions respecting its 
 essence than, as we shall presently see, are deducible from 
 his works. The true ideal of landscape is precisely the same 
 as that of the human form ; it is the expression of the spe- 
 cific — not the individual, but the specific — characters of every 
 object, in their perfection ; there is an ideal form of every 
 herb, flower, and tree: it is that form to which every indi- 
 vidual of the species has a tendency to arrive, freed from the 
 influence of accident or disease. Every landscape painter 
 should know the specific characters of every object he has to 
 represent, rock, flower, or cloud ; and in his highest ideal 
 works, all their distinctions will be perfectly expressed, 
 broadly or delicately, slightly or completely, according to the 
 nature of the subject, and the degree of attention which is to 
 be drawn to the particular object by the part it plays in the 
 composition. Where the sublime is aimed at, such distinc- 
 tions will be indicated with severe simplicity, as the muscular 
 markings in a colossal statue ; where beauty is the object, 
 they must be expressed with the utmost refinement of which 
 the hand is capable. 
 
 This may sound like a contradiction of principles advanced 
 by the highest authorities; but it is only a contradiction of 
 a particular and most mistaken a})plication of them. Much 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 27 
 
 evil has been done to art by the remarks of historical painters 
 on landscape. Accustomed themselves to treat their back* 
 grounds slightly and boldly, and feeling (though, as I shall 
 presently show, only in consequence of their own deficient 
 powers) that any approach to completeness of detail therein, 
 injures their picture by interfering with its principal subject, 
 they naturally lose sight of the peculiar and intrinsic beauties 
 of things which to them are injurious, unless subordinate. 
 Hence the frequent advice given by Reynolds and others, to 
 neglect specific form in landscape, and treat its materials in 
 large masses, aiming only at general truths, — the flexibility 
 of foliage, but not its kind ; the rigidity of rock, but not its 
 mineral character. In the passage more especially bearing 
 on this subject (in the eleventh lecture of Sir J. Reynolds), 
 we are told that " the landscape painter works not for the 
 virtuoso or the naturalist, but for the general observer of life 
 and nature." This is true, in precisely the same sense that 
 the sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the 
 common observer of life and nature. Yet the sculptor is not, 
 for this reason, permitted to be wanting either in knowledge 
 or expression of anatomical detail; and the more refined that 
 expression can be rendered, the more perfect is his work. 
 That which, to the anatomist, is the end, — is, to the sculptor, 
 the means. The former desires details, for their own sake ; 
 the latter, that by means of them, he may kindle his work 
 with life, and stamp it with beauty. And so in landscape; — 
 botanical or geological details are not to be given as matter 
 of curiosity or subject of search, but as the ultimate elements 
 of every species of expression and order of loveliness. 
 
 In his observations on the foreground of the St. Pietro 
 Martire, Sir Joshua advances, as matter of praise, that the 
 plants are discriminated "just as much as was necessary for 
 variety, and no more." Had this foreground been occupied 
 by a group of animals, we should have been surprised to be 
 told that the lion, the serpent, and the dove, or whatever 
 other creatures might have been introduced, were distin- 
 guished from each other just as much as was necessary for 
 variety, and no more. Yet is it to be supposed that the 
 
28 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 distinctions of the vegetable world are less complete, less 
 essential, or less divine in origin, than those of the animal ? 
 If the distinctive forms of animal life are meant for our 
 reverent observance, is it likely that those of vegetable life 
 are made merely to be swept away ? The latter are indeed 
 less obvious and less obtrusive ; for which very reason there 
 is less excuse for omitting them, because there is less danger 
 of their disturbing the attention or engaging the fancy. 
 
 But Sir Joshua is as inaccurate in fact, as false in prin- 
 ciple. He himself furnishes a most singular instance of the 
 very error of which he accuses Vaseni, — the seeing what he 
 expects ; or, rather, in the present case, not seeing what he 
 does not expect. The great masters of Italy, almost without 
 exception, and Titian perhaps more than any (for he had 
 the highest knowledge of landscape), are in the constant 
 habit of rendering every detail of their foregrounds with 
 the most laborious botanical fidelity : witness the Bacchus 
 and Ariadne," in which the foreground is occupied by the 
 common blue iris, the aquilegia, and the wild rose ; every 
 stamen of which latter is given, while the blossoms and 
 leaves of the columbine (a difficult flower to draw) have 
 been studied with the most exquisite accuracy. The fore- 
 grounds of Raffaelle's two cartoons — The Miraculous 
 Draught of Fishes " and " The Charge to Peter " — are cov- 
 ered with plants of the common sea colewort {crambe mari- 
 tima), of which the sinuated leaves and clustered blossoms 
 would have exhausted the patience of any other artist ; but 
 have appeared worthy of prolonged and thoughtful labor to 
 the great mind of Raffaelle. 
 
 It appears then, not only from natural principles, but from 
 the highest of all authority, that thorough knowledge of the 
 lowest details is necessary and full expression of them right, 
 even in the highest class of historical painting ; that it will 
 not take away from, nor interfere with, the interest of the 
 figures ; but, rightly managed, must add to and elucidate it ; 
 and, if further proof be wanting, I would desire the reader 
 to compare the background of Sir Joshua's " Holy Family," 
 in the National Gallery, with that of Nicolo Poussin's 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIONS 29 
 
 " Nursing of Jupiter," in the Dulwich Gallery. The first, 
 owing to the utter neglect of all botanical detail, has lost 
 every atom of ideal character, and reminds us of nothing 
 but an English fashionable flower garden ; — the formal ped- 
 estal adding considerably to the effect. Poussin's, in which 
 every vine leaf is drawn with consummate skill and untiring 
 diligence, produces not only a tree group of the most per- 
 fect grace and beauty, but one which, in its pure and simple 
 truth, belongs to every age of nature, and adapts itself to 
 the history of all time. If, then, such entire rendering of 
 specific character be necessary to the historical painter, in 
 cases where these lower details are entirely subordinate to 
 his human subject, how much more must it be necessary in 
 landscape, where they themselves constitute the subject, 
 and where the undivided attention is to be drawn to them. 
 
 There is a singular sense in which the child may peculiarly 
 be said to be father of the man. In many arts and attain- 
 ments, the first and last stages of progress — the infancy and 
 the consummation — have many features in common ; while 
 the intermediate stages are wholly unlike either, and are 
 farthest from the right. Thus it is in the progress of a 
 painter's handling. We see the perfect child, — the absolute 
 beginner, using of necessity a broken, imperfect, inadequate 
 line, which, as he advances, becomes gradually firm, severe, 
 and decided. Yet before he becomes a perfect artist, this 
 severity and decision will again be exchanged for a light 
 and careless stroke, which in many points will far more 
 resemble that of his childhood than of his middle age — 
 differing from it only by the consummate effect wrought 
 out by the apparently inadequate means. So it is in many 
 matters of opinion. Our first and last coincide, though 
 on different grounds ; it is the middle stage which is far- 
 thest from the trutho Childhood often holds a truth with its 
 feeble fingers, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain, — 
 which it is the pride of utmost age to recover. 
 
 Perhaps this is in no instance more remarkable than in 
 the opinion we form upon the subject of detail in works of 
 art. Infants in judgment, we look for specific character, 
 
30 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 and complete finish — we delight in the faithful plumage of 
 the well-known bird — in the finely drawn leafage of the dis- 
 criminated flower. As we advance in judgment^ we scorn 
 such detail altogether ; we look for impetuosity of execu- 
 tion, and breadth of effect. But, perfected in judgment, we 
 return in a great measure to our early feelings, and thank 
 Raffaelle for the shells upon his sacred beach, and for the 
 delicate stamens of the herbage beside his inspired St. 
 Catherine.* 
 
 Of those who take interest in art, nay, even of artists 
 themselves, there are an hundred in the middle stage of 
 judgment, for one who is in the last ; and this not because 
 they are destitute of the power to discover or the sensibility 
 to enjoy the truth, but because the truth bears so much 
 semblance of error — the last stage of the journey to the first, 
 — that every feeling which guides to it is checked in its 
 origin. The rapid and powerful artist necessarily looks 
 with such contempt on those who seek minutiae of detail 
 rather than grandeur of impression, that it is almost impos- 
 sible for him to conceive of the great last step in art, by 
 which both become compatible. He has so often to dash the 
 delicacy out of the pupil's work, and to blot the details 
 from his encumbered canvas ; so frequently to lament the 
 loss of breadth and unity, and so seldom to reprehend the 
 imperfection of minutse, that he necessarily looks upon com- 
 plete parts as the very sign of error, weakness and igno- 
 rance. Thus, frequently to the latest period of his life, he 
 separates, like Sir Joshua, as chief enemies, the details and 
 the whole, which an artist cannot be great unless he recon- 
 ciles ; and because details alone, and unreferred to a final 
 purpose, are the sign of a tyro's work, he loses sight of the 
 remoter truth, that details perfect in unity, and, contribut-- 
 ing to a final purpose, are the sign of the production of a 
 consummate master. 
 
 * Let not this principle be confused with Fuseli's, 'Move for what 
 is called deception in painting marks either the infancy or decrepitude 
 of a nation's taste." Realization to the mind necessitates not decep- 
 tion of the eye. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 31 
 
 It is not, therefore, detail sought for its own sake, — not 
 the calculable bricks of the Dutch house-painters, nor the 
 numbered hairs and mapped wrinkles of Denner, which con- 
 stitute great art, — they are the lowest and most contemptible 
 art ; but it is detail referred to a great end, — sought for the - 
 sake of the inestimable beauty which exists in the slightest 
 and least of God's works, and treated in a manly, broad and 
 impressive manner. There may be as much greatness of 
 mind, as much nobility of manner in a master's treatment of 
 ^he smallest features, as in his management of the most 
 vast; and this greatness of manner chiefly consists in seizing 
 ihe specific character of the object, together with all the 
 great qualities of beauty which it has in common with higher 
 orders of existence,* while he utterly rejects the meaner 
 oeauties which are accidentally peculiar to the object, and 
 yet not specifically characteristic of it. I cannot give a 
 oetter instance than the painting of the flowers in Titian's 
 picture above mentioned. While every stamen of the rose 
 s given, because this was necessary to mark the flower, and 
 vvhile the curves and large characters of the leaves are ren- 
 dered with exquisite fidelity, there is no vestige of particular 
 texture, of moss, bloom, moisture, or any other accident — no 
 iew-drops, nor flies, nor trickeries of any kind ; nothing 
 beyond the simple forms and hues of the flowers, — even 
 those hues themselves being simplified and broadly ren- 
 dered. The varieties of aquilegia have, in reality, a grayish 
 and uncertain tone of color ; and, I believe, never attain the 
 intense purity of blue with which Titian has gifted his 
 flower. But the master does not aim at the particular color 
 of individual blossoms ; he seizes the type of all, and gives 
 it with the utmost purity and simplicity of which color is 
 capable. 
 
 These laws being observed, it will not only be in the power, 
 it will be the duty, — the imperative duty, — of the landscape 
 
 *I shall show, in a future portion of the work, that there are 
 principles of universal beauty common to all the creatures of God ; 
 and that it is by the greater or less share of these that one form becomes 
 nobler or meaner than another. 
 
32 PBEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 painter, to descend to the lowest details with undiminished 
 attention. Every herb and flower of the field has its specific, 
 distinct, and perfect beauty; it has its peculiar habitation, 
 expression and function. The highest art is that which seizes 
 this specific character, which develops and illustrates it, 
 which assigns to it its proper position in the landscape, and 
 which, by means of it, enhances and enforces the great im- 
 pression which the picture is intended to convey. Nor is it 
 of herbs and flowers alone that such scientific representation 
 is required. Every class of rock, every kind of earth, every 
 form of cloud, must be studied with equal industry, and ren- 
 dered with equal precision. And thus we find ourselves un- 
 avoidably led to a conclusion directly opposed to that con- 
 stantly enunciated dogma of the parrot-critic, that the 
 features of nature must be generalized," — a dogma whose 
 inherent and broad absurdity would long ago have been de- 
 tected, if it had not contained in its convenient falsehood an 
 apology for indolence, and a disguise for incapacity. Gen- 
 eralized ! As if it were possible to generalize things gener- 
 ically different. Of such common cant of criticism I extract 
 a characteristic passage from one of the reviews of this work, 
 that in this year's Athenaeum for February 10th : ^'He (the 
 author) would have geological landscape painters, dendro- 
 logic, meteorologic, and doubtless entomologic, ichthyologic, 
 every kind of physiologic painter united in the same person; 
 yet, alas, for true poetic art among all these learned The- 
 bans ! No; landscape painting must not be reduced to mere 
 portraiture of inanimate substances, Denner-like portraiture 
 of the earth's face. ***** Ancient landscapists 
 took a broader, deeper, higher view of their art ; they neg- 
 lected particular traits, and gave only general features. 
 Thus they attained mass and force, harmonious union and 
 simple effect, the elements of grandeur and beauty. 
 
 To all such criticism as this (and I notice it only because 
 it expresses the feelings into which many sensible and 
 thoughtful minds have been fashioned by infection) the an- 
 swer is simple and straightforward. It is just as impossible 
 to generalize granite and slate, as it is to generalize a man 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 33 
 
 and a cow. An animal must be either one animal or another 
 animal ; it cannot be a general animal, or it is no animal ; 
 and so a rock must be either one rock or another rock ; it 
 cannot be a general rock, or it is no rock. If there were a 
 creature in the foreground of a picture, of which he could 
 not decide whether it were a pony or a pig, the Athenaeum 
 critic would perhaps affirm it to be a generalization of pony 
 and pig, and consequently a high example of " harmonious 
 union and simple effect." But I should call it simple bad 
 drawing. And so when there are things in the foreground 
 of Salvator of which I cannot pronounce whether they be 
 granite or slate, or tufa, I affirm that there is in them neither 
 harmonious union nor simple effect, but simple monstrosity. 
 There is no grandeur, no beauty of any sort or kind ; nothing 
 but destruction, disorganization, and ruin, to be obtained by 
 the violation of natural distinctions. The elements of brutes 
 can only mix in corruption, the elements of inorganic nature 
 only in annihilation. We may, if we choose, put together 
 centaur monsters ; but they must still be half man, half 
 horse ; they cannot be both man and horse, nor either man or 
 horse. And so, if landscape painters choose, they may give 
 us rocks which shall be half granite and half slate ; but they 
 cannot give us rocks which shall be either granite or slate, 
 nor which shall be both granite and slate. Every attempt to 
 produce that which shall be any rock, ends in the production 
 of that which is no rock. 
 
 It is true that the distinctions of rocks and plants and 
 clouds are less conspicuous, and less constantly subjects of 
 observation than those of the animal creation ; but the diffi- 
 culty of observing them proves not the merit of overlooking 
 them. It only accounts for the singular fact, that the world 
 lias never yet seen anything like a perfect school of land- 
 scape. For just as the highest historical painting is based 
 on perfect knowledge of the workings of the human form 
 and human mind, so must the highest landscape painting be 
 based on perfect cognizance of the form, functions, and sys- 
 tem of every organic or definitely structured existence which 
 it has to represent. This proposition is self-evident to every 
 Vol. I.— 3 
 
34 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 thinking mind ; and every principle which appears to con- 
 tradict it is either misstated or misunderstood. For instance, 
 the Athenaeum critic calls the right statement of generic 
 difference " Denjier-WkQ portraiture." If he can find any- 
 thing like Denner in what I have advanced as the utmost 
 perfection of landscape art — the recent works of Turner — he 
 is welcome to his discovery and his theory. No ; Denner-like 
 portraiture would be the endeavor to paint the separate crys- 
 tals of quartz and felspar in the granite, and the separate 
 flakes of mica in the mica slate, — an attempt just as far re- 
 moved from what I assert to be great art, (the bold render- 
 ing of the generic characters of form in both rocks,) as mod- 
 ern sculpture of lace and button-holes is from the Elgin mar- 
 bles. Martin has attempted this Denner-like portraiture of 
 sea-foam with the assistance of an acre of canvas — with what 
 success, I believe the critics of his last year's Canute had, for 
 once, sense enough to decide. 
 
 Again, it does not follow that because such accurate knowl- 
 edge is necessary to the painter that it should constitute the 
 painter, nor that such knowledge is valuable in itself, and 
 without reference to high ends. Every kind of knowledge 
 may be sought from ignoble motives, and for ignoble ends ; 
 and in those who so possess it, it is ignoble knowledge ; while 
 the very same knowledge is in another mind an attainment 
 of the highest dignity, and conveying the greatest blessing. 
 This is the difference between the mere botanist's knowledge 
 of plants, and the great poet's or painter's knowledge of them. 
 The one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his 
 herbarium, the other, that he may render them vehicles of 
 expression and emotion. The one counts the stamens, and 
 affixes a name, and is content ; the other observes every 
 character of the plant's color and form ; considering each of 
 its attributes as an element of expression, he seizes on its 
 lines of grace or energy, rigidity or repose ; notes the feeble- 
 ness or the vigor, the serenity or tremulousness of its hues ; 
 observes its local habits, its love or fear of peculiar places, its 
 nourishment or destruction by particular influences ; he 
 associates it in his mind with all the features of the situa- 
 
PBEFAGE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 35 
 
 tions it inhabits, and the fninistering agencies necessary to 
 its support. Thenceforward the flower is to him a living 
 creature, with histories written on its leaves, and passions 
 breathing in its motion. Its occurrence in his picture is no 
 mere point of color, no meaningless spark of light. It is a 
 voice rising from the earth, — a new chord of the mind's 
 music, — a necessary note in the harmony of his picture, con- 
 tributing alike to its tenderness and its dignity, nor less to 
 its loveliness than its truth. 
 
 The particularization of flowers by Shakspeare and Shelley 
 affords us the most frequent examples of the exalted use of 
 these inferior details. It is true that the painter has not the 
 same power of expressing the thoughts with which his symbols 
 are connected ; he is dependent in some degree on the knowl- 
 edge and feeling of the spectator ; but, by the destruction of 
 such details, his foreground is not rendered more intelligible 
 to the ignorant, although it ceases to have interest for the 
 informed. It is no excuse for illegible writing that there are 
 persons who could not have read it had it been plain. 
 
 I repeat then, generalization, as the word is commonly 
 understood, is the act of a vulgar, incapable, and unthinking 
 mind. To see in all mountains nothing but similar heaps of 
 earth ; in all rocks, nothing but similar concretions of solid 
 matter ; in all trees, nothing but similar accumulations of 
 leaves, is no sign of high feeling or extended thought. The 
 more we know, and the more we feel, the more we separate ; 
 we separate to obtain a more perfect unity. Stones, in the 
 thoughts of the peasant, lie as they do on his field, one is like 
 another, and there is no connection between any of them. 
 The geologist distinguishes, and in distinguishing connects 
 them. Each becomes different from its fellow, but in differ- 
 ing from, assumes a relation to its fellow ; they are no more 
 each the repetition of the other, — they are parts of a system, 
 and each implies and is connected with the existence of the 
 rest. That generalization then is right, true, and noble, 
 which is based on the knowledge of the distinctions and ob- 
 servance of the relations of individual kinds. That general- 
 ization is wrong, false, and contemptible, which is based on 
 
36 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 ignorance of the one, and disturbance of the other. It is 
 indeed no generalization, but confusion and chaos ; it is the 
 generalization of a defeated army into indistinguishable im- 
 potence — the generalization of the elements of a dead carcass 
 into dust. 
 
 Let us, then, without farther notice of the dogmata of the 
 schools of art, follow forth those conclusions to which we are 
 led by observance of the laws of nature. 
 
 I have just said that every class of rock, earth and cloud, 
 must be known by the painter, with geologic and meteoro- 
 logic accuracy.* Nor is this merely for the sake of obtain- 
 ing the character of these minor features themselves, but 
 more especially for the sake of reaching that simple, earnest, 
 and consistent character which is visible in the whole effect 
 of every natural landscape. Every geological formation has 
 features entirely peculiar to itself ; definite lines of fracture, 
 giving rise to fixed resultant forms oi rock and earth ; pe- 
 culiar vegetable products, among which still farther distinc- 
 tions are wrought out by variations of climate and elevation. 
 From such modifying circumstances arise the infinite varie- 
 ties of the orders of landscape, of which each one shows per- 
 fect harmony among its several features, and possesses an 
 ideal beauty of its own ; a beauty not distinguished merely 
 by such peculiarities as are wrought on the human form by 
 change of climate, but by generic differences the most 
 marked and essential ; so that its classes cannot be general- 
 ized or amalgamated by any expedients whatsoever. The 
 
 * Is not this — it may be asked — demanding more from him than life 
 can accomplish? Not one whit. Nothing more than knowledge of 
 external characteristics is absolutely required ; and even if, which were 
 more desirable, thorough scientific knowledge had to be attained, the 
 time which our artists spend in multiplying crude sketches, or finishincr 
 their unintelligent embryos of the study, would render them masters of 
 every science that modern investigations have organized, and familiar 
 with every form that Nature manifests. Martin, if the time which he 
 must have spent on the abortive bubbles of his Canute had been passed 
 in working on the seashore, might have learned enough to enable him 
 to produce, with a few strokes, a picture which would have smote like 
 the sound of the sua, upon men*s hearts forever. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, Zf 
 
 level marshes and rich meadows of the tertiary, the rounded 
 swells and short pastures of the chalk, the square-built cliffs 
 and cloven dells of the lower limestone, the soaring peaks 
 and ridgy precipices of the primaries, having nothing in 
 common among them — nothing which is not distinctive and 
 incommunicable. Their very atmospheres are different — 
 their clouds are different — their humors of storm and sun- 
 shine are different — their flowers, animals and forests are 
 different. By each order of landscape — and its orders, I 
 repeat, are infinite in number, corresponding not only to 
 the several species of rock, but to the particular circum- 
 stances of the rocks' deposition or after treatment, and to 
 the incalculable varieties of climate, aspect, and human 
 interference : — by each order of landscape, I say, peculiar 
 lessons are intended to be taught, and distinct pleasures to 
 be conveyed ; and it is as utterly futile to talk of general- 
 izing their impressions into an ideal landscape, as to talk of 
 amalgamating all nourishment into one ideal food, gathering 
 all music into one ideal movement, or confounding all thought 
 into one ideal idea. 
 
 There is, however, such a thing as composition of different 
 orders of landscape, though there can be no generalization of 
 them. Nature herself perpetually brings together elements 
 of various expression. Her barren rocks stoop through 
 wooded promontories to the plain ; and the wreaths of the 
 vine show through their green shadows the wan light of un- 
 perishing snow. 
 
 The painter, therefore, has the choice of either working 
 out the isolated character of some one distinct class of scene, 
 or of bringing together a multitude of different elements, 
 which may adorn each other by contrast. 
 
 I believe that the simple and uncombined landscape, if 
 wrought out with due attention to the ideal beauty of the 
 features it includes, will always be the most powerful in its 
 appeal to the heart. Contrast increases the splendor of 
 beauty, but it disturbs its influence ; it adds to its attractive- 
 ness, but diminishes its power. On this subject I shall have 
 much to say hereafter ; at present I merely wish to suggest 
 
m 
 
 38 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 the possibility, that the single-minded painter, who is work- 
 ing out on broad and simple principles, a piece of unbroken, 
 harmonious landscape character, may be reaching an end in 
 art quite as high as the more ambitious student who is always 
 
 within fiv^e minutes' walk of everywhere," making the ends 
 of the earth contribute to his pictorial guazzetto ; * and the 
 certainty, that unless the composition of the latter be regu- 
 lated by severe judgment, and its members connected by 
 natural links, it must become more contemptible in its mot- 
 ley, than an honest study of road-side weeds. 
 
 Let me, at the risk of tediously repeating what is univer- 
 sally known, refer to the common principles of historical 
 composition, in order that I may show their application to 
 that of landscape. The merest tyro in art knows that every 
 figure which is unnecessary to his picture, is an encumbrance 
 to it, and that every figure which does not sympathize with 
 the action, interrupts it. He that gathereth not with me, 
 scattereth, — is, or ought to be, the ruling principle of his 
 plan : and the power and grandeur of his result will be ex- 
 actly proportioned to the unity of feeling manifested in its 
 several parts, and to the propriety and simplicity of the rela- 
 tions in which they stand to each other. 
 
 All this is equally applicable to the materials of inanimate 
 nature. Impressiveness is destroyed by a multitude of con- 
 tradictory facts, and the accumulation, which is not harmo- 
 nious, is discordant. He who endeavors to unite simplicity 
 with magnificence, to guide from solitude to festivity, and 
 to contrast melancholy with mirth, must end by the produc- 
 tion of confused inanity. There is a peculiar spirit possessed 
 by every kind of scene ; and although a point of contrast 
 may sometimes enhance and exhibit this particular feeling 
 more intensely, it must be only a point, not an equalized 
 opposition. Every introduction of new and different feel- 
 ing weakens the force of what has already been impressed, 
 
 * * * A ^een field is a sight which makes us pardon 
 The absence of that more sublime construction 
 Which mixes up vines, olive, precipices, 
 Glaciers, volcanoes, oranges, and ices.'' — Don Juan, 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 39 
 
 and the mingling of all emotions must conclude in apathy, 
 as the mingling of all colors in white. 
 
 Let us test by these simple rules one of the ''ideal " land- 
 scape compositions of Claude, that known to the Italians as 
 "II Mulino." 
 
 The foreground is a piece of very lovely and perfect forest 
 scenery, with a dance of peasants by a brookside ; quite 
 enough subject to form, in the hands of a master, an im- 
 pressive and complete picture. On the other side of the 
 brook, however, we have a piece of pastoral life, a man with 
 some bulls and goats tumbling headforemost into the water, 
 owing to some sudden paralytic affection of all their legs. 
 Even this group is one too many ; the shepherd had no 
 business to drive his flock so near the dancers, and the dan- 
 cers will certainly frighten the cattle. But w^ien we look 
 farther into the picture, our feelings receive a sudden and 
 violent shock, by the unexpected appearance, amidst things 
 pastoral and musical, of the military : a number of Roman 
 soldiers riding in on hobby-horses, with a leader on foot, ap- 
 parently encouraging them to make an immediate and decisive 
 charge on the musicians. Beyond the soldiers is a circular 
 temple, in exceedingly bad repair, and close beside it, built 
 against its very walls, a neat water-mill in full work. By 
 the mill flows a large river, with a weir all across it. The 
 weir has not been made for the mill, (for that receives its 
 water from the hills by a trough carried over the temple,) 
 but it is particularly ugly and monotonous in its line of fall, 
 and the water below forms a dead-looking pond, on which 
 some people are fishing in punts. The banks of this river 
 resemble in contour the later geological formations around 
 London, constituted chiefly of broken pots and oyster-shells. 
 At an inconvenient distance from the water-side stands a 
 city, composed of twenty-five round towers and a pyramid. 
 Beyond the city is a handsome bridge ; beyond the bridge, 
 part of the Campagna, with fragments of aqueducts ; be- 
 yond the Campagna, the chain of the Alps ; on the left, the 
 cascades of Tivoli. 
 
 This is, I believe, a fair example of what is commonly 
 
40 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 called an "ideal landscape," a group of the artist's 
 studies from nature, individually spoiled, selected with such 
 opposition of character as may insure their neutralizing each 
 other's effect, and united with sufficient unnaturalness and 
 violence of association to insure their producing a general 
 sensation of the impossible. Let us analyze the separate 
 subjects a little in this ideal work of Claude's. 
 
 Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than 
 the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under even- 
 ing light. Let the reader imagine himself for a moment 
 withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world, 
 and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The 
 earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never 
 so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, 
 like the dusty wreck of the bones of men.* The long knot- 
 ted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and 
 the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks 
 of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of 
 mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath 
 were struggling in their sleep ; scattered blocks of black 
 stone, four-square, remnants of mighty edifices, not one left 
 upon another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull 
 purple, poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veil- 
 ing its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the 
 red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue 
 ridge of the Alban mount lifts itself against a solemn space 
 of green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds 
 stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. 
 From the plain to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, pier 
 beyond pier^ melt into the darkness, like shadowy and count- 
 less troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation's 
 grave. 
 
 Let us, with Claude, make a few " ideal " alterations in 
 this landscape. First, we will reduce the multitudinous 
 pro3cipices of the Apennines to four sugar-loaves. Secondly, 
 
 * The vegetable soil of the Campagna is chiefly formed by decom- 
 posed lavas, and under it lies a bed of white pumice, exactly resem- 
 bling remnants of bones. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 41 
 
 we will remove the Alban mount, and put a large dust-heap 
 in its stead. Next, we will knock down the greater part of 
 the aqueducts, and leave only an arch or two, that their 
 infinity of length may no longer be painful from its monot- 
 ony. For the purple mist and declining sun we will sub- 
 stitute a bright blue sky, with round white clouds. Finally, 
 we will get rid of the unpleasant ruins in the foreground ; 
 we will plant some handsome trees therein, we will send for 
 some fiddlers, and get up a dance, and a picnic party. 
 
 It will be found, throughout the picture, that the same 
 species of improvement is made on the materials which 
 Claude had ready to his hand. The descending slopes of 
 the city of Rome, towards the pyramid of Caius Cestius, 
 supply not only lines of the most exquisite variety and 
 beauty, but matter for contemplation and reflection in every 
 fragment of their buildings. This passage has been ideal- 
 ized by Claude into a set of similar round towers, respecting 
 which no idea can be formed but that they are uninhabit- 
 able, and to which no interest can be attached, beyond the 
 difficulty of conjecturing what they could have been built 
 for. The ruins of the temple are rendered unimpressive by 
 the juxtaposition of the water-mill, and inexplicable by the 
 introduction of the Roman soldiers. The glide of the 
 muddy streams of the melancholy Tiber and Anio through 
 the Campagna is impressive in itself, but altogether ceases 
 to be so, when we disturb their stillness of motion by a weir, 
 adorn their neglected flow with a handsome bridge, and 
 cover their solitary surface with punts, nets, and fishermen. 
 
 It cannot, I think, be expected, that landscapes like this 
 should have any effect on the human heart, except to harden 
 or to degrade it ; to lead it from the love of what is simple, 
 earnest and pure, to what is as sophisticated and corrupt in 
 arrangement as erring and imperfect in detail. So long as 
 such works are held up for imitation, landscape painting 
 must be a manufacture, its productions must be toys, and 
 its patrons must be children. 
 
 My purpose then, in the present work, is to demonstrate 
 the utter falseness both of the facts and principles ; the 
 
42 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 imperfection of material, and error of arrangement, on which 
 works such as these are based ; and to insist on the neces- 
 sity, as well as the dignity, of an earnest, faithful, loving, 
 study of nature as she is, rejecting with abhorrence all that 
 man has done to alter and modify her. And the praise 
 which, in this first portion of the work, is given to many 
 English artists, would be justifiable on this ground onlv, 
 that although frequently with little power and desultory 
 effort, they have yet, in an honest and good heart, received 
 the word of God from clouds, and leaves, and waves, and 
 kept it,* and endeavored in humility to render to the world 
 that purity of impression which can alone render the result 
 
 * The feelings of Constable with respect to his art might be almost 
 a model for the young student, were it not that they err a little on the 
 other side, and are perhaps in need of chastening and guiding from 
 the works of his fellow-men. We should use pictures not as authori- 
 ties, but as comments on nature, just as we use divines, not as authori- 
 ties, but as comments on the Bible. Constable, in his dread of saint- 
 worship, excommunicates himself from all benefit of the Church, and 
 deprives himself of much instruction from the Scripture to which he 
 holds, because he will not accept aid in the reading of it from the 
 learning of other men. Sir George Beaumont, on the contrary, fur- 
 nishes, in the anecdotes given of him in Constable's life, a melancholy 
 instance of the degradation into which the human mind may fall, when 
 it suffers human works to interfere between it and its Master. The 
 recommending the color of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing 
 tone of everything, and the vapid inquiry of the conventionalist, 
 
 Where do you put your brown tree ? " show a prostration of intellect 
 BO laughable and lamentable that they are at once, on all, and to all, 
 students of the gallery, a satire and a warning. Art so followed is the 
 most servile indolence in which life can be wasted. There are then 
 two dangerous extremes to be shunned, — forgetfulness of the Scripture, 
 and scorn of the divine— slavery on the one hand, free-thinking on the 
 other. The mean is nearly as difficult to determine or keep in art as 
 in religion, but the great danger is on the side of superstition. He 
 who walks humbly with Nature will seldom be in danger of losing sight 
 of Art. He will commonly find in all that is truly great of man's 
 works, something of their original, for which he will regard them with 
 gratitude, and sometimes follow them with respect ; while he who 
 takes Art for his authority may entirely lose sight of all that it inter- 
 prets, and sink at once into the sin of an idolater, and the degradation 
 of a slave. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 
 
 43 
 
 of art an instrument of good, or its labor deserving of grati- 
 tude. 
 
 If, however, I shall have frequent occasion to insist on 
 the necessity of this heartfelt love of, and unqualified sub- 
 mission to, the teaching of nature, it will be no less incum- 
 bent upon me to reprobate the careless rendering of casual 
 impression, and the mechanical copyism of unimportant sub- 
 ject, which are too frequently visible in our modern school.* 
 Their lightness and desultoriness of intention, their mean- 
 
 * I should have insisted more on this fault (for it is a fatal one) in 
 the following Essay, but the cause of it rests rather with the public 
 than with the artist, and in the necessities of the public as much as in 
 their will. Such pictures as artists themselves would wish to paint, 
 could not be executed under very high prices ; and it must always be 
 easier, in the present state of society, to find ten purchasers of ten- 
 guinea sketches, than one purchaser for a hundred-guinea picture. 
 Still, I have been often both surprised and grieved to see that any 
 effort on the part of our artists to rise above manufacture — any strug- 
 gle to something like completed conception — was left by the public to 
 be its own reward. In the water-color exhibition of last year there 
 was a noble work of David Cox's, ideal in the right sense — a forest hol- 
 low with a few sheep crushing down through its deep fern, and a solemn 
 opening of evening sky above its dark masses of distance. It was 
 worth all his little bits on the walls put together. Yet the public picked 
 up all the little bits — blots and splashes, ducks, chickweed, ears of 
 com — all that was clever and petite ; and the real picture — the full 
 development of the artist's mind — was left on his hands. How can I, 
 or any one else, with a conscience, advise him after this to aim at any- 
 thing more than may be struck out by the cleverness of a quarter of an 
 hour. Cattermole, I believe, is earthed and shackled in the same 
 manner. He began his career with finished and studied pictures, 
 which, I believe, never paid him — he now prostitutes his fine talent to 
 the super ficialn ess of public taste, and blots his way to emolument and 
 oblivion. There is commonly, however, fault on both sides ; in the ar- 
 tist for exhibiting his dexterity by mountebank tricks of the brush, 
 until chaste finish, requiring ten times the knowledge and labor, ap- 
 pears insipid to the diseased taste which he has himself formed in his 
 patrons, as the roaring and ranting of a common actor will oftentimes 
 render apparently vapid the finished touches of perfect nature ; and in 
 the public, for taking less real pains to become acquainted with, and 
 discriminate, the various powers of a great artist, than they would to 
 estimate the excellence of a cook or develop the dexterity of a dancer. 
 
M PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 ingless multiplication of unstudied composition, and their 
 want of definiteness and loftiness of aim, bring discredit on 
 their whole system of study, and encourage in t>he critic the 
 unhappy prejudice that the field and the hill-side are less fit 
 places of study than the gallery and the garret. Not every 
 casual idea caught from the flight of a shower or the fall of 
 a sunbeam, not every glowing fragment of harvest light, nor 
 every flickering dream of copsewood coolness, is to be given 
 to the world as it came, unconsidered, incomplete, and for- 
 gotten by the artist as soon as it has left his easel. That 
 only should be considered a picture, in which the spirit, (not 
 the materials, observe,) but the animating emotion of many 
 such studies is concentrated, and exhibited by the aid of 
 long-studied, painfully-chosen, forms; idealized in the right 
 sense of the word, not by audacious liberty of that faculty 
 of degrading God's works which man calls his " imagina- 
 tion," but by perfect assertion of entire knowledge of every 
 part and character and function of the object, and in which 
 the details are completed to the last line compatible with the 
 dignity and simplicity of the whole, wrought out with that 
 noblest industry which concentrates profusion into point, 
 and transforms accumulation into structure ; neither must 
 this labor be bestowed on every subject which appears to 
 afford a capability of good, but on chosen subjects in which 
 nature has prepared to the artist's hand the purest sources 
 of the impression he would convey. These may be humble 
 in their order, but they must be perfect of their kind. There 
 is a perfection of the hedgerow and cottage, as well as of the 
 forest and the palace, and more ideality in a great artist's 
 selection and treatment of roadside weeds and brook-worn 
 pebbles, than in all the struggling caricature of the meaner 
 mind which heaps its foreground with colossal columns, and 
 heaves impossible mountains into the encumbered sky. 
 Finally, these chosen subjects must not be in any way repeti- 
 tions of one another, but each founded on a new idea, and 
 developing a totally distinct train of thought; so that the 
 work of the artist's life should form a consistent series of 
 essays, rising through the scale of creation from the hum- 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 45 
 
 blest scenery to the most exalted; each picture being a nec- 
 essary link in the chain, based on what preceded, introduc- 
 ing to what is to follow, and all, in their lovely system, 
 exhibiting and drawing closer the bonds of nature to the 
 human heart. 
 
 Since, then, I shall have to reprobate the absence of study 
 in the moderns nearly as much as its false direction in the 
 ancients, my task will naturally divide itself into three por- 
 tions. In the^ first, I shall endeavor to investigate and ar- 
 range the facts of nature with scientific accuracy ; showing 
 as I proceed, by what total neglect of the very first base and 
 groundwork of their art the idealities of some among the old 
 masters are produced. This foundation once securely laid, I 
 shall proceed, in the second portion of the work, to analyze 
 and demonstrate the nature of the emotions of the Beautiful 
 and Sublime; to examine the particular characters of every 
 kind of scenery, and to bring to light, as far as may be in 
 my power, that faultless, ceaseless, inconceivable, inexhaust- 
 ible loveliness, which God has stamped upon all things, if 
 man will only receive them as He gives them. Finally, I 
 shall endeavor to trace the operation of all this on the hearts 
 and minds of men; to exhibit the moral function and end of 
 art, to prove the share which it ought to have in the thoughts, 
 and influence on the lives of all of us; to attach to the artist 
 the responsibility of a preacher, and to kindle in the general 
 mind that regard which such an ofiice must demand. 
 
 It must be evident that the first portion of this task, which 
 is all that I have yet been enabled to offer to the reader, can- 
 not but be the least interesting and the most laborious, es- 
 pecially because it is necessary that it should be executed 
 without reference to any principles of beauty or influences of 
 emotion. It is the hard, straightforward classification of 
 material things, not the study of thought or passion; and 
 therefore let me not be accused of the feelings which I choose 
 to repress. The consideration of the high qualities of art 
 must not be interrupted by the work of the hammer and the 
 eudiometer. 
 
 Again, I would request that the frequent passages of 
 
46 PBEFAGE TO THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 reference to the great masters of the Italian school may not 
 be looked upon as mere modes of conventional expression. 
 I think there is enough in the following pages to prove that 
 I am not likely to be carried away by the celebrity of a name; 
 and therefore that the devoted love which 1 profess for the 
 works of the great historical and sacred painters is sincere 
 and well-grounded. And indeed every principle of art which 
 I may advocate, I shall be able to illustrate by reference to 
 the works of men universally allowed to be the masters of 
 masters; and the public, so long as my teaching leads them 
 to higher understanding and love of the works of Buonaroti, 
 Leonardo, Raffaelle, Titian, and Cagliari, may surely concede 
 to me without fear, the right of striking such blows as I may 
 deem necessary to the establishment of my principles, at 
 Gasper Poussin, or Yandevelde. 
 
 Indeed, I believe there is nearly as much occasion, at the 
 present day, for advocacy of Michael Angelo against the 
 pettiness of the moderns, as there is for support of Turner 
 against the conventionalities of the ancients. For, though 
 the names of the fathers of sacred art are on all our lips, our 
 faith in them is much like that of the great world in its 
 religion — nominal, but dead. In vain our lecturers sound the 
 name of Raffaelle in the ears of their pupils, while their own 
 works are visibly at variance with every principle deducible 
 from his. In vain is the young student compelled to produce 
 a certain number of school copies of Michael Angelo, when 
 his bread must depend on the number of gewgaws he can 
 crowd into his canvas. And I could with as much zeal exert 
 myself against the modern system of English historical art, 
 as I have in favor of our school of landscape, but that it is 
 an ungrateful and painful task to attack the works of living 
 painters, struggling with adverse circumstances of every kind, 
 and especially with the false taste of a nation which regards 
 matters of art either with the ticklishness of an infant, or the 
 stolidity of a Megatherium. 
 
 I have been accused, in the execution of this first portion 
 of my work, of irreverent and scurrile expression towards 
 the works which I have depreciated. Possibly I may have 
 
PBEFAGE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 47 
 
 been in some degree infected by reading those criticisms of 
 our periodicals, which consist of nothing else; but I believe 
 in general that my words will be found to have sufficient 
 truth in them to excuse their familiarity; and that no other 
 weapons could have been used to pierce the superstitious 
 prejudice with which the works of certain painters are shield- 
 ed from the attacks of reason. My answer is that given long 
 ago to a similar complaint, uttered under the same circum- 
 stances by the foiled sophist: — ("O? 8' Icrriv o avOpijiiTo^ ; 
 aTratScuTos ris, os ovusi <fiavXa oi/d/xara ovofxat^civ roX/Jia iv crcfj^via 
 Trpay/xart.) Tolovtos rts, S) iTrTraz, ovSlv aXXo (ppovTit^oiV rj to aXrj- 
 
 It is with more surprise that I have heard myself accused 
 of thoughtless severity with respect to the works of contem- 
 porary painters, for I fully believe that whenever I attack 
 them, I give myself far more pain than I can possibly inflict; 
 and, in many instances, I have withheld reprobation which I 
 considered necessary to the full understanding of my work, 
 in the fear of grieving or injuring men of whose feelings and 
 circumstances I was ignorant. Indeed, the apparently false 
 and exaggerated bias of the whole book in favor of modern 
 art, is in great degree dependent on my withholding the 
 animadversions which would have given it balance, and keep- 
 ing silence where I cannot praise. But I had rather be a 
 year or two longer in effecting my purposes, than reach them 
 by trampling on men's hearts and hearths ; and I have per- 
 mitted myself to express unfavorable opinions only where 
 the popularity and favor of the artist are so great as to render 
 the opinion of an individual a matter of indifference to him. 
 
 And now — but one word more. For many a year we have 
 heard nothing with respect to the works of Turner but ac- 
 cusations of their want of truth. To every observation on 
 their power, sublimity, or beauty, there has been but one 
 reply : They are not like nature. I therefore took my op- 
 ponents on their own ground, and demonstrated, by thorough 
 investigation of actual facts, that Turner is like nature, and 
 paints more of nature than any man who ever lived. I ex- 
 pected this proposition (the foundation of all my future 
 
48 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 efforts) would have been disputed with desperate struggles, 
 and that I should have had to fight my way to my position 
 inch by inch. Not at all. My opponents yield me the field 
 at once. One (the writer for the Athenaeum) has no other 
 resource than the assertion, that " he disapproves the natural 
 style in painting. If people want to see nature^ let them go 
 and look at herself. Why should they see her at second- 
 hand on a piece of canvas ?" The other, (Blackwood,) still 
 more utterly discomfited, is reduced to a still more remark- 
 able line of defence. " It is not," he says, "what things in 
 all respects really are, but how they are convertible by the 
 mind into what they are not, that we have to consider." 
 (October, 1843, p. 485.) I leave therefore the reader to 
 choose whether, with Blackwood and his fellows, he will 
 proceed to consider how things are convertible by the mind 
 into what they are not, or whether, with me, he will undergo 
 the harder, but perhaps on the whole more useful, labor of 
 ascertaining — What they are. 
 
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 It is with much regret, and partly against my own judg- 
 ment, that I republish the following chapters in their pres- 
 ent form. The particular circumstances (stated in the first 
 preface) under which they were originally written, have ren- 
 dered them so unfit for the position they now hold as in- 
 troductory to a serious examination of the general func- 
 tions of art, that I should have wished first to complete the 
 succeeding portions of the essay, and then to write another 
 introduction of more fitting character. But as it may be 
 long before I am able to do this, and as I believe what I have 
 already written may still be of some limited and partial ser- 
 vice, I have suffered it to reappear, trusting to the kindness 
 of the reader to look to its intention rather than its temper, 
 and forgive its inconsideration in its earnestness. 
 
 Thinking it of too little substance to bear mending, wher- 
 ever I have found a passage which I thought required modi- 
 fication or explanation, I have cut it out ; what I have left, 
 however imperfect, cannot I think be dangerously misunder- 
 stood : something I have added, not under the idea of ren- 
 dering the work in any wise systematic or complete, but to 
 supply gross omissions, answer inevitable objections, and 
 give some substance to passages of mere declamation. 
 
 Whatever inadequacy or error there may be, throughout, 
 in materials or modes of demonstration, I have no doubt of 
 the truth and necessity of the main result ; and though the 
 reader may, perhaps, find me frequently hereafter showing 
 other and better grounds for what is here affirmed, yet the 
 Vol. L— 4 
 
50 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 point and bearing of the book, its determined depreciation 
 of Claude, Salvator, Gaspar, and Canaletto, and its equally 
 determined support of Turner as the greatest of all land- 
 scape painters, and of Turner's recent works as his finest, 
 are good and right ; and if the prevalence throughout of 
 attack and eulogium be found irksome or offensive, let it be 
 remembered that my object thus far has not been either the 
 establishment or the teaching of any principles of art, but 
 the vindication, most necessary to the prosperity of our 
 present schools, of the uncomprehended rank of their greatest 
 artist, and the diminution, equally necessary as I think to 
 the prosperity of our schools, of the unadvised admiration of 
 the landscape of the seventeenth century. For I believe it 
 to be almost impossible to state in terms sufficiently serious 
 and severe the depth and extent of the evil which has re- 
 sulted (and that not in art alone, but in all other matters 
 with which the contemplative faculties are concerned) from 
 the works of those elder men. On the continent all land- 
 scape art has been utterly annihilated by them, and with it 
 all sense of the power of nature. We in England have 
 only done better because our artists have had strength of 
 mind enough to form a school withdrawn from their influ- 
 ence. 
 
 These points are somewhat farther developed in the gen- 
 eral sketch of. ancient and modern landscape, which I have 
 added to the first section of the second part. Some im- 
 portant additions have also been made to the chapters on 
 the painting of sea. Throughout the rest of the text, though 
 something is withdrawn, little is changed ; and the reader 
 may rest assured that if I were now to bestow on this feeble 
 essay the careful revision which it much needs, but little de- 
 serves, it would not be to alter its tendencies, or modify its 
 conclusions, but to prevent indignation from appearing 
 virulence on the one side, and enthusiasm partisanship on 
 the other. 
 
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION (1873). 
 
 I HAVE been lately so often asked by friends on whose 
 judgment I can rely, to permit the publication of another 
 edition of " Modern Painters " in its original form, that I 
 have at last yielded, though with some violence to my own 
 feelings; for many parts of the first and second volumes are 
 written in a narrow enthusiasm, and the substance of their 
 metaphysical and religious speculation is only justifiable on 
 the ground of its absolute honesty. Of the third, fourth, and 
 fifth volumes I indeed mean eventually to rearrange what I 
 think of permanent interest, for the complete edition of my 
 works, but with fewer and less elaborate illustrations: nor 
 have I any serious grounds for refusing to allow the book 
 once more to appear in the irregular form which it took as it 
 was written, since of the art-teaching and landscape descrip- 
 tion it contains I have little to retrench, and nothing to 
 retract. 
 
 This final edition must, however, be limited to a thousand 
 copies, for some of the more delicate plates are already worn, 
 that of the Mill Stream in the fifth volume, and of the Loire 
 Side very injuriously; while that of the Shores of Wharfe 
 had to be retouched by an engraver after the removal of the 
 mezzotint for reprinting. But Mr. Armytage's, Mr. Cousen's, 
 and Mr. Cuff's magnificent plates are still in good state, and 
 my own etchings, though injured, are still good enough to 
 answer their purpose. 
 
 LIB. 
 
 U. Or ILL 
 CALESBURC 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 OF GENERAL PRmCIPLES. 
 
 SECTION L 
 
 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 67 
 
 § 2. And therefore obstinate when once formed 70 
 
 § 3. The author's reasons for opposing it in particular instances 71 
 
 § 4. But only on points capable of demonstration 72 
 
 § 5. The author's partiality to modern works excusable 73 
 
 CHAPTER II.— Definition of Greatness in Art. 
 
 § 1. Distinction between the painter's intellectual power and 
 
 technical knowledge 74 
 
 § 2. Painting, as such, is nothing more than language 74 
 
 § 3. Painter," a term corresponding to ''versifier" 75 
 
 § 4. Example in a painting of E. Landseer's 75 
 
 § 5. Difi&culty of fixing an exact limit between language and 
 
 thought 76 
 
 § 6. Distinction between decorative and expressive language. 76 
 
 § 7. Instance in the Dutch and early Italian schools 77 
 
 § 8. Yet there are certain ideas belonging to language itself. . 78 
 
 § 9. The definition 78 
 
54 
 
 STJS^OPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER III.— Op Ideas of Power. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. What classes of ideas are conveyable by art 79 
 
 § 2. Ideas of power vary much in relative dignity 79 
 
 § 3. But are received from whatever has been the subject of 
 
 power. The meaning of the word excellence " 80 
 
 § 4. What is necessary to the distinguishing of excellence. ... 82 
 
 § 5. The pleasure attendant on conquering difficulties is right 82 
 
 CHAPTER IV.— Of Ideas of Imitation. 
 
 § 1. False use of the term imitation " by many writers of art 83 
 
 § 2. Real meaning of the term 84 
 
 § 3. What is requisite to the sense of imitation 85 
 
 § 4. The pleasure resulting from imitation the most contemp- 
 tible that can be derived from art. 86 
 
 § 5. Imitation is only of contemptible subjects « 86 
 
 § 6. Imitation is contemptible because it is easy 86 
 
 § 7. Recapitulation .* 87 
 
 CHAPTER v.— Of Ideas of Truth. 
 
 § 1. Meaning of the word truth " as applied to art 87 
 
 § 2. Firsb difference between truth and imitation 88 
 
 §3. Second difference 88 
 
 §4. Third difference 88 
 
 § 5. No accurate truths necessary to imitation 89 
 
 § 6. Ideas of truth are inconsistent with ideas of imitation. ... 91 
 
 CHAPTER VI.— Of Ideas of Beauty. 
 
 § 1. Definition of the term beautiful " 92 
 
 § 2. Definition of the term taste" 92 
 
 § 3. Distinction between taste and judgment 93 
 
 § 4. How far beauty may become intellectual 93 
 
 § 5. The high rank and function of ideas of beauty 94 
 
 § 6. Meaning of the term ideal beauty , 94 
 
 CHAPTER VII.— Of Ideas of Relation. 
 
 § 1. General meaning of the term 94 
 
 § 2. What ideas are to be comprehended under it 95 
 
 § 3. The exceeding nobility of these ideas 96 
 
 § 4. Why no subdivision of so extensive a class is necessary. . . 96 
 
SYJ^OPSIS OF CONTENTS, 
 
 55 
 
 SECTION IL 
 OF POWER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. — General Principles respecting Ideas of 
 Power. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. No necessity for detailed study of ideas of imitation 98 
 
 § 2. Nor for separate study of ideas of power 98 
 
 § 3. Except under one particular form 99 
 
 § 4. There are two modes of receiving ideas of power, com- 
 monly inconsistent 99 
 
 g 5. First reason of the inconsistency 99 
 
 g 6. Second reason for the inconsistency 100 
 
 g 7. The sensation of power ought not to be sought in imper- 
 fect art 100 
 
 g 8. Instances in pictures of modern artists 101 
 
 § 9. Connection between ideas of power and modes of execu- 
 tion 101 
 
 CHAPTER II.— Of Ideas of Power, as they are depend- 
 ent UPON Execution. 
 
 § 1. Meaning of the term execution" 102 
 
 g 2. The first quality of execution is truth 102 
 
 g 3. The second, simplicity 103 
 
 g 4. The third, mystery 103 
 
 g 5. The fourth, inadequacy ; and the fifth, decision 103 
 
 g 6. The sixth, velocity 103 
 
 g 7. Strangeness an illegitimate source of pleasure in execu- 
 tion 103 
 
 g 8. Yet even the legitimate sources of pleasure in execution 
 
 are inconsistent with each other 105 
 
 g 9. And fondness for ideas of power leads to the adoption 
 
 of the lowest 105 
 
 g 10. Therefore perilous 106 
 
 g 11. Recapitulation 106 
 
 CHAPTER III. -Op the Sublime. 
 
 § 1. Sublimity is the effect upon the mind of anything above it 107 
 g 2. Burke's theory of the nature of the sublime incorrect, and 
 
 why 107 
 
 g 3. Danger is sublime, but not the fear of it 108 
 
 g 4. The highest beauty is sublime 108 
 
 g 5. And generally whatever elevates the mind 108 
 
 g 6. The former division of the subject is therefore sufficient 109 
 
56 
 
 JSYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PART IL 
 OF TEUTH. 
 SECTION L 
 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES RESPECTING IDEAS OF TRUTH. 
 CHAPTER L— Of Ideas of Truth in their connection 
 
 WITH THOSE OF BeAUTY AND RELATION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. The two great ends of landscape painting are the repre- 
 sentation of facts and thoughts 110 
 
 § 2. They induce a different choice of material subjects . . , . Ill 
 § 3. The first mode of selection apt to produce sameness and 
 
 repetition , Ill 
 
 § 4. The second necessitating variety 112 
 
 § 5. Yet the first is delightful to all 112 
 
 § 6. The second only to a few 112 
 
 § 7. The first necessary to the second 113 
 
 § 8. The exceeding importance of truth 114 
 
 § 9. Coldness or want of beauty no sign of truth 114 
 
 § 10. How truth may be considered a just criterion of all art. 114 
 
 CHAPTER II.— That the Truth of Nature is not to be 
 
 DISCERNED BY THE UNEDUCATED SENSES. 
 
 g 1. The common self-deception of men with respect to their 
 
 power of discerning truth „ 116 
 
 § 2. Men usually see little of what is before their eyes 116 
 
 § 3. But more or less in proportion to their natural sensibility 
 
 to what is beautiful 118 
 
 §4. Connected with a perfect state of moral feeling 118 
 
 § 5. And of the intellectual powers 119 
 
 § 6. How sight depends upon previous knowledge 120 
 
 § 7. The diificulty increased by the variety of truths in nature 121 
 § 8. We recognize objects by their least important attributes. 
 
 Compare Part L, Sect. I., Chap. 4 122 
 
 CHAPTER III.— Of the Relative Importance of Truths: 
 —First, that Particular Truths are more impor- 
 tant THAN General Ones. 
 § 1. Necessity of determining the relative importance of 
 
 truths 124 
 
STI^OPSIS OF CONTENTS, 57 
 
 PAGB 
 
 §2. Misapplication .of the aphorism: General truths are 
 
 more important than particular ones" 124 
 
 § 3. Falseness of this maxim taken without explanation 125 
 
 § 4. Generality important in the subject, particularity in the 
 
 predicate 125 
 
 § 5. The importance of truths of species is not owing to their 
 
 generality 126 
 
 § 6. All truths valuable as they are characteristic 127 
 
 § 7. Otherwise truths of species are valuable, because beauti- 
 ful 127 
 
 § 8. And many truths, valuable if separate, may be objection- 
 able in connection with others 128 
 
 § 9. Recapitulation 129 
 
 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 
 represented 
 
 § 2. But the cases in which those principles have been strik- 
 ingly exemplified 
 
 § 3. Which are comparatively rare 
 
 § 4. All repetition is blamable 
 
 § 5. The duty of the painter is the same as that of a preacher 
 
 CHAPTER v.— Of the Relative Importance of Truths:— 
 Thirdly, that Truths of Color are the least im- 
 portant OF ALL Truths. 
 
 § 1. Difference between primary and secondary qualities in 
 
 bodies 132 
 
 § 2. The first are fully characteristic, the second imperfectly 
 
 so 132 
 
 § 3. Color is a secondary quality, therefore less important 
 
 than form 133 
 
 § 4. Color no distinction between objects of the same species 134 
 
 § 5. And different in association from what it is alone 134 
 
 § 6. It is not certain whether any two people see the same 
 
 colors in things 134 
 
 § 7. Form, considered as an element of landscape, includes 
 
 light and shade 135 
 
 § 8. Importance of light and shade in expressing the character 
 
 of bodies, and unimportance of color. 135 
 
 § 9. Recapitulation 136 
 
 129 
 
 130 
 130 
 131 
 131 
 
58 
 
 SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI.— Recapitulation. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. The importance of historical truths 186 
 
 § 2. Form, as explained by light and shade, the first of all 
 
 truths. Tone, light, and color are secondary 137 
 
 §3. And deceptive chiaroscuro the lowest of all 137 
 
 CHAPTER YIL— General Application of the Foregoing 
 Principles. 
 
 § 1. The different selection of facts consequent on the several 
 
 aims at imitation or at truth 138 
 
 § 2. The old masters, as a body, aim only at imitation 139 
 
 § 3. What truths they gave 139 
 
 § 4. The principles of selection adopted by modem artists 141 
 
 § 5. General feeling of Claude, Salvator, and G. Poussin, con- 
 trasted with the freedom and vastness of nature 141 
 
 § 6. Inadequacy of the landscape of Titian and Tintoret 142 
 
 § 7. Causes of its want of influence on subsequent schools. . . 143 
 § 8. The value of inferior works of art, how to be estimated 145 
 § 9. Religious landscape of Italy. The admirableness of its 
 
 completion 146 
 
 § 10. Finish, and the want of it, how right and how wrong 147 
 § 11. The open skies of the religious schools, how valuable. 
 
 Mountain drawing of Masaccio. Landscape of the 
 
 Bellinis and Giorgione 149 
 
 § 12. Landscape of Titian and Tintoret 151 
 
 § 13. Schools of Florence, Milan, and Bologna 153 
 
 § 14. Claude, Salvator, and the Poussins 154 
 
 § 15. German and Flemish landscape 155 
 
 § 16. The lower Dutch schools 157 
 
 §17. English school, Wilson and Gainsborough 158 
 
 § 18. Constable, Calcott 159 
 
 § 19. Peculiar tendency of recent landscape 160 
 
 § 20. G. Robson, D. Cox. False use of the term style . . . 161 
 
 § 21. Copley Fielding. Phenomena of distant color 163 
 
 § 22. Beauty of mountain foreground 105 
 
 §23. DeWint 167 
 
 § 24. Influence of Engraving. J. D. Harding 168 
 
 § 25. Samuel Prout. Early painting of architecture, how 
 
 deficient 160 
 
 § 26. Effects of age upon buildings, how far desirable 170 
 
 § 27. Effects of light, how necessary to the understanding of 
 
 detail 173 
 
 § 28. Architectural painting of Gentile Bellini and Vittor 
 
 Carpaccio 174 
 
SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 59 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 29. And of the Venetians generally 176 
 
 § 30. Fresco painting of the Venetian exteriors. Canaletto. . 177 
 § 31. Expression of the effects of age on Architecture by S. 
 
 Prout 180 
 
 §32. His excellent composition and color 181 
 
 § 33. Modern architectural painting generally. G. Cattermole 183 
 § 34. The evil in an archseological point of view of misapplied 
 
 invention in architectural subject 184 
 
 § 35. Works of David Roberts : their fidelity and grace 186 
 
 § 36. Clarkson Stanfield 188 
 
 § 37. J. M. W. Turner. Force of national feeling in all great 
 
 painters 191 
 
 § 38. Influence of this feeling on the choice of Landscape 
 
 subject 193 
 
 § 39. Its peculiar manifestation in Turner 194 
 
 § 40. The domestic subjects of the Liber Studiorum 195 
 
 § 41. Turner's painting of French and Swiss landscape. The 
 
 latter deficient 197 
 
 § 42. His rendering of Italian character still less successful. 
 
 His large compositions how failing 198 
 
 § 43. His views of Italy destroyed by brilliancy and redundant 
 
 quantity 201 
 
 § 44. Changes introduced by him in the received system of art. 202 
 § 45. Difficulties of his later manner. Resultant deficiencies . 203 
 
 §46. Reflection of his very recent works 206 
 
 § 47. Difficulty of demonstration in such subjects 208 
 
 SECTION II. 
 OF GENERAL TRUTHS. 
 
 CHAPTER I.— Op Truth of Tone. 
 
 § 1. Meaning of the word tone First, the right relation 
 
 of objects in shadow to the principal light 210 
 
 § 2. Secondly, the quality of color by which it is felt to owe 
 
 part of its brightness to the hue of light upon it 210 
 
 § 3. Difference between tone in its first sense and aerial per- 
 spective 211 
 
 § 4. The pictures of the old masters perfect in relation of 
 
 middle tints \o light 211 
 
 § 5. And consequently totally false in relation of middle tints 
 
 to darkness 212 
 
 § 6. General falsehood of such a system 213 
 
60 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 7. The principle of Turner in this respect 213 
 
 § 8. Comparison of N. Poussin's *'Phocion" 214 
 
 § 9. With Turner's "Mercury and Argus" 215 
 
 § 10. And with the " Datur Hora Quieti" 216 
 
 § 11. The second sense of the word "tone'' 216 
 
 § 12. Remarkable difference in this respect between the paint- 
 ings and drawings of Turner 216 
 
 § 13. Not owing to want of power over the material ..... 217 
 
 § 14. The two distinct qualities of light to be considered .... 218 
 § 15. Falsehoods by which Titian attains the appearance of 
 
 quality in light 218 
 
 § 16. Turner will not use such means 219 
 
 § 17. But gains in essential truth by the sacrifice 219 
 
 § 18. The second quality of light 220 
 
 § 19. The perfection of Cuyp in this respect interfered with 
 
 by numerous solecisms 221 
 
 § 20. Turner is not so perfect in parts— far more so in the whole. 222 
 
 § 21. The power in Turner of uniting a number of tones 223 
 
 § 22. Recapitulation 224 
 
 CHAPTER 11. —Of Tkuth of Color. 
 
 § 1. Observations on the color of G. Poussin's LaRiecia 225 
 
 § 2. As compared with the actual scene 225 
 
 § 3. Turner himself is inferior in brilliancy to nature 227 
 
 § 4. Impossible colors of Salvator, Titian 227 
 
 § 5. Poussin, and Claude 229 
 
 § 6. Turner's translation of colors 231 
 
 § 7. Notice of effects in which no brilliancy of art can even 
 
 approach that of reality 231 
 
 § 8. Reasons for the usual incredulity of the observer with 
 
 respect to their representation 232 
 
 § 9. Color of the Napoleon 234 
 
 § 10. Necessary discrepancy between the attainable brilliancy 
 
 of color and light 234 
 
 § 11. This discrepancy less in Turner than in other colorists. , 235 
 
 § 12. Its great extent in a landscape attributed to Rubens. . . 236 
 
 § 13. Turner scarcely ever uses pure or vivid color 236 
 
 § 14. The basis of gray, under all his vivid hues 238 
 
 § 15. The variety and fulness even of his most simple tones. 239 
 § 16. Following the infinite and unapproachable variety of 
 
 nature 239 
 
 § 17. His dislike of purple, and fondness for the opposition of 
 
 yellow and black. The principles of nature in this 
 
 respect 240 
 
STJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 61 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 18. His early works are false in color , 242 
 
 § 19. His drawings invariably perfect 242 
 
 § 20. The subjection of his system of color to that of chiaros- 
 curo 242 
 
 CHAPTER IIL— Of Truth of Chiaroscuro. 
 
 § 1. We are not at present to examine particular effects of 
 
 light 245 
 
 § 2. And therefore the distinctness of shadows is the chief 
 
 means of expressing vividness of light 246 
 
 § 3. Total absence of such distinctness in the works of the 
 
 Italian school 247 
 
 § 4. And partial absence in the Butch , 247 
 
 § 5. The perfection of Tamer's works in this respect 248 
 
 § 6. The effect of hig-shadows upon the light 250 
 
 § 7. The distinction holds good between almost all the works 
 
 of the ancient and modern schools , . . , 250 
 
 § 8. Second great principle of chiaroscuro. Both high light 
 
 and deep shadow are used in equal quantity, and only 
 
 in points 252 
 
 § 9. Neglect or contradiction of this principle by writers on 
 
 art 252 
 
 § 10. And consequent misguiding of the student 253 
 
 § 11. The great value of a simple chiaroscuro 254 
 
 § 12. The sharp separation of nature's lights from her middle 
 
 tint.. 254 
 
 § 13. The truth of Turner 255 
 
 CHAPTER ly. — Of Truth of Space: — First, as Dependent 
 ON THE Focus of the Eye. 
 
 § 1. Space is more clearly indicated by the drawing of ob- 
 jects than by their hue 257 
 
 § 2. It is impossible to see objects at unequal distances dis- 
 tinctly at one moment 258 
 
 § 3. Especially such as are both comparatively near 258 
 
 § 4. In painting, therefore, either the foreground or distance 
 
 must be partially sacrificed 259 
 
 § 5. Which not being done by the old masters, they could 
 
 not express space 259 
 
 § 6. But modern artists have succeeded in fully carrying out 
 
 this principle 260 
 
 § 7. Especially of Turner 261 
 
 § 8. Justification of the want of drawing in Turner's figures 262 
 
62 
 
 SYN'OFSIS OF CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER v.— Of Truth op Space : — Secondly, as its Ap- 
 pearance IS Dependent on the Power op the 
 Eye. 
 
 § 1. The peculiar indistinctness dependent on the retire- 
 ment of objects from the eye 263 
 
 § 2. Causes confusion, but not annihilation of details 263 
 
 g 3. Instances in various objects 264 
 
 § 4. Two great resultant truths ; that nature is never dis- 
 tinct, and never vacant 265 
 
 § 5. Complete violation of both these principles by the old 
 
 masters. They are either distinct or vacant 266 
 
 § 6. Instances from Nicholas Poussin 266 
 
 § 7. From Claude 266 
 
 § 8. AndG. Poussin 268 
 
 § 9. The imperative necessity, in landscape painting, of ful- 
 ness and finish , 268 
 
 § 10. Breadth is not vacancy. 269 
 
 § 11. The fulness and mystery of Turner's distances 371 
 
 § 12. Farther illustrations in architectural drawing 271 
 
 § 13. In near objects as well as distances 272 
 
 § 14. Vacancy and falsehood of Canaletto 272 
 
 § 15. Still greater fulness and finish in landscape foregrounds 273 
 § 16. Space and size are destroyed alike by distinctness and 
 
 by vacancy Ji75 
 
 § 17. Swift execution best secures perfection of details 275 
 
 § 18. Finish is far more necessary in landscape than in histori- 
 cal subjects 275 
 
 § 19. Recapitulation of the section 276 
 
 SECTION III. 
 OF TRUTH OF SKIES. 
 CHAPTER L— Op the Open Sky. 
 
 § 1. The peculiar adaptation of the sky to the pleasing and 
 
 teaching of man 277 
 
 § 2. The carelessness with which its lessons are received. . . . 278 
 
 § 3. The most essential of these lessons are the gentlest. . . . 278 
 
 § 4. Many of our ideas of sky altogether conventional 279 
 
 § 5. Nature and essential qualities of the open blue 279 
 
 § 6. Its connection with clouds 280 
 
 § 7. Its exceeding depth 280 
 
 § 8. These qualities are especially given by modern masters 281 
 
 § 9. And by Claude , 281 
 
SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 63 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 10. Total absence of them in Poussin. Physical errors in 
 
 his general treatment of open sky 282 
 
 § 11. Errors of Cuyp in graduation of color 282 
 
 § 13. The exceeding value of the skies of the early Italian 
 and Dutch schools. Their qualities are unattainable 
 in modern times 284 
 
 § 13. Phenomena of visible sunbeams. Their nature and 
 
 cause 284 
 
 § 14. They are only illuminated mist, and cannot appear when 
 the sky is free from vapor, nor when it is without 
 clouds 285 
 
 § 15. Erroneous tendency in the representation of such phe- 
 nomena by the old masters 28G 
 
 § 16. The ray which appears in the dazzled eye should not be 
 
 represented 28G 
 
 § 17. The practice of Turner. His keen perception of the 
 
 more delicate phenomena of rays 287 
 
 § 18. The total absence of any evidence of such perception in 
 
 the works of the old masters 287 
 
 § 19. Truth of the skies of modern drawings 288 
 
 § 20. Recapitulation. The best skies of the ancients are, in 
 quality^ inimitable, but in rendering of various truth, 
 childish • 288 
 
 CHAPTER 11.— Of Truth of Clouds :— First, of the Re- 
 gion OF THE Cirrus. 
 
 § 1. Difficulty of ascertaining wherein the truth of clouds 
 
 consists 289 
 
 § 2. Variation of their character at different elevations. The 
 three regions to which they may conveniently be con- 
 sidered as belonging 290 
 
 § 3. Extent of the upper region 290 
 
 § 4. The symmetrical arrangement of its clouds. 290 
 
 § 5. Their exceeding delicacy 291 
 
 § 6. Their number 292 
 
 § 7. Causes of their peculiarly delicate coloring 292 
 
 § 8. Their variety of form 293 
 
 § 9. Total absence of even the slightest effort at their repre- 
 sentation, in ancient landscape 293 
 
 § 10. The intense and constant study of them by Turner 294 
 
 § 11. His vignette, Sunrise on the Sea 296 
 
 § 12. His use of the cirrus in expressing mist 297 
 
 § 13. His consistency in every minor feature , 297 
 
64 
 
 SYlSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 14. The color of the upper clouds 298 
 
 § 15. Recapitulation 299 
 
 CHAPTER III.— Of Truth of Clouds:— Secondly, of the 
 Central Cloud Region. 
 
 § 1. Extent and typical character of the central cloud region. 300 
 § 2. Its characteristic clouds, requiring no attention nor 
 thought for their representation, are therefore favor- 
 ite subjects with the old masters 300 
 
 § 3. The clouds of Salvator and Poussin 301 
 
 § 4. Their essential characters 301 
 
 § 5. Their angular forms and general decision of outline. .. . 303 
 
 § 6.- The composition of their minor curves 803 
 
 § 7. Their characters, as given by S. Rosa 304 
 
 § 8. Monotony and falsehood of the clouds of the Italian 
 
 school generally 304 
 
 § 9. Vast size of congregated masses of cloud 305 
 
 § 10. Demonstrable by comparison with mountain ranges. . . . 306 
 
 § 11. And consequent divisions and varieties of feature 306 
 
 § 12. Not lightly to be omitted 307 
 
 § 13. Imperfect conceptions of this size and extent in ancient 
 
 landscape 308 
 
 § 14. Total want of transparency and evanescence in the 
 
 clouds of ancient landscape. 308 
 
 § 15. Farther proof of their deficiency in space 309 
 
 § 16. Instance of perfect truth in the sky of Turner's Babylon 310 
 
 §17. And in his Pools of Solomon 311 
 
 § 18. Truths of outline and character in his Como 312 
 
 § 19. Association of the cirrostratus with the cumulus 313 
 
 § 20. The deep-based knowledge of the Alps in Turner's Lake 
 
 of Geneva 313 
 
 § 21. Further principles of cloud form exemplified in his 
 
 Amalfi 313 
 
 § 22. Reasons for insisting on the infinity of Turner's works. 
 
 Infinity is almost an unerring test of truth 314 
 
 § 23. Instances of the total want of it in the works of Salvator 315 
 § 24. And of the universal presence of it in those of Turner. 
 
 The conclusions which may be arrived at from it. . . . 315 
 § 25. The multiplication of objects, or increase of their size, 
 will not give the impression of infinity, but is the 
 
 resource of novices 316 
 
 § 26. Farther instances of infinity in the gray skies of Turner 317 
 
 § 27. The excellence of the cloud-drawing of Stanfield 317 
 
 §28. The average standing of the English school 318 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 65 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER IV.— 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 319 
 
 § 2. Their marked difference in color 319 
 
 § 3. And in definiteness of form 320 
 
 § 4. They are subject to precisely the same great laws 321 
 
 § 5. Value, to the painter, of the rain-cloud 321 
 
 § 6. The old masters have not left a single instance of the 
 painting of the rain-cloud, and very few efforts at it. 
 
 Caspar Poussin's storms , 323 
 
 § 7. The great power of the moderns in this respect 323 
 
 § 8. Works of Copley Fielding 323 
 
 § 9. His peculiar truth e.. 324 
 
 § 10. His weakness and its probable cause 324 
 
 § 11. Impossibility of reasoning on the rain- clouds of Turner 
 
 from engravings 325 
 
 § 12. His rendering of Fielding's particular moment in the 
 
 Jumieges 326 
 
 § 13. Illustration of the nature of clouds in the opposed forms 
 
 of smoke and steam 326 
 
 § 14. Moment of retiring rain in the Llanthony 327 
 
 § 15. And of commencing, chosen with peculiar meaning' for 
 
 Loch Coriskin 327 
 
 § 16. The drawing of transparent vapor in the Land's End. . . 328 
 
 § 17. The individual character of its parts 329 
 
 § 18. Deep studied form of swift rain-cloud in the Coventry. . 330 
 
 § 19. Compared with forms given by Salvator 330 
 
 § 20. Entire expression of tempest by minute touches and cir- 
 cumstances in the Coventry 331 
 
 § 21. Especially by contrast with a passage of extreme repose 331 
 § 22. The truth of this particular passage. Perfectly pure 
 
 blue sky only seen after rain, and how seen 332 
 
 § 23. Absence of this effect in the works of the old masters. . 332 
 § 24. Success of our water-color artists in its rendering. Use 
 
 of it by Turner 333 
 
 § 25. Expression of near rain- cloud in the Gosport, and other 
 
 works..., 333 
 
 § 26. Contrasted with Caspar Poussin's rain-cloud in the Dido 
 
 and ^neas 334 
 
 § 27. Turner's power of rendering mist 334 
 
 § 28. His effects of mist so perfect, that if not at once under- 
 stood, they can no more be explained or reasoned on 
 
 than nature herself. . . 335 
 
 Vol. I.— 5 
 
66 
 
 SYI^OPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 29. Various instances 335 
 
 § 30. Turner's more violent effects of tempest are never ren- 
 dered by engravers 336 
 
 §31. General system of landscape engraving 336 
 
 §32. The storm in the Stonehenge 337 
 
 § 33. General character of such effects as given by Turner. 
 
 His expression of falling rain 337 
 
 § 34. Recapitulation of the section 338 
 
 § 35. Sketch of a few of the skies of nature, taken as a whole, 
 compared with the works of Turner and of the old 
 
 masters. Morning on the plains, 338 
 
 § 36. Noon with gathering storms 339 
 
 § 37. Sunset in tempest. Serene midnight 340 
 
 § 38. And sunrise on the Alps 341 
 
 CHAPTER V. — Effects of Light rendered by Modern Art. 
 
 § 1. Reasons for merely, at present, naming, without exam- 
 ining the particular effects of light rendered by Tur- 
 ner. . . 342 
 
 § 2. Hopes of the author for assistance in the future investi- 
 gation of them 342 
 
MODERN PAINTERS. 
 
 PAET I. 
 OF GENEEAL PRINCIPLES. 
 
 SIECTXOIsr I. 
 
 OF THE NATUEE OF THE IDEAS CONVEYABLE BY 
 
 AET. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 If it be true, and it can scarcely be disputed, that nothing 
 has been for centuries consecrated by public admiration, 
 without possessing in a high degree some kind of sterling 
 excellence, it is not because the average intellect and feeling 
 § 1. Public opinion of the maioritv of the public are competent 
 
 no criterion of ex- , ... . 
 
 ceiience, except af- in any Way to distinguish what is really excel- 
 
 ter long periods of , i i n .... 
 
 time. lent, but because all erroneous opinion is incon- 
 
 sistent, and all ungrounded opinion transitory ; so that 
 while the fancies and feelings which deny deserved honor 
 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 necessarily stable, 
 communicate themselves gradually from mind to mind, de- 
 
68 
 
 INTRODUGTOBY. 
 
 scending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the 
 whole lump, and rule by absolute authority, even where the 
 grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On 
 this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacil- 
 lating, 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, de- 
 grade 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 suffi- 
 ciently evident that there is no process of amalgamation by 
 which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely 
 by their multitude.* 
 
 If I stand by a picture in the Academy, and hear twenty 
 persons in succession admiring some paltry piece of mechan- 
 ism 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 gri- 
 mace of expression, it is absurd to tell me that they collective- 
 ly respect what they separately scorn, or that the feelings 
 and knowledge of such judges, by any length of time or 
 comparison 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 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 
 
 * The opinion of a majority is right only when it is more probable 
 with each individual that he should be 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, 
 
 69 
 
 to a wider and lower circle ; each rank being so far cogni- 
 zant of the superiority of that above it, as to receive its deci- 
 sion with respect ; until, in jDrocess of time, the right and 
 consistent 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 circamstances 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, uni- 
 ted 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 addi- 
 tion 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 corselet, 
 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 ; popularity was as instant as it was deserved, be- 
 cause there is in them an appeal to those passions which are universal 
 in all men, as well as all expression of such thoughts as can be re- 
 ceived 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 congregation for the worst part of his sermoji. 
 
 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 reputa- 
 tion of Shakspeare. No ordinary mind can comprehend wherein his 
 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 
 
70 INTRODTJGTORT. 
 
 But when this process has taken place, and the work has 
 become sanctified by time in the minds of men, it is impos- 
 sible that any new work of equal merit can be impartially 
 compared with it, except by minds not only educated and 
 § 2. And there- generally capable of appreciating merit, but 
 when once^^^^ strong euough to shake off the weight of preju- 
 formed. (Jxce and association, which invariably incline 
 
 them to the older favorite. It is much easier, says Barry, 
 to repeat the character recorded of Phidias, than to in- 
 vestigate the merits of Agasias. And when, as peculiarly 
 in the case of painting, much knowledge of what is tech- 
 nical and practical is necessary to a right judgment, so 
 that those alone are competent to pronounce a true ver- 
 dict who are themselves the persons to be judged, and who 
 therefore can give no opinion, centuries may elapse before 
 
 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 addi- 
 tional trouble to learn half a dozen quotations, without understanding 
 them, and admit the superiority of Shakspeare without further de- 
 mur. Nothing, 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 at- 
 tract and something to disgust the vulgar mind. Neither their intrin- 
 sic excellence, 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 vul- 
 gar a labor 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. Angelo, or Da Vinci, 
 —stand as Shakspeare does, — that which is commonplace and feeble 
 in their excellence being taken for its essence by the uneducated, im- 
 agination assisting the impression, (for we readily fancy that we feel, 
 wh n feeling is a matter of pride or conscience,) and affectation and 
 pretension increasing the noise of the rapture, if not its degree. Giotto, 
 Orgagna, Angelico, 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. 
 
INTHODUCTORT, 
 
 71 
 
 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 ex- 
 ample. In no city of Europe where art is a subject of atten- 
 tion, are its prospects so hopeless, or its pursuits so result- 
 less, as in Rome ; because there, among all students, the 
 authority of their predecessors 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 of demonstrating any definite points of superi- 
 ority in modern art, and who is in a position in which his 
 doing so will not be ungraceful, to encounter without hesita- 
 § 3. The author's tion whatever opprobrium may fall upon him 
 posing\t^n par^ from the ncccssary prejudice even of the most 
 ticuiar instances, candid minds, and from the far more virulent 
 opposition of those who have no hope of maintaining 
 their own reputation for discernment but in the support 
 of that kind of consecrated merit which may be ap- 
 plauded without an inconvenient necessity for reasons. It 
 is my purpose, therefore, believing that there are certain 
 points of superiority in modern artists, and especially in one 
 or two of their number, which have not yet been fully un- 
 derstood, 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 decep- 
 tive veil of imaginary light through which we are accus- 
 tomed to gaze upon the patriarchal work, and to show the 
 real relations, whether favorable 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, 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 arround than mere feelinor or taste. I have accord- 
 
72 
 
 INTBODUGTORY. 
 
 ingly advanced nothing in the following pages but with 
 accompanying demonstration, which may indeed be true 
 or false — complete or conditional, but which can 
 lotnS capaweof Only be met on its own grounds, and can in 
 demonstration. borne down or affected by mere au- 
 
 thority of great names. Yet even thus I should scarcely 
 have ventured to speak so decidedly as I have, but for my 
 full conviction that we ought not to class the historical 
 painters of the fifteenth, and landscape painters of the 
 seventeenth, centuries, together, under the general title of 
 old masters," as if they possessed anything like corre- 
 sponding rank in their respective walks of art. I feel 
 assured that the principles on which they worked are totally 
 opposed, and that the landscape painters have been honored 
 only because they exhibited in mechanical and technical 
 qualities some semblance of the manner of the nobler his- 
 torical painters, whose principles of conception and compo- 
 sition they entirely reversed. The course of study which 
 has led me reverently to the feet of Michael Angelo and Da 
 Vinci, has alienated me gradually from Claude and Gaspar 
 — I cannot at the same time do homage to power and petti- 
 ness — to the truth of consummate science, and the manner- 
 ism of undisciplined imagination. And 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 particularly mentioned, do I intend to 
 include Nicholas Poussin, whose landscapes have a separate 
 and elevated character, which renders it necessary to con- 
 sider them apart from all others. Speaking generally of the 
 older masters, I refer only to Claude, Gaspar, Poussin, Salva- 
 tor 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 commence- 
 ment of the work to state briefly those principles on which 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 73 
 
 I conceive all right judgment of art must be founded. • 
 These introductory chapters I should wish to be read care- 
 fully, because all criticism must be useless when the terms or 
 grounds of it are in any degree ambiguous ; and the ordin- 
 ary language of connoisseurs and critics, granting that they 
 understand it themselves, is usually mere jargon to others, 
 from their custom of using technical terms, by which every- 
 thing is meant, and nothing is expressed. 
 § 5. The author's And if, in the application t)f these principles, 
 eruto&u^" in spite of my endeavor to render it impartial, 
 the feeling and fondness which I have for some 
 works of modern art 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 per- 
 fect, must be usually regarded by the reader. I do not say 
 that this veneration is wrong, nor that we should be less at- 
 tentive to the repeated words of time : but let us not forget, 
 that if honor 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 forever 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 measure to the departed spirit for the 
 hour of unkindness, 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 honor to the ashes which they had 
 denied to the spirit. Let it not displease 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. 
 
74 DEFINITION OF GREATNESS IN ABT. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 DEFINITION OF GREATNESS IN ART. 
 
 In the 15th Lecture of Sir Joshua Reynolds, incidental 
 notice is taken of the distinction between those excellences 
 in the painter which belong to him as such, and those which 
 § 1. Distinction belong to him in common with all men of intel- 
 painter^s ^^intei- ^^^^5 general and exalted powers of which 
 and"^^ technical evidence and expression, not the sub- 
 
 knowiedge. ject. 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. 
 
 §2. Painting, as Painting, or art generally, as such, with all 
 mo^L' 'LLf Yan? technicalities, difficulties, and particular 
 guage. ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive lan- 
 
 guage, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself noth- 
 ing. 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 lan- 
 guage 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, indeed, more difficult 
 of acquirement in the one case than in the other, and pos- 
 sesses more power of delighting the sense, while it speaks 
 to the intellect, but it is, nevertlicless, nothing more than 
 language, and all those excellences which are peculiar to 
 the painter as such, are merely what rhythm, melody, pre- 
 cision and force are in the words of the orator and the poet, 
 necessary to their great nt^ss, but not the test of their great- 
 
DEFINITION OF GREATNESS IN ART, 75 
 
 ness. 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 
 a term corres- ghould Call a man a srreat painter only as he ex- 
 
 pondmg to " ver- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 
 
 sifier." celled in precision and force in the language of 
 
 lines, and a great versifier, as he excelled in precision or force 
 in 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 convey. 
 
 Take, for instance, one of the most perfect 
 
 § 4. Example in ' /T o.!. j 
 
 a painting of E. pocms or pictures (1 use the words as synony- 
 
 Landseer's. \ i • i ^ . • i .^ 
 
 mous) w^hich modern times have seen : — the 
 " Old Shepherd's Chief-mourner." Here the exquisite execu- 
 tion 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 lan- 
 guage — 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 powerlessness of the head 
 laid, close and motionless, upon its folds, the fixed and tear- 
 ful 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- 
 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 solitary 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 high art, 
 and stamps its author, not as the neat imitator of the tex- 
 ture 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 
 
76 
 
 DEFINITION OF GREATNESS IN ART. 
 
 literature, to determine where the influence of language 
 stops, and where that of thought begins. Many thoughts 
 5 D'ffi It of dependent upon the language in which 
 
 fixing an exact they are clothed, that they would lose half their 
 language and bcauty if Otherwise expressed. But the highest 
 thought, 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 independ- 
 ency of language or expression. A composition is indeed 
 usually most perfect, 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 noth- 
 ing. 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. 
 
 §6. Distinction There is therefore a distinction to be made 
 tive aiKi expres- between wliat is ornamental in language and 
 sive language. what is expressive. That part of it which is 
 necessary to the embodying and conveying the thought is 
 worthy of respect and attention as necessar}'- to excellence, 
 though not the test of it. But that part of it which is deco- 
 rative has little more to do with the intrinsic excellence of 
 the picture than the frame or the varnishing of it. And 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 immediately stigmatized 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 fre- 
 quently 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 honor 
 
DEFINITION OF OBEATNESS IN ART. 77 
 
 of authors those who were never more than ornamental 
 writing-masters. 
 
 § 7. Instance in Most pictures of the Dutch school, for instance, 
 eariy^ttiian^""^ excepting always those of Rubens, Vandyke, and 
 schools. Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the 
 
 artist's power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of 
 useless and senseless words : while the early efforts of Cima- 
 bue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, de- 
 livered by the stammering lips of infants. It is not by rank- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 cellence, and one which cannot be compared with nor weighed 
 against thought in any way nor in any degree whatsoever. 
 The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, 
 however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better pict- 
 ure than that which has the less noble and less numerous 
 ideas, however beautifully expressed. No weight, nor mass, 
 nor beauty of execution 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 finished work of a great 
 artist is only better than its sketch, if the sources of pleasure 
 belonging to color and realization — valuable in themselves, — • 
 are so employed as to increase the impressiveness of the 
 thought. But if one atom of thought has vanished, all color, 
 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 picture 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 is 
 thus to be distinguished from, and held subordinate to, that 
 
78 
 
 DEFINITION OF GBEATNE88 IN ART. 
 
 which it conveys, we must still remember that there are 
 certain ideas inherent in language itself, and that strictly 
 §8 Yet there are Speaking, every pleasure connected with art has 
 certain ideas be- in it some reference to the intellect. The mere 
 
 lonecing to lan- 
 guage itself. sensual pleasure of the eye, received from the 
 
 most brilliant piece of coloring, 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 
 color, 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 
 § 9. The defini- received by the mind through the eye. So that, 
 if I say that the greatest picture is that which 
 conveys to the mind 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 beau- 
 ties of color and form, and those works of art wholly, which, 
 like the arabesques of Raffaelle in the Loggias, are not imi- 
 tative at all. Now I want a definition of art wide enough to 
 include all its varieties of aim ; I do not say therefore that 
 the art is greatest which gives most pleasure, because per- 
 haps 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 great- 
 est 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 spec- 
 tator, V)y 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 
 
OF IDEAS OF POWER, 
 
 79 
 
 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 in. 
 
 OF IDEAS OF POWER. 
 
 The definition of art which I have just given, requires me 
 to determine what kinds of ideas can be received from works 
 of art, and which of these are the greatest, before proceed- 
 ing* to any practical application of the test. 
 
 §1. What classes % . / , i . n 1.1. £ ^ 
 
 of ideas are con- I thmk that all the sourccs ot pleasure, or 
 veyabie by art. 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. 
 11. 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 sug- 
 gests 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 
 
 §2. Ideasof pow- . „ , , , 
 
 er vary much in perception oi the mental or bodily powers ex- 
 reiative dignity. ^j^^ productioii of any work of art. 
 
80 
 
 OF IDEAS OF POWER. 
 
 According to the 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 connected 
 with art ; but the differences in degree of dignity among 
 themselves are infinite, being correspondent with every 
 order of power, — from that of the fingers to that of the 
 most exalted intqjlect. Thus, when we see an Indian's 
 paddle carved from the handle to the blade, we have a con- 
 ception of prolonged manual labor, and are gratified in pro- 
 portion 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 in- 
 deed into our admiration of all elaborate ornament, archi- 
 tectural decoration, etc. 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 labor 
 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 persons 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 unneces- 
 sary. If to the evidence of labor be added that of strength 
 or dexterity, the sensation of power is yet increased ; if to 
 strength and dexterity be added that of ingenuity and judg- 
 ment, 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. 
 §3. But are re- So far the nature and effects of ideas of 
 whlteveJ^Tas powcr cannot but be admitted by all. But the 
 orpowerf^^ih'e circumstance which I wish especially to insist 
 wo?ci exce?^ upon, with rcspcct to them, is one which may 
 lence." ^xot^ perhaps, be so readily allowed, namely, 
 
 that they arc indej)endent of the nature or worthiness ol: 
 the object from which they are received, and that whatever 
 Las been the subject of a great power, whether there be in- 
 
OF IDEAS OF POWER,* 
 
 81 
 
 trinsic 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 consequent 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 unworthy objects : the object may be dangerous or use- 
 less, 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 ^'estimation 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," etc.; and we shall always, 
 in future, use the word excellent, as signifying that the 
 thing to which it is applied required a great power for its 
 production.* 
 
 * 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, be- 
 cause it is difficult to compose or write such, but never of excellent 
 flowers, because all flowers being the result of the same power, mutt 
 Vol. L— 6 
 
82 
 
 -OF IDEAS OF POWER, 
 
 The faculty of j^erceiving what powers are required for 
 the production of a thing, is the faculty of perceiving ex- 
 § 4. What is ne- cellcnce. It Is this faculty in which men, even 
 distil^guisMngof most Cultivated taste, must always be 
 
 excellence. wanting, unlcss they have added practice to re- 
 flection ; because none can estimate the power manifested 
 in victory, unless they have personally measured the strength 
 to be overcome. Though, therefore, it is possible, by the 
 cultivation 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 multi]3lied hours of toil have not reached the slight- 
 est resemblance of one of its tones, that its excellence is man- 
 ifest. 
 
 § 5. The pleasure Wherever, then, difficulty has been over- 
 attendant on come, there is excellence : and therefore, in 
 
 conquering dif- ' ' 
 
 Acuities is right, 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 dis- 
 eased taste which looks for the overcoming of difficulties, 
 and has pleasure in it, even without any view to resultant 
 good. It has been made part of our moral nature that we 
 should have a pleasure in encountering and conquering op- 
 position, for the sake of the struggle and the victory, not 
 for the sake of any after result; and not only our own vic- 
 tory, but the perception 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 seek- 
 ino- rather to show his skill in overcominor technical difficul- 
 
 o o 
 
 be equally excelleut. We distinguish them only as beautiful or useful, 
 and therefore, as there is no other one word to signify that quality of a 
 thiug produced 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 IMITATION, 
 
 83 
 
 ties, than to reach a great end, be it observed that he is only 
 blamed because he has sought to conquer an inferior diffi- 
 culty rather than a great one; for it is much easier to over- 
 come technical difficulties than to reach a great end. When- 
 ever the visible victory over difficulties 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 complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and 
 cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both in- 
 discriminately. We shall find, in the course of our investi- 
 gation, that beauty and difficulty go together; 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 em- 
 ployed, produces excellence in proportion to its own dignity 
 and exertion; and the faculty of perceiving this exertion, 
 and appreciating this dignity, is the faculty of perceiving 
 excellence. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. 
 
 FusELi, in his lectures, and many other persons of equally 
 just and accurate habits of thought, (among others, S. T. 
 Coleridge,) make a distinction between imitation and copy- 
 § 1. False use of ^^g'^ representing the first as the legitimate 
 tton*"' by'ml^^^^ fuuctiou of art— the latter as its corruption ; 
 writers of art. j^^^ sucli a distinction is by no means war- 
 ranted, or explained by the common meaning of the words 
 themselves, it is not easy to comprehend exactly in what 
 sense they are used by those writers. And though, reason- 
 ing 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 
 
84 
 
 OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. 
 
 (especially in the case of the word Imitation) are ex- 
 ceedingly 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. '^'^ In which 
 case the real pleasure may be in what we have been just 
 speaking of, the dexterity of the artist's hand ; or it may 
 be in a beautiful or singular arrangement of colors, 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 ''imitation one which, 
 though constantly confused in reasoning, 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. 
 
 § 2 Real mean- Whenever anything looks like what it is not, 
 ing of the term. i]^q resemblance being so great as nearly to 
 deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable 
 excitement 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 inquire \ we only know that there is no man who does not 
 
OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. 
 
 85 
 
 feel pleasure in his animal nature from gentle surprise, and 
 that such surprise can be excited in no more distinct manner 
 than by the evidence that a thing is not what it appears to 
 §3. What is re- be.* Now two things are requisite to our com- 
 sense^^of^'^iinita- P^^^e and more pleasurable perception of this : 
 first, that the resemblance be so perfect as to 
 amount to a deception ; secondly, that there be some 
 means of proving at the same moment that it is a decep- 
 tion. 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, 
 ^nd the finger says it is flat ; they are, therefore, never felt 
 in so high a degree as in painting, where appearance of pro- 
 jection, rougiiness, hair, velvet, etc., 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 figure does not look like what it is not : it looks 
 like marble, and like the form of a man, but then it is mar- 
 ble, 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, bona fide and actual, whether in marble or in 
 flesh — not an imitation or resemblance 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 deception occasioned by 
 a thing's intentionally seeming different from what it is ; and 
 the degree of the pleasure depends on the degree of differ- 
 ence and the perfection of the resemblance, not on the nature 
 of the thing resembled. The simple pleasure in the imita- 
 tion would be precisely of the same degree, (if the accuracy 
 could be equal,) whether the subject of it were the hero or 
 his horse. There are other collateral sources of pleasure, 
 * ovWoyi^fius eTT<7, otl tovto iKuyo. — Arist. Rhet. 1, 11, 23. 
 
86 
 
 OF IDEAS OF IMITATION. 
 
 which are necessarily associated with this, but that part of 
 the pleasure which depends on the imitation is the same in 
 both. 
 
 § 4. The pleasure Ideas of imitation, then, act by producing the 
 [mitatk)! ^"th"^ simple pleasure of surprise, and that not of sur- 
 SbSthat c?n be P^^^^ highest scusc and function, but of the 
 
 derived from art. mean and paltry surprise which is felt in jug- 
 glery. These ideas and 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 impres- 
 sion 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 strict- 
 ly sensual pleasure. 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 
 only orcontem^ sccond placc, because not only do they preclude 
 tibie subjects. spectator 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 dis- 
 played are therefore either of contemptible subjects, or have 
 the imitation shown in contemptibly parts of them, bits of 
 dress, jewels, furniture, etc. 
 
 Thirdly, these ideas are contemptible, because 
 cont(;mptibie be- nO ideas of power are associated with them; to 
 caube It lb easy. ^|^^ ignorant, imitation, indeed, seems difficult, 
 and its success praiseworthy, but even they can by no possi- 
 bility see more in the artist than they do in a juggler, who 
 arrives at a strange end by means with which they are unac- 
 
OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 
 
 87 
 
 quainted. 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 
 attainment than a true eye, a steady hand, and moderate in- 
 dustry — qualities which in no degree separate the imitative 
 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 depend- 
 ent 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 imitation, I 
 wish to be understood to mean the immediate and present per- 
 §7 Recapituia ^^^P^^^^ ^^^^ Something produced by art is not 
 tion. 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 subsequent perception of its being something 
 else — flat, for instance, when we thought it was round. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 OF IDEAS OF TEUTH. 
 
 The word truth, as applied to art, signifies the faithful 
 statement, either to the mind or senses, of any fact of 
 nature. 
 
 ^ , . ^ We receive an idea of truth, then, when we 
 
 § 1, Meaning of . , ' 
 
 the word "truth" perccive the faithfulness of such a statement. 
 
 as applied to art. rr-n t ^ i • i o i -• /. 
 
 i he dinerence between ideas oi truth and of 
 imitation lies chiefly in the following points. 
 
88 
 
 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH, 
 
 First, — Imitation can only be of something material, but 
 truth has reference to statements both of the qualities of 
 § 2 First differ- material things, and of emotions, impressions and 
 Sutk^and imita- "thoughts. There is a moral as well as material 
 tion. truth, — a truth of impression as well as of 
 
 form, — of thought as well as of matter ; and the truth of im- 
 pression and thought is a thousand times the more impor- 
 tant of the two. Hence, truth is a term of universal appli- 
 cation, but imitation is limited to that narrow field of art 
 which takes cognizance only of material things. 
 § 3. Second differ- Secondly,— Truth may be stated by any signs 
 or 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 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 in- 
 ducing the effect of it, then this channel of communication 
 can convey uncorrupted 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 ob- 
 ject. They speak to the perceptive faculties only : truth to 
 the conceptive. 
 
 Thirdly, — And in consequence of what is above stated, an 
 idea of truth exists in the statement of one attribute of any- 
 § 4. Third differ- ^^^^ imitation requires 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 agreeable with its previous impres* 
 
OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 
 
 89 
 
 sions 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. 
 
 §5. No accurate Hcncc it might at first sight appear, that an 
 
 truths necessary /? • x* • "U ^ '^ 
 
 to imitation. idea oi imitation, inasmuch as several ideas or 
 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 pro- 
 duce the effect 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 
 apparent form even of a simple parallelopiped. How much 
 less of the complicated forms of boughs, leaves, or limbs? 
 Although, therefore, something resembling the real form is 
 necessary to deception, 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 in- 
 stantly offend and give pain to a mind really capable of dis- 
 tinguishing truth, is yet quite sufficient for all the purposes 
 of deceptive imagination. It is the same with regard to color. 
 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 
 
90 
 
 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH, 
 
 the falsehood ; but, so that there be just so much approach to 
 truth of color 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 color be wholly omitted, or 
 rather defied and contradicted, there is yet quite enough for 
 all purposes of imitation. The only facts then, which 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 color to assist them, the idea of imita- 
 tion is complete. I would undertake to paint an arm, with 
 every muscle out of its place, and every bone of false form 
 and dislocated articulation, and yet to observe 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 endeavoring 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 
 neighboring church. I had not, but felt little inclined 
 to leave my marble for all the canvas that ever suffered from 
 French brushes. My apathy was attacked with gradually 
 increasing energy of praise. Rubens never executed — 
 Titian never colored 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 heaiif^'^ repeated I, wishing to 
 know what particular excellences 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 con- 
 centrated in one conclusive and overwhelming proposition 
 the qualities w^hich were to outshine Rubens and overpower 
 Buonaroti — " Monsieur, IL sort ! " 
 
 This gentleman could only perceive two truths — flesh color 
 and projection. These constituted his notion of the perfec- 
 tion of painting ; because they unite all that is necessary 
 
OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 
 
 91 
 
 for deception. He was not therefore cognizant of many ideas 
 of truth, though perfectly cognizant of ideas of imitation. 
 §6 Ideas of ^® shall sce, in the course of our investiga- 
 truth are incon- ^^^^ {^q^^ of truth, that idcas of imitation 
 
 sistent with ideas ^ ' 
 
 of imitation. not Only do not imply their presence, but even 
 are inconsistent with it ; and that pictures which imi- 
 tate 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 imitation — 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 quali- 
 ties 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 con- 
 veyed. These signs have no pretence, nor hypocrisy, 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 con- 
 templation 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 imitation, 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 investigation which we propose of the 
 functions of the former ; but we may as well now express 
 the conclusion to which we shall then be led — that no pict- 
 ure can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the 
 very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true. 
 
92 
 
 OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. 
 
 CHAPTER VL 
 
 OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. 
 
 Any material object which can give us pleasure in the 
 simple contemplation of its outward qualities without any 
 direct and definite exertion of the intellect, I call in some 
 §1. Definition of ^^3^^ degree, beautiful Why we 
 
 the term ''beau- receive pleasure from some forms and colors, 
 
 tiful." ^ . ' 
 
 and not from others, is no more to be asked or 
 answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood. 
 The utmost subtilty of investigation will only lead us to 
 ultimate instincts and principles of human nature, for which 
 no farther reason can be given than the simple will of the 
 Deity that we should be so created. /We may, indeed, per- 
 ceive, as far as we are acquainted with His nature, that we 
 have been so constructed as, w^hen 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, edu- 
 cation 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 more and more authoritative by con- 
 stant obedience, so as to derive pleasure always from that 
 which God originally 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 dis- 
 theterm'^'^iB^^^^ P^^^^^ w^^^- Perfect taste is the faculty of re- 
 ceiving the greatest possible pleasure from those 
 
OJ?' IDEAS OF BEAUTY, 
 
 93 
 
 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 
 Ltweeif^^^taste distinguished from that of "judgment," with 
 and judgment, ^j^jc]^ jg constantly confounded. Judgment 
 is a general term, expressing definite action of the intellect, 
 and applicable to every kind of subject which can be sub- 
 mitted to it. There may be judgment of congruity, judg- 
 ment 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. 
 § 4. How far Observe, however, I do not mean by exclud- 
 come^ intellect- direct cxertion 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 relation, which are 
 purely intellectual, and through which we arrive at our no- 
 blest ideas of what is commonly and rightly called " intellect- 
 ual beauty." But there is yet no immediate exertion of the 
 intellect ; that is to say, if a person receiving even the no- 
 blest ideas of simple beauty be asked why he likes the object 
 exciting them, he will not be able to give any distinct rea- 
 son, 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 received more than an idea of beauty — it is 
 an idea of relation. 
 
94 
 
 OF IDEAS OF RELATION, 
 
 Ideas of beauty are among the noblest which can be pre- 
 sented to the human mind, invariably exalting and purify- 
 ing it according to their degree ; and it would appear that 
 we are intended by the Deity to be constantly under their 
 § 5. The high influence, because there is not one single ob- 
 tfon^ of'^ ideas^of 3^^^ nature which is not capable of convey- 
 beauty. jj^g 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 scarce- 
 ly anything, in pure, undiseased nature, like positive de- 
 formity, but only degrees of beauty, or such slight and rare 
 points of permitted contrast as may render all around them 
 more valuable by their opposition, spots of blackness in crea- 
 tion, to make its colors felt.. 
 
 But althouoh evervthino" in nature is more or 
 
 §6. Meaning of ^ ^ ? i? u ' ^ I, 
 
 the term " ideal less beautiiul, every species oi object has its 
 beauty. o^yri kind and degree of beauty ; some being in 
 
 their own nature more beautiful than others, and few, if any, 
 individuals possessing 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. 
 
 Ideas of beauty, then, be it remembered, are the subjects 
 of moral, but not of intellectual perception. By the inves- 
 tigation of them we shall be led to the knowledge of the 
 ideal subjects of art. 
 
 CHAPTER VIT. 
 
 OF IDEAS OF RELATION. 
 
 I USE this term rather as one of convenience than as ade- 
 quately expressive of the vast class of ideas which I wish to 
 be comprehended under it, namely, all those conveyable by 
 § 1. General moan- which are the subjects of distinct intel- 
 ing of the term. lectual perception and action, and which are 
 
OF IDEAS OF RELATION, 
 
 95 
 
 therefore worthy of the name of thoughts. But as every 
 thought, or definite exertion of intellect, implies two sub- 
 jects, and some connection or relation inferred between them, 
 the term " ideas of relation " is not incorrect, though it is 
 inexpressive. 
 
 Under this head must be arranp-ed every- 
 
 § 2. What ideas . -i . • p • 4.- ^l 
 
 are to be compre- thing productive ot expression, sentiment, and 
 hended undent, character, whether in figures or landscapes, (for 
 there may be as much definite expression and marked car- 
 rying out of particular thoughts in the treatment of inani- 
 mate as of animate nature,) everything relating to the con- 
 ception of the subject and to the congruity and relation of 
 its parts ; not as they enhance each other's beauty by known 
 and constant laws of composition, but as they give each other 
 expression and meaning, by particular application, requiring 
 distinct thought to discover or to enjoy: the choice, for in- 
 stance, of a particular lurid or appalling light, to illustrate an 
 incident in itself terrible, or of a particular tone of pure 
 color to prepare the mind for the expression of refined and 
 delicate feeling ; and, in a still higher sense, the invention 
 of such incidents and thoughts as can be expressed in words 
 as well as on canvas, 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 stone-masons 
 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 
 realizations of color. Such a thought a*s this is something 
 far above all art ; it is epic poetry of the highest order. 
 Claude, in subjects of the same kind, commonly introduces 
 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 
 
96 
 
 OF IDEAS OF 'RELATION, 
 
 here ; we must look to the imitation or to nothing. Conse- 
 quently, Turner rises above Claude in the very first instant 
 of the conception of his picture, and acquires an intellectual 
 superiority v^hich no powers of the draughtsman or the artist 
 (supposing that such existed in his antagonist) could ever 
 wrest from him. 
 
 Such are the function and force of ideas of 
 
 § 3 The exceed- 
 
 ing nobility of relation. They are what I have asserted in the 
 these ideas. second chapter of this section to be the noblest 
 subjects of art. Dependent 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 and color which its 
 nature was capable of, and that the ideal lines should be car- 
 ried 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 become 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 Madonna ; and the di- 
 vine 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 gener- 
 ally, the most extensive as the most important source of 
 §4. Why no sub- pleasure ; and if we proposed entering upon the 
 ten^ivTa^ciassis criticism of historical works, it would be absurd 
 necessary. attempt to do SO without further subdivision 
 
 and arrangement. But the old landscape painters got over 
 so much canvas without either exercise of, or appeal to, the 
 intellect, that we shall be little troubled with the subject as 
 
OF IDEAS OF RELATION. 
 
 97 
 
 far as they are concerned ; and whatever subdivision we may 
 adopt, as it will therefore have particular reference to the 
 works of modern artists, will be better understood when we 
 have obtained some knowledge 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 re- 
 quire, at the instant of their perception, active exertion of 
 the intellectual powers. 
 Vol. I.— 7 
 
 I 
 
OF POWEE. 
 
 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 appre- 
 ciate their relative worth as to see, that from the list, as it is 
 §1. No necessity to be applied to the purposcs of legitimate criti- 
 Btudy*lf ideLs^of cism, wc may at once throw out the ideas of 
 imitation. imitation ; first, because, as we have shown, they 
 
 are unworthy the pursuit of the artist ; and secondly, be- 
 cause they are nothing more than the result of a particular 
 association of ideas of truth. In examining the truth of art, 
 therefore, we shall be compelled to take notice of those par- 
 ticular 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, there- 
 fore it must be bad." 
 
 Ideas of power, in the same way, cannot be 
 
 §2. Norforscp- , , • , i , 
 
 arate study of completely vicwcd as a separate class ; not be- 
 
 ideas of power. ^ • , . i i i 
 
 cause they are mean or unimportant, but because 
 they are almost always associated with, or dependent upon, 
 some of the higher ideas of truth, beauty, or relation, rendered 
 with decision or velocity. That Dower which delights us in 
 the chalk sketch of a great painter is not one of the fingers, 
 not like that of the writing-master, mere dexterity of hand. 
 It is the accuracy and certainty of the knowledge, rendered 
 
IDEAS OF POWER. 
 
 99 
 
 evident by its rapid and fearless 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 other- 
 wise desirable in art, we shall gradually develop the sources 
 of the ideas of power ; and if there be anything difficult 
 which is not otherwise desirable, it must be afterwards con- 
 sidered separately. 
 
 But it will be necessary at present to notice 
 ler* one ^particu- a particular form of the ideas of power, which 
 lar form. 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 cal- 
 culation 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 resist- 
 ing, and the other overwhelming. In the one case the 
 power is imagined, and in the other felt. 
 
 §4. There are There are thus two modes in which we re- 
 receivin^g^^ideas ^cive the Conception of power ; one, the most 
 of power, com -jugt when bv a perfect knowledsre of the diffi- 
 
 monly mconsis- J ? <j r o 
 
 teiit* culty to be overcome, and the means employed, 
 
 we form a right estimate of the faculties exerted ; the 
 other, when without possessing such intimate and ac- 
 curate knowledge, we are impressed by a sensation of 
 power in visible action. If these two modes of receiving 
 the impression 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 
 
 § 5. First reason . . . „ 
 
 of the inconsis- in order to receive a sensatio?i of power, we 
 must see it in operation. Its victory, there- 
 
100 GENERAL PRmCIPLES RESPECTING 
 
 fore, must not be achieved, but achieving, and therefore 
 imperfect. Thus we receive a greater sensation of power 
 from the half-hewn limbs of the Twib'ght to the Da}^ of the 
 Cappella de' 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 inconsistencv is, that 
 
 §6. Second rea- , /? • • ^' ^ a. ^v. ' 
 
 son for the in- the scusatiou OT powcr IS m proportion to the 
 
 consistency, ^'j t 
 
 apparent inadequacy oi the means to the end ; 
 so that the impression 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 tlie 
 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 constantly decreasing, and therefore 
 the least sensation of power is received from the most per- 
 fect work. 
 
 It is thus evident that there are sensations of 
 
 § 7. The sensa- . . i • i • i 
 
 tion of power powcr about impcrtect art, so that it be right 
 
 ought not to be , « ., , . , , , 
 
 fionght in iraper- art as lar as it goes, which must always be want- 
 foctart. perfection ; and that there are sources 
 
 of pleasure in the hasty sketch and rough hewn block, which 
 are partially wanting in the tinted canvas 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 com- 
 mencement ; and though it be not so manifest to the senses, 
 it ought to have higher influence on the mind ; and there- 
 fore in praising pictures for the ideas of power they convey, 
 we must not look to the keenest sensation, but to the hio-h- 
 
IDEAS OF POWEB, 
 
 101 
 
 est estimate, accompanied with as much of the sensation as 
 is compatible with it ; and thus we shall consider those pict- 
 ures 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 propor- 
 tion to the effect obtained than in the picture ; but yet the 
 picture involves the greater power, if out of all the addi- 
 tional labor bestowed on it, not a touch has been lost. 
 
 For instance, there are few drawings of the 
 
 § 8. Instances in . i . i , • i , • « 
 
 pictures of mod- present day that involve greater sensations of 
 ern artists. power than those 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 complete. Brilliant, beautiful, and right, as a sketch, the 
 work is still far from perfection, as a drawing. On the con- 
 trary, there are few drawings of the present day that bear 
 evidence of more labor bestowed, or more complicated means 
 employed, than those of John Lewis. The result does not, 
 at first, so much convey an impression of inherent power as 
 of prolonged exertion ; but the result is complete. Water- 
 color drawing can be carried no farther ; 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 employed 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 is of the highest order, and the enduring 
 pleasure following on the estimate of it pure. 
 §9. Connection But there is still farther ground for caution 
 pou4Ta"ncf ^ in pursuing the sensation of power, connected 
 of execution. with the particular characters and modes of exe- 
 cution. This we shall be better able to understand by briefly 
 reviewing the various excellences which may belong to execu- 
 tion, and give pleasure in it ; though the full determination of 
 
102 
 
 OF IDEAS OF POWER, 
 
 what is desirable in it, and the critical examination of the exe- 
 cution of different artists, must be deferred, as will be immedi- 
 ately seen, until we are more fully acquainted with the prin- 
 ciples of truth. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 OF IDEAS OF POWER, AS THEY AEE DEPENDENT UPON 
 EXECUTION. 
 
 By the term " execution," I understand the right me- 
 §1. Meaning of chanical usc of the means of art to produce a 
 
 the term " ex- 
 ecution." given end. 
 
 All qualities of execution, properly so called, are influ- 
 
 §2. The first enced by, and in a 2:reat deo-ree dependent on, 
 
 quality of execu- ' ^ ^1. 4.% 
 
 tion is truth. a lar higher power than that oi 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 expres- 
 sion of refined truth which is carried out to the last touch, 
 and shadow of a touch, and which makes every hairsbreadth 
 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 commonplace 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 per- 
 fection and precision of the instantaneous line that the claim 
 to immortality is laid. And if this truth of truths be present, 
 all the other qualities of execution may well be spared ; and 
 to those artists who wish to excuse their ignorance and in- 
 accuracy by a species of execution which is a perpetual proc- 
 lamation, "qu'ils n'ont demeurc qu'un quart d'heure a le 
 
AS DEPENDENT ON EXECUTION 1( 
 
 faire," we may reply with the truthful Alceste, Monsieii , 
 le temps ne fait rien a I'affaire." 
 
 § 3. The second, The secoiid quality of execution is simplicity, 
 simplicity, rpj^g more unpretending, quiet, and retiring the 
 
 means, the more impressive their effect. Any ostentation, 
 brilliancy, 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. 
 § 4. The third, The third is mystery. Nature is always 
 mystery. mysterious and secret in the use of her meanb ; 
 
 and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable. 
 That execution which is the most incomprehensible, and 
 which therefore defies imitation, (other qualities being sup- 
 posed alike,) is the best. 
 
 § 5. The fourth, The f ourth is inadequacy. The less sufficient 
 the'^m'th^'dec^ means appear to the end, the greater (as 
 s^^"- has been already noticed) will be the sensation 
 
 of power. 
 
 The fifth is decision : the appearance, that is, that what- 
 ever is done, has been done fearlessly and at once ; because 
 this gives us the impression that both the fact to be repre- 
 sented, and the means necessary to its representation, were 
 perfectly known. 
 
 § 6. The sixth, The sixth is velocity. Not only is velocity, 
 velocity. ^Y^Q appearaj .e of it, agreeable as decision 
 
 is, because it gives ideas o power and knowledge ; but 
 of two touches, as nearly a^ possible the same in other re- 
 spects, the quickest will invariably be the best. Truth 
 being .supposed equally present in the shape and direc- 
 tion of both, there will be more evenness, grace and vari- 
 ety, in the quick one than in the slow one. It will be 
 more agreeable to the eye as a touch or line, '^ndi will pos- 
 sess more of the qualities of the lines of nature — gradation, 
 uncertainty, and unity. 
 
 §7. strangeness These six qualities are the only perfectly 
 source^oT^pTeas^ legitimate sources of pleasure in execution ; 
 ure in execution, j^^^ J flight havc added a seventh— strange- 
 ness, which in many cases is productive of -a pleasure not 
 
104 
 
 OF IDEAS OF POWER, 
 
 altogether mean or degrading, though scarcely right. Sup- 
 posing the other higher qualities first secured, it adds in 
 no small degree to our impression of the artist's knowl- 
 edge, if the means used be such as we should never have 
 thought of, or should have thought adapted to a con- 
 trary effect. Let us, for instance, compare the execution of 
 the bull's head in the left hand lowest corner of the Adora- 
 tion 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 canvas a thin 
 grayish brown, transparent and even, very much the color 
 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 transparency. 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 
 background is then laid in with thick, solid, warm white, 
 actually projecting all round the head, leaving it in dark in- 
 taglio. 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 canvas, it looks actually transparent — a flimsy, meaning- 
 less, distant shadow ; while the background looks solid, pro- 
 jecting 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 realiza- 
 tion 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 exquisite delicacy and transpar- 
 ency, and on this the cow's head is actually modelled in 
 luminous white, the separate locks of hair j^rojecting from 
 the canvas. 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 
 
AS DEPENDENT ON EXECUTION 
 
 105 
 
 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 ; an#that which 
 is most conducive to the end, can be strange only to the 
 ignorance of the spectator. This kind of pleasure is illegiti- 
 mate, therefore, because it implies and requires, in those who 
 feel it, ignorance of art. 
 
 §8. Yet even the The legitimate sources of pleasure in execu- 
 LufcesofVeL^ ^^^^^ therefore truth, simplicity, mystery, 
 ure in execution inadequacy, dccisiou, and velocity. But of 
 
 are inconsistent . . 
 
 with each other, these, be it obscrved, some are so far incon- 
 sistent with others, that they cannot be 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, be- 
 cause on them are chiefly attendant 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 
 creation 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 fix itself 
 on the conception. Hence the danarer of too 
 
 §9. And fond- « -, ^ , • /» 
 
 ness for ideas of great fonducss lor thoso sensations of power 
 thr^adoption of which are associated with the three last quali- 
 the lowest. ^.^^ cxccution ; for although it is most de- 
 sirable that these should be present as far as they are con- 
 sistent with the others, and though their visible absence is 
 always painful and wrong, yet the moment the higher quali- 
 ties are sacrificed to them in the least degree, we have a 
 brilliant vice. Berghem and Salvator Rosa are good in- 
 stances of vicious execution dependent on too great fond- 
 ness for sensations of power, vicious because intrusive and 
 attractive in itself, instead of being subordinate to its results 
 and forgotten in them. There is perhaps no greater stum- 
 
106 
 
 OF IDEAS OF POWEB. 
 
 bling-block in the artist's way, than the tendency to sacrifice 
 truth and simpKcity to decision and velocity,* captivating 
 qualities, ^^.s^ 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 unappreciable by the 
 majority of spectators, so difficult of attainment to the artist, 
 that it is no wonder that efforts so arduous and unrewarded 
 §10. Therefore should be abandoned. But if the temptation 
 perilous. once yielded to, its consequences are fatal ; 
 
 there is no pause in the fall. I could name a celebrated 
 modern artist- — once a man of the highest power and prom- 
 ise, who is a glaring instance of the peril of such a course. 
 Misled by the undue popularity of his swift execution, he 
 has sacrificed to it, first precision, and then truth, and her 
 associate, beauty. What was first neglect of nature, has 
 become contradiction of her ; what was once imperfection, 
 is now falsehood ; and all that was meritorious in his man- 
 ner, is becoming the worst, because the most attractive of 
 vices ; decision without a foundation, and swiftness without 
 an end. 
 
 § 11. Recapituia- Such are the principal modes in which the 
 ideas of power may become a dangerous attrac- 
 tion 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 diffi- 
 culty to victory over a great, but concealed one ; and so that 
 
 * I have here noticed only noble vices, the sacrifices of one excel- 
 lence to another legitifnate but inferior one. Th^re are, on the other 
 hand, qualities of execution 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 pleasure, and these are vice throughout, and have no redeeming 
 quality nor excusing aim. Such is that which is often thought so de- 
 sirable 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, on the other hand, the softness and smoothness which are 'the 
 great attraction of Carlo Dolci, and such the exhibition of particular 
 powers and tricks of the hand and fingers, in total forgetfulness of any 
 end whatsoever to be attained thereby, which is especially character- 
 istic of modern engraving. Compare Sect. II. Chap. II. § 21. Note. 
 
OF THE SUBLIME. 
 
 107 
 
 we keep this distinction constantly in view, (whether with 
 reference to execution or to any other quality of art,) be- 
 tween 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. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF THE SUBLIME. 
 
 It may perhaps be wondered that in the division we have 
 made of oar subject, we have taken no notice of the sublime 
 in art, and that in our explanation of that division we have 
 not once used the word. 
 
 § 1. Sublimity is The fact is, that sublimity is not a specific 
 JhemfnaofTy"^ term,— not a term descriptive of the effect of a 
 thing above It. particular class of ideas. Anything which ele- 
 vates 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, therefore, only another »word for the effect of greatness 
 upon the feelings. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue, 
 or beauty, are thus all sublime ; and there is perhaps no de- 
 sirable quality of a work of art, which in its perfection is not, 
 in some way or degree, sublime. 
 
 § 2 Burke's the ^^^^7 prepared to allow of much ingenuity 
 
 ory of the nat- in Burkc's thcorv of the sublime, as connected 
 
 Ure of the sub- • y ^^> . rm P ^ ' 
 
 lime incorrect, With scli-prescrvation. ihere are icw thmgs SO 
 and why. great as death ; and there is perhaps nothing 
 
 which banishes all littleness 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 de- 
 gree sublime. But it is not the fear, observe, but the con- 
 templation of death ; not the instinctive shudder and strug- 
 
108 
 
 OF THE SUBLIME 
 
 gle of self-preservation, but the deliberate measurement of 
 the 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 conceptions of the fate. There is no sub- 
 limity 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 con- 
 
 §3. Danger is , i <» n . 
 
 Bubiime, but not vince any one, that so far from the feeliners of 
 
 the fear of it. m> - ^ - ^ ^ ^' 
 
 seli-jDreservation being necessary to the sublime, 
 their greatest action is totally destructive of it ; and that 
 there are few feelings less capable of its perception 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 percep- 
 tion of these agencies in their influence on others would not 
 be less sublime, not because peril or pain are sublime in their 
 own nature, but because their contemplation, exciting com- 
 passion or fortitude, elevates the mind, and ren- 
 beau^'^^s^^mib- ^^^^ 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 meanins: of the ideal in art. 
 
 § 5. And gener- % ^ ^ . . ° 
 
 ally whatever ele- I do not mean, in tracing the source of the sub- 
 
 vates the mind. , . ^ ^ , i /. • i i 
 
 lime to greatness, to hamper myselr with any 
 fine-spun theory. I take the widest possible ground of in- 
 vestigation, that sublimity is found wherever anything ele- 
 vates 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 sublimis ; 
 and will serve us much more easily, and be a far clearer and 
 more evident ground of argument, than any mere metaphysi- 
 cal or tu-^^ limited definition, while the proof of its justness 
 
OF THE SUBLIME, 
 
 109 
 
 will be naturally developed by its application to the different 
 branches of art. 
 
 §6. The former As, therefore, the sublime is not distinct from 
 subject^ is ^Lere- what is beautiful, nor from other sources of pleas- 
 fore sufficient, ^j,^ ^^^^ y^^^ -g Qj^jy ^ particular mode and 
 
 manifestation of 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 histori- 
 ans of nature. 
 
 That of ideas of beauty will lead us to compare them in 
 their attainment, first of what is agreeable in technical mat- 
 ters, then in color 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 just thought. 
 
PAET IL 
 OF TEUTH. 
 
 GENEEAL PKINCIPLES EESPECTING IDEAS OF TEUTH. 
 
 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 tv^o great and distinct ends ; the first, to in- 
 §1. The two great duce in the spectator's mind the faithful con- 
 ^S^^t^' ception of any natural objects whatsoever ; the 
 of fec^iTand^^ sccoud, to guidc the spectator's mind to those 
 thoughts. 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 spec- 
 tator where he stands himself ; he sets him before the land- 
 scape and leaves him. The spectator is alone. He may 
 follow out his own thoughts as he would in the natural soli- 
 tude, or he may remain untouched, unreflecting and regard- 
 less, as his disposition may incline him. But he has nothing 
 of thought given to him, no new ideas, no unknown feelings, 
 
OF IDEAS OF TllUTR. 
 
 Ill 
 
 forced on his attention or his heart. The artist is his con- 
 veyance, not his companion, — his horse, not his friend. But 
 in attaining the second end, the artist not only places the 
 spectator, 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 penetrating intelligence. 
 §2. They induce Each of these different aims of art will neces- 
 o/materM^sub^ sitate a different system of choice of objects to 
 j^^^^- be represented. The first does not indeed im- 
 
 ply choice at all, but it is usually united with the selection of 
 such objects 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 themselves objects of uncon- 
 nected admiration. 
 
 § 3 The first Now, although the first mode of selection, 
 mode of selection when fiTuided bv deep reflection, may rise to the 
 
 apt to produce , ^. , • ii i 
 
 sameness and production oi works posscssmg a uobic and 
 repetition. ceaseless influence on the human mind, it is 
 likely to degenerate into, or rather, in nine cases out of ten, 
 il; never goes beyond, a mere appeal to such parts of our ani- 
 mal 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 color, or of a massy 
 form with a delicate one. It also tends to induce constant 
 repetition of the same ideas, and reference to the same prin- 
 ciples ; it gives rise to those rules of art which properly ex- 
 cited Reynolds's indignation when applied to its higher eiforts ; 
 it is the source of, and the apology for, that host of techni- 
 
112 
 
 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH. 
 
 calities and absurdities which in all ages have been the curse 
 of art and the crown of the connoisseur. 
 
 But art, in its second and hiorhest aim, is not 
 
 §4. The second , • i p i- •, 
 
 necessitating va- an appeal to Constant annnal leehngs, but an ex- 
 pression 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 Y t th fi . t Hence, although there can be no doubt which 
 is delightful to of these branches of art is the hisrhest, it is 
 
 all . . 
 
 equally evident that the first will be the most 
 generally felt and appreciated. For the simple statement 
 of the truths of nature must in itself be pleasing to every 
 order of mind ; because every truth of nature is more or less 
 beautiful ; and if there be just and right selection of the 
 more important of these truths — based, as above explained, 
 on feelings and desires coi^mon to all mankind — the facts so 
 selected must, in some degree, be delightful to all, and their 
 value appreciable by all : more or less, indeed, as their senses 
 and instinct have been rendered more or less acute and ac- 
 curate by use and study ; but in some degree by all, and in 
 § 6. The second Same Way by all. But the highest art, being 
 only to a few. based on sensations of peculiar minds, sensations 
 occurring to them only at particular times, and to a plurality 
 of mankind perhaps never, and being ex^jressive 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 mo- 
 ments of his most fiery passion and most original thought. 
 And whereas the true meaninsc and end of his art must thus 
 
OF IDEAS OF TRUTH, 
 
 113 
 
 be sealed to thousands, or misunderstood 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 want of extended influence in high art, be it espe- 
 cially observed, proceeds from no want of truth in the art 
 itself, but from a want of sympathy in the spectator with 
 those feelings in the artist which prompt him to the utter- 
 ance of one truth rather than of another. For 
 necessary to the (and this is what I wish at present especially to 
 second. insist upon) although it is possible to reach 
 
 what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representa- 
 tion of facts, without reaching the second, the representation 
 of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the 
 second without having previously reached the first. I do 
 not say that a man cannot think, having false basis and ma- 
 terial for thought ; but that a false thought is worse than 
 the want of thought, and therefore is not art. And this 
 is the reason why, 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 attained before it. It is the foundation of all art ; 
 like real foundations it maybe little thought of when a brill- 
 iant 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 be beautiful in 
 art which does not in all its parts suggest and guide to the 
 foundation, even where no undecorated portion of it is visi- 
 ble ; while 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 under- 
 stood of the matter ; while 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 s|)irit is dwelling. And 
 Vol. I.— 8 
 
114 
 
 OF IDEAS OF TRUTH, 
 
 thus, though we want the thoughts and feelings of the artist 
 as well as the truth, yet they must be thoughts arising out 
 of the knowledge of truth, and feelings raising out of the 
 contemplation of truth. We do not want his mind to be as 
 badly blown glass, that distorts what we see through it ; but 
 like a glass of sweet and strange color, 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 imagina- 
 tion, the most playful fancy, the most pure feeling, (suppos- 
 ing that feeling could be pure and false at the same time ;) 
 §8 The exceed most exalted conccption, nor the most 
 
 ing importance comprehensive errasp of intellect, can make 
 
 of truth. TP i r. T -.1 
 
 amends tor the want ot 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 as a decep- 
 tion. 
 
 We shall, in consequence, find that no artist 
 
 § 9. Coldness or , i? i • • . • • • i i 
 
 want of beauty no Can be gracciul, imaginative, or original, unless 
 sign of truth. truthful ; and that the pursuit of beauty, 
 
 instead of leading us away from truth, increases the desire 
 for it and the necessity 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 knowl- 
 edge far exceeding that possessed by those who pride them- 
 selves on its accumulation without regarding its use. Cold- 
 ness and want of passion in a picture, are not signs of the 
 accuracy, but of the paucity of its statements ; true vigor 
 and brilliancy are not signs of audacity, but of knowledge. 
 § 10. How truth Hence it follows that it is in the power of all, 
 Sed a^jusrcri- ^^^th ^^^^ time, to form something like a 
 
 terion of all art. j^g^ judgment of the relative merits of ar- 
 tists ; for although with respect to the feeling and pas- 
 
TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 115 
 
 sion of pictures, it is often as impossible 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 representation of facts, it is possible for all, by atten- 
 tion, to form a right judgment of the respective powers and 
 attainments 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 invariably be that 
 which, if capable of appreciating them in every respect, we 
 should be just in assigning them ; so strict is the connec- 
 ■ tion, so constant the relation between the sum of knowledge 
 and the extent of thought, between accuracy of perception 
 and vividness of idea. 
 
 I shall endeavor, therefore, in the present portion of the 
 work, to enter, with care and impartiality into the investiga- 
 tion of the claims of the schools of ancient and modern land- 
 scape to faithfulness in representing nature. I shall pay no 
 regard whatsoever to what may be thought beautiful, or sub- 
 lime, or imaginative. I shall look only for truth ; bare, clear, 
 downright 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 endeavor, totally regardless of fervor 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. 
 
 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 appear- 
 ance of reason, why I think it necessary to devote a separate 
 
116 
 
 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 
 
 portion of the work to the showing of what is truthful in 
 art. " Cannot we/' say the public, "see what nature is with 
 „ ^, our own eyes, and find out for ourselves what 
 
 § 1. The common ^ 
 
 self-deception of is like her ? " It will be as well to determine 
 
 men with respect • i p 
 
 to their power of this QUBstion before we go farther, because if 
 
 discerning truth. . ^ ^ i i t i 
 
 this were possible, there would be little need 
 of criticism or teaching 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 
 artists to nature. To do this, no peculiar powers of mind 
 are required, no sympathy with particular feelings, nothing 
 which every man of ordinary intellect does not in some de- 
 gree possess, — powers, namely, of observation and intelli- 
 gence, which by cultivation 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 observa- 
 tion, 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 what nature is, or 
 what is like her, that they can discover truth by 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 philosophy, and that the truth of nature is a part of the 
 truth of God ; to him who does not search it out, darkness, - 
 as it is to him who does, infinity. 
 
 The first great mistake that people make in the matter, is 
 the supposition that they must see a thing if it be before 
 their eyes. They forget the great truth told them by 
 §2. Men usually Lockc, Book ii. chap. 9, § 3 I— " This is cer- 
 irbefore^^ thek whatever alterations are made in the 
 
 body, if they reach not the mind, whatever im- 
 pressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not 
 taken notice of within, there is no perception. Fire may 
 burn our bodies, with no other effect than it does a billet. 
 
TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 117 
 
 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. IIow often may a man 
 observe in himself, that while his mind is intently employed 
 in the contemplation of some subjects and curiously survey- 
 ing some ideas that are there, it takes no notice of impres- 
 sions 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 sufficient 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 accustomed to 
 exercise constantly its functions of hearing ; it is accustomed 
 to stillness, and the occurrence of a sound of any kind what- 
 soever is apt to awake attention, and be followed with per- 
 ception, in proportion to the degree of sound ; but the eye, 
 during our waking hours, exercises constantly its function 
 of seeing ; it is its constant habit ; we always, as far as the 
 bodily organ is concerned, see something, and we always see 
 in the same degree, 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 
 particular nature and quality of the sight. And thus, unless 
 the minds of men are particularly directed to the impressions 
 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 in- 
 evitable sensations of blueness, redness, darkness, light, etc., 
 and except at particular and rare moments, no more what- 
 soever. 
 
118 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 
 
 The degree of ignorance of external nature in which men 
 may thus remain, depends, therefore, partly on the number 
 § 3. But more or and character of the subjects with which their 
 tion to^thdr^nl- mi^ds may be otherwise occupied, and partly 
 to\t^ha?^s^beaS ^ natural 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 re- 
 ceiving pleasure from certain forms and colors, as there 
 is in persons who are technically said to have no ear^ for 
 distinguishing notes, but there is naturally every degree 
 of bluntness 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 be expanded almost unlimitedly by cultivation, 
 the pleasure received rewards not the labor necessary, and 
 the pursuit is abandoned. So that while 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 sen- 
 sations are naturally blunt, the call is overpowered at once 
 by other thoughts, and their faculties of perception, weak 
 § 4. Connected Originally, die of disuse. With this kind of 
 Itate of ^ moral t)odily Sensibility to color and form is inti- 
 feeiing. mately connected that higher sensibility which 
 
 we revere as one of the chief attributes of all rioble 
 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 embraces divine and human and brutal intel- 
 ligences, 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 abstract 
 intellect, wholly independent of our moral nature, yet these 
 instruments (perception and judgment) are so sharpened and 
 
TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED, 
 
 119 
 
 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 — perception is so quickened by 
 love, and judgment so tempered by veneration, that, practi- 
 cally, 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 constant 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 incapacitated 
 from either discovering or feeling it. 
 
 Next to sensibility, which is necessary for 
 fnteiitctuai^pow^ the perception of facts, come reflection and 
 ^^^* memory, which are 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 impresions 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 
 connection, or may coin causes for them that have no exist- 
 ence at all. And the more sensibility and imagination 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 gray in 
 color 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 with the clearness of the sky, as 
 contrasted 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 
 
120 
 
 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCEENED, 
 
 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. 
 §6. How Bight And this influence of the imagination over the 
 ll^^vkjus kno^w? senses, is peculiarly observable in the perpetual 
 disposition of mankind to suppose that they see 
 what they /cnoWy and vice versa 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 impres- 
 sion of a slope. It requires repeated and close attention 
 before he detects this fact, or can be made to feel that the 
 lines on his paper are false. And the Chinese, children in 
 all things, suppose a good perspective drawing 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 ob- 
 servers imagined and affirmed to be the painting of half a 
 face. Barry, in his sixth lecture, takes notice of the same 
 want of actual si(/ht 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 
 previoii-sly known and sought for ; and numberless observ- 
 able d^erences between the age of ignorance and that of 
 ^knovi'Iedge, show how much the contraction or extension of 
 our sphere of vision depends upon other considerations than 
 
TRUTH NOT EASILY DISCERNED. 
 
 121 
 
 the mere returns of our natural optics." 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 supposing 
 that we see what experience only has shown us, 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. 
 §7. The difficulty Be it also observed, that all these difficulties 
 variety ^truths would lie in the wav, even if the truths of 
 m nature. nature Were always the same, constantly re- 
 
 peated 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 network, nor two leaves on the same tree which 
 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 con- 
 ception 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 disgraceful, 
 that the majority of spectators are totally incapable of ap- 
 preciating 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 the con- 
 noisseur, 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 pre- 
 tend 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 ! 
 
122 TRUTH NOT EASILY DISGEBNED. 
 
 A few such interrogations as these might indeed convict, 
 if not convince the mass of spectators of incapability, were 
 it not for the universal reply, that they can recognize what 
 §8. We recognize they Cannot describe, and feel what is truthful, 
 Te^sT^^importLnt though they do not know what is truth. And 
 pTre^Par^t^L, ^^^^ ^ Certain degree, true : a man may 
 
 Sect. I., Chap. 4. recognize 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 herself 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 recognize 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 valu- 
 able, yet if those be wanting, or imperfectly rendered, by 
 which we are accustomed to recognize the object, we deny 
 the likeness ; while if these be given, though all the great 
 and valuable and important attributes may be wanting, we 
 affirm the likeness. Recognition is no proof of real and in- 
 trinsic resemblance. We recognize our books by their bind- 
 ings, 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 dignity 
 of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed charac- 
 teristic 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 ad- 
 miration bestowed on such portraits by those whom they 
 please, as like as it can stare." Everybody, 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 his hours of highest mental excitement. None but 
 his friends would know this. Another may have given none 
 of his ordinary expressions, but one which he wore in the 
 most excited instant of his life, when all his secret passions 
 
TRUTH NOT EASILY DI8CEENED, 
 
 123 
 
 and all his highest powers were brought into play at once. 
 None but those who had then seen him might recognize 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 acci- 
 dent — a gloze, whether purposely worn or unconsciously as- 
 sumed, 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 emo- 
 tion — the ice, and the bank, and the foam of the immortal 
 river — were shivered, and broken, and swallowed up in the 
 awakening of its inward 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 repre- 
 sent the body without the spirit ; and this shall be like to 
 those whose senses are only cognizant of body. It is possi- 
 ble to represent the spirit in its ordinary and inferior mani- 
 festations ; and this shall be like to those who have not 
 watched for its moments of power. It is possible to repre- 
 sent the spirit in its secret and high 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 represent or feel, is the power of the 
 painter, — the justice of the judge. 
 
124 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS : — FIRST, THAT 
 PARTICULAR TRUTHS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN GEN- 
 ERAL ONES. 
 
 I HAVE in the last chapter affirmed that we usually recog- 
 nize objects by their least essential characteristics. This 
 very naturally excites the inquiry what I consider their im- 
 § 1. Necessity of portant characteristics, and why I call one truth 
 refatwe^^^mpor- Tnore important than another. And this ques- 
 tance of truths, ^'^j^ 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 in- 
 dividual 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. 
 § 2. Misappiica- Now if wc are to begin our investigation in 
 orism''^'Gen?ral Aristotle's Way, and look at the ^aci/oVci/a of the 
 impOTtant than subjcct, we shall immediately stumble over a 
 particular ones." maxim which is in everybody's mouth, and 
 which, as it is understood in practice, is true and useful, as 
 it is usually applied in argument, false and misleading. 
 " General truths are more important than particular ones." 
 Often, when in conversation, I have been praising Turner 
 for his perpetual variety, and for giving so particular and 
 separate a character to each of his compositions, that the 
 mind of the painter can only be estimated by seeing all that 
 he has ever done, and that nothing can be prophesied 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 inexhaustible knowl- 
 edge or imagination, whichever it may be, to the perpetual 
 
IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. 125 
 
 repetition of some half-dozen conceptions by Claude and 
 Poussin, I have been met by the formidable objection, 
 enunciated with much dignity and self-satisfaction on the 
 part of my antagonist — " That is not painting general truths, 
 §3. Falseness of that is painting particular truths." Now there 
 \vithSrt^S)ian^^ must be something wrong in that application of 
 a principle which would 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 proposi- 
 tion 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 important. Had the 
 lady exclaimed — " How evidently is the Bible a divine reve- 
 lation ! " she would have expressed a particular truth, one 
 predicable of the Bible only ; but certainly far more interest- 
 ing 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 neighbor for 
 ^ , ^ his information. The fact is, and the above in- 
 
 § 4. Generality ' 
 
 important in the stanccs mav serve at once to prove it if it be not 
 
 subject, parti- • i i t 
 
 cuiarity in the seli-evident, that generality gives importance to 
 predicate. ^j^^ siibject, and limitation or particularity to the 
 
 predicate. If I say that such and such a man in China is an 
 opium-eater, I say nothing very interesting, because my sub- 
 ject (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 predicate (eat) 
 is general. If I say that ail men in China eat opium, I say 
 
126 OF THE RELATIVE 
 
 something interesting, because my predicate (eat opium) is 
 particular. 
 
 Now almost everything which (with reference to a given 
 subject) a painter has to ask himself whether he shall repre- 
 sent or not, is a predicate- Hence in art, particular truths 
 are usually more important than general ones. 
 
 How is it then that anything so plain as this should be con- 
 tradicted 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. 
 „^ .i It is self-evident that when we are paintinsr 
 
 § 5. The impor- ... r & 
 
 tance of truths or dcscribino; anvthinsT, those truths must be the 
 
 of species is not . i • i . . « 
 
 owing to their most important which are most characteristic of 
 generahty. vv'hat is to be told or represented. Now that 
 which is first and most broadly characteristic of a thing, is that 
 which distinguishes its genus, or which makes it what it is. 
 For instance, that which makes drapery he 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 inherent in a thing, 
 make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity 
 and comparative thinness. Everything which has these prop- 
 erties, 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 charac- 
 teristic 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 important 
 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 predi- 
 cable only of certain individuals of it. Hence it is carelessly 
 and fasely said, that general ideas are more important than 
 
IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. 
 
 127 
 
 particular ones ; carelessly and falsely, I say, because 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, vs^hich 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 
 predicable of things out of that species. It is not its in- 
 dividuality, but its g-enerality v^hich renders it 
 
 § 6. AU truths val- . i i 
 
 uabie as they are unimportant. So, then, truths are important 
 
 characteristic. , . . . , . • , • i 
 
 just in proportion as they are characteristic, and 
 are valuable, primarily, as they separate the species from all 
 other created things secondarily, as they separate the in- 
 dividuals 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 
 characters of the species, flexibility (non-elasticity, etc.,) but 
 of individuality and definite character in the case immedi- 
 ately observed, and are consequently most important and 
 necessary ideas. So in a man, to be short -legged or long- 
 nosed, or anything else of accidental quality, does not dis- 
 tinguish him from other short-legged or long-nosed animals; 
 but the important truths respecting a man are, first, the 
 marked development 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. 
 
 § 7. otherwise Such are the real sources of importance in 
 arfvaiuibi^be- truths as far as they are considered with refer- 
 cause beautiful, ence merely to their being general, or particu- 
 lar ; but there are other sources of importance which give 
 
128 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE 
 
 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 inves- 
 tigate, but which must just be noticed, as invariably adding 
 value to truths of species rather than to those of individual- 
 ity. The qualities and properties which characterize man 
 or any other animal as a species, are the perfection of his 
 or its form of 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. 
 
 § 8. And many Again, a truth which may be of great inter- 
 iT^eparair^^^^^ est, wheu an object is viewed by itself, may be 
 i? ^^connection objectionable when it is viewed in relation to 
 with others. other objccts. Thus if we were painting a piece 
 of drapery as our whole subject, it would be proper to give 
 in it every source of entertainment, which particular truths 
 could supply, to give it varied color and delicate texture ; 
 but if we paint this same piece of drapery, as part of the 
 dress of a Madonna, all these ideas of richness or texture be- 
 come thoroughly contemptible, and unfit to occupy the mind 
 at the same moment with the idea of the Virgin. The con- 
 ception 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 reprobation ; but this, 
 observe, is not because they are particular or general or any- 
 thing 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 
 unobtrusive way possible, by rendering those essential qual- 
 ities 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 
 
IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS. 
 
 129 
 
 now, to show that all that is alleged by Sir J. Reynolds and 
 other scientific writers respecting the kind of truths proper 
 to be represented by the painter or sculptor is perfectly just 
 and right ; while yet the principle on which they base their 
 selection (that general truths are more important than par- 
 ticular 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 Sistine 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 
 § 9. Recapituia- ' their being particular or general affects their 
 value at all, are valuable in proportion as they 
 are particular, and valueless in proportion as they are gen- 
 eral ; 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. 
 
 CHAPTER lY. 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS : SECONDLY, THAT 
 
 RARE TRUTHS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FREQUENT 
 ONES. 
 
 It will be necessary next for us to determine how far fre- 
 quency or rarity can affect the importance of 
 
 §1. No accident- ^ J J r 
 
 ai violation of truths, and whether the artist is to be considered 
 
 nature's princi- , i /. i i • i • 
 
 pies should be the most truthful who paints what is common or 
 
 represented. i . • i • , 
 
 what IS unusual in nature. 
 Now the whole determination of this question depends upon 
 whether the unusual fact be a violation of nature's general 
 principles, or the application of some of those principles in a 
 Vol. I — 9 
 
130 
 
 OF THE BELATIVE 
 
 peculiar and striking way. Nature sometimes, though very 
 rarely, violates her own principles ; it is her principle to make 
 everything 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 per- 
 mitted, 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 instantaneous discords) in art ; 
 but the artist who should seek after these exclusively, and 
 paint nothing else, though he might be able to point to some- 
 thing 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 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 con- 
 sidered thoroughly and inexcusably false. 
 
 But the case is widely different, when instead of a princi- 
 ple violated, we have one extraordinarily carried out or mani- 
 fested under unusual circumstances. Though 
 
 §2. But the cases . • /. i i i 
 
 "in which those nature IS Constantly beautiful, she does not ex- 
 brerf^^strikingiy hibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, 
 exemphfied. 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 passasres 
 
 § 3. Which are „ , ^ ^, ' x oi • 
 
 comparatively oi beauty are the most evanescent, one is con- 
 ^^^®* stantly doing something beautiful for us, but 
 
 it is something 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 pass- 
 ing, will not be repeated for us. Now they are these evanes- 
 cent 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 absurd than that ef- 
 fects or truths frequently exhibited are more characteristic of 
 
IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS, 
 
 131 
 
 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 
 AM .... two pictures is wasted life. What should we 
 
 § 4. All repetition ^ 
 
 is biamabie. think of a poet who should keep all his life re- 
 peating the 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 stammering it out 
 with eternal repetition without turning the leaf ? Is it less 
 tautology to describe a thing over and over again with lines, 
 than it is with words ? The teaching of nature is as varied 
 and infinite as it is constant ; 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 strik- 
 ing way. The deeper his research and the rarer the phenom- 
 ena he has noted, the more valuable will his works be ; to 
 repeat himself, even in a single instance, is treachery to nat- 
 ure, for a thousand human lives would not be enough to give 
 one instance of the perfect manifestation of each of her pow- 
 ers ; and as for combining or classifying them, as well might 
 a preacher expect 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 illus- 
 §5. The duty of trate every lesson which can be received from 
 Sm^lf thiVof God's creation. Both are commentators on in- 
 a preacher. finity, and the duty of both is to take for each 
 discourse one essential truth, seeking particularly and insist- 
 ing especially on those which are less palpable to ordinary 
 observation, and more likely to escape an iridolent 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 
 
132 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE 
 
 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, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS :— THIRDLY, i 
 THAT TRUTHS OF COLOR ARE THE LEAST IMPORTANT 
 OF ALL TRUTHS. 
 
 In the two last chapters, we have pointed out general tests 
 of the importance of all truths, which will be sufficient at 
 § 1. Difference oncc to distinguish Certain classes of properties 
 andTe'condary^^ bodics, as more neccssary to be told than 
 qualities in bodies, others, bccausc morc characteristic, either of the 
 particular 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, situa- 
 tion, and inotion 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," (sen- 
 sible qualities.) And thirdly, " the power that is any body 
 to make such a change in another body as that it shall oper- 
 ate 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 prim- 
 ary 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 
 § 2. The first are effects and scnsations. Now a power of influ- 
 iS;ic^ the^Rccond ^^^^ always equally characteristic of two ob- 
 imperfectiy so. jects — the activc and passive; for it is as much 
 necessary that there should be a power in the object suffer- 
 
IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS, 
 
 133 
 
 ing to receive the impression, as in the object acting to give 
 the impression. (Compare Locke, Book ii. chap. 21, sect. 2.) 
 For 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 nat- 
 ure 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, there- 
 fore, being characteristic of the nature of two bodies, is 
 imperfectly and incompletely characteristic of either sepa- 
 rately ; but the primary qualities, being characteristic only 
 of the body in which they are inherent, are the most impor- 
 tant truths connected with it. For the question, what the 
 thing must precede, and be of more importance than the 
 question, what can it do. 
 
 Now, by Locke's definition above 2^iven, only 
 
 § 3. Color is a , ' . . ^ . ^ ^ 
 
 secondary qual- bulk, figure. Situation, and motion or rest of 
 
 ity, therefore less ^ . . ^ . -^t n 
 
 important than solid parts, are primary qualities, lience all 
 truths of color sink at once into the second rank. 
 He, therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth 
 of color, has neglected a greater truth for a less one. 
 
 And that color is indeed a most unimportant characteristic 
 of objects, will be farther evident on the slightest consider- 
 ation. The color 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 are 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, 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 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 structure and outward form, and 
 though its leaves grew white, or pink, or blue, or tri-color, it 
 would be a white oak, or a pink oak, or a republican oak, but 
 an oak still. Again, color is hardly ever even di, possible dis- 
 
134 
 
 OF THE RELATIVE 
 
 tinction between two objects of the same species. Two 
 trees, of the same kind, at the same season, and of the same 
 age, are of absolutely the same color ; but they are not of 
 § 4. Color no dis- the Same form, nor anything like it. There can 
 obTect? ofTe be no difference in the color of two pieces of 
 same species. pock broken from the same place ; but it is im- 
 possible 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. 
 
 §5. And different Again, a color, in association with other 
 in association colors, is different from the same color seen by 
 
 from what it is ' ^ ^ ^ J 
 
 aloiie. itself. It has a distinct and peculiar power 
 
 upon the retina dependent on its association. Consequently, 
 the color of any object is not more dependent upon the 
 nature of the object itself, and the eye beholding it, than on 
 the color of the objects near it ; in this respect also, there 
 fore, it is no characteristic. 
 
 § 6 It is not And so great is the uncertainty with respect 
 certain whether to those qualities or powcrs which depend as 
 see the same much on the nature of the object suffering as of 
 colors m things. object acting, that it is totally impossible to 
 prove that one man sees in the same thing the same color 
 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 color is not in the thing, but 
 in the thing and them together. But if they see forms dif- 
 ferently, one must see falsely, because the form is positive in 
 the object. My friend may see boars blue for anything I 
 know, but it is impossible he should see them with paws in- 
 stead of hoofs, unless his eyes or brain are diseased. (Com- 
 pare Locke, Book ii. chap, xxxii. § 15.) But I do not speak 
 of this uncertainty as capable of having any effect on art, 
 because, though perhaps Landseer sees dogs of the color 
 which I should call blue, yet the color he puts on the canvas, 
 being in the same way blue to him, will still be brown or 
 
IMPORTANCE OF TRUTHS, 
 
 135 
 
 dog-color to me ; and so we may argue on points of color 
 just as if all men saw alike, as indeed in all probability they 
 do ; but I merely mention this uncertainty to show farther 
 the vagueness and unimportance of color as a characteristic 
 of bodies. 
 
 „ ^ ^ Before sroinar farther, however, I must explain 
 
 § 7. Form, con- . ^. ' 
 
 Bidered as an the seusc in which I have used the word ^' form," 
 
 element of land- , . , 
 
 scape, includes bccause paiutcrs have a most inaccurate and * 
 light and shade. ^g^j,^j^gg Ji^j^it of Confining the term to the out- 
 line 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 generally 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 propor- 
 tions of a body are fully explained to the eye, being never- 
 theless perfectly independent of sight or power in other ob- 
 jects, the presence of light upon a body being a positive 
 existence, whether we are aware of it or not, and in no de- 
 gree dependent upon our senses. This being understood, 
 § 8. Importance the most Convincing proof of the unimportance 
 inexpmsshig^fhe^ of color Hcs in the accurate observation of the 
 ii^s^'^a^nd^^unim- which any material object impresses it- 
 
 portance of color, self on the mind. If we look at nature care- 
 fully, we shall find that her colors are in a state of perpetual 
 confusion and indistinctness, while her forms, as told by 
 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 grays and yel- 
 lows from the ground ; every hairbreadth 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 color ; this local color, change- 
 ful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified 
 by the hue of the light, or quenched in the gray of the 
 shadow ; and the confusion and blending of tint is altogether 
 so great, that were we left to find out what objects were by 
 
136 
 
 BEGAPITULA TION. 
 
 their colors only, we would scarcely in places distinguish the 
 boughs of a tree from the air beyond 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 color, that the 
 difference in hue between the illumined parts of a white and 
 black object is not so great as the difference (in sunshine) 
 between the illumined and dark side of either separately. 
 
 W e shall see hereafter, in considering ideas of bea-uty, that 
 color, even as a source of pleasure, is feeble compared to 
 § 9. Recapituia- fo^m ; but this we cannot insist upon at pres- 
 ent ; 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 color, sacrifices what is definite to what 
 is uncertain, and what is essential to what is accidental. 
 
 CHAPTER VL 
 
 RECAPITULATION. 
 
 It ought farther to be observed respecting truths in gen- 
 eral, that those are always most valuable which are most his- 
 torical, that is, which tell us most about the past 
 
 §1. The impor- ' ' /. i i . 
 
 tance of histori- and future states of the obiect to which they 
 
 cal truths ... 
 
 belong. In a tree, for instance, it is more impor- 
 tant 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 
 
RECAPITULA TION. 
 
 137 
 
 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 them- 
 selves. 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. 
 
 § 2 Form as Hence in general the truths of specific form 
 explained by are the first and most important of all ; and 
 
 ight and shade, ^ o ^ > i • i 
 
 the first of all next to them, those truths of chiaroscuro which 
 
 truths. Tone, , ^ ^ 
 
 ight and color are ncccssary to make us understand every 
 are secondary. quality and part of forms, and the relative dis- 
 tances of objects among each other, and in consequence their 
 relative bulks. Altogether lower than these, as truths, 
 though often most important as beauties, stand all effects of 
 chiaroscuro which are productive merely of imitations of 
 light and tone, and all effects of color. To make us under- 
 stand 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 par- 
 
 tive chiaroscuro ticular accuracies or tricks of chiaroscuro which 
 e owestof au. ^^^^g^ objects to look projecting from the can- 
 vas, not worthy of the name of truths, because they require 
 for their attainment the sacrifice of all others ; for not hav- 
 ing 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 
 
138 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 throws one object out of his picture, never lets the specta- 
 tor 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 ex- 
 cept as jugglery ; it addresses no sense of beauty nor of 
 power ; and wherever it characterizes the general aim of a 
 picture, it is the sign and the evidence of the vilest and low- 
 est mechanism which art can be insulted by giving name to. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 We have seen, in the preceding chapters, some proof of 
 what was before asserted, that the truths necessary for de- 
 § 1. The differ- ccptive imitation are not only few, but of the 
 facts^consequent ^cry lowcst Order. We thus find painters 
 on the several ransrinsr themselves into two sfreat classes ; one 
 
 aims at imita- . . , . 
 
 tion or at truth, aiming at the development of the exquisite 
 truths of specific form, refined color, and ethereal 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 specta- 
 tor into a belief of reality. The first class, if they have to 
 paint a tree, are intent upon giving the exquisite designs of 
 intersecting undulation in its boughs, the grace of its leaf- 
 age, the intricacy of its organization, and all those qualities 
 which make it lovely or affecting of its kind. The second 
 endeavor only to make you believe that you are looking at 
 wood. They are totally regardless of truths or beauties of 
 form ; a stump is as good as a trunk for all their purposes, 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLE 8. 
 
 139 
 
 so that they can only deceive the eye into the supposition 
 that it is a stump and not canvas. 
 
 § 2. The old mas- To which of these classes the great body of 
 aim onVat^im^ ^^^^ landscape painters belonged, may be 
 tation. partly gathered '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 of color, etc., 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 possessor 
 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 
 judgment of art. It is strange that, with the great histor- 
 ical 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, 
 § 3 What truths ^^^^ deception of the senses was the great 
 they gave. and first end of all their art. To attain this 
 they paid deep and serious 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 they re- 
 quired 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, covering 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 careful attention to their pitch 
 
140 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 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 color and aerial tone, totally neglectful of all 
 facts and forms which nature uses such color and tone to 
 relieve and adorn. They had neither love of nature, nor 
 feeling of her beauty ; they looked for her coldest and most 
 commonplace effects, because they were easiest to imitate ; 
 and for her most vulgar forms, because they were most 
 easily to be recognized by the untaught eyes of those whom 
 alone they could hope to please ; they did it, like the Phari- 
 see 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 colors endure, be the stand- 
 ards 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 limit- 
 ed number and low character of the truths which are neces- 
 sary, and the accumulated multitude of pure, broad, bold 
 falsehoods which are admissible in pictures meant only to 
 deceive. 
 
 There is of course more or less accuracy of knowledge and 
 execution combined with this aim at effect, according to the 
 industry and precision of eye possessed 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 feel- 
 ing for beauty of form, and is seldom ungraceful in his foli- 
 age ; but his picture, when examined with reference to essen- 
 tial 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 success, but he 
 has no sense of beauty. Gaspar 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, 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 141 
 
 everything that they can do is done for deception, and noth- 
 ing for the sake or love of what they are painting. 
 §4 The princi- Modern landscape painters have looked at 
 adopted by ""So^^^ nature with totally different eyes, seeking not 
 ern artists. f qj. what is easicst to imitate, but for what is 
 most important to tell. Rejecting at once all ideal of boiia 
 fide imitation, they think only of conveying the impression 
 of nature into the mind of the spectator. And there is, in 
 consequence, a greater sum of valuable, essential, and im- 
 pressive 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 present ; it 
 must rest for demonstration on the examination we are about 
 to enter upon ; yet, even without reference to any intricate 
 or deep-laid truths, it appears strange to me, that any one 
 familiar with nature, and fond of her, should not grow weary 
 and sick at heart among the melancholy and monotonous 
 § 5. General feel- transcripts of her which alone can be received 
 Sa1vator,^nd1i'. froiTi the old school of art. A man accustomed 
 t^rasted\ithX to the broad, wild sea-shore, with its bright 
 freedom and breakers, and free winds, and soundino; rocks, 
 
 vastness of na- ' ^ ^ o > 
 
 t^J^e. 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 ac- 
 customed 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 cli- 
 mates upon their crests, can scarcely but be angered when 
 Salvator bids him stand still under some contemptible frag- 
 ment of splintery crag, which an Alpine snow-wreath would 
 
142 
 
 GENEHAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 smother in its first swell, with a stunted bush or two grow- 
 ing out of it, and a 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 rev- 
 elation, can scarcely but be angered when Poussin mocks 
 him with a black round mass of impenetrable paint, diverg- 
 ing into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick 
 instead of a trunk. The fact is, there is one thing wanting 
 in all the doing of these men, and that is the very virtue by 
 which the work of human mind chiefly rises above that of 
 the Daguerreotype or Calotype, or any other mechanical 
 means that ever have been or may be invented. Love : There 
 is no evidence of their ever having gone to nature with any 
 thirst, or received from her such emotion as could make 
 them, even for an instant, lose sight of themselves ; there 
 is in them neither earnestness nor humility ; there is no sim- 
 ple or honest record of any single truth ; none of the plain 
 words nor straight efforts that men speak and make when 
 they once feel. 
 
 Nor is it only by the professed landscape painters that the 
 great verities of the material world are betrayed : Grand as 
 are the motives of landscape in the works of the earlier and 
 mightier men, there is yet in them nothing approaching to 
 §6. Inadequacy ^ general view nor complete rendering of nat- 
 ^\ ^^M, l^^^^^^^S ural phenomena : not that they are to be blamed 
 
 of Titian and ^ ^ ' 
 
 Tintoret. for this ; for they took out of nature that which 
 
 was fit for their purpose, and their mission was to do no 
 more ; but we must be cautious to distinguish that imagin- 
 ative abstraction of landscape which alone we find in them, 
 from the entire statement of truth which has been attempted 
 by the moderns. I have said in the chapter on symmetry in 
 the second volume, that all landscape grandeur vanishes 
 before that of Titian and Tintoret ; and this is true of what- 
 ever these two giants touched ; — but they touched little. A 
 few level flakes of chestnut foliage ; a blue abstraction of 
 hill forms from Cadore or the Euganeans ; a grand mass or 
 two of glowing ground and mighty herbage, and a few burn- 
 ing fields of quiet cloud were all they needed ; there is evi- 
 
THE FOBEGOING PBINCIPLES, 143 
 
 dence of Tintoret's having felt more than this, but it occurs 
 only in secondary fragments of rock, cloud, or pine, hardly 
 noticed amono: the accumulated interest of his human sub- 
 ject. From the window of Titian's house at Venice, the 
 chain of the Tyrolese Alps is seen lifted in spectral power 
 above the tufted plain of Treviso ; every dawn that reddens 
 the towers of Murano lights also a line of pyramidal fires 
 along that colossal ridge ; but there is, so far as I know, no 
 evidence in any of the master's works of his ever having 
 beheld, much less felt, the majesty of their burning. The 
 dark firmament and saddened twilight of Tintoret are suffi- 
 cient for their end ; but the sun never plunges behind San 
 Giorgio in Aliga without such retinue of radiant cloud, such 
 rest of zoned light on the green lagoon, as never received 
 image from his hand. More than this, of that which they 
 loved and rendered much is rendered conventionally ; by 
 noble conventionalities indeed, but such nevertheless as 
 would be inexcusable if the landscape became the principal 
 subject instead of an accompaniment. I will instance only 
 the San Pietro Martire, which, if not the most perfect, is at 
 least the most popular of Titian's landscapes ; in which, to 
 obtain light on the flesh of the near figures the sky is made 
 as dark as deep sea, the mountains are laid in with violent 
 and impossible blue, except one of them on the left, which, 
 to connect the distant lio^ht with the foreo^round, is thrown 
 into light relief, unexplained by its materials, unlikely in its 
 position, and in its degree impossible under any circum- 
 stances. 
 
 § 7. Causes of its ^ instance these as faults in the pict- 
 
 on"* subsequent * there are no works of very powerful color 
 schools. which are free from conventionality concentrated 
 
 or diffused, daring or disguised ; but as the conventionality 
 of this whole picture is mainly thrown into the landscape, it 
 is necessary, while we acknowledge the virtue of this dis- 
 tance as a part of the great composition, to be on our guard 
 against the license it assumes and the attractiveness of its 
 overcharged color. Fragments of far purer truth occur in 
 the works of Tintoret ; and in the drawing of foliage, 
 
GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 whether rapid or elaborate, of masses or details, the Vene- 
 tian painters, taken as a body, may be considered almost 
 faultless models. But the whole field of what they have 
 done is so narrow, and therein is so much of what is only 
 relatively right, and in itself false or imperfect, that the 
 young and inexperienced painter could run no greater risk 
 than the too early taking them for teachers ; and to the gen- 
 eral spectator their landscape is valuable rather as a means 
 of peculiar and solemn emotion than as ministering to, or 
 inspiring the universal love of nature. Hence while men of 
 serious mind, especially those whose pursuits have brought 
 them into continued relations with the peopled rather than 
 the lonely world, will always look to the Venetian painters 
 as having touched those simple chords of landscape harmony 
 which are most in unison with earnest and melancholy feel- 
 ing ; those whose philosophy is more cheerful and more ex- 
 tended, as having been trained and colored among simple 
 and solitary nature, will seek for a wider and more system- 
 atic circle of teaching : they may grant that the barred hori- 
 zontal gloom of the Titian sky, and the massy leaves of the 
 Titian forest are among the most sublime of the conceivable 
 forms of material things ; but they know that the virtue of 
 these very forms is to be learned only by right comparison of 
 them with the cheerfulness, fulness and comparative inquiet- 
 ness of other hours and scenes ; that they are not intended 
 for the continual food, but the occasional soothing of the 
 human heart ; that there is a lesson of not less value in its 
 place, though of less concluding and sealing authority, in 
 every one of the more humble phases of material things : 
 and that there are some lessons of equal or greater authority 
 which these masters neither taught nor received. And until 
 the school of modern landscape arose Art had never noted 
 the links of this mighty chain ; it mattered not that a frag- 
 ment lay here and there, no heavenly lightning could descend 
 by it ; the landscape of the Venetians was without effect on 
 any contemporary in subsequent schools ; it still remains on 
 the continent as useless as if it had never existed ; and at 
 this moment German and Italian landscapes, of which no 
 
TEE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 145 
 
 words are scornful enough to befit the utter degradation, 
 hang in the Venetian Academy in the next room to the 
 Desert of Titian and the Paradise of Tintoret."^ 
 §8. Thevaiueof That then which I would have the reader in- 
 a^tTowtcTbe^^ quire respecting every work of art of undeter- 
 timated. mined merit submitted to his judgment, is not 
 
 whether it be a work of especial grandeur, importance, or 
 power ; but whether it have any virtue or substance as a 
 link in this chain of truth, whether it have recorded or in- 
 terpreted anything before unknown, whether it have added 
 one single stone to our heaven-pointing pyramid, cut away 
 one dark bough, or levelled one rugged hillock in our path. 
 This, if it be an honest work of art, it must have done, for 
 no man ever yet worked honestly without giving some such 
 help to his race. God appoints to every one of his creatures 
 a separate mission, and if they discharge it honorably, if they 
 quit themselves like men and faithfully follow that light 
 which is in them, withdrawing from it all cold and quench- 
 ing influence, there will assuredly come of it such burning 
 as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before 
 men, and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite 
 of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us 
 has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to 
 him, and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race 
 forever — 
 
 " Fool not," says George Herbert, 
 
 For all may have, 
 If they dare choose, a glorious life or grave." 
 
 If, on the contrary, there be nothing of this freshness 
 achieved, if there be neither purpose nor fidelity in what is 
 done, if it be an envious or powerless imitation of other men's 
 
 * Not the large Paradise, but the Fall of Adam, a small picture 
 chiefly in brown and gray, near Titian's Assumption. Its companion, 
 the Death of Abel, is remarkable as containing- a group of trees which 
 Turner, I believe accidentally, has repeated nearly mass for mass in the 
 
 Marly." Both are among the most noble works of this or any other 
 master, whether for preciousness of color or energy of thought. 
 Vol. I.— 10 
 
146 GENERAL APPLIGATION OF 
 
 labors, if it be a display of mere manual dexterity or curious 
 manufacture, or if in any other mode it show itself as having 
 its origin in vanity, — Cast it out. It matters not what pow- 
 ers of mind may have been concerned or corrupted in it, all 
 have lost their savor, it is worse than worthless ; — perilous 
 — Cast it out. 
 
 Works of art are indeed always of mixed kind, their hon- 
 esty being more or less corrupted by the various weaknesses 
 of the painter, by his vanity, his idleness, or his cowardice ; 
 (the fear of doing right has far more influence on art than is 
 commonJy thought,) that only is altogether to be rejected 
 which is altogether vain, idle, and cowardly. Of the rest 
 the rank is to be estimated rather by the purity of their 
 metal than the coined value of it. 
 
 § 9 Religious Keeping these principles in view, let us en- 
 1 and scape of dcavor to obtain some til in o- like a s^cueral vicw of 
 
 Italy. The ad- . i • , , ? t . 
 
 mirabieness of the assistance which has been rendered to our 
 
 its completion. ^ t /? , i . i • e 
 
 study oi nature by the various occurrences oi 
 landscape in elder art, and by the more exclusively directed 
 labors of modern schools. 
 
 To the ideal landscape of the early religious painters of 
 Italy I have alluded in the concluding chapter of the second 
 volume. It is absolutely right and beautiful in its peculiar 
 application ; but its grasp of nature is narrow and its treat- 
 ment in most respects too severe and conventional to form 
 a profitable example when the landscape is to be alone the 
 subject of thought. The great virtue of it is its entire, ex- 
 quisite, and humble realization of those objects it selects ; in 
 this respect differing from such German imitations of it as I 
 have met with, that there is no effort of any fanciful or orna- 
 mental modifications, but loving fidelity to the thing studied. 
 The foreground plants are usually neither exaggerated nor 
 stiffened ; they do not form arches or frames or borders ; 
 their grace is unconfined, their simplicity undestroyed. 
 Cima da Conegliano, in his picture in the church of the Ma- 
 donna dell' Orto at Venice, has given us the oak, the fig, the 
 beautiful Erba della Madonna" on the wall, precisely such 
 a bunch of it as may l)e seen growing at this day on the 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLE S. 
 
 147 
 
 marble steps of that very church ; ivy and other creepers, 
 and a strawberry plant in the foreground, with a blossom and 
 ji berry just set, and one half ripe and one ripe, all patiently 
 and innocently painted from the real thing, and therefore 
 most divine. Fra Angelico's use of the oxalis acetosella is 
 as faithful in representation as touching in feeling.* The 
 ferns that grow on the walls of Fiesole may be seen in their 
 simple verity on the architecture of Ghirlandajo. The rose, 
 the myrtle, and the lily, the olive and orange, pomegranate 
 and vine, have received their fairest portraiture where they 
 bear a sacred character ; even the common plantains and 
 mallows of the waysides are touched with deep reverence by 
 Raffaelle ; and indeed for the perfect treatment of details of 
 this kind, treatment as delicate and affectionate as it is ele- 
 vated and manly, it is to the works of these schools alone 
 that we can refer. And on this their peculiar excellence I 
 should the more earnestly insist, because it is of a kind al- 
 together neglected by the English school, and with most un- 
 fortunate result, many of our best painters missing their de- 
 served rank solely from the want of it, as Gainsborough ; 
 and all being more or less checked in their progress or vul- 
 garized in their aim. 
 
 § 10. Finish, and It is a misfortune for all honest critics, that 
 how ^^rlght^^and hardly any quality of art is independently to be 
 how wrong. praiscd, and without reference to the motive 
 from which it resulted, and the place in which it appears ; so 
 that no principle can be simply enforced but it shall seem to 
 countenance a vice ; while the work of qualification and ex- 
 planation both weakens the force of what is said, and is not 
 perhaps always likely to be with patience received : so also 
 those who desire to misunderstand or to oppose have it always 
 in their power to become obtuse listeners or specious oppo- 
 nents. Thus I hardly dare insist upon the virtue of comple- 
 
 * The triple leaf of this plant, and white flower, stained purple, prob- 
 ably gave it strange typical interest among the Christian painters. 
 Angelico, in using its leaves mixed with daisies in the foreground of 
 his Crucifixion had, I imagine, a view also to its chemical property. 
 
148 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 tion, lest I should be supposed a defender of Wouvermans or 
 Gerard Dow ; neither can I adequately praise the power of 
 Tintoret, without fearing to be thought adverse to Holbein 
 or Perugino. The fact is, that both finish and impetuosity, 
 specific minuteness, or large abstraction, may be the signs of 
 passion, or of its reverse ; may result from affection or in- 
 difference, intellect or dulness. Some men finish from in- 
 tense love of the beautiful in the smallest parts of what they 
 do ; others in pure incapability of comprehending anything 
 but parts ; others to show their dexterity with the brush, 
 and prove expenditure of time. Some are impetuous and 
 bold in their handling, from having great thoughts to ex- 
 press which are independent of detail ; others beca.use they 
 have bad taste or have been badly taught ; others from van- 
 ity, and others from indolence. (Compare Vol. II. Chap. IX. 
 §8.) Now both the finish and incompletion are right where 
 they are the signs of passion or of thought, and both are 
 wrong, and I think the finish the more contemptible of the 
 two, when they cease to be so. The modern Italians will 
 paint every leaf of a laurel or rose-bush without the slightest 
 feeling of their beauty or character ; and without showing 
 one spark of intellect or affection from beginning to end. 
 Anything is better than this ; and yet the very highest 
 schools do the same thing, or nearly so, but with totally 
 different motives and perceptions, and the result is divine. 
 On the whole, I conceive that the extremes of good and evil 
 lie with the finishers, and that whatever glorious power we 
 may admit in men like Tintoret, whatever attractiveness of 
 method to Rubens, Rembrandt, or, though in far less degree, 
 our own Reynolds, still the thoroughly great men are those 
 who have done everything thoroughly, and who, in a word, 
 have never despised anything, however small, of God's mak- 
 ing. And this is the chief fault of our English landscapists, 
 that they have not the intense all-observing penetration of 
 well-balanced mind ; they have not, except in one or two in- 
 stances, anything of that feeling which Wordsworth shows 
 in the following lines : — 
 
THE FOBE GOING PBINGIPLES. 149 
 
 " So fair, so sweet, witbal so sensitive; — 
 Would that the little flowers were born to live 
 Conscious of half the pleasure which they give. 
 That to this mountain daisy's self were known 
 The beauty of its star-shaped shadow^ thrown 
 On the smooth surface of this naked stane.''^ 
 
 That is a little bit of good, downright, foreground paint- 
 ing — no mistake about it ; daisy, and shadow, and stone 
 texture and all. Our painters must come to this before they 
 have done their duty ; and yet, on the other hand, let them 
 beware of finishing, for the sake of finish, all over their pict- 
 ure. The ground is not to be all over daisies, nor is every 
 daisy to have its star-shaped shadow ; there is as much finish 
 in the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition 
 of them ; and while I demand this amount of specific char- 
 acter where nature shows it, I demand equal fidelity to her 
 where she conceals it. To paint mist rightly, space rightly, 
 and light rightly, it may be often necessary to paint noth- 
 ing else rightly, but the rule is simple for all that ; if the artist 
 is painting something that he knows and loves, as he knows it 
 because he loves it, whether it be the fair strawberry of Cima, 
 or the clear sky of Francia, or the blazing incomprehensible 
 mist of Turner, he is all right ; but the moment he does any- 
 thing as he thinks it ought to be, because he does not care 
 about it, he is all wrong. He has only to ask himself whether 
 he cares for anything except himself ; so far as he does he 
 will make a good picture ; so far as he thinks of himself a 
 vile one. This is the root of the viciousness of the whole 
 French school. Industry they have, learning they have, 
 power they have, feeling they have, yet not so much feeling 
 as ever to force them to forget themselves even for a mo- 
 ment ; the ruling motive is invariably vanity, and the pict- 
 ure therefore an abortion. 
 
 skies* ofttiere?^^ Returning to the pictures of the religious 
 ious schools, how schools, we find that their open skies are also of 
 
 valuable. Moun- i i . i . . 
 
 tain clra^ving of the highest valuc. Their preciousness is such 
 
 Masaccio. Land- . i , i , 
 
 scape of the Bel- that no subscqucnt schools can by comparison 
 one!^^^ Giorgi- ^^j^ have painted sky at all, but only 
 
150 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 clouds, or mist, or blue canopies. The golden sky of Marco 
 Basaiti in the Academy of Venice altogether overpowers 
 and renders valueless that of Titian beside it. Those of 
 Francia in the gallery of Bologna are even more wonder- 
 ful, because cooler in tone and behind figures in full light. 
 The touches of white light in the horizon of Angelico's 
 Last Judgment are felt and wrought with equal truth. The 
 dignified and simple forms of cloud in repose are often by 
 these painters sublimely expressed, but of changeful cloud 
 form they show no examples. The architecture, mountains, 
 and water of these distances are commonly conventional ; 
 motives are to be found in them of the highest beauty, and 
 especially remarkable for quantity and meaning of incident ; 
 but they can only be studied or accepted in the particular 
 feeling that produced them. It may generally be observed 
 that whatever has been the result of strong emotion is ill 
 seen unless through the medium of such emotion, and will 
 lead to conclusions utterly false and perilous, if it be made 
 a subject of cold-hearted observance, or an object of sys- 
 tematic imitation. One piece of genuine mountain drawing, 
 however, occurs in the landscape of Masaccio's Tribute 
 Money. It is impossible to say what strange results might 
 have taken place in this particular field of art, or how sud- 
 denly a great school of landscape might have arisen, had the 
 life of this great painter been prolonged. Of this particular 
 fresco I shall have much to say hereafter. The two brothers 
 Bellini gave a marked and vigorous impulse to the landscape 
 of Venice, of Gentile's architecture I shall speak presently. 
 Giovanni's, though in style less interesting and in place less 
 prominent, occurring chiefly as a kind of frame to his pict- 
 ures, connecting them with the architecture of the churches 
 for which they were intended, is in refinement of realization, 
 I suppose, quite unrivalled, especially in passages requiring 
 pure gradation, as the hollows of vaultings. That of Ver- 
 onese would look ghostly beside it ; that of Titian lightless. 
 His landscape is occasionally quaint and strange like Gior- 
 gione's, and as fine in color, as that behind the Madonna in 
 the Brera gallery at Milan ; but a more truthful fragment 
 
THE FOEE GOING PUINCIPLES, 
 
 151 
 
 occurs in the picture in San Francesco della Vigna at Venice; 
 and in the picture of St. Jerome in the church of San Gris- 
 ostomo, the landscape is as perfect and beautiful as any 
 background may legitimately be, and finer, as far as it goes, 
 than anything of Titian's. It is remarkable for the absolute 
 truth of its sky, whose blue, clear as crystal, and though 
 deep in tone bright as the open air, is gradated to the hori- 
 zon with a cautiousness and finish almost inconceivable ; 
 and to obtain light at the horizon without contradicting the 
 system of chiaroscuro adopted in the figures which are 
 lio^hted from the ri2:ht hand, it is barred across with some 
 glowing white cirri which, in their turn, are opposed by a 
 single dark horizontal line of lower cloud ; and to throw the 
 w^hole farther back, there is a wreath of rain cloud of warmer 
 color floating above the mountains, lighted on its under 
 edge, whose faithfulness to nature, both in hue and in its 
 light and shattering form, is altogether exemplary ; the 
 wandering of the light among the hills is equally studied, 
 and the whole is crowned by the grand realization of the 
 leaves of the fig-tree alluded to (Vol. II. Part iii. Chap. 5,) 
 as well as of the herbage upon the rocks. Considering that 
 with all this care and completeness in the background, there 
 is nothing that is not of meaning and necessity in reference 
 to the figures, and that in the figures themselves the dignity 
 and heavenliness of the highest religious painters are com- 
 bined with a force and purity of color, greater I think than 
 Titian's, it is a work which may be set before the young 
 artist as in every respect a nearly faultless guide. Giorgi- 
 one's landscape is inventive and solemn, but owing to the 
 rarity even of his nominal works I dare not speak of it 
 in general terms. It is certainly conventional, and is rather, 
 I imagine, to be studied for its color and its motives than its 
 details. 
 
 Of Titian and Tintoret I have spoken already. 
 
 § 12. Landscape rx^^ ^ - i 
 
 of Titian and I he latter IS every way the orreater master, never 
 
 Tintoret. , , /. rr^. . 
 
 indulging in the exaggerated color of Iitian, and 
 attaining far more perfect light ; his grasp of nature is more 
 extensive, and his view of her more imaginative, (incidental 
 
152 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 notices of his landscape will be found in the chapter on 
 Imagination penetrative, of the second volume,) but he is 
 usually too impatient to carry his thoughts as far out, or 
 to realize with as much substantiality as Titian. In the 
 St. Jerome of the latter, in the gallery of the Brera, there 
 is a superb example of the modes in which the objects of 
 landscape may be either suggested or elaborated according 
 to their place and claim. The larger features of the ground, 
 foliage, and drapery, as well as the lion in the lower angle, 
 are executed with a slightness which admits not of close ex- 
 amination, and which, if not in shade, would be offensive to 
 the generality of observers. But on the rock above the 
 lion, where it turns towards the light, and where the eye is 
 intended to dwell, there is a wreath of ivy of which every 
 leaf is separately drawn with the greatest accuracy and care, 
 and beside it a lizard, studied with equal earnestness, yet 
 always with that right grandeur of manner to which I have 
 alluded in the preface. Tintoret seldom reaches or attempts 
 the elaboration in substance and color of these objects, but 
 he is even more truth-telling and certain in his rendering of 
 all the great characters of specific form, and as the painter 
 of Space he stands altogether alone among dead masters ; 
 being the first who introduced the slightness and confusion 
 of touch which are expressive of the effects of luminous ob- 
 jects seen through large spaces of air, and the principles of 
 aerial color which have been since carried out in other fields 
 by Turner. I conceive him to be the most powerful painter 
 whom the world has seen, and that he was prevented from 
 being also the most perfect, partly by untoward circum- 
 stances in his position and education, partly by the very 
 fulness and impetuosity of his own mind, partly by the want 
 of religious feeling and its accompanying perception of 
 beauty ; for his noble treatment of religious subject, of 
 which I have given several examples in the third part, 
 appears to be the result only of that grasp which a great 
 and well-toned intellect necessarily takes of any subject 
 submitted to it, and is wanting in the signs of the more 
 withdrawn and sacred sympathies. 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 153 
 
 But whatever advances were made by Tintoret in modes 
 of artistical treatment, he cannot be considered as having 
 enlarged the sphere of landscape conception. He took no 
 cognizance even of the materials and motives, so singularly 
 rich in color, which were forever around him in his own 
 Venice. All portions of Venetian scenery introduced by 
 him are treated conventionally and carelessly ; the architect- 
 ural characters lost altogether, the sea distinguished from 
 the sky only by a darker green, while of the sky itself only 
 those forms were employed by him which had been repeated 
 again and again for centuries, though in less tangibility 
 and completion. Of mountain scenery he has left, I be- 
 lieve, no example so far carried as that of John Bellini above 
 instanced. 
 
 The Florentine and Ambrian schools supply 
 
 §13. Schools of . , 1 p 1 T 1 
 
 Florence, Milan, US With no examples oi landscape, except that 
 and Bologna. introduced by their earliest masters, gradually 
 overwhelmed under renaissance architecture. 
 
 Leonardo's landscape has been of unfortunate effect on 
 art, so far as it has had effect at all. In realization of detail 
 he verges on the ornamental, in his rock outlines he has all 
 the deficiencies and little of the feeling of the earlier men. 
 Behind the " Sacrifice for the Friends " of Giotto at Pisa, 
 there is a sweet piece of rock incident, a little fountain 
 breaking out at the mountain foot, and trickling away, its 
 course marked by branches of reeds, the latter formal enough 
 certainly, and always in triplets, but still with a sense of 
 nature pervading the whole which is utterly wanting to the 
 rocks of Leonardo in the Holy Family in the Louvre. The 
 latter are grotesque without being ideal, and extraordinary 
 without being impressive. The sketch in the Uffizii of 
 Florence has some fine foliage, and there is of course a cer- 
 tain virtue in all the work of a man like Leonardo which I 
 would not depreciate, but our admiration of it in this par- 
 ticular field must be qualified, and our following cautious. 
 
 No advances were made in landscape, so far as I know, 
 after the time of Tintoret ; the power of art ebbed gradu- 
 ally away from the derivative schools ; various degrees of 
 
154 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 cleverness or feeling being manifested in more or less brill- 
 iant conventionalism. I once supposed there was some life 
 in the landscape of Domenichino, but in this I must have 
 been wrong. The man who painted the Madonna del Ros- 
 ario and Martyrdom of St. Agnes in the gallery of Bologna, 
 is palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, or right 
 in any field, way, or kind, whatsoever.* 
 
 § 14 Claude Though, however, at this period the general 
 the^Po^'ss ns^^^ grasp of the schools was perpetually contract- 
 ing, a gift was given to the world by Claude, for 
 which we are perhaps hardly enough grateful, owing to the 
 very frequency of our after enjoyment of it. He set the sun 
 in heaven, and was, I suppose, the first who attempted any- 
 thing like the realization of actual sunshine in misty air. He 
 gives the first example of the study of nature for her own 
 sake, and allowing for the unfortunate circumstances of his 
 education, and for his evident inferiority of intellect, more 
 could hardly have been expected from him. His false taste, 
 
 * This is no rash method of judgment, sweeping and hasty as it may 
 appear. From the weaknesses of an artist, or failures, however numer- 
 ous, we have no right to conjecture his total inability ; a time may 
 come when he may rise into sudden strength, or an instance occur 
 when his efforts shall be successful. But there are some pictures 
 which rank not under the head of failures, but of perpetrations or com- 
 missions ; some things which a man cannot do nor say without sealing 
 forever his character and capacity. The angel holding the cross with 
 his finger in his eye, the roaring red-faced children about the crown of 
 thorns, the blasphemous (I speak deliberately and determinedly) head 
 of Christ upon the handkerchief, and the mode in which the martyr- 
 dom of the saint is exhibited (I do not choose to use the expressions 
 which alone could characterize it) are perfect, suflScient, incontrovert- 
 ible proofs that whatever appears good in any of the doings of such a 
 painter must be deceptive, and that we may be assured that our taste 
 is corrupted and false whenever we feel disposed to admire him. I am 
 prepared to support this position, however uncharitable it may seem ; 
 a man may be tempted into a gross sin by passion, and forgiven ; and 
 yet there are some kinds of sins into which only men of a certain kind 
 can be tempted, and which cannot be forgiven. It should be added, 
 however, that the artistical qualities of these pictures are in every way 
 worthy of the conceptions they realize ; I do not recollect any instances 
 of color or execution so coarse and feelingless. 
 
THE FOREGOING PRmCIPLES. 
 
 155 
 
 forced composition, and ignorant rendering of detail have per- 
 haps been of more detriment to art than the gift he gave 
 was of advantage. The character of his own mind is singu- 
 lar ; I know of no other instance of a man's working from 
 nature continually with the desire of being true, and never 
 attaining the power of drawing so much as a bough of a tree 
 rightly. Salvator, a man originally endowed with far higher 
 power of mind than Claude, was altogether unfaithful to his 
 mission, and has left us, I believe, no gift. Everything that 
 he did is evidently for the sake of exhibiting his own dex- 
 terity ; there is no love of any kind for anything ; his choice 
 of landscape features is dictated by no delight in the sub-- 
 lime, but by mere animal restlessness or ferocity, guided by 
 an imaginative power of which he could not altogether de- 
 prive himself. He has done nothing which others have not 
 done better, or which it would not have been better not 
 to have done ; in nature, he mistakes distortion for energy, 
 and savageness for sublimity ; in man, mendicity for sancti- 
 ty, and conspiracy for heroism. 
 
 The landscape of Nicolo Poussin shows much power, and is 
 usually composed and elaborated on right principles, (compare 
 preface to second edition,) but I am aware of nothing that it 
 has attained of new or peculiar excellence ; it is a graceful 
 mixture of qualities to be found in other masters in higher 
 degrees. In finish it is inferior to Leonardo's, in invention 
 to Giorgione's, in truth to Titian's, in grace to Raffaelle's. 
 The landscapes of Gaspar have serious feeling and often valu- 
 able and solemn color ; virtueless otherwise, they are full of 
 the most degraded mannerism, and I believe the admiration 
 of them to have been productive of extensive evil among re- 
 cent schools. 
 
 § 15 German '^^^ development of landsca^^e north of the 
 and Flemish Alps, presents US with the same s-eneral phases 
 
 landscape. . . . 
 
 under modifications dependent partly on less in- 
 tensity of feeling, partly on diminished availableness of land- 
 scape material. That of the religious painters is treated with 
 the same affectionate completion ; but exuberance of fancy 
 sometimes diminishes the influence of the imagination, and 
 
156 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 the absence of the Italian force of passion admits of more pa* 
 tient and somewhat less intellectual elaboration. A morbid 
 habit of mind is evident in many, seeming to lose sight of the 
 balance and relations of things^, so as to become intense in 
 trifles, gloomily minute, as in Albert Durer ; and this min- 
 gled with a feverish operation of the fancy, which appears 
 to result from certain habitual conditions of bodily health 
 rather than of mental culture, (and of which the sickness 
 without the power is eminently characteristic of the modern 
 Germans ;) but with all this there are virtues of the very 
 highest order in those schools, and I regret that my knowl- 
 edge is insufficient to admit of my giving any detailed ac- 
 count of them. 
 
 In the landscape of Rembrandt and Rubens, we have the 
 northern parallel to the power of the Venetians. Among the 
 etchings and drawings of Rembrandt, landscape thoughts 
 may be found not unworthy of Titian, and studies from nat- 
 ure of sublime fidelity ; but his system of chiaroscuro was 
 inconsistent with the gladness, and his peculiar modes of feel- 
 ing with the grace, of nature ; nor from my present knowl- 
 edge can I name any work on canvas in which he has carried 
 out the dignity of his etched conceptions, or exhibited any 
 perceptiveness of new truths. 
 
 Not so Rubens, who perhaps furnishes us with the first in- 
 stances of complete unconventional unaffected landscape. 
 His treatment is healthy, manly, and rational, not very 
 affectionate, yet often condescending to minute and multi- 
 tudinous detail ; always as far as it goes pure, forcible, and 
 refreshing, consummate in composition, and marvellous in 
 color. In the Pitti palace, the best of its two Rubens land- 
 scapes has been placed near a characteristic and highly- 
 finished Titian, the marriage of St. Catherine. But for the 
 grandeur of line and solemn feeling in the flock of sheep, and 
 the figures of the latter work, I doubt if all its glow and 
 depth of tone could support its overcharged green and blue 
 against the open breezy sunshine of the Fleming. I do not 
 mean to rank the art of Rubens with that of Titian, but it is 
 always to be remembered that-Titian hardly ever paints sun- 
 
THE F QBE GOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 157 
 
 shine, but a certain opalescent twilight which has as much of 
 human emotion as of imital^e truth in it, — 
 
 The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
 
 Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
 
 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; " 
 
 and that art of this kind must always be liable to some ap- 
 pearance of failure when compared with a less pathetic state- 
 ment of facts. 
 
 It is to be noted, however, that the licenses taken by Rubens 
 in particular instances are as bold as his general statements 
 are sincere. In the landscape just instanced the horizon is 
 an oblique line ; in the Sunset of our own gallery many of 
 the shadows fall at right angles to the light ; and in a pict- 
 ure in the Dulwich gallery a rainbow is seen by the specta- 
 tor at the side of the sun. 
 
 These bold and frank licenses are not to be considered as 
 detracting from the rank of the painter ; they are usually 
 characteristic of those minds whose grasp of nature is so cer- 
 tain and extensive as to enable them fearlessly to sacrifice a 
 truth of actuality to a truth of feeling. Yet the young artist 
 must keep in mind that the painter's greatness consists not 
 in his taking, but in his atoning for them. 
 §16. the lower Among the professed landscapists of the 
 Dutch schools. D^tch school, we find much dexterous imitation 
 of certain kinds of nature, remarkable usually for its perse- 
 vering rejection of whatever is great, valuable, or affecting in 
 the object studied. Where, however, they show real desire 
 to paint what they saw as far as they saw it, there is of 
 course much in them that is instructive, as in Cuyp and in 
 the etchings of Waterloo, which have even very sweet and 
 genuine feeling ; and so in some of their architectural paint- 
 ers. But the object of the great body of them is merely to 
 display manual dexterities of one kind or another, and their 
 effect on the public mind is so totally for evil, that though I 
 do not deny the advantage an artist of real judgment may 
 derive from the study of some of them, I conceive the best 
 patronage that any monarch could possibly bestow upon the 
 
158 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 arts, would be to collect the whole body of them into a grand 
 gallery and burn it to the ground. 
 
 Passing to the English school, we find a con- 
 fch^ooifwifsoiand necting link between them and the Italians 
 Gainsborough. f^^^^^^ Richard Wilson. Had this artist 
 studied under favorable circumstances, there is evidence of 
 his having possessed power enough to produce an original 
 picture ; but, corrupted by study of the Poussins, and gath- 
 ering his materials chiefly in their field, the district about 
 Rome — a district especially unfavorable, as exhibiting no 
 pure or healthy nature, but a diseased and overgrown Flora 
 among half-developed volcanic rocks, loose calcareous con- 
 cretions, and mouldering wrecks of buildings — and whose 
 spirit, I conceive, to be especially opposed to the natural 
 tone of the English mind, his originality was altogether 
 overpowered, and, though he paints in a manly way and oc- 
 casionally reaches exquisite tones of color, as in the small 
 and very precious picture belonging to Mr. Rogers, and 
 sometimes manifests some freshness of feeling, as in the 
 Villa of Msecenas of our National Gallery, yet his pictures 
 are in general mere diluted adaptations from Poussin and 
 Salvator, without the dignity of the one or the fire of the 
 other. 
 
 Not so Gainsborough — a great name his, whether oi the 
 English or any other school. The greatest colorist since 
 Rubens, and the last, I think, of legitimate colorists; that is to 
 say, of those who were fully acquainted with the power of 
 their material ; pure in his English feeling, profound in his 
 seriousness, graceful in his gayety, there are nevertheless cer- 
 tain deductions to be made from his worthiness which yet I 
 dread to make, because my knowledge of his landscape works 
 is not extensive enough to justify me in speaking of them de- 
 cisively ; but this is to be noted of all that I know, that they 
 are rather motives of feeling and color than earnest studies ; 
 that their .execution is in some degree mannered, and always 
 hasty ; that they are altogether wanting in the affectionate 
 detail of which I have already spoken ; and that their color 
 is in some measure dependent on a bituminous brown and 
 
THE FOREGOING PEINGIPLE8. 
 
 159 
 
 conventional green which have more of science than of truth 
 in them. These faults may be sufficiently noted in the mag- 
 nificent picture presented by him to the Royal Academy, 
 and tested by a comparison of it with the Turner (Llanberis,) 
 in the same room. Nothing can be more attractively lumi- 
 nous or aerial than the distance of the Gainsborough, noth- 
 ing more bold or inventive than the forms of its crags and 
 the diffusion of the broad distant light upon them, where a 
 vulo;ar artist would have thrown them into dark contrast. 
 But it will be found that the light of the distance is brought 
 out by a violent exaggeration of the gloom in the valley ; 
 that the forms of the green trees which bear the chief light 
 are careless and ineffective ; that the markings of the crags 
 are equally hasty ; and that no object in the foreground has 
 realization enough to enable the eye to rest upon it. The 
 Turner, a much feebler picture in its first impression, and 
 altogether inferior in the quality and value of its individual 
 hues, will yet be found in the end more forcible, because un- 
 exaggerated ; its gloom is moderate and aerial, its light deep 
 in tone, its color entirely unconventional, and the forms of 
 its rocks studied with the most devoted care. With Gains- 
 borough terminates the series of painters connected with the 
 elder schools. By whom, among those yet living or lately 
 lost, the impulse was first given to modern landscape, I at- 
 tempt not to decide. Such questions are rather invidious 
 than interesting ; the particular tone or direction of any 
 school seems to me always to have resulted rather from cer- 
 tain phases of national character, limited to particular pe- 
 riods, than from individual teaching ; and, especially among 
 moderns, what has been good in each master has been com- 
 monly original. 
 
 § 18. Constable, I have already alluded to the simplicity and 
 Caicott. earnestness of the mind of Constable ; to its 
 
 vigorous rupture with school laws, and to its unfortunate 
 error on the opposite side. Unteachableness seems to 
 have been a main feature of his character, and there is 
 corresponding want of veneration in the way he approaches 
 nature herself. His early education and associations were 
 
160 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 also against him ; they induced in him a morbid preference 
 of subjects of a low order. I have never seen any work of 
 his in which there were any signs of his being able to draw, 
 and hence even the most necessary details are painted by 
 him inefficiently. His works are also eminently wanting 
 both in rest and refinement, and Fuseli's jesting compliment 
 is too true ; for the showery weather in which the artist de- 
 lights, misses alike the majesty of storm and the loveliness of 
 calm weather : it is great-coat weather, and nothing more. 
 There is strange want of depth in the mind which has no 
 pleasure in sunbeams but when piercing painfully through 
 clouds, nor in foliage but when shaken by the wind, nor in 
 light itself but when flickering, glistening, restless, and fee- 
 ble. Yet, with all these deductions, his works are to be 
 deeply respected as thoroughly original, thoroughly honest, 
 free from affectation, manly in manner, frequently successful 
 in cool color, and especially realizing certain motives of Eng- 
 lish scenery with perhaps as much affection as such scenery, 
 unless when regarded through media of feeling derived from 
 higher sources, is calculated to inspire. 
 
 On the works of Calcott, high as his reputation stands, I 
 should look with far less respect ; I see not any preference 
 or affection in the artist ; there is no tendency in him with 
 which we can sympathize, nor does there appear any sign of 
 aspiration, effort, or enjoyment in any one of his works. He 
 appears to have completed them methodically, to have been 
 content with them when completed, to have thought them 
 good, legitimate, regular pictures ; perhaps in some respects 
 better than nature. He painted everything tolerably, and 
 nothing excellently ; he has given us no gift, struck for us 
 no light, and though he has produced one or two valuable 
 works, of which the finest I know is the Marine in the pos- 
 session of Sir J. Swinburne, they will, I believe, in future 
 have no place among those considered representative of the 
 English school. 
 
 Throughout the ransre of elder art it will be 
 
 § 19. Peculiar u j ' ^ t ^X. 
 
 tendency of re- remembered we have lound no instance or the 
 
 cent landscape. c ' .\ c ^ • i.' £ u. ' j. 
 
 taithiul painting oi mountain scenery, except 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 161 
 
 m a faded background of Masaccio's : nothing more than 
 rocky eminences, undulating hills, or fantastic crags, and 
 e-ren these treated altogether under typical forms. The 
 more specific study of mountains seems to have coincided 
 with the most dexterous practice of water-color ; but it ad- 
 mits of doubt whether the choice of subject has been directed 
 by the vehicle, or whether, as I rather think, the tendency 
 of national feeling has been followed in the use of the most 
 appropriate means. Something is to be attributed to the 
 increased demand for slighter works of art, and much to the 
 sense of the quality of objects now called picturesque, which 
 appears to be exclusively of modern origin. From what feel- 
 ing the character of middle-age architecture and costume 
 arose, or with what kind of affection their forms were re- 
 garded by the inventors, I am utterly unable to guess ; but 
 of this I think we may be assured, that the natural instinct 
 and child-like wisdom of those days were altogether different 
 from the modern feeling, which appears to have taken its 
 origin in the absence of such objects, and to be based rather 
 on the strangeness of their occurrence than on any real affec- 
 tion for them ; and which is certainly so shallow and ineffec- 
 tive as to be instantly and always sacrificed by the majority 
 to fashion, comfort, or economy. Yet I trust that there is a 
 healthy though feeble love of nature mingled with it, nature 
 pure, separate, felicitous, which is also peculiar to the mod- 
 erns ; and as signs of this feeling, or ministers to it, I look 
 with veneration upon many works which, in a technical 
 point of view, are of minor importance. 
 
 §20. G-. Robson, ^ have been myself indebted for much teach- 
 ?se ^the terS more delight to those of the late G. 
 
 "style." Robson. Weaknesses there are in them mani- 
 
 fold, much bad drawing, much forced color, much over 
 finish, little of what artists call composition ; but there 
 is thorough affection for the thing drawn ; they are serious 
 and quiet in the highest degree, certain qualities of atmos- 
 phere and texture in them have never been excelled, and 
 certain facts of mountain scenery never but by them ex- 
 pressed, as, for instance, the stillness and depth of the 
 Vol. I.— 11 
 
162 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 mountain tarns, with the reversed imagery of their darkness 
 signed across by the soft lines of faintly touching winds ; 
 the solemn flush of the brown fern and glowing heath under 
 evening light ; the purple mass of mountains far removed, 
 seen against clear still twilight. With equal gratitude I 
 look to the drawings of David Cox, which, in spite of their 
 loose and seemingly careless execution, are not less serious 
 in their meaning, nor less important in their truth. I must, 
 however, in reviewing those modern works in which certain 
 modes of execution are particularly manifested, insist espe- 
 cially on this general principle, applicable to all times of art ; 
 that what is usually called the style or manner of an artist 
 is, in all good art, nothing but the best means of getting at 
 the particular truth which the artist wanted ; it is not a 
 mode peculiar to himself of getting at the same truths as 
 other men, but the 07ily mode of getting the particular facts 
 he desires, and which mode, if others had desired to express 
 those facts, they also must have adopted. All habits of ex- 
 ecution persisted in under no such necessity, but because the 
 artist has invented them, or desires to show his dexterity in 
 them, are utterly base ; for every good painter finds so much 
 difficulty in reaching the end he sees and desires, that he 
 has no time nor power left for playing tricks on the road to 
 it ; he catches at the easiest and best means he can get ; it 
 is possible that such means may be singular, and then it will 
 be said that his style is strange ; but it is not a style at all, 
 it is the saying of a particular thing in the only way in 
 which it possibly can be said. Thus the' reed pen outline 
 and peculiar touch of Prout, which are frequently considered 
 as mere manner, are in fact the only means of expressing 
 the crumbling character of stone which the artist loves and 
 desires. That character never has been expressed except by 
 him, nor will it ever be expressed except by his means. And 
 it is of the greatest importance to distinguish this kind of 
 necessary and virtuous manner from the conventional man- 
 ners very frequent in derivative schools, and always utterly 
 to be contemned, wherein an artist, desiring nothing and 
 feeling nothing, executes everything in his own particular 
 
THE FO EE GO ma PRINCIPLES. 
 
 163 
 
 mode, and teaches emulous scholars how to do with difficulty 
 what might have been done with ease. It is true that there 
 are sometimes instances in which great masters have em- 
 ployed different means of getting at the same end, but in 
 these cases their choice has been always of those which to 
 them appeared the shortest and most complete ; their prac- 
 tice has never been prescribed by affectation or continued 
 from habit, except so far as must be expected from such 
 weakness as is common to all men ; from hands that neces- 
 sarily do most readily what they are most accustomed to do, 
 and minds always liable to prescribe to the hands that which 
 they can do most readily. 
 
 The recollection of this will keep us from being offended 
 with the loose and blotted handling of David Cox. There is 
 no other means by which his object could be attained. The 
 looseness, coolness, and moisture of his herbage ; the rust- 
 ling crumpled freshness of his broad-leaved weeds ; the play 
 of pleasant light across his deep heathered moor or plashing 
 sand ; the melting of fragments of white mist into the drop- 
 ping blue above ; all this has not been fully recorded except 
 by him, and what there is of accidental in his mode of reach- 
 ing it, answers gracefully to the accidental part of nature 
 herself. Yet he is capable of more than this, and if he suf- 
 fers himself uniformly to paint beneath his capability, that 
 which began in feeling must necessarily end in manner. He 
 paints too many small pictures, and perhaps has of late per- 
 mitted his peculiar execution to be more manifest than is 
 necessary. Of this, he is himself the best judge. For al- 
 most all faults of this kind the public are answerable, not the 
 painter. I have alluded to one of his grander works — such 
 as I should wish always to see him paint — in the preface ; an- 
 other, I think still finer, a red sunset on distant hills, almost un- 
 equalled for truth and power of color, was painted by him sev- 
 eral years ago, and remains, I believe, in his own possession. 
 § 21. Copley The dcscrvcd popularity of Copley Fielding 
 nomenJof'^dS'- rendered it less necessary for me to allude 
 
 tant color. frequently to his works in the following pages 
 than it would otherwise have been, more especially as 
 
164 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 my own sympathies and enjoyments are so entirely directed 
 in the channel which his art has taken, that I am afraid of 
 trusting them too far. Yet I may, perhaps, be permitted to 
 speak of myself so far as I suppose my own feelings to be 
 representative of those of a class ; and I suppose that there 
 are many who, like myself, at some period of their life have 
 derived more intense and healthy pleasure from the works of 
 this painter than of any other whatsoever ; healthy, because 
 always based on his faithful and simple rendering of 
 nature, and that of very lovely and impressive nature, 
 altogether freed from coarseness, violence, or vulgarity. 
 Various references to that which he has attained will 
 be found subsequently : what I am now about to say 
 respecting what he has not attained, is not in depreciation of 
 what he has accomplished, but in regret at his suffering 
 powers of a high order to remain in any measure dormant. 
 
 He indulges himself too much in the use of crude color. 
 Pure cobalt, violent rose, and purple, are of frequent occur- 
 rence in his distances ; pure siennas and other browns in his 
 foregrounds, and that not as expressive of lighted but of 
 local color. The reader will find in the following chapters 
 that I am no advocate for subdued coloring ; but crude 
 color is not bright color, and there was never a noble or 
 brilliant work of color yet produced, whose real form did not 
 depend on the subduing of its tints rather than the elevation 
 of them. 
 
 It is perhaps one of the most difficult lessons to learn in 
 art, that the warm colors of distance, even the most glowing, 
 are subdued by the air so as in no wise to resemble the same 
 color seen on a foreground object ; so that the rose of sun- 
 set on clouds or mountains has a gray in it which dis- 
 tinguishes it from the rose color of the leaf of a flower ; and 
 the mingling of this gray of distance, without in the 
 slightest degree taking away the expression of the intense 
 and perfect purity of the color in and by itself, is perhaps 
 the last attainment of the great landscape colorist. In the 
 same way the blue of distance, however intense, is not the 
 blue of a bright blue flower, and it is not distinguished from 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 165 
 
 it by different texture merely, but by a certain intermixture 
 and under current of warm color, which is altogether want- 
 ing in many of the blues of Fielding's distances ; and so of 
 every bright distant color ; while in foreground where colors 
 may be, and ought to be, pure, yet that any of them are ex- 
 pressive of light is only to be felt where there is the accurate 
 fitting of them to their relative shadows which we find in the 
 works of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, Veronese, Turner, and 
 all other great colorists in proportion as they are so. Of this 
 fitting of light to shadow Fielding is altogether regardless, 
 so that his foregrounds are constantly assuming the aspect 
 of over-charged local color instead of sunshine, and his 
 figures and cattle look transparent. 
 
 A2:ain, the finishing: of Fieldin^j^'s foreo-rounds, 
 
 §22. Beauty of a .1. ' A ' ' • . '.T 4- 
 
 mountain fore- ES regards their drawing, is minute without ac- 
 ground. curacy, multitudinous without thought, and con- 
 
 fused without mystery. Where execution is seen to be in 
 measure accidental, as in Cox, it may be received as repre- 
 sentative of what is accidental in nature ; but there is no 
 part of Fielding's foreground that is accidental ; it is evidently 
 worked and re-worked, dotted, rubbed, and finished with 
 great labor, and where the virtue, playfulness, and freedom 
 of accident are thus removed, one of two virtues must be sub- 
 stituted for them. Either we must have the deeply studied 
 and imaginative foreground, of which every part is necessary 
 to every other, and whose every spark of light is essential to 
 the well-being of the whole, of which the foregrounds of 
 Turner in the Liber Studiorum are the most eminent exam- 
 ples I know, or else we must have in some measure the 
 botanical faithfulness and realization of the early masters. 
 Neither of these virtues is to be found in Fielding's. Its 
 features, though grouped with feeling, are yet scattered and 
 inessential. Any one of them might be altered in many ways 
 without doing harm ; there is no proportioned, necessary, 
 unalterable relation among them ; no evidence of invention 
 or of careful thought, while on the other hand there is no 
 botanical or geological accuracy, nor any point on which the 
 eye may rest with thorough contentment in its realization. 
 
1G6 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 It seems strange that to an artist of so quick feeling the 
 details of a mountain foreground should not prove irresist- 
 ibly attractive, and entice him to greater accuracy of study. 
 There is not a fragment of its living rock, nor a tuft of its 
 heathery herbage, that has not adorable manifestations of 
 God's working thereu]3on. The harmonies of color among 
 the native lichens are better than Titian's ; the interwoven 
 bells of campanula and heather are better than all the arab- 
 esques of the Vatican ; they need no improvement, arrange- 
 ment, nor alteration, nothing but love, and every combination 
 of them is different from every other, so that a painter need 
 never repeat himself if he will only be true ; yet all these 
 sources of power have been of late entirely neglected by 
 Fielding ; there is evidence through all his foregrounds of 
 their being mere home inventions, and like all home inven- 
 tions they exhibit perpetual resemblances and repetitions ; 
 the painter is evidently embarrassed without his rutted road 
 in the middle, and his boggy pool at the side, which pool he 
 has of late painted in hard lines of violent blue : there is not 
 a stone, even of the nearest and most important, which has 
 its real lichens upon it, or a studied form or anything more to 
 occupy the mind than certain variations of dark and light 
 browns. The same faults must be found with his present 
 painting of foliage, neither the stems nor leafage being ever 
 studied from nature ; and this is the more to be regretted, 
 because in the earlier works of the artist there was much 
 admirable drawing, and even yet his power is occasionally 
 developed in his larger works, as in a Bolton Abbey on can- 
 vas, which was, — I cannot say, exhibited, — but was in the 
 rooms of the Royal Academy in 1843."* T should have made 
 
 * It appears not to be sufficiently understood by those artists who 
 complain acrimoniously of their position on the Academy walls, that the 
 Academicians have in their own rooms a right to the line and the best 
 places near it ; in their taking this position there is no abuse nor in- 
 justice; but the Academicians should remember that with their rights 
 they have their duties, and their duty is to determine among the works 
 of artists not belonging to their body those which are most likely to ad- 
 vance public knowledge and judgment, and to give these the best places 
 next their own; neither would it detract from their dignity if they 
 
THE FOBE GOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 the preceding remarks with more hesitation and diffidence, 
 but that, from a comparison of works of this kind with the 
 slighter ornaments of the water-color rooms, it seems evident 
 that the painter is not unaware of the deficiencies of these 
 latter, and concedes something of what he would himself de- 
 sire to what he has found to be the feeling of a majority of 
 his admirers. This is a dangerous modesty, and especially so 
 in these days when the judgment of the many is palpably as 
 artificial as their feeling is cold. 
 
 There is much that is instructive and deservino- 
 
 § 23. De Wint. « , . , . . . , . r. ttt • 
 
 oi nigh praise in tlie sketches or De Wint. Yet 
 it is to be remembered that even the pursuit of truth, how- 
 ever determined, wnll have results limited and imperfect 
 when its chief motive is the pride of being true ; and I fear 
 that these works, sublime as many of them have unquestion- 
 ably been, testify more accuracy of eye and experience of color 
 than exercise of thought. Their truth of effect is often pur- 
 chased at too great an expense by the loss of all beauty of 
 form, and of the higher refinements of color ; deficiencies, 
 however, on which I shall not insist, since the value of the 
 sketches, as far as they go, is great ; they have done good 
 
 occasionally ceded a square even of their own territory, as they did 
 gracefully and rightly, and, I am sorry to add, disinterestedly, to the 
 picture of Paul de la Roche in 1844. Now the Academicians know per- 
 fectly well that the mass of portrait which encumbers their walls at half 
 height is worse than useless, seriously harmful to the public taste, and 
 it wns highly criminal (I use the word advisedly) that the valuable and 
 interesting work of Fielding, of which I have above spoken, should have 
 been placed where it was, above three rows of eye-glasses and waist- 
 coats. A very beautiful work of Harding^s was treated either in 
 same or the following exhibition, with still greater injustice. Fielding's 
 was merely put out of sight ; Harding's where its faults were conspicu- 
 ous and its virtues lost. It was an Alpine scene, of which the fore- 
 ground, rocks, and torrents were painted with unrivalled fidelity and 
 precision ; the foliage was dexterous, the aerial gradations of the moun- 
 tains tender and multitudinous, their forms carefully studied and very 
 grand. The blemish of the picture was a buff-colored tower with a red 
 roof ; singularly meagre in detail, and conventionally relieved from a 
 mass of gloom. The picture was placed where nothing but this tower 
 could be seen. 
 
168 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 service and set good example, and whatever their failings 
 may be, there is evidence in them that the painter has al- 
 ways done what he believed to be right. 
 
 The influence of the masters of whom we have 
 If^^' EngravSi^. hitherto spoken is confined to those who have ac- 
 j. D. Harding. ^^^^ their actual works, since the particular 
 qualities in which they excel, are in no wise to be rendered by 
 the engraver. Those of whom we have next to speak are known 
 to the public in a great measure by the help of the engraver ; 
 and while their influence is thus very far extended, their 
 modes of working are perhaps, in some degree modified by 
 the habitual reference to the future translation into light and 
 shade ; reference which is indeed beneficial in the care it in- 
 duces respecting the arrangement of the chiaroscuro and the 
 explanation of the forms, but which is harmful, so far as it 
 involves a dependence rather on quantity of picturesque 
 material than on substantial color or simple treatment, and 
 as it admits of indolent diminution of size and slightness of 
 execution. 
 
 We should not be just to the present works of J. D. Hard- 
 ing unless we took this influence into account. Some years 
 back none of our artists realized more laboriously, nor 
 obtained more substantial color and texture ; a large draw- 
 ing in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq., of Tottenham, 
 is of great value as an example of his manner at the period ; 
 a manner not only careful, but earnest, and free from any 
 kind of affectation. Partly from the habit of making slight 
 and small drawings for engravers, and partly also, I imagine, 
 f^m an overstrained seeking after appearances of dexterity 
 in execution, his drawings have of late years become both 
 less solid and less complete ; not, however, without attain- 
 ing certain brilliant qualities in exchange which are very 
 valuable in the treatment of some of the looser portions of 
 subject. Of the extended knowledge and various powers of 
 this painter, frequent instances are noted in the following 
 pages. Neither, perhaps, are rightly estimated among 
 artists, owing to a certain coldness of sentiment in his choice 
 of subject, and a continual preference of the picturesque to 
 
THE FORE GOING PIUNGIPLES. 
 
 169 
 
 the impressive ; proved perhaps in nothing so distinctly as 
 in the little interest usually attached to his skies, which, if 
 aerial and expressive of space and movement, content him, 
 though destitute of story, power, or character : an exception 
 must be made in favor of the very grand sunrise on the 
 Swiss Alps, exhibited in 1844, wherein the artist's real power 
 was in some measure displayed, though I am convinced he 
 is still capable of doing far greater things. So in his foliage 
 he is apt to sacrifice the dignity of his trees to their wild- 
 ness, and lose the forest in the copse, neither is he at all ac- 
 curate enough in his expression of species or realization of 
 near portions. These are deficiencies, be it observed, of sen- 
 timent, not of perception, as there are few who equal him in 
 rapidity of seizure of material truth. 
 
 Very extensive influence in modern art must be attributed 
 to the works of Samuel Prout ; and as there are some cir- 
 cumstances belonging to his treatment of architectural sub- 
 § 25 Samuel ^^^^ which it does not come within the sphere 
 Prout. Early of the followin^: chapters to examine, I shall 
 
 painting of archi- . 
 
 lecture, how defi- endcavor to note the more important of them 
 
 cient. , 
 
 here. 
 
 Let us glance back for a moment to the architectural draw- 
 ing of earlier times. Before the time of the Bellinis at Yen- 
 ice, and of Ghirlandajo at Florence, I believe there are no ex- 
 amples of anything beyond conventional representation of 
 architecture, often rich, quaint, and full of interest, as Mem- 
 mi's abstract of the Duomo at Florence at S*^ Maria No- 
 vella ; but not to be classed with any genuine efforts at rep- 
 resentation. It is much to be regretted that the power and 
 custom of introducing well-drawn architecture should have 
 taken place only when architectural taste had been itself cor- 
 rupted, and that the architecture introduced by Bellini, Ghir- 
 landajo, Francia, and the other patient and powerful work- 
 men of the fifteenth century, is exclusively of the renaissance 
 styles ; while their drawing C)f it furnishes little that is of 
 much interest to the architectural draughtsman as such, be- 
 ing always governed by a reference to its subordinate posi- 
 tion, so that all forceful shadow and play of color are (most 
 
170 GENERAL APPLICATION' OF 
 
 justly) surrendered for quiet and uniform hues of gray and 
 chiaroscuro of extreme simplicity. Whatever they chose to 
 do they did with consummate grandeur, (note especially the 
 chiaroscuro of the square window of Ghirlandajo's, which so 
 much delighted Yasari, in S*^^ Maria Novella ; and the daring 
 management of a piece of the perspective in the Salutation, 
 opposite, where he has painted a flight of stairs descending in 
 front, though the picture is twelve feet above the eye) ; and 
 yet this grandeur, in all these men, results rather from the 
 general power obtained in their drawing of the figure than 
 from any definite knowledge respecting the things introduced 
 in these accessory parts ; so that while in some points it is 
 impossible for any painter to equal these accessories, unless 
 he were in all respects as great as Ghirlandajo or Bellini, in 
 others it is possible for him, with far inferior powers, to at- 
 tain a representation both more accurate and more inter- 
 esting. 
 
 In order to arrive at the knowledge of these, we must briefly 
 take note of a few of the modes in which architecture itself 
 is agreeable to the mind, especially of the influence upon the 
 character of the building which is to be attributed to the 
 signs of age. 
 
 §26. Effects of evident, first, that if the design of the 
 
 rng8,"^how"far ^^i^^^^^g t)e Originally bad, the only virtue it can 
 desirable. evcr posscss will be in signs of antiquity. All 
 
 that in this world enlarges the sphere of affection or imagina- 
 tion is to be reverenced, and all those circumstances enlarge 
 it which strengthen our memory or quicken our conception 
 of the dead ; hence it is no light sin to destroy anything that 
 is old, more especially because, even with the aid of all ob- 
 tainable records of the past, we, the living, occupy a space 
 of too large importance and interest in our own eyes ; we 
 look upon the world too much as our own, too much as if we 
 had possessed it and should possess it forever, and forget that 
 it is a mere hostelry, of which we occupy the apartments for 
 a time, which others better than we have sojourned in before, 
 who are now where we should desire to be with them. Fort- 
 unately for mankind, as some counterbalance to that wretched 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES, 171 
 
 love of novelty which originates in selfishness, shallowness, 
 and conceit, and which especially characterizes all vulgar 
 minds, there is set in the deeper places of the heart such af- 
 fection for the signs of age that the eye is delighted even by 
 injuries which are the work of time ; not but that there is 
 also real and absolute beauty in the forms and colors so ob- 
 tained, for which the original lines of the architecture, unless 
 they have been very grand indeed, are well exchanged, so 
 that there is hardly any building so ugly but that it may be 
 made an agreeable object by such appearances. It would not 
 be easy, for instance, to find a less pleasing piece of architect- 
 ure than the portion of the front of Queen's College, Ox- 
 ford, which has just been restored ; yet I believe that few 
 persons could have looked with total indifference on the 
 mouldering and peeled surface of the oolite limestone previ- 
 ous to its restoration. If, however, the character of the 
 building consist in minute detail or multitudinous lines, the 
 evil or good effect of age upon it must depend in great meas- 
 ure on the kind of art, the material, and the climate. The 
 Parthenon, for instance, would be injured by any markings 
 which interfered with the contours of its sculptures ; and 
 any lines of extreme purity, or colors of original harmony 
 and perfection are liable to injury, and are ill exchanged for 
 mouldering edges or brown weatherstains. 
 
 But as all architecture is, or ought to be, meant to be 
 durable, and to derive part of its glory from its antiquity, 
 all art that is liable to mortal injury from effects of time is 
 therein out of place, and this is another reason for the prin- 
 ciple I have asserted in the second part, page 277. I do not 
 at this instant recollect a single instance of any very fine 
 building which is not improved up to a certain period by all 
 its signs of age, after which period, like all other human 
 works, it necessarily declines, its decline being in almost all 
 ages and countriffe accelerated by neglect and abuse in its 
 time of beauty, and alteration or restoration in its time of 
 age. 
 
 Thus I conceive that all buildings dependent on color, 
 whether of mosaic or painting, have their effect improved 
 
172 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 by the richness of the subsequent tones of age ; for there 
 are few arrangements of color so perfect but that they are 
 capable of improvement by some softening and blending of 
 this kind : with mosaic, the improvement may be considered 
 as proceeding almost so long as the design can be distinctly 
 seen ; with painting, so long as the colors do not change or 
 chip off. 
 
 Again, upon all forms of sculptural ornament, the effect of 
 time is such, that if the design be poor, it will enrich it ; if 
 overcharged, simplify jt ; if harsh and violent, soften it ; if 
 smooth and obscure, exhibit it ; whatever faults it may have 
 are rapidly disguised, whatever virtue it has still shines and 
 steals out in the mellow light ; and this to such an extent, 
 that the artist is always liable to be tempted to the drawing 
 of details in old buildings as of extreme bfeauty, which look 
 cold and hard in their architectural lines ; and I have never 
 yet seen any restoration or cleaned portion of a building 
 whose effect was not inferior to the weathered parts, even to 
 those of which the design had in some parts almost disap- 
 peared. On the front of the church of San Michele at Lucca, 
 the mosaics have fallen out of half the columns, and lie in 
 weedy ruin beneath ; in many, the frost has torn large 
 masses of the entire coating away, leaving a scarred un- 
 sightly surface. Two of the shafts of the upper star win- 
 dow are eaten entirely away by the sea wind, the rest have 
 lost their proportions, the edges of the arches are hacked 
 into deep hollows, and cast indented shadows on the weed- 
 grown wall. The process has gone too far, and* yet I doubt 
 not but that this building is seen to greater advantage now 
 than when first built, always with exception of one circum- 
 stance, that the French shattered the lower wheel window, 
 and set up in front of it an escutcheon with " Libertas " 
 upon it, which abomination of desolation, the Lucchese have 
 not yet had human-heartedness enough to^ull down. 
 
 Putting therefore the application of architecture as an ac- 
 cessory out of the question, and supposing our object to be 
 the exhibition of the most impressive qualities of the build- 
 ing itself, it is evidently the duty of the draughtsman to 
 
THE FOREGOING PBINCIPLE8, 
 
 173 
 
 represent it under those conditions, and with that amount 
 of age-mark upon it which may best exalt and harmonize the 
 sources of its beauty : this is no pursuit of mere pictu- 
 resqueness, it is true following out of the ideal character of 
 the building ; nay, far greater dilapidation than this may in 
 portions be exhibited, for there are beauties of other kinds, 
 not otherwise attainable, brought out by advanced dilapida- 
 tion ; but w^hen the artist suffers the mere love of ruinous- 
 ness to interfere with his perception of the art of the build- 
 ing, and substitutes rude fractures and blotting stains for 
 all its fine chiselling and determined color, he has lost the 
 end of his own art. 
 
 So far of asrins: : next of effects of lio^ht and 
 
 §27. Effects of T u r U ^1 u u 
 
 light, how neces- color. it IS, i believe, hardly enough observed 
 standing of ° de- among architects that the same decorations are 
 ^^^* of totally different effect according to their posi- 
 
 tion and the time of day. A moulding which is of value on 
 a building facing south, where it takes deep shadows from 
 steep sun, may be utterly ineffective if placed west or east ; 
 and a moulding which is chaste and intelligible in shade on 
 a north side, may be grotesque, vulgar, or confused when it 
 takes black shadows on the south. Farther, there is a time 
 of day in which every architectural decoration is seen to 
 best advantage, and certain times in which its peculiar force 
 and character are best explained ; of these niceties the arch- 
 itect takes little cognizance, as he must in some sort calcu- 
 late on the effect of ornament at all times ; but to the artist 
 they are of infinite importance, and especially for this reason, 
 that there is always much detail on buildings which cannot 
 be drawn as such, which is too far off, or too minute, and 
 which must consequently be set down in short-hand of some 
 kind or another ; and, as it were, an abstract, more or less 
 philosophical, made of its general heads. Of the style of this 
 abstract, of the lightness, confusion, and mystery necessary 
 in it, I have spoken elsewhere ; at present I insist only on 
 the arrangement and matter of it. All good ornament and 
 all good architecture are capable of being put into short- 
 hand ; that is, each has a perfect system of parts, principal 
 
174 
 
 oenehal application of 
 
 and subordinate, of which, even when the complemental de- 
 tails vanish in distance, the system and anatomy yet remain 
 visible so long as anything is visible ; so that the divisions 
 of a beautiful spire shall be known as beautiful even till 
 their last line vanishes in blue mist, and the effect of a well- 
 designed moulding shall be visibly disciplined, harmonious, 
 and inventive, as long as it is seen to be a moulding at all. 
 Now the power of the artist of marking this character de- 
 pends not on his complete knowledge of the design, but on 
 his experimental knowledge of its salient and bearing parts, 
 and of the effects of light and shadow, by which their sali- 
 ency is best told. He must therefore be prepared, according 
 to his subject, to use light, steep or level, intense or feeble, 
 and out of the resulting chiaroscuro select those peculiar 
 and hinging points on which the rest are based, and by which 
 all else that is essential may be explained. 
 
 The thoughtful command of all these circumstances con- 
 stitutes the real architectural draughtsman ; the habits of 
 executing everything either under one kind of effect or in 
 one manner, or of usino; unintellio^ible and meanino^less ab- 
 stracts of beautiful designs, are those which must commonly 
 take the place of it and are the most extensively esteemed.* 
 „ * V,.. ^ Let us now proceed with our review of those 
 
 § 28. Architect- ^ ^ 
 
 urai painting of artists who have devoted themselves more pecul- 
 
 Gentile Bellini . ^ ^ - 
 
 and vittor Car- larly to architectural subject. 
 
 Foremost among them stand Gentile Bellini 
 and Vittor Carpaccio, to whom we are indebted for the only 
 existing faithful statements of the architecture of Old Ven- 
 ice, and who are the only authorities to whom we can trust 
 in conjecturing the former beauty of those few desecrated 
 fragments, the last of which are now being rapidly swept 
 away by the idiocy of modern Venetians. 
 
 Nothing can be more careful, nothing more delicately fin- 
 ished, or more dignified in feeling than the works of both 
 
 * I have not g-iven any examples in this place, because it is difficult 
 to explain such circumstances of effect without diagrams : I purpose 
 entering into fuller discussion of the subject with the aid of illustra- 
 tion. 
 
THE FOBEQOma PBINGIPLE8. 
 
 175 
 
 these men ; and as architectural evidence they are the best 
 we could have had, all the gilded parts being gilt in the pict- 
 ure, so that there can be no mistake or confusion of them 
 with yellow color or light, and all the frescoes or mosaics 
 given ^ith the most absolute precision and fidelity. At the 
 same time they are by no means examples of perfect archi- 
 tectural drawing ; there is little light and shade in them of 
 any kind, and none whatever of the thoughtful observance 
 of temporary effect of which we have just been speaking ; 
 so that, in rendering the character of the relieved parts, 
 their solidity, depth, or gloom, the representation fails alto- 
 gether, and it is moreover lifeless from its very completion, 
 both the signs of age and the effects of use and habitation 
 being utterly rejected ; rightly so, indeed, in these instances, 
 (all the architecture of these painters being in background 
 to religious subject,) but wrongly so, if we look to the archi- 
 tecture alone. Neither is there anything like aerial per- 
 spective attempted ; the employment of actual gold in the 
 decoration of all the distances, and the entire realization of 
 their details, as far as is possible on the scale compelled by 
 perspective, being alone sufficient to prevent this, except in 
 the hands of painters far more practised in effect than either 
 Gentile or Carpaccio. But with all these discrepancies. 
 Gentile Bellini's church of St. Mark's is the best church of 
 St. Mark's that has ever been painted, so far as I know ; 
 and I believe the reconciliation of true aerial perspective 
 and chiaroscuro with the splendor and dignity obtained by 
 the real gilding and elaborate detail, is a problem yet to be 
 accomplished. With the help of the Daguerreotype, and the 
 lessons of color given by the later Venetians, we ought now 
 to be able to accomplish it, more especially as the right use of 
 gold has been shown us by the greatest master of effect whom 
 Venice herself produced, Tintoret, who has employed it with 
 infinite grace on the steps ascended by the young Madonna, 
 in his large picture in the church of the Madonna dell' Orto. 
 Perugino uses it also with singular grace, often employing it 
 for golden light on distant trees, and continually on the 
 high light of hair, and that without losing relative distances. 
 
176 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 The great group of Venetian painters who brought land- 
 scape art, for that time, to its culminating point, have left, 
 as we have already seen, little that is instructive in architect- 
 ural paintina:. The causes of this I cannot 
 
 §29. And of the ^ . , ^. . , . ^. 
 
 Venetians gener- Comprehend, lor neither iitian nor lintoret ap- 
 pears to despise anything that affords them 
 either variety of form or of color, the latter especially con- 
 descending to very trivial details, — as in the magnificent 
 carpet painting of the Doge Mocenigo ; so that it might 
 have been expected that in the rich colors of St. Mark's, and 
 the magnificent and fantastic masses of the Byzantine pal* 
 aces, they would have found whereupon to dwell with de- 
 lighted elaboration. This is, however, never the case, and 
 although frequently compelled to introduce portions of 
 Venetian locality in their backgrounds, such portions are 
 always treated in a most hasty and faithless manner, missing 
 frequently all character of the building, and never advanced 
 to realization. In Titian's picture of Faith, the view of 
 Venice below is laid in so rapidly and slightly, the houses 
 all leaning this way and that, and of no color, the sea a dead 
 gray green, and the ship-sails mere dashes of the brush, that 
 the most obscure of Turner's Venices would look substantial 
 beside it ; while in the very picture of Tintoret in which he 
 has dwelt so elaborately on the carpet, he has substituted a 
 piece of ordinary renaissance composition for St. Mark's, 
 and in the background has chosen the Sansovino side of the 
 Piazzetta, treating even that so carelessly as to lose all the 
 proportion and beauty of its design, and so flimsily that the 
 line of the distant sea which has been first laid in, is seen 
 through all the columns. Evidences of magnificent power of 
 course exist in whatever he touches, but his full power is 
 never turned in this direction. More space is allowed to his 
 architecture by Paul Veronese, but it is still entirely sugges- 
 tive, and would be utterly false except as a frame or back- 
 ground for figures. The same may be said with respect to 
 RalTaelle and the Roman school. 
 
 If, however, these men laid architecture little under contri- 
 bution to their own art, they made their own art a glorious 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 177 
 
 gift to architecture, and the walls of Venice, which before, 
 I believe, had received color only in arabesque patterns, were 
 lighted with human life by Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and 
 § 30. Fresco Veronese. Of the works of Tintoret and Titian, 
 Venetian exteri- i^othing now, I belicve, remains ; two figures 
 ors. canaietto. Qf Giorgione's are still traceable on the Fon- 
 daco de' Tedeschi, one of which, singularly uninjured, is 
 seen from far above and below the Rialto, flaming like the 
 reflection of a sunset. Two figures of Veronese were also 
 traceable till lately, the head and arms of one still remain, 
 and some glorious olive-branches which were beside the 
 other ; the figure having been entirely effaced by an in- 
 scription in large black letters on a whitewash tablet which 
 we owe to the somewhat inopportunely expressed enthusiasm 
 of the inhabitants of the district in favor of their new pas- 
 tor.* Judging, however, from the rate at which destruction 
 is at present advancing, and seeing that, in about seven or 
 eight years more, Venice will have utterly lost every external 
 claim to interest, except that which attaches to the group of 
 buildings immediately around St. Mark's place, and to the 
 larger churches, it may be conjectured that the greater part 
 of her present degradation has taken place, at any rate, 
 within the last forty years. Let the reader with such scraps 
 of evidence as may still be gleaned from under the stucco 
 and paint of the Italian committees of taste, and from 
 
 * The inscription is to the following effect, — a pleasant thing to see 
 upon the walls, were it but more innocently placed ; — 
 
 CAMPO. DI. S. MAURIZIO 
 
 DIG 
 CONSERVI A NOI. 
 LUNGAMENTE 
 LO ZELANTIS. E. REVERENDIS 
 D. LUIGI, PICCINI. 
 NOSTRO 
 NOVELLO PIEVANO, 
 
 gli esultant. 
 parrocchiani 
 
 Vol. L— 12 
 
178 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 among the drawing-room innovations of English and Ger- 
 man residents restore Venice in his imagination to »some 
 resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. 
 Let him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace in the forest 
 of towers those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which 
 the French threw down ; let him sheet her walls with purple 
 and scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold,* cleanse from 
 their pollution those choked canals which are now the drains 
 of hovels, where they were once vestibules of palaces, and 
 fill them with gilded barges and bannered ships ; finally, let 
 him withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sad- 
 ness and stain as had been set upon it by the declining ener- 
 gies of more than half a century, and he will see Venice as 
 it was seen by Canaletto ; whose miserable, virtueless, heart- 
 less mechanism, accepted as the representation of such vari- 
 ous glory, is, both in its existence and acceptance, among 
 the most striking signs of the lost sensation and deadened 
 intellect of the nation at that time ; a numbness and dark- 
 ness more without hope than that of the grave itself, holding 
 and wearing yet the sceptre and the crown like the corpses 
 of the Etruscan kings, ready to sink into ashes at the first 
 unbarring of the door of the sepulchre. 
 
 The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I 
 know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile 
 and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness 
 of the shadows ; it gives no one single architectural orna- 
 ment, however near, so much form as might enable us even 
 to guess at its actual one ; and this I say not rashly, for 
 I shall prove it by placing portions of detail accurately 
 copied from Canaletto side by side with engravings from 
 the Daguerreotype ; it gives the buildings neither their 
 
 * The quantity of gold with which the decorations of Venice were 
 once covered corjd not now be traced or credited without reference to 
 the authority of Gentile Bellini. The greater part of the marble mould- 
 ings have been touched with it in lines and points, the minarets of St. 
 Mark's, and all the florid carving of the arches entirely sheeted. The 
 Casa d'Oro retained it on its lions until the recent commencement oi 
 its Restoration. 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 179 
 
 architectural beauty nor their ancestral dignity, for there is 
 no texture of stone nor character of age in Canaletto's 
 touch ; which is invariably a violent, black, sharp, ruled pen- 
 manlike line, as far removed from the grace of nature 
 as from her faintness and transparency ; and for his truth 
 of color, let the single fact of his having omitted all record, 
 whatsoever, of the frescoes whose wrecks are still to be found 
 at least on one half of the unrestored palaces, and, with still 
 less excusableness, all record of the magnificent colored 
 marbles of many whose greens and purples are still un- 
 dimmed upon the Casa Dario, Gasa Bianca Capello, and 
 multitudes besides, speak for him in this respect. 
 
 Let it be observed that I find no fault with Canaletto, for 
 his want of poetry, of feeling, of artistical thoughtf ulness in 
 treatment, or of the various other virtues which he does not 
 so much as profess. He professes nothing but colored 
 Daguerreotypeism. Let us have it : most precious and to 
 be revered it w^ould be : let us have fresco where fresco was, 
 and that copied faithfully ; let us have carving where 
 carving is, and that architecturally true. I have seen 
 Daguerreotypes in which every figure and rosette, and 
 crack and stain, and fissure are given on a scale of an inch 
 to Canaletto's three feet. What excuse is there to be 
 offered for his omitting, on that scale, as I shall hereafter 
 show, all statement of such ornament whatever ? Among 
 the Flemish schools, exquisite imitations of architecture are 
 found constantly, and that not with Canaletto's vulgar, 
 black exaggeration of shadow, but in the most pure and 
 ^ silvery and luminous grays. T have little pleasure in such 
 pictures ; but I blame not those who have more ; they are 
 what they profess to be, and they are wonderful and in- 
 structive, and often graceful, and even affecting, but Cana- 
 letto possesses no virtue except that of dexterous imitation 
 of commonplace light and shade, and perhaps, with the 
 exception of Salvator, no artist has ever fettered his un- 
 fortunate admirers more securely from all healthy or vigorous 
 perception of truth, or been of more general detriment to all 
 subsequent schools. 
 
180 
 
 OENEBAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 Neither, however, by the Flemings, nor by any other of 
 the elder schools, was the effect of age or of human life 
 upon architecture ever adequately expressed. What ruins 
 §31. Expression they drew looked as if broken down on pur- 
 age on aiSiTtect^ pose, what weeds they put on seemed put on for 
 ure by s. Prout. ornament. Their domestic buildings had never 
 any domesticity, the people looked out of their windows 
 evidently to be drawn, or came into the streets only to 
 stand there forever. A peculiar studiousness infected all 
 accident ; bricks fell out methodically, windows opened and 
 shut by rule ; stones were chipped at regular intervals ; 
 everything that happened seemed to have been expected 
 before ; and above all, the street had been washed and the 
 houses dusted expressly to be painted in their best. We 
 owe to Prout, I believe, the first perception, and certainly 
 the only existing expression of precisely the characters 
 which were wanting to old art, of that feeling which results 
 from the influence among the noble lines of architecture, of 
 the rent and the rust, the fissure, the lichen, and the 
 weed, and from the writing upon the pages of ancient 
 walls of the confused hieroglyphics of human history. I 
 suppose, from the deserved popularity of the artist, that the 
 strange pleasure which I find myself in the deciphering of 
 these is common to many ; the feeling has been rashly and 
 thoughtlessly contemned as mere love of the picturesque-; 
 there is, as I have above shown, a deeper moral in it, and we 
 owe much, I am not prepared to say how much, to the artist 
 by whom pre-eminently it has been excited. For, numerous 
 as have been his imitators, extended as his influence, and 
 simple as his means and manner, there has yet appeared 
 nothing at all to equal him ; there is no stone drawing, no 
 vitality of architecture like Prout's. I say not this rashly, I 
 have Mackenzie in my eye and many other capital imitators; 
 and I have carefully reviewed the Architectural work of the 
 Academicians, often most accurate and elaborate. I repeat, 
 there is nothing but the work of Prout which is true, living, 
 or right in its general impression, and nothing, therefore, so 
 inexhaustibly agreeable. Faults he has, manifold, easily 
 
THE FOREGOING PBINCIPLES, 
 
 181 
 
 detected, and much declaimed against by second-rate 
 artists ; but his excellence no one has ever touched, and his 
 lithographic work, (Sketches in Flanders and Germany,) 
 which was, I believe, the first of the kind, still remains the 
 most valuable of all, numerous and elaborate as its various 
 successors have been. The second series (in Italy and 
 Switzerland) was of less value, the drawings seemed more 
 laborious, and had less of the life of the original sketches, 
 being also for the most part of subjects less adapted for the 
 development of the artist's peculiar powers ; but both are 
 fine, and the Brussels, Louvain, Cologne, and Nuremberg, 
 subjects of the one, together with the Tours, Amboise, 
 Geneva, and Sion, of the other, exhibit substantial qualities 
 of stone and wood drawing, together with an ideal apprecia- 
 tion of the present active vital being of the cities, such as 
 nothing else has ever approached. Their value is much in- 
 creased by the circumstance of their being drawn by the 
 artist's own hand upon the stone, and by the consequent 
 manly recklessness of subordinate parts, (in works of this 
 kind, be it remembered, much is subordinate,) which is of all 
 characters of execution the most refreshing. Note the 
 scrawled middle tint of the wall behind the Gothic well at 
 Ratisbonne, and compare this manly piece of work with the 
 wretched smoothness of recent lithography. Let it not be 
 thought that there is any inconsistency between what I say 
 here and what I have said respecting finish. This piece of 
 dead wall is as much finished in relation to function as a 
 wall of Ghirlandajo's or Leonardo's in relation to theirs, and 
 the refreshing quality is the same in both, and manifest in 
 all great masters, without exception, that of the utter regard- 
 lessness of the means so that their end be reached. The 
 same kind of scrawling occurs often in the shade of 
 Raffaelle. 
 
 It is not only, however, by his peculiar stone touch nor 
 perception of human character that he is distinguished. He 
 ^ „^ . is the most dexterous of all our artists in a cer- 
 
 § 32. Hia excel- . i . . « . . -vt i 
 
 lent composition tain Kinci oi Composition. JNo one can place 
 
 and color. ^ tit* rr? t • i • 
 
 figures like him, except lurner. It is one thing 
 
182 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 to know where a piece of blue or white is wanted, and an- 
 other to make the wearer of the blue apron or white cap 
 come there, and not look as if it were against her will. Prout's 
 streets are the only streets that are accidentally crowded, his 
 markets are the only markets where one feels inclined to get 
 out of the way. With others we feel the figures so right 
 where they are, that we have no expectation of their going 
 anywhere else, and approve of the position of the man with 
 the wheelbarrow, without the slightest fear of his running 
 against our legs. One other merit he has, far less generally 
 acknowledged than it should be : he is among our most sunny 
 and substantial colorists. Much conventional color occurs in 
 his inferior pictures (for he is very unequal) and some in all ; 
 but portions are always to be found of quality so luminous 
 and pure that I have found these works the only ones capa- 
 ble of bearing juxtaposition with Turner and Hunt, who in- 
 variably destroy everything else that comes within range of 
 them. His most beautiful tones occur in those drawings in 
 which there is prevalent and powerful warm gray, his most 
 failing ones in those of sandy red. On his deficiencies I 
 shall not insist, because I am not prepared to say how far it 
 is possible for him to avoid them. We have never seen the 
 reconciliation of the peculiar characters he has obtained with 
 the accurate following out of architectural detail. With his 
 present modes of execution, farther fidelity is impossible, nor 
 has any other mode of execution yet obtained the same re- 
 sults ; and though much is unaccomplished by him in certain 
 subjects, and something of over-mannerism may be traced in 
 his treatment of others, as especially in his mode of express- 
 ing the decorative parts of Greek or Roman architecture, yet 
 in his own peculiar Gothic territory, where the spirit of the 
 subject itself is somewhat rude and grotesque, his abstract of 
 decoration has more of the spirit of the reality than far more 
 laborious imitation. The spirit of the Flemish Hotel de Ville 
 and decorated street architecture has never been even in the 
 slightest degree felt or conveyed except by him, and by him, 
 to my mind, faultlessly and absolutely ; and though his in- 
 terpretation of architecture that contains more refined art in 
 
THE FOREGOING PIUNGIPLE8, 
 
 183 
 
 its details is far less satisfactory, still it is impossible, while 
 walking on his favorite angle of the Piazzetta at Venice, 
 either to think of any other artist than Prout or not to think 
 of hirru 
 
 Many other dexterous and agreeable architectural artists 
 Doo ^ we have of various deo;rees of merit, but of all 
 
 §33. Modern ^ ^ ^ 
 
 architectural of whom, it may be generally said, that they 
 ally. G. Catter- draw hats, faccs, cloaks, and caps much better 
 than Prout, but figures not so well ; that they 
 draw walls and windows but not cities, mouldings and but- 
 tresses but not cathedrals. Joseph Nash's work on the archi- 
 tecture of the middle ages is, however, valuable, and I sup- 
 pose that Haghe's works may be depended on for fidelity. 
 But it appears very strange that a workman capable of pro- 
 ducing the clever drawings he has, from time to time, sent to 
 the New Society of Painters in Water Colors, should publish 
 lithographs so conventional, forced, and lifeless. 
 
 It is not without hesitation, that I mention a name respect- 
 ing which the reader may already have been surprised at my 
 silence, that of G. Cattermole. There are signs in his works 
 of very peculiar gifts, and perhaps also of powerful genius ; 
 their deficiencies I should willingly attribute to the advice of 
 ill-judging friends, and to the applause of a public satisfied 
 with shallow efforts, if brilliant ; yet I cannot but think it one 
 necessary characteristic of all true genius to be misled by no 
 such false fires. The Antiquarian feeling of Cattermole is pure, 
 earnest, and natural ; and I think his imagination originally 
 vigorous, certainly his fancy, his grasp of momentary passion 
 considerable, his sense of action in the human body vivid and 
 ready. But no original talent, however brilliant, can sustain 
 its energy when the demands upon it are constant, and all 
 legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not recollect 
 in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so 
 much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent 
 conventionalism of light and shade, sketchy forms continu- 
 ally less and less developed, the walls and the faces drawn 
 with the same stucco color, alike opaque, and all the shades 
 on flesh, dress, or stone, laid in with the same arbitrary 
 
184 
 
 GENEBAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind wasting its 
 strength and substance in the production of emptiness, and 
 seeking, by more and more blindly hazarded handling, to 
 conceal the weakness which the attempt at finish would be- 
 tray. 
 
 This tendency of late, has been painfully visible in his 
 architecture. Some drawings made several years ago for an 
 annual illustrative of Scott's works were for the most part 
 pure and finely felt — (though irrelevant to our present sub- 
 ject, a fall of the Clyde should be noticed, admirable for 
 breadth and grace of foliage, and for the bold sweeping of 
 the water, and another subject of which I regret that I can 
 only judge by the engraving ; Glendearg at twilight — the 
 monk Eustace chased by Christie of the Clint Hill — which I 
 think must have been one of the sweetest pieces of simple 
 Border hill feeling ever painted) — and about that time his 
 architecture, though always conventionally brown in the 
 shadows, was generally well drawn, and always powerfully 
 conceived. 
 
 Since then, he has been tending gradually through exag- 
 geration to caricature, and vainly endeavoring to attain by 
 inordinate bulk of decorated parts, that dignity which is only 
 to be reached by purity of proportion and majesty of line. 
 
 It has pained me deeply, to see an artist of so great orig- 
 inal power indulging in childish f antasticism and exaggeration, 
 and substituting for the serious and subdued work of legiti- 
 § 34. The evil in mate imagination, monster machicolations and 
 poinrSfview^^^ colossal cusps and crockets. While there is so 
 misapplied in- much beautiful architecture daily in process of 
 
 vention in archi- ^ . . 
 
 tecturai subject, destruction around us, I cannot but think it trea- 
 son to imagine anything ; at least, if we must have composi- 
 tion, let the design of the artist be such as the architect would 
 applaud. But it is surely very grievous, that while our idle 
 artists are helping their vain inventions by the fall of sponges 
 on soiled paper, glorious buildings with the whole intellect 
 and history of centuries concentrated in them, are suffered 
 to fall into unrecorded ruin. A day does not now pass in 
 Italy without the destruction of some mighty monument ; 
 
TEE FOBE GOING PBINGIPLES. 
 
 185 
 
 the streets of all her cities echo to the hammer, half of her 
 fair buildings lie in separate stones about the places of their 
 foundation ; would not time be better spent in telling us the 
 truth about these perishing remnants of majestic thought, 
 than in perpetuating the ill-digested fancies of idle hours ? 
 It is, I repeat, treason to the cause of art for any man to in- 
 vent, unless he invents something better than has been in- 
 vented before, or something differing in kind. There is room 
 enough for invention in the pictorial treatment of what ex- 
 ists. There is no more honorable exhibition of imaginative 
 power, than in the selection of such place, choice of such 
 treatment, introduction of such incident, as may prockice a 
 noble picture without deviation from one line of the actual 
 truth ; and such I believe to be, indeed, in the end the most 
 advantageous, as well as the most modest direction of the 
 invention, for I recollect no single instance of architectural 
 composition by any men except such as Leonardo or Veron- 
 ese, who could design their architecture thoroughly before 
 they painted it, which has not a look of inanity and absurdity. 
 The best landscapes and the best architectural studies have 
 been views ; and I would have the artist take shame to him- 
 self in the exact degree in which he finds himself obliged in 
 the production of his picture to lose any, even of the small- 
 est parts or most trivial hues which bear a part in the great 
 impression made by the reality. The difference between the 
 drawing of the architect and artist * ought never to be, as it 
 now commonly is, the difference between lifeless formality 
 and witless license ; it ought to be between giving the mere 
 lines and measures of a building, and giving those lines and 
 measures with the impression and soul of it besides. All 
 artists should be ashamed of themselves when they find they 
 have not the power of being true ; the right wit of drawing 
 is like the right wit of conversation, not hyperbole, not vio- 
 lence, not frivolity, only well expressed, laconic truth. 
 
 Among the members of the Academy, we have at present 
 
 * Indeed there should be no such difference at all. Every architect 
 ought to be an artist ; every very great artist is necessarily an architect. 
 
186 
 
 GENEMAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 only one professedly architectural draughtsman of note, David 
 Roberts, whose reputation is probably farther extended on 
 § 35. Works of the Continent than that of any other of our ar- 
 their^fideii^^Sd tists, except Laudseer. I am not certain, how- 
 ever, that I have any reason to congratulate either 
 of my countrymen upon this their European estimation ; for 
 I think it exceedingly probable that in both instances it is 
 exclusively based on their defects ; and in the case of Mr. 
 Roberts, in particular, there has of late appeared more ground 
 for it than is altogether desirable in a smoothness and over- 
 finish of texture which bears dangerous fellowship with the 
 work^f our Gallic neighbors. 
 
 The fidelity of intention and honesty of system of Roberts 
 have, however, always been meritorious ; his drawing of archi- 
 tecture is dependent on no unintelligible lines, or blots, or 
 substituted types : the main lines of the real design are al- 
 ways there, and its hollowness and undercuttings given with 
 exquisite feeling ; his sense of solidity of form is very pecu- 
 liar, leading him to dwell with great delight on the round- 
 ings of edges and angles ; his execution is dexterous and 
 delicate, singularly so in oil, and his sense of chiaroscuro re- 
 fined. But he has never done himself justice, and suffers his 
 pictures to fall below the rank they should assume, by the 
 presence of several marring characters, which I shall name, 
 because it is perfectly in his power to avoid them. In look- 
 ing over the valuable series of drawing of the Holy Land, 
 which we owe to Mr. Roberts, we cannot but be amazed to 
 find how frequently it has happenjed that there was something 
 very white immediately in the foreground, and something very 
 black exactly behind it. The same thing happens perpetu- 
 ally with Mr. Roberts's pictures ; a white column is always 
 coming out of a blue mist, or a white stone out of a green 
 pool, or a white monument out of a brown recess, and the 
 artifice is not always concealed with dexterity. This is un- 
 worthy of so skilful a composer, and it has destroyed the im- 
 pressiveness as well as the color of some of his finest works. 
 It shows a poverty of conception, which appears to me to 
 arise from a deficient habit of study. It will be remembered 
 
THE FOBEGOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 187 
 
 that of the sketches for this work, several times exhibited in 
 London, every one was executed in the same manner, and 
 with about the same degree of completion : being all of them 
 accurate records of the main architectural lines, the shapes of 
 the shadows, and the remnants of artificial color, obtained, by 
 means of the same grays, throughout, and of the same yel- 
 low (a singularly false and cold though convenient color) 
 touched upon the lights. As far as they went, nothing could 
 be more valuable than these sketches, and the public, glanc- 
 ing rapidly at their general and graceful effects, could hardly 
 form anything like an estimate of the endurance and deter- 
 mination which must have been necessary in such a climate 
 to obtain records so patient, entire, and clear, of details so 
 multitudinous as (especially) the hieroglyphics of the Egyp- 
 tian temples ; an endurance which perhaps only artists can 
 estimate, and for which we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. 
 Roberts most difficult to discharge. But if these sketches 
 were all that the artist brought home, whatever value is to be 
 attached to them as statements of fact, they are altogether 
 insufficient for the producing of pictures. I saw among 
 them no single instance of a downright study ; of a study in 
 which the real hues and shades of sky and earth had been 
 honestly realized or attempted ; nor were there, on the other 
 hand, any of those invaluable-blotted-five-minutes works 
 which record the unity of some single and magnificent im- 
 pressions. Hence the pictures which have been painted from 
 these sketches have been as much alike in their want of im- 
 pressiveness as the sketches themselves, and have never borne 
 the living aspect of the Egyptian light ; it has always been 
 impossible to say whether the red in them (not a pleasant 
 one) was meant for hot sunshine or for red sandstone — their 
 power has been farther destroyed by the necessity the artist 
 seems to feel himself under of eking out their effect by points 
 of bright foreground color, and thus we have been encumber- 
 ed with caftans, pipes, scymetars, and black hair, when all that 
 we wanted was a lizard, or an ibis. It is perhaps owing to 
 this want of earnestness in study rather than to deficiency of 
 perception, that the coloring of this artist is commonly un- 
 
188 
 
 OENEBAL APPLICATION- OF 
 
 true. Some time ago when he was painting Spanish subjects, 
 his habit was to bring out his whites in relief from transpar- 
 ent bituminous browns, which though not exactly right in 
 color, were at any rate warm and agreeable ; but of late his 
 color has become cold, waxy, and opaque, and in his deep 
 shades he sometimes permits himself the use of a violent black 
 which is altogether unjustifiable. A picture of Roslin Chapel 
 exhibited in 1844, showed this defect in the recess to which 
 the stairs descend, in an extravagant degree ; and another 
 exhibited in the British Institution, instead of showing the 
 exquisite crumbling and lichenous texture of the Roslin stone, 
 was polished to as vapid smoothness as ever French historical 
 picture. The general feebleness of the effect is increased by 
 the insertion of the figures as violent pieces of local color un- 
 affected by the light and unblended with the hues around 
 them, and bearing evidence of having been painted from 
 models or draperies in the dead light of a room instead of 
 sunshine. On these deficiencies I should not have remarked, 
 but that by honest and determined painting from and of nat- 
 ure, it is perfectly in the power of the artist to supply them ; 
 and it is bitterly to be regretted that the accuracy and ele- 
 gance of his work should not be aided by that genuineness of 
 hue and effect which can only be given by the uncompromis- 
 ing effort to paint not a fine picture but an impressive and 
 known verity. 
 
 The two artists whose works it remains for us to review, 
 are men who have presented us with examples of the treat- 
 ment of every kind of subject, and among the rest with por- 
 tions of architecture which the best of our exclusively archi- 
 tectural draughtsmen could not excel. 
 
 The frequent references made to the works of Clarkson 
 Stanfield throughout the subsequent pages render it less 
 necessary for me to speak of him here at any length. He is 
 the leader of the English Realists, and perhaps among the 
 ^, , more remarkable of his characteristics is the 
 
 § 36. Clarkson . i • i i • 
 
 Stanfield. look of common-scnsc and rationality which his 
 
 compositions will always bear when opposed to any kind of 
 affectation. He appears to think of no other artist. What 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 189 
 
 he has learned, has been from his own acquaintance with and 
 affection for the steep hills and the deep sea ; and his modes 
 of treatment are alike removed from sketchiness or incom- 
 pletion, and from exaggeration or effort. The somewhat 
 over-prosaic tone of his subjects is rather a condescension to 
 what he supposes to be public feeling, than a sign of want 
 of feeling in himself ; for in some of his sketches from nature 
 or from fancy, I have seen powers and perceptions manifested 
 of a far higher order than any that are traceable in his Acad- 
 emy works, powers which I think him much to be blamed for 
 checking. The portion of his pictures usually most defective 
 in this respect is the sky, which is apt to be cold and unin- 
 ventive, always well drawn, but with a kind of hesitation in 
 the clouds whether it is to be fair or foul weather ; they hav- 
 ing neither the joyfulness of rest, nor the majesty of storm. 
 Their color is apt also to verge on a morbid purple, as was 
 eminently the case in the large picture of the wreck on the 
 coast of Holland exhibited in 1844, a work in which both his 
 powers and faults were prominently manifested, the picture 
 being full of good painting, but wanting in its entire appeal. 
 There was no feeling of wreck about it ; and, but for the 
 damage about her bowsprit, it would have been impossible 
 for a landsman to say whether the hull was meant for a wreck 
 or a guardship. Nevertheless, it is always to be recollected, 
 that in subjects of this kind it is probable that much escapes 
 us in consequence of our want of knowledge, and that to the 
 eye of the seaman much may be of interest and value which 
 to us appears cold. At all events, this healthy and rational 
 regard of things is incomparably preferable to the dramatic 
 absurdities which weaker artists commit in matters marine ; 
 and from copper-colored sunsets on green waves sixty feet 
 high, with cauliflower breakers, and ninepin rocks ; from 
 drowning on planks, and starving on rafts, and lying naked 
 on beaches, it is really refreshing to turn to a surge of Stan- 
 field's true salt, serviceable, unsentimental sea. It would be 
 well, however, if he would sometimes take a higher flight. 
 The castle of Ischia gave him a grand subject, and a little 
 more invention in the sky, a little less muddiness in the rocks, 
 
190 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 and a little more savageness in the sea, would have made it 
 an impressive picture ; it just misses the sublime, yet is a fine 
 work, and better engraved than usual by the Art Union. 
 
 One fault we cannot but venture to find, even in our own 
 extreme ignorance, with Mr. Stanfield's boats ; they never 
 look weather-beaten. There is something peculiarly precious 
 in the rusty, dusty, tar-trickled, fishy, phosphorescent brown 
 of an old boat, and when this has just dipped under a wave 
 and rises to the sunshine it is enough to drive Giorgione to 
 despair. I have never seen any effort at this by Stanfield ; 
 his boats always look new painted and clean ; witness espe- 
 cally the one before the ship in the wreck picture above 
 noticed : and there is some such absence of a riofht sense of 
 color in other portions of his subject ; even his fishermen 
 have always clean jackets and unsoiled caps, and his very 
 rocks are lichenless. And, by the way, this ought to be 
 noted respecting modern painters in general, that they have 
 not a proper sense of the value of dirt ; cottage children 
 never appear but in fresh got-up caps and aprons, and white- 
 handed beggars excite compassion in unexceptionable rags. 
 In reality, almost all the colors of things associated with hu- 
 man life derive something of their expression and value from 
 the tones of impurity, and so enhance the value of the en- 
 tirely pure tints of nature herself. Of Stanfield's rock and 
 mountain drawing enough will be said hereafter. His foliage 
 is inferior ; his architecture admirably drawn, but commonly 
 wanting in color. His picture of the Doge's palace at Venice 
 was quite clay-cold and untrue. Of late he has shown a mar- 
 vellous predilection for the realization, even to actually re- 
 lieved texture, of old worm-eaten wood ; we trust he will not 
 allow such fancies to carry him too far. 
 
 The name I have last to mention is that of J. M. W. Turner. 
 I do not intend to speak of this artist at present in general 
 terms, because my constant practice throughout this work is 
 to say, when I speak of an artist at all, the very truth of what 
 I believe and feel respecting him ; and the truth of what I 
 believe and feel respecting Turner would appear in this place, 
 unsupported by any proof, mere rhapsody. I shall therefore 
 
TEE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 191 
 
 here confine myself to a rapid glance at the relations of his 
 past and present works, and to some notice of what he has 
 37 J M w -^^^^^^ accomplishing : the greater part of the 
 Turner.* Force subscqucnt chapters will be exclusively devoted 
 
 ot national feel- pit 
 
 ing in all great to the examination oi the new iields over 
 painters. which he has extended the range of landscape art. 
 
 It is a fact more universally acknowledged than enforced 
 or acted upon, that all great painters, of whatever school, 
 have been great only in their rendering of what they had 
 seen and felt from early childhood ; and that the greatest 
 among them have been the most frank in acknowledging 
 this their inability to treat anything successfully but that 
 with which they had been familar. The Madonna of Raf- 
 faelle was born on the Urbino mountains, Ghirlandajo's is a 
 Florentine, Bellini's a Venetian ; there is not the slightest 
 effort on the part of any one of these great men to paint her 
 as a Jewess. It is not the place here to insist farther on a 
 point so simple and so universally demonstrable. Expres- 
 sion, character, types of countenance, costume, color, and 
 accessories are with all great painters whatsoever those of 
 their native land, and that frankly and entirely, without the 
 slightest attempt at modification ; and I assert fearlessly 
 that it is impossible that it should ever be otherwise, and 
 that no man ever painted or ever will paint well anything 
 but what he has early and long seen, early and long felt, and 
 early and long loved. How far it is possible for the mind of 
 one nation or generation to be healthily modified and taught 
 by the w^ork of another, I presume not to determine ; but it 
 depends upon whether the energy of the mind which receives 
 the instruction be sufficient, while it takes out of what it 
 feeds upon that which is universal and common to all nature, 
 to resist all warping from national or temporary peculiarities. 
 Nino Pisano got nothing but good, the modern French 
 nothing but evil, from the study of the antique ; but Nino 
 Pisano had a God and a character. All artists who have at- 
 tempted to assume, or in their weakness have been affected 
 by, the national peculiarities of other times and countries, 
 have instantly, whatever their original power, fallen to third- 
 
192 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 rate rank, or fallen altogether, and have invariably lost their 
 birthright and blessing, lost their power over the human 
 heart, lost all capability of teaching or benefiting others. 
 Compare the hybrid classification of Wilson with the rich 
 English purity of Gainsborough ; compare the recent ex- 
 hibition of middle-age cartoons for the Houses of Parliament 
 with the works of Hogarth ; compare the sickly modern Ger- 
 man imitations of the great Italians with Albert Durer and 
 Holbein ; compare the vile classicality of Oanova and the 
 modern Italians with Mino da Fiesole, Luca della Robbia, 
 and Andrea del Yerrocchio. The manner of Nicolo Poussin 
 is said to be Greek — it may be so ; this only I know, that it 
 is heartless and profitless. The severity of the rule, how- 
 ever, extends not in full force to the nationality, but only to 
 the visibility of things ; for it is very possible for an artist 
 of powerful mind to throw himself well into the feeling of 
 foreio^n nations of his own time. Thus John Lewis has been 
 eminently successful in his seizing of Spanish character. Yet 
 it may be doubted if the seizure be such as Spaniards them- 
 selves would acknowledge ; it is probably of the habits of 
 the people more than their hearts ; continued efforts of this 
 kind, especially if their subjects be varied, assuredly end in 
 failure ; Lewis, who seemed so eminently penetrative in 
 Spain, sent nothing from Italy but complexions and cos- 
 tumes, and I expect no good from his stay in Egypt. Eng- 
 lish artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy, 
 but for this there are collateral causes which it is not here 
 the place to examine. Be this as it may, and whatever suc- 
 cess may be attained in pictures of slight and unpretending 
 aim, of genre, as they are called, in the rendering of foreign 
 character, of this I am certain, that whatever is to be truly 
 great and affecting must have on it the strong stamp of the 
 native land ; not a law this, but a necessity, from the intense 
 hold on their country of the affections of all truly great men ; 
 all classicality, all middle-age patent reviving, is utterly vain 
 and absurd ; if we are now to do anything great, good, 
 awful, religious, it must be got out of our own little island, 
 and out of this year 1846, railroads and all : if a British 
 
THE FOREQOING PEINGIPLES, 
 
 193 
 
 painter, I say this in earnest seriousness, cannot make his- 
 torical characters out of tlie British House of Peers, he can- 
 not paint history ; and if he cannot make a Madonna of a 
 British girl of the nineteenth century, he cannot paint one 
 at all. 
 
 The rule, of course, holds in landscape ; yet so far less 
 authoritatively, that the material nature of all countries and 
 times is in many points actually, and in all, in principle, the 
 „ ^ same : so that feelino^s educated in Cumberland, 
 
 § 38. Influence ' i . , • o • 
 
 of this feeling on may find their food in bwitzeriand, and impres- 
 Landscape sub- sions first received among the rocks of Corn- 
 wall, be recalled upon the precipices of Genoa. 
 Add to this actual sameness, the power of every great mind 
 to possess itself of the spirit of things once presented to it, 
 and it is evident, that little limitation can be set to the land- 
 scape painter as to the choice of his field ; and that the law 
 of nationality will hold with him only so far as a certain 
 joyfulness and completion will be by preference found in 
 those parts of his subject which remind him of his own land. 
 But if he attempt to impress on his landscapes any other 
 spirit than that he has felt, and to make them landscapes of 
 other times, it is all over with him, at least, in the degree in 
 which such reflected moonshine takes place of the genuine 
 light of the present day. 
 
 The reader will at once perceive how much trouble this 
 simple principle will save both the painter and the critic ; it 
 at once sets aside the whole school of common composition, 
 and exonerates us from the labor of minutely examining any 
 landscape which has nymphs or philosophers in it. 
 
 It is hardly necessary for us to illustrate this principle by 
 any reference to the works of early landscape painters, as I 
 suppose it is universally acknowledged with respect to them ; 
 Titian being the most remarkable instance of the influence 
 of the native air on a strong mind, and Claude, of that of 
 the classical poison on a weak one ; but it is very necessary 
 to keep it in mind in reviewing the works of our great mod- 
 ern landscape painter. 
 
 I do not know in what district of England Turner first or 
 Vol. I.— 13 
 
194 
 
 GENEBAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 longest studied, but the scenery whose influence I can trace 
 most definitely throughout his works, varied as they are, is 
 §39. Its pecu- ^^^^ Yorkshire. -Of all his drawings, I think, 
 liar manifesta- those of the Yorkshire series have the most 
 
 tion in Turner. ^ , - ,^ , , - . -, 
 
 heart in them, the most attectionate, simple, un- 
 wearied, serious finishing of truth. There is in them little 
 seeking after effect, but a strong love of place, little exhibi- 
 tion of the artist's own powers or peculiarities, but intense 
 appreciation of the smallest local minutiae. These drawings 
 have unfortunately changed hands frequently, and have been 
 abused and ill-treated by picture dealers and cleaners ; the 
 greater number of them are now mere wrecks. I name them 
 not as instances, but as proofs of the artist's study in this 
 district ; for the affection to which they owe their excellence, 
 must have been grounded long years before. It is to be 
 traced, not only in these drawings of the places themselves, 
 but in the peculiar love of the painter for rounded forms of 
 hills ; not but that he is right in this on general principles, 
 for I doubt not, that, with his peculiar feeling for beauty of 
 line, his hills would have been rounded still, even if he had 
 studied first among the peaks of Cadore ; but rounded to 
 the same extent and with the same delight in their round- 
 ness, they would not have been. It is, I belie.ve, to those 
 broad wooded steeps and swells of the Yorkshire downs that 
 we in part owe the singular massiveness that prevails in 
 Turner's mountain drawing, and gives it one of its chief ele- 
 ments of grandeur. Let the reader open the Liber Studio- 
 rum, and compare the painter's enjoyment of the lines in the 
 Ben Arthur, with his comparative uncomfortableness among 
 those of the aiguilles about the Mer de Glace. Great as he 
 is, those peaks would have been touched very differently by 
 a Savoyard as great as he. 
 
 I am in the habit of looking to the Yorkshire drawings, as 
 indicating one of the culminating points in Turner's career. 
 In these he attained the highest degree of what he had up 
 to that time attempted, namely, finish and quantity of form 
 united with expression pf atmosphere, and light without 
 color. His early drawings are singularly instructive in this 
 
THE FOREGOING PEINGIPLE8. 195 
 
 definiteness and simplicity of aim. No complicated or brill- 
 iant color is ever thought of in them ; they are little more 
 than exquisite studies in light and shade, very green blues 
 being used for the shadows, and golden browns for the lights. 
 The difficulty and treachery of color being thus avoided, the 
 artist was able to bend his whole mind upon the drawing, 
 and thus to attain such decision, delicacy, and completeness 
 as have never in any wise been equalled, and as might serve 
 him for a secure foundation in all after experiments. Of the 
 quantit}" and precision of his details, the drawings made 
 for Hakewill's Italy are singular examples. The most per- 
 fect gem in execution is a little bit on the Rhine, with reeds 
 in the foreground, in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq., 
 of Tottenham ; but the Yorkshire drawings seem to be on 
 the v^hole the most noble representatives of his art at this 
 period. 
 
 About the time of their production, the artist seems to 
 have felt that he had done either all that could be done, or 
 all that was necessary, in that manner, and began to reach 
 after something beyond it. The element of color begins to 
 mingle with his work, and in the first efforts to reconcile his 
 intense feeling for it with his careful form, several anomalies 
 begin to be visible, and some unfortunate or uninteresting 
 works necessarily belong to the period. The England draw- 
 ings, which are very characteristic of it, are exceedingly un- 
 equal, — some, as the Oakhampton, Kilgarren, Alnwick, and 
 Llanthony, being among his finest works ; others, as the 
 Windsor from Eton, the Eton College, and the Bedford, 
 showing coarseness and conventionality. 
 
 I do not know at what time the painter first went abroad, 
 but among the earliest of the series of the Liber Studiorum 
 (dates 1808, 1809) occur the magnificent Mont St. Gothard, 
 § 40. The domes- little Devil's Bridge. Now it is remarkable 
 the Lib^r^tu- ^^^^ after his acquaintance with this scenery, so 
 diorum. Congenial in almost all respects with the energy 
 
 of his mind, and supplying him with materials of w^hich in 
 these two subjects, and in the Chartreuse, and several others 
 afterwards, he showed both his entire appreciation and com* 
 
196 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 mand, the proportion of English to foreign subjects should 
 in the rest of the work be more than two to one ; and that 
 those English subjects should be — many of them — of a kind 
 peculiarly simple, and of every-day occurrence, such as the 
 Pembury Mill, the Farm Yard Composition with the White 
 Horse, that with the Cocks and Pigs, Hedging and Ditch- 
 ing, Watercress Gatherers (scene at Twickenham,) and the 
 beautiful and solemn rustic subject called a Watermill ; and 
 that the architectural subjects instead of being taken, as 
 might have been expected of an artist so fond of treating 
 effects of extended space, from some of the enormous con- 
 tinental masses, are almost exclusively British ; Rivaulx, 
 Holy Island, Dumblain, Dunstanborough, Chesptow, St. 
 Catherine's, Greenwich Hospital, an English Parish Church, 
 a Saxon Ruin, and an exquisite Reminiscence of the English 
 Lowland Castle in the pastoral, with the brook, wooden 
 bridge, and wild duck, to all of which we have nothing for- 
 eign to oppose but three slight, ill-considered, and unsatis- 
 factory subjects, from Basle, Lauifenbourg, and another 
 Swiss village ; and, further, not only is the preponderance 
 of subject British, but of affection also ; for it is strange 
 with what fulness and completion the home subjects are 
 treated in comparison with the greater part of the foreign 
 ones. Compare the figures and sheep in the Hedging and 
 Ditching, and the East gate Winchelsea, together with the 
 near leafage, with the puzzled foreground and inappropriate 
 figures of the Lake of Thun ; or the cattle and road of the 
 St. Catherine's Hill, with the foreground of the Bonneville ; 
 or the exquisite figure with the sheaf of corn, in the Water- 
 mill; with the vintages of the Grenoble subject. 
 
 In his foliage the same predilections are remarkable. Rem- 
 iniscences of English willows by the brooks, and English 
 forest glades mingle even with the heroic foliage of the 
 iEsacus and Hesperie, and the Cephalus ; into the pine, 
 whether of Switzerland or the glorious Stone, he cannot en- 
 ter, or enters at his peril, like Ariel. Tliose of the Valley 
 of Chamounix are fine masses, better pines than other peo- 
 ple's, but not a bit like pines for all that ; he feels his weak- 
 
THE FOREGOING FBINGIPLE8. 
 
 197 
 
 iiess, and tears them off the distant mountains with the mer- 
 cilessness of an avalanche. The Stone pines of the two 
 Italian compositions are fine in their arrangement, but they 
 are very pitiful pines ; the glory of the Alpine rose he never 
 touches ; he munches chestnuts with no relish ; never has 
 learned to like olives ; and, by the vine, we find him in the 
 foreground of the Grenoble Alps laid utterly and incontro- 
 vertibly on his back. 
 
 I adduce these evidences of Turner's nationality (and in- 
 numerable others might be given if need were) not as proofs 
 of weakness but of power ; not so much as testifying want 
 of perception in foreign lands, as strong hold on his own 
 will ; for I am sure that no artist who has not this hold upon 
 his own will ever get good out of any other. Keeping this 
 principle in mind, it is instructive to observe the depth and 
 solemnity which Turner's feeling received from the scenery 
 of the continent, the keen appreciation up to a certain point 
 of all that is locally characteristic, and the ready seizure for 
 future use of all valuable material. 
 
 Of all foreign countries he has most entirely entered into 
 the spirit of France ; partly because here he found more fel- 
 lowship of scene with his own England, partly because an 
 ^ ^ , amount of thou2:ht which will miss of Italy or 
 
 § 41. Turner's . . ^ 
 
 painting oc Switzerland, will fathom France ; partly be- 
 
 French and Swiss .. . ^ ir»T n*)* 
 
 landscape. The cause there IS in the I* rench loliage and forms 
 
 latter deficient. « t -ii -i 
 
 oi ground, much that is especially congenial 
 with his own peculiar choice of form. To what cause it is 
 owing I cannot tell, nor is it generally allowed or felt ; but 
 of the fact I am certain, that for grace of stem and perfec- 
 tion of form in their transparent foliage, the French frees 
 are altogether unmatched ; and their modes of grouping and 
 massing are so perfectly and constantly beautiful that I think 
 of all countries for educating an artist to the perception of 
 grace, France bears the bell ; and that not romantic nor 
 mountainous France, not the Vosges, nor Auvergne, nor 
 Provence, but lowland France, Picardy and Normandy, the 
 valleys of the Loire and Seine, and even the district, so 
 thoughtlessly and mindlessly abused by English travellers, as 
 
198 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 uninteresting, traversed between Calais and Dijon ; of which 
 there is not a single valley but is full of the most lovely pict- 
 ures, nor a mile from which the artist may not receive in- 
 struction ; the district immediately about Sens being per- 
 haps the most valuable from the grandeur of its lines of pop- 
 lars and the unimaginable finish and beauty of the tree forms 
 in the two great avenues without the walls. Of this kind of 
 beauty Turner was the first to take cognizance, and he still 
 remains the only, but in himself the sufficient painter of 
 French landscape. One of the most beautiful examples is 
 the drawing of trees engraved for the Keepsake, now in the 
 possession of B. G. Windus, Esq.; the drawings made to 
 illustrate the scenery of the Rivers of France supply in- 
 stances of the most varied character. 
 
 The artist appears, until very lately, rather to have taken 
 from Switzerland thoughts and general conceptions of size and 
 of grand form and effect to be used in his after compositions, 
 than to have attempted the seizing of its actual character. 
 This was beforehand to be expected from the utter physical 
 impossibility of rendering certain effects of Swiss scenery, 
 and the monotony and unmanageableness of others. The 
 Valley of Chamounix in the collection of Walter Fawkes, 
 Esq., I have never seen ; it has a high reputation ; the Han- 
 nibal passing the Alps in its present state exhibits nothing 
 but a heavy shower and a crowd of people getting wet ; an- 
 other picture in the artist's gallery of a land-fall is most mas- 
 terly and interesting, but more daring than agreeable. The 
 Snow-storm, avalanche, and inundation, is one of his might- 
 iest works, but the amount of mountain drawing in it is less 
 tharl of cloud and effect ; the subjects in the Liber Studiorum 
 are on the whole the most intensely felt, and next to them 
 §4'> His render vignettes to Rogers's Poems and Italy. Of 
 ing of Italian some reccut drawin2:s of Swiss subject I shall 
 
 character still ^ " 
 
 loss successful, speak presently. 
 
 His large com- rm /v i« 't* 
 
 positions how The efiect oi Italy upon his mind is very puz- 
 faihng. zling. On the one hand, it gave him the solemnity 
 
 and power which are manifested in the historical compositions 
 of the Liber Studiorum, more especially the Rizpah, the 
 
THE FOBE GOING PIUNGIPLES. 
 
 199 
 
 Cephalus, the scene from the Fairy Queen, and the ^sacus 
 and Hesperie : on the other, he seems never to have entered 
 thoroughly into the spirit of Italy, and the materials he 
 obtained there were afterwards but awkwardly introduced in 
 his large compositions. 
 
 Of these there are very few at all worthy of him ; none but 
 the Liber Studiorum subjects are thoroughly great, and these 
 are great because there -is in them the seriousness without 
 the materials of other countries and times. There is nothing 
 particularly indicative of Palestine in the Barley Harvest of 
 the Rizpah, nor in those round and awful trees ; only the 
 solemnity of the south in the lifting of the near burning 
 moon. The rocks of the Jason may be seen in any quarry of 
 Warwickshire sandstone. Jason himself has not a bit of 
 Greek about him — he is a simple warrior of no period in par- 
 ticular, nay, I think there is something of the nineteenth 
 century about his legs. When local character of this classic 
 cal kind is attempted, the painter is visibly cramped : awk- 
 ward resemblances to Claude testify the want of his usual 
 forceful originality: in the tenth Plague of Egypt, he makes 
 us think of Belzoni rather than of Moses ; the fifth is a total 
 failure, the pyramids look like brick-kilns, and the fire run- 
 ning along the ground bears brotherly resemblance to the 
 burning of manure. The realization of the tenth plague now 
 in his gallery is finer than the study, but still uninteresting ; 
 and of the large compositions which have much of Italy in 
 them, the greater part are overwhelmed with quantity and de- 
 ficient in emotion. The Crossing the Brook is one of the best 
 of these hybrid pictures ; incomparable in its tree-drawing, it 
 yet leaves us doubtful where we are to look and what we are 
 to feel ; it is northern in its color, southern in its foliage, 
 Italy in its details, and England in its sensations, without the 
 grandeur of the one, or the healthiness of the other. 
 
 The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude, 
 one of them excessively bad in color, the other a grand 
 thought, and yet one of the kind which does no one any 
 good, because everything in it is reciprocally sacrificed ; the 
 foliage is sacrificed to the architecture, the architecture to 
 
200 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 the water, the water is neither sea, nor river, nor lake, nor 
 brook, nor canal, and savors of Regent's Park ; the fore- 
 ground is uncomfortable ground, — -let on building leases. So 
 the Caligula's Bridge, Temple of Jupiter, Departure of 
 Regulus, Ancient Italy, Cicero's Villa, and such others, 
 come they from whose hand they may, I class under the 
 general head of "nonsense pictures." There never can be 
 any wholesome feeling developed in these preposterous ac- 
 cumulations, and where the artist's feeling fails, his art fol- 
 lows ; so that the worst possible examples of Turner's color 
 are found in pictures of this class ; in one or two instances 
 he has broken through the conventional rules, and then is 
 always fine, as in the Hero and Leander ; but in general the 
 picture rises in value as it approaches to a view, as the 
 Fountain of Fallacy, a piece of rich northern Italy, with 
 some fairy waterworks ; this picture was unrivalled in color 
 once, but is now a mere wreck. So the Rape of Proserpine, 
 though it is singular that in his Academy pictures even his 
 simplicity fails of reaching ideality ; in this picture of Pros- 
 erpine the nature is not the grand nature of all time, it is 
 indubitably modern,* and we are perfectly electrified at any- 
 body's being carried away in the corner except by people 
 with spiky hats and carabines. This is traceable to several 
 causes ; partly to the want of any grand specific form, partly 
 to the too evident middle-age character of the ruins crown- 
 ing the hills, and to a multiplicity of minor causes which we 
 cannot at present enter into. 
 
 Neither in his actual views of Italy has Turner ever caught 
 her true spirit, except in the little vignettes to Rogers's 
 Poems. The Villa of Galileo, the nameless composition with 
 stone pines, the several villa moonlights, and the convent 
 
 This passage seems at variance with what has been said of the neces- 
 sity of painting present times and objects. It is nob so. A great painter 
 makes out of that which he finds before him something which is inde- 
 pendent of all time. He can only do this out of the materials ready to 
 his hand, but that which he builds has the dignity of dateless age. A 
 little painter is annihilated by an anachronism, and is conventionally 
 anti(iue, and involuntarily modern. 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 201 
 
 compositions in the Voyage of Columbus, are altogether 
 exquisite ; but this is owing chiefly to their simplicity and 
 perhaps in some measure to their smallness of 
 of Italy destroy- size. Noue of his large pictures at all equal 
 and^^redundS them ; the Bay of Baiae is encumbered with ma- 
 quantity. tcrial, it contaius ten times as much as is neces- 
 
 sary to a good picture, and yet is so crude in color as to 
 look unfinished. The Palestrina is full of raw white^ and 
 has a look of Hampton Court about its long avenue ; the 
 modern Italy is purely English in its near foliage ; it is com- 
 posed from Tivoli material enriched and arranged most 
 dexterously, but it has the look of a rich arrangement, 
 and not the virtue of the real thing. The early Tivoli, a 
 large drawing taken from below the falls, was as little true, 
 and still less fortunate, the trees there being altogether af- 
 fected and artificial. The Florence engraved in the Keep- 
 sake is a glorious drawing, as far as regards the passage 
 with the bridge and sunlight on the Arno, the Cascine foli- 
 age, and distant plain, and the towers of the fortress on the 
 left ; but the details of the duomo and the city are entirely 
 missed, and with them the majesty of the whole scene. The 
 vines and melons of the foreground are disorderly, and its 
 cypresses conventional ; in fact, I recollect no instance of 
 Turner's drawing a cypress except in general terms. 
 
 The chief reason of these failures I imagine to be the effort 
 of the artist to put joyousness and brilliancy of effect upon 
 scenes eminently pensive, to substitute radiance for serenity 
 of light, and to force the freedom and breadth of line which 
 he learned to love on English downs and Highland moors, 
 out of a country dotted by campaniles and square convents, 
 bristled with cypresses, partitioned by walls, and gone up 
 and down by steps. 
 
 In one of the cities of Italy he had no such difficulties to 
 encounter. At Venice he found freedom of space, brilliancy 
 of light, variety of color, massy simplicity of general form ; 
 and to Venice we owe many of the motives in which his 
 highest powers of color have been displayed after that 
 change in his system of which we must now take note. 
 
202 
 
 GENEBAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 Among the earlier paintings of Turner, the culminating 
 period, marked by the Yorkshire series in his drawings, is 
 distinguished by great solemnity and simplicity of subject, 
 § 44 Changes P^'^valent gloom in light and shade, and brown 
 • introduced b y in the hue, the drawinsr manly but careful, the 
 
 him in the re- . . . . . , *^ , ' 
 
 ceived system of minutiae sometimes exquisitely delicate. All the 
 finest works of this period are, I believe, with- 
 out exception, views, or quiet single thoughts. The Calder 
 Bridge, belonging to E. Bicknell, Esq., is a most pure and 
 beautiful example. The Ivy Bridge I imagine to be later, 
 but its rock foreground is altogether unrivalled and remark- 
 able for its delicacy of detail ; a butterfly is seen settled on 
 one of the large brown stones in the midst of the torrent. 
 Two paintings of Bonneville, in Savoy, one in the possession 
 of Abel Allnutt, Esq., the other, and, I think, the finest, in a 
 collection at Birmingham, show more variety of color than is 
 usual with him at the period, and are in every respect mag- 
 nificent examples. Pictures of this class are of peculiar 
 value, for the larger compositions of the same period are all 
 poor in color, and most of them much damaged, but the 
 smaller works have been far finer originally, and their color 
 seems secure. There is nothing in the range of landscape 
 art equal to them in their way, but the full character and 
 capacity of the painter is not in them. Grand as they are in 
 their sobriety, they still leave much to be desired ; there is 
 great heaviness in their shadows, the material is never thor- 
 oughly vanquished, (though this partly for a very noble rea- 
 son, that the painter is always thinking of and referring to 
 nature, and indulges in no artistical conventionalities,) and 
 sometimes the handling appears feeble. In warmth, light- 
 ness, and transparency they have no chance against Gains- 
 borough ; in clear skies and air tone they are alike unfortu- 
 nate when they provoke comparison with Claude ; and in 
 force and solemnity they can in no wise stand with the land- 
 scape of the Venetians. 
 
 The painter evidently felt that he had farther powers, and 
 pressed forward into the field where alone they could be 
 brought into play. It was impossible for him, with all his 
 
THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 
 
 203 
 
 keen and long-disciplined perceptions, not to feel that the 
 real color of nature had never been attempted by any school ; 
 and that though conventional representations had been given 
 by the Venetians of sunlight and twilight, by invariably ren- 
 dering the whites golden and the blues green, yet of the ac- 
 tual, joyous, pure, roseate hues of the external world no rec- 
 ord had ever been given. He saw also that the finish and 
 specific grandeur of nature had been given, but her fulness, 
 space, and mystery never ; and he saw that the great land- 
 scape painters had always sunk the lower middle tints of 
 nature in extreme shade, bringing the entire melody of color 
 as many degrees down as their possible light was inferior to 
 nature's ; and that in so doing a gloomy principle had influ- 
 enced them even in their choice of subject. 
 
 For the conventional color he substituted a pure straight- 
 forward rendering of fact, as far as was in his power ; and 
 that not of such fact as had been before even suggested, but 
 of all that is 7nost brilliant, beautiful, and inimitable ; he 
 went to the cataract for its iris, to the conflagration for its 
 flames, asked of the sea its intensest azure, of the sky its 
 clearest gold. For the limited space and defined forms of 
 elder landscape, he substituted the quantity and the mystery 
 of the vastest scenes of earth ; and for the subdued chiaros- 
 curo he substituted first a balanced diminution of oppositions 
 throughout the scale, and afterwards, in one or two instances, 
 attempted the reverse of the old principle, taking the lowest 
 portion of the scale truly, and merging the upper part in 
 high light. 
 
 Innovations so daring and so various could not be intro- 
 duced without corresponding peril : the difficulties that lay 
 in his way were more than any human intellect could alto- 
 §45. Difficulties gather surmount. In his time there has been 
 ne^!^^ ^ ResuUant systcm of color generally approved ; 
 
 deficiencies. every artist has his own method and his own 
 vehicle ; how to do what Gainsborough did, we know not ; 
 much less what Titian ; to invent a new system of color can 
 hardly be expected of those who cannot recover the old. 
 To obtain perfectly satisfactory results in color under the 
 
204 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 new conditions introduced by Turner, would at least have re- 
 quired the exertion of all his energies in that sole direc- 
 tion. But color has always been only his second object. 
 The effects of space and form, in which he delights, often 
 require the employment of means and method totally at 
 variance with those necessary for the obtaining of pure 
 color. It is physically impossible, for instance, rightly to 
 draw certain forms of the upper clouds with the brush ; noth- 
 ing will do it but the pallet knife with loaded white after the 
 blue ground is prepared. Now it is impossible that a cloud 
 so drawn, however glazed afterwards, should have the virtue 
 of a thin warm tint of Titian's, showing the canvas through- 
 out. So it happens continually. Add to these difficulties, 
 those of the peculiar subjects attempted, and to these again, 
 all that belong to the altered system of chiaroscuro, and it is 
 evident that we must not be surprised at finding many de- 
 ficiencies or faults in such works, especially in the earlier of 
 them, nor even suffer ourselves to be withdrawn by the 
 pursuit of what seems censurable from our devotion to what 
 is mighty. 
 
 Notwithstanding, in some chosen examples of pictures of 
 this kind, I will name three : Juliet and her Nurse ; the Old 
 Temeraire, and the Slave Ship : I do not admit that there 
 are at the time of their first appearing on the walls of the 
 Royal Academy, any demonstrably avoidable faults. I do 
 not deny that there may be, nay, that it is likely there are ; 
 but there is no living artist in Europe whose judgment 
 might safely be taken on the subject, or who could without 
 arrogance affirm of any part of such a picture, that it was 
 wrong / I am perfectly willing to allow, that the lemon yel- 
 low is not properly representative of the yellow of the sky, 
 that the loading of the color is in many places disagreeable, 
 that many of the details are drawn with a kind of imperfec- 
 tion different from what they would have in nature, and that 
 many of the parts fail of imitation, especially to an unedu- 
 cated eye. But no living authority is of weight enough to 
 prove that the virtues of the picture could have been ob- 
 tained at a less sacrifice, or that they are not worth the sac- 
 
'fiflff FOREGOING PRINCIPLES, 
 
 205 
 
 rifice ; and though it is perfectly possible that such may be 
 the case, and that what Turner has done may hereafter in 
 some respects be done better, I believe myself that these 
 works are at the time of their first appearing as perfect as 
 those of Phidias or Leonardo ; that is to say, incapable in 
 their way, of any improvement conceivable by human mind. 
 
 Also, it is only by comparison with such that we are au- 
 thorized to affirm definite faults in any of his others, for we 
 should have been bound to speak, at least for the present, 
 with the same modesty respecting even his worst pictures of 
 this class, had not his more noble efforts given us canons of 
 criticism. 
 
 But, as was beforehand to be expected from the difficulties 
 he grappled with, Turner is exceedingly unequal ; he appears 
 always as a champion in the thick of fight, sometimes with 
 his foot on his enemies' necks, sometimes staggered or struck 
 to his knee ; once or twice altogether down. He has failed 
 most frequently, as before noticed, in elaborate compositions, 
 from redundant quantity ; sometimes, like most other men, 
 from overcare, as very signally in a large and most labored 
 drawing of Bamborough ; sometimes, unaccountably, his eye 
 for color seeming to fail him for a time, as in a large paint- 
 ing of Rome from the Forum, and in the Cicero's Villa, Build- 
 ing of Carthage, and the picture of this year in the British 
 Institution ; and sometimes I am sorry to say, criminally, 
 from taking licenses which he must know to be illegitimate, 
 or indulging in conventionalities which he does not require. 
 
 On such instances I shall not insist, for the finding fault 
 with Turner is not, I think, either decorous in myself or like 
 to be beneficial to the reader.* The greater number of fail- 
 
 * One point, however, it is incumbent upon me to notice, being no 
 question of art but of material. The reader will have observed that I 
 strictly limited the perfection of Turner's works to the time of their 
 first appearing on the walls of the Royal Academy. It bitterly grieves 
 me to have to do this, but the fact is indeed so. No 'picture of Turner's 
 is seen in perfection a month after it is painted. The Walhalla cracked 
 before it had been eight days in the Academy rooms ; the vermilions 
 frequently lose lustre long before the exhibition is over ; and when all 
 
206 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 ures took place ih the transition period, when the artist was 
 feeling for the new qualities, and endeavoring to reconcile 
 them with more careful elaboration of form than was prop- 
 § 46. Reflection ^^^^ Consistent with them. Gradually his hand 
 of his very re- became more free, his perception and sfrasD of the 
 
 cent works. x i & r 
 
 new truths more certain, and his choice of subject 
 more adapted to the exhibition of them. But his powers did 
 
 the colors begin to get hard a year or two after the picture is painted, 
 a painful deadness and opacity comes over them, the whites especially 
 becoming lifeless, and many of the warmer passages settling into a hard 
 valueless brown, even if the paint remains perfectly firm, which is far 
 from being always the case. I believe that in some measure these re- 
 sults are unavoidable, the colors being so peculiarly blended and mingled 
 in Turner's present manner as almost to necessitate their irregular dry- 
 ing ; but that tbey are not necessary to the extent in which they sometimes 
 take place, is proved by the comparative safety of some even of the 
 more brilliant works. Thus the Old Temeraire is nearly safe in color, 
 and quite firm ; while the Juliet and her Nurse is now the ghost of 
 what it was ; the Slaver shows no cracks, though it is chilled in somo 
 of the darker passages, while the Walhalla and several of the recent 
 Venices cracked in the Royal Academy. It is true that the damage 
 makes no further progress after the first year or two, and that even in 
 its altered state the picture is always valuable and records its intention ; 
 but it is bitterly to be regretted that so great a painter should not leave 
 a single work by which in succeeding ages he might be estimated. The 
 fact of his using means so imperfect, together with that of his utter 
 neglect of the pictures in bis own gallery, are a phenomenon in human 
 mind which appears to me utterly inexplicable ; and both are without 
 excuse, if the effects he desires cannot be to their full extent pro- 
 duced except by these treacherous means, one picture only should be 
 painted each year as an exhibition of immediate power, and the rest 
 should be carried out, whatever the expense of labor and time, in safe 
 materials, even at the risk of some deterioration of immediate effect. 
 That which is greatest in him is entirely independent of means ; much 
 of what he now accomplishes illegitimately might without doubfc be at- 
 tained in securer modes — what cannot should without hesitation be 
 abandoned. Fortunately the drawings appear subject to no such dete- 
 rioration. Many of them are now almost destroyed, but this has been 
 I think always through ill treatment, or has been the case only with 
 very early works. I have myself known no instance of a drawing prop- 
 erly protected, and not rashly exposed to light suffering the slightest 
 change. The great foes of Turner, as of all other great colorists espe- 
 cially, are the picture cleaner and the mounter. 
 
THE FOREGOING FEINGIFLES. 
 
 207 
 
 not attain their highest results till towards the year 1840, 
 about which period they did so suddenly, and with a vigor and 
 concentration which rendered his pictures at that time almost 
 incomparable with those which had preceded them. The 
 drawings of Nemi, and Oberwesel, in the possession of B. G. 
 Windus, Esq., were among the first evidences of this sudden 
 advance ; only the foliage in both of these is inferior ; and 
 it is remarkable that in this phase of his art, Turner has drawn 
 little foliage, and that little badly — the great characteristic 
 of it being its power, beauty, and majesty of color, and its 
 abandonment of all littleness and division of thought to a 
 single impression. In the year 1842, he made some draw- 
 ings from recent sketches in Switzerland ; these, with some 
 produced in the following years, all of Swiss subject, I con- 
 sider to be, on the whole, the most characteristic and perfect, 
 works he has ever produced. The Academy pictures were 
 far inferior to them ; but among these exam23les of the same 
 power were not wanting, more especially in the smaller pict- 
 ures of Venice. The Sun of Venice, going to sea ; the San 
 Benedetto, looking towards Fusina ; and a view of Murano, 
 with the Cemetery, were all faultless ; another of Venice, 
 seen from near Fusina, with sunlight and moonlight mixed 
 (1844) was, I think, when I first saw it, (and it still remains 
 little injured,) the most perfectly heautiful piece of color of 
 all that I have seen produced by human hands, by any means, 
 or at any period. Of the exhibition of 1845, I have only 
 seen a small Venice, (still I believe in the artist's possession,) 
 and the two whaling subjects. The Venice is a second-rate 
 work, and the two others altogether unworthy of him. 
 
 In conclusion of our present sketch of the course of land- 
 scape art, it may be generally stated that Turner is the only 
 painter, so far as I know, who has ever drawn the sky, (not 
 the clear sky, which we before saw belonged exclusively to 
 the religious schools, but the various forms and phenomena 
 of the cloudy heavens,) all previous artists having only 
 represented it typically or partially ; but he absolutely and 
 universally : he is the only painter who has ever drawn a 
 mountain, or a stone \ no other man ever having learned 
 
208 
 
 GENERAL APPLICATION OF 
 
 tlieir organization, or possessed himself of their spirit, 
 except in part and obscurely, (the one or two stones noted 
 of Tintoret's, (Vol. II., Part m. Ch. 3,) are perhaps hardly 
 enough on which to found an exception in his favor.) He is 
 the only painter who ever drew the stem of a tree, Titian 
 having come the nearest before him, and excelling him in 
 the muscular development of the larger trunks, (though 
 sometimes losing the woody strength in a serpent-like 
 flaccidity,) but missing the grace and character of the 
 ramifications. He is the only painter who has ever repre- 
 sented the surface of calm, or the force of agitated water ; 
 who has represented the effects of space on distant objects, 
 or who has rendered the abstract beauty of natural color. 
 These assertions I make deliberately, after careful weigh- 
 ing and consideration, in no spirit of dispute, or momentary 
 zeal ; but from strong and convinced feeling, and with the 
 consciousness of being able to prove them. 
 
 This proof is only partially and incidentally attempted in 
 the present portion of this work, which was originally writ- 
 ten, as before explained, for a temporary purpose, and which, 
 therefore, I should have gladly cancelled, but that, relating 
 as it does only to simple matters of fact and not to those of 
 feeling, it may still, perhaps, be of service to some readers 
 who would be unwilling to enter into the more speculative 
 fields with which the succeeding sections are concerned. I 
 leave, therefore, nearly as it was orimnally writ- 
 
 § 47. Difficulty of \ n ^^ - . . /. I 1 • 
 
 demonstration in ten, the following examination of the relative 
 such subjects. truthf ulness of elder and of recent art ; always 
 requesting the reader to remember, as some excuse for the 
 inadequate execution, even of what I have here attempted, 
 how difficult it is to express or explain, by language only, 
 those delicate qualities of the object of sense, on the seizing 
 of which all refined truth of representation depends. Try, 
 for instance, to explain in language the exact qualities of 
 the lines on which depend the whole truth and beauty of 
 expression about the half-opened lips of RaiTaelle's St. Cath- 
 erine. There is, indeed, nothing in landscape so ineffable as 
 this 5 but there is no part nor portion of God's works in which 
 
THE FOBE GOING PPJNGIPLE8, 
 
 209 
 
 the delicacy appreciable by a cultivated eye, and necessary 
 to be rendered in art, is not beyond all expression and ex- 
 planation ; I cannot tell it you, if you do not see it. And 
 thus I have been entirely unable, in the following pages, to 
 demonstrate clearly anything of really deep and perfect 
 truth ; nothing but what is coarse and commonplace, in mat- 
 ters to be judged of by the senses, is within the reach of 
 argument. How much or how little I have done must be 
 judged of by the reader : how much it is impossible to do I 
 have more fully shown in the concluding section. 
 
 I shall first take into consideration those general truths, 
 common to all the objects of nature, which are productive of 
 what is usually called effect," that is to say, truths of tone, 
 general color, space, and light. I shall then investigate the 
 truths of specific form and color, in the four great compo- 
 nent parts of landscape — sky, earth, water, and vegetation. 
 Vol. I.— 14 
 
OF GENEEAL TEUTHS. 
 
 CHAPTER 1. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 As I have already allowed, that in effects of tone, the old 
 masters have never yet been equalled ; and as this is the 
 first, and nearly the last, concession I shall have to make to 
 them, I wish it at once to be thoroughly understood how 
 §1. Meaning of far it extends. 
 
 F^rst[°\he^ right I Understand two things by the word " tone 
 hfsharJto^^he —first, the exact relief and relation of objects 
 principal light, agaiust and to each other in substance and dark- 
 ness, as they are nearer or more distant, and the perfect rela- 
 tion of the shades of all of them to the chief light of the 
 §2. Secondly, the Picture, whether that be sky, water, or anything 
 quality of color elsc. Secoudlv, the cxact relation of the colors 
 
 by which it is i i /. i t i 
 
 felt to owe part of the shadows to the colors of the lights, so 
 
 of its brightness , , , p i i i 
 
 to the hue of that they may be at once leit to be merely 
 hghtuponit. different degrees of the same light ; and the ac- 
 curate relation among the illuminated parts themselves, with 
 respect to the degree in which they are influenced by the 
 color of the light itself, whether warm or cold ; so that the 
 whole of the picture (or, where several tones are united, 
 those parts of it which are under each), may be felt to be in 
 one climate, under one kind of light, and in one kind of at- 
 mosphere ; this being chiefly dependent on that peculiar and 
 inexplicable quality of each color laid on, which makes the 
 eye feel both what is the actual color of the object represen- 
 
OF TllUTH OF TONE, 
 
 211 
 
 ted, and that it is raised to its apparent pitch by illumina- 
 tion. A very bright brown, for instance, out of sunshine, 
 may be precisely of the same shade of color as a very dead 
 or cold brown in sunshine, but it will be totally different in 
 quality ; and that quality by which the illuminated dead 
 color would be felt in nature dijfferent from the unillumin- 
 ated bright one, is what artists are perpetually aiming at, 
 and connoisseurs talking nonsense about, under the name 
 of " tone." The want of tone in pictures is caused by 
 objects looking bright in their own positive hue, and not by 
 illumination, and by the consequent want of sensation of the 
 raising of their hues by light. 
 
 The first of these meanings of the word tone " is liable 
 to be confounded with what is commonly called " aerial per- 
 spective." But aerial perspective is the expression of space, 
 § 3 Difference ^^3^ means whatsoever, sharpness of edge, 
 between tone in vividness of color, ctc. , assistcd bv 2:reater pitch 
 
 Its first sense and ^ . ^ ^ ^ • 
 
 aerial perspect- of shadow, and requires only that objects should 
 be detached from each other, by degrees of inten- 
 sity in proportion to their distance, without requiring that 
 the difference between the farthest and nearest should be in 
 positive quantity the same that nature has put. But w^hat I 
 have called '^tone" requires that there should be the same 
 sum of difference, as well as the same division of differences. 
 
 Now the finely toned pictures of the old masters are, in 
 this respect, some of the notes of nature played two or three 
 octaves below her key ; the dark objects in the middle dis- 
 p ^ . tance havino: precisely the same relation to the 
 
 § 4. The pictures & r J 
 
 of the old mas- lio-ht of the skv which they have in nature, but 
 
 ters perfect in ^. . . . ^ m • r. • i i n 
 
 relation of mid- the light being ncccssarily infinitely lowered, 
 e tints to light. mass of the shadow deepened in the 
 
 same degree. I have often been struck, when looking at a 
 camera-obscuro on a dark day, with the exact resemblance 
 the image bore to one of the finest pictures of the old mas- 
 ters ; all the foliage coming dark against the sky, and noth- 
 ing being seen in its mass but here and there the isolated 
 light of a silvery stem or an unusually illumined cluster of 
 leafage. 
 
212 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 Now if this could be done consistently, and all the notes 
 of nature given in this way an octave or two down, it would 
 „ ^ , , be risrht and necessary so to do : but be it ob- 
 
 § 5. And conse- ^ «^ 
 
 quently totally served, not onlv does nature surpass us in power 
 
 false in relation « i . . t i , 
 
 of middle tints oi obtaining light as much as the sun surpasses 
 
 to darkness. , . i . i i 
 
 white paper, but she also mnnitely surpasses 
 us in her power of shade. Her deepest shades are void 
 spaces from which no light whatever is reflected to the eye ; 
 ours are black surfaces 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 dis- 
 tinct light. Here we are then, with white paper for our 
 highest light, and visible illumined surface 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 be- 
 fore she comes to black, or to anything like it — all the illum- 
 ined 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, in- 
 sist 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 inter- 
 mediate 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, 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 expenditure of our means by totally missing half a 
 
OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 213 
 
 dozen distances, not a whit less important or marked, and so 
 sacrifice a multitude or truths, to obtain one. And this, ac- 
 cordingly 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 in- 
 stance 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 ex- 
 hausted, 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 thou- 
 sand. 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 them- 
 selves powerless when they should seize a thousand. And is it 
 „ _ ^ , . , indeed worthy of beinn;" called a truth, when we 
 
 § 6. General false- , ^ 
 
 hood of such a have a vast history s^iven us to relate, to the 
 
 system. , . , . , t • 
 
 fulness oi which neither our limits nor our 
 language are adequate, instead of giving all its parts 
 abridged in the order of their imj)ortance, to omit or deny 
 the greater part of them, that we may dwell with verbal 
 fidelity on two or three ? Nay, the very truth 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 different 
 principle. He boldly takes pure white (and justly, for it is 
 the sign of the most intense sunbeams) for his highest light, 
 § 7 The principle lamp-black for his deepest shade; and 
 
 of Turner in this between thcsc he makes every deforce of shade 
 
 respect. ... . , 
 
 indicative of a separate degree of distance,^' 
 
 * Of course I am not speaking here of treatment of chiaroscuro, but 
 of that quantity of depth of shade by which, cwteris paribus^ a near 
 object will exceed a distant one. For the truth of the systems 
 
214 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 giving each step of approach, not the exact difference in 
 pitch which it would have in nature, but a difference bear- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 actly in half tint of force, and every minute division of in- 
 termediate space will have just its proportionate share of the 
 lesser sum, and no more. Hence where the old masters ex- 
 pressed 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 at- 
 tained the apparent accuracy of tone which is so satisfying 
 to the eye, compelled them to give up all idea of real rela- 
 tions of retirement, and to represent a few successive and 
 marked stages of distance, like the scenes of a theatre, in- 
 stead of the imperceptible, multitudinous, symmetrical re- 
 tirement of nature, who is not more careful to separate her 
 nearest bush from her farthest one, than to separate the 
 nearest bouo:h of that bush from the one next to it. 
 
 Take for instance, one of the finest landscapes that 
 ancient art has produced — the work of a really great and 
 intellectual mind, the quiet Nicholas Poussin, in our own 
 ^ ^ „ . National Gallery, with the traveller washing: 
 
 § 8. Comparison ^ . . , 
 
 of N. Poiissin's his feet. The first idea we receive from this 
 
 *'Phocion," . . , . . . T n 1 T 1 
 
 picture ]s, that it is evening, and all the light 
 coming from the horizon. Not so. It is full moon, the 
 light coming steep from the left, as is shown by the shadow 
 of the stick on the right-hand pedestal — (for if the sun 
 were not very high, that shadow could not lose itself half 
 way down, and if it w^ere not lateral, the shadow would 
 slope, instead of being vertical). Now, ask yourself, and 
 answer candidly, if those black masses of foliage, in which 
 
 of Turner and the old masters, as regards chiaroscuro, vide Chapter 
 III. of this Section, § 8. 
 
OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 215 
 
 scarcely any form is seen but the outline, be a true represen- 
 tation of trees under noon-day sunlight, sloping from tlie 
 left, bringing out, as it necessarily would do, their masses 
 into golden green, and marking every leaf and bough with 
 sharp shadow and sparkling light. The only truth in the 
 picture is the exact pitch of relief against the sky of both 
 trees and hills, and to this the organization of the hills, the 
 intricacy of the foliage, and everything indicative either of 
 the nature of the light, or the character of the objects, are 
 unhesitatingly sacrificed. So much falsehood does it cost to 
 obtain two apparent truths of tone. Or take, as a still more 
 glaring instance. No. 260 in the Dulwich Gallery, where the 
 trunks of the trees, even of those farthest off, on the left, are 
 as black as paint can make them, and there is not, and 
 cannot be, the slightest increase of force, or any marking 
 whatsoever of distance by color, or any other means, 
 between them and the foreground. 
 
 Compare with these Turner's treatment of his materials in 
 the Mercury and Argus. He has here his light actually com- 
 ing from the distance, the sun being nearly in the centre of 
 the picture, and a violent relief of objects ao-ainst 
 
 § 9. With Turner's . i i % • ^' n • "D • 5 
 
 " Mercury and it would be lar more justiiiable than m Foussm s 
 case. But this dark relief is used in its full force 
 only with the nearest leaves of the nearest group of foliage 
 overhanging the foreground from the left ; and between these 
 and the more distant members of the same group, though only 
 three or four yards separate, distinct aerial perspective and 
 intervening mist and light are shown ; while the large tree 
 in the centre, though very dark, as being very near, compared 
 with all the distance, is much diminished in intensity of shade 
 from this nearest group of leaves, and is faint compared with 
 all the foreground. It is true that this tree has not, in con- 
 sequence, the actual pitch of shade against the sky which it 
 would have in nature ; but it has precisely as much as it pos- 
 sibly can have, to leave it the same proportionate relation to 
 the objects near at hand. And it cannot but be evident to 
 the thoughtful reader, that whatever trickery or deception 
 may be the result of a contrary mode of treatment, this is the 
 
216 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 only scientific or essentially truthful system, and that what 
 it loses in tone it gains in aerial perspective. 
 
 Compare again the last vignette in Rogers's Poems, the 
 "Datur Hora Quieti," where everything, even the darkest 
 parts of the trees, is kept pale and full of graduation ; even 
 
 the bridge where it crosses the descending stream 
 ^'Dca^^^Hora* ^ of sunshiuc, rather lost in the light than relieved 
 
 against it, until we come up to the foreground, 
 and then the vigorous local black of the plough throws the 
 whole picture into distance and sunshine. I do not know 
 anything in art which can for a moment be set beside this 
 drawing for united intensity of light and repose. 
 
 Observe, I am not at present speaking of the beauty or de- 
 sirableness of the system of the old masters ; it may be sub- 
 lime, and affecting, and ideal, and intellectual, and a great 
 deal more ; but all I am concerned with at present is, that it 
 is not true ; while Turner's is the closest and most studied 
 approach to truth of which the materials of art admit. 
 
 It was not, therefore, with reference to this division of the 
 subject that I admitted inferiority in our great modern master 
 to Claude or Poussin, but with reference to the second and 
 
 more usual meaning of the word 'Hone" — the 
 senVe S^he^word exact relation and fitness of shadow and light, 
 
 and of the hues of all objects under them ; and 
 more especially that precious quality of each color laid on, 
 which makes it appear a quiet color illuminated, not a bright 
 color in shade. But I allow this inferiority only with respect 
 to the paintings, of Turner, not to his drawings, I could se- 
 § 12. Remarkable Icct from among the works named in Chap. VI. 
 
 difference in this p • n ^ ^ ^ j. ^ £ ^,^ 
 
 respect between 01 this section, pieccs OI tone absolutely laultless 
 drawings of '''''^ and perfect, from the coolest grays of wintry 
 Turner. dawn to the intense fire of summer noon. And 
 
 the difference between the prevailing character of these and 
 that of nearly all the paintings, (for the early oil pictures of 
 Turner are far less perfect in tone than the most recent,) it 
 is difficult to account for, but on the supposition that there 
 is something in the material which modern artists in general 
 are incapable of mastering, and which compels Turner him- 
 
OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 217 
 
 self to think less of tone in oil color, than of other and more 
 important qualities. Tlie total failures of Callcott, whose 
 struggles after tone ended so invariably in shivering winter 
 or brown paint, the misfortune of Landseer with his evening 
 sky in 1842, the frigidity of Stanfield, and the earth iness and 
 opacity which all the magnificent power and admirable science 
 of Etty are unable entirely to conquer, are too fatal and con- 
 vincing proofs of the want of knowledge of means, rather 
 than of the absence of aim, in modern artists as a body. Yet, 
 with respecfc to Turner, however much the want 
 
 want'of^power^^^ of toue in llis early paintings (the Fall of Car- 
 over the material. ,1 £ ' J. Ixl- ' 1. 1 1. i.' 
 
 thage, tor instance, and others painted at a time 
 when he was producing the most exquisite hues of light in 
 water-color) might seem to favor such a supposition, there 
 are passages in his recent w^orks (such, for instance, as the 
 sunlight along the sea, in the Slaver) which directly con- 
 tradict it, and which prove to us that where he now errs in 
 tone, (as in the Cicero's Villa,) it is less owing to want of 
 powder to reach it, than to the pursuit of some different and 
 nobler end. I shall therefore glance at the particular modes 
 in which Turner manages his tone in his present Academy 
 pictures ; the early ones must be given up at once. Place a 
 genuine untouched Claude beside the Crossing the Brook, 
 and the difference in value and tenderness of tone will be felt 
 in an instant, and felt the more painfully because all the cool 
 and transparent qualities of Claude would have been here 
 desirable, and in their place, and appear to have been aimed 
 at. The foreground of the Building of Carthage, and the 
 greater part of the architecture of the Fall, are equally heavy 
 and evidently paint, if we compare them with genuine pas- 
 sages of Claude's sunshine. There is a very grand and simple 
 piece of tone in the possession of J. Allnutt, Esq., a sunset 
 behind willows, but even this is wanting in refinement of 
 shadow, and is crude in its extreme distance. Not so with 
 the recent Academy pictures ; many of their passages are 
 absolutely faultless ; all are refined and marvellous, and with 
 the exception of the Cicero's Villa, we shall find few^ pictures 
 painted within the last ten years which do not either present 
 
21S 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 us with perfect tone, or with some higher beauty, to which it 
 is necessarily sacrificed. If we glance at the requirements of 
 nature, and her superiority of means to ours, we shall see why 
 and how it is sacrificed. 
 
 Light, with reference to the tone it induces on objects, is 
 either to be considered as neutral and white, bringing out 
 locaj colors with fidelity ; or colored, and consequently modi- 
 § 14. The two fyii^o these local tints, with its own. But the 
 Sii'gitTo'^l power of pure white light to exhibit local color 
 considered. jg strangely Variable. The morning light of 
 about nine or ten is usually very pure ; but the difference of 
 its effect on different days, independently of mere brilliancy, 
 is as inconceivable as inexplicable. Every one knows how 
 capriciously the colors of a fine opal vary from day to day, 
 and how rare the lights are which bring them fully out. Now 
 the expression of the strange, penetrating, deep, neutral 
 light, which, while it alters no color, brings every color up to 
 the highest possible pitch and key of pure, harmonious in- 
 tensity, is the chief attribute of finely-toned pictures by the 
 great colorists as opposed to pictures of equally high tone, 
 by masters who, careless of color, are content, like Cuyp, to 
 lose local tints in the golden blaze of absorbing light. 
 
 Falsehood, in this neutral tone, if it may be so called, is a 
 matter far more of feeling than of proof, for any color is pos- 
 sible under such lights ; it is meagreness and feebleness only 
 o.. -r. , ^ . which are to be avoided : and these are rather 
 
 § 15. Falsehoods , ' 
 
 by which Titian matters of sensation than of reasoning. But it 
 
 attains the ap- , . 
 
 pearance of qual- IS yet easy cnougb to prove by what exagger- 
 ityinhght. atcd and false means the pictures most cele- 
 brated for this quality are endowed with their richness and 
 solemnity of color. In the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian, 
 it is difficult to imagine anything more magnificently impos- 
 sible than the blue of the distant landscape ; — impossible, 
 not from its vividness, but because it is not faint and aerial 
 enough to account for its purity of color ; it is too dark and 
 blue at the same time ; and there is indeed so total a want of 
 atmosphere in it, that, but for the difference of form, it would 
 be impossible to tell the mountains (intended to be ten miles 
 
OF TRUTH OF TONE, 
 
 219 
 
 off) from the robe of Ariadne close to the spectator. Yet 
 make this bhie faint, aerial, and distant — make it in the slight- 
 est degree to resemble the truth of nature's color — and all 
 the tone of the picture, all its intensity and splendor, will van- 
 ish on the instant. So again, in the exquisite and inimitable 
 little bit of color, the Europa in the Dulwich Gallery; the blue 
 of the dark promontory on the left is thoroughly absurd and 
 impossible, and the warm tones of the clouds equally so, unless 
 it were sunset ; but the blue especially, because it is nearer 
 than several points of land which are equally in shadow, and 
 yet are rendered in warm gray. But the whole value and tone 
 of the picture would be destroyed if this blue were altered. 
 
 Now, as much of this kind of richness of tone is always 
 given by Turner as is compatible with truth of aerial effect ; 
 but he will not sacrifice the higher truths of his landscape to 
 mere pitch of color as Titian does. He in- 
 
 §16. Turner will ^ .. i « , . -P • • 
 
 not use such hnitcly prefers having the power oi giving ex- 
 tension of space, and fulness of form, to that of 
 giving deep melodies of tone ; he feels too much the inca- 
 pacity of art, with its feeble means of light, to give the abun- 
 dance of nature's gradations ; and therefore it is, that taking 
 pure white for his highest expression of light, that even pure 
 yellow may give him one more step in the scale of shade, he 
 becomes necessarily inferior in richness of effect to the old 
 masters of tone, (who always used a golden highest light,) but 
 gains by the sacrifice a thousand more essential truths. For, 
 § 17 But gains ^^^^^^ ^® know how much more like light, 
 in essential truth in the abstract, a finely-toned warm hue will be 
 
 by the sacrifice. , ^ . 
 
 to the feelings than white, yet it is utterly im- 
 possible to mark the same number of gradations between 
 such a sobered high light and the deepest shadow, which we 
 can between this and white ; and as these gradations are 
 absolutely necessary to give the facts of form and distance, 
 which, as we have above shown, are more important than any 
 truths of tone,* Turner sacrifices the richness of his picture 
 
 * More important, observe, as matters of truth or fact. It may often 
 chance that, as a matter of feeling, the tone is the more important of 
 the two ; but with this we have here no concern. 
 
220 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 to its completeness — the manner of the statement to its mat- 
 ter. And not only is he right in doing this for the sake of 
 space, but he is right also in the abstract question of color ; 
 for as we observed above (Sect. 14,) it is only the white light 
 — the perfect unmodified group of rays — which will bring 
 out local color perfectly ; and if the picture, therefore, is to 
 be complete in its system of -color, that is, if it is to have 
 each of the three primitives in their purity, it must have white 
 for its highest light, otherwise the purity of one of them at 
 least will be impossible. And this leads us to notice the 
 §18 The second sccond and more frequent quality of light, 
 quality of light, (which is assumcd if we make our highest repre- 
 sentation of it yellow,) the positive hue, namely, which it 
 may itself possess, of course modifying whatever local tints 
 it exhibits, and thereby rendering certain colors necessary, 
 and certain colors impossible. Under the direct yellow light 
 of a descending sun, for instance, pure white and pure blue 
 are both impossible ; because the purest whites and blues 
 that nature could produce would be turned in some degree 
 into gold or green by it ; and when the sun is within half a de- 
 gree of the horizon, if the sky be clear, a rose light supersedes 
 the golden one, still more overwhelming in its effect on local 
 color. I have seen the pale fresh green of spring vegetation 
 in the gardens of Venice, on the Lido side, turned pure rus- 
 set, or between that and crimson, by a vivid sunset of this 
 kind, every particle of green color being absolutely anni- 
 hilated. And so under all colored lights, (and there are few, 
 from dawn to twilight, which are not slightly tinted by some 
 accident of atmosphere,) there is a change of local color, 
 which, when in a picture it is so exactly proportioned that 
 we feel at once both what the local colors are in themselves, 
 and what is the color and strength of the light upon them, 
 gives us truth of tone. 
 
 For expression of effects of yellow sunlight, parts might 
 be chosen out of the good pictures of Cuyp, which have 
 never been equalled in art. But I much doubt if there be a 
 single bright Cuyp in the world, which, taken as a whole, 
 does not present many glaring solecims in tone. I have not 
 
OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 221 
 
 seen many fine pictures of his, which were not utterly 
 spoiled by the vermilion dress of some principal figure, a 
 vermilion totally unaffected and un warmed by the golden 
 § 19. The perfec- hue of the rest of the picture ; and, what is 
 th£ ?espec^t^in- worse, with little distinction, between its own 
 terfered with by illumined and shaded parts, so that it appears 
 
 numerous sole- . . 
 
 cisms. altogether out of sunshine, the color of a bright 
 
 vermilion in dead, cold daylight. It is possible that the 
 original color may have gone down in all cases, or that these 
 parts may have been villanously repainted : but I am the 
 rather disposed to believe them genuine, because even 
 throughout the best of his pictures there are evident recurren- 
 ces of the same kind of solecism in other colors — greens for in- 
 stance — as in the steep bank on the right of the largest pict- 
 ure in the Dulwich Gallery ; and browns, as in the lying cow 
 in the same picture, which is in most visible and painful 
 contrast with the one standing beside it, the flank of the 
 standino; one beinsr bathed in breathins: sunshine, and the 
 reposing one laid in with as dead, opaque, and lifeless brown 
 as ever came raw from a novice's pallet. And again, in that 
 marked 83, while the fissures on the risrht are walkino^ in the 
 most precious light, and those just beyond them in the dis- 
 tance leave a furlong or two of pure visible sunbeams be- 
 tween us and them, the cows in the centre are entirely 
 deprived, poor things, of both light and air. And these 
 failing parts,, though they often escape the eye when we are 
 near the picture and able to dwell upon what is beautiful in 
 it, yet so injure its whole effect that I question if there be 
 many Cuyps in which vivid colors occur, which will not lose 
 their effect, and become cold and flat at a distance of ten or 
 twelve paces, retaining their influence only when the eye is 
 close enough to rest on the right parts without including 
 the whole. Take, for instance, the large one in our National 
 Gallery, seen from the opposite door, where the black cow 
 appears a great deal nearer than the dogs, and the golden 
 tones of the distance look like a sepia drawing rather than 
 like sunshine, owing chiefly to the utter want of aerial grays 
 indicated throus^h them. 
 
222 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 Now, there is no instance in the works of Turner of any- 
 thing so faithful and imitative of sunshine as the best parts 
 of Cuyp ; but at the same time, there is not a single vestige 
 of the same kind of solecism. It is true, that in his fondness 
 § 20. Turner is for color, Turner is in the habit of allowing ex- 
 pa^tP— ^a?^more cessivelj cold fragments in his warmest pictures ; 
 so 111 the whole. |^^^ these are never, observe, warm colors with 
 no light upon them, useless as contrasts while they are dis- 
 cords in the tone ; but they are bits of the very coolest tints, 
 partially removed from the general influence, and exquisitely 
 valuable as color, though, with all deference be it spoken, I 
 think them sometimes slightly destructive of what would 
 otherwise be perfect tone. For instance, the two blue and 
 white stripes on the drifting flag of the Slave Ship, are, I 
 think, the least degree too purely cool. I think both the 
 blue and white would be impossible under such a light ; and 
 in the same way the white parts of the dress of the Napoleon 
 interfered by their coolness with the perfectly managed 
 warmtlf of all the rest of the picture. But both these lights 
 are reflexes, and it is nearly impossible to say what tones 
 may be assumed even by the warmest light reflected from a 
 cool surface ; so that we cannot actually convict these parts 
 of falsehood, and though we should have liked the tone of 
 the picture better had they been slightly warmer we cannot 
 but like the color of the picture better with them as they are ; 
 while Cuyp's failing portions are not only e^^idently and 
 demonstrably false, being in direct light, but are as disagree- 
 able in color as false in tone, and injurious to everything 
 near them. And the best proof of the grammatical accu- 
 racy of the tones of Turner is in the perfect and unchanging 
 influence of all his pictures at any distance. We approach 
 only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage, 
 and retire only to feel it dilfused over the scene, the whole 
 picture glowing like a sun or star at whatever distance we 
 stand, and lighting the air between us and it ; while many 
 even of the best pictures of Claude must be looked close into 
 to be felt, and lose light every foot that we retire. The 
 smallest of the three seaports in the National Gallery is valu' 
 
OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 223 
 
 able and right in tone when we are close to it ; but ten 
 yards off, it is all brick-dust, offensively and evidently false 
 in its whole hue. 
 
 The comparison of Turner with Cuyp and Claude may 
 sound strange in most ears ; but this is chiefly because we 
 are not in the habit of analyzing and dwelling upon those 
 § 21 The pow- difficult and daring passages of the modern mas- 
 er in Turner of ^^j, which do not at first appeal to our ordinary 
 
 uniting a num- ^ . , . *^ 
 
 ber of tones. notions of truth, owing to his habit of uniting 
 two, three, or even more separate tones in the same com- 
 position. In this also he strictly follows nature, for wher- 
 ever climate changes, tone changes, and the climate changes 
 with every 200 feet of elevation, so that the upper clouds are 
 always different in tone from the lower ones, these from the 
 rest of the landscape, and in all probability, some part of the 
 horizon from the rest. And when nature allows this in a 
 high degree, as in her most gorgeous effects she always will, 
 she does not herself impress at once with intensity of tone, 
 as in the deep and quiet yellows of a July evening, but 
 rather with the magnificence and variety of associated color, 
 in which, if we give time and attention to it, we shall gradu- 
 ally find the solemnity and the depth of twenty tones instead 
 of one. Now in Turner's power of associating cold with 
 warm light, no one has ever approached, or even ventured 
 into the same field with him. The old masters, content with 
 one simple tone, sacrificed to its unity all the exquisite grada- 
 tions and varied touches of relief and change by which nature 
 unites her hours with each other. They gave the warmth of 
 the sinking sun, overwhelming all things in its gold ; but 
 they did not give those gray passages about the horizon 
 where, seen through its dying light, the cool and the gloom 
 of night gather themselves for their victory. Whether it 
 was in them impotence or judgment, it is not for me to de- 
 cide. ]*have only to point to the daring of Turner in this 
 respect, as something to which art affords no matter of com- 
 parison, as that in which the mere attempt is, in itself, superi- 
 ority. Take the evening effect with the Temeraire. That 
 picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of 
 
224 
 
 OF TRUTH OF TONE. 
 
 actual sunlight ; but this is because there is in it more than 
 
 sunlight, because under the blazing veil of vaulted fire 
 
 which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue, deep, 
 
 desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the 
 
 voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed 
 
 sea ; because the oold, deadly shadows of the twilight are 
 
 gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment 
 
 as you look, you will fancy some new film and faintness of 
 
 the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form. 
 
 And if, in effects of this kind, time be taken to dwell 
 
 upon the individual tones, and to study the laws of their 
 
 reconcilement, there will be found in the recent Academy 
 
 § 22. Recapitu- pictures of this great artist a mass of various 
 
 lation. truth to which nothinoc can be brous^ht for corn- 
 
 er o 
 
 parison, which stands not only unrivalled, but uncontended 
 with, and which, when in carrying out it may be inferior to 
 some of the picked passages of the old masters, is so through 
 deliberate choice rather to suggest a multitude of truths than 
 to imitate one, and through a strife with difficulties of effect 
 of which art can afford no parallel example. Nay, in the 
 next chapter, respecting color, we shall see farther rea- 
 son for doubting the truth of Claude, Cuyp, and Poussin, in 
 tone, — reason so palpable that if these were all that were 
 to be contended with, I should scarcely have allowed any 
 inferiority in Turner whatsoever ; * but I allow it, not so 
 much with reference to the deceptive imitations of sunlight, 
 wrought out with desperate exaggerations of shade, of the 
 professed landscape painters, as with reference to the glory 
 of Rubens, the glow of Titian, the silver tenderness of Cagli- 
 ari, and perhaps more than all to the precious and pure pas- 
 sages of intense feeling and heavenly light, holy and unde- 
 
 * We must not leave the subject of tone without alluding to the works 
 of the late George Barrett, which afford glorious and exalted^passages 
 of light ; and John Varley, who, though less truthful in his aim, was 
 frequently deep in his feeling. Some of the sketches of De Wint are 
 also admirable in this respect. As for our oil pictures, the less that is 
 said about them the better. Callcott has the truest aim ; but not hav- 
 ing any eye for color, it is imijossible for him to succeed in tone. 
 
OF TBUTU OF COLOR, 
 
 225 
 
 filed, and glorious with the changeless passion of eternity, 
 which sanctify with their shadeless peace the deep and noble 
 conceptions of the early school of Italy, — of Fra Bartolomeo, 
 Perugino, and the early mind of Raffaelle. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 OP TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 There is, in the first room of the National Gallery, a land- 
 scape attributed to Gaspar Poussin, called sometimes Aricia, 
 sometimes Le or La Riccia, according to the fancy of cata- 
 § 1. Observations logue printers. Whether it can be supposed 
 gT Poussin'? La resemble the ancient Aricia, now La Riccia, 
 i^ccia. close to Albano, I will not take upon me to 
 
 determine, seeing that most of the towns of these old mas- 
 ters are quite as like one place as another ; but, at any rate, 
 it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes, of 
 very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of 
 leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull 
 opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the 
 lights, and discover in one place a bit of rock, which of 
 course would in nature have been cool and gray beside the 
 lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being more- 
 over completely in shade, is consistently and scientifi- 
 cally painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick-red, 
 the only thing like color in the picture. The foreground is 
 a piece of road, which in order to make allowance for its 
 greater nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it 
 may be presumed, for the quantity of vegetation usually 
 present on carriage-roads, is given in a very cool green gray, 
 and the truth of the picture is completed by a number of 
 dots in the sky on the right, with a stalk to them, of a sober 
 and similar brown. 
 
 Not lone; asro, I was slowly descendino; this 
 
 §2. As compared U'^- 1 ' A C ^ ^ 
 
 Witt the actual Very bit oi camage-road, the nrst turn alter 
 ^^^^^* you leave Albano, not a little impeded by tlie 
 
 Vol. I.— 15 
 
226 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COL OB, 
 
 worthy successors of the ancient prototypes of Veiento.* It 
 had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the 
 Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, 
 with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun 
 along the Claudian aqueduct lighting up the infinity of its 
 arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long 
 slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the 
 north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano and 
 graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks 
 of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flush- 
 ing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep, palpi- 
 tating azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun 
 came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its 
 masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints 
 were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, 
 were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it color, 
 it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like 
 the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank 
 into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quiv- 
 ering with buoyant and burning life ; each, as it turned to 
 reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an 
 emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green 
 vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crys- 
 talline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks 
 for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the 
 air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a 
 thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as 
 the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of 
 grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in 
 sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as 
 sheet-lighting opens in a cloud at sunset ; the motionless 
 masses of dark rock — dark though flushed with scarlet 
 lichen, — casting their quiet shadows across its restless radi- 
 ance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow 
 with blue mist and fitful sound, and over all — the multitudi- 
 
 * '* Caecus adulator — 
 
 Dignus Aricinos qui mendicaret ad axes, 
 Blandaque devexaj jactaret batia rhedse.*' 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 227 
 
 nous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no 
 darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless 
 intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone 
 pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding 
 lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted 
 into the blaze of the sea. 
 
 Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner ? Not in his 
 most daring and dazzling efforts could Turner himself come 
 near it ; but you could not at the time have thought or re- 
 membered the work of any other man as having the remotest 
 § 3. Tiiraer him- resemblance of what you saw. Nor am 
 
 briUiancy^to na^ ^ Speaking of what is uncommou or unnatural ; 
 
 there is no climate, no place, and scarcely an 
 hour, in which nature does not exhibit color which no mortal 
 effort can imitate or approach. For all our artificial pig- 
 ments are, even when seen under the same circumstances, 
 dead and lightless beside her living color ; the green of a 
 growing leaf, the scarlet of a fresh flower, no art nor ex- 
 pedient can reach ; but in addition to this, nature exhibits 
 her hues under an intensity of sunlight which trebles their 
 brilliancy, while the painter, deprived of this splendid aid, 
 works still with what is actually a gray shadow compared to 
 the force of nature's color. Take a blade of grass and a 
 scarlet flower, and place them so as to receive sunlight be- 
 side the brightest canvas that ever left Turner's easel, and 
 the picture will be extinguished. So far from out-facing 
 nature, he does not, as far as mere vividness of color goes, 
 one-half reach her ; — but does he use this brilliancy of color 
 on objects to which it does not properly belong ? Let us 
 compare his works in this respect with a few instances from 
 the old masters. 
 
 There is, on the left hand side of Salvator's Mercury and 
 the Woodman in our National Gallery, something, without 
 doubt intended for a rocky mountain, in the middle distance, 
 near enough for all its fissures and crags to be 
 colors of saiva- distinctly visible, or, rather, for a great many 
 tor, Titian , awkward scratches of the brush over it to be 
 visible, which, though not particularly representative either 
 
228 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 of one thing or another, are without doubt intended to be 
 symbolical of rocks. Now no mountain in full light, and 
 near enough for its details of crag to be seen, is without 
 great variety of delicate color. Salvator has painted it 
 throughout without one instant of variation ; but this, I sup- 
 pose, is simplicity and generalization ; — let it pass : but what 
 is the color ? Pure sky hlue^ without one grain of gray, or 
 any modifying hue whatsoever ; — the same brush which had 
 just given the bluest parts of the sky, has been more loaded 
 at the same part of the pallet, and the whole mountain thrown 
 in with unmitigated ultramarine. Now mountains only can 
 become pure blue when there is so much air between us and 
 them that they become mere flat, dark shades, every detail 
 being totally lost : they become blue when they become air, 
 and not till then. Consequently this part of Salvator's paint- 
 ing, being of hills perfectly clear and near, with all their de- 
 tails visible, is, as far as color is concerned, broad, bold false- 
 hood — the direct assertion of direct impossibility. 
 
 In the whole range of Turner's works, recent or of old date, 
 you will not find an instance of anything near enough to have 
 details visible, painted in sky blue. Wherever Turner gives 
 blue, there he gives atmosphere ; it is air, not object. Blue 
 he gives to his sea ; so does nature ; — blue he gives, sapphire- 
 deep, to his extreme distance ; so does nature ; — blue he 
 gives to the misty shadows and hollows of his hills ; so does 
 nature : but blu^ he gives not^ where detailed and illumined 
 surface are visible ; as he comes into light and character, so 
 he breaks into warmth and varied hue ; nor is there in one of 
 his works, and I speak of the Academy pictures especially, 
 one touch of cold color which is not to be accounted for, and 
 proved right and full of meaning. 
 
 I do not say that Salvator's distance is not artist-like ; both 
 in that, and in the yet more glaringly false distances of Titian 
 above alluded to, and in hundreds of others of equal boldness 
 of exaggeration, I can take delight, and perhaps should be 
 sorry to see them other than they are ; but it is somewhat 
 singular to hear people talking of Turner's exquisite care and 
 watchfulness in color as false, while they receive such cases 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR, 
 
 229 
 
 of preposterous and audacious fiction with the most generous 
 and simple credulity. 
 
 Again, in the upper sky of the picture of Nicolas Poussin, 
 before noticed, the clouds are of a very fine clear olive-green, 
 about the same tint as the brightest parts of the trees beneath 
 § 5. Ponssin, and them. They cannot have altered, (or else the 
 Claude. trees must have been painted in gray), for the 
 
 hue is harmonious and well united with the rest of the picture, 
 and the blue and white in the centre of the sky are still fresh 
 and pure. Now a green sky in open and illumined distance 
 is very frequent, and very beautiful ; but rich olive-green 
 clouds, as far as I am acquainted with nature, are a piece of 
 color in which she is not apt to indulge. You will be puzzled 
 to show me such a thing in the recent works of Turner.* 
 Again, take any important group of trees, I do not care whose 
 — Claude's, Salvator's, or Poussin's — with lateral light (that 
 in the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, or Gaspar's sacrifice of 
 Isaac, for instance :) Can it be seriously supposed that those 
 murky browns and melancholy greens are representative of 
 the tints of leaves under full noonday sun ? I know that 
 you cannot help looking upon all these pictures as pieces of 
 dark relief against a light wholly proceeding from the dis- 
 tances ; but they are nothing of the kind — they are noon and 
 morning effects with full lateral light. Be so kind as to match 
 the color of a leaf in the sun (the darkest you like) as nearly 
 as you can, and bring your matched color and set it beside one 
 of these groups of trees, and take a blade of common grass, and 
 set it beside any part of the fullest light of their foregrounds, 
 and then talk about the truth of color of the old masters ! 
 
 * There is perhaps nothing more characteristic of a great colorist than 
 his power of using greens in strange places without their being felt as 
 such, or at least than a constant preference of green gray to purple 
 gray. And this hue of Poussin's clouds would have been perfectly 
 agreeable and allowable, had there been gold or crimson enough in the 
 rest of the picture to have thrown it into gray. It is only because the 
 lower clouds are pure white and blue, and because the trees are of the 
 same color as the clouds, that the cloud color becomes false. There is 
 a jSne instance of a sky, green in itself, but turned gray by the opposi- 
 tion of warm color, in Turner's Devonport with the Dockyards. 
 
230 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 And let not arguments respecting the sublimity or fidel- 
 ity of impressio7i be brought forward here. I have nothing 
 whatever to do with this at present. I am not talking about 
 what is sublime, but about what is true. People attack 
 Turner on this ground ; — they never speak of beauty or sub- 
 limity with respect to him, but of nature and truth, and let 
 them support their own favorite masters on the same grounds. 
 Perhaps I may have the very deepest veneration for the feel- 
 ing of the old masters, but I must not let it influence me 
 now — my business is to match colors, not to talk sentiment. 
 Neither let it be said that I am going too much into details, 
 and that general truths may be obtained by local falsehood. 
 Truth is only to be measured by close comparison of actual 
 facts ; we may talk forever about it in generals, and prove 
 nothing. We cannot tell what effect falsehood may pro- 
 duce on this or that person, but we can very well tell what 
 is false and what is not, and if it produce on our senses the 
 effect of truth, that only demonstrates their imperfection 
 and inaccuracy, and need of cultivation. Turner's color is 
 glaring to one person's sensations, and beautiful to another's. 
 This proves nothing. Poussin's color is right to one, soot to 
 another. This proves nothing. There is no means of arriv- 
 ing at any conclusion but close comparison of both with the 
 know^n and demonstrable hues of nature, and this comparison 
 will invariably turn Claude or Poussin into blackness, and 
 even Turner into gray. 
 
 Whatever depth of gloom may seem to invest the objects 
 of a real landscape, yet a window with that landscape seen 
 through it, will invariably appear a broad space of light as 
 compared with the shade of the room walls ; and this single 
 circumstance may prove to us both the intensity and the 
 diffusion of daylight in open air, and the necessity, if a pict- 
 ure is to be truthful in effect of color, that it should tell as a 
 broad space of graduated illumination — not, as do those of 
 the old masters, as a patchwork of black shades. Their 
 works are nature in mourning weeds, — ovK kv rjXlijd KaOapia 
 Tc^pa/x/jLci/ot, aX)C vtto (rv/A/jttya cr/<ta. 
 
 It is true that there are, here and there, in the Academy 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR, 
 
 231 
 
 pictures, passages in which Turner has translated the unat- 
 tainable intensity of one tone of color, into the attainable 
 pitch of a hi2:her one : the crolden orreen for in- 
 
 § 6. Turner's ^ « . i • i • 
 
 translation of col- stance, oi intense sunshine on verdurc, luto purc 
 yellow, because he knows it to be impossible, 
 with any mixture of blue whatsoever, to give faithfully its 
 relative intensity of light, and Turner always will have his 
 light and shade right, whatever it costs him in color. But 
 he does this in rare cases, and even then over very small 
 spaces ; and I should be obliged to his critics if they would 
 go out to some warm, mossy green bank in full summer sun- 
 shine, and try to reach its tone ; and when they find, as find 
 they will, Indian yellow and chrome look dark beside it, let 
 them tell me candidly which is nearest truth, the gold of 
 Turner, or the mourning and murky olive browns and verdi- 
 gris greens in which Claude, with the industry and intelli- 
 gence of a Sevres china painter, drags the laborious bramble 
 leaves over his childish foreground. 
 
 But it is sino;ular enouo^h that the chief attacks on Turner 
 for overcharged brilliancy, are made, not when there could 
 by any possibility be any chance of his outstepping nature, 
 § 7. Notice of but whcu he has taken subjects which no colors 
 n^bdiiiancy^of earth could ever vie with or reach, such, for 
 preach That ^of instance, as his suusets among the high clouds, 
 reality. When I come to speak of skies, I shall point 
 
 out w^hat divisions, proportioned to their elevation, exist in 
 the character of clouds. It is the highest region, — that ex- 
 clusively characterized by white, filmy, multitudinous, and 
 quiet clouds, arranged in bars, or streaks, or flakes, of which 
 I speak at present, a region which no landscape painters 
 have ever made one effort to represent, except Rubens and 
 Turner — the latter taking: it for his most favorite and fre- 
 quent study. Now we have been speaking hitherto of what 
 is constant and necessary in nature, of the ordinary effects 
 of daylight on ordinary colors, and we repeat again, that no 
 gorgeousness of the pallet can reach even these. But it is 
 a widely different thing when nature herself takes a coloring 
 fit, and does something extraordinary, something really to 
 
232 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 exhibit her power. She has a thousand ways and means of 
 rising above herself, but incomparably the noblest manifes- 
 tations of her capability of color are in these sunsets among 
 the high clouds. I speak especially of the moment before 
 the sun sinks, when his light turns pure rose-color, and when 
 this light falls upon a zenith covered with countless cloud- 
 forms of inconceivable delicacy, threads and flakes of vapor, 
 which would in common daylight be pure snow white, and 
 which give therefore fair field to the tone of light. There is 
 then no limit to the multitude, and no check to the inten- 
 sity of the hues assumed. The whole sky from the zenith to 
 the horizon becomes one molten, mantling sea of color and 
 fire ; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and 
 wave into unsullied, shadowless, crimson, and purple, and 
 scarlet, and colors for which there are no words in language, 
 and no ideas in the mind, — things which can only be con- 
 ceived while they are visible, — the intense hollow blue of 
 the upper sky melting through it all, — showing here deep, 
 and pure, and lightless, there, modulated by the filmy, form- 
 less body of the transparent vapor, till it is lost impercepti- 
 bly in its crimson and gold. Now there is no connection, 
 no one link of association or resemblance, between those 
 skies and the work of any mortal hand but Turner's. He 
 alone has followed nature in these her highest efforts ; he 
 follows her faithfully, but far behind ; follows at such a dis- 
 tance below her intensity that the Napoleon of last year's 
 exhibition^ and the Temeraire of the year before, would look 
 colorless and cold if the eye came upon them after one of 
 nature's sunsets among the high clouds. But there are a 
 §8. RJh sons for thousand rcasons why this should not be be- 
 (Uauy^ofTh^o lieved. The concurrence of circumstances nec- 
 respcct^o thei ^ssary to produce the sunsets of which I speak 
 representation, docs not take placc abovc fivc or six times in 
 the summer, and then only for a space of from five to ten 
 minutes, just as the sun reaches the horizon. Considering 
 how seldom people think of looking for sunset at all, and 
 how seldom, if they do, they are in a position from which it 
 can be fully seen, the chances that their attention should be 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 233 
 
 awake, and their position favorable, during these few flying 
 instants of the year, is almost as nothing. What can the 
 citizen, who can see only the red light on the canvas of the 
 wagon at the end of the street, and the crimson color of 
 the bricks of his neighbor's chimney, know of the flood of 
 fire which deluges the sky from the horizon to the zenith ? 
 What can even the quiet inhabitant of the English lowlands, 
 whose scene for the manifestation of the fire of heaven is 
 limited to the tops of hayricks, and the rooks' nests in the 
 old elm-trees, know of the mighty passages of splendor 
 which are tossed from Alp to Alp over the azure of a thou- 
 sand miles of champaign ? Even granting the constant vigor 
 of observation, and supposing the possession of such impos- 
 sible knowledge, it needs but a moment's reflection to prove 
 how incapable the memory is of retaining for any time 
 the distinct image of the sources even of its most vivid im- 
 pressions. What recollection have we of the sunsets which 
 delighted us last year ? We may know that they were mag- 
 nificent, or glowing, but no distinct image of color or form 
 is retained — nothing of whose degree (for the great difiiculty 
 with the memory is to retain, not facts, but degrees of fact) 
 we could be so certain as to say of anything now presented 
 to us, that it is like it. If we did say so, we should be 
 wrong ; for we may be quite certain that the energy of an 
 impression fades from the memory, and becomes more and 
 more indistinct every day ; and thus we compare a faded and 
 indistinct image with the decision and certainty of one 
 present to the senses. How constantly do we affirm that the 
 thunder-storm of last week was the most terrible one we 
 ever saw in our lives, because we compare it, not with the 
 thunder-storm of last year, but with the faded and feeble 
 recollection of it. And so, when we enter an exhibition, as 
 we have no definite standard of truth before us, our feelings 
 are toned down and subdued to the quietness of color which 
 is all that human power can ordinarily attain to ; and when 
 we turn to a piece of higher and closer truth, approaching the 
 pitch of the color of nature, but to which we are not guided, 
 as we should be in nature, by corresponding gradations of 
 
234 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COL OB, 
 
 light everywhere around us, but which is isolated and cut 
 off suddenly by a frame and a wall, and surrounded by dark- 
 ness and coldness, what can we expect but that it should sur- 
 prise and shock the feelings ? Suppose, where the Napoleon 
 § 9. Color of hung in the Academy last year, there could 
 the Napoleon. have been left, instead, an opening in the wall, 
 and through that opening, in the midst of the obscurity of 
 the dim room and the smoke-laden atmosphere, there could 
 suddenly have been poured the full glory of a tropical sun- 
 set, reverberated from the sea : How would you have shrunk, 
 blinded, from its scarlet and intolerable lightnings ! What 
 picture in the room would not have been blackness after it ? 
 And why then do you blame Turner because he dazzles you ? 
 Does not the falsehood rest with those who do not? There 
 was not one hue in this whole picture which was not far 
 below what nature would have used in the same circum- 
 stances, nor was there one inharmonious or at variance with 
 the rest ; — the stormy blood-red of the horizon, the scarlet 
 of the breaking sunlight, the rich crimson browns of the wet 
 and illumined sea-weed ; the pure gold and purple of the 
 upper sky, and, shed through it all, the deep passage of 
 solemn blue, where the cold moonlight fell on one pensive 
 spot of the limitless shore — all were given with harmony as 
 perfect as their color was intense ; and if, instead of passing, 
 as I doubt not you did, in the hurry of your unreflecting prej- 
 udice, you had paused but so much as one quarter of an 
 hour before the picture, you would have found the sense of 
 air and space blended with every line, and breathing in every 
 cloud, and every color instinct and radiant w4th visible, glow- 
 ing, absorbing light. 
 
 It is to be observed, however, in general, that wherever in 
 brilliant effects of this kind, we approach to anything like a 
 true statement of nature's color, there must yet be a distinct 
 § 10 Necessary ^^^^^^^'^^^^ imprcssion wc couvcy, because 
 
 discrepancy be- -vvc caunot approach her Uqht. All such hues 
 
 twcen the attain- *■ , . 
 
 able brilliancy of are usuallv ffiveu bv her with an accompanyinsj' 
 
 color and light. f U X.' I. A 1 A 
 
 intensity oi sunbeams which dazzles ana over- 
 powers the eye, so that it cannot rest on the actual colors, 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 235 
 
 nor understand what they are ; and hence in art, in render- 
 ing^ all effects of this kind, there must be a want of the ideas 
 of imitatio7ij which are the great source of enjoyment to the 
 ordinary observer ; because we can only give one series of 
 truths, those of color, and are unable to give the accompa- 
 nying truths of light, so that the more true we are in color, 
 the greater, ordinarily, will be the discrepancy felt between 
 the mtensity of hue and the feebleness of light. But the 
 painter who really loves nature will not, on this account, give 
 you a faded and feeble image, which indeed may appear to 
 3^ou to be right, because your feelings can detect no discrep- 
 ancy in its parts, but which he knows to derive its apparent 
 truth from a systematized falsehood. No ; he will make you 
 understand and feel that art cannot imitate nature — that 
 where it appears to do so, it must malign her, and mock 
 her. He will give you, or state to you, such truths as are 
 in his power, completely and perfectly ; and those which he 
 cannot give, he will leave to your imagination. If you are 
 acquainted with nature, you will know all he has given to 
 be true, and you will supply from your memory and from 
 your heart that life which he cannot give. If you are unac- 
 quainted with nature, seek elsewhere for whatever may hap- 
 pen to satisfy your feelings ; but do not ask for the truth 
 which you would not acknowledge and could not enjoy. 
 
 Nevertheless the aim and struggle of the artist must 
 always be to do away with this discrepancy as far as the 
 powers of art admit, not by lowering his color, but by in- 
 creasing his light. And it is indeed by this that the works 
 §11. This dis- of Turner are peculiarly distinguished from 
 Ser^han In those of all other colorists, by the dazzling in- 
 other coiorists. tensity, namely, of the light which he sheds 
 through every hue, and which, far more than their brilliant 
 color, is the real source of their overpowering effect upon 
 the eye, an effect so reasonably made the subject of per- 
 petual animadversion, as if the sun which they repre- 
 sent were quite a quiet, and subdued, and gentle, and man- 
 ageable luminary, and never dazzled anybody, under any 
 circumstances whatsoever. I am fond of standing by a 
 
236 
 
 OF TBUTH OF COLOR, 
 
 bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional 
 compliments of the crowd — "What a glaring thing ! " "I 
 declare I can't look at it ! " " Don't it hurt your eyes ? *' — 
 expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking 
 the sun full in the face, with the most perfect comfort and 
 entire facility of vision. It is curious after hearing people 
 § 12. Its great malign som^e of Turner's noble passages of light, 
 s?Ipo* Attributed to pass to some really ungrammatical and false 
 to Rubens. picture of the old masters, in which we have 
 color given without light. Take, for instance, the land- 
 scape attributed to Rubens, No. 175, in the Dulwich Gal- 
 ler}^ 1 never have spoken, and I never will speak of 
 Rubens but with the most reverential feelinor : and what- 
 ever imperfections in his art may have resulted from his un- 
 fortunate want of seriousness and incapability of true pas- 
 sion, his calibre of mind was originally such that I believe 
 the world may see another Titian and another Raffaelle, be- 
 fore it sees another Rubens. But I have before alluded to 
 the violent license he occasionally assumes ; and there is an 
 instance of it in this picture apposite to the immediate ques- 
 tion. The sudden streak and circle of yellow and crimson 
 in the middle of the sky of that picture, being the occur- 
 rence of a fragment of a sunset color in pure daylight, and 
 in perfect isolation, while at the same time it is rather darker, 
 when translated into light and shade, than brighter than the 
 rest of the sky, is a case of such bold absurdity, come from 
 whose pencil it may, that if every error which Turner has 
 fallen into in the whole course of his life were concentrated 
 into one, that one would not equal it ; and as our connois- 
 seurs gaze upon this wath never-ending approbation, we must 
 not be surprised that the accurate perceptions which thus 
 take delight in pure fiction, should consistently be disgusted 
 by Turner's fidelity and truth. 
 
 Hitherto, however, we have been speaking of vividness of 
 § 13. Turner pi^^re color, and showing that it is used by Turner 
 u^es^ p uV^e^^oJ Only whcre nature uses it, and in no less degree, 
 vivid color. have hitherto, therefore, been speaking 
 
 of a most limited and uncharacteristic portion of his works ; 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 237 
 
 for Turner, like all great colorists, is distinguished not more 
 for his power of dazzling and overwhelming the eye with in- 
 tensity of effect, than for his power of doing so by the use 
 of subdued and gentle means. There is no man living more 
 cautious and sparing in the use of pure color than Turner. To 
 say that he never perpetrates anything like the blue excres- 
 cences of foreground, or hills shot like a housekeeper's best 
 silk gown, with blue and red, which certain of our cele- 
 brated artists consider the essence of the sublime, would 
 be but a poor compliment. I might as well praise the por- 
 traits of Titian because they have not the grimace and paint 
 of a clown in a pantomime ; but I do say, and say with con- 
 fidence, that there is scarcely a landscape artist of the 
 present day, however sober and lightless their effects may 
 look, who does not employ more pure and raw color than 
 Turner ; and that the ordinary tinsel and trash, or rather 
 vicious and perilous stuff, according to the power of the 
 mind producing it, with which the walls of our Academy are- 
 half covered, disgracing, in weak hands, or in more powerful, 
 degrading and corrupting our whole school of art, is based 
 on a system of color beside which Turner's is as Vesta to 
 Cotytto — the chastity of fire to the foulness of earth. 
 Every picture of this great colorist has, in one or two parts 
 of it, (key-notes of the whole,) points where the system of 
 each individual color is concentrated by a single stroke, as 
 pure as it can come from the pallet ; but throughout the 
 great space and extent of even the most brilliant of his 
 works, there will not be found a raw color ; that is to say, 
 there is no warmth which has not gray in it, and no blue 
 which has not warmth in it ; and the tints in which he most 
 excels and distances all other men, the most cherished and 
 inimitable portions of his color, are, as with all perfect col- 
 orists they must be, his grays. 
 
 It is instructive in this respect, to compare the sky of the 
 Mercury and Argus with the various illustrations of the se- 
 renity, space, and sublimity naturally inherent in blue and 
 pink, of which every year's exhibition brings forward enough 
 and to spare. In the Mercury and Argus, the pale and va- 
 
238 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 porous blue of the heated sky is broken with gray and pearly 
 white, the gold color of the light warming it more or less as 
 it approaches or retires from the sun ; but throughout, there 
 is not a grain of pure blue ; all is subdued and warmed at 
 the same time by the mingling gray and gold, up to the 
 very zenith, where, breaking through the flaky mist, the 
 transparent and deep azure of the sky is expressed with a 
 single crumbling touch ; the key-note of the whole is given, 
 and every part of it passes at once far into glowing and 
 aerial space. The reader can scarcely fail to remember at 
 once sundry works in contradistinction to this, with great 
 names attached to them, in which the sky is a sheer piece of 
 plumber's and glazier's work, and should be valued per yard, 
 with heavy extra charge for ultramarine. 
 
 Throughout the works of Turner,^ the same truthful prin- 
 ciple of delicate and subdued color is carried out with a care 
 and labor of which it is difficult to form a conception. He 
 o^. ^ • ^ Ofives a dash of pure white for his his^hest 
 
 § 14. The basis of C5 r ^ p 
 
 |ray, .^^"der all light ; but all the othcr whites of his picture 
 are pearled down with gray or gold. He gives 
 a fold of pure crimson to the drapery of his nearest figure, 
 but all his other crimsons will be deepened with black, or 
 warmed with yellow. In one deep reflection of his distant 
 sea, we catch a trace of the purest blue ; \ ut all the rest is 
 palpitating with a varied and delicate gradation of harmon- 
 ized tint, which indeed looks vivid blue aa a mass, but is 
 only so by opposition. It is the most difficult, the most rare 
 thing, to find in his works a definite space, however small, of 
 unconnected color ; that is, either of a blue which has 
 nothing to connect it with the warmth, or of a warm color 
 which has nothing to connect it with the grays of the whole ; 
 and the result is, that there is a general system and under- 
 current of gray pervading the whole of his color, out of 
 which his highest lights, and those local touches of pure 
 color, which are, as I said before, the key-notes of the 
 picture, flash with the peculiar brilliancy and intensity in 
 which he stands alone. 
 
 Intimately associated with this toning down and connec- 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 239 
 
 tion of tlie colors actually used, is his inimitable power of 
 varying and blending them, so as never to give a quarter of 
 §15. The variety mch of canvas without a change in it, a 
 o?L^mrtliS inelody as well as a harmony of one kind 
 or another. Observe, I am not at present 
 speaking of this as artistical or desirable in itself, not as 
 a characteristic of the great colorist, but as the aim of 
 the simple follower of nature. For it is strange to see how 
 marvellously nature varies the most general and simple 
 of her tones. A mass of mountain seen against the light, 
 may, at first, appear all of one blue ; and so it is, blue as a 
 whole, by comparison with other parts of the landscape. 
 But look how that blue is made up. There are black 
 shadows in it under the crags, there are green shadows 
 along the turf, there are gray half-lights upon the rocks, 
 there are faint touches of stealthy warmth and cautious 
 light along their edges ; every bush, every stone, every tuft 
 of moss has its voice in the matter, and joins with individ- 
 ual character in the universal will. Who is there who can 
 do this as Turner will ? The old masters would have set- 
 tled the matter at once with a transparent, agreeable, but 
 monotonous gray. Many among the moderns would prob- 
 ably be equally monotonous with absurd and false colors. 
 Turner only would give the uncertainty — the palpitating, 
 perpetual change — the subjection of all to a great influence, 
 without one part or portion being lost or merged in it — the 
 unity of action with infinity of agent. And I wish to insist 
 § 16. Foiiowint? ^^^s the more particularly, because it is one 
 JmwroacLwe^ eternal principles of nature, that she will 
 
 variety of nature, have One line nor color, nor one portion nor 
 atom of space without a change in it. There is not one of 
 her shadows, tints, or lines that is not in a state of perpetual 
 variation : I do not mean in time, but in space. There is not 
 a leaf in the world which has the same color visible over its 
 whole surface ; it has a white high light somewhere ; and in 
 proportion as it curves to or from that focus, the color 
 is brighter or grayer. Pick up a common flint from the 
 roadside, and count, if you can, its changes and hues 
 
240 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 of color. Every bit of bare ground under your feet has in 
 it a thousand such — the gray pebbles, the warm ochre, the 
 green of incipient vegetation, the grays and blacks of 
 its reflexes and shadows, might keep a painter at work for a 
 month, if he were obliged to follow them touch for touch : 
 how much more, when the same infinity of change is carried 
 out with vastness of object and space. The extreme of 
 distance may appear at first monotonous ; but the least ex- 
 amination will show it to be full of every kind of change — 
 that its outlines are perpetually melting and appearing 
 again — sharp here, vague there — now lost altogether, now 
 just hinted and still confused among each other — and so for- 
 ever in a state and necessity of change. Hence, wherever 
 in a painting we have unvaried color extended even over a 
 small space, there is falsehood. Nothing can be natural 
 which is monotonous ; nothing true which only tells one 
 story. The brown foreground and rocks of Claude's Sinon 
 before Priam are as false as color can be : first, because 
 there never was such a brown under sunlight, for even the 
 sand and cinders (volcanic tufa) about Naples, granting that 
 he had studied from these ugliest of all formations, are, 
 where they are fresh fractured, golden and lustrous in full 
 light compared to these ideals of crag, and become, like all 
 other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered ; and secondly, 
 because no rock that ever nature stained is without its 
 countless breaking tints of varied vegetation. And even 
 Stanfield, master as he is of rock form, is apt in the same 
 way to give us here and there a little bit of mud, instead of 
 stone. 
 
 What I am next about to say with respect to Turner's 
 color, I should wish to be received with caution, as it admits 
 of dispute. I think that the first approach to viciousness of 
 § 17. His dislike color in any master is commonly indicated chiefly 
 fondness for" the by a prevalence of purple, and an absence of 
 iTran^bLlk: yellow. I think nature mixes yellow with al- 
 n^^turrintliirre- ^^^t cvcry One of her hues, never, or very 
 ^P^^^- rarely, using red without it, but frequently 
 
 using yellow with scarcely any red \ and I believe it will be 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR, 
 
 241 
 
 in consequence found that her favorite opposition, that which 
 generally characterizes and gives tone to her color, is yellow 
 and black, passing, as it retires, into white and blue. It is 
 beyond dispute that the great fundamental opposition of 
 Rubens is yellow and black ; and that on this, concentrated 
 in one part of the picture, and modified in various grays 
 throughout, chiefly depend the tones of all his finest works. 
 And in Titian, though there is a far greater tendency to the 
 purple than in Rubens, I believe no red is ever mixed with 
 the pure blue, or glazed over it, which has not in it a modi- 
 fying quantity of yellow. At all events, I am nearly certain 
 that whatever rich and pure purples are introduced locally, 
 by the great colorists, nothing is so destructive of all fine 
 color as the slightest tendency to purple in general tone; and 
 I am equally certain that Turner is distinguished from all the 
 vicious colorists of the present day, by the foundation of all 
 his tones being black, yellow, and the intermediate grays, 
 while the tendency of our common glare-seekers is invariably 
 to pure, cold, impossible purples. So fond indeed is Turner 
 of black and yellow, that he has given us more than one 
 composition, both drawings and paintings, based on these 
 two colors alone, of which the magnificent Quilleboeuf , which 
 I consider one of the most perfect pieces of simple color ex- 
 isting, is a most striking example ; and I think that where, 
 as in some of the late Venices, there has been something like 
 a marked appearance of purple tones, even though exquisitely 
 corrected by vivid orange and warm green in the foreground, 
 the general color has not been so perfect or truthful : my 
 own feelings would always guide me rather to the warm 
 grays of such pictures as the Snow Storm, or the glowing 
 scarlet and gold of thie Napoleon and Slave Ship. But I do 
 not insist at present on this part of the subject, as being per- 
 haps more proper for future examination, when we are con- 
 sidering the ideal of color. 
 
 The above remarks have been made entirely with reference 
 to the recent Academy pictures, which have been chiefly at- 
 tacked for their color. I by no means intend them to apply 
 to the early works of Turner, those which the enlightened 
 Vol. L— 16 
 
242 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 newspaper critics are perpetually talking about as charac- 
 teristic of a time when Turner was " really great." He is, 
 and was, really great, from the time when he first could hold 
 a brush, but he never was so e^reat as he is now 
 
 §18. His early mi n • id i i • • . 
 
 works are false 1 ue brossmg the .brook, glorious as it IS as a 
 m color. composition, and perfect in all that is most 
 
 desirable and most ennobling in art, is scarcely to be looked 
 upon as a piece of color ; it is an agreeable, cool, gray ren- 
 dering of space and form, but it is not color ; if it be re- 
 garded as such, it is thoroughly false and vapid, and very 
 far inferior to the tones of the same kind given by Claude. 
 The reddish brown in the foreground of the Fall of Carthage, 
 with all diffidence be it spoken, is, as far as my feelings are 
 competent to judge, crude, sunless, and in every way wrong; 
 and both this picture and the Building of Carthage, though 
 this latter is far the finer of the two, are quite unworthy of 
 Turner as a colorist. 
 
 Not so with the drawings ; these, countless as they are, 
 from the earliest to the latest, though presenting an unbroken 
 chain of increasing difficulty overcome, and truth illustrated, 
 § 19. His drawings ^^^3 according to their aim, equally faultless 
 invariably perfect, to color. Whatever we have hitherto said, 
 applies to them in its fullest extent ; though each, being gen- 
 erally the realization of some effect actually seen, and realized 
 but once, requires almost a separate essay. As a class, they 
 are far quieter and chaster than the Academy pictures, and, 
 were they better known, might enable our connoisseurs to 
 form a somewhat more accurate judgment of the intense study 
 of nature on which all Turner's color is based. 
 
 One point only remains to be noted respecting his system 
 of color generally — its entire subordination to light and shade, 
 a subordination which there is no need to prove here, as 
 § 20. Thesubjec- Gvcry engraving from his works — and few are 
 "r^totlft'5 unengraved--is sufficient demonstration of it. 
 chiaroscuro. J ImwQ bcforc showu the inferiority and unim- 
 portance in nature of color, as a truth, comp^recj with light 
 and shade. That inferiority is maintained and assepted by all 
 really great works of color ; but most by Turner's as thpir 
 
OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 243 
 
 color is most intense. Whatever brilliancy he may choose to 
 assume, is subjected to an inviolable law of chiaroscuro, from 
 which there is no appeal. No richness nor depth of tint is 
 considered of value enough to atone for the loss of one par- 
 ticle of arranged light. No brilliancy of hue is permitted to 
 interfere with the depth of a determined shadow. And hence 
 it is, that while engravings from works far less splendid in 
 color are often vapid and cold, because the little color em- 
 ployed has not been rightly based on light and shade, an 
 engraving from Turner is always beautiful and forcible in 
 proportion as the color of the original has been intense, and 
 never in a single instance has failed to express the picture as 
 a perfect composition.* Powerful and captivating and faith- 
 
 * This is saying too much ; for it not unfrequently happens that the 
 light and shade of the original is lost in the engraving, the effect of 
 which is afterwards partially recovered, with the aid of the artist him- 
 self, by introductions of new features. Sometimes, when a drawing 
 depends chiefly on color, the engraver gets unavoidably embarrassed, and 
 must be assisted by some change or exaggeration of the effect ; but the 
 more frequent case is, that the engraver's difficulties result merely from 
 his inattention to, or wilful deviations from his original ; and that the 
 artist is obliged to assist him by such expedients as the error itself 
 suggests. 
 
 Not unfrequently in reviewing a plate, as very constantly in reviewing 
 a picture after some time has elapsed since its completion, even the 
 painter is liable to make unnecessary or hurtful changes. In the plate 
 of the Old Temeraire, lately published in Finden's gallery, I do not 
 know whether it was Turner or the engraver who broke up the water 
 into sparkling ripple, but it was a grievous mistake, and has destroyed 
 the whole dignity and value of the conception. The flash of lightning 
 in the Winch elsea of the England series does not exist in the original ; 
 it is put in to withdraw the attention of the spectator from the sky 
 which the engraver destroyed. 
 
 There is an unfortunate persuasion among modern engravers that color 
 can be expressed by particular characters of line ; and in the endeavor 
 to distinguish by different lines, different colors of equal depth, they 
 frequently lose the whole system of light and shade. It will hardly be 
 credited that the piece of foreground on the left of Turner's Modern 
 Italy, represented in the Art-Union engraving as nearly coal black, is in 
 the original of a pale warm gray, hardly darker than the sky. All at- 
 tempt to record color in engraving, is heraldry out of its place ; the en- 
 graver has no power beyond that of expressing transparency or opacity 
 
244 
 
 OF TRUTH OF COLOR. 
 
 ful as his color is, it is the least important of all his excel- 
 lences, because it is the least important feature of nature. He 
 paints in color, but he thinks in light and shade ; and were 
 it necessary, rather than lose one line of his forms, or one ray 
 
 by greater or less openness of line, (for the same depth of tint is pro- 
 ducible by lines with very different intervals.) 
 
 Texture of surface is only in a measure in the power of the steel, and 
 ought not to be laboriously sought after ; nature's surfaces are distin- 
 guished more by form than texture ; a stone is often smoother than a 
 leaf ; but if texture is to be <; iven, let the engraver at least be sure that 
 he knows what the texture of the object actually is, and how to rep- 
 resent it. The leaves in the foreground of the engraved Mercury and 
 Argus have all of them three or four black lines across them. What 
 sort of leaf texture is supposed to be represented by these ? The stones 
 in the foreground of Turner's Llanthony received from the artist the 
 powdery texture of sandstone ; the engraver covered them with con- 
 torted lines and turned them into old timber. 
 
 A still more fatal cause of failure is the practice of making out or 
 finishing what the artist left incomplete. In the England plate of Dud- 
 ley, there are two offensive blank windows in the large building with 
 the chimney on the left. These are engraver's improvements ; in the 
 original they are barely traceable, their lines being excessively faint and 
 tremulous as with the movement of heated air between them and the 
 spectator ; their vulgarity is thus taken away, and the whole building 
 left in one grand unbroken mass. It is almost impossible to break en- 
 gravers of this unfortunate habit. I have even heard of their taking 
 journeys of some distance in order to obtain knowledge of the details 
 which the artist intentionally omitted ; and the evil will necessarily 
 continue until they receive something like legitimate artistical educa- 
 tion. In one or two instances, however, especially in small plates, they 
 have shown great feelin<2:: ; the plates of Miller (especially those of the 
 Turner illustrations to Scott) are in most instances perfect and beautiful 
 interpretations of the originals ; so those of Goodall in Rogers's works, 
 and Cousens's in the Rivers of France ; those of the Yorkshire series 
 are also very valuable, though singularly inferior to the drawings. But 
 none even of these men appear capable of producing a large plate. They 
 have no knowledge of the means of rendering their lines vital or valu- 
 able ; cross-hatching stands for everything ; and inexcusably, for thou : h 
 we cannot expect every engraver to etch like Rembrandt or Albert 
 Durer, or every wood-cutter to draw like Titian, at least something of 
 the system and power of the grand works of those men mi<iht be pre- 
 served, and some mind and meaning stolen into the reticulation of the 
 restlefcs modern lines. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 245 
 
 of his sunshine, would, I apprehend, be content to paint in 
 black and white to the end of his life. It is by mistaking the 
 shadow for the substance, and aiming at the brilliancy and 
 the fire, without perceiving of what deep-studied shade and 
 inimitable form it is at once the result and the illustration, 
 that the host of his imitators sink into deserved disgrace. 
 With him, as with all the greatest painters, and in Turner's 
 more than all, the hue is a beautiful auxiliary in working out 
 the great impression to be conveyed, but is not the source nor 
 the essence of that impression ; it is little more than a visible 
 melody, given to raise and assist the mind in the reception 
 of nobler ideas — as sacred passages of sweet sound, to pre- 
 pare the feelings for the reading of the mysteries of God. 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 
 
 It is not my intention to enter, in the present portion of 
 the work, upon any examination of Turner's particular effects 
 of light. We must know something about what is beautiful 
 §1. We are not at before we spcak of these. 
 
 fne"c^^^^^^ At present I wish only to insist upon two great 
 fects of light. principles of chiaroscuro, which are observed 
 throughout the works of the great modern master, and set at 
 defiance by the ancients — great general laws, which may, or 
 may not, be sources of beauty, but whose observance is in- 
 disputably necessary to truth. 
 
 Go out some bright sunny day in winter, and look for a 
 tree with a broad trunk, having rather delicate boughs hang- 
 ing down on the sunny side, near the trunk. Stand four or 
 five yards from it, with your back to the sun. You will find 
 that the boughs between you and the trunk of the tree are 
 very indistinct, that you confound them in places with the 
 trunk itself, and cannot possibly trace one of them from its 
 insertion to its extremity. But the shadows which they cast 
 upon the trunk, you will find clear, dark, and distinct, per- 
 
246 OF TRUTH OF CHIAHOSCURO. 
 
 fectly traceable through their whole course, except when 
 they are interrupted by the crossing boughs. And if you 
 retire backwards, you will come to a point where you cannot 
 see the intervening boughs at all, or only a fragment of them 
 here and there, but can still see their shadows perfectly plain. 
 Now, this may serve to show you the immense prominence 
 and importance of shadows where there is anything like bright 
 light. They are, in fact, commonly far more conspicuous than 
 the thing which casts them, for being as large as the casting 
 object, and altogether made up of a blackness deeper than 
 the darkest part of the casting object, (while that object is 
 also broken up with positive and reflected lights,) their large, 
 broad, unbroken spaces, tell strongly on the eye, especially 
 as all form is rendered partially, often totally invisible within 
 them, and as they are suddenly terminated by the sharpest 
 lines which nature ever shows. For no outline of objects 
 whatsoever is so sharp as the edge of a close shadow. Put 
 your finger over a piece of white paper in the sun, and ob- 
 serve the difference between the softness of the outline of the 
 finger itself and the decision of the edge of the shadow. 
 And note also the excessive gloom of the latter. A piece of 
 black cloth, laid in the light, will not attain one-fourth of the 
 blackness of the paper under the shadow. 
 
 Hence shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the 
 most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest 
 lights. All forms are understood and explained chiefly by 
 p „ , ^ their aofency : the rouo^hness of the bark of a 
 
 §2. And there- . . 
 
 fore the distinct- tree, f or instance, is not seen in the lio:ht, nor 
 
 ness of shadows . , , i . . , i 
 
 is the chief in the shadc ; it is only seen between the two, 
 
 means of expres- , . i i i p .\ • i i • 
 
 sing vividness of where the shadows OI the ridges explain it. 
 light. And hence, if we have to express vivid light, our 
 
 very first aim must be to get the shadows sharp and visible ; 
 and this is not to be done by blackness, (though indeed 
 chalk on white paper Is the only thing which comes up to 
 the intensity of real shadows,) but by keeping them per- 
 fectly flat, keen, and even. A very pale shadow, if it be 
 quite flat — if it conceal the details of the objects it crosses 
 — if it be gray and cold compared to their color, and very 
 
OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 
 
 247 
 
 sharp edged, will be far more conspicuous, and make every- 
 thing out of it look a great deal more like sunlight, than a 
 shadow ten times its depth, shaded off at the edge, and con- 
 o „ rx, , ^, founded with the color of the objects on which 
 
 § 3. Total ab- ^ , 
 
 senceof suchdis- it falls. Now the old mastcrs of the Italian 
 
 tinctness in the ii. ^ ni* i t i 
 
 works of the school, in almost ail their works, directly reverse 
 this principle: they blacken their shadows till the 
 picture becomes quite appalling, and everything in it invisible; 
 but they make a point of losing their edges, and carrying 
 them off by gradation ; in consequence utterly destroying 
 every appearance of sunlight. All their shadows are the 
 faint, secondary darknesses of mere daylight ^ the sun has 
 nothing whatever to do with them. The shadow between 
 the pages of the book which you hold in your hand is dis- 
 tinct and visible enough, (though you are, I suppose, read- 
 ing it by the ordinary daylight of your room,) out of the 
 sun ; and this weak and secondary shadow is all that we ever 
 find in the Italian masters, as indicative of sunshine. Even 
 Cuyp and Berghern, though they know thor- 
 Ibsencf^irT'^the oughly wcll what they are about in their fore- 
 Dutch, grounds, forget the principle in their distances ; 
 and though in Claude's seaports, where he has plain archi- 
 tecture to deal with, he gives us something like real shadows 
 along the stones, the moment we come to ground and foli- 
 age with lateral light, away go the shadows and the sun 
 together. In the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, in our own 
 gallery, the trunks of the trees between the water-wheel and 
 the white figure in the middle distance, are dark and visible ; 
 but their shadows are scarcely discernible on the ground, and 
 are quite vague and lost in the building. In nature, every 
 bit of the shadow would have been darker than the darkest 
 part of the trunks, and both on the ground and building 
 would have been defined and conspicuous ; while the trunks 
 themselves would have been faint, confused, and indis- 
 tinguishable, in their illumined parts, from the grass or dis- 
 tance. So in Poussin's Phocion, the shadow of the stick on 
 the stone in the right-hand corner, is shaded off and lost, 
 while you see the stick plain all the way. In nature's sun- 
 
248 
 
 OF TRUTH OF GHIAROSGURO. 
 
 light it would have been the direct reverse — you would have 
 seen the shadow black and sharp all the way down, but you 
 would have had to look for the stick, which in all probability 
 would in several places have been confused with the stone 
 behind it. 
 
 And so throughout the works of Claude, Poussin, and Sal- 
 vator, we shall find, especially in^ their conventional foliage, 
 and unarticulated barbarisms of rock, that their whole sum 
 and substance of chiaroscuro is merely the gradation and 
 variation which nature gives in the body of her shadows, and 
 that all which they do to express sunshine, she does to vary 
 shade. They take only one step, while she always takes 
 two ; marking, in the first place, with violent decision, the 
 great transition from sun to shade, and then varying the 
 shade itself with a thousand gentle gradations and double 
 shadows, in themselves equivalent, and more than equiva- 
 lent, to all that the old masters did for their entire chiaros- 
 curo. 
 
 Now if there be one principle, or secret more than another, 
 on which Turner depends for attaining brilliancy of light, it 
 is his clear and exquisite drawing of the shadows. What- 
 §5 Theperfec- ^^^^^ obscure, misty, or undefined in his ob- 
 tion of Turner's -jects or his atmosphere, he takes care that the 
 
 works m this re- i i i 
 
 spect. shadows be sharp and clear — and then he knows 
 
 that the light will take care of itself, and he makes them 
 clear, not by blackness, but by excessive evenness, unity, 
 and sharpness of edge. He will keep them clear and dis- 
 tinct, and make them felt as shadows, though they are so 
 faint, that, but for their decisive forms, we should not have 
 observed them for darkness at all. He will throw them one 
 after another like transparent veils, along the earth and upon 
 the air, till the whole picture palpitates with them, and yet 
 the darkest of them will be a faint gray, imbued and pene- 
 trated with light. The pavement on the left of the Hero 
 and Leander, is about the most thorough piece of this kind 
 of sorcery that I remember in art ; but of the general prin- 
 ciple, not one of his works is without constant evidence. 
 Take the vignette of the garden opposite the title-page of 
 
OF TRUTH OF CniAROSCURO, 
 
 249 
 
 Rogers's Poems, and note the drawing of the nearest balus- 
 trade on the right. The balusters themselves are faint and 
 misty, and the light through them feeble ; but the shadows 
 of them are sharp and dark, and the intervening light as in- 
 tense as it can be left. And see how much more distinct 
 the shadow of the running figure is on the pavement, than 
 the checkers of the pavement itself. Observe the shadows on 
 the trupk of the tree at page 91, how they conquer all the 
 details of the trunk itself, and become darker and more con- 
 spicuous than any part of the boughs or limbs, and so in 
 the vignette to Campbell's Beechtree's Petition. Take the 
 beautiful concentration of all that is most characteristic of 
 Italy as she is, at page 168 of Rogers's Italy, where we have 
 the long shadows of the trunks made by far the most con- 
 spicuous thing in the whole foreground, and hear how 
 Wordsworth, the keenest-eyed of all modern poets for what 
 is deep and essential in nature, illustrates Turner here, as 
 we shall find him doing in all other points. 
 
 Atthe root 
 
 Of that tall pine, the shadow of whose bare 
 And slender stem, while here I sit at eve, 
 Oft stretches towards me, like a long straight path, 
 Traced faintly in the greensward." 
 
 Excursion, Book VI. 
 
 So again in the Rhymer's Glen, (Illustrations to Scott,) 
 note the intertwining of the shadows across the path, and 
 the checkering of the trunks by them ; and again on the 
 bridge in the Armstrong's Tower ; and yet more in the long 
 avenue of Brienne, where we have a length of two or three 
 miles expressed by the playing shadows alone, and the whole 
 picture filled with sunshine by the long lines of darkness 
 cast by the figures on the snow. The Hampton Court in 
 the England series, is another very striking instance. In 
 fact, the general system of execution observable in all Turn- 
 er's drawings, is to work his grounds richly and fully, some- 
 times stippling, and giving infinity of delicate, mysterious, 
 and ceaseless detail ; and on the ground so prepared to cast 
 his shadows with one dash of the brush, leaving an exces- 
 
250 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO, 
 
 sively sharp edge of watery color. Such at least is com- 
 monly the case in such coarse and broad instances as those 
 o b « ^ * I have above oriven. Words are not accurate 
 
 § 6. The effect of o 
 
 h^s shadows upon enough, nor delicate enough to express or trace 
 the constant, all-pervading influence of the finer 
 and vaguer shadovs^s throughout his works, that thrilling 
 influence which gives to the light they leave, its passion and 
 its power. There is not a stone, not a leaf, not a cloud, over 
 which light is not felt to be actually passing and palpitating 
 before our eyes. There is the motion, the actual wave and 
 radiation of the darted beam — not the dull universal day- 
 light, which falls on the landscape without life, or direction, 
 or speculation, equal on all things and dead on all things ; 
 but the breathing, animated, exulting light, which feels, and 
 receives, and rejoices, and acts — which chooses one thing 
 and rejects another — which seeks, and finds, and loses again 
 — leaping from rock to rock, from leaf to leaf, from wave to 
 wave, — glowing, or flashing, or scintillating, according to 
 what it strikes, or in its holier moods, absorbing and enfold- 
 ing all things in the deep fulness of its repose, and then 
 again losing itself in bewilderment, and doubt, and dimness ; 
 or perishing and passing away, entangled in drifting mist, 
 or melted into melancholy air, but still, — kindling, or declin- 
 ing, sparkling or still, it is the living light, which breathes 
 in its deepest, most entranced rest, which sleeps, but never 
 dies. 
 
 I need scarcely insist farther on the marked distinction 
 between the works of the old masters and those of the great 
 modern landscape-painters in this respect. It is one which 
 § 7. The distinc- the reader can perfectly well work out for him- 
 between^aimo^st Self, by the slightest Systematic attention, — one 
 the^'ancS^lnd ^^ich he will find existing, not merely between 
 modern schools, this work and that, but throughout the whole 
 body of their productions, and down to every leaf and line. 
 And a little careful watching of nature, especially in her 
 foliage and foregrounds, and comparison of her with Claude, 
 Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator, will soon show him that 
 those artists worked entirely on conventional principles, not 
 
OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 251 
 
 representing what they saw, but what they thought would 
 make a handsome picture ; and even when they went to 
 nature, which I believe to have been a very much rarer 
 practice with them than their biographers would have us 
 suppose, they copied her like children, drawing what they 
 knew to be there, but not what they saw there.* I believe 
 you may search the foregrounds of Claude, from one end of 
 Europe to another, and you will not find the shadow of one 
 leaf cast upon another. You will find leaf after leaf painted 
 more or less boldly or brightly out of the black ground, and 
 you will find dark leaves defined in perfect form upon the 
 light ; but you will not find the form of a single leaf dis- 
 guised or interrupted by the shadow of another. And 
 Poussin and Salvator are still farther from anything like 
 genuine truth. There is nothing in their pictures which 
 might not be manufactured in their painting-room, with a 
 branch or two of brambles and a bunch or two of weeds be- 
 fore them, to give them the form of the leaves. And it is 
 refreshing to turn from their ignorant and impotent repeti- 
 tions of childish conception, to the clear, close, genuine 
 studies of modern artists ; for it is not Turner only, (though 
 here, as in all other points, the first,) who is remarkable for 
 fine and expressive decision of chiaroscuro. Some passages 
 by J. D. Harding are thoroughly admirable in this respect, 
 though this master is getting a little too much into a habit 
 of general keen execution, which prevents the parts which 
 ought to be especially decisive from being felt as such, and 
 which makes his pictures, especially the large ones, look a 
 little thin. But some of his later passages of rock fore- 
 ground have, taken in the abstract, been beyond all praise, 
 owing to the exquisite forms and firm expressiveness of their 
 shadows. And the chiaroscuro of Stanfield is equally de- 
 serving of the most attentive study. 
 
 The second point to which I wish at present to direct at- 
 tention has reference to the arrangement of light and shade. 
 It is the constant habit of nature to use both her highest 
 lights and deepest shadows in exceedingly small quantity \ 
 * Compare Sect. II. Chap. 11. § 6. 
 
252 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 
 
 always in points, never in masses. She will give a large 
 mass of tender light in sky or water, impressive by its quan- 
 tity, and a large mass of tender shadow relieved against it, 
 §8. Second great in foliage, or hill, or building ; but the light is 
 oscnro^^othhTgh always subdued if it be extensive — the shadow 
 Sow'are uZ ^Iways feeble if be broad. She will then fill up 
 in equal quantity the rest of her picture wdth middle tints 
 
 and only m -t^ 
 
 points. and pale grays of some sort or another, and 
 
 on this quiet and harmonious whole, she will touch her 
 high lights in spots — the foam of an isolated wave — the sail 
 of a solitary vessel — the flash of the sun from a wet roof — 
 the gleam of a single whitewashed cottage — or some such 
 sources of local brilliancy, she will use so vividly and del- 
 icately as to throw everything else into definite shade by 
 comparison. And then taking up the gloom, she will use 
 the black hollows of some overhanging bank, or the black 
 dress of some shaded figure, or the depth of some sunless 
 chink of wall or window, so sharply as to throw everything 
 else into definite light by comparison ; thus reducing the 
 whole mass of her picture to a delicate middle tint, approach- 
 ing, of course, here to light, and there to gloom ; but yet 
 sharply separated from the utmost degrees either of the one 
 or the other. 
 
 Now it is a curious thing that none of our writers on art 
 seem to have noticed the great principle of nature in this 
 respect. They all talk of deep shadow as a thing that may 
 §9. Neglect or be given in quantity, — one-fourth of the pict- 
 thrJ'p^indpie by Certain effects, much more. Barry, 
 
 writers on art. foj. instance, says that the practice of the great 
 painters, who " best understood the effects of chiaroscuro," 
 was, for the most part, to make the mass of middle tint 
 larger than the light, and the mass of dark larger than 
 the masses of light and middle tint together, i.e.^ occu- 
 pying more than one-half of the picture. Now I do 
 not know what we are to suppose is meant by " under- 
 standing chiaroscuro." If it means being able to manu- 
 facture agreeable patterns in the shape of pyramids, and 
 crosses, and zigzags, into which arms and legs are to be 
 
OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 253 
 
 persuaded, and passion and motion arranged, for the promo- 
 tion and encouragement of the cant of criticism, such a prin- 
 ciple may be productive of the most advantageous results. 
 But if it means, being acquainted with the deep, perpetual, 
 systematic, unintrusive simplicity and unwearied variety of 
 nature's chiaroscuro — if it means the perception that black- 
 ness and sublimity are not synonymous, and that space and 
 light may possibly be coadjutors — then no man, who ever 
 advocated or dreamed of such a principle, is 
 
 § 10. And conse- , • ui J j 
 
 quent misguiding anything more than a novice, blunderer, and 
 
 of the student, i ' ^ i • t_* aj h it/? 
 
 trickster in chiaroscuro. And my firm belief 
 is, that though color is inveighed against by all artists, as 
 the great Circe of art — the great transformer of mind into 
 sensuality — no fondness for it, no study of it, is half so great 
 a peril and stumbling-block to the young student, as the 
 admiration he hears bestowed on such artificial, false, and 
 juggling chiaroscuro, and the instruction he receives, based 
 on such principles as that given us by Fuseli — that " mere 
 natural light and shade, however separately or individually 
 true, is not always legitimate chiaroscuro in art." It may 
 not always be agreeable to a sophisticated, unfeeling, and 
 perverted mind ; but the student had better throw up his 
 art at once, than proceed on the conviction that any other 
 can ever be legitimate, I believe I shall be perfectly well 
 able to prove, in following parts of the work, that mere 
 natural light and shade " is the only fit and faithful attend- 
 ant of the highest art ; and that all tricks — all visible, in- 
 tended arrangement — all extended shadows and narrow 
 lights — everything in fact, in the least degree artificial, or 
 tending to make the mind dwell upon light and shade as 
 such, is an injury, instead of an aid, to conceptions of high 
 ideal dignity. I believe I shall be able also to show, that 
 nature manages her chiaroscuro a great deal more neatly 
 and cleverly than people fancy ; — that "mere natural light 
 and shade " is a very much finer thing than most artists can 
 put together, and that none think they can improve upon it 
 but those who never understood it. 
 
 But however this may be, it is beyond dispute that every 
 
254 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO. 
 
 permission given to the student to amuse himself with paint- 
 ing one figure all black, and the next all white, and throwing 
 them out with a backo^round of nothing^ — every 
 
 § 11. The great . . . , i ° ^ -i i • i f 
 
 value of a simple permission giveu to him to spoil his pocketbook 
 chiaroscuro. ^ith sixths of suushine and sevenths of shade, 
 and other such fractional sublimities, is so much more diffi- 
 culty laid in the way of his ever becoming a master ; and that 
 none are in the right road to real excellence, but those who 
 are struggling to render the simplicity, purity, and inexhausti- 
 ble variety of nature's own chiaroscuro in open, cloudless 
 daylight, giving the expanse of harmonious light — the speak- 
 ing, decisive shadow — and the exquisite grace, tenderness, 
 and grandeur of aerial opposition of local color and equally 
 illuminated lines. No chiaroscuro is so difficult as this ; and 
 none so noble, chaste, or impressive. On this part of the 
 subject, however, I must not enlarge at present. I wish now 
 only to speak of those great principles of chiaroscuro, which 
 nature observes, even when she is most working for effect — 
 when she is playing with thunderclouds and sunbeams, and 
 throwing one thing out and obscuring another, with the most 
 marked artistical feeling and intention ; — even then, she never 
 forgets her great rule, to give precisely the same quantity of 
 deepest shade which she does of highest light, and no more ; 
 points of the one answering to points of the other, and both 
 vividly conspicuous and separated from all the rest of the 
 landscape. 
 
 And it is most singular that this separation, which is the 
 great source of brilliancy in nature, should not only be unob- 
 served, but absolutely forbidden by our great writers on art, 
 § 12. The sharp ^^o are always talking about connecting the 
 SThghts^'from ^^E^^ ^i^^ ^^^^ shade by imperceptible gradations. 
 her middle tint. Now SO surely as this is done, all sunshine is 
 lost, for imperceptible gradation from light to dark is the 
 characteristic of objects seen out of sunshine, in what is, in 
 landscape, shadow. Nature's principle of getting light is the 
 direct reverse. She will cover her whole landscape with mid- 
 dle tint, in which she will have as many gradations as you 
 please, and a great many more than you can paint ; but on 
 
OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO, 
 
 255 
 
 this middle tint she touches her extreme lights, and extreme 
 darks, isolated and sharp, so that the eye goes to them di- 
 rectly, and feels them to be key-notes of the whole composi- 
 tion. And although the dark touches are less attractive than 
 the light ones, it is not because they are less distinct, but be- 
 cause they exhibit nothing ; while the bright touches are in 
 parts where everything is seen, and where in consequence the 
 eye goes to rest. But yet the high lights do not exhibit any- 
 thing in themselves, they are too bright and dazzle the eye ; 
 and having no shadows in them, cannot exhibit form, for form 
 can only be seen by shadow of some kind or another. Hence 
 the highest lights and deepest darks agree in this, that noth- 
 ing is seen in either of them ; that both are in exceedingly 
 small quantity, and both are marked and distinct from the 
 middle tones of the landscape — the one by their brilliancy, 
 the other by their sharp edges, even though m.any of the more 
 energetic middle tints may approach their intensity very 
 closely. 
 
 I need scarcely do more than tell you to glance at any one 
 of the works of Turner, and you will perceive in a moment 
 the exquisite observation of all these principles ; the sharp- 
 § 13. The truth ness, decision, conspicuousness, and excessively 
 of Turner. small quantity, both of extreme light and ex- 
 treme shade, all the mass of the picture being graduated and 
 delicate middle tint. Take up the Rivers of France, for in- 
 stance, and turn over a few of the plates in succession. 
 
 1. Chateau Gaillard (vignette.)— Black figures and boats, 
 points of shade ; sun-touches on castle, and wake of boat, of 
 light. See how the eye rests on both, and observe how sharp 
 and separate all the lights are, falling in spots, edged by 
 shadow, but not melting off into it. 
 
 2. Orleans. — The crowded figures supply both points of 
 shade and light. Observe the delicate middle tint of both 
 in the whole mass of buildings, and compare this with the 
 blackness of Canaletto's shadows, against which neither fig- 
 ures nor anything else can ever tell, as points of shade. 
 
 3. Blois. — White figures in boats, buttresses of bridge, 
 dome of church on the right, for light ; woman on horse' 
 
256 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CniAROSCURO, 
 
 back, heads of boats, for shadow. Note especially the isola- 
 tion of the light on the church dome. 
 
 4. Chateau de Blois. — Torches and white figures for light, 
 roof of chapel and monks' dresses for shade. 
 
 5. Beaugencj. — Sails and spire opposed to buoy and boats. 
 An exquisite instance of brilliant, sparkling, isolated touches 
 of morning light. 
 
 6. Amboise. — White sail and clouds ; cypresses under 
 castle. 
 
 7. Chauteau of Amboise. — The boat in the centre, with 
 its reflections, needs no comment. Note the glancing lights 
 under the bridge. This is a very glorious and perfect in- 
 stance. 
 
 8. St. Julien, Tours. — Especially remarkable for its preser- 
 vation of deep points of gloom, because the whole picture is 
 one of extended shade. 
 
 I need scarcely go on. The above instances are taken as 
 they happen to come, without selection. The reader can 
 proceed for himself. I may, however, name a few cases of 
 chiaroscuro more especially deserving of his study. Scene 
 between Quilleboeuf and Villequier, — Honfleur, — Light Tow- 
 ers of the Heve, — On the Seine between Mantes and Yernon, 
 — The Lantern at St. Cloud, — Confluence of Seine andMarne, 
 — Troyes, — the first and last vignette, and those at pages 36, 
 63, 95, 184, 192, 203, of Rogers's poems ; the first and second 
 in Campbell, St. Maurice in the Italy, where note the black 
 stork ; Brienne, Skiddaw, Mayburgh, Melrose, Jedburgh, in 
 the illustrations to Scott, and the vignettes to Milton, not 
 because these are one whit superior to others of his works, 
 but because the laws of which we have been speaking are 
 more strikingly developed in them, and because they have 
 been well engraved. It is impossible to reason from the 
 larger plates, in which half the chiaroscuro is totally de- 
 stroyed by the haggling, blackening, and making out " of 
 the engravers. 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 257 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE : FIRST, AS DEPENDENT ON THE FOCUS 
 
 OF THE EYE.* 
 
 In the first chapter of this section I noticed the distinction 
 between real aerial perspective, and that overcharged con- 
 trast of light and shade by which the old masters obtained 
 § 1. Space is their deceptive effect ; and I showed that, 
 dicated^^by ^ the though inferior to them in the precise quality 
 fe^c t™thaii *by tonc of aerial color, our great modern master 
 their hue. jg altogether more truthful in the expression of 
 
 the proportionate relation of all his distances to one another. 
 I am now about to examine those modes of expressing space, 
 both in nature and art by far the most important, which are 
 dependent, not on the relative hues of objects, but on the 
 drawing of them : by far the most important, I say, because 
 the most constant and certain ; for nature herself is not al- 
 ways aerial. Local effects are frequent which interrupt and 
 violate the laws of aerial tone, and induce strange deception 
 in our ideas of distance. I have often seen the summit of a 
 snowy mountain look nearer than its base, owing to the per- 
 fect clearness of the upper air. But the drawing of objects, 
 that is to say, tjie degree in which their details and parts 
 are distinct or confused, is an unfailing and certain criterion 
 of their distance ; and if this be rightly rendered in a paint- 
 ing, we shall have genuine truth of space, in spite of many 
 errors in aerial tone ; while, if this be neglected, all space 
 
 * I have left this chapter in its original place, because I am more 
 than ever convinced of the truth of the pasition advanced in the 8th 
 paragraph ; nor can I at present assign any other cause, than that here 
 given, for what is there asserted ; and yet I cannot but think that I 
 have allowed far too much influence to a change so slight as that which 
 we insensibly make in the focus of the eye ; and that the real justifica- 
 tion of Turner's practice, with respect to some of his foregrounds, is to 
 be elsewhere sought. I leave the subject, therefore, to the reader's 
 consideration. 
 
 Vol. I. -17 
 
258 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 will be destroyed, whatever dexterity of tint may be em- 
 ployed to/3onceal the defective drawing. 
 
 First, then, it is to be noticed, that the eye, like any other 
 lens, must have its focus altered, in order to convey a dis- 
 tinct image of objects at different distances ; so that it is 
 §2 itisimpossi ^^^^^^J impossible to see distinctly, at the same 
 bie to see objects moment, two objects, one of which is much 
 
 at unequal dis- „ , np i i r\p ^ - 
 
 tances distinctly farther Oil than another. Oi this, any one may 
 
 at one moment. . |. t-i . i 
 
 convince himseii in an instant. Look at the 
 bars of your window-frame, so as to get a clear image of 
 their lines and form, and you cannot, while your eye is fixed 
 on them, perceive anything but the most indistinct and 
 shadowy images of whatever objects may be visible beyond. 
 But fix your eyes on those objects, so as to see them clearly, 
 and though they are just beyond and apparently beside the 
 window-frame, that frame will only be felt or seen as a vague, 
 flitting, obscure interruption to whatever is perceived beyond 
 it. A little attention directed to this fact will convince 
 every one of its universality, and prove beyond dispute that 
 objects at unequal distances cannot be seen together, not 
 from the intervention of air or mist, but from the impossibil- 
 ity of the rays proceeding from both, converging to the same 
 focus, so that the whole impression, either of one or the other, 
 must necessarily be confused, indistinct, and inadequate. 
 
 But, be it observed (and I have only to request that what- 
 ever I say may be tested by immediate experiment,) the dif- 
 ference of focus necessary is greatest within the first five 
 § 3. Especially hundred yards, and therefore, though it is totally 
 compamtTvety impossible to see an object ten yards from the 
 eye, and one a quarter of a mile beyond it, at 
 the same moment, it is perfectly possible to see one a quar- 
 ter of a mile ofP, and one five miles beyond it, at the same 
 moment. The consequence of this is, practically, that in a 
 real landscape, we can see the whole of what would be called 
 the middle distance and distance together, with facility and 
 clearness ; but while we do so we can see nothing in the 
 foreground beyond a vague and indistinct arrangement of 
 lines and colors ; and that if, on the contrary, we look at 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE, 
 
 259 
 
 any foreground object, so as to receive a distinct impression 
 of it, the distance and middle distance become all disorder 
 and mystery. 
 
 And therefore, if in a painting our foreground is anything, 
 our distance must be nothing, and vice versa; for if we 
 represent our near and distant objects as giving both at once 
 § 4. In painting, that distinct image to the eye, which we receive 
 thr^^oregroimd in nature from each, when we look at them sep- 
 be paSiaiiy^ac- irately ; * and if we distinguish them from each 
 rificed. other Only by the air-tone ; and indistinctness 
 
 dependent on positive distance, we violate one of the most 
 essential principles of nature ; we represent that as seen at 
 once which can only be seen by two separate acts of seeing, 
 and tell a falsehood as gross as if we had represented four 
 sides of a cubic object visible together. 
 
 Now, to this fact and principle, no landscape painter of 
 the old school, as far as I remember, ever paid the slightest 
 attention. Finishing their foregrounds clearly and sharply, 
 §5 Which not with vigorous impression on the eye, giving 
 th^"^id ^^^ste^^ even the leaves of their bushes and grass with 
 they could not perfect edge and shape, they proceeded into the 
 express space. (jigtance with equal attention to what they could 
 
 * This incapacity of the eye must not be confounded with its incapa- 
 bility to comprehend a large portion of lateral space at once. We in- 
 deed can see, at any one moment, little more than one point, the objects 
 beside it being confused and indistinct ; but we need pay no attention 
 to this in art, because we can see just as little of the picture as we can 
 of the landscape without turning the eye, and hence any slurring or 
 confusing of one part of it, laterally, more than another, is not founded 
 on any truth of nature, but is an expedient of the artist — and often an 
 excellent and desirable one — to make the eye rest where he wishes it. 
 But as the touch expressive of a distant object is as near upon the can- 
 vas as that expressive of a near one, both are seen distinctly and with 
 the same focus of the eye, and hence an immediate contradiction of 
 nature results, unless one or other be given with an artificial and in- 
 creased indistinctness, expressive of the appearance peculiar to the un- 
 adapted focus. On the other hand, it must be noted that the greater 
 part of the effect above described is consequent not on variation of 
 focus, but on the different angle at which near objects are seen by each 
 of the two eyes, when bo^h are directed towards the distance. 
 
260 
 
 OF TBUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 see of its details — they gave all that the eye can perceive in 
 a distance, when it is fully and entirely devoted to it, and 
 therefore, though masters of aerial tone, though employing 
 every expedient that art could supply to conceal the inter- 
 section of lines, though caricaturing the force and shadow of 
 near objects to throw them close upon the eye, they suc- 
 ceeded in truly representing space. Turner introduced a new 
 §6 But modern landscape art, by showing that the fore- 
 
 artists have sue- o;round misrht be sunk for the distance, and that 
 
 ceeded in fully ^ -i i . . , 
 
 carrying out this it was possiblc to cxprcss immediate proximity 
 principle. Spectator, without giving anything like 
 
 completeness to the forms of the near objects. This is not 
 done by slurred or soft lines, observe, (always the sign of vice 
 in art,) but by a decisive imperfection, a firm, but partial asser- 
 tion of form, which the eye feels indeed to be close home to 
 it, and yet cannot-rest upon, or cling to, nor entirely under- 
 stand, and from which it is driven away of necessity, to those 
 parts of distance on which it is intended to repose. And 
 this principle, originated by Turner, though fully carried out 
 by him only, has yet been acted on with judgment and suc- 
 cess by several less powerful artists of the English school. 
 Some six years ago, the brown moorland foregrounds of Cop- 
 ley Fielding were very instructive in this respect. Not a 
 line in them was made out, not a single object clearly dis- 
 tinguishable. Wet broad sweeps of the brush, sparkling, 
 careless, and accidental as nature herself, always truthful as 
 far as they went, implying knowledge, though not express- 
 ing it, suggested everything, while they represented nothing. 
 But far off into the mountain distance came the sharp edge 
 and the delicate form ; the whole intention and execution of 
 the picture being guided and exerted where the great im- 
 pression of space and size was to be given. The spectator 
 was compelled to go forward into the waste of hills — there, 
 where the sun broke wide upon the moor, he must walk and 
 wander — he could not stumble and hesitate over the near 
 rocks, nor stop to botanize on the first inches of his path.* 
 
 * There is no inconsistency, observe, between this passage and what 
 was before asserted respecting the necessity of botanical fidelity — where 
 
OF TBUTH OF SPACE, 
 
 261 
 
 And the impression of these pictures was always great and 
 enduring, as it was simple and truthful. I do not know any- 
 thing in art which has expressed more completely the force 
 and feeling of nature in these particular scenes. And it is a 
 farther iriustration * of the principle we are insisting upon, 
 that where, as in some of his later works, he has bestowed 
 more labor on the foreground, the picture has lost both in 
 space and sublimity. And among artists in general, who are 
 either not aware of the principle, or fear to act upon it, (for 
 it requires no small courage, ^s well as skill, to treat a fore- 
 ground with that indistinctness and mystery which they have 
 been accustomed to consider as characteristic of distance,) 
 the foreground is not only felt, as every landscape painter 
 will confess, to be the most embarrassing and unmanageable 
 part of the picture, but, in ninety-nine cases out of a hun- 
 dred, will go near to destroy the effect of the rest of the com- 
 position. Thus Callcott's Trent is severely injured by the 
 harsh group of foreground figures ; and Stanfield very rarely 
 gets through an Academy picture without destroying much 
 of its space, by too much determination of near form ; 
 while Harding constantly sacrifices his distance, and com- 
 pels the ■ spectator to dwell on the foreground altogether, 
 though indeed, with such foregrounds as he gives us, we 
 are most happy so to do. But it is in Turner only that we see 
 § 7. Especially ^ -and decisive choice of the distance and 
 of Turner. middle distance, as his great object of attention ; 
 and by him only that the foreground is united and adapted 
 to it, not by any want of drawing, or coarseness, or careless- 
 ness of execution, but by the most precise and beautiful in- 
 dication or suggestion of just so much of even the minutest 
 forms as the eye can see when its focus is not adapted to 
 them. And herein is another reason for the vio:or and whole- 
 
 the foreground is the object of attention. Compare Part II. Sect I. 
 Chap. VII. §10:— ''To paint mist rightly, space rightly, ard light 
 rightly, it may be often necessary to paint notldng else rightly." 
 
 * Hardly. It would have been so only had the recently finished fore- 
 grounds been as accurate in detail as they are abundant : they are pain- 
 ful, I believe, not from their finish, but their falseness. 
 
262 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 ness of the effect of Turner's works at any distance ; while 
 those of almost all other artists are sure to lose space as soon 
 as we lose sight of the details. 
 
 And now we see the reason for the singular, and to the ig- 
 norant in art, the offensive execution of Turner's figures. I 
 do not mean to assert that there is any reason whatsoever, 
 § 8. Justification 5(^6? drawing, (though in landscape it matters 
 dVJ'wiTg^i'n exceedingly little ;) but that there is both rea- 
 Turner's figures, qqu and necessity for that want of drawing which 
 gives even the nearest figures Bound balls with four pink spots 
 in them instead of faces, and four dashes of the brush instead 
 of hands and feet ; for it is totally impossible that if the eye 
 be adapted to receive the rays proceeding from the utmost 
 distance, and some partial impression from all the distances, 
 it should be capable of perceiving more of the forms and feat- 
 ures of near figures than Turner gives. And how absolutely 
 necessary to the faithful representation of space this inde- 
 cision really is, might be proved with the utmost ease by any 
 one who had veneration enough for the artist to sacrifice one 
 of his pictures to his fame ; who would take some one of his 
 works in which the figures were most incomplete, and have 
 them painted in by any of our delicate and first-rate figure 
 painters, absolutely preserving every color and shade of Tur- 
 ner's group, so as not to lose one atom of the composition, 
 but giving eyes for the pink spots, and feet for the white 
 ones. Let the picture be so exhibited in the Academy, and 
 even novices in art would feel at a glance that its truth of 
 space was gone, that every one of its beauties and harmonies 
 had undergone decomposition, that it was now a grammatical 
 solecism, a painting of impossibilities, a thing to torture the 
 eye, and offend the mind. 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 263 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 OF TEUTH OF SPACE I SECONDLY, AS ITS APPEARANCE IS 
 
 DEPENDENT ON THE POWER OF THE EYE. 
 
 In the last chapter, we have seen how indistinctness of in- 
 dividual distances becomes necessary in order to express the 
 adaptation of the eye to one or other of them ; we have now 
 § 1. The peculiar to examine that kind of indistinctness which is 
 peude^f o^t^^^ dependent on real retirement of the object 
 jecis^^fioL^^the ^^'^^ when the focus of the eye is fully concen- 
 ^y®- trated 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 off : 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 the 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 cannot tell which is the square and which the 
 circle. 
 
 Now this takes place of course with every object in a land- 
 scape, in proportion to its distance and size. The definite 
 forms of the leaves of a tree, however sharply and separately 
 §2. Causes con- ^^ey may appear to come against the sky, are 
 anriiMiatiin "of ^^^^^ indistinguishable at fifty yards off, and the 
 details. 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, etc.; these lesser 
 
264 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 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 can- 
 not tell what they are. As the distance increases, the confu- 
 sion 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 checkering, caused 
 by the details in it, which, though totally merged and lost in 
 the mass, have still an influence 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 distinguish 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 
 §3. Instances in l^^st tell what they are, or what they mean. It 
 various objects, jg m\^t 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 number ; window and door, archi- 
 trave 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 experience to be in- 
 dicative of a face, and yet you cannot tell how it is so. 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 : there is a vaofueness and indecision of 
 line still. Now you are sure, but even yet there are a 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 265 
 
 thousand things in his face which have their effect in induc- 
 ing the recognition, but which you cannot see so as to know 
 what they are. 
 
 Changes like these, and states of vision corresponding to 
 them, take place wdth each and all of the objects of nature, 
 and two great principles of truth are deducible froin their 
 §4. Two great observation. First, place an object as close to 
 thlt^*^na\u7e^^^^ ^7® there is always something 
 
 never distinct, jjj which vou caunot See, exccpt in the hinted 
 
 and never va- " . 
 
 cant. and mysterious manner above described. You 
 
 can see the texture of a piece of dress, but you cannot see 
 the individual 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 colors are not 
 lost sight of as it retires ; they get mixed and indistinguish- 
 able, but they are still there, and there is a difference always 
 perceivable 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 differ- 
 ence 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, but always abundant ; you 
 always see something, but you never see all. 
 
 And thus arise that exquisite 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, forever presented, and forever exhaust- 
 less. 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. 
 
266 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 Now, I would not wish for any more illustrative or marked 
 examples of the total contradiction of these two great prin- 
 ciples, than the landscape works of the old masters, taken as 
 §5. Complete a body: — the Dutch masters furnishing the 
 
 everything, and the Italians of. 
 They^ ar^e'^e^^^^^^^^ Seeing nothing. The rule with both is indeed 
 distinct or vacant, the Same, differently applied. "You shall see 
 the bricks in the wall, and be able to count them, or you 
 shall see nc^^hing 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." 
 
 Take, for instance, the street in the centre of the 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 
 
 § u. J nstances 
 
 from Nicholas black touches for windows. There is no suofo^es- 
 
 X*0USS\T1« 
 
 tion of anything in any of the spaces, the light 
 wall is dead gray, the dark wall dead gray, and the windows 
 dead black. How differently would nature have treated us. 
 She would have let us 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 mattresses stuffed out of the windows, and the 
 flapping corners of the mat blinds. AW would have been 
 there ; not as such, not like the 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 the 
 river in Claude's Marriage of Isaac and Re- 
 
 § 7. From Claude. . • tvt ^ ^^ t u 
 
 becca, in the National Grallery. I nave seen 
 pany cities in my life, and drawn not a few \ and I have seen 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE, 
 
 267 
 
 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 fac-similes of each other, 
 and absolutely agreeing in the number of battlements. I 
 have, indeed, some faint recollection of having delineated 
 such an one in the first page of a spelling-book when I was 
 four years old ; but, somehow or other, the dignity and per- 
 fection of the ideal were not appreciated, and the volume 
 was not considered to be increased in value by the frontis- 
 piece. WithoTit, however, 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 details. Claude has permitted us to see every battle- 
 ment, and the first impulse we feel upon looking at the 
 picture is to count how many there are. Nature would have 
 given us a peculiar confused roughness of the upper lines, a 
 multitude of intersections and spots, which we should have 
 known from experience was indicative of battlements, but 
 which we might as well have thought of creating as of 
 counting. Claude has given you the walls below in one 
 dead void of uniform gray. There is nothing to be seen, nor 
 felt, nor guessed at in it ; it is gray paint or gray shade, 
 whichever you may choose to call it, but it is nothing more. 
 Nature would have let you see, nay, would have compelled 
 you to see, thousands of spots and lines, not one to be 
 absolutely understood or accounted for, but yet all char- 
 acteristic 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 them- 
 selves, but all visible ; little shadows, and sparkles, and 
 scratches, making that whole space of color a transparent, 
 palpitating, various infinity. 
 
 Or take one of Poussin's extreme distances, such as ^at in 
 
268 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 the Sacrifice of Isaac. It is luminous, retiring, delicate and 
 perfect in tone, and is quite complete enough to deceive and 
 § 8. And G. cl^light the careless eye to which all distances 
 Poussin. 2l\kQ ; 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 gray and 
 gold are not the landscape itself, but the treatment of it — 
 not its substance, but its ligtt and shade. They are just 
 what nature would cast over it, and w^rite upon it with every 
 cloud, but which she would cast in play, and without care- 
 fulness, as 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 illus- 
 trate, not to conceal. Every one of those broad spaces she 
 would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you fresh 
 lessons in every hairsbreadth 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 gleam- 
 ing 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, impenetrable 
 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 follow all 
 this — he cannot come up to the same degree and order of in- 
 finity — but he can give us a lesser kind of infinity. He has 
 „ ^ . not one-thousandth part of the space to occupy 
 
 § 0. The impera- ^ ^ ^ ^ 
 
 tive necessity, in which nature has : but he can, at least, leave no 
 
 landscape paint- r» i i tp 
 
 inf?, of fulness part of that space vacant and unprofitable. If 
 
 and finish. ' ^ . . . . ^ . , , 
 
 nature carries out her minutia? over miles, he 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE, 
 
 269 
 
 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 complete 
 and as mysterious as nature's, we will pardon him for its be- 
 ing 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 occupy the inch, and because 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 labor, and for following her only in her hour of rest, 
 without observing how she has worked for it. After spend- 
 ing centuries in raising the forest, and guiding the river, and 
 modelling the mountain, she exults over her work in buoy- 
 ancy of spirit, with playful sunbeam and flying cloud ; but 
 the painter must go through the same labor, 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 
 adjunct instead of the essence — with the illustration instead 
 of the fact. 
 
 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 
 §10. Breadth is ^ve partially artistical, respecting "gener- 
 not vacancy. alizatiou," breadth," "effect," etc. It were 
 to be wished that our writers on art would not dweil so fre- 
 quently on the necessity of breadth, without explaining what 
 it means ; and that we had more constant reference made to 
 the principle which I can only remember having seen once 
 clearly explained and insisted on, — that breadth is not 
 vacancy. Generalization is unity, not destruction of part ; 
 and composition is not annihilation, 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 result from 
 
270 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 the eclipse of details are contemptible and painful.* And 
 we shall show, in following parts of the work, that distances 
 like those of Poussin are mere meaningless tricks of clever 
 execution, which, when once discovered, the artist may re- 
 peat over and over again, with mechanical contentment and 
 perfect satisfaction, both to himself and to his superficial 
 admirers, with no more exertion of intellect nor awakening 
 of feeling 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 admit 
 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 w^orks 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 vacuity, 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 color, or mellow and transpar- 
 ent modulations of mysterious atmosphere, even here the 
 touches, though satisfactory to the eye, are suggestive of 
 nothing, — they are characterless, — they have none of the 
 peculiar expressiveness and meaning by which nature main- 
 tains the variety and interest even of what she most con- 
 ceals. 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 cannot be anything / while even the most dexterous 
 distances of the old masters pretend to secrecy without hav- 
 ing 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 distances, it matters 
 
 * 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 ; but he must not generalize the details of a 
 champaign, in which there is a history of creation. The full discussion 
 of the subject belongs to a future part of our investigation. 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 271 
 
 not which, or of what kind, — drawing or painting, small or 
 great, done thirty years ago, or for last year's Academy, as 
 § 11. The fui- ^^^^ 5 ^^^^ Mercury and Argus, 
 
 orTumerrS ^ook if every fact which I have just been 
 tanc^. pointing out in nature be not carried out in it. 
 
 Abundant, beyond the power of the eye to embrace or fol- 
 low, vast and various, beyond the power of the mind to com- 
 prehend, 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 individual inch of that distance 
 is absolutely clear and complete in the master's mind, a sep- 
 arate 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 us to feel or see ; just so much 
 as would enable a spectator of experience and knowledge to 
 understand almost every minute fragment 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 dis- 
 guised by the dazzle and indecision of distance. No form is 
 made out, and yet no form is unknown. 
 
 Perhaps the truth of this system 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 
 § 12. Farther Highgate Hill on a clear summer morning at 
 Sfiruri"} five o'clock, and look at Westminster Abbey, 
 drawing. You will receive an impression of a building en- 
 
 riched 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 beginning or end of any one of them : You 
 cannot. Look at it generally, and it is all symmetry and 
 arrangement. Look at it in its parts, and it is all inextri- 
 cable confusion. Am not I, at this moment, describing a 
 piece of Turner's drawing, with the same words by which I 
 describe nature ? And what would one of the old masters 
 
272 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 have done with such a building as this in his distance ? 
 Either he would only have given the shadows of the but- 
 tresses, 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 detai^it 
 would have been done by distinct lines, — would have been 
 broad caricature 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 atmos- 
 phere, the effect of a colossal parish church, without one line 
 of curving on its economic sides. Turner, and Turner only, 
 would follow and render on the canvas that mystery of de- 
 cided line, — that distinct, sharp, visible, but unintelligible 
 and inextricable richness, which, examined part by part, is 
 to the eye nothing but confusion and defeat, which, taken 
 as a whole, is all unity, symmetry, and truth.* 
 
 Nor is this mode of representation true only with respect 
 to distances. Every object, however near the eye, has some- 
 thing about it which you cannot see, and which brings the 
 mystery of distance even into every part and por- 
 
 §13. Innearob- / i , ^ 4. 
 
 jects as well as tion OI what we suppose ourselves to see most 
 distances. distinctly. 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 columns on the 
 second story. You see that they are exquisitely rich, carved 
 all over. Tell me 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 cer- 
 ^ tain tendency and arrang^ement in those lines, 
 
 § 14. Va c a n 0 y »^ ^ ^ ^ / 
 
 and falsehood of that vou are quite sure the capitals are beauti- 
 
 Canaletto. /. 1 -, 1 t n -../i 0 i 
 
 ful, 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 Canaletto's painting of this church, 
 
 * Vide, for iUustration, Fontainebleau, in the Illustrations to Scott ; 
 Vignette at opening of Human Life, in Rogers's Poems ; Venice, in the 
 Italy ; Chateau de Blois ; the Rouen, and Pont Neuf, Paris, in the Riv- 
 ers of France. The distances of all the Academy pictures of Venice, 
 especially the Shylock, are most instructive. 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 273 
 
 in the Palazzo Manfriiii, taken from the very spot on which 
 you stood. How much has he represented of all this ? A 
 black dot under each capital for the shadow, and a yellow one 
 above it for the light. There is not a vestige nor indication 
 of carving or decoration of any sort or kind. 
 
 ■ 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 dis- 
 order, 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 incomparable decoration of 
 § 15. still greater nature. The detail of a single weedy bank 
 LtTiantcJpe ^^ughs the carviug of ages to scorn. Every leaf 
 foregrounds. stalk has a design and tracery upon it, — 
 
 every knot of grass an intricacy of shade which the labor of 
 years could never imitate, and which, if such labor could fol- 
 low 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.* 
 
 * It is to be remembered, however, that these truths present them- 
 selves in all probability under very different phases to individuals of 
 different powers of vision. Many artists who appear to generalize rudely 
 or rashly are perhaps faithfully endeavoring to render the appearance 
 which nature bears to sight of limited range. Others may be lead by 
 their singular keenness of sight into inexpedient detail. Works which 
 are painted for effect at a certain distance must be always seen at dis- 
 Vol. L— 18 
 
274 
 
 OF TBUTE OF SPACE. 
 
 Hence, throughout the picture, the expression of space 
 and size is dependent upon obscurity, united with, or rather 
 
 advantage by those whose sighfc is of different range from the painter's. 
 Another circumstance to which I ought above to have alluded is the scale 
 of the picture ; for there are different degrees of generalization, and differ- 
 ent necessities of symbolism, belonging to every scale : the stipple of tl"3 
 miniature painter would be offensive on features of the life size, and the 
 leaves which Tintoret may articulate on a canvas of sixty feet by twenty- 
 five, must be generalized by Turner on one of four by three. Another 
 circumstance of some importance is the assumed distance of the fore- 
 ground ; many landscape painters seem to think their nearest foreground 
 is always equally near, whereas its distance from the spectator varies 
 not a little, being always at least its own calculable breadth from side 
 to side as estimated by figures or any other object of known size at the 
 nearest part of it. With Claude almost always ; with Turner often, as 
 in the Daphne aod Leucippus, this breadth is forty or fifty yards ; and 
 as the nearest foreground object must then be at least that distance re- 
 moved, and may be much more, it is evident that no completion of close 
 detail is in such cases allowable, (see here another proof of Claude's er- 
 roneous practice ;) with Titian and Tintoret, on the contrary, the fore- 
 ground is rarely more than five or six yards broad, and its objects there- 
 fore being only five or six yards distant are entirely detailed. 
 
 None of these circumstances, however, in any wise affect the great 
 principle, the confusion of detail taking place sooner or later in all cases. 
 I ought to have noted, however, that many of the pictures of Turner in 
 which the confused drawing has been least understood, have been lumi- 
 nous twilights ; and that the uncertainty of twilight is therefore added 
 to that of general distance. In the evenings of the south it not unfre- 
 quently happens that objects touched with the reflected light of the 
 western sky, continue even for the space of half an hour after sunset, 
 glowing, ruddy, and intense in color, and almost as bright as if they 
 were still beneath actual sunshine, even till the moon begius to cast a 
 shadow : but in spite of this brilliancy of color all the details become 
 ghostly and ill-defined. This is a favorite moment of Turner's, and he 
 invariably characterizes it, not by gloom, but by uncertainty of detail. 
 I have never seen the effect of clear twilight thoroughly rendered by 
 art ; that effect in which all details are lost, while intense clearness and 
 light are still felt in the atmosphere, in which nothing is distinctly seen, 
 and yet it is not darkness, far less mist, that is the cause of conceal- 
 ment. Turner's efforts at rendering this effect (as the Wilderness of 
 Engedi, Assos, Chateau de Blois, Caer-laverock, and others innumer- 
 able,) have always some slight appearance of mistiness, owing to the 
 indistinctness of details ; but it remains to be shown that any closer ap- 
 proximation to the effect is possible. 
 
OF TRUTH OF SPACE, 
 
 275 
 
 resultant from, exceeding fulness. We destroy both space 
 and size, either by the vacancy, which affords us no measure 
 of space, or by the distinctness, which gives us a false one. 
 
 16 s c and "^^^ distance of Poussin, having no indication 
 size are destroyed of trccs, uor of mcadows, nor of character of any 
 
 alike by distinct- , . t ^ n p, • i /v ^ n 
 
 ness and by va- Kind, may be nity miles oii, or may be hve ; we 
 ^^°^^* cannot tell — we have no measure, and in conse- 
 
 quence, no vivid impression. But a middle distance of Hob- 
 bima's involves a contradiction in terms ; it states a distance 
 by perspective, which it contradicts by distinctness of detail. 
 
 A single dusty roll of Turner's brush is more truly expres- 
 sive of the infinity of foliage, than the niggling of Hobbima 
 could have rendered his canvas, if he had worked on it till 
 §17. Swift execu- doomsday. What Sir J. Reynolds says of the 
 perfection ^of'^dl- misplaced labor 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 mare faithful representation 
 of a tree, than the unfortunate mechanist in as many years, 
 is thus perfectly true and well founded ; but this is not be- 
 cause details are undesirable, but because they are best given 
 §18 Finish is far swift execution, and because, individually, 
 more necessary thcv cauuot be sriven at all. But it should be 
 
 m landscape ^ i n i i ^ ^ 
 
 than in histori- observed (though we shall be better able to in- 
 caisub3ects. ^.^^ upon this point in future) that much of harm 
 and error has arisen from the supposition and assertions of 
 swift and brilliant historical painters, that the same princi- 
 ples of execution are entirely applicable to landscape, which 
 are right for the figure. The artist who falls into extreme 
 detail in drawing the human form, is apt to become disgust- 
 ing rather than pleasing. It is 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 even 
 the most rapid and generalizing expression of the human body, 
 if directed by perfect knowledge, and rigidly faithful in draw- 
 ing, will commonly omit very little of what is agreeable or 
 impressive. But the exclusively generalizing landscape 
 painter omits the whole of what is valuable in his subject, — - 
 
276 
 
 OF TRUTH OF SPACE. 
 
 omits thoughts, designs, and beauties by the million, every- 
 thing, indeed, which can furnish him with variety or expres- 
 sion. A distance in Lincolnshire, or in Lombardy, might 
 both be generalized 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 de- 
 tails, 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 landscape, so that they be 
 rightly arranged and rightly massed ; but that it is equally 
 impossible to render anything 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 fol- 
 lowed her. 
 
 We have now rapidly glanced at such general truths of 
 nature as can be investigated without much knowledge of 
 what is beautiful. Questions of arrangement, massing, and 
 
 generalization, I prefer leaving untouched, until 
 tion ofthe^sec-^ 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 which they 
 arise, I shall, therefore, proceed to examine 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 sub- 
 ject for himself. 
 
BIEOTZOlsr IIX- 
 OF TRUTH OF SKIES. 
 
 CHAPTER 1. 
 
 OF THE OPEN^ SKY. 
 
 It is a strange thing how little in general people know 
 about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has 
 done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and 
 evident purpose of talkinsr to him and teachino- 
 
 § 1. The peculiar , ^ . ? , t • • 
 
 adaptation of the him, than in any other of her works, and it is 
 
 sky to the pleas- . , • i • i i ' i i 
 
 ing and teaching ]ust the part in which we Icast attend to her. 
 of man. There are not many of her other works in which 
 
 some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleas- 
 ing of man is not answered by every part of their organiza- 
 tion ; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so 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 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 
 
278 
 
 OF. THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 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 perpetual com- 
 fort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purify, 
 ing it from its dross and dust. Sometimes 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, its appeal to what 
 is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement 
 § 2. The careless- o^* of blessing to what is mortal is essential. 
 ksTerso^^sI^i''^ And yet we never attend to it, we never make 
 received. ^ 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 wit- 
 ness 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, only as a suc- 
 cession 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 phenomena 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 sunlight left them last night, and the west wind 
 blew them before it like withered leaves ? All has passed, 
 unregretted as unseen ; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, 
 even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what is ex- 
 §3. The most 88- traordinary ; and yet it is not in the broad and 
 leTsonl lV\hI fi^^ce manifestations of the elemental energies, 
 gentlest. ^ot in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the 
 
 whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are de- 
 
OF THE OPEN SKY, 
 
 279 
 
 veloped. 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 
 lampblack 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 devo- 
 tion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given. 
 These are what the artist of highest aim must study ; it is 
 §4. Many of our these, by the combination of which his ideal is 
 together conveji- Created ; thesc, of which so little notice is 
 
 tionai. ordinarily taken by common observers, that I 
 
 fully believe, little as people in general are concerned 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 frequently be found composed of frag- 
 ments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters. 
 
 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 competent judges. 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 decisively, in the hope that it may be so. 
 
 Let us begin then with the simple open blue of the sky. 
 This is of course the color of the pure atmospheric air, not 
 the aqueous vapor^ but the pure azote and oxygen, and it is 
 „ ^ , , the total color of the whole mass of that air 
 
 § 5. Nature and 
 
 essential qualities between US and the void of space. It is modi- 
 
 of the open blue. . x-x i? 
 
 lied by the varying quantity or aqueous vapor 
 suspended in it, whose color, in its most imperfect, and 
 
280 
 
 OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 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 gray, by mixing warm tones with its blue. 
 This gray aqueous vapor, when very decided, becomes mist, 
 and when local, cloud. Hence the sky is to be considered as 
 a transparent blue liquid, in which, at various elevations, 
 clouds are suspended, those clouds being themselves only 
 particular visible spaces of a substance with which the whole 
 mass of this liquid is more or less impregnated. Now, we 
 § 6 Its connec- know this perfectly well, and yet we so far 
 tion with clouds, forget it in practice, that we little notice the 
 constant 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 
 vapors 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 re- 
 §7 Its exceed- i^^ved in tone their skies may be, you always 
 ing depth. \odk at them, not through them. Now, if there 
 be one characteristic of the sky more valuable or necessary 
 to be rendered than another, it is that which Wordsworth 
 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 ;— but rather an ahyss 
 In w^hich 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 
 
OF THE OPEN' SKY. 
 
 281 
 
 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 color, 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 
 vestiges of dark vapor ; and it is this trembling transparency 
 §8 These quaii- which our great modern master has especially 
 ties are especially g^jj^g^j at and Hvcu. His bluc is ncvcr laid 
 
 given Dy modern ^ ... 
 
 masters. qji in 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 im- 
 measurable 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 profundity 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 strike hard against it at last. A perfectly gen- 
 § 9 And by ^^^^ ^^^^ Untouched sky of Claude is indeed 
 Claude. 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, 
 however, to say a word against such skies as that of the 
 Enchanted Castle, or that marked 30 in the National Gal- 
 lery, or one or two which I remember at Rome ; but how 
 little and by how few these fine passages of Claude are ap- 
 preciated, is sufficiently proved by the sufferance of such 
 villainous and unpalliated copies as we meet with all over 
 Europe, like the Marriage 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 re- 
 painted or altogether copies, or perhaps from Claude's hand, 
 but carelessly laid in, like that marked 241, Dulwich Gal- 
 lery, were not fully as. Jeelingless and false as those of other 
 masters ; while, with^-'^jlhe Poussins, there are no favorable 
 exceptions. Their skies are systematically wrong ; take, 
 
282 
 
 OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 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 color is the sky at the top of the picture ? Is 
 § 10. Total ab- P^^-l^ S^^Y with heat, full of sunshine, and 
 Sfuiin^^^PhyS unfathomable in depth? On the contrary, it 
 generlureiti^^^ ^ pitch of darkncss which, except on the 
 
 of open sky. Mont Blanc or Chimborazo, is as purely impos- 
 sible as color can be. He might as well have painted it coal 
 black ; and it is laid on with a dead coat of flat paint, hav- 
 ing no one quality or resemblance of sky about it.' It can- 
 not 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 whole thing, this color 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 yel- 
 low 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 w^ere effected imperceptibly and 
 gradually, as is invariably the case in reality, instead of taking 
 place within a space of two or three degrees ; — even then, 
 this gold yellow would be altogether 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 colors impossibly united ! Find 
 such a color in Turner's noonday zenith as the blue at the 
 top, or such a color at a noonday horizon as the yellow at 
 the bottom, or such a connection of ^ny colors 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 favorite and characteris- 
 Cuyp in'gradua- tic effect. I remember twenty such, most of 
 tion of color. ^hcm worsc than this, in^the downright surface 
 and opacity of blue. Again, look at ^he large Cuyp in the 
 
OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 283 
 
 Dulwich Gallery, which Mr. Hazlitt considers the "finest in 
 the world," and of which he very complimentarily says, " TFio 
 tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple 
 light of the hills, have an effect like the down on an unripe 
 nectarine ! " I ought to have apologized 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 infor- 
 mation that he was " juicy ; " and it is now happily discovered 
 that Cuyp is " downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this 
 first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe 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 ; w^hile 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 conceive how any man call- 
 ing himself a painter could impose such a thing on the pub- 
 lic, and still more how the public can receive it, as a repre- 
 sentation of that sunset purple which invariably extends its 
 influence to the zenith, so that there is no pure blue any- 
 where, 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 colors extending their influence over the whole 
 sky ; so that throughout the whole sweep of the heaven, 
 there is no one spot where the color 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 abso- 
 lute equality of change, so that in no place can it be said, 
 " here it changes," and in no 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. 
 
284 
 
 OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 Such bold, broad examples of ignorance as these would 
 soon set aside ail the claims of the professed landscape 
 painters to truth, with whatever delicacy of color or manipu- 
 § 12. The exceed- lation they may be disguised. But there are 
 skfeJSf^the eariy some skics, of the Dutch school, in which clear- 
 DutX school ^^ss and coolness have been aimed at, instead 
 arolnmttSbie depth ; and some introduced merely as back- 
 in modern times, grounds 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 comparison. 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 acci- 
 dent ; 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 the 
 open blue of the sky, which we must take especial notice of, 
 § 13. Phenomena it is of Constant Occurrence in the works of 
 bLmi!TLrna: Turner and Claude, the effects, namely, of visible 
 ture and cause, sunbeams. It wlll be necessary for us thoroughly 
 to understand the circumstances under which such effects 
 take place. 
 
 Aqueous vapor or mist, suspended in the atmosphere, be- 
 comes 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 
 interruption to the sight, so that a transverse sunbeam is a 
 
OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 285 
 
 real obstacle to the vision, you cannot see things clearly 
 through it. 
 
 In the same way, wherever vapor is illuminated by trans- 
 verse rays there it becomes visible as a whiteness more or less 
 affecting the purity of the blue, and destroying it exactly in 
 proportion to the degree of illumination. But where vapor 
 is in shade, it has very little effect on the sky, perhaps mak- 
 ing it a little deeper and grayer 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 accompanies sun- 
 shine, and which, supposing the quantity of vapor constant, 
 § 14 The3' are greatest in the brightest sunlight. When 
 only illuminated there are no clouds in the skv, the whiteness, 
 
 mist, and cannot . p« 
 
 appear when the as it aiiects the wholc sky equally, is not par- 
 sky is free from • i i • i i -r> ^ i it 
 
 vapor, nor when ticularly noticcabie. i3ut when there are clouds 
 clouds. between us and the sun, the sun being low, 
 
 those clouds cast shadows along and through the mass of 
 suspended vapor. Within the space of these shadows, the 
 vapor, as above stated, becomes transparent and invisible, 
 and the sky appears of a pure blue. But where the sun- 
 beams strike, the vapor becomes visible in the form of the 
 beams, occasioning 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, gradated passages of light ; when 
 it is very thick, they are keen-edged and decisive in a 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 illu- 
 mination, 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 
 
286 
 
 OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 sky can present such an appearance, except when there are 
 broken clouds between it and the sun ; and lastly, that the 
 shadows cast from such clouds are not necessarily gray or 
 dark, but very nearly of the natural pure blue of a sky des- 
 titute of vapor. 
 
 Now, as it has been proved that the appearance of beams 
 can only take place in a part of the sky which has clouds be- 
 tween it and the sun, it is evident that no appearance of 
 §15. Erroneous bcams cau evcr begin from the orb itself, ex- 
 repreSaUonof ^^P^ whcu there is a cloud or solid body of some 
 bythe^oiT mTs^ ^^^^ between us and it ; but that such appear- 
 ances will almost invariably begin on the dark 
 side of some of the clouds around it, the orb itself remain- 
 ing the centre of a broad blaze of united light. Words- 
 worth has given us in two lines, the only circumstances under 
 which rays can ever appear to have origin in the orb itself: — 
 
 " 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 re- 
 member cases in which he has given us the diverging beam, 
 without any cloud or hill interferino- with the 
 
 § 16. The ray ° 
 
 which appears in orb. It may, perhaps, be somewhat aimcult to 
 Bhouid^^not %e Say how far it is allowable to represent that kind 
 repi evented. which is sccu by the dazzled eye. It is 
 
 very certain that V7e never look towards a bright sun with- 
 out seeing glancing rays issue from it; but it is equally cer- 
 tain 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 
 
OF THE OPEN SKY. 
 
 287 
 
 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 which 
 § 17. The prac- ^^s actual existence. Such we find to be the 
 mskeen^ercep- constant practice of Turner. Even where, owing 
 ScaL phenom^ iutcrposcd clouds, he has beams appearing to 
 ena of rays. issuc 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 80th 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 for by a mass of dense clouds sur- 
 rounding the orb itself. Turn to the 7th 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 sunbeam. 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 
 §18. The total by the dim dark promontory projecting out near 
 ev"eof Ruch the sun. I need not multiply examples ; you 
 perception m the ^^^jj various modifications and uses of these 
 
 works; of the old 
 
 masters. effccts throughout his works. But you will not 
 
 find a single trace of them in the old masters. They give 
 you the rays issuing from behind black clouds, and because 
 they are a coarse and common effect which could not pos- 
 sibly 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 
 
 * I have left this passage as it stood originally, because it is right as 
 far as it goes ; yet it speaks with too little respect of symbolisra, which 
 is often of the highest use in religious art, and in some measure is allow- 
 
288 
 
 OF THE OPEN SET. 
 
 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 whatsoever in their works. It was too 
 delicate and spiritual for them ; probably their blunt and f eel- 
 ingless eyes never perceived it in nature, and their untaught 
 imaginations were not likely to originate it in the study. 
 
 Little is to be said of the skies of our other landscape ar- 
 tists. In paintings, they are commonly toneless, crude, and 
 wanting in depth and transparency ; but in drawings, some 
 §19 Truth of ^^^y P^i'f^ct and delicate examples have been 
 the skies of mod- produced bv vaHous members of the old water 
 
 em drawings. ^ c^ - i i i • i 
 
 color bociety, 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 color, 
 are capable of producing an appearance of quality which it 
 needs much higher art to produce in oils. 
 
 Taken generally, the open skies of the moderns are inferior 
 in quality to picked and untouched skies of the greatest of 
 the ancients, but far superior to the average class of pictures 
 § 20. Eecapitu- which we have every day fathered upon their 
 pMeT'of^he'^an^ reputation. Nine or ten skies of Claude might 
 Equality ^Tnimit^ ^® named which are not to be contended with, 
 able, but in ren- their wav, and as many of Cuyp. Teniers 
 
 dermg or various «^ ' ^ 'J ^ 
 
 truth, chUdish. has givcu some very wonderful passages, and 
 
 able in all art. In the works of almost all the greatest masters there 
 are portions which are explanatory rather than representative, and typi- 
 cal rather than imitative ; nor could these be parted with but at infinite 
 loss. Note, with respect to the present question, the daring black sun- 
 beams of Titian, in his woodcut of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, 
 and compare here Part III. Sect. II. Chap. IV. § 18 ; Chap. V. § 13. 
 And though I believe that I am right in considering all such symbolism 
 as out of place in pure landscape, and ia attributing that of Claude to 
 ignorance or inability, and not to feeling, yet I praise Turner not so 
 much for his absolute refusal to represent the spiky ray about the sun, 
 as for his perceiving and rendering that which Claude never perceived, 
 the multitudinous presence of radiating light in the upper sky, and on 
 all its countless ranks of subtile cloud. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 289 
 
 the clearness of the early Italian and Dutch schools is beyond 
 all imitation. But the common blue daubing vvhicli 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 requiring delicate observation or accu- 
 rate 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. 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 OF TRUTH or CLOUDS : FIRST, OF THE REGIOIST OF THE 
 
 CIRRUS. 
 
 Our next subject of investigation must be the specific 
 character of clouds, a species of truth which is especially 
 neglected by artists ; first, because as it is within the limits 
 of possibility that a cloud may assume almost 
 
 § 1. Difficulty of ^ . . T ^ , . 
 
 ascertaining any form, it IS difficult to poiut out, and not al- 
 
 wherein the i i • • n 
 
 truth of clouds ways casy to leel, wherein error consists ; and 
 consists. secondly, because it is totally impossible to 
 
 study the forms of clouds from nature with care and accu- 
 racy, as a change in the subject takes place between every 
 touch of the following pencil, and parts of an outline 
 sketched at different instants cannot harmonize, nature never 
 having intended them to come together. Still if artists were 
 more in the habit of sketching clouds rapidly, and as accu- 
 rately as possible in the outline, from nature, instead of daub- 
 ing down what they call " effects " with the brush, they 
 would soon find there is more beaiity about their forms than 
 can be arrived at by any random felicity of invention, how- 
 ever brilliant, and more essential character than can be vio- 
 VoL. I. —19 
 
290 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 lated 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 character of clouds, is de- 
 pendent on the different altitudes at which they are formed. 
 The atmosphere may be conveniently considered as divided 
 § 2. Variation ^"^^ three spaces, each inhabited by clouds of 
 acter^at different specific character altogether different, though, 
 elevations. The in reality, there is no distinct limit fixed between 
 
 three regions to ^ 
 
 which they may them by nature, clouds being formed at every 
 
 conveniently be , i • t , . , . 
 
 considered as be- altitude, and partaking according to their aiti- 
 longing. tude, 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 considerable space. I 
 shall therefore consider the sky as divided into three regions 
 — the upper region, or region of the cirrus ; the central re- 
 gion, or region of the stratus ; the lower region, or the re- 
 gion of the rain-cloud. 
 
 The clouds which I wish to consider as included in the up- 
 per region, never touch even the highest mountains of 
 Europe, and may therefore be looked upon as never formed 
 § 3. Extent of below an elevation of at least 15,000 feet ; they 
 theupperregion. are the motionless multitudinous lines of deli- 
 cate vapor with which the blue of the open sky is commonly 
 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 tlie 
 works of modern artists, and I shall have occasion to speak 
 frequently of them in future parts of the work. Their chief 
 § 4. The sym- characters are — first. Symmetry : They are 
 m^e nT^ o?^?tt nearly always arranged in some definite and 
 clouds. evident order, commonly in long ranks reaching 
 
 sometimes from the zenith to the horizon, each rank com- 
 posed of an infinite number of transverse bars of about the 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 291 
 
 same length, each bar thickest in the middle, and terminat- 
 ing in a traceless vaporous point at each side ; the ranks are 
 in the direction of the wind, and the bars of course at right 
 angles to it ; these latter are commonly slightly bent in the 
 middle. Frequently two systems of this kind, indicative of 
 two currents of wind, at different altitudes intersect one an- 
 other, forming a network. Another frequent arrangement 
 is in groups of excessively fine, silky, parallel fibres, com- 
 monly radiating, or having a tendency to radiate, from one 
 of their extremities, and terminating in a plumy sweep at the 
 other : — these are vulgarly known as '^mares' tails." The 
 plumy and expanded extremity of these is often bent up- 
 wards, sometimes 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 modification 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 anything like a relative and general 
 system of government. The upper clouds are to the lower, 
 what 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. 
 
 Secondly, Sharpness of Edge : The edges of the bars of 
 the upper clouds which are turned to the wind, are often 
 the sharpest which the sky shows ; no outline whatever of 
 § 5 Their ex- Other kind of cloud, however marked and 
 ceeding delicacy, energetic, ever approaches the delicate decision 
 of these edges. The outline of a black thunder-cloud is 
 striking, from the great energy of the color or shade of the 
 general mass ; but as a line, it is soft and indistinct, com- 
 pared with the edge of the cirrus, in a clear sky with a brisk 
 breeze. On the other hand, the edge of the bar turned away 
 from the wind is always soft, often imperceptible, melting 
 
292 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 into the blue interstice between it and its next neighbor. 
 Commonly the sharper one edge is, the softer is the other, 
 and the clouds look flat, a^d as if th^j 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 windless, the 
 cloud looks solid, round, and fleecy. 
 
 Thirdly, Multitude : The delicacy of these vapors is some- 
 times 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 
 
 § 6. Their num- . . ^ . . 
 
 ber. it is symmetrical, (vide Burke on " Sublime," 
 
 Part ii. sect. 8,) and, therefore, no sea-waves nor fresh leaves 
 make their number so evident or so impressive as these 
 vapors. Nor is nature content with an infinity of bars or 
 lines alone — each bar is in its turn severed into a number of 
 small undulatorv masses, more or less connected according^ to 
 the violence of the wind. 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 separa- 
 tion we have the mottled or mackerel skies. Commonly, the 
 greater the division of its bars, the broader and more shape- 
 less 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 below 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. 
 
 Fourthly, Purity of Color : The nearest of these clouds — 
 those over the observer's head, being at least three miles 
 above him, and nearly all entering the ordinary sphere of 
 „ ^ ^ . vision, farther from him still, — their dark sides 
 
 § 7. Causes of ' ' 
 
 their peculiarly are much STraver and cooler than those of other 
 
 delicate coloring. . , . , . ^ , 
 
 clouds, owing to their distance. Ihey are com- 
 posed of the purest aqueous vapor, free from all foulness of 
 earthy gases, and of this in the lightest and most ethereal 
 state in which it can be, to be visible. Farther, they receive 
 the light of the sun in a state of far greater intensity than 
 lower objects, the beams being transmitted to them through 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 293 
 
 atmospheric air far less dense, and wholly unaffected by mist, 
 smoke, or any other impurity. Hence their colors are more 
 pure and vivid, and their white less sullied than those of any 
 other clouds. 
 
 Lastly, Yariety : Variety is never so conspicuous, as when 
 it is united with symmetry. The perpetual change of form 
 in other clouds, is monotonous in its very dissimilarity, nor 
 §8. Their vari- is difference striking where no connection is im- 
 etyofform. plied ; 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 variously numbered groups, the variety is 
 doubly striking, because contrasted with the perfect symme- 
 try 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 feat- 
 ures resembles all the others, not one, out of the millions 
 with which the sky is checkered, is without a separate beauty 
 and character, appearing to have had distinct thought oc- 
 cupied in its conception, and distinct forces in its produc- 
 tion ; and in addition to this perpetual invention, visible in 
 each member of each system, we find systems of separate 
 cloud intersecting one another, the sweeping lines mingled 
 and interwoven with the rigid bars, these in their turn melt- 
 ing into banks of sand-like ripple and flakes of drifted and 
 irregular foam; under all, perhaps the massy outline of some 
 lower cloud moves heavily across the motionless buoyancy of 
 the upper lines, and indicates at once their elevation and 
 their repose. 
 
 Such are the great attributes of the upper cloud region ; 
 § 9. Total ab- whether they are beautiful, valuable, or impres- 
 
 Beiice of even the • •,• , 
 
 slightest effort at sive, it IS uot our present business to decide, 
 
 tion' in^an^^^^^^^ "or to cudeavor to discover the reason of the 
 
 landscape. somcwhat remarkable fact, that the whole field 
 
294 
 
 OF TRUTH OF GLOVDS. 
 
 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 color cross the seren- 
 ity of the blue. These, as far as they go, are often very per- 
 fect, 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 
 certainly 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 orb, 
 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, 
 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 of 
 while we read this ; one alone has taken notice of the neg- 
 § 10. The in- lected Upper sky ; it is his peculiar and favorite 
 stant fttuciy^'^of ^^'^ 5 watchcd its cvcry modification, and 
 
 theru by Turner, given its cvcry phasc and feature ; at all hours, 
 in all seasons, he has followed its passions and its changes, 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 295 
 
 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 altogether alike. Sometimes they are 
 crowded together in masses of mingling light, as in the Shy- 
 lock ; every part and atom sympathizing in that continuous 
 expression of slow movement which Shelley has so beauti- 
 fully touched : — 
 
 Underneath the young gray dawn 
 A multitude of dense, white fleecy clouds, 
 Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains, 
 SJiepherded by the slow, unwilling windy 
 
 At other times they are blended with the sky itself, felt 
 only here and there by a ray of light calling them into exist- 
 ence 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, melting 
 into the blue as in the Napoleon. But in all cases the ex- 
 quisite manipulation of the master gives to each atom of the 
 multitude its own character and expression. Though they 
 be countless as leaves, each has its portion of light, its 
 shadow, its reflex, its peculiar and separating form. 
 
 Take for instance the illustrated edition of Rogers's 
 Poems,* and open it at the 80th page, and observe how 
 every attribute which I have pointed out in the upper sky, 
 
 * 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. 
 
296 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 is there rendered with the faithfulness of a mirror : the lono* 
 lines of parallel bars, the delicate curvature from the wind, 
 which the inclination of the sail shows you to be from the 
 § 11 His vig ' excessive sharpness of every edge 
 
 nette, Sunrise on which is turned to the wiud, 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 hairbreadth 
 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 interval 
 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 vapor is melting away from the cloud that it 
 crosses. Now watch for the next barred sunrise, and take 
 this vignette to the window, and test it by nature's own 
 clouds, among which you will find forms and passages, 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 manu- 
 factory smoke beside those calm and quiet bars, which pause 
 in the heaven as if they would never leave it more ? 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 297 
 
 Now we have just seen how Turner uses the sharp-edged 
 cirri when he aims at giving great transp^Rncy of air. But 
 it was shown in the preceding chapter that sunbeams, or the 
 §12 His use of ^PP^^^^^^<^^ them, are always sharper in their 
 the cirrus in ex- edo:e in proportion as the air is more misty, as 
 
 pressing mist. ^ \ir>i- i i - 
 
 they are most denned in a room where there is 
 most dust flying about in it. Consequently, in the vignette 
 we have been just noticing, where transparency 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, page 193, in the same book. Here we 
 have the cirri used again, but now they have no sharp 
 edges, the}^ are all fleecy and mingling with each other, 
 though every one of them has the most exquisite indication 
 of individual form, and they melt back, not till they are 
 lost in exceeding light, as in the other plate, but into 
 a mysterious, fluctuating, shadowy sky, of which, though 
 the light penetrates through it all, you perceive every part 
 to be charged with vapor. 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, palpitating, every one is 
 sharp and clear, and terminated by definite shadow ; note 
 especially the marked lines on the upper cloud ; 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 con- 
 § 13. His con- ^^i^tJ^^tion of every fact which can possibly bear 
 sistency in every upon what we are to be told, this watchfulness 
 
 minor feature. . . 
 
 of the entire meaning and system of nature, 
 which fills every part and space of the picture with coinci- 
 dences of witness, which come out upon us, as they would 
 
298 
 
 OF TBUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 from the reality, ijj^re fully and deeply in proportion to the 
 knowledge we po^Wss 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, instatitly and totally 
 lost at its edge. And thus a separate essay would be re- 
 quired by every picture, to make fully understood the new 
 phenomena which it treated and illustrated. But after once 
 showing what are the prevailing characteristics 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 ex- 
 plain in words, but which, perhaps, by simple outlines, on a 
 large scale, selected from the cloud forms of various artists, I 
 may in following portions of the work illustrate with the pencil. 
 
 Of the colors of these clouds I have spoken before, (Sec. I. 
 Chap. II.;) but though I then alluded to their purity and 
 vividness, I scarcely took proper notice of their variety ; 
 §14. The color of there is indeed in nature variety in all things, 
 the upper clouds, ^^d it would be absurd to insist on it in each 
 case, yet the colors of these clouds are so marvellous in their 
 changefulness, that they require particular notice. If you 
 watch 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 color 
 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 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 299 
 
 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 gray of the darker clouds, and which will be itself 
 full of gradation, 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 color enough for a separate picture, and 
 yet no single part which is like another, or which has not 
 some peculiar source of beauty, and some peculiar arrange- 
 ment of color 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 gray, 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 presents us with more essential truth, and more 
 clear expression and illustration of natural laws, in every 
 wreath of vapor, 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 beautiful ; 
 we have at present only to remember that of these clouds, 
 § 15. Recapitu- ^^^d the truths connected with them, none be- 
 lation. £^^^ 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 advance- 
 ment of our knowledge, and to every added moment of our 
 contemplation. 
 
300 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS : — SECONDLY, OF THE CENTRAL CLOUD 
 
 REGION. 
 
 We have next to investigate the character of the Central 
 Cloud Region, which I consider as including all clouds which 
 are the usual characteristic of ordinary serene weather, and 
 §1. Extent and which touch and envelop the mountains of 
 of^^the^^centrai Switzerland, but never affect those of our own 
 cloud region. island ; they may therefore be considered as 
 occupying a space of air ten thousand feet in height, extend- 
 ing 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 closely connected 
 with the lowest rain clouds ; but the species especially char- 
 acteristic of the central region is a white, ragged, irregular, 
 and scattered vapor, which has little form and less color, and 
 of which a good example may be seen in the largest land- 
 scape of Cuyp, in the Dulwich Gallery. When this vapor 
 collects into masses, it is partially rounded, clumsy, and pon- 
 derous, as if it would tumble out of the sky, shaded with a 
 dull gray, and totally devoid of any appearance of energy 
 or motion. Even in nature, these clouds are comparatively 
 uninteresting, scarcely worth raising our heads 
 teristic*^ clouds^ to look at ; and on canvas, valuable only as a 
 Te^STr^n^nor ^leans of introducing light, and breaking the 
 repretnt^^^^^^^^^^ mouotony of bluc ; yet they are, perhaps, beyond 
 are therefore fa- ^\\ others the favoritc clouds of the Dutch mas- 
 
 vorite subjects 
 
 with the old mas- ters. Whether they had any motive for the 
 
 ters. . . 
 
 adoption of such materials, beyond the extreme 
 facility with which acres of canvas might thus be covered with- 
 out any troublesome exertion of thought ; or any temptation 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 301 
 
 to such selections beyond the impossibility of error where nat- 
 ure 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 de- 
 termine, 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 — 
 and equally devoid of all that could gratify, inform, or of- 
 fend. 
 
 But although this kind of cloud is, as I have said, typical 
 of the central region, it is not one which nature is fond of. 
 She scarcely ever lets an hour pass without some manifesta- 
 §3 The clouds ^i^n of finer forms, sometimes approaching the 
 of saivator and uDDcr cirri, somctimcs the lower cumulus. And 
 
 Poussm. . 
 
 then in the lower outlines, we have the nearest 
 approximation which nature ever presents to the clouds of 
 Claude, Saivator, and Poussin, to the characters of which I 
 must request especial attention, as it is here only 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. 
 
 Clouds, it is to be remembered, are not so much local vapor, 
 as vapor rendered locally visible by a fall of temperature. 
 Thus a cloud, whose parts are in constant motion, will hover 
 § 4. Their essen- ^ suowy mountain, pursuing constantly the 
 tiai characters, game track upon its flanks, and yet remaining 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 car- 
 ries becomes visible, and then and there the cloud forms on 
 the instant, apparently maintaining its form against the wind, 
 though the careful and keen eye can see all its parts in the 
 
302 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 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 regu- 
 late 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 correspond- 
 ent 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 outline of the Grandes Jorasses, 
 at Chamounix, mimicked in its every jag by a line of clouds 
 above it. Another resultant phenomenon is the formation of 
 cloud in the calm air to leeward of a steep summit ; cloud 
 whose edges are in rapid motion, where they are affected by 
 the current of the wind above, and stream from4he peak like 
 the smoke of a volcano, yet always vanish at a certain dis- 
 tance from it as steam issuing from a chimney. When wet 
 weather of some duration is approaching, a small white spot 
 of cloud will sometimes appear low on the hill flanks ; it will 
 not move, but will increase gradually for some little time, 
 then diminish, still without moving ; disappear altogether, 
 reappear ten minutes afterwards, exactly in the same spot ; 
 increase to a greater extent than before, again disappear, 
 again return, and at last permanently ; other similar spots of 
 cloud forming simultaneously, with various fluctuations, each 
 in its own spot, and at the same level on the hill-side, until 
 all expand, join together, and form an unbroken veil of threat- 
 ening gray, which darkens gradually into storm. What in 
 such cases takes place palpably and remarkably, is more or 
 less a law of formation in all clouds whatsoever ; 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 formation 
 and disappearance of parts. There is, therefore, usually a 
 parallelism and consistency in their great outlines, which 
 give system to the smaller curves of which they are composed; 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 303 
 
 and if these great lines be taken, rejecting the minutiae of 
 variation, the resultant form will almost always be angular, 
 § 5. Their angu- and full of character and decision. In the flock- 
 gTne/aTdecislon fields of equal masscs, each individual mass 
 of outline. has the effect, not of an ellipse or circle, but of 
 a rhomboid ; the sky is crossed and checkered, not honey- 
 combed ; in the lower cumuli, 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 fantastic energy which 
 gives every cloud a marked character 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 origi- 
 nality and vigor of separate conception in cloud forms, which 
 give to the scenery of the sky a force and variety no less de- 
 lightful 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 inani- 
 mate 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 an2:ular iafr, 
 
 §6. The compo- , ' . . & J o> 
 
 eition of their breaking off into sprav, then a downright 
 
 minor curves. -it J- ^ ^ o 
 
 straight Ime, then a curve again, then a deep 
 gap, and a place where all is lost and melted away, and so 
 on ; displaying in every inch of the form renewed and cease- 
 less invention, setting off grace with rigidity, and relieving 
 flexibility with force, in a manner scarcely less admirable, 
 and far more changeful than even in the muscular forms of 
 the human frame. Nay, such is the exquisite composition 
 of all this, that you may take any 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 
 
304 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 the most studied inequality — with the most delicate symme- 
 try — 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 have yet 
 proved, be highly expedient and proper, in art, that this va- 
 riety, individuality, and angular character should be changed 
 into a mass of convex curves, each preciselvlike 
 
 §7. Their char- . • 11 • n n i i 
 
 acters, as given its neighbor in all respects, and unbroken from 
 by s. Rosa. beginning to end ; — it may be highly original, 
 masterly, bold, whatever you choose to call it ; but it \s false, 
 I do not take upon me to assert that the clouds which in 
 ancient Germany were more especially and peculiarly de- 
 voted to the business of catching princesses off desert islands, 
 and carrying them to enchanted castles, might not have pos- 
 sessed something of the pillowy organization which we may 
 suppose best adapted for functions of such delicacy and dis- 
 patch. 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 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 " skies 
 of Salvator, such as that marked 159 in the Dulwich Gallery, 
 than were ever attributed, even by the ignorant and unfeel- 
 ing, 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 of the 
 seventeenth century, and in most of the Dutch. They looked 
 at clouds as at everythino: else which did not 
 
 § 8. Monotony . , . 
 
 and falsehood of particularly help them in their c^reat end 01 de- 
 
 the clouds of the ^ . . , , i i i . 
 
 Italian School ceptiou. With utter carelcssncss and bluntness 
 geneiaiiy. 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 in their studies, 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 305 
 
 contented with 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 Seaports 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 repetition of every other part of it, all to- 
 gether 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 similar- 
 ity between them ; you cannot tell which is which ; or take 
 the so-called Nicholas Poussin, No. 212, Dulwich Gallery, in 
 which, from the brown trees to the right-hand side of the pict- 
 ure, there is not one line which is not physically impossible. 
 
 But it is not the outline only which is thus systematically 
 false. The drawing of the solid form is worse still, for it is 
 to be remembered that although clouds of course arrange 
 themselves more or less into broad masses, with 
 of ^' congregated a light sidc and dark side, both their light and 
 
 masses of cloud. it • 'ii ii? • 
 
 shade are invariably composed ot a series or di- 
 vided 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 general form. Nor are these multitu- 
 dinous divisions a truth of slight importance in the character 
 of sky, for they are dependent on, and illustrative of, a qual- 
 ity which is usually in a great degree overlooked, — the enor- 
 mous 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 sev- 
 eral 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 vapor, from the 
 edge to the shadow, involves at least a distance of five or 
 six miles. We are little apt, in watching the changes of a 
 Vol. I. —20 
 
306 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 mountainous range of cloud, to reflect that the masses of 
 vapor which compose it, are huger and higher than any 
 § 10. Demonstra- mountain range of the earth ; and the distances 
 Bon witrmouS- between mass and mass are not yards of air tra- 
 tain ranges. vcrscd in an instant by the flying form, but val- 
 leys of changing atmosphere leagues over ; that the slow mo- 
 tion of ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a 
 boiling energy of exulting vapor 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, 3000 feet 
 from base to summit. It is not until we have actually com- 
 pared 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 colos- 
 sal scale of the 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 demon- 
 strable and evident fact, that the space of vapor visibly ex- 
 tended 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 boiling heap of illuminated mist in the nearer 
 sky, is an enormous mountain, fifteen or twenty thousand 
 feet in height, six or seven miles over an illuminated sur- 
 face, 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 evident, 
 that though we might, without much violation of truth, omit 
 § 11. And conse- minor divisions of a cloud four yards over, 
 anTUr^ues'^of the Veriest audacity of falsehood to omit 
 
 feature. those of masscs 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 fore- 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 307 
 
 ibly 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 abso- 
 lutely necessary, in order to express this space and distance, 
 which cannot 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 vari- 
 eties of ravine, crag, chasm, and precipice, into one solid, 
 §12. NotiigMiy unbrokcn mass, with one light side and one dark 
 to be omitted. side, looking like a white ball or parallelopiped 
 two yards broad, the words breadth," " boldness," or gen- 
 eralization," would scarcely be received as a sufficient apology 
 for a proceeding so glaringly false, and so painfully degrad- 
 ing. But when, instead o^ 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 association with each 
 other, and rendered visible in a thousand 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 arrangement, should be all summed up into one 
 round mass, with one swell of white, and one flat side of un- 
 broken gray, is considered an evidence of the sublimest pow- 
 ers 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 depriv- 
 ing 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 ; 
 
 * Here I include even the great ones — even Titian and Veronese, — 
 excepting only Tintoret and the religious schools. 
 
308 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 more or less perfectly carried out, according to their power 
 of hand and accuracy of eye, but universally the same in con- 
 ception. It was the idea of a comparatively 
 
 § 13. Imperfect ^ / *^ 
 
 conceptions of small, round, puffed-up white body, irregularly 
 tent in ancient associated with Other round and puffed-up white 
 landscape. bodics, each with a white light side, and a gray 
 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 people ; it is the first, general, uncultivated notion 
 of what we see every day. People think of the clouds as 
 about as large 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, whitish, and apparently 
 suspended a great way under a high blue concavity. So 
 that these ideas be tolerably given with smooth paint, they 
 are content, and call it nature. How different it is from any- 
 thing that nature ever did, or ever will do, I have endeavored 
 to show ; but I cannot, 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 them- 
 selves 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 imagina- 
 tion lost in their immensity, and his senses confused with 
 their multitude, let him go to Claude, to Salvator, 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 transparency. Not 
 §14. Total want her most ponderous and lightless masses will 
 aL*evan^escence "^ture ever leave us without some evidence of 
 Lnci'i'nt'^^°"w- transmitted sunshine ; and she perpetually gives 
 scape. us passages in which the vapor becomes visible 
 
 only by the sunshine which it arrests and holds within itself, 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 309 
 
 not caught on its surface, but entangled in its mass — float- 
 ing fleeces, precious with the gold of heaven ; and this trans- 
 lucency is especially indicated on the dark sides even of her 
 heaviest wreaths, which possess opalescent and delicate hues 
 of partial illumination, far more dependent upon the beams 
 which pass through them than on those which are reflected 
 upon them. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more pain- 
 fully and ponderously opaque than the clouds of the old 
 masters universally. However far removed in aerial dis- 
 tance, 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 per- 
 severing determination on the part of their outlines not to 
 be broken in upon, nor interfered with in the slightest de- 
 gree, by any presumptuous blue, or impertinent winds. 
 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 deficiencies 
 are to be found in their drawing merely of the separate 
 masses of the solid cumulus, the easiest drawn of all clouds. 
 § 15 Farther nature Scarcely ever confines herself to such 
 proof of their de- masscs 1 they form but the thousandth part of 
 
 ficiency m space. . . . 
 
 her variety of effect. She builds up a pyramid 
 of their boiling volumes, bars this across like a mountain with 
 the gray cirrus, envelops it in black, ragged, drifting vapor, 
 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 infinitv of multitude of the hio;h cirri, and melts 
 even the unoccupied 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 masses, nature 
 has fifty pictures, made up each of millions qf minor thoughts 
 
310 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 — fifty aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the 
 Shechinah of the blue — fifty hollow ways among bewildered 
 hills — each with their own nodding rocks, and cloven preci- 
 pices, and radiant summits, and robing vapors, but all unlike 
 each other, except in beauty, all bearing witness to the un- 
 wearied, exhaustless operation of the Infinite Mind. Now, in 
 cases like these especially, 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 enter- 
 tainment and food for thought. If he could subdivide it by 
 millionths of inches, he could not reach the multitudinous 
 majesty of nature ; but it is at least incumbent upon him to 
 make the most of what 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 — fitfulness and infinity. And now let us, keeping 
 in memory what we have seen of Poussin and Salvator, take 
 up one of Turner's skies, and see whether he is as narrow in 
 § 16. Instance his Conception, or as niggardly in his space. It 
 in the^sky^o/iM^^ docs not matter which we take, his sublime Baby- 
 ner's Babylon. Ion* 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 vapor, 
 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 fragments, 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, illuminated mist, or rather cloud melted into rain, and 
 absorbed again before that rain has fallen, but penetrated 
 throughout, whether it be vapor or whether it be dew, with 
 soft sunshine, turning it as white as snow. Gradually as it 
 * Engraved in Findel's Bible Illustrations. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 311 
 
 rises, the rainy fusion ceases, you cannot tell where the film 
 of blue on the left begins — but it is deepening, deepening 
 stilly — 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, winnowed into threads by 
 the wind, and flung before the following vapor 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 gray 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 
 showing through their own visible radiance the three suc- 
 cessive ranges of hills which connect its desolate plain with 
 space. Above, the edgy summit of the cumulus, broken into 
 fragments, recedes into the sky, which is peopled in its seren- 
 ity 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 ! It is the exhaustless living energy 
 with which the universe is filled ; and what will you set be- 
 side it of the works of other men ? Show me a single picture, 
 § 17. And in his ^he whole compass of ancient art, in which I 
 Pools of Solomon. p^gg f^om cloud to cloud, from region to 
 region, from first to second and third heaven, as T can here, 
 and you may talk of Turner's want of truth. Turn to the 
 Pools of Solomon, 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 hairbreadth without 
 
312 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 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 4 or 
 when you can measure the modulation and the depth of that 
 hollow mist, as you can the flourishes of the brush upon the 
 canvas 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 analyzed. 
 
 In the vignette of the Lake of Como, in Rogers's Italy, 
 the space is so small that the details have been partially lost 
 by the engraver ; but enough remain to illustrate the great 
 principles of cloud from which we have endeav- 
 outune^nd char- orcd to explain. Obscrve first the general angu- 
 acter in his Como. outline of the volumes on the left of the sun. 
 If you mark the points where the direction of their outline 
 changes, and connect those points by right lineiB, 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 colos- 
 sal. 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 multi- 
 plicity 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 imperceptibly above into 
 the haziness of the sun-lighted atmosphere, contrasted in all 
 its vast forms with the 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 
 infinite in its organization! 
 
 I would draw especial attention, both here and in all other 
 works of Turner, to the beautiful use of the low horizon- 
 § 19. AfiRocia- tal bars or fields of cloud, (cirrostratus,) which 
 foXfifus^^w u h associate themselves so frequently — more es- 
 the cumulus. pecially before storms — with the true cumulus, 
 floating on its flanks, or capping it, as if it were a mountain, 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 313 
 
 and seldom mingling with its substance, unless in the very 
 formation of rain. They supply us with one of those beauti- 
 ful instances of natural composition, by which the artist is 
 superseded and excelled — for, by the occurrence of these 
 horizontal flakes, the rolling form of the cumulus is both op- 
 posed in its principal lines, and gifted with an apparent 
 solidity and vastness, which no other expedient could have 
 exhibited, and which far exceed in awfulness the impression 
 of tlie noblest mountains of the earth. I have seen in the 
 evening light of Italy, the Alps themselves out-towered by 
 ranges of these mighty clouds, alternately white in the star- 
 light, and inhabited by fire. 
 
 Turn back to the first vignette in the Italy. The angular 
 outlines and variety of modulation in the clouds above the 
 sail, and the delicate atmosphere of morning into which they 
 are dissolved about the breathinsr hills, require 
 
 §20. The deep- . U ^ 4- 4? ^U' ' 
 
 based knowledge no Comment ; but one part ot this vignette de- 
 
 of the Alps in t . i ,. • ii a'j- p 
 
 Turner's Lake of mands especial notice ; it is the repetition or 
 Geneva. ^j^^ Outline of the snowy mountain by the light 
 
 cloud above it. The cause of this I have already explained 
 (vide page 302,) and its occurrence here is especially valuable 
 as bearing witness to the thorough and scientific knowledge 
 thrown by Turner into his slightest works. The thing can- 
 not be seen once in six months ; it would not have been no- 
 ticed, much less introduced by an ordinary artist, and to the 
 public it is a dead letter, or an offence. Ninety-nine persons 
 in a hundred would not have observed this pale wreath of 
 parallel cloud above the hill, and the hundredth in all prob- 
 ability says it is unnatural. It requires the most intimate 
 and acctirate 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 
 
 a c^H T. bffluence but that of their own elastic force, 
 § 21. Further , , , , ' 
 
 principles of boil, rise, and melt in the heaven with more ap- 
 
 cloudformexem- i ^ i n i i 
 
 pUficd in his proach to globular form than under any other 
 circumstances is possible. I name this vignette, 
 not only because it is most remarkable for the buoyancy 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 and elasticity of inward energy, indicated through the most 
 ponderous forms, and affords us a beautiful instance of the 
 junction of the cirrostratus with the cumulus, of which we 
 have just been speaking (§ 19,) but because it is a charac- 
 teristic 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 in relief 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 out- 
 line, giving character and solidity to the great masses of light, 
 without taking away from their breadth. And Turner avails 
 himself of these boldly and constantly,— outlining 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, depends upon such outlines. 
 
 As I before observed of mere execution, that one of the 
 best tests of its excellence was the expression of infinity ; 
 so it may be noticed with respect to the painting of details 
 §22 Reasons for g^^^^rally, that more difference lies between one 
 insisting on the artist and another, in the attainment of this 
 
 infinity of Tur- . , ' 
 
 ner's works. In- quality, than in any other of the efforts of art ; 
 
 finity is almost ti ./, . « , 
 
 an unerring test and that II we wish. Without reierence to beauty 
 
 of all truth. « ... i • i? • 
 
 of composition, or any other intertering circum- 
 stances, to form a judgment of the truth of painting, per- 
 haps 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 division of parts. For we may be quite sure that 
 what is not infinite, cannot be true ; it does not, indeed, fol- 
 low that w^hat is infinite, always is true, but it cannot be alto- 
 gether false, for this simple reason ; that it is impossible for 
 mortal mind to compose an infinity of any kind for itself, or to 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 315 
 
 form an idea of perpetual variation, and to avoid all repeti- 
 tion, merely by its own combining resources. The moment that 
 we trust to ourselves, we repeat ourselves, and therefore the 
 moment we see in a work of any kind whatsoever, the ex- 
 pression of infinity, we may be certain that the workman has 
 gone to nature for it ; while, on the other hand, the moment 
 we see repetition, or want of infinity, we may be certain that 
 the workman has not gone to nature for it. 
 
 For instance, in the picture of Salvator before noticed, No. 
 220 in the Dulwich Gallery, as we see at once that the two 
 masses of cloud absolutely repeat each other in every one of 
 § 23. Instances their forms, and that each is composed of about 
 of iUn*the\vorks ^welve white swecps of the brush, all forming 
 of Salvator. ^he Same curve, and all of the same length ; 
 and as we can count these, and measure their common diam- 
 eter, 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 abso- 
 lutely 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 can- 
 not possibly resemble anything / that whatever 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, 
 § 24 And of the ^^^^ place, that he has given us a distance 
 
 universal pres- ovcr the hills in the horizon, into which, when 
 
 enceofitin -ir. • 
 
 those of Turner, we are tired of penetrating, we must turn and 
 
 The conclusions . , . , . . 
 
 which may bear- come back again, there being not the remotest 
 rue a rom i . ^j^^j^^^ q£ 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 oyer 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 
 
316 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 one of those divisions, it is still as utterly defied and de- 
 feated by the part as by the whole — that there is not one 
 line out of the millions there which repeats another, not one 
 which is unconnected with another, not one which does not 
 in itself convey histories 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 analyze — 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 in- 
 finity can only be based on truth — that it 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 in the works of 
 §25 Themuiti ^^^^^ men than is commonly supposed, and the 
 plication of ob- sifiTU, wherevcr it is really found, of the very 
 
 ]ects, or increase . */ ^ ♦/ 
 
 of their size, will highest art. For we are apt to forget that the 
 
 not give the im- . • p 
 
 pression of in- greatest number is no nearer innnity than the 
 S=^ource^of^nov^^^ least, if it be definite number ; and the vastest 
 bulk is no nearer infinity than the most minute, 
 if it be definite bulk ; so that a man may multiply his ob- 
 jects forever 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 ob- 
 scure. And we shall find, the more we examine the works 
 of the old masters, that always, and in all parts, they are to- 
 tally wanting in every feeling of infinity, 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 errone- 
 ous choice of means, and a substitution of mere number or 
 bulk for real infinity. 
 
 And therefore, in concluding our notice of the central 
 cloud region, I should wish to dwell particularly 6n those 
 
OF TBUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 317 
 
 skies of Turner's, in which we have the whole space of the 
 heaven covered with the delicate dim flakes of gathering va- 
 § 26. Farther in- por, which are the intermediate link between 
 in^^re^gmy^kies the Central region and that of the rain-cloud, 
 of Turner. which assemble and grow out of the air ; 
 
 shutting up the heaven with a gray 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 page 115 of Roger's 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 
 omin^ous forms of level cloud behind the building. In that 
 at page 223, there are passages of the same kind, of exceed- 
 ing perfection. The sky through which the dawn is break- 
 ing in the Voyage of Columbus, and that with the Moon- 
 light under the Rialto, in Roger's Poems, the skies of the 
 Bethlehem, and the Pyramids in Finden's Bible series, and 
 among the Academy pictures, that of the Hero and Leander, 
 and Flight into Egypt, are characteristic and noble ex- 
 amples, as far as any individual works can be characteristic 
 of the universality of this mighty mind. I ought not 
 to forget the magnificent solemnity and fulness of the 
 wreaths of gathering darkness in the Folkstone. 
 
 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 
 § 27. The excel- ^P^ cxtcnsive Compositions to repeat him- 
 dra^ng^ of ^stan- neither is he ever very refined ; but his 
 
 fi^^^- 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 taste- 
 ful, 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 
 
318 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 it is a very different thing to rub out an irregular white 
 space neatly with the handkerchief, or to leave a bright 
 little bit of paper in the middle of a wash, and to give the 
 ^ real anatomy of cloud-form with perfect artic- 
 
 § 28. The average ... . 
 
 Btanding of the ulation of chiaroscuro. We have multitudes 
 
 English school. /. • ^• ^ ^ - t> 
 
 oi painters who can throw a light bit of strag- 
 gling vapor 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, 
 except when it occurs only as a part of a higher sys^tem. 
 And there is not one of our modern artists, except Stan- 
 field, 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 regu- 
 lated by precisely the same simple laws of light and shade as 
 more substantial matter, overcharge their color, confuse 
 their shadows and dark sides, and end in mere ragged con- 
 fusion. 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 anything 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 superior to the conventional and 
 narrow 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, that we 
 should be little attracted to the sky, and taught to be satis- 
 fied with a light suggestion of truthful form, than that we 
 be drawn to it by violently pronounced outline and intense 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 319 
 
 color, 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. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS I THIRDLY, OY THE REGION OF THE 
 RAIN-CLOUD. 
 
 The clouds which I wish to consider as characteristic of 
 the lower, or rainy region, differ not so much in their real 
 nature from those of the central and uppermost regions, 
 § 1 The apparent appearance, owing to their greater near- 
 
 difference in char- ness. For the central clouds, and perhaps 
 
 acter between the , , , . . ■'^ , 
 
 lower and central even the high cirH, deposit moisture, if not 
 
 clouds is depend- . . nn • ^ 11 ^ 
 
 ent chiefly on distinctly rain, as IS sutnciently proved by the 
 proximity. 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 differences, dependent on proximity, are most 
 marked and important. 
 
 In the first place, the clouds of the central region have, 
 as has been before observed, pure and aerial grays for 
 their dark sides, owing to the necessary distance from the 
 observer ; and as this distance permits a 
 difference^in^cofo^r^ multitude of local phenomena capable of in- 
 fluencing color, such as accidental sunbeams, 
 refractions, transparencies, or local mists and showers, to 
 be collected into a space comparatively small, the colors of 
 these clouds are always changeful and palpitating ; and 
 
 * I am unable to say to what height the real rain-cloud may extend ; 
 perhaps there are no mountains which rise altogether above storm. I 
 have never been in a violent storm at a greater height than between 
 8000 and 9000 feet above the level of the sea. There the rain-cloud is 
 exceedingly light, compared to the ponderous darkness of the lower air. 
 
320 
 
 OF TBUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 whatever degree of gray 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 phenom- 
 ena to be at once visible, makes its hue of gray monoto- 
 nous, and (by losing the blue of distance) warm and brown 
 compared to that of the upper clouds. This is especially re- 
 markable on any part of it which may happen to be illu- 
 mined, which is of a brown, bricky, ochreous tone, never 
 bright, always coming in dark outline on the 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 
 gray, and sulphureous and lurid if there be thunder in the 
 air. 
 
 With these striking differences in color, it presents no 
 fewer nor less important in form, chiefly from losing almost 
 all definiteness of character and outline. It is sometimes 
 § 3. And in defi- nothing more than a thin mist, whose outline 
 nitenessof form, ^^nnot be traced, rendering the landscape locally 
 indistinct 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 vapor. 
 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 sus- 
 pended 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 waved and bent by the wind, or twisted, sometimes 
 even swept upwards from the cloud. The velocity of these 
 vapors, 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 tTiey 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 321 
 
 are precisely subject to the same great laws of form which 
 regulate the upper clouds. They are not solid bodies borne 
 § 4. They are about with the wind, but they carry the wind 
 crseir*the^ same ^ith them, and cause it. Every one knows, 
 great laws. ^Jjq 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 Tete 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 vapor, al- 
 ways forming 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, un- 
 der the slate rocks of the Croix de Fer, 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 horseshoe ; al- 
 ways coming into existence, and always vanishing at exactly 
 the same places ; traversing the space between with enor- 
 mous 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 phe- 
 nomena of drifted smoke, heat-haze, local mists in the morn- 
 ing or evenino- • in valleys, or over water, mi- 
 
 §5. Value, to the ^ ^. '. 
 
 painter, of the rage, whitc Steaming vapor rising in evaporation 
 
 rain-cloud. « • a i p -i i i • 
 
 irom moist and open suriaces, and everything 
 which visibly affects the condition of the atmosphere without 
 actually assuming the form of cloud. These phenomena are 
 a8 perpetual in all countries as they are beautiful, and afford 
 Vol. I.— 21 
 
322 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 by far the most effective and valuable means which the painter 
 possesses, for modification 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, accordingly, nature her- 
 self uses it constantly, as one of her chief means of most per- 
 fect effect ; not in one country, nor another, but every where 
 — everywhere, at least, where there is anything worth call- 
 ing landscape. I cannot answer for the desert of the Sahara, 
 but I know that there can be no greater mistake, than sup- 
 posing that delicate and variable effects of mist and rain- 
 cloud are peculiar to northern climates. I have never seen 
 in any place or country effects of mist more perfect than in 
 § 6 The old ^^^^ Campagua of Rome, and among the hills of 
 masters have not Sorrcnto. It is therefore matter of no little 
 
 left a single in- 
 stance of the marvel to me, and I conceive that it can scarcely 
 
 painting of the , , . n • ^ 
 
 rain-cloud, and be otherwise to any reilectmg person, that 
 ir^it^^ Gaspar throughout the whole range of ancient land- 
 
 roussin' a storms. i. ^-l • j. £ j.\ • ^ 
 
 scape art, there occurs no instance or the paint- 
 ing of a real rain-cloud, still less of any of the more delicate 
 phenomena characteristic of the region. " Storms " indeed, 
 as the innocent public persist in calling such abuses of nat- 
 ure and abortions of art as the two windy Gaspars in our 
 National Gallery, are common enough ; massive concretions 
 of ink and indigo, wrung and twisted very hard, apparently 
 in a vain effort to get some moisture out of them ; bear- 
 ing 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 India-rubber 
 species. Enough of this in all conscience we have, and to 
 spare ; but for the legitimate rain-cloud, with its ragged and 
 spray-like edge, its veilly transparency, and its columnar bur- 
 den of blessing, neither it, nor anything like it, or approaching 
 it, occurs in any painting of the old masters that I have ever 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 323 
 
 seen ; and I have seen enough to warrant my affirming that if it 
 occur anywhere, it must be through accident rather than in- 
 tention. 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 vapors. 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 mat- 
 ter ; 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 consider- 
 ing the central clouds, are, by way of being energetic or sub- 
 lime, more glaringly and audaciously committed in their 
 " storms ; " and 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. 
 
 Supposing that we had nothing to show in modern art, of 
 the region of the rain-cloud, but the dash of Cox, the blot o^ 
 de Wint, or even the ordinary stormy skies of the body of 
 §7. The great our inferior water-color painters, we might yet 
 moderns this ^^ugh all efforts of the old masters to utter scorn, 
 i-espect. 'Bnt One among our water-color artists, deserves 
 
 especial notice — before we ascend the steps of the solitary 
 throne — as having done in his peculiar walk, what for faith- 
 ful and pure truth, truth indeed of a limited range and un- 
 studied application, but yet most faithful and most pure, will 
 remain unsurpassed if not unrivalled, — Copley Fielding. We 
 § 8, Works of VfeW aware how much of what he has done 
 Copley Fielding. Jepcnds in a great degree upon particular tricks 
 of execution, or on a labor somewhat too mechanical to be 
 meritorious ; that it is rather the texture than the pla7% 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 dexterous 
 imitation than of definite thought. But whatever detrac- 
 tions from his merit we may be compelled to make on these 
 grounds, in considering art as the embodying of beauty, or 
 
324 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 the channel of mind, it is impossible, when we are speaking 
 of truth only, to pass by his down scenes and moorland show- 
 ers, of some years ago, in which he produced some of the 
 most perfect and faultless passages of mist and rain-cloud 
 §9. His peculiar w^^^^ hasever seen. Wet, transparent, 
 
 formless, full of motion, felt rather by their 
 shadows on the hills than by their presence in the sky, be- 
 coming dark only through increased depth of space, most 
 translucent where most sombre, and light only through in- 
 creased 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 will remain, as long as their colors stand, 
 among the most simple, unadulterated, and complete tran- 
 scripts 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 particu- 
 
 § 10. His weak- ^ , „ ^ . . - 
 
 fiessanditsprob- lar moment, to that easiest moment for imita- 
 tion, when knowledge of form may be super- 
 seded by management of the brush, and the judgment of the 
 colorist by the manufacture of a color ; the moment when all 
 form is melted down and drifted away in the descending veil 
 of rain, and when the variable and fitful colors of the heaven 
 are lost in the monotonous gray of its storm tones.* We 
 can only account for this by supposing that there is some- 
 thing radically wrong in his method of study ; for a man of 
 
 * I ought here, however, to have noted another effect of the rain- 
 cloud, which, so far as I know, has been rendered only by Copley Field- 
 ing It is seen chiefly in clouds gathering for rain, when the sky is en- 
 tirely covered with a gray veil rippled or waved with pendent swells of 
 soft texture, but excessively hard and liny in their edges. I am not 
 sure that this is an agreeable or impressive form of the rain-cloud, btit 
 it is a frequent one, and it is often most faithfully given by Fielding ; 
 only in some cases the edges becoming a little doubled and harsh have 
 given a look of failure or misadventure to some even of the best studied 
 passages ; and something of the same hardness of line is occasionally 
 visible in his drawing of clouds by whose nature it is not warranted. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 325 
 
 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 unweakened 
 or unblunted, without constant and laborious studies in sim- 
 ple light and shade, of form only. The brush is at once the 
 artist's greatest aid and enemy ; it enables him 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 over- 
 come 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. 
 
 In passing to the works of our greatest modern master, it 
 must be premised that the qualities which constitute a most 
 essential part of the truth of the rain-cloud, are in no degree 
 . to be rendered by ens^ravins:. Its indefiniteness 
 
 § 11. Impossibil- J & & ^ 
 
 ity of reasoning of torn and transparent form is far beyond the 
 
 ontherain- . 
 
 clouds of Turner powcr oi cvcn our bcst eugravcrs : I do not say 
 lom engravings, j^^^^jj^ t\\Q\v possible powcr, 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 grays 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 dark- 
 ness of the steel. What w^e say of his works, therefore, must 
 be understood as referring only to the original drawings ; 
 though we may name one or two instances in which the en- 
 graver has, to a certain degree, succeeded in distantly fol- 
 lowing the intention of the master. 
 
 Jumieges, in the Rivers of France, ought perhaps, after 
 
326 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 what we have said of Fielding, to be our first object of at- 
 tention, because it is a rendering by Turner of Fielding's par- 
 §12 His render- ^^^^^^^^ moment, and the only one existing, for 
 ing of Fielding's Turner never repeats himself. One picture is 
 
 particular mo- ^ r ^ 
 
 ment in the allotted to One truth : the statement is perfect- 
 
 Jumieges. 
 
 ly 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 re- 
 tirement 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 there is added to this noble com- 
 ^„ , position an incident which may serve us at 
 
 §13. Illustration . , 
 
 ofti^e nature of oncc for a farther illustration of the nature and 
 posed forms of forms of cloud, and for a final proof how 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 dissipation ; it is as much 
 a cloud as those of the sky itself, that is, a quantity of moist- 
 ure rendered visible in the air by imperfect solution. Ac- 
 cordingly, observe how exquisitely irregular and broken are 
 its forms, how sharp and spray-like ; but with all the facts 
 observed 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 dissipation but that of 
 tenuity. Observe its volumes ; there is no breaking up nor 
 disappearing here ; the wind carries its elastic globes be- 
 fore it, but does not dissolve nor break them.f 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, 
 
 * Compare Sect. I. Chap. IV. § 5. 
 
 f 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. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 327 
 
 and the accuracy of study which has guided Turner to the 
 truth. 
 
 From this picture we should pass to the Llanthony,* which 
 is the rendering of the moment immediately following 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 spring- 
 fetfriiig^rain^ in ing spray to meet the returning light; and these, 
 the Liantaony. heavcu regretted what it had given, 
 
 and were taking it back, pass, as they leap, into vapor, and 
 fall not again, but vanish in the shafts of the sunlight f — 
 hurrying, fitful, wind-woven sunlight — which glides through 
 the thick leaves, and paces along the pale rocks like rain ; 
 half conquering, half quenched by 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 sum- 
 mits 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 which we 
 can better iudo'e by the ensfravins^ — the Loch 
 
 §15. And of com- ^ . , . , \ ^ . c , 
 
 mencing, chosen Coriskin, lu the illustrations to bcott, because it 
 
 with peculiar. , , , iii 
 
 meaning for introduces US to another and a most remarkable 
 Loch Conskin. instance of the artist's vast and varied knowl- 
 edge. When rain falls on a mountain composed chiefly of 
 
 * No conception can be formed of this picture from the engraving. 
 It is perhaps the most marvellous piece of execution and of gray color 
 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. 
 
 f 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 vapor as it springs ; and this vapor 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 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. 
 
328 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 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 vapor are instanta- 
 neously and universally formed, which rise, are absorbed by 
 the atmosphere, 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 diminished ; w^here 
 there is foliage it scarcely takes place at all. Now this ef- 
 fect has evidently been especially chosen by Turner for Loch 
 Coriskin, not only because it enabled him to relieve its jagged 
 forms with veiling vapor, but to tell the tale which no pen- 
 cilling could, the story of its utter absolute barrenness of un- 
 lichened, dead, desolated rock : — 
 
 *' The wildest glen, but this, can show 
 Some touch of nature's genial glow, 
 On high Benmore green mosses grow. 
 And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe. 
 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 its rocks at random thrown, 
 Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone." 
 
 Lord of the Isles, Canto III. 
 
 Here, again, we see the absolute necessity of scientific and 
 entire acquaintance with nature, before this great artist can 
 be understood. That which, to the ignorant, is little more 
 tfian an unnatural and meaningless confusion of steam-like 
 vapor, is to the experienced such a full and perfect expres- 
 sion of the character of the spot, as no means of art could 
 have otherwise given. 
 
 In the Long Ships Lighthouse, Land's End, we have 
 §16. The draw- clouds Without rain — at twilight — enveloping 
 entvapo^iTthe ^^c cHffs of the coast, but couccaliug nothing, 
 Land's End. every outline being visible through their o^loom ; 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 329 
 
 and not only the outline — for it is easy to do this — but 
 the surface. The bank of rocky coast approaches the spec- 
 tator 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 trar^sparent veil, but 
 of a solid body of cloud, every inch of whose increasing dis- 
 tance is marked and felt. But the great wonder of the 
 picture is the intensity of gloom which is attained in pure 
 warm gray, without either blackness or blueness. It is a 
 gloom, dependent rather on the enormous space and depth 
 indicated, than on actual pitch of color, 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, 
 shattered, 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 vapor tossed up like 
 men's hands, as in defiance of the tempest, the jets of result- 
 ing 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 untrace- 
 §17 Theindivid Unconnected, yet perpetual form — this ful- 
 
 uai character of ness of character absorbed in the universal en- 
 its parts. 
 
 ergy — 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 sim- 
 ilarity of line and direction, is for the multitude ; but to 
 mark the independent passion, the tumultuous separate ex- 
 istence of every wreath of writhing vapor, 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 vapors, 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. 
 
330 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 The drawing of Coventry may be particularized as a far- 
 ther example of this fine suggestion of irregularity and fit- 
 fulness, through very constant parallelism of direction, both 
 _ . ^ in rain and clouds. The srreat mass of cloud, 
 
 §18. Deep stud- ^ ^ ^ ^ ' 
 
 ied form of swift which traverscs the whole picture, is character- 
 
 rain-cloud in the , , 
 
 Coventry. izcd throughout by severe right Imes, nearly 
 
 parallel with each other, into which everyone of its wreaths 
 has a tendency to range itself ; but no one of these right 
 lines is actually and entirely parallel to any other, though 
 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 varied 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 force of 
 the tempest which it carries with it, and every one of its 
 wreaths to be (as was before explained) not so much some- 
 thing borne before or by the wind, as the visible form and 
 presence 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 
 
 § 19. Compared 
 
 with forms given to (159 Dulwich Gallery). Both are rolling 
 masses of connected cloud ; but in Turner'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 for- 
 ward, fierce, inevitable influence of storm. In Salvator's, 
 every curve repeats its neighbor, 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 whatso- 
 ever. I could not brinof togrether two finer or more instruc- 
 
 * Note especially the dark uppermost outline of the mass. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 831 
 
 tive examples, the one of everything that is perfect, the 
 other of everything 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 ir- 
 regular in their parallelism, but those of the falling rain are 
 §20. Entire ex- equally Varied in their direction, indicating the 
 pesfb? minuTe g^sty changcf ulucss of the v^ind, and yet kept 
 touches and cir- straight and stern in their individual descent, 
 
 cumstances in & > 
 
 the Coventry. 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 per- 
 petually in each of its swirls back in the direction of the 
 w^ind, but so suddenly and violently, as almost to assume the 
 angular lines of lightning. Farther, to complete the impres- 
 sion, 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 complete torrent, and particular atten- 
 tion 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. 
 
 But I have not quite done with this noble picture yet. Im- 
 petuous clouds, twisted rain, flickering sunshine, fleeting 
 shadow, gushing water, and oppressed cattle, all speak the 
 § 21. Especially Same story of tumult, fitful ness, powder, and ve- 
 7^^:'orel locity. Only one thing is wanted, a passage 
 treme repose. 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, hori- 
 zontal, silent flakes of the highest cirrus, resting in the repose 
 of the deep sky. Of all else that we have noticed in this draw- 
 ing, some faint idea can be formed from th^ engraving : but 
 not the slightest of the delicate and soft forms of these paus- 
 ing vapors, and still less of the exquisite depth and palpitat- 
 ing tenderness of the blue with which they are islanded. En- 
 
332 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 gravers, indeed, invariably lose the effect of all passages of 
 cold color, under the mistaken idea that it is to be kept pale 
 in order to indicate distance ; whereas it ought commonly 
 to be darker than the rest of the sky. 
 
 To appreciate the full truth of this passage, we must un- 
 derstand another effect peculiar to the rain-cloud, that its 
 openings exhibit the purest blue which the sky ever shows. 
 §2-2 The truth ^^^^ chapter of this sec- 
 
 of this particular tiou, that aqueous vapor always turns the skv 
 
 passage. Per- • r» n 
 
 fectly pure blue more or Icss gray, it follows that we never can 
 
 skv only seen , . , . 
 
 after rain, and See the azure SO intense as when the greater 
 how seen. ^^^^ ^j^.^ vapor has just fallen in rain. Then, 
 
 and then only, pure blue sky becomes visible in the first 
 openings, distinguished especially by the manner in whick 
 the clouds melt into it ; their edges passing off in faint white 
 threads and fringes, through which the blue shines more and 
 more intensely, till the last trace of vapor is lost in its per- 
 fect color. It is only the upper white clouds, however, which 
 do this, or the last fragments of rain-clouds, becoming white 
 as they disappear, so that the blue is never corrupted by the 
 cloud, but only paled and broken with pure white, the pur- 
 est white which the sky ever shows. Thus we have a melt- 
 ing and palpitating color, never the same for two inches to- 
 gether, 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 back, as a retired scene, into 
 § 23. Absence of the Upper sky. Of this effect the old masters, 
 work^^of \he oW ^ remember, have taken no cognizance 
 
 masters. whatsoever ; all with them is, as we partially 
 
 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 im- 
 perturbable, impenetrable cloud on all sides — beautiful in 
 positive color, but totally destitute of that exquisite grada- 
 tion and change, that fleeting, panting, hesitating effort, 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 333 
 
 with which the first glance of the natural sky is shed through 
 the turbulence of the earth-storm. 
 
 They have some excuse, however, for not attempting this, 
 in the nature of their material, as one accidental dash of the 
 brush with water-color on a piece of wet or damp paper, will 
 ^ come nearer the truth and transparency of this 
 our water - color rain-blue than the labor of a day in oils ; and 
 
 artists in its ren- . , i i> t • ^ p r? ^ i i 
 
 dering. Use of the purity and leiicity ot some oi the careless. 
 It by Turner. melting watcr-color skies of Cox and Tayler may 
 well make us fastidious in all effects of this kind. It is, how- 
 ever, only in the drawings of Turner that we have this perfect 
 transparency and variation of blue, given in association with 
 the perfection of considered form. In Tayler and Cox the 
 forms are always partially accidental and unconsidered, often 
 essentially bad, and always incomplete ; in Turner the dash 
 of the brush is as completely under the rule of thought and 
 feeling as its slowest line ; all that it does is perfect, and 
 could not be altered, even in a hairbreadth, without injury ; 
 in addition to this, peculiar management and execution are 
 used in obtaining quality in the color itself, totally different 
 from the manipulation of any other artist ; and none, who 
 have ever spent so much as one hour of their lives over his 
 drawing, can forget those dim passages of dreamy blue, barred 
 and severed with a thousand delicate and soft and snowy 
 forms, which, gleaming in their patience of hope between the 
 troubled rushing of the racked earth-cloud, melt farther and 
 farther back into the height of heaven, until the eye is be- 
 wildered and the heart lost in the intensity of their peace. I 
 do not say that this is beautiful — I do not say it is ideal, nor 
 refined — I only ask you to watch for the first opening of the 
 clouds after the next south rain, and tell me if it be not 
 true ? 
 
 The Gosport affords us an instance more exquisite even 
 § 25. Expression than the passage above named in the Coventry, 
 i^nThe^GoSX the use of this melting and dewy blue, ac- 
 and other works, companied by two distances of rain-cloud, one 
 towering over the horizon, seen blue with excessive distance 
 through crystal atmosphere ; the other breaking overhead in 
 
334 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 the warm, sulphurous fragments of spray, whose loose and 
 shattering transparency, being the most essential characteris- 
 tic of the near rain-cloud, is precisely that which the old mas- 
 ters are sure to contradict. Look, for instance, at the wreaths 
 of cloud? in the Dido and ^neas of Gaspar Poussin, with their 
 unpleasant edges cut as hard and solid and opaque and smooth 
 as thick black paint can make them, rolled up 
 
 § 26. Contrasted ^ r 
 
 with* Gaspar Pous- ovcr ouc another like a dirty sail badly reefed : 
 
 sin's rain - cloud i i . i i i i 
 
 in the Dido and or look at the agreeable transparency and va- 
 riety of the cloud-edge where it cuts the Moun- 
 tain in N. Poussin's Phocion, and compare this with th© 
 wreaths which float across the precipice in the second vignette 
 in Campbell, or which gather around the Ben Lomond, the 
 white rain gleaming beneath their dark transparent shadows ; 
 or which drift up along the flanks of the wooded hills, called 
 from the river by the morning light, in the Oakhampton ; or 
 which island the crags of Snowdon in the Llanberis, or melt 
 along the Cumberland hills, while Turner leads us across the 
 sands of Morecambe Bay. This last drawing deserves espe- 
 cial notice ; it is of an evening in spring, when the south rain 
 has ceased at sunset, and through the lulled and golden air, 
 the confused and fantastic mists float up along the hollows of 
 the mountains, white and pUre, the resurrection in spirit of 
 the new-fallen rain, catching shadows from the precipices, 
 and mocking the dark peaks with their own mountain-like but 
 melting forms till the solid mountains seem in motion like 
 those waves of cloud, emerging and vanishing as the weak 
 wind passes by their summits ; while the blue, level night ad- 
 vances along the sea, and the surging breakers leap up to 
 catch the last light from the path of tlie sunset. 
 
 I need not, however, insist upon Turner's peculiar power 
 of rendering mist, and all those passages of intermediate mys- 
 tery, between earth and air, vs^hen the mountain is melting 
 into the cloud, or the horizon into the twilierht : 
 
 §27. Turner^s , , . . , . . ^ ' 
 
 power of render- bccausc his Supremacy in these points is alto- 
 ingmis. gether undisputed, except by persons to whom 
 
 it would be impossible to prove anything which did not fall 
 under the form of a Rule of Three. Nothing is more natural 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 335 
 
 than that the studied form and color of this great artist should 
 be little understood, because they require for the full percep- 
 tion of their meaning and truth, such knowledge and such 
 time as not one in a thousand possesses, or can bestow ; but 
 yet the truth of them for that very reason is capable of dem- 
 onstration, and there is hope of our being able to make it 
 in some degree felt and comprehended even by those to whom 
 it is now a dead letter, or an offence. But the aerial and 
 § 28. His effects of misty effects of landscape, being matters of 
 ^at i/not^aTonce which the eye should be simply cognizant, and 
 
 caTn?more'^'be without eifort of thought, aS it is of light, mUSt, 
 
 explained or rea- ^yherc they are exquisitely rendered, either be 
 
 soiled on than na- n J 5 ^ 
 
 ture herself. felt at once, or prove that degree of blindness 
 and bluntness in the feelings of the observer which there is 
 little hope of ever conquering. Of course for persons w^ho 
 have never seen in their lives a cloud vanishing on a mountain- 
 side, and whose conceptions of mist or vapor are limited to 
 ambiguous outlines of spectral hackney-coaches and bodiless 
 lamp-posts, discerned through a brown combination of sul- 
 phur, soot, and gaslight, there is yet some hope ; we cannot, 
 indeed, tell them what the morning mist is like in mountain 
 air, but far be it from us to tell them that they are incapable 
 of feeling its beauty if they will seek it for themselves. But 
 if you have ever in your life had one opportunity with your 
 eyes and heart open, of seeing the dew rise from a hill-pasture, 
 or the storm gather on a sea-cliff, and if you have yet no feel- 
 ing for the glorious passages of mingled earth and heaven 
 which Turner calls up before you into breathing, tangible 
 being, there is indeed no hope for your apathy — art will never 
 touch you, nor nature inform. 
 
 It would be utterly absurd, among the innumerable pas- 
 sages of this kind given throughout his works, to point to 
 one as more characteristic or more perfect than another. The 
 §29. Variousin- Simmer Lake, near Askrig, for expression of 
 stances. mist pervaded with sunlight, — the Lake Lucerne, 
 
 a recent and unengraved drawing, for the recession of near 
 mountain form, not into dark, but into luminous cloud, the 
 most difficult thing to do in art, — the Harlech, for expres- 
 
336 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 sion of the same phenomena, shown over vast spaces in dis- 
 tant ranges of hills, the Ehrenbreitstein, a recent drawing, 
 for expression of mist, rising from the surface of water at 
 sunset, — and, finally, the glorious Oberwesel and Nemi,* for 
 passages of all united, may, however, be named, as noble in- 
 stances, though in naming five works I insult five hundred. 
 
 One word respecting Turner's more violent storms, for we 
 have hitherto been speaking only of the softer rain-clouds, 
 associated with gusty tempest, but not of the thunder-cloud 
 „ „ , and the whirlwind. If there be anv one point 
 
 § 30. Turner's .... _. i " i 
 
 more violent ef- in which cngravcrs disgrace themselves more 
 
 fects of tempest , . , . . . , . , . /> t i 
 
 are never render- than in another, it IS 111 their rendering oi dark 
 ed by engravers. f urious storm. It appears to be utterly im- 
 possible to force it into their heads, that an artist does 7iot 
 leave his color with a sharp edge and an angular form by ac- 
 cident, or that they may have the pleasure of altering it and 
 improving upon it ; and equally impossible to persuade them 
 that energy and gloom may in some circum- 
 tem of ^landscape stanccs be arrived at without any extraordinary 
 
 engraving. t , /» • i t p 
 
 expenditure oi inko i am aware or no engraver 
 of the present day whose ideas of a storm-cloud are not com- 
 prised under two heads, roundness and blackness ; and, in- 
 deed, their general principles of translation (as may be dis- 
 tinctly gathered from their larger works) are the following : 
 1. Where the drawing is gray, make the paper black. 2. 
 Where the drawing is white, cover the page with zigzag lines. 
 3. Where the drawing has particularly tender tones, cross- 
 hatch them. 4, Where any outline is particularly angular, 
 make it round. 5. Where there are vertical reflections in 
 water, express them with very distinct horizontal lines. G. 
 Where there is a passage of particular simplicity, treat it in 
 sections. 7. Where there is anything intentionally concealed, 
 make it out. Yet, in spite of the necessity which all en- 
 gravers impose upon themselves, of rigidly observing this 
 code of general laws, it is difficult to conceive how such 
 pieces of work, as the plates of Stonehenge and Winchelsea, 
 
 * In the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq., of Tottenham. 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS, 
 
 337 
 
 can ever have been presented to the public, as in any way 
 resembling, or possessing even the most fanciful relation to 
 §32 Thestoi-min Turner drawings of the same subjects. The 
 the stonehenge. original of the Stonehenge is perhaps the stand- 
 ard of storm-drawing, both for the overwhelming power 
 and gigantic proportions and spaces of its cloud-forms, and 
 for the tremendous qualities of lurid and sulphurous colors 
 which are gained in them. All its forms are marked with 
 violent angles, as if the whole muscular energy — so to speak 
 — of the cloud, were writhing in every fold, and their fantas- 
 tic and fiery volumes have a peculiar horror — an awful life — 
 shadowed out in their strange, swift, fearful outlines, which 
 oppress the mind more than even the threatening of their 
 gigantic gloom. The white lightning, not as it is drawn by 
 less observant or less capable painters, in zigzag fortifications, 
 but in its own dreadful irregularity of streaming fire, is 
 brought down, not merely over the dark clouds, but through 
 the full light of an illumined opening to the blue, which yet 
 cannot abate the brilliancy of its white line ; and the track 
 of the last flash along the ground is fearfully marked by the 
 dog howling over the fallen shepherd, and the ewe pressing 
 her head upon the body of her dead lamb. 
 
 I have not space, however, to enter into examination of 
 Turner's storm-drawing ; I can only warn the public against 
 supposing that its effect is ever rendered by engravers. The 
 § 33. General great principles of Turner are angular outline, 
 effects*as%iven vastness and energy of form, infinity of grada- 
 exp^e^sifn ^^P^^ without blackncss. The great 
 
 of falling rain, principles of the engravers (vide Psestum, in 
 Rogers's Italy, and the Stonehenge, above alluded to) are 
 rounded outline, no edges, want of character, equality of 
 strength, and blackness without depth. 
 
 I have scarcely, I see, on referring to what I have written, 
 sufficiently insisted on Turner's rendering of the rsanj fringe^ 
 whether in distances, admitting or concealing more or less of 
 the extended plain, as in the Waterloo, and Richmond (with 
 the girl and dog in the foreground,) or as in the Dunstaff- 
 nage, Glencoe, St. Michael's Mount, and Slave Ship, not reach- 
 VoL. I.— 22 
 
338 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 ing the earth, but suspended in waving and twisted lines from 
 the darkness of the zenith. But I have no time for farther 
 development of particular points ; I must defer discussion of 
 
 them until we take up each picture to be viewed 
 lion o/The^sec- as a whole ; for the division of the sky which I 
 
 have been obliged to make, in order to render 
 fully understood the peculiarities of character in the separate 
 cloud regions, prevents my speaking of any one work with 
 justice to its concentration of various truth. Be it always 
 remembered that we pretend not, at present, to give any ac- 
 count or idea of the sum of the works of any painter, much 
 less of the universality of Turner's ; but only to explain in 
 what real truth, as far as it is explicable, consists, and to il- 
 lustrate it by those pictures in which it most distinctly oc- 
 curs, or from which it is most visibly absent. And it will 
 only be in the full and separate discussion of individual works, 
 when we are acquainted also with what is beautiful, that we 
 shall be completely able to prove or disprove the presence of 
 the truth of nature. 
 
 The conclusion, then, to which w^e are led by our present 
 examination of the truth of clouds, is, that the old masters 
 attempted the representation of only one among the thou- 
 sands of their systems of scenery, and were altogether false 
 in the little they attempted ; while we can find records in 
 modern art of every form or phenomenon of the heavens, 
 from the highest film that glorifies the ether to the wildest 
 vapor that darkens the dust, and in all these records we find 
 the most clear language and close thought, firm words, and 
 true message, unstinted fulness and unfailing faith. 
 
 And indeed it is difficult for us to conceive how, even with- 
 out such laborious investigation as we have gone through, 
 §35. Sketch of a ^"3^ P^^rson Can go to nature for a single day or 
 few of the skies hour, whcu she is rcallv at work in any of her 
 
 of nature, taken „ . , . 
 
 aR a whole, com- noblcr sphercs of action, and yet retain respect 
 workH of Turner for the old masters ; finding, as find he will, that 
 nihsten^. *^Morn- evcry scenc which rises, rests, or departs before 
 
 ingonthepiainB. j^j^^ ^^^^^ ^j^^ ^ thoUSaud gloricS of which 
 
 |,hcre is not one shadow, one image, one trace or line, in any 
 
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 339 
 
 of their works ; but which will illustrate to him, at every new 
 instant, some passage which he had not before understood in 
 the high works of modern art. Stand upon the peak of some 
 isolated mountain at daybreak, when the night mists first rise 
 from off the plains, and watch their white and lake-like fields 
 as they float in level bays and winding gulfs about the 
 islanded summits of the lower hills, untouched yet by more 
 than dawn, colder and more quiet than a windless sea under 
 the moon of midnight ; watch when the first sunbeam is sent 
 upon the silver channels, how the foam of their undulating 
 surface parts and passes away ; and down under their depths, 
 the glittering city and green pasture lie like Atlantis, be- 
 tween the white paths of winding rivers ; the flakes of light 
 falling every moment faster and broader among the starry 
 spires, as the wreathed surges break and vanish above them, 
 and the confused crests and ridges of the dark hills shorten 
 their gray shadows upon the plain. Has Claude given this ? 
 § 36. Noon with Wait a little longer, and you shall see those 
 gathering storms, scattered mists rallying in the ravines, and float- 
 ing up towards you, along the winding valleys, till they couch 
 in quiet masses, iridescent with the morning light,* upon the 
 broad breasts of the higher hills, whose leagues of massy un- 
 dulation will melt back and back into that robe of material 
 light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear again 
 above, in the serene heaven, like a wild, bright, impossible 
 dream, foundationless and inaccessible, their very bases van- 
 ishing in the unsubstantial and mocking blue of the deep lake 
 below. f Has Claude given this ? Wait yet a little longer, 
 and you shall see those mists gather themselves into white 
 towers, and stand like fortresses along the promontories, massy 
 and motionless, only piled with every instant higher and 
 
 * I have often seen the white thin, morning cloud, edged with the 
 seven colors of the prism. I am not aware of the cause of this phe- 
 nomenon, for ic takes place not when we stand with our backs to the 
 sun, but in clouds near the sun itself, irregularly and over indefinite 
 spaces, sometimes taking place in the body of the cloud. The colors are 
 distinct and vivid, but have a kind of metallic lustre upon them. 
 
 f Lake Lucerne. 
 
340 
 
 OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS. 
 
 higher into the sky,* and casting longer shadows athwart the 
 rocks ; and out of the pale blue of the horizon you will see 
 forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, pointed va- 
 pors, f which will cover the sky, inch by inch, with their gray 
 network, and take the light oif the landscape with an eclipse 
 which will stop the singing of the birds and the motion of the 
 leaves together ; and then you will see horizontal bars of 
 black shadow forming under them, and lurid wreaths create 
 themselves, you know not how, along the shoulders of the 
 hills ; you never see them form, but when you look back to 
 a place which was clear an instant ago, there is a cloud on it, 
 hanging by the precipices, as a hawk pauses over his prey. J 
 Has Claude given this ? And then you will hear the sudden 
 rush of the awakened wind, and you will see those watch- 
 towers of vapor swept away from their foundations, and wav- 
 ing curtains of opaque rain let down to the valleys, swinging 
 from the burdened clouds in black, bending fringes,§ or pac- 
 ing in pale columns along the lake level, grazing its surface 
 § 37 Sunset in '^^^^ f oam as they go. And then, as the sun 
 tempest. Serene sinks, vou shall See the storm drift for an instant 
 
 midnight, . 
 
 from off the hills, leaving their broad sides smok- 
 ing, and loaded yet with snow-white torn, steam-like rags of 
 capricious vapor, now gone, now gathered again ; || while the 
 smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a 
 red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges 
 through the rushing wind and rolling cloud with headlong 
 fall, as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it 
 with blood.^ Has Claude given this ? And then you shall 
 hear the fainting tempest die in the hollow of the night, and, 
 you shall see a green halo kindling on the summit of the 
 eastern hills,** brighter — brighter yet, till the large white cir- 
 
 * St. Maurice (Rogers's Italy). 
 
 f Vignette, the great St. Bernard. 
 
 X Vignette of the Andes. 
 
 § St. MichaeFs Mount — England series. 
 
 II Illustration to the Antiquary. Goldeau, a recent drawing of the 
 highest orfler. 
 
 If Vignette to Campbell's Last Man. ** Caerlaverock. 
 
EFFECTS OF LIGHT. 
 
 34] 
 
 cle of the slow moon is lifted up among the barred clouds,* 
 step by step, line by line ; star after star she quenches with 
 her kindling light, setting in their stead an army of pale, 
 penetrable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to give light upon 
 the earth, which move together, hand in hand, company by 
 company, troop by troop, so measured in their unity of mo- 
 tion, that the whole heaven seems to roll with them, and the 
 earth to reel under them. Ask Claude, or his brethren, for that. 
 
 And then wait yet for one hour, until the east 
 oa tht^ips^"^ again becomes purple,f and the heaving moun- 
 tains, rolling against it in darkness, like waves 
 of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its burn- 
 ing ; watch the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths 
 about the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of fire ; 
 watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling down- 
 wards, chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning ; th^ir 
 long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than the 
 lightning, sending each his tribute of driven snow, like altar- 
 smoke, up to the heaven ; the rose-light of their silent domes 
 flushing that heaven about them and above them, piercing 
 with purer light through its purple lines of lifted cloud, cast- 
 ing a new glory on every wreath as it passes by, until the 
 whole heaven — one scarlet canopy, — is interwoven with a roof 
 of waving flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the 
 drifted wings of many companies of angels ; and then, when 
 you can look no more for gladness, and when you are bowed 
 down with fear and love of the Maker and Doer of this, tell 
 me who has best delivered this His message unto men ! 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 EFFECTS OF LIGHT RENDERED BY MODERN ART. 
 
 I HAVE before given my reasons (Sect. H. Chap. HI.) for 
 not wishing at present to enter upon the discussion of par- 
 ticular effects of light. Not only are we incapable of rightly 
 
 * St. Denis. 
 
 f Alps at Daybreak (Rogers's Poems :) Delphi, and various vignettes. 
 
34:2 
 
 EFFECTS OF LIGHT 
 
 viewing them, or reasoning upon them, until we are ac- 
 quainted with the principles of the beautiful ; but, as 1 dis- 
 §1. Reasons for tinctly limited myself, in the present portion of 
 ^rt^^n'a mfng^,' work, to the examination of general truths, 
 i^^the pardcu: would be out of pkcc to take cognizance of 
 ifjht ^ tendered particular phases of light, even if it were pos- 
 by Turner. sible to do SO, before we have some more definite 
 knowledge of the material objects which they illustrate. 1 
 shall therefore, at present, merely set down a rough cata- 
 logue of the effects of light at different hours of the day, 
 which Turner has represented : naming a picture or two, as 
 an example of each, which we will hereafter take up one by 
 one, and consider the physical science and the feeling to- 
 on rr another. Arid I do this, in the hope that, in the 
 
 §2. Hopes of the ^ ^ , ' . 
 
 author for assist- meantime, some admirer of the old masters will 
 
 ance in the fut- , , . , 
 
 ure investigation be kmd enough to Select from the works of any 
 one of them, a series of examples of the same ef- 
 fects, and to give me a reference to the pictures, so that I 
 may be able to compare each with each ; for, as my limited 
 knowledge of the works of Claude or Poussin does not sup- 
 ply me with the requisite variety of effect, I shall be grate- 
 ful for assistance. 
 
 The following list, of course, does not name the hundredth 
 part of the effects of light given by Turner ; it only names 
 those which are distinctly and markedly separate from each 
 other, and representative each of an entire class. Ten or 
 twelve examples, often many more, might be given of each ; 
 every one of which would display the effects of the same hour 
 and light, modified by different circumstances of weather, sit- 
 uation, and character of objects subjected to them, and espe- 
 cially by the management of the sky ; but it will be gener- 
 ally sufficient for our purpose to examine thoroughly one 
 good example of each. 
 
 The prefixed letters express the direction of the light. F. 
 front light (the sun in the centre, or near the top of the pict- 
 ure ;) L. lateral light, the sun out of the picture on the right 
 or left of the spectator ; L. F. the light partly lateral, partly 
 fronting the spectator, as when he is looking south, with the 
 
EENDERED BY MOBEllN AItT, 
 
 343 
 
 sun in the south-west ; L. B. light partly lateral, partly be- 
 hind the spectator, as when he is looking north, with the sun 
 in the south-west. 
 
 MORNING. 
 
 L An hour before sunrise in winter. Violent 
 
 storm, with rain, on the sea. Light- 
 hpuses seen through it. 
 
 F An hour before sunrise. Serene sky, 
 
 with light clouds. Dawn in the dis- 
 tance. 
 
 L Ten minutes before sunrise. Violent 
 
 storm. Torchlight. 
 F Sunrise. Sun only half above the hori- 
 zon. Clear sky, with light cirri. 
 
 F Sun just disengaged from horizon. Misty, 
 
 with light cirri. 
 
 F Sun a quarter of an hour risen. Sky 
 
 covered with scarlet clouds. 
 , Serene sky. Suu emerging from a bank 
 of cloud on horizon, a quarter of an 
 hour risen. 
 . . Same hour. Light mists in flakes on 
 
 hillsides. Clear air. 
 . . Light flying rain-clouds gathering in val- 
 leys. Same hour. 
 . . Same hour. A night storm rising off the 
 mountains. Dead calm. 
 
 L Sun half an hour risen. Cloudless sky. 
 
 L Same hour. Light mists lyiug in the 
 
 valleys. 
 
 F Same hour. Bright cirri. Sun dimly 
 
 seen through battle smoke, with con- 
 flagration. 
 
 L Sun an hour risen. Cloudless and clear. 
 
 L.F.. 
 
 L.F. 
 
 L.F. 
 
 L.B. 
 
 NAMES OF PICTURES. 
 
 Lowestoffe, Suffolk. 
 
 Vignette to Voyage of 
 Columbus. 
 
 Fowey Harbor. 
 
 Vignette to Human 
 
 Life. 
 Alps at Daybreak. 
 
 Castle Upnor. 
 
 Orford, Suffolk. 
 
 Skiddaw. 
 
 Oakhampton. 
 
 Lake of Geneva. 
 
 Beaugency. 
 Kirby Lonsdale. 
 
 Hohenlinden. 
 
 Buckfastleigh. 
 
 NOON AND AFTERNOON. 
 
 L.B. . .Midday. Dead calm, with heat. Cloud- 
 less. 
 
 L Same hour. Serene and bright, with 
 
 streaky clouds. 
 L Same hour. Serene, with multitudes of 
 
 the high cirrus. 
 
 Corinth. 
 
 Lantern at St. Cloud. 
 
 Shylock, and other 
 Venices. 
 
344 
 
 EFFECTS OF LIGHT 
 
 EFFECTS. 
 
 L Bright sun, with light wind and clouds. 
 
 F Two o'clock. Clouds gathering for rain, 
 
 with heat. 
 
 F Rain beginning, with light clouds and 
 
 wind. 
 
 L Soft rain, with heat. 
 
 L.F. . .Great heat. Thun.Jer gathering. 
 
 L Thunder broaking down, after intense 
 
 heat, with furious wind. 
 
 L Violent rain and wind, but cool. 
 
 L.F. . .Furious storm, with thunder. 
 
 L.B. . .Thunder retiring, with rainbow. Dead 
 calm, with heat. 
 
 L About three o'clock, summer. Air very 
 
 cool and clear. Exhausted thunder- 
 clouds low on hills. 
 
 F Descending sunbeams through soft 
 
 clouds, after rain. 
 
 L Afternoon, very clear, after rain. A few 
 
 clouds still on horizon. Dead calm. 
 
 F Afternoon of cloudless day, with heat. 
 
 NAMES OP PICTURES, 
 
 Richmond, Middlesex. 
 Warwick. Blenheim. 
 
 Piacenza. 
 
 Caldron Snout Fall. 
 
 Malvern. 
 
 Winchelsea. 
 
 Llamberis, Coventry, &c 
 Stonehenge, Psestum, 
 
 &c. 
 Nottingham. 
 
 Bingen. 
 
 Carew Castle. 
 Saltash. 
 
 Mercury and Argus. 
 Oberwesel. Nemi. 
 
 EVENING. 
 
 L An hour before sunset. Cloudless. 
 
 F Half an hour before sunset. Light clouds. 
 
 Misty air. 
 
 F Within a quarter of an hour of sunset. 
 
 Mists rising. Light cirri. 
 
 L.F. . . Ten minutes before sunset. Quite cloud- 
 less. 
 
 F Same hour. Tumultuous spray of illu- 
 mined rain-cloud. 
 
 F Five minutes before sunset. Sky covered 
 
 with illumined cirri. 
 
 L.B. ..Same hour. Serene sky. Full moon 
 rising. 
 
 F Sun setting. Detached light cirri and 
 
 clear air. 
 
 L Same hour. Cloudless. New moon. 
 
 L.F. . .Same hour. Heavy storm clouds. Moon- 
 rise. 
 
 Trematon Castle. 
 Lake Albano. Flor- 
 ence. 
 Dater Hora Quieti. 
 
 Durham. 
 
 Solomon's Pools. Slave- 
 ship. 
 
 Temeraire. ^ Napoleon. 
 
 Various vignettes. 
 Kenil worth. 
 
 Amboise. 
 
 Troyes. 
 
 First vignette. Pleas' 
 ures of Memory. 
 
BENDERED BY MODERN ART. 345 
 
 EFFECTS. 
 
 L.B. . . Sun just set. Sky covered with clouds. 
 
 New moon setting. 
 L.B. ..Sun five minutes set. Strong twilight, 
 
 with storm clouds. Full moonrise. 
 L.B. ..Same hour. Seiene, with light clouds. 
 L.B... Same hour. Serene. New moon. 
 
 L.B. . .Sun a quarter of an hour set. Cloudless. 
 
 L.P. . .Sun half an hour set. Light cirri. 
 
 F Same hour. Dead calm at sea. New 
 
 moon and evening star. 
 F Sun three quarters of an hour set. Moon 
 
 struggling through storm clouds, over 
 
 heavy sea. 
 
 NIGHT. 
 
 F An hour after sunset. No moon. Torch- 
 light. 
 
 F Same hour. Moon rising. Fire from 
 
 furnaces. 
 
 L.F. ..Same hour, with storm clouds. Moon 
 rising. 
 
 L Same hour, with light of rockets and fire. 
 
 F Midnight. Moonless, with light-houses. 
 
 Same hour, with fire-light. 
 
 F Ditto. Full moon. Clear air, with deli- 
 cate clouds. Light-houses. 
 
 F Ditto, with conflagration, battle smoke, 
 
 and storm. 
 
 F Ditto. Moonlight through mist. Build- 
 ings illuminated in interior. 
 
 F Ditto. Pull moon with halo. Light rain- 
 clouds. 
 
 F Full moon. Perfectly serene. Sky cov- 
 ered with white cirri. 
 
 NAMES OF PICTURES. 
 
 Caudebec. 
 
 Wilderness of Engedi, 
 
 Assos. 
 Montjan. 
 
 Pyramid of Caius Ces- 
 tius. 
 
 Chateau de Blois. 
 
 Clairmont. 
 
 Cowes. 
 
 Folkestone. 
 
 St. Julien. Tours. 
 
 Dudley. 
 
 Nantes. 
 
 Juliet and her Nurse. 
 Calais. 
 
 Burning of Parliament 
 
 Houses. 
 Towers of the Hev6. 
 
 Waterloo. 
 
 Vignette. St. Herbert's 
 
 Isle. 
 St. Denis. 
 
 Alnwick. Vignette of Ri- 
 alto, & Bridge of Sighs. 
 
Modern Painters 
 
 VOLUME II. 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 Part II.— III. 
 
 OF TRUTH AND TEEOBETIG FACULTIES 
 
 JOHN RUSKEN, LL.D., 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE STONES OF VENICE," ETC., ETC. 
 
 " 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 thousand faculties composed. 
 And twice ten thousand mterests, do yet prize 
 This soul, and the transcendent universe 
 No more than as a mirror that reflects 
 To proud Self-love her own mtelligence." 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER, 
 1885. 
 
TROWS 
 
 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, 
 NEW YORK. 
 
THE LANDSCAPE ARTISTS OF ENGLAND 
 
 THIS WORK 
 is respectfully dedicated 
 by their sincere admirer 
 
 The Author 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PART IL— (Continued.) 
 OF TRUTH. 
 
 SECTION IV. 
 OF TRUTH OF EARTH. 
 CHAPTER I.— Of General Structure. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. First laws of the organization of the earth, and their im- 
 portance in art , 21 
 
 § 2. The slight attention ordinarily paid to them. Their care- 
 ful study by modern artists 22 
 
 § 3. General structure of the earth. The hills are its action, 
 
 the plains its rest 23 
 
 § 4. Mountains come out from underneath the plains, and are 
 
 their support 23 
 
 § 5. Structure of the plains themselves. Their perfect level, 
 
 when deposited by quiet water 24 
 
 § 6. Illustrated by Turner's Marengo 25 
 
 § 7. General divisions of formation resulting from this ar- 
 rangement. Plan of investigation 25 
 
 CHAPTER II.— Of the Central Mountains. 
 
 § 1. Similar character of the central peaks in all parts of the 
 
 world 26 
 
 § 2. Their arrangements in pyramids or wedges, divided by 
 
 vertical fissures 26 
 
 ^ 3. Causing groups of rock resembling an artichoke or rose . . 27 
 
2 
 
 SYJSrOFSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 § 4. The faithful statement of these facts by Turner in his 
 
 Alps at Daybreak 27 
 
 g 5. Vignette of the Andes and others 28 
 
 § 6. Necessary distance, and consequent aerial effect on all 
 
 such mountains 29 
 
 § 7. Total want of any rendering of their phenomena in 
 
 ancient art 29 
 
 § 8. Character of the representations of Alps in the distances 
 
 of Claude 30 
 
 § 9. Their total want of magnitude and aerial distance 30 
 
 § 10. And violation of specific form 31 
 
 g 11. Even in his best works 32 
 
 § 12. Farther illustration of the distant character of moun- 
 tain chains 33 
 
 § 13. Their excessive appearance of transparency 33 
 
 § 14. Illustrated from the works of Turner and Stanfield. The 
 
 Borromean Islands of the latter 34 
 
 § 15. Turner's Arena 34 
 
 § 16. Extreme distance of large objects always characterized 
 
 by very sharp outline „ 35 
 
 § 17. Want of this decision in Claude 36 
 
 § 18. The perpetual rendering of it by Turner 37 
 
 § 19. Effects of snow, how imperfectly studied 37 
 
 § 20. General principles of its forms on the Alps 39 
 
 § 21. Average paintings of Switzerland. Its real spirit has 
 
 scarcely yet been caught '41 
 
 CHAPTER III.— Of the Inferior Mountains. 
 
 § 1. The inferior mountains are distinguished from the cen- 
 tral by being divided into beds. 42 
 
 § 2. Farther division of these beds by joints 42 
 
 § 3. And by lines of lamination 43 
 
 § 4. Variety and seeming uncertainty under which these laws 
 
 are manifested 43 
 
 § 5. The perfect expression of them in Turner's Loch Coriskin 44 
 
 ^ 0. Glencoe and other works 45 
 
 § 7. Especially the Mount Lebanon 46 
 
 § 8. Compared with the work of Salvator. 46 
 
 § 9. And of Poupsin 47 
 
 § 10. Effects of external influence on mountain form 48 
 
 § 11. The gentle convexity caused by aqueous erosion 49 
 
 § 12. And the effect of the action of torrents 50 
 
 § 13. The exceeding simplicity of contour caused by these in- 
 fluences , 51 
 
SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 3 
 
 PAOB 
 
 § 14. And multiplicity of feature 51 
 
 § 15. Both utterly neglected in ancient art 52 
 
 § 16. The fidelity of treatment in Turner's Daphne and Leu- 
 
 cippus 52 
 
 §17. And in the Avalanche and Inundation 53 
 
 § 18. The rarity among secondary hills of steep slopes or high 
 
 precipices 54 
 
 § 19. And consequent expression of horizontal distance in their 
 
 ascent 55 
 
 § 20. Full statement of all these facts in various works of 
 
 Turner, — Caudebec, etc 55 
 
 § 21. The use of considering geological truths 56 
 
 § 22. Expression of retiring surface by Turner contrasted with 
 
 the work of Claude 57 
 
 § 23. The same moderation of slope in the contours of his 
 
 higher hills 57 
 
 g 24. The peculiar difficulty of investigating the more essen- 
 tial truths of hill outline 58 
 
 § 25. Works of other modern artists. Clarkson Stanfield 59 
 
 § 26. Importance of particular and individaal truth in hill 
 
 drawing 59 
 
 § 27. Works of Copley Fielding. His hill feeling 60 
 
 § 28. Works of J. D. Harding and others 61 
 
 CHAPTER IV.— Of the Foreground. 
 
 § 1. 
 
 What rocka were the chief components of ancient land- 
 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 § 2. 
 
 Salvator's limestones. The real characters of the rock. 
 
 
 
 Its fractures, and obtuseness of angles 
 
 62 
 
 § 3. 
 
 Salvator's acute angles caused by the meeting of con- 
 
 
 
 
 63 
 
 § 4. 
 
 Peculiar distinctness of light and shade in the rocks of 
 
 
 
 
 64 
 
 § 5. 
 § 6. 
 
 Peculiar confusion of both in the rocks of Salvator 
 
 And total want of any expression of hardness or brittle- 
 
 64 
 
 
 
 65 
 
 § 7. 
 
 Instances in particular pictures 
 
 65 
 
 § 8. 
 
 Compared with the works of Stanfield 
 
 65 
 
 § 9. 
 
 Their absolute opposition in every particular 
 
 66 
 
 §10. 
 
 The rocks of J. D. Harding 
 
 67 
 
 §11- 
 
 
 68. 
 
 §12. 
 
 
 68 
 
 §13. 
 
 
 69 
 
4 
 
 SYJ^OFSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 § 14. Importance of these minor parts and points . . * * 69 
 
 § 15. The observance of them is the real distinction between 
 
 the master and the novice 70 
 
 § 16. The Ground of Cuyp 70 
 
 §17. And of Claude 71 
 
 g 18. The entire weakness and childishness of the latter 71 
 
 §19. Compared with the work of Turner 72 
 
 § 20. General features of Turner's foreground 72 
 
 § 21. Geological structure of his rocks in the Fall of the Tees 73 
 
 § 22. Their convex surfaces and fractured edges 73 
 
 § 23. And perfect unity 74 
 
 § 24. Various parts whose history is told us by the details of 
 
 the drawing. 74 
 
 § 25. Beautiful instance of an exception to general rules in 
 
 the Llanthony 75 
 
 § 26. Turner's drawing of detached blocks of weathered stone 76 
 
 § 27. And of complicated foreground 77 
 
 § 28. And of loose soil 77 
 
 § 29. The unison of all in the ideal foregrounds of the Academy 
 
 pictures 78 
 
 § 30. And the great lesson to be received from all 78 
 
 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. ... 80 
 § 2. The ease with which a common representation of it may 
 
 be given. The impossibility of a faithful one 81 
 
 § 3. Difficulty of properly dividing the subject 81 
 
 § 4. Inaccuracy of study of water-effect among all painters. , 81 
 
 § 5. Difficulty of treating this part of the subject. 83 
 
 § 6. General laws which regulate the phenomena of water. 
 
 First, the imperfection of its reflective surface 85 
 
 § 7. The inherent hue of water modifies dark reflections, and 
 
 does not affect bright ones 85 
 
 § 8. Water takes no shadow 87 
 
 § 9. Modification of dark reflections by shadow 88 
 
 § 10. Examples on the water of the Rhone 89 
 
 § 11. Effect of ripple on distant water 91 
 
 § 12. Elongation of reflections by moving water 91 
 
 § 13. Effect of rippled water on horizontal and inclined images 93 
 
SYl^OPSIS OF CONTENTS. ' 6 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 14. To what extent reflection is visible from above 93 
 
 § 15. Deflection of images on agitated water 93 
 
 § 16. Necessity of watchfulness as well as of science. Licenses, 
 
 how taken by great men i 03 
 
 § 17. Various licenses or errors in water painting of Claude, 
 
 Cuyp, Vandevelde * 95 
 
 § 18. And Canaletto 97 
 
 § 19. Why unpardonable 99 
 
 §20. The Dutch painters of sea 100 
 
 § 21. Ruysdael, Claude, and Salvator 101 
 
 § 22. Nicholas Poussin. 102 
 
 § 23. Venetians and Florentines. Conclusion 103 
 
 CHAPTER II.— Of Water, as Painted by the Moderns. 
 
 § 1. General power of the moderns in painting quiet water. 
 
 The lakes of Fielding 104 
 
 § 2. The calm rivers of De Wint, J. Holland, &c 104 
 
 § 3. The character of bright and violent falling water 105 
 
 § 4. As given by Nesfield , 105 
 
 § 5. The admirable water-drawing of J. D. Harding 106 
 
 § 6. His color ; and painting of sea 107 
 
 § 7. The sea of Copley Fielding. Its exceeding grace and 
 
 rapidity 107 
 
 § 8. Its high aim at character 108 
 
 § 9. But deficiency in the requisite quality of grays 108 
 
 § 10. Variety of the grays of nature 109 
 
 §11. Works of Stanfield. His perfect knowledge and power. 109 
 § 12. But want of feeling. General sum of truth presented 
 
 by modern art 110 
 
 CHAPTER III — Of Water, as Painted by Turner. 
 
 § 1. The difficulty of giving surface to smooth water Ill 
 
 § 2. Is dependent on the structure of the eye, and the focus 
 
 by which the reflected rays are perceived Ill 
 
 § 3. Morbid clearness occasioned in painting of water by dis- 
 tinctness of reflections 112 
 
 § 4. How avoided by Turner 113 
 
 § 5. All reflections on distant water are distinct 114 
 
 § 6. The error of Vandevelde 114 
 
 § 7. Difference in arrangement of parts between the reflected 
 
 object and its image 115 
 
 § 8. Illustrated from the works of Turner 116 
 
 § 9. The boldness and judgment shown in the observance of it . 117 
 
6 
 
 STJSrOPSTS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 10. The texture of surface in Turner's painting of calm 
 
 water 117 
 
 § 11. Its united qualities 118 
 
 § 12. Relation of various circumstances of past agitation, etc., 
 
 by the most trifling incidents, as in the Cowes 119 
 
 § 13. In scenes on the Loire and Seine 120 
 
 § 14. Expression of contrary waves caused by recoil from shore 121 
 
 § 15. Various other instances 121 
 
 § 16. Turner's painting of distant expanses of water. Calm, 
 
 interrupted by ripple 122 
 
 § 17. And ripple, crossed by sunshine 122 
 
 § 18. His drawing of distant rivers 123 
 
 § 19. And of surface associated with mist 124 
 
 § 20. His drawing of falling water, with peculiar expression 
 
 of weight 124 
 
 § 21. The abandonment and plunge of great cataracts. How 
 
 given by him 125 
 
 § 22. Difference in the action of water, when continuous and 
 when interrupted. The interrupted stream fills the 
 
 hollows of its bed 126 
 
 § 23. But the continuous stream takes the shape of its bed. . 127 
 
 § 24. Its exquisite curved lines 127 
 
 §25. Turner's careful choice of the historical truth 128 
 
 § 26. His exquisite drawing of the continuous torrent in the 
 
 Llanthony Abbey 128 
 
 § 27. And of the interrupted torrent in the Mercury and Argus. 129 
 
 § 28. Various cases, 130 
 
 §29. Sea painting. Impossibility of truly representiog foam. 130 
 
 § 30. Character of shore-breakers, also inexpressible 132 
 
 § 31. Their effect, how injured when seen from the shore 133 
 
 § 32. Turner's expression of heavy rolling sea 138 
 
 § 33. With peculiar expression of weight 134 
 
 § 34. Peculiar action of recoiling waves 135 
 
 § 35. And of the stroke of a breaker on the shore 135 
 
 § 36. General character of sea on a rocky coast given by Tur- 
 ner in the Land's End 136 
 
 § 37. Open seas of Turner's earlier times 137 
 
 § 38. Effect of sea after prolonged storm 138 
 
 § 39. Turner's noblest work, the painting of the deep open sea 
 
 in the Slave Ship 140 
 
 § 40. Its united excellences and perfection as a whole 141 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 7 
 
 SECTION VI. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. — CONCLUSION. 
 
 CHAPTER I.— Of Truth of Vegetation. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. Frequent occurrence of foliage in the works of the old 
 
 masters 142 
 
 § 2. Laws common to all forest trees. Their branches do not 
 
 taper, but only divide 143 
 
 § 3. Appearance of tapering caused by frequent buds 143 
 
 § 4. And care of nature to conceal the parallelism 144 
 
 § 5. The degree of tapering which may be represented as con- 
 tinuous 144 
 
 § 6. The trees of Gaspar Poussin 144 
 
 § 7. And of the Italian school generally, defy this law 145 
 
 § 8. The truth, as it is given by J. D. Harding 145 
 
 § 9. Boughs, in consequence of this law, must diminish where 
 
 they divide. Those'of the old masters of ten do not . 146 
 § 10. Boughs must multiply as they diminish. Those of the 
 
 old masters do not 147 
 
 § 11. Bough-drawing of Salvator 148 
 
 § 12. All these errors especially shown in Claude's sketches, 
 
 and concentrated in a work of Gr. Poussin's 149 
 
 § 13. Impossibility of the angles of boughs being taken out of 
 
 them by wind 150 
 
 § 14. Bough-drawing of Titian 151 
 
 §15. Bough-drawing of Turner 152 
 
 g 16. Leafage. Its variety and symmetry 153 
 
 § 17. Perfect regularity of Poussin 154 
 
 § 18. Exceeding intricacy of nature's foliage 154 
 
 § 19. How contradicted by the tree -patterns of G. Poussin. . . . 155 
 
 § 20. How followed by Creswick 156 
 
 § 21. Perfect unity in nature's foliage * , . 157 
 
 § 22. Total want of it in Both and Hobbima 157 
 
 § 23. How rendered by Turner 158 
 
 § 24. The near leafage of Claude. His middle distances are 
 
 good 158 
 
 § 25. Universal termination of trees in symmetrical curves. . . 159 
 § 26. Altogether unobserved by the old masters Always given 
 
 by Turner 160 
 
 § 27. Foliage painting cm the Continent 161 
 
 § 28. Foliage of J. D. Harding. Its deficiencies 162 
 
 § 29. His brilliancy of execution too manifest 162 
 
8 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 30. His bough-drawing and choice of form 163 
 
 § 31. Local color, how far expressible in black and white, and 
 
 with what advantage 164 
 
 § 32. Opposition between great manner and great knowledge 165 
 
 § 33. Foliage of Cox, Fielding, and Cattermole 166 
 
 § 34. Hunt and Creswick. Green, how to be rendered ex- 
 pressive of light, and offensive if otherwise. 166 
 
 § 35. Conclusion. Works of J. Linnell and S. Palmer 167 
 
 CHAPTER II.— General Remarks respecting the Truth op 
 Turner. 
 
 § 1. No necessity of entering into discussion of architectural 
 
 truth 168 
 
 § 2. Extreme difficulty of illustrating or explaining the high- 
 est truth 169 
 
 § 3. The positive rank of Turner is in no degree shown in the 
 
 foregoing pages, but only his relative rank 170 
 
 § 4. The exceeding refinement of his truth 170 
 
 § 5. There is nothing in his works which can be enjoyed with- 
 out knowledge 171 
 
 § 6. And nothing which knowledge will not enable us to en- 
 joy 171 
 
 § 7. His former rank and progress 172 
 
 § 8. Standing of his present works. Their mystery is the 
 
 consequence of their fulness 172 
 
 CHAPTER III.— Conclusion. — Modern Art and Modern Criti- 
 cism. 
 
 § 1. The entire prominence hitherto given to the works of 
 
 one artist caused only by our not being able to take 
 cognizance of c/iarac^er 173 
 
 § 2. The feelings of different artists are incapable of full com- 
 parison 174 
 
 § 3. But the fidelity and truth of each are capable of real 
 
 comparison , 174 
 
 § 4. Especially because they are equally manifested in the 
 
 treatment of all subjects 175 
 
 § 5. No man draws one thing well, if he can draw nothing 
 
 else 175 
 
 § 6. General conclusions to be derived from our past investi- 
 gation 176 
 
 § 7. Truth, a standard of all excellence 176 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 9 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 8. Modem criticism. Changefulness of public taste 177 
 
 § 9. Yet associated with a certain degree of judgment 177 
 
 § 10. Duty of the press 178 
 
 § 11. Qualifications necessary for discharging it 178 
 
 § 12. General incapability of modern critics 178 
 
 §13. And inconsistency with themselves 179 
 
 § 14. How the press may really advance the cause of art 179 
 
 § 15. Morbid fondness at the present day for unfinished works 180 
 
 §16. By which the public defraud themselves 180 
 
 § 17. And in pandering to which, artists ruin themselves .... 180 
 
 § 18. Necessity of finishing works of art perfectly 181 
 
 § 19. Sketches not sufficiently encouraged 182 
 
 § 20. Brilliancy of execution or efforts at invention not to be 
 
 tolerated in young artists 182 
 
 §21. The duty and after privileges of all students 182 
 
 § 22. Necessity among our greater artists of more singleness 
 
 of aim 183 
 
 § 23. What should be their general aim 185 
 
 § 24. Duty of the press with respect to the works of Turner. . 187 
 
 PAET III. 
 OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. 
 
 SECTION L 
 
 OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 
 
 CHAPTER I.— Of the Rank and Relations of the Theo- 
 retic Faculty. 
 
 § 1. With what care the subject is to be approached 190 
 
 § 2. And of what importance considered 191 
 
 § 3. The doubtful force of the term utility" 192 
 
 § 4. Its proper sense 193 
 
 § 5. How falsely applied in these times 193 
 
 § 6. The evil consequences of such interpretation. How con- 
 nected with national power 194 
 
 § 7. How to be averted 195 
 
 § 8. Division of the pursuits of men into subservient and ob- 
 jective 198 
 
10 
 
 SYI^OPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 9. Their relative dignities 199 
 
 § 10. How reversed through erring notions of the contempla- 
 tive and imaginative faculties 199 
 
 § 11. Object of the present section 200 
 
 CHAPTER II.— Op the Theoretic Faculty as concerned 
 WITH Pleasures of Sense. 
 
 § 1. Explanation of the term theoretic" 201 
 
 § 2. Of the differences of rank in pleasures of sense 201 
 
 § 3. Use of the terms Temperate and Intemperate 203 
 
 § 4. Right use of the term intemperate" 203 
 
 § 5. Grounds of inferiority in the pleasures which are sub- 
 jects of intemperance 204 
 
 § 6. Evidence of higher rank in pleasures of sight and hear- 
 ing 204 
 
 § 7. How the lower pleasures may be elevated in rank 205 
 
 § 8. Ideas of beauty how essentially moral 206 
 
 § 9. How degraded by heartless reception 207 
 
 § 10. How exalted by affection 207 
 
 CHAPTER III. — Of Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Impres- 
 sions OF Sense. 
 
 § 1. By what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to 
 
 be determined? 208 
 
 § 2. And in what sense may the terms Right and Wrong be 
 
 attached to its conclusions ? 209 
 
 § 3. What power we have over impressions of sense 210 
 
 § 4. Depends on acuteness of attention 211 
 
 § 5. Ultimate conclusions universal 211 
 
 § 6. What duty is attached to this power over impressions of 
 
 sense 213 
 
 § 7. How rewarded 213 
 
 § 8. Especially with respect to ideas of beauty 218 
 
 § 9. Errors induced by the power of habit 214 
 
 § 10. The necessity of submission in early stages of judgment 214 
 
 § 11. The large scope of matured judgment 215 
 
 § 12. How distinguishable from false taste 215 
 
 § 13. The danger of a spirit of choice 216 
 
 § 14. And criminality , 216 
 
 § 15. How certain conclusions respecting beauty are by reason 
 
 demonstrable 217 
 
 § 16. With what liabilities to error 218 
 
 §17. The term "beauty" how limitable in the outset. 
 
 Divided into typical and vital 218 
 
snsropsis of contents. 11 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER IV. — Op False Opinions held concerning Beauty. 
 
 § 1. Of the false opinion that truth is beauty, and vice versa 220 
 § 2. Of the false opinion that beauty is usefulness. Compare 
 
 Chap. xii. § 5 221 
 
 § 3. Of the false opinion that beauty results from custom. 
 
 Compare Chap. vi. § 1 221 
 
 § 4. The twofold operation of custom. It deadens sensation, 
 
 but confirms affection 221 
 
 § 5. But never either creates or destroys the essence of beauty 222 
 
 § 6. Instances 2J^2 
 
 § 7. Of the false opinion that beauty depends on the associa- 
 tion of ideas 223 
 
 § 8. Association. Is, 1st, rational. It is of no efficiency as a 
 
 cause of beauty 224 
 
 § 9. Association accidental. The extent of its influence. . . . 224 
 
 § 10. The dignity of its function 225 
 
 § 11. How it is connected with impressions of beauty 226 
 
 § 12. And what caution it renders necessary in the examina- 
 tion of them 227 
 
 CHAPTER v.— Of Typical Beauty :— First, op Infinity, or 
 THE Type op Divine Incomprehensibility. 
 
 § 1. Impossibility of adequately treating the subject 228 
 
 § 2. With what simplicity of feeling to be approached 228 
 
 § 3. The child instinct respecting space 230 
 
 § 4. Continued in after life 230 
 
 § 5. Whereto this instinct is traceable 231 
 
 § 6. Infinity how necessary in art 232 
 
 § 7. Conditions of its necessity 232 
 
 ,§ 8. And connected analogies 233 
 
 § 9. How the dignity of treatment is proportioned to the ex- 
 pression of infinity 234 
 
 § 10. Examples among the Southern schools 234 
 
 § 11. Among the Venetians 235 
 
 § 12. Among the painters of landscape , 235 
 
 § 13. Other modes in which the power of infinity is felt 236 
 
 § 14. The beauty of curvature 236 
 
 § 15. How constant in external nature 237 
 
 § 16. The beauty of gradation 238 
 
 § 17. How found in Nature 238 
 
 § 18. How necessary in Art 239 
 
 § 19. Infinity not rightly implied by vastness 240 
 
12 
 
 SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER VI.— Of Unity, of the Type of the Divine Com- 
 
 PHEHENSIVENESS. 
 
 § 1. The general conception of divine Unity 240 
 
 § 2. The glory of all things is their Unity 241 
 
 § 3. The several kinds of unity. Subjectional. Original. 
 
 Of sequence, and of membership. 242 
 
 § 4. Unity of membership. How secured 243 
 
 § 5. Variety. Why required 243 
 
 § 6. Change, and its influence on beauty 244 
 
 § 7. The love of change. How morbid and evil 245 
 
 § 8. The conducing of variety towards unity of subjection . . 246 
 
 § 9. And towards unity of sequence 248 
 
 §10. The nature of proportion. 1st, of apparent proportion. 248 
 
 § 11. The vahie of apparent proportion in curvature 251 
 
 §12. How by nature obtained 252 
 
 § 13. Apparent proportion in melodies of line 253 
 
 § 14. Error of Burke in this matter 253 
 
 § 15. Constructive proportion. Its influence in plants 254 
 
 § 16. And animals 255 
 
 § 17. Summary 256 
 
 CHAPTER VIL— Of Repose, or the Type of Divine Perma- 
 nence. 
 
 § 1. Universal feeling respecting the necessity of repose in art. 
 
 Its sources 256 
 
 § 2. Repose, how expressed in matter. 257 
 
 § 3. The necessity to repose of an implied energy 258 
 
 § 4. Mental repose, how noble 258 
 
 § 5. Its universal value as a test of art 259 
 
 § 6. Instances in the Laocoon and Theseus 260 
 
 § 7. And in altar tombs J262 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. — Of Symmetry, or the Type of Divine Jus- 
 tice. 
 
 § 1. Symmetry, what and how found in organic nature 263 
 
 § 2. How necessary in art 264 
 
 § 3. To what its agreeableness is referable. Various in- 
 stances 264 
 
 § 4. Especially in religious art 265 
 
 CHAPTER IX.— Of Purity, or the Type of Divine Energy. 
 
 § 1. The influence of light as a sacred symbol 266 
 
 § 2. The idea, of purit^y connected with it. 266 
 
SYJV0P8IS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 13 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 3. Originally derived from conditions of matter 267 
 
 § 4. Associated ideas adding to the power of the impression. 
 
 Influence of clearness 267 
 
 § 5. Perfect beauty of surface, in what consisting 268 
 
 § 6. Purity only metaphorically a type of sinlessness 269 
 
 § 7. Energy, how expressed by purity of matter , . . 270 
 
 § And of color 270 
 
 § 9. Spirituality, how so expressed 271 
 
 CHAPTER X.— Of Moderation, or the Type of Government 
 BY Law. 
 
 § 1. Meaning of the terms Chasteness and Refinement 272 
 
 § 2. How referable to temporary fashions 272 
 
 § 3. How to the perception of completion 272 
 
 § 4. Finish, by great masters esteemed essential 272 
 
 § 5. Moderation, its nature and value 274 
 
 § 6. It is the girdle of beauty 275 
 
 § 7. How found in natural curves and colors 275 
 
 § 8. How difficult of attainment, yet essential to all good. . . 276 
 
 CHAPTER XI. — General Inferences respecting Typical 
 Beauty. 
 
 § 1. The subject incompletely treated, yet admitting of gen- 
 eral conclusions 277 
 
 § 2. Typical beauty not created for man's sake 277 
 
 § 3. But degrees of it for his sake admitted 278 
 
 § 4. What encouragement hence to be received 278 
 
 CHAPTER XII. — Of Vital Beauty. First, as Relative. 
 
 § 1. Transition from typical to vital Beauty 2T9 
 
 § 2. The perfection of the theoretic faculty as concerned with 
 
 vital beauty, is charity 281 
 
 § 3. Only with respect to plants, less affection than sym- 
 pathy 282 
 
 § 4. Which is proportioned to the appearance of energy in the 
 
 plants 283 
 
 § 5- This sympathy is unselfish, and does not regard utility . . 284 
 
 § 6. Especially with respect to animals 285 
 
 § 7. And it is destroyed by evidences of mechanism 286 
 
 § 8. The second perfection of the theoretic faculty as con- 
 cerned with life is justice of moral judgment 287 
 
 § 9. How impeded , . , 288 
 
 § 10. The influence of moral signs in expression 288 
 
14 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 11. As also in plants 290 
 
 §12. Recapitulation 291 
 
 CHAPTER XIIL— Op Vital Beauty. Secondly, as GtENeric. 
 § 1. The beauty of fulfilment of appointed function in every 
 
 animal 292 
 
 § 2. The two senses of the word ideal.'* Either it refers to 
 
 action of the imagination ' 293 
 
 § 3. Or to perfection of type 294 
 
 § 4. This last sense how inaccurate, yet to be retained 295 ^ 
 
 § 5. Of Ideal form. First, in the lower animals 295 
 
 g 6. In what consistent 296 
 
 g 7. Ideal form in vegetables 296 
 
 § 8. The difference of position between plants and animals. 297 
 
 § 9. Admits of variety in the ideal of the former 297 
 
 § 10. Ideal form in vegetables destroyed by cultivation. 298 
 
 § 11. Instance in the Soldanella and Ranunculus 299 
 
 § 12. The beauty of repose and felicity, how consistent with 
 
 such ideal 300 
 
 §13. The ideality of Art 301 
 
 § 14. How connected with the imaginative faculties 301 
 
 § 15. Ideality, how belonging to ages and conditions 301 
 
 CHAPTER XIV.— Op Vital Beauty. Thirdly, in Man. 
 
 § 1. Condition of the human creature entirely different from 
 
 that of the lower animals 302 
 
 § 2. What room here for idealization 303 
 
 § 3. How the conception of the bodily ideal is reached. . . . 304 
 § 4. Modifications of the bodily ideal owing to influence of 
 
 mind. First, of intellect 304 
 
 § 5. Secondly, of the moral feelings 305 
 
 § 6. What beauty is bestowed by them 306 
 
 § 7. How the soul culture interferes harmfully with the bodily 
 
 ideal 307 
 
 § 8. The inconsistency among the effects of the mental vir- 
 tues on the form 307 
 
 § 9. Is a sign of God's kind purpose towards the race 308 
 
 § 10. Consequent separation and difference of ideals 309 
 
 § 11. The effects of the Adamite curse are to be distinguished 
 
 from signs of its immediate activity 310 
 
 § 12. Which latter only are to be banished from ideal form. . . 310 
 
 § 13. Ideal form is only to be obtained by portraiture 311 
 
 § 14. Instances among the greater of the ideal Masters 312 
 
 § 15. Evil results of opposite practice in modern times 313 
 
 § 16. The right use of the model ^ 313 
 
STWOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 15 
 
 •PAGE 
 
 § 17. Ideal form to be reached only by love. . „ 313 
 
 § 18. Practical principles deducible 314 
 
 § 19. Expressions chiefly destructive of ideal character. 1st, 
 
 Pride 314 
 
 § 20. Portraiture ancient and modem 315 
 
 §21. Secondly, Sensuality 316 
 
 § 22. How connected with impurity of color 316 
 
 § 23. And prevented by its splendor 317 
 
 § 24. Or by severity of drawing 317 
 
 § 25. Degrees of descent in this respect : Rubens, Correggio, 
 
 and Guido 318 
 
 § 26. And modern art 318 
 
 § 27. Thirdly, ferocity and fear. The latter how to be distin- 
 guished from awe 319 
 
 § 28. Holy fear, how distinct from human terror 319 
 
 § 29. Ferocity is joined always with fear. Its unpardonable- 
 
 ness 320 
 
 § 30. Such expressions how sought by painters powerless and 
 
 impious. 320 
 
 § 31. Of passion generally 322 
 
 § 33. It is never to be for itself exhibited — at least on the face. 322 
 § 33. Recapitulation 324 
 
 CHAPTER XV. — General Conclusions RESPECTING the Theo- 
 retic Faculty. 
 § 1. There are no sources of the emotion of beauty more than 
 
 those found in things visible 325 
 
 § 2. What imperfection exists in visible things. How in a sort 
 
 by imagination removable 326 
 
 § 3. Which however affects not our present conclusions .... 327 
 § 4. The four sources from which the pleasure of beauty is 
 
 derived are all divine 327 
 
 § 5. What objections may be made to this conclusion 327 
 
 § 6. Typical beauty may be sesthetically pursued. Instances. 328 
 
 § 7. How interrupted by false feeling 329 
 
 § 8. Greatness and truth are sometimes by the Deity sustained 
 
 and spoken in and through evil men 330 
 
 § 9. The second objection arising from the coldness of Chris- 
 tian men to external beauty 331 
 
 § 10. Reasons for this coldness in the anxieties of the world. 
 
 These anxieties overwrought and criminal 332 
 
 § 11. Evil consequences of such coldness 333 
 
 § 12. Theoria the service of Heaven 333 
 
16 
 
 SYJ^OPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 SECTION II. 
 OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY. 
 CHAPTER I. — Of the Three Fokms of Imagination. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 1. A partial examination only of the imagination is to be 
 
 attempted 334 
 
 § 2. The works of the metaphysicians how nugatory with re- 
 spect to this faculty 335 
 
 § 3. The definition of D. Stewart, how inadequate 336 
 
 § 4. This instance nugatory , 337 
 
 § 5. Various instances 337 
 
 § 6. The three operations of the imagination. Penetrative, 
 
 associative, contemplative 339 
 
 CHAPTER II.— Of Imagination Associative. 
 
 § 1. Of simple conception 339 
 
 § 2. How connected with verbal knowledge. 340 
 
 § 3. How used in composition , 341 
 
 § 4. Characteristics of composition 342 
 
 § 5. What powers are implied by it. The first of the three 
 
 functions of fancy 342 
 
 § 6. Imagination not yet manifested 343 
 
 § 7. Imagination is the correlative conception of imperfect 
 
 component parts 344 
 
 § 8. Material analogy with imagination 344 
 
 § 9. The grasp and dignity of imagination 345 
 
 § 10. Its limits 346 
 
 § 11. How manifested in treatment of uncertain relations. Its 
 
 deficiency illustrated 347 
 
 § 12. Laws of art, the safeguard of the unimaginative 348 
 
 § 13. Are by the imaginative painter despised. Tests of im- 
 agination 349 
 
 § 14. The monotony of unimaginative treatment 349 
 
 § 15. Imagmation never repeats itself 350 
 
 § 16. Relation of the imaginative faculty to the theoretic 351 
 
 §17. Modification of its manifestation 351 
 
 § 18. rnstances of -absence of imagination. — Claude, Gaspar 
 
 Poussin 352 
 
 § 19. Its presence. — Salvator, Nicolo Poussin, Titian, Tintoret. 352 
 § 20. And Turner 353 
 
SYJS'OPSIS OF CONTENTS. 17 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 21. The due function of Associative imagination with re- 
 spect to nature 354 
 
 § 22. The sign of imaginative work is its appearance of abso- 
 lute truth 355 
 
 CHAPTER III.— Op Imagination Penetrative. 
 
 § 1. Imagination penetrative is concerned not with the com- 
 bining but apprehending of things 356 
 
 § 2. Milton's and Dante's description of flame 357 
 
 § 3. The imagination seizes always by the innermost point. . 358 
 
 § 4. It acts intuitively and without reasoning 358 
 
 § 5. Signs of it in language 359 
 
 § 6. Absence of imagination, how shown 359 
 
 § 7. Distinction between imagination and fancy 360 
 
 § 8. Fancy how involved with imagination 362 
 
 § 9. Fancy is never serious 363 
 
 § 10. Want of seriousness the bar to high art at the present 
 
 time 363 
 
 § 11. Imagination is quiet ; fancy, restless 364 
 
 §12. The detailing operation of fancy 364 
 
 § 13. And suggestive, of the imagination 365 
 
 § 14. This suggest! veness how opposed to vacancy 366 
 
 § 15. Imagination addresses itself to imagination 367 
 
 Instances from the works of Tintoret 368 
 
 § 16. The entombment 368 
 
 §17. The Annunciation , 369 
 
 § 18. The Baptism of Christ. Its treatment by various painters 370 
 
 § 19. By Tintoret , 371 
 
 §20. The Crucifixion 372 
 
 § 21. The Massacre of Innocents 374 
 
 § 22. Various works in the Scuola di San Rocco 375 
 
 § 23. The Last Judgment. How treated by various painters. 376 
 
 .§ 24. By Tintoret 377 
 
 § 25. The Imaginative verity, how distinguished from realism. 378 
 
 § 26. The imagination how manifested in sculpture 379 
 
 § 27. Bandinelli, Canova, Mino da Fiesole 379 
 
 § 28. Michael Angelo 380 
 
 § 29. Recapitulation. The perfect function of the imagina- 
 tion is the intuitive perception of ultimate truth .... 383 
 
 § 30. Imagination, how vulgarly understood 385 
 
 § 31. How its cultivation is dependent on the moral feelings. . 386 
 
 § 32. On independence of mind 386 
 
 § 33. And on habitual reference to nature 386 
 
 Vol. II.— 2 
 
18 
 
 SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV.— Of Imagination Contemplative. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 g 1. Imagination contemplative is not part of the essence, but 
 
 only a habit or mode of the faculty 387 
 
 § 2. The ambiguity of conception 388 
 
 § 3. Is not in itself capable of adding to the charm of fair 
 
 things 388 
 
 § 4. But gives to the imagination its regardant power over 
 
 them 389 
 
 § 5. The third office of fancy distinguished from imagination 
 
 contemplative 390 
 
 § 6. Various instances 393 
 
 § 7. Morbid or nervous fancy 396 
 
 § 8. The action of contemplative imagination is not to be ex- 
 pressed by art 396 
 
 § 9. Except under narrow limits. — 1st. Abstract rendering 
 
 of form without color 397 
 
 §10. Of color without form 398 
 
 §11. Or of both without texture 398 
 
 § 12. Abstraction or typical representation of animal form . . , 399 
 
 § 13. Either when it is symbolically used 400 
 
 § 14. Or in architectural decoration 401 
 
 § 15. Exception in delicate and superimposed ornament. 402 
 
 §16. Abstraction necessary from imperfection of materials. . . 402 
 § 17. Abstractions of things capable of varied accident are not 
 
 imaginative 403 
 
 § 18. Yet sometimes valuable 403 
 
 § 19. Exaggeration. Its laws and limits. First, in scale of 
 
 representation 404 
 
 § 20. Secondly, of things capable of variety of scale 405 
 
 § 21, Thirdly, necessary in exp;:ession of characteristic features 
 
 on diminished scale ... . 406 
 
 § 22. Recapitulation 407 
 
 CHAPTER v.— Of the Superhuman Ideal. 
 
 § 1. The subject is not to be here treated in detail 407 
 
 § 2. The conceivable modes of manifestation of Spiritual 
 
 Beings are four 408 
 
 § 3. And these are in or through creature forms familiar to us 408 
 § 4. Supernatural character may be impressed on these either 
 by phenomena inconsistent with their common nature 
 
 (compare Chap. iv. § 16) 409 
 
 § 5. Or by inherent Dignity 409 
 
 § 6. let. Of the expression of inspiration 409 
 
SYJSrOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 19 
 
 PAGE 
 
 § 7. No representation of that which is more than creature is 
 
 possible 410 
 
 § 8. riupernatural character expressed by modification of ac- 
 cessories 413 
 
 § 9. Landscape of the religious painters. Its character is 
 
 eminently symmetrical 412 
 
 § 10. Landscape of Benozzo Gozzoli 413 
 
 § 11. Landscape of Perugino and Raffaelle 414 
 
 § 12. Such Landscape is not to be imitated 414 
 
 § 13. Color, and Decoration. Their use in representations of 
 
 the Supernatural 415 
 
 § 14. Decoration so used must be generic 416 
 
 § 15. And color pure 416 
 
 § 16. Ideal form of the body itself, of what variety susceptible. 417 
 
 § 17. Anatomical development how far admissible 417 
 
 § 18. Symmetry. How valuable 418 
 
 § 19. The influence of Greek art, how dangerous 418 
 
 § 20. Its scope, how limited 419 
 
 § 21. Conclusion 420 
 
 Addenda 421 
 
MODERN PAINTERS. 
 
 PART II.— (Continued.) 
 OF TRUTH. 
 
 OF TEUTH OF EAETH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OF GENERAL STRUCTURE. 
 
 By truth of earth, we mean the faithful representation of 
 the facts and forms of the bare ground, considered as en- 
 tirely divested of vegetation, through whatever disguise, or 
 _ . ^. ^ , . under whatever modification the clothinor of the 
 
 § 1. First laws of ^ ^ ^ 
 
 the organization landscape may occasion. Ground is to the land- 
 
 of the earth, and ^ . i i i it* 
 
 their importance scape painter what the naked human body is to 
 the historical. The growth of vegetation, the 
 action of water, and even of clouds upon it and around it, 
 are so far subject and subordinate to its forms, as the folds 
 of the dress and the fall of the hair are to the modulation of 
 the animal anatomy. Nor is this anatomy always so con- 
 cealed, but in all sublime compositions, whether of nature or 
 art, it must be seen in its naked purity. The laws of the 
 organization of the earth are distinct and fixed as those of 
 
22 
 
 OF GENERAL STRUCTURE. 
 
 the animal frame, simpler and broader, but equally authori- 
 tative and inviolable. Their results may be arrived at with- 
 out knowledge of the interior mechanism ; but for that very 
 reason ignorance of them is the more disgraceful, and vio- 
 lation of them more unpardonable. They are in the land- 
 scape the foundation of all other truths — the most necessary, 
 therefore, even if they were not in themselves attractive ; 
 but they are as beautiful as they are essential, and every 
 abandonment of them by the artist must end in deformity as 
 it begins in falsehood. 
 
 That such abandonment is constant and total in the works 
 of the old masters, has escaped detection, only because of 
 persons generally cognizant of art, few have spent time 
 enough in hill countries to perceive the certainty of the laws 
 § 2. The slight of hill anatomy ; and because few, even of those 
 attention^^_ ord^ ^j^^ posscss such Opportunities, ever think of 
 carSui stiidy^ by ^^^^ common earth beneath their feet, as any- 
 modern artists, thing possessing specific form, or governed by 
 steadfast principles. That such abandonment should have 
 taken place cannot be surprising, after what we have seen of 
 their fidelity to skies. Those artists who, day after day, 
 could so falsely represent what was forever before their eyes, 
 when it was to be one of the most important and attractive 
 parts of their picture, can scarcely be expected to give with 
 truth what they could see only partially and at intervals, and 
 what was only to be in their picture a blue line in the hori- 
 zon, or a bright spot under the feet of their figures. 
 
 That such should be all the space allotted by the old land- 
 scape painters to the most magnificent phenomena of nature ; 
 that the only traces of those Apennines, which in Claude's 
 walks along the brow of the Pincian, forever bounded his 
 horizon with their azure wall, should, in his pictures, be a 
 cold white outline in the extreme of his tame distance ; and 
 that Salvator's sojourns among their fastnesses should only 
 have taught him to shelter his banditti with such paltry mor- 
 sels of crag as an Alpine stream would toss down before it 
 like a foam-globe ; though it may indeed excite our surprise, 
 will, perhaps, when we have seen how these slight passages 
 
OF GENERAL STRUCTURE, 
 
 23 
 
 are executed, be rather a subject of congratulation than of 
 regret. It might, indeed, have shortened our labor in the 
 investisration of mountain truth, had not modern artists been 
 so vast, comprehensive, and multitudinous in their mountain 
 drawings, as to compel us, in order to form the slightest esti- 
 mate of their knowledge, to enter into some examination of 
 every variety of hill scenery. We shall first gain some gen- 
 eral notion of the broad organization of large masses, and 
 then take those masses to pieces, until we come down to the 
 crumbling soil of the foreground. 
 
 Mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth, what 
 p „ ^ , violent muscular action is to the body of man. 
 
 §3. General , ^ 
 
 structure of the The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in 
 
 earth. The hills . • i i 
 
 are its action, the the mountain, brought out with fierce and con- 
 
 plains its rest, , . p ^^ p • • i 
 
 vulsive energy, lull oi expression, passion, ana 
 strength ; the plains and the lower hills are the repose and 
 the effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles lie dor- 
 mant and concealed beneath the lines of its beauty, yet rul- 
 ing those lines in their every undulation. This, then, is the 
 first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit 
 of the hills is action ; that of the lowlands, repose ; and be- 
 tween these there is to be found every variety of motion and 
 of rest ; from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, 
 with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, which, with heaving 
 bosoms and exulting limbs, with the clouds drifting like hair 
 from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to 
 Heaven, saying, I live forever ! 
 
 But there is this difference between the action of the 
 earth, and that of a living creature, that while the exerted 
 limb marks its bones and tendons through the flesh, the ex- 
 « . „ . . cited earth casts off the flesh altos^ether, and its 
 
 § 4. Mountains ^ ' ^ 
 
 come out from bones come out from beneath. Mountains are 
 
 underneath the 
 
 plains, and are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are 
 
 their support. . /»• i-i* 
 
 invariably those parts of its anatomy which m 
 the plains lie buried under five and twenty thousand feet of 
 solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which spring up 
 in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging 
 their garment of earth away from them on each side. The 
 
24 
 
 OF GENEBAL STRUCTURE, 
 
 masses of the lower hills are laid over and against their sides, 
 like the masses of lateral masonry against the skeleton arch 
 of an unfinished bridge, except that they slope up to and 
 lean against the central ridge : and, finally, upon the slopes 
 of these lower hills are strewed the level beds of sprinkled 
 gravel, sand, and clay, which form the extent of the cham- 
 paign. Here then is another grand principle of the truth of 
 earth, that the mountains must come from under all, and be 
 the support of all ; and that everything also must be laid in 
 their arms, heap above heap, the plains being the uppermost. 
 Opposed to this truth is every appearance of the hills being 
 laid upon the plains, or built upon them. Nor is this a truth 
 only of the earth on a large scale, for every minor rock (in 
 position) comes out from the soil about it as an island out of 
 the sea, lifting the earth near it like waves beating on its 
 sides. 
 
 Such being the structure of the framework of the earth, it 
 is next to be remembered that all soil whatsoever, wherever 
 it is accumulated in greater quantity than is sufficient to 
 nourish the moss of the wallflower, has been so, either by the 
 direct transporting agency of water, or under the guiding 
 § 5. structure of influence and power of water. All plains capa- 
 eeives^^^T^h^e ir Cultivation are deposits from some kind 
 
 perfect level, Qf water — some from swift and tremendous 
 
 when deposited 
 
 by quiet water. Currents, leaving their soil in sweeping banks 
 and furrowed ridges — others, and this is in mountain dis- 
 tricts almost invariably the case, by slow deposit from a 
 quiet lake in the mountain hollow, which has been gradually 
 filled by the soil carried into it by streams, which soil is of 
 course finally left spread at the exact level of the surface of 
 the former lake, as level as the quiet water itself. Hence we 
 constantly meet with plains in hill districts, which fill the 
 hollows of the hills with as perfect and faultless a level as 
 water, and out of which the steep rocks rise at the edge with 
 as little previous disturbance, or indication of their forms 
 beneath, as they do from the margin of a quiet lake. Every 
 delta — and there is one at the head of every lake in every 
 hill-district — supplies an instance of this. The rocks at Al- 
 
OF GENERAL STRUCTURE. 
 
 25 
 
 torf plunge beneath the plain, which the lake has left, at as 
 sharp an angle as they do into the lake itself beside the 
 chapel of Tell. The plain of the Arve, at Sallenche, is ter- 
 minated so sharply by the hills to the south-east, that I have 
 seen a man sleeping with his back supported against the 
 mountain, and his legs stretched on the plain ; the slope 
 which supported his back rising 5,000 feet above him, and 
 the couch of his legs stretched for five miles before him. In 
 distant effect these champaigns lie like deep, blue, undis- 
 turbed water, while the mighty hills around them burst out 
 from beneath, raging and tossing like a tumultuous sea. The 
 valleys of Meyringen, Interlachen, Altorf, Sallenche, St. 
 Jean de Maurienne ; the great plain of Lombardy itself, as 
 seen from Milan or Padua, under the Alps, the Euganeans, 
 and the Apennines ; and the Campo Felice under Vesuvius, 
 are a few, out of the thousand instances, which must occur 
 at once to the mind of every traveller. 
 
 Let the reader now open Rogers's Italy, at the seventeenth 
 page, and look at the vignette which heads it of the battle of 
 Marengo. It needs no comment. It cannot but carry with 
 it, after what has been said, the instant convic- 
 
 §6. lUustrated ^ . , ' , . , 
 
 by Turner's Ma- tiou that 1 umer IS as much or a geologist as he 
 is of a painter. It is a summary of all we have 
 been saying, and a summary so distinct and clear, that with- 
 out any such explanation it must have forced upon the mind 
 the impression of such facts — of the plunging of the hills un- 
 derneath the plain — of the perfect level and repose of this 
 latter laid in their arms, and of the tumultuous action of the 
 emergent summits. 
 
 We find, according to this its internal structure, which, I be- 
 lieve, with the assistance of Turner, can scarcely now be mis- 
 understood, that the earth may be considered as divided into 
 §7. General divi- three great classes of formation, which geology 
 risumnf T o m ^as already named for us. Primary— the rocks, 
 piin^ori^leSiga^ which, though in position lower than all others, 
 rise to form the central peaks, or interior nuclei 
 of all mountain ranges. Secondary — the rocks which are laid 
 in beds above these, and which form the greater proportion 
 
26 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 of all hill scenery. Tertiary — the light beds of sand, gravel, 
 and clay, which are strewed upon the surface of all, forming 
 plains and habitable territory for man. We shall find it con- 
 venient, in examining the truth of art, to adopt, with a little 
 modification, the geological arrangement, considering first, 
 the formation and character of the highest or central peaks ; 
 then the general structure of the lower mountains, including 
 in this division those composed of the various slates which a 
 geologist would call primary ; and, lastly, the minutiae and 
 most delicate characters of the beds of these hills, when they 
 are so near as to become foreground objects, and the struct- 
 ure of the common soil which usually forms the greater 
 space of an artist's foreground. Hence our task will arrange 
 itself into three divisions — the investigation of the central 
 mountains, of the interior mountains, and of the foreground. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 It does not always follow, because a mountain is the high- 
 est of its group, that it is in reality one of the central range. 
 The Jungfrau is only surpassed in elevation, in the chain of 
 which it is a member, by the Schreckhorn and 
 
 §1. Similar char- a i i •/ • • i 
 
 acter of the cen- Finster-Aarhorn ; but it is entirely a secondary 
 p^a^Ts^^of"\he mountain. But the central peaks are usually 
 world. highest, and may be considered as the chief 
 
 components of all mountain scenery in the snowy regions. 
 Being composed of the same rocks in all countries, their ex- 
 ternal character is the same everywhere. Its chief essential 
 points are the following. 
 
 Their summits are almost invariably either pyramids or 
 §2. Their ar- wcdgcs. Domcs may be formed by superin- 
 TyrTmitisor cumbcnt snow, or appear to be formed by the 
 by^?erticai^^1is^ continuous Outline of a sharp ridge seen trans- 
 s^res. versely, with its precipice to the spectator ; but 
 
 wherever a rock appears, the uppermost termination of that 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 27 
 
 rock will be a steep edgy ridge, or a sharp point, very rarely 
 presenting even a gentle slope on any of its sides, but usu- 
 ally inaccessible unless encumbered with snow. 
 
 These pyramids and wedges split vertically, or nearly so, 
 giving smooth faces of rock, either perpendicular or very 
 steeply inclined, which appear to be laid against the central 
 wedge or peak, like planks upright against a wall. The sur- 
 faces of these show close parallelism ; their fissures are verti- 
 cal, and cut them smoothly, like the edges of shaped planks. 
 Often groups of these planks, if I may so call them, rise higher 
 than those between them and the central ridge, forming de- 
 tached ridges inclining towards the central one. The planks 
 are cut transversely, sometimes by graceful curvilinear fis- 
 sures ; sometimes by straight fissures, which are commonly 
 parallel to the slope of one of the sides of the peak, while the 
 main direction of the planks or leaves is parallel to that of its 
 other side, or points directly to its summit. But the universal 
 law of fracture is — first, that it is clean and sharp, having a 
 perfectly smooth surface, and a perfectly sharp edge to all the 
 fissures ; secondly, that every fissure is steeply inclined, and 
 that a horizontal line, or one approaching to it, is an impos- 
 sibility, except in some turn of a curve. 
 
 Hence, however the light may fall, these peaks are seen 
 marked with sharp and defined shadows, indicating the square 
 edges of the planks of which they are made up, which shad- 
 §3. Causing ows Sometimes are vertical, pointing to the sum- 
 Sbiing Tn ; but are oftener parallel to one of the sides 
 artichoke or rose, peak, and intersected by a second series, 
 
 parallel to the other side. Where there has been much dis- 
 integration, the peak is often surrounded with groups of lower 
 ridges or peaks, like the leaves of an artichoke or a rose, all 
 evidently part and parcel of the great peak ; but falling back 
 from it, as if it were a budding flower, expanding its leaves 
 one by one. 
 
 § 4. The faithful ^ ^^^^ giving a lecture on geology, and 
 
 statement of were scarchino^ for some means of Hvine: the 
 
 these facts by o o 
 
 Turner in his Alps most faithful idea possible of the external ap- 
 at Daybreak. pearance causcd by this structure of the pri- 
 
28 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 inary hills, I should throw my geological outlines aside, and 
 take up Turner's vignette of the Alps at Daybreak. After what 
 has been said, a single glance at it will be enough. Observe 
 the exquisite decision with which the edge of the uppermost 
 plank of the great peak is indicated by its clear dark side and 
 sharp shadow ; then the rise of the second low ridge on its 
 side, only to descend again precisely in the same line ; the 
 two fissures of this peak, one pointing to its summit, the other 
 rigidly parallel to the great slope which descends towards the 
 sun ; then the sharp white aiguille on the right, with the 
 great fissure from its summit, rigidly and severely square, as 
 marked below, where another edge of rock is laid upon it. 
 But this is not all ; the black rock in the foreground is equally 
 a member of the mass, its chief slope parallel with that of the 
 mountain, and all its fissures and lines inclined in the same 
 direction ; and, to complete the mass of evidence more forcibly 
 still, we have the dark mass on the left articulated with ab- 
 solute right lines, as parallel as if they had been drawn with 
 a ruler, indicating the tops of two of these huge plates or 
 planks, pointing, with the universal tendency, to the great 
 ridge, and intersected by fissures parallel to it. Throughout 
 the extent of mountain, not one horizontal line, nor an ap- 
 proach to it, is discernible. This cannot be chance — it cannot 
 be composition — it may not be beautiful — perhaps nature is 
 very wrong to be so parallel, and very disagreeable in being 
 so straight ; — but this is nature, whether we admire it or not. 
 
 In the vignette illustration to Jacqueline, we have another 
 series of peaks, whose structure is less developed, owing to 
 their distance, but equally clear and faithful in all points, as 
 far as it is ffiven. But the visfnette of Aosta, 
 
 § 5. Vignette of . , _ , ^ . , ^ . . ' 
 
 the Andes and in the Italy, IS perhaps more striking than any 
 that could be named for its rendering of the 
 perfect parallelism of the lower and smaller peaks with the 
 great lines of the mass they compose ; and that of the An- 
 des, the second in Campbell, for its indication of the mul- 
 titudes of the vertical and plank-like beds arranged almost 
 like the leaves of a flower. This last especially, one of the 
 very noblest, most faithful, most scientific statements of 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 29 
 
 mountain form which even Turner has ever made, can leave 
 little more to be said or doubted. 
 
 Now, whenever these vast peaks, rising from 12,000 to 
 24,000 feet above the sea, form part of anything like a land- 
 scape, that is to say, whenever the spectator beholds them 
 § 6 Necessary ^^^^ region of Vegetation, or even from any 
 
 distance, and distance at which it is possible to get some- 
 consequent ae- -,.1.1 . /» 1 • 1 1 1 
 
 rial effect on all thmg like a view oi their whole mass, they must 
 
 such mountains, , ^ i t i j» i • ^ i 
 
 be at so great a distance irom him as to become 
 aerial and faint in all their details. Their summits, and all 
 those higher masses of whose character we have been speak- 
 ing, can by no possibility be nearer to him than twelve or 
 fifteen miles ; to approach them nearer he must climb — must 
 leave the region of vegetation, and must confine his view to 
 a part, and that a very limited one, of the mountain he is 
 ascending. Whenever, therefore, these mountains are seen 
 over anything like vegetation, or are seen in mass, they 
 must be in the far distance. Most artists would treat an 
 horizon fifteen miles off very much as if it were mere air; and 
 though the greater clearness of the upper air permits the 
 high summits to be seen with extraordinary distinctness, yet 
 they never can by any possibility have dark or deep shadows, 
 or intense dark relief against a light. Clear they may be, 
 but faint they must be, and their great and prevailing char- 
 acteristic, as distinguished from other mountains, is want of 
 apparent solidity. They rise in the morning light rather like 
 sharp shades, cast up into the sky, than solid earth. Their 
 lights are pure, roseate, and cloud-like — their shadows trans- 
 parent, pale, and opalescent, and often indistinguishable 
 from the air around them, so that the mountain-top is seen 
 in the heaven only by its flakes of motionless fire. 
 
 Now, let me once more ask, though I am sufficiently tired 
 §7 Total want asking, what record have we of anything like 
 of any rendering this in the works of the old masters ? There is 
 
 or their phenom- , , . . . p i t i 
 
 ena in ancient no vcstigc in any existing picturc of the slight- 
 est effort to represent the high hill ranges ; and 
 as for such drawing of their forms as we have found in 
 Turner, we might as well look for them among the Chinese. 
 
30 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 Very possibly it may be all quite right, — very probably these 
 men showed the most cultivated taste, the most unerring 
 judgment, in filling their pictures with mole-hills and sand- 
 heaps. Very probably the withered and poisonous banks of 
 Avernus, and the sand and cinders of the Campagna, are 
 much more sublime things than the Alps ; but still what 
 limited truth it is, if truth it be, when through the last fifty 
 pages we have been pointing out fact after fact, scene after 
 scene, in clouds and hills, (and not individual facts nor scenes, 
 but great and important classes of them,) and still we have 
 nothing to say when we come to the old masters ; but, "they 
 are not here." Yet this is what we hear so constantly called 
 painting " general " nature. 
 
 Although, however, there is no vestige among the old 
 masters of any effort to represent the attributes of the higher 
 mountains seen in comparative proximity, we are not alto- 
 o o r.^ . r firether left without evidence of their having: 
 
 § 8. Character of » ^ & 
 
 the representa- thousfht of them as sourccs of liffht in the ex- 
 
 tions of Alps in ^ i • i 
 
 the distances of trcme distance, as for example, in that of the 
 reputed Claude in our National Gallery, called 
 the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca. I have not the slightest 
 doubt of its being a most execrable copy ; for there is not 
 one touch nor line of even decent painting in the whole pict- 
 ure ; but as connoisseurs have considered it a Claude, as it 
 has been put in our Gallery for a Claude, and as people ad- 
 mire it every day for a Claude, I may at least presume it has 
 those qualities of Claude in it which are wont to excite the 
 public admiration, though it possesses none of those which 
 sometimes give him claim to it ; and I have so reasoned, and 
 shall continue to reason upon it, especially with respect to 
 facts of form, which cannot have been much altered by the 
 copyist. In the distance*of that picture (as well as in that 
 of the Sinon before Priam, which I have little doubt is at 
 least partially original, and whose central group of trees is a 
 very noble piece of painting) is something white, which I 
 §9. Their total believe must be intended for a snowy moun- 
 J^de* andTeri^i ^ain, because I do not see that it can well be in- 
 distance. tended for anything else. Now no mountain of 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 31 
 
 elevation sufficient to be so sheeted with perpetual snow, can 
 by any possibility sink so low on the horizon as this some- 
 thing of Claude's, unless it be at a distance of from fifty to 
 seventy miles. At such distances, though the outline is in- 
 variably sharp and edgy to an excess, yet all the circum- 
 stances of aerial perspective, faintness of shadow, and isola- 
 tion of light, which I have described as characteristic of the 
 Alps fifteen miles off, take place, of course, in a threefold 
 degree ; the mountains rise from the horizon like transparent 
 films, only distinguishable from mist by their excessively 
 keen edges, and their brilliant flashes of sudden light ; they 
 are as unsubstantial as the air itself, and impress their enor- 
 mous size by means of this aerialness, in a far greater degree 
 at these vast distances, than even when towering above the 
 spectator's head. Now, I ask of the candid observer, if there 
 be the smallest vestige of an effort to attain — if there be the 
 most miserable, the most contemptible shadow of attainment 
 of such an effect by Claude ? Does that white thing on the 
 horizon look seventy miles off ? Is it faint, or fading, or to 
 be looked for by the eye before it can be found out ? Does 
 it look high ? does it look large ? does it look impressive ? 
 You cannot but feel that there is not a vestige of any kind 
 or species of truth in that horizon ; and that, however artis- 
 tical it may be, as giving brilliancy to the distance, (though, 
 as far as I have any feeling in the matter, it only gives cold- 
 ness,) it is, in the very branch of art on which Claude's rep- 
 utation chiefly rests, aerial perspective, hurling defiance to 
 nature in her very teeth. 
 
 But there are worse failures yet in this unlucky distance. 
 Aerial perspective is not a matter of paramount importance, 
 because nature infringes its laws herself, and boldly too, 
 §10. And viola- though never in a case like this before us ; but 
 
 tion of specific , i • i , 
 
 form. there are some laws which nature never vio- 
 
 lates — her laws of form. No mountain was ever raised to the 
 level of perpetual snow, without an infinite multiplicity of 
 form. Its foundation is built of a hundred minor mountains, 
 and, from these, great buttresses run in converging ridges to 
 the central peak. There is no exception to this rule ; no 
 
32 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOVNTAINS. 
 
 mountain 15,000 feet high is ever raised without such prep- 
 aration and variety of outwork. Consequently, in distant 
 effect, when chains of such peaks are visible at once, the 
 multiplicity of form is absolutely oceanic ; and though it is 
 possible in near scenes to find vast and simple masses com- 
 posed of lines which run unbroken for a thousand feet, or 
 more, it is physically impossible when these masses are 
 thrown seventy miles back, to have simple outlines, for then 
 these large features become mere jags, and hillocks, and are 
 heaped and huddled together with endless confusion. To get 
 a simple form, seventy miles away, mountain lines would be 
 required unbroken for leagues ; and this, I repeat, is physi- 
 cally impossible. Hence these mountains of Claude, having 
 no indication of the steep vertical summits which we have 
 shown to be the characteristic of the central ridges, having 
 soft edges instead of decisive ones, simple forms (one line to 
 the plain on each side) instead of varied and broken ones, 
 and being painted with a crude raw white, having no trans- 
 parency, nor filminess, nor air in it, instead of rising in the 
 opalescent mystery which invariably characterizes the dis- 
 tant snows, have the forms and the colors of heaps of chalk 
 in a lime-kiln, not of Alps. They are destitute of energy, 
 of height, of distance, of splendor, and of variety, and are 
 the work of a man, whether Claude or not, who had neither 
 feelinof for nature, nor knowleds^e of art. 
 
 I should not, however, insist upon the faults of this pict- 
 §11. Even in Ma believing it to be a copy, if I had ever seen, 
 best works. eveu in his most genuine works, an extreme 
 distance of Claude with any of the essential characters of 
 nature. But although in his better pictures we have always 
 beautiful drawing of the air^ which in the copy before us is 
 entirely wanting, the real features of the extreme mountain 
 distance are equally neglected or maligned in all. There is, 
 indeed, air between us and it ; but ten miles, not seventy 
 miles of space. Let us observe a little more closely the 
 practice of nature in such cases. 
 
 The multiplicity of form which I have shown to be neces- 
 sary in the outline, is not less felt in the body of the mass. 
 
• OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS, 
 
 33 
 
 For, in all extensive hill ranges, there are five or six lateral 
 chains separated by deep valleys, which rise between the 
 spectator and the central ridge, showing: their 
 
 §12. Farther il- ^ . i i -i 
 
 lustration of the tops One over another, wave beyond wave, until 
 
 distant character , . ' ^ ^ ^ i £ ' j. i. ii'i 
 
 of mountain the eye IS carried back to the laintest and high- 
 chams. forms of the principal chain. These successive 
 
 ridges, and I speak now not merely of the Alps, but of moun- 
 tains generally, even as low as 3000 feet above the sea, show 
 themselves in extreme distance merely as vertical shades, with 
 very sharp outlines, detached from one another by greater 
 intensity, according to their nearness. It is with the utmost 
 difficulty that the eye can discern any solidity or roundness 
 in them ; the lights and shades of solid form are both equally 
 lost in the blue of the atmosphere, and the mountain tells only 
 as a flat, sharp-edged film, of which multitudes intersect and 
 overtop one another, separated by the greater faintness of 
 the retiring masses. This is the most simple and easily im- 
 itated arrangement possible, and yet, both in nature and art, 
 it expresses distance and size in a way otherwise quite unat- 
 tainable. For thus, the whole mass of one mountain being 
 of one shada only, the smallest possible difference in shade 
 will serve completely to detach it from another, and thus ten 
 or twelve distances may be made evident, when the darkest 
 and nearest is an aerial gray as faint as the sky ; and the 
 beauty of such arrangements carried out as nature carries 
 them, to their highest degree, is, perhaps, the most striking 
 feature connected with hill scenery : you will never, by any 
 chance, perceive in extreme distance, anythinq; 
 
 §13. Their exces- ... t i « . . /. i i -n f 
 
 sive appearance of like solid lorm or projection ot the hills. xLach 
 tiansparency. ^ dead, flat, perpendicular film or shade, with 
 
 a sharp edge darkest at the summit, and lost as it descends, 
 and about equally dark whether turned towards the light or 
 from it ; and of these successive films of mountain you will 
 probably have half a dozen, one behind another, all showing 
 with perfect clearness their every chasm and peak in the out- 
 line, and not one of them showing the slightest vestige of 
 solidity, but on the contrary, looking so thoroughly transpa- 
 rent, that if it so happens, as I have seen frequently, that a 
 Vol. II.— 3 
 
34 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 conical near hill meets with its summit the separation of two 
 distant ones, so that the right-hand slope of the nearer hill 
 forms an apparent continuation of the right-hand slope of the 
 left-hand farther hill, and vice versa, it is impossible to get 
 rid of the impression that one of the more distant peaks is 
 seen through the other. 
 
 I may point out in illustration of these facts, the engrav- 
 ings of two drawings of precisely the same chain of distant 
 hills, — Stanfield's Borromean Islands, with the St. Gothard in 
 § 14. Illustrated distance, and Turner's Arona, also with the 
 from the works of g^. Gothard in the distance. Far be it from me 
 
 Turner and Stan- 
 field. The Borro- to indicate the former of these plates as in any 
 
 mean Islands of . , 
 
 the latter. way exemplifying the power of Stanfield, or 
 
 affecting his reputation ; it is an unlucky drawing, murdered 
 by the engraver, and as far from being characteristic of Stan- 
 field as it is from being like nature, but it is just what I want, 
 to illustrate the particular error of which I speak ; and I pre- 
 fer showing this error where it accidentally exists in the works 
 of a really great artist, standing there alone, to point it out 
 where it is confused with other faults and falsehoods in the 
 works of inferior hands. The former of these plates is an ex- 
 ample of everything which a hill distance is not, and the 
 latter of everything which it is. In the former, we have the 
 mountains covered with patchy lights, which being of equal 
 intensity whether near or distant, confuse all the distances 
 together ; while the eye, perceiving that the light falls so as 
 to give details of solid form, yet finding nothing but insipid 
 and formless spaces displayed by it, is compelled to suppose 
 that the whole body of the hill is equally monotonous and 
 devoid of character ; and the effect upon it is not one whit 
 more impressive and agreeable than might be received from 
 a group of sand-heaps, washed into uniformity by recent 
 rain. 
 
 Compare with this the distance of Turner in Arona. It is 
 § 15. Turner's totally impossible here to say which way the light 
 Arona. f^jjg ^he distant hills, except by the slightly 
 
 increased decision of their edges turned towards it, but the 
 greatest attention is paid to get these edges decisive, yet full 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 35 
 
 of gradation, and perfectly true in character of form. All the 
 rest of the mountain is then indistinguishable haze, and by 
 the bringing of these edges more and more decisively over 
 one another, Turner has given us between the right-hand side 
 of the picture and the snow, fifteen distinct distances, yet 
 every one of these distances in itself palpitating, changeful, 
 and suggesting subdivision into countless multitude. Some- 
 thing of this is traceable even in the engraving, and all the 
 essential characters are perfectly well marked. I think even 
 the least experienced eye can scarcely but feel the truth of 
 this distance as compared with Stanfield's. In the latter, the 
 eye gets something of the form, and therefore wonders it sees 
 no more ; the impression on it, therefore, is of hills within 
 distinctly visible distance, indiscernible through want of light 
 or dim atmosphere ; and the effect is, of course, smallness of 
 space, with obscurity of light and thickness of air. In Tur- 
 ner's the eye gets nothing of the substance, and wonders it 
 sees so much of the outline ; the impression is, therefore, 
 of mountains too far off to be ever distinctly seen, rendered 
 clear by brilliancy of light and purity of atmosphere ; and 
 the effect, consequently, vastness of space, with intensity of 
 light and crystalline transparency of air. 
 
 These truths are invariably given in every one of Turner's 
 distances, that is to say, we have always in them two prin- 
 cipal facts forced on our notice ; transparency, or filminess 
 § 16. Extreme of mass, and excessive sharpness of edge. And 
 object^ ^always I wish particularly to insist upon this sharpness 
 f^l^t^^^^^'^l of edge, because it is not a casual or changeful 
 habit of nature ; it is the unfailing character- 
 istic of all very great distances. It is quite a mistake to 
 suppose that slurred or melting lines are characteristic of 
 distant large objects ; they may be so, as before observed, 
 (Sec. II. Chap. lY. § 4,) when the focus of the eye is not 
 adapted to them ; but, when the eye is really directed to the 
 distance, melting lines are characteristic only of thick mist 
 and vapor between us and the object, not of the removal of 
 the object. If a thing has character upon its outline, as a 
 tree for instance, or a mossy stone, the farther it is removed 
 
36 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 from us, the sharper the outline of the whole mass will be- 
 come, though in doing so, the particular details which make 
 up the character will become confused in the manner de- 
 scribed in the same chapter. A tree fifty yards from us, 
 taken as a mass, has a soft outline, because the leaves and 
 interstices have some effect on the eye. But put it ten 
 miles off against the sky, and its outline will be so sharp that 
 you cannot tell it from a rock. There are three trees on the 
 Mont Saleve, about five miles from Geneva, which from the 
 city, as they stand on the ridge of the hill, are seen defined 
 against the sky. The keenest eye in the world could not 
 tell them from stones. So in a mountain five or six miles 
 off, bushes, and heather, and roughnesses of knotty ground 
 and rock, have still some effect on the eye, and by becoming 
 confused and mingled as before described, soften the out- 
 line. But let the mountain be thirty miles off, and its edge 
 will be as sharp as a knife. Let it, as in the case of the 
 Alps, be seventy or eighty miles off, and though it has be- 
 come so faint that the morning mist is not so transparent, 
 its outline will be beyond all imitation for excessive sharp- 
 ness. Thus, then, the character of extreme distance is al- 
 ways excessive keenness of edge. If you soften your out- 
 line, you either put mist between you and the object, and in 
 doing so diminish your distance, for it is impossible you 
 should see so far through mist as through clear air ; or, if 
 you keep an impression of clear air, you bring the object 
 close to the observer, diminish its size in proportion, and if 
 the aerial colors, excessive blues, etc., be' retained, represent 
 an impossibility. 
 
 Take Claude's distance (in No. 244, Dulwich Gallery,) * on 
 the right of the picture. It is as pure blue as ever came from 
 the pallet, laid on thick ; you cannot see through it, there is 
 not the slio'htest vestio^e of transparency or film- 
 
 § 17. Want of . i ° t -f i • i?^ j ui ^ 
 
 this decision in iness about it, and Its edge is sott and blunt. 
 Claude. Hencc, if it be meant for near hills, the blue is 
 
 impossible, and the want of details impossible, in the clear 
 
 * One of the most genuine Claudes I know. 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 37 
 
 atmosphere indicated through the whole picture. If it be 
 meant for extreme distance, the blunt edge is impossible, 
 and the opacity is impossible. I do not know a single dis- 
 tance of the Italian school to which the same observation is 
 not entirely applicable, except, perhaps, one or two of Nich- 
 olas Poussin's. They always involve, under any supposition 
 whatsoever, at least two impossibilities. 
 
 I need scarcely mention in particular any more of the 
 works of Turner, because there is not one of his mountain 
 distances in which these facts are not fully exemplified. Look 
 o r^^. at the last vio-nette — the Farewell, in Ro2:ers's 
 
 § 18. The per- » ^ ' & 
 
 petual rendering Italy I obscrvc the exccssive sharpness of all the 
 
 of it by Turner. ^ . 
 
 edges, almost amounting to lines, in the dis- 
 tance, while there is scarcely one decisive edge in the fore- 
 ground. Look at the hills of the distance in the Dunstaff- 
 nage, Glencoe, and Loch Achray, (illustrations to Scott,) in 
 the latter of which the left-hand side of the Benvenue is 
 actually marked with a dark line. In fact, Turner's usual 
 mode of executing these passages is perfectly evident in all 
 his drawings ; it is not often that we meet with a very broad 
 dash of wet color in his finished works, but in these distances, 
 as we before saw of his shadows, all the effect has been evi- 
 dently given by a dash of very moist pale color, probably 
 turning the paper upside down, so that a very firm edge may 
 be left at the top of the mountain as the color dries. And 
 in the Battle of Marengo we find the principle carried so far 
 as to give nothing more than actual outline for the represen- 
 tation of the extreme distance, while all the other hills in the 
 picture are distinctly darkest at the edge. This plate, though 
 coarsely executed, is yet one of the noblest illustrations of 
 mountain character and masrnitude existino^. 
 
 Such, then, are the chief characteristics of the highest peaks 
 and extreme distances of all hills, as far as the forms of the 
 § 19. Efeects of rocks themselves, and the aerial appearances es- 
 perfectiyTt u d^- pecially belonging to them, are alone concerned. 
 
 There is, however, yet another point to be con- 
 sidered — the modification of their form caused by incumbent 
 snow. 
 
38 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 Pictures of winter scenery are nearly as common as moon- 
 lights, and are usually executed by the same order of artists, 
 that is to say, the most incapable ; it being remarkably easy 
 to represent the moon as a white wafer on a black ground, or 
 to scratch out white branches on a cloudy sky. Neverthe- 
 less, among Flemish paintings several valuable representa- 
 tions of winter are to be found, and some clever pieces of 
 effect among the moderns, as Hunt's, for instance, and De 
 Wint's. But all such efforts end in effect alone, nor have I 
 ever in any single instance seen a snow wreathy I do not say 
 thoroughly, but even decently, drawn. 
 
 In the range of inorganic nature, I doubt if any object can 
 be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snow- 
 drift, seen under warm light.* Its curves are of inconceiv- 
 able perfection and changefulness, its surface and transpar- 
 ency alike exquisite, its light and shade of inexhaustible 
 variety and inimitable finish, the shadows sharp, pale, and of 
 heavenly color, the reflected lights intense and multitudi- 
 nous, and mingled with the sweet occurrences of transmitted 
 light. No mortal hand can approach the majesty or loveli- 
 ness of it, yet it is possible by care and skill at least to sug- 
 gest the preciousness of its forms and intimate the nature of 
 its light and shade ; but this has never been attempted ; it 
 could not be done except by artists of a rank exceedingly 
 high, and there is something about the feeling of snow in 
 ordinary scenery which such men do not like. But when the 
 same qualities are exhibited on a magnificent Alpine scale 
 and in a position where they interfere with no feeling of life, 
 I see not why they should be neglected, as they have hith- 
 erto been, unless that the difficulty of reconciling the brill- 
 iancy of snow with a picturesque light and shade, is so great 
 that most good artists disguise or avoid the greater part of 
 upper Alpine scenery, and hint at the glacier so slightly, that 
 they do not feel the necessity of careful study of its forms. 
 Habits of exaggeration increase the evil : I have seen a 
 sketch from nature, by one of the most able of our landscape 
 
 * Compare Part III. Sect. I. Chap. 9, § 5. 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 39 
 
 painters, in which a cloud had been mistaken for a snowy 
 summit, and the hint thus taken exaggerated, as was likely, 
 into an enormous mass of impossible height^ and unintelli- 
 gent form, when the mountain itself, for which the cloud had 
 been mistaken, though subtending an angle of about eighteen 
 or twenty degrees, instead of the fifty attributed to it, was of 
 a form so exquisite that it might have been a profitable les- 
 son truly studied to Phidias. Nothing but failure can result 
 from such methods of sketching, nor have I ever seen a sin- 
 gle instance of an earnest study of snowy mountains by any 
 one. Hence, wherever they are introduced, their drawing is 
 utterly unintelligent, the forms being those of white rocks, 
 or of rocks lightly powdered with snow, showing sufficiently 
 that not only the painters have never studied the mountain 
 carefully from below, but that they have never climbed into 
 the snowy region. Harding's rendering of the high Alps 
 {vide the engraving of Chamonix, and of the Wengern Alp, 
 in the illustrations to Byron) is best ; but even he shows no 
 perception of the real anatomy. Stanfield paints only white 
 rocks instead of snow. Turner invariably avoids the diffi- 
 culty, though he has shown himself capable of grappling 
 with it in the ice of the Liber Studiorum, (Mer de Glace,) 
 which is very cold and slippery and very like ice ; but of the 
 crusts and wreaths of the higher snow he has taken no cog- 
 nizance. Even the vignettes to Rogers's Poems fail in this 
 respect. It would be vain to attempt in this place to give 
 any detailed account of the phenomena of the upper snows ; 
 but it may be well to note those general principles which 
 every artist ought to keep in mind when he has to paint an 
 Alp. 
 
 Snow is modified by the under forms of the hill in some 
 § 20 G 1 dress is by the anatomy of the human 
 
 principles of its frame. And as no dress can be well laid on 
 
 forms on the Alps. • i i , • • . ^ ^ t ^ ^ 
 
 Without conceiving the body beneath, so no 
 Alp can be drawn unless its under form is conceived first, 
 and its snow laid on afterwards. 
 
 Every high Alp has as much snow upon it as it can hold 
 or carry. It is not, observe, a mere coating of snow of given 
 
40 
 
 OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS. 
 
 depth throughout, but it is snow loaded on until the rocks 
 can hold no more. The surplus does not fall in the winter^ 
 because, fastened by continual frost, the quantity of snow 
 which an Alp can carry is greater than each single winter can 
 bestow ; it falls in the first mild days of spring in enormous 
 avalanches. Afterwards the melting continues, gradually re- 
 moving from all the steep rocks the small quantity of snow 
 which was all they could hold, and leaving them black and 
 bare among the accumulated fields of unknown depth, which 
 occupy the capacious valleys and less inclined superfices ot 
 the mountain. 
 
 Hence it follows that the deepest snow does not take nor 
 indicate the actual forms of the rocks on which it lies, but it 
 hangs from peak to peak in unbroken and sweeping fes- 
 toons, or covers whole groups of peaks, which afford it 
 sufficient hold, with vast and unbroken domes : these fes- 
 toons and domes being guided in their curves, and modified 
 in size, by the violence and prevalent direction of the winter 
 winds. 
 
 We have, therefore, every variety of indication of the 
 under mountain form ; first, the mere coating, which is soon 
 to be withdrawn, and which shows as a mere sprinkling or 
 powdering after a storm on the higher peaks ; then the shal- 
 low incrustation on the steep sides glazed by the running 
 down of its frequent meltings, frozen again in the night ; 
 then the deep snow more or less cramped or modified by sud- 
 den eminences of emergent rock, or hanging in fractured 
 festoons and huge blue irregular cliffs on the mountain 
 flanks, and over the edges and summits of their precipices m 
 nodding drifts, far overhanging, like a cornice, (perilous 
 things to approach the edge of from above ;) finally, the pure 
 accumulation of overwhelming depth, smooth, sweeping, and 
 almost cleftless, and modified only by its lines of drifting- 
 Countless phenomena of exquisite beauty belong to each of 
 these conditions, not to speak of the transition of the snow 
 into ice at lower levels ; but all on which I shall at present 
 insist is that the artist should not think of his Alp merely as 
 a white mountain, but conceive it as a group of peaks loaded 
 
OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS, 
 
 41 
 
 with an accumulation of snow, and that especially he should 
 avail himself of the exquisite curvatures, never failing, by 
 which the snow unites and opposes the harsh and broken 
 lines of the rock. I shall enter into farther detail on this 
 subject hereafter ; at present it is useless to do so, as I have 
 no examples to refer to, either in ancient or modern art. No 
 statement of these facts has hitherto been made, nor any 
 evidence given even of their observation, except by the most 
 inferior painters.* 
 
 Various works in green and white appear from time to 
 time on the walls of the Academy, like the Alps indeed, but 
 so frightfully like, that we shudder and sicken at the sight 
 § 21. Average of them, as wc do when our best friend shows 
 Switzerland.^ Its iuto his diuing-room, to see a portrait of 
 scarcely yet been himsclf, which "everybody thinks very like.'* 
 caught. should be glad to see fewer of these, for 
 
 Switzerland is quite beyond the power of any but first-rate 
 men, and is exceedingly bad practice for a rising artist ; but, 
 let us express a hope that Alpine scenery will not continue 
 to be neglected- as it has been, by those who alone are ca- 
 pable of treating it. We love Italy, but we have had rather 
 a surfeit of it lately; — too many peaked caps and flat-headed 
 pines. We should be very grateful to Harding and Stan- 
 field if they would refresh us a little among the snow, and 
 give us, what we believe them to be capable of giving us, a 
 faithful expression of Alpine ideal. We are well aware of 
 the pain inflicted on an artist's mind by the preponderance 
 of black, and white, and green, over more available colors ; 
 but there is nevertheless in generic Alpine scenery, a foun- 
 tain of feeling yet unopened — a chord of harmony yet un- 
 touched by art. It will . be struck by the first man who can 
 separate what is national, in Switzerland, from what is ideal. 
 We do not want chalets and three-legged stools, "cow-bells 
 and buttermilk. We want the pure and holy hills, treated 
 as a link between heaven and earth. 
 
 * I hear of some study of Alpine scenery among the professors at 
 Geneva ; but all foreign landscape that I have ever met with has been so 
 utterly ignorant that I hope for nothing except from our own painters. 
 
42 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 We have next to investigate the character of those inter- 
 § 1. The inferior mediate masses which constitute the greater 
 dng\iilh" d ^^^f ro^^ P^^'t of all hill scenery, forming the outworks 
 Sg ""divided^^ into ^^§^1 ranges, and being almost the sole 
 
 constituents of such lower groups as those of 
 Cumberland, Scotland, or South Italy. 
 
 All mountains whatever, not composed of the granite or 
 gneiss rocks described in the preceding chapter, nor volcanic, 
 (these latter being comparatively rare,) are composed of heds^ 
 not of homogeneous, heaped materials, but of accumulated 
 layers, whether of rock or soil. It may be slate, sandstone, 
 limestone, gravel, or clay ; but whatever the substance, it is 
 laid in layers, not in a mass. These layers are scarcely ever 
 horizontal, and may slope to any degree, often occurring 
 vertical, the boldness of the hill outline commonly depending 
 in a great degree on their inclination. In consequence of 
 this division into beds, every mountain will have two great 
 sets of lines more or less prevailing in its contours— one 
 indicative of the surfaces of the beds, where they come out 
 from under each other — and the other indicative of the ex- 
 tremities or edges of the beds, where their continuity has 
 been interrupted. And these two great sets of lines will 
 commonly be at right angles with each other, or nearly so. 
 If the surface of the bed approach a horizontal line, its 
 termination will approach the vertical, and this is the most 
 usual and ordinary way in ^hich a precipice is produced. 
 
 Farther, in almost all rocks there is a third division of sub- 
 L. n T. ... stance, which crives to their beds a tendency 
 
 ^ 2. Farther dm- / ^ , . . 
 
 sion of these beds to Split transversely in some directions rather 
 than others, giving rise to what geologists call 
 "joints," and throwing the whole rock into blocks more or 
 less rhomboidal ; so that the beds are not terminated by 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 43 
 
 torn or ragged edges, but by faces comparatively smooth 
 and even, usually inclined to each other at some definite 
 angle. The whole arrangement may be tolerably represented 
 by the bricks of a wall, whose tiers may be considered as 
 strata, and whose sides and extremities will represent the 
 joints by which those strata are divided, varying, however, 
 their direction in different rocks, and in the same rock under 
 differing circumstances. 
 
 Finally, in the slates, grauwackes, and some calcareous 
 beds, in the greater number, indeed, of mountain rocks, we 
 find another most conspicuous feature of general structure — 
 , , ^ the lines of lamination, which divide the whole 
 
 § 3. And by ^ ^ , ' 
 
 lines of lamina- rock iuto an infinite number of delicate plates 
 or layers, sometimes parallel to the direction or 
 " strike " of the strata, oftener obliquely crossing it, and 
 sometimes, apparently, altogether independent of it, main- 
 taining a consistent and unvarying slope through a series of 
 beds contorted and undulating in every conceivable direc- 
 tion. These lines of lamination extend their influence to the 
 smallest fragment, causing it (as, for example, common roof- 
 ing slate) to break smooth in one direction, and with a rag- 
 ged edge in another, and marking the faces of the beds and 
 joints with distinct and numberless lines, commonly far more 
 conspicuous in a near view than the larger and more impor- 
 tant divisions. 
 
 Now, it cannot be too carefully held in mind, in exam- 
 ining the principles of mountain structure, that nearly all 
 the laws of nature with respect to external form are rather 
 § 4 Variety and ^^^^^^^^^ tendencies, evidenced by a plurality of 
 seeming uncer- instanccs, than imperative necessities complied 
 
 tainty under • i i n n • • i 
 
 which these laws With by all. For lustancc, it may be said to be 
 
 are manifested. . , , . , i i i /» 
 
 a universal law with respect to the boughs of 
 all trees that they incline their extremities more to the ground 
 in proportion as they are lower on the trunk, and that the 
 higher their point of insertion is, the more they share in the 
 upward tendency of the trunk itself. But yet there is not 
 a single group of boughs in any one tree which does not 
 show exceptions to the rule, and present boughs lower in in- 
 
44 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 sertion, and yet steeper in inclination, than their neighbors. 
 Nor is this defect or deformity, but the result of the constant 
 habit of nature to carry variety into her very principles, and 
 make the symmetry and beauty of her laws the more felt by 
 the grace and accidentalism v^ith which they are carried out. 
 No one familiar with foliage could doubt for an instant of 
 the necessity of giving evidence of this downward tendency 
 in the boughs ; but it would be nearly as great an offence 
 against truth to make the law hold good with every indi- 
 vidual branch, as not to exhibit its influence on the majority. 
 Now, though the laws of mountain form are more rigid and 
 constant than those of vegetation, they are subject to the 
 same species of exception in carrying out. Though every 
 mountain has these great tendencies in its lines, not one in 
 a thousand of those lines is absolutely consistent with and 
 obedient to this universal tendency. There are lines in every 
 direction, and of almost every kind, but the sum and aggre- 
 gate of those lines will invariably indicate the universal force 
 and influence to which they are all subjected ; and of these 
 lines there will, I repeat, be two principal sets or classes, 
 pretty nearly at right angles with each other. When both 
 are inclined, they give rise to peaks or ridges ; when one is 
 nearly horizontal and the other vertical, to table-lands and 
 precipices. 
 
 This then is the broad organization of all hills, modified 
 afterwards by time and weather, concealed by superincum- 
 bent soil and vegetation, and ramified into minor and more 
 delicate details in a way presently to be considered, but 
 nevertheless universal in its great first influence, and giving 
 to all mountains a particular cast and inclination ; like the 
 exertion of voluntary power in a definite direction, an inter- 
 nal spirit, manifesting itself in every crag, and breathing in 
 every slope, flinging and forcing the mighty mass towards 
 the heaven with an expression and an energy like that of life. 
 
 Now, as in the case of the structure of the central peaks 
 § 5. The perfect described above, so also here, if I had to give a 
 them inTurner's clcar idea of this Organization of the lower hills, 
 Loch coriskin. where it is seen in its greatest perfection, with 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 45 
 
 a mere view to geological truth, I should not refer to any 
 geological drawings, but I should take the Loch Coriskin 
 of Turner. It has luckily been admirably engraved, and for 
 all purposes of reasoning or form, is nearly as effective in 
 the print as in the drawing. Looking at any group of the 
 multitudinous lines which make up this mass of mountain, 
 they appear to be running anywhere and everywhere ; there 
 are none parallel to each other, none resembling each other 
 for a moment ; yet the whole mass is felt at once to be com- 
 posed with the most rigid parallelism, the surfaces of the 
 beds towards the left, their edges or escarpments towards 
 the right. In the centre, near the top of the ridge, the edge 
 of a bed is beautifully defined, casting its shadow on the 
 surface of the one beneath it ; this shadow marking by three 
 jags the chasms caused in the inferior one by three of its 
 parallel joints. Every peak in the distance is evidently sub- 
 ject to the same great influence, and the evidence is com- 
 pleted by the flatness and evenness of the steep surfaces of 
 the beds which rise out of the lake on the extreme right, 
 parallel with those in the centre. 
 
 Turn to Glencoe, in the same series (the Illustrations to 
 Scott). We have in the Albs of mountain on the left, the 
 most beautiful indication of vertical beds of a finely lami- 
 §6. Glencoe and ^^^^^ rock, terminated by even joints towards 
 other works. the precipicc ; while the whole sweep of the 
 landscape, as far as the most distant peaks, is evidently gov- 
 erned by one great and simple tendency upwards to the left, 
 those most distant peaks themselves lying over one another 
 in the same direction. In the Daphne hunting with Leucip- 
 pus, the mountains on the left descend in two precipices to 
 the plain, each of which is formed by a vast escarpment of 
 the beds whose upper surfaces are shown between the two 
 cliffs, sinking with an even slope from the summit of the 
 lowest to the base of the highest, under which they evidently 
 descend, being exposed in this manner for a length of five or 
 six miles. The same structure is shown, though wnth more 
 complicated development, on the left of the Loch Katrine. 
 But perhaps the finest instance, or at least the most marked 
 
46 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS, 
 
 of all, will be found in the exquisite Mount Lebanon, with the 
 convent of St. Antonio, engraved in Finden's Bible. There 
 „ „ _ . „ is not one shade nor touch on the rock which is 
 
 § 7. Especially ... 
 
 the Mount Leba- not indicative of the lines of stratification ; and 
 every fracture is marked with a straightforward 
 simplicity which makes you feel that the artist has nothing 
 in his heart but a keen love of the pure unmodified truth ; 
 there is no effort to disguise the repetition of forms, no ap- 
 parent aim at artificial arrangement or scientific grouping ; 
 the rocks are laid one above another with unhesitating de- 
 cision ; every shade is understood in a moment, felt as a dark 
 side, or a shadow, or a fissure, and you may step from one 
 block or bed to another until you reach the mountain sum- 
 mit. And yet, though there seems no effort to disguise the 
 repetition of forms, see how it is disguised, just as nature 
 would have done it, by the perpetual play and changefulness 
 of the very lines which appear so parallel ; now bending a 
 little up, or down, or losing themselves, or running into each 
 other, the old story over and over again, — infinity. For here 
 is still the great distinction between Turner's work and that 
 of a common artist. Hundreds could have given the paral- 
 lelism of blocks, but none but •biself could have done so 
 without the actual repetition of a single line or feature. 
 
 Now compare with this the second mountain from the left in 
 the picture of Salvator, No. 220 in the Dulwich Gallery. The 
 whole is first laid in with a very delicate and masterly gray, 
 rio:ht in tone, asrreeable in color, quite unobiec- 
 
 § 8. Compared n i • ' "D 4- U ' ^U' A 
 
 with the work of tiouablc lor a beginning. But now is this made 
 Salvator , .^^^ rock ? On the light side Salvator gives us a 
 
 multitude of touches, all exactly like one another, and there- 
 fore, it is to be hoped, quite patterns of perfection in rock- 
 drawing, since they are too good to be even varied. Every 
 touch is a dash of the brush, as nearly as possible in the shape 
 of a comma, round and bright at the top, convex on its right 
 side, concave on its left, and melting off at the bottom into the 
 gray. These are laid in confusion one above another, some 
 paler, some brighter, some scarcely discernible, but all alike 
 in shape. Now, I am not aware myself of any particular 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 47 
 
 object, either in earth or heaven, which these said touches do 
 at all resemble or portray. I do not, however, assert that 
 they may not resemble something — feathers, perhaps ; but I 
 do say, and say with perfect confidence, that they may be 
 Chinese for rocks, or Sanscrit for rocks, or symbolical of 
 rocks in some mysterious and undeveloped character ; but 
 that they are no more like rocks than the brush that made 
 them. The dark sides appear to embrace and overhang the 
 lights ; they cast no shadows, are broken by no fissures, and 
 furnish, as food for contemplation, nothing but a series of 
 concave curves. 
 
 Yet if we go on to No. 269, we shall find something a great 
 deal worse. I can believe Gaspar Poussin capable of com- 
 mitting as much sin against nature as most people ; but I 
 certainly do not suspect him of having had any hand in this 
 §9. And of thing, at least after he was ten years old. Nev- 
 Poussin. ertheless, it shows what he is supposed capable 
 
 of by his admirers, and will serve for a broad illustration of all 
 those absurdities which he himself in a less degree, and with 
 feeling and thought to atone for them, perpetually commits. 
 Take the white bit of rock on the opposite side of the river, 
 just above the right arm of the Niobe, and tell me of what 
 the square green daubs of the brush at its base can be con- 
 jectured to be typical. Rocks with pale-brown light sides, 
 and rich green dark sides, are a phenomenon perhaps occur- 
 ring in some of the improved passages of nature among our 
 Cumberland lakes ; where I remember once having seen a 
 bed of roses, of peculiar magnificence, tastefully and artisti- 
 cally assisted in effect by the rocks above it being painted 
 pink to match ; but I do not think that they are a kind of 
 thing which the clumsiness and false taste of nature can be 
 supposed frequently to produce ; even granting that these 
 same sweeps of the brush could, by any exercise of the im- 
 agination, be conceived representative of a dark, or any 
 other side, which is far more than I am inclined to grant ; 
 seeing that there is no cast shadow, no appearance of re- 
 flected light, of substance, or of character on the edge ; 
 nothing, in short, but pure, staring green paint, scratched 
 
48 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS, 
 
 heavily on a white ground. Nor is there a touch in the pict- 
 ure more expressive. All are the mere dragging of the 
 brush here and there and everyv^here, w^ithout meaning or 
 intention ; winding, twisting, zigzagging, doing anything in 
 fact which may serve to break up the light and destroy its 
 breadth, without bestowing in return one hint or shadow of 
 anything like form. This picture is, indeed, an extraordi- 
 nary case, but the Salvator above mentioned is a character- 
 istic and exceedingly favorable example of the usual mode 
 of mountain drawing among the old landscape painters.* 
 Their admirers may be challenged to bring forward a single 
 instance of their expressing, or even appearing to have 
 noted, the great laws of structure above explained. Their 
 hills are, without exception, irregular earthy heaps, without 
 energy or direction of any kind, marked with shapeless shad- 
 ows and meaningless lines ; sometimes, indeed, where great 
 sublimity has been aimed at, approximating to the pure and 
 exalted ideal of rocks, which, in the most artistical speci- 
 mens of China cups and plates, we see suspended from aerial 
 pagodas, or balanced upon peacocks' tails, but never warrant- 
 ing even the wildest theorist in the conjecture that their 
 perpetrators had ever seen a mountain in their lives. Let 
 us, however, look farther into the modifications of character 
 by which nature conceals the regularity of her first plan ; 
 for although all mountains are organized as we have seen, 
 their organization is always modified, and often nearly con- 
 cealed, by changes wrought upon them by external influence. 
 
 We ought, when speaking of their stratification, to have 
 noticed another great law, which must, however, be under- 
 stood with greater latitude of application than any of the 
 § 10. Effects of others, as very far from imperative or constant 
 cnce^^on moun- particular cases, though universal in its influ- 
 tain form. ^jjce on the aggregate of all. It is that the lines 
 by which rocks are terminated, are always steeper and more 
 
 * I have above exhausted all terms of vituperation, and probably dis- 
 gusted the reader ; and yet I have not spoken with enough severity : I 
 know not any terms of blame that are bitter enough to chastise justly 
 the mountain drawings of Salvator in the pictures of the Pitti Palace. 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 49 
 
 inclined to the vertical as we approach the summit of the 
 mountain. Thousands of cases are to be found in every group, 
 of rocks and lines horizontal at the top of the mountain and 
 vertical at the bottom ; but they are still the exceptions, and 
 the average out of a given number of lines in any rock forma- 
 tion whatsoever, will be found increasing in perpendicularity 
 as they rise. Consequently the great skeleton lines of rock 
 outline are always concave ; that is to say, all distant ranges 
 of rocky mountain approximate more or less to a series of 
 concave curves, meeting in peaks, like a range of posts with 
 chains hanging between. I do not say that convex forms 
 will not perpetually occur, but that the tendency of the ma- 
 jority will always be to assume the form of sweeping, curved 
 valleys, with angular peaks ; not of rounded convex summits, 
 with angular valleys. This structure is admirably exempli- 
 fied in the second vignette in Rogers's Italy, and in Piacenza. 
 
 But although this is the primary form of all hills, and that 
 which will always cut against the sky in every distant range, 
 there are two great influences whose tendency is directly the 
 reverse, and which modify, to a great degree, both the evi- 
 § 11. The gentle dences of Stratification and this external form, 
 by^aqueous^^TO^ These are aqueous erosion and disintegration. 
 
 The latter only is to be taken into consideration 
 when we have to do with minor features of crags ; but the 
 former is a force in constant action — of the very utmost im- 
 portance — a force to which one-half of the great outlines of 
 all mountains is entirely owing, and which has much influence 
 upon every one of their details. 
 
 Now the tendency of aqueous action over a large elevated 
 surface is always to make that surface symmetrically and 
 evenly convex and dome-like, sloping gradually more and 
 more as it descends, until it reaches an inclination of about 
 40^, at which slope it will descend perfectly straight to the 
 valley ; for at that slope the soil washed from above will ac- 
 cumulate upon the hillside, as it cannot lie in steeper beds. 
 This influence, then, is exercised more or less on all moun- 
 tains, with greater or less effect in proportion as the rock is 
 harder or softer, more or less liable to decomposition, more 
 Vol. II.— 4 
 
50 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 or less recent in date of elevation, and more or less charac- 
 teristic in its original forms ; but it universally induces, in 
 the lower parts of mountains, a series of the most exquisitely 
 symmetrical convex curves, terminating, as they descend to 
 the valley, in uniform and uninterrupted slopes ; this sym- 
 metrical structure being perpetually interrupted by cliffs 
 and projecting masses, which give evidence of the interior 
 parallelism of the mountain anatomy, but which interrupt the 
 convex forms more frequently by rising out of them, than 
 by indentation. 
 
 There remains but one fact more to be noticed. All 
 mountains, in some degree, but especially those which are 
 composed of soft or decomposing substance, are delicately 
 § 12 And the Symmetrically furrowed by the descent of 
 
 efifect of the ac- streams. The traces of their action commence 
 
 tion of torrents. . 
 
 at the very summits, fine as threads, and mul- 
 titudinous, like the uppermost branches of a delicate tree. 
 They unite in groups as they descend, concentrating grad- 
 ually into dark undulating ravines, into which the body of 
 the mountain descends on each side, at first in a convex 
 curve, but at the bottom with the same uniform slope on 
 each side which it assumes in its final descent to the pUin, 
 unless the rock be very hard, when the stream will cut itself 
 a vertical chasm at the bottom of the curves, and there will 
 be no even slope.* If, on the other hand, the rock be very 
 soft, the slopes will increase rapidly in height and depth 
 from day to day ; washed away at the bottom and crum- 
 bling at the top, until, by their reaching the summit of the 
 masses of rock which separate the active torrents, the whole 
 mountain is divided into a series of penthouse-like ridges^, 
 all guiding to its summit, and becoming steeper and nar- 
 rower as they ascend ; these in their turn being divided by 
 similar, but smaller ravines — caused in the same manner — ^ 
 into the same kind of ridges ; and these again by another 
 
 * Some terrific cuts and chasms of this kind occur on the north side 
 of the Valais, from Sion to Briey. The torrent from the great Aletsch 
 glacier descends through one of them. Elsewhere chasms may be 
 found as narrow, but few so narrow and deep. 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS, 
 
 51 
 
 series, the arrangement being carried finer and farther ac- 
 cordins: to the softness of the rock. The south side of Sad- 
 dleback, in Cumberland, is a characteristic example ; and 
 the Montagne du Tacondy, in Chamonix, a noble instance 
 of one of these ridges or buttresses, with all its subdivisions, 
 on a colossal scale. 
 
 Now we wish to draw especial attention to the broad and 
 bold simplicity of mass, and the excessive complication of 
 details, which influences like these, acting on an enormous 
 §13. The exceed- scalc, must inevitably produce in all mountain 
 contoi iTcau^ d by groups ; bccause each individual part and prora- 
 these influences, outory, being Compelled to assume the same 
 symmetrical curves as its neighbors, and to descend at pre- 
 cisely the same slope to the valley, falls in with their pre- 
 vailing lines, and becomes a part of a great and harmonious 
 whole, instead of an unconnected and discordant individual. 
 It is true that each of these members has its own touches of 
 specific character, its own projecting crags and peculiar hol- 
 lows ; but by far the greater portion of its lines will be such 
 as unite with, though they do not repeat, those of its neigh- 
 bors, and carry out the evidence of one great influence and 
 spirit to the limits of the scene. This effort is farther aided 
 by the original unity and connection of the rocks them- 
 selves, which though it often may1)e violently interrupted, 
 is never without evidence of existence ; for the very inter- 
 ruption itself forces the eye to feel that there is something 
 to be interrupted, a sympathy and similarity of lines and 
 fractures, which, however full of variety and change of direc- 
 tion, never lose the appearance of symmetry of 
 
 § 14. And mul- , . -, ^ ^ ^ i t 
 
 tipiicity of feat- One kind or another. But, on the other hand, 
 it is to be remembered that these great sympa- 
 thizing masses are not one mountain, but a thousand moun- 
 tains ; that they are originally composed of a multitude of 
 separate eminences, hewn and chiselled indeed into associ- 
 ating form, but each retaining still its marked points and 
 features of character, — that each of these individual mem- 
 bers has, by the very process which assimilated it to the 
 rest, been divided and subdivided into equally multitudinous 
 
52 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 groups of minor mountains ; finally, that the whole compli- 
 cated system is interrupted forever and ever by daring mani- 
 festations of the inward mountain will — by the precipice 
 which has submitted to no modulation of the torrent, and 
 the peak which has bowed itself to no terror of the storm. 
 Hence we see that the same imperative laws which require 
 perfect simplicity of mass, require infinite and termless com- 
 plication of detail, — that there will not be an inch nor a 
 hairbreadth of the gigantic heap which has not its touch of 
 separate character, its own peculiar curve, stealing out for 
 an instant and then melting into the common line ; felt for 
 a moment by the blue mist of the hollow beyond, then lost 
 when it crosses the enlightened slope, — that all this multi- 
 plicity will be grouped into larger divisions, each felt by 
 their increasing aerial perspective, and their instants of indi- 
 vidual form, these into larger, and these into larger still, 
 until all are merged in the great impression and prevailing 
 energy of the two or three vast dynasties which divide the 
 king-dom of the scene. 
 
 There is no vestige nor shadow of approach to such treat- 
 ment as this in the whole compass of ancient art. Whoever 
 the master, his hills, wherever he has attempted them, have 
 o i-T. 1 not the slisrhtest trace of association or con- 
 
 § 15. Both utterly ^ * 
 
 neglected in an- ncction ; they are separate, conflicting, con- 
 fused, petty and paltry heaps of earth ; there 
 is no marking of distances or divisions in their body ; they 
 may have holes in them, but no valleys, — protuberances and 
 excrescences, but no parts ; and in consequence are in- 
 variably diminutive and contemptible in their whole appear- 
 ance and impression. 
 
 But look at the mass of mountain on the right in Turner's 
 Daphne hunting with Leucippus. It is simple, broad, and 
 united as one surge of a swelling sea ; it rises in an un- 
 § 16. The fidelity broken line along the valley, and lifts its prom- 
 TarSsi)aphne ontoHes with an equal slope. But it contains 
 and Leucippus. -^^ j^^^^ ^^^^ thousand hiUs. There is not a 
 quarter of an inch of its surface without its suggestion 
 of increasing distance and individual form. First, on the 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS, 
 
 53 
 
 right, you have a range of tower-like precipices, the clinging 
 wood climbing along their ledges and cresting their summits, 
 white waterfalls gleaming through its leaves ; not, as in 
 Claude's scientific ideals, poured in vast torrents over the 
 top, and carefully keeping all the way down on the most 
 projecting parts of the sides ; but stealing down, traced 
 from point to point, through shadow after shadow, by their 
 evanescent foam and flashing light, — here a wreath, and 
 there a ray, — through the deep chasms and hollow ravines, 
 out of which rise the soft rounded slopes of mightier moun- 
 tain, surge beyond surge, immense and numberless, of del- 
 icate and gradual curve, accumulating in the sky until 
 their garment of forest is exchanged for the shadowy fold 
 of slumbrous morning cloud, above which the utmost silver 
 peak shines islanded and alone. Put what mountain paint- 
 ing you will beside this, of any other artist, and its heights 
 will look like mole-hills in comparison, because it will 
 not have the unity nor the multiplicity which are in nature, 
 and with Turner, the signs of size. 
 
 Again, in the Avalanche and Inundation, we have for the 
 whole subject nothing but one vast bank of united moun- 
 tain, and one stretch of uninterrupted valley. Though the 
 „ . . bank is broken into promontory beyond prom- 
 
 § 17. And in the ^ i i 
 
 Avalanche and ontorv, peak abovo peak, each the abode of a 
 
 Inundation. *^ , ^ - p t i 
 
 new tempest, the arbiter oi a separate desola- 
 tion, divided from each other by the rushing of the snow, by 
 the motion of the storm, by the thunder of the torrent ; the 
 mighty unison of their dark and lofty line, the brotherhood 
 of ages, is preserved unbroken ; and the broad valley at 
 their feet, though measured league after league away by a 
 thousand passages of sun and darkness, and marked with 
 fate beyond fate of hamlet and of inhabitant, lies yet but as 
 a straight and narrow channel, a filling furrow before the 
 flood. Whose work will you compare with this ? Salvator's 
 gray heaps of earth, seven yards high, covered with bunchy 
 brambles, that w^e may be under no mistake about the size, 
 thrown about at random in a little plain, beside a zigzagging 
 river, just wide enough to admit of the possibility of there 
 
54 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS, 
 
 being fish in it, and with banks just broad enough to allow 
 the respectable angler or hermit to sit upon them con- 
 veniently in the foreground ? Is there more of nature in 
 such paltriness, think you, than in the valley and the moun- 
 tain which bend to each other like the trough of the sea ; 
 with the flank of the one swept in one surge into the height 
 of heaven, until the pine forests lie on its immensity like the 
 shadows of narrow clouds, and the hollow of the other laid 
 league by league into the blue of the air, until its white 
 villages flash in the distance only like the fall of a sunbeam ? 
 
 But let us examine by what management of the details 
 themselves this wholeness and vastness of effect are given. 
 We have just seen (§ 11) that it is impossible for the slope 
 § 18 The rarity ^ mountain, not actually a precipice of rock, 
 a^^huis of stee^ cxcecd 35^ or 40^, and that by far the greater 
 slopes or high part of all hill-surface is composed of graceful 
 precipices. curvcs of much Icss degree than this, reaching 
 40° only as their ultimate and utmost inclination. It must 
 be farther observed that the interruptions to such curves, by 
 precipices or steps, are always small in proportion to the 
 slopes themselves. Precipices rising vertically more than 100 
 feet are very rare among the secondary hills of which we are 
 speaking. I am not aware of any cliff in England or Wales 
 where a plumb-line can swing clear for 200 feet ; and even 
 although sometimes, with intervals, breaks, and steps, we 
 get perhaps 800 feet of a slope of 60° or 70°, yet not only 
 are these cases very rare, but even these have little influence 
 on the great contours of a mountain 4000 or 5000 feet in ele- 
 vation, being commonly balanced by intervals of ascent not 
 exceeding 6° or 8°. The result of which is, first, that the 
 peaks and precipices of a mountain appear as little more than 
 jags or steps emerging from its great curves ; and, secondly, 
 that the bases of all hills are enormously extensive as com- 
 pared with their elevation, so that there must be always a 
 horizontal distance between the observer and the summit five 
 or six times exceeding the perpendicular one. 
 
 Now it is evident, that whatever the actual angle of eleva- 
 tion of the mountain may be, every exhibition of this hori- 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 55 
 
 zontal distance between us and the summit is an addition to 
 its height, and of course to its impressiveness ; while every 
 endeavor to exhibit its slope as steep and sud- 
 
 § 19. And conse- .... /. • • 
 
 quent expression den. is diminution at once of its distance and 
 
 of horizontal dis- . . 
 
 tance in their as- elevatiou. In consequence nature is constantly 
 endeavoring to impress upon us this horizontal 
 distance, which, even in spite of all her means of manifesting 
 it, we are apt to forget or underestimate ; and all her noblest 
 effects depend on the full measurement and feeling of it. 
 And it is to the abundant and marvellous expression of it by 
 Turner, that I would direct especial attention, as being that 
 which is in itself demonstrative of the highest knowledge 
 and power — knowledge, in the constant use of lines of sub- 
 dued slope in preference to steep or violent ascents, and in 
 the perfect subjection of all such features, when they neces- 
 sarily occur, to the larger masses ; and power, in the inimit- 
 able statements of retiring space by mere painting of sur- 
 face details, without the aid of crossing shadows, divided 
 forms, or any other artifice. 
 
 The Caudebec, in the Rivers of France, is a fine instance 
 of almost every fact which we have been pointing out. We 
 have in it, first, the clear expression of what takes place con- 
 §20 Full state- ^tantly among hills, — that the river, as it passes 
 ment of all these throusrh the vallcv, will fall backwards and for- 
 
 facts in various ^ . . 
 
 works of Turner, wards from Side to side, lying: first, if I may so 
 
 Caudebec etc. »/ o j j 
 
 speak, with all its weight against the hills on 
 the one side, and then against those on the other ; so that, 
 as here it is exquisitely told, in each of its circular sweeps 
 the whole force of its current is brought deep and close to 
 the bases of the hills, while the water on the side next the 
 plain is shallow, deepening gradually. In consequence of 
 this, the hills are cut away at their bases by the current, so 
 that their slopes are interrupted by precipices mouldering 
 to the water. Observe first, how nobly Turner has given us 
 the perfect unity of the whole mass of hill, making us under- 
 stand that every ravine in it has been cut gradually by 
 streams. The first eminence, beyond the city, is not disjoint- 
 ed from, or independent of, the one succeeding, but evident- 
 
56 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 ]y part of the same whole, originally united, separated only 
 by the action of the stream between. The association of the 
 second and third is still more clearly told, for we see that 
 there has been a little longitudinal valley running along the 
 brow of their former united mass, which, after the ravine 
 had been cut between, formed the two jags which Turner has 
 given us at the same point in each of their curves. This 
 great triple group has, however, been originally distinct from 
 those beyond it ; for we see that these latter are only the 
 termination of the enormous even slope, which appears again 
 on the extreme right, having been interrupted by the rise of 
 the near hills. Observe how the descent of the whole series 
 is kept gentle and subdued, never suffered to become steep 
 except where it has been cut away by the river, the sudden 
 precipice caused by which is exquisitely marked in the last 
 two promontories, where they are defined against the bright 
 horizon ; and, finally, observe how, in the ascent of the near- 
 est eminence beyond the city, without one cast shadow or 
 any division of distances, every yard of surface is felt to be 
 retiring by the mere painting of its details, — how we are 
 permitted to walk up it, and along its top, and are carried, 
 before we are half way up, a league or two forward into the 
 picture. The difficulty of doing this, however, can scarcely 
 be appreciated except by an artist. 
 
 I do not mean to assert that this great painter is ac- 
 quainted with the geological laws and facts he has thus illus- 
 trated ; I am not aware whether he be or not ; I merely 
 wish to demonstrate, in points admittino^ of 
 
 § 21. The use of ^ . , . ' ^ , . « , 
 
 considering geo- demonstration, that intense observation or, and 
 logical truths. ^i^'iGt adherence to truth, which it is impossible 
 to demonstrate in its less tangible and more delicate mani- 
 festations. However I may feel the truth of every touch 
 and line, I ca^unot prove truth, except in large and general 
 features ; and I leave it to the arbitration of every man's 
 reason, whether it be not likely that the painter who is thus 
 so rigidly faithful in great things that every one of his pict- 
 ures might be the illustration of a lecture on the physical 
 sciences, is not likely to be faithful also in small. 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAIN'S. 57 
 
 Honfleur, and the scene between Clairmont and Mauves, 
 supply us with farther instances of the same grand simplicity 
 of treatment ; and the latter is especially remarkable for its 
 expression of the furrowing of the hills by descending water, 
 in the complete roundness and symmetry of their curves, and 
 §22. Expression in the delicate and sharp shadows which are 
 face'^bT^Turnlr cast in the Undulating ravines. It is interest- 
 contrasted^with compare with either of these noble works 
 
 Claude. gm^ij jjiiis as those of Claude, on the left of the 
 
 picture marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery. There is no 
 detail nor surface in one of them ; not an inch of ground for 
 us to stand upon ; we must either sit astride upon the edge, 
 or fall to the bottom. I could not point to a more complete 
 instance of mountain calumniation ; nor can I oppose it more 
 completely, in every circumstance, than with the Honfleur of 
 Turner, already mentioned ; in which there is not one edge 
 nor division admitted, and yet we are permitted to climb up 
 the hill from the town, and pass far into the mist along its 
 top, and so descend mile after mile along the ridge to sea- 
 ward, until, without one break in the magnificent unity of 
 progress, we are carried down to the utmost horizon. And 
 contrast the brown paint of Claude, which you can only 
 guess to be meant for rock or spii because it is brown, 
 with Turner's profuse, pauseless richness of feature, carried 
 through all the enormous space — the unmeasured wealth of 
 exquisite detail, over which the mind can dwell, and walk, 
 and wander, and feast forever, without finding either one 
 break in its vast simplicity, or one vacuity in its exhaustless 
 splendor. 
 
 But these, and hundreds of others which it is sin not to 
 dwell upon — wooded hills and undulating moors of North 
 England — rolling surges of park and forest of the South — 
 - „^ soft and vine-clad ransres of French coteaux, 
 
 § 23. The same ... . 
 
 moderation of casting" their obliquc shadows on silver leaoues 
 
 elope in the con- p ^ > • it i« t 
 
 tours of his hiyh- oi glancing rivers, — and olive-whitened prom- 
 
 er hills. . /. * i i \ • i • 
 
 ontories ot Alp and Apennine, are only in- 
 stances of Turner's management of the lower and softer hills. 
 In the bolder examples of his powers, where he is dealing 
 
58 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 with lifted masses of enormous mountain, we shall still find 
 him as cautious in his use of violent slopes or vertical lines, 
 and still as studied in his expression of retiring surface. We 
 never get to the top of one of his hills without being tired 
 with our walk ; not by the steepness, observe, but by the 
 stretch ; for we are carried up towards the heaven by such 
 delicate gradation of line, that we scarcely feel that we have 
 left the earth before we find ourselves among the clouds. 
 The Skiddaw, in the illustrations to Scott, is a noble instance 
 of this majestic moderation. The mountain lies in the 
 morning light, like a level vapor ; its gentle lines of ascent 
 are scarcely felt by the eye ; it rises without effort or exer- 
 tion, by the mightiness of its mass ; every slope is full of 
 slumber ; and we know not how it has been exalted, until 
 we find it laid as a floor for the walking of the eastern clouds. 
 So again in the Fort Augustus, where the whole elevation 
 of the hills depends on the soft lines of swelling surface 
 which undulate back through leagues of mist carrying us 
 unawares higher and higher above the diminished lake, until, 
 when we are all but exhausted with the endless distance, the 
 mountains make their last spring, and bear us, in that in- 
 stant of exertion, half way to heaven. 
 
 I ought perhaps rather to have selected, as instances of 
 mountain form, such elaborate works as the Oberwesel or 
 Lake of Uri, but I have before expressed my dislike of 
 §24. The peculiar Speaking of such magnificent pictures as these 
 vSigithig^ the fc^y parts. And indeed all proper consideration 
 truths^ o/hm out- ^^^^ drawing of Turner must be deferred 
 
 1^^^- until we are capable of testing it by the prin- 
 
 ciples of beauty ; for, after all, the most essential qualities 
 of line, — those on which all right delineation of mountain 
 character must depend, are those which are only to be ex- 
 plained or illustrated by appeals to our feeling of what is 
 beautiful. There is an expression and a feeling about all the 
 hill lines of nature, which I think I shall be able, hereafter, 
 to explain ; but it is not to be reduced to line and rule — not 
 to be measured by angles or described by compasses — not to 
 be chipped out by the geologist, or equated by the mathe- 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS, 
 
 59 
 
 matician. It is intangible, incalculable — a thing to be felt, 
 not understood — to be loved, not comprehended — a music of 
 the eyes, a melody of the heart, whose truth is known only 
 by its sweetness. 
 
 I can scarcely, without repeating myself to tediousness, 
 enter at present into proper consideration of the mountain 
 drawing of other modern painters. We have, fortunately, 
 § 25. Works of Several by whom the noble truths which we have 
 tfstr "^clarkson ^^^^ ^^^^7 exemplified by Turner are also 
 stanfieid. deeply felt and faithfully rendered ; though 
 
 there is a necessity, for the perfect statement of them, of 
 such an unison of freedom of thought with perfect mastery 
 over the greatest mechanical difficulties, as we can scarcely 
 hope to see attained by more than one man in our age. Very 
 nearly the same words which we used in reference to Stan- 
 field's drawings of the central clouds, might be applied to his 
 rendering of mountain truth. He occupies exactly the same 
 position with respect to other artists in earth as in cloud. 
 None can be said really to draw the mountain as he will, to 
 have so perfect a mastery over its organic development ; but 
 there is, nevertheless, in all his works, some want of feeling 
 and individuality. He has studied and mastered his subject 
 to the bottom, but he trusts too much to that past study, 
 and rather invents his hills from his possessed stores of 
 knowledge, than expresses in them the fresh ideas received 
 from nature. Hence, in all that he does, we feel a little 
 too much that the hills are his own. We cannot swear 
 to their being the particular crags and individual promon- 
 tories which break the cone of Ischia, or shadow the waves 
 of Maggiore. We are nearly sure, on the contrary, that 
 nothing but the outline is local, and that all the filling up 
 has been done in the study. Now, we have already shown 
 § 26. Importance (Scct. I. Chap. III.) that particular truths are 
 ind^iviS^^truth i^ore important than general ones, and this is 
 in hill drawing, j^g|^ the cases in which that rule espe- 
 
 cially applies. Nothing is so great a sign of truth and 
 beauty in mountain drawing as the appearance of individu- 
 ality — nothing is so great a proof of real imagination and in- 
 
60 
 
 OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 vention, as the appearance that nothing has been imagined 
 or invented. We ought to feel of every inch of mountain, 
 that it must have existence in reality, that if we had lived 
 near the place we should have known every crag of it, and 
 that there must be people to whom every crevice and shadow 
 of the picture is fraught with recollections, and colored with 
 associations. The moment the artist can make us feel this — 
 the moment he can make us think that he has done nothing, 
 that nature has done all — that moment he becomes ennobled, 
 he proves himself great. As long as we remember him, we 
 cannot respect him. We honor him most when we most 
 forget him. He becomes great when he becomes invisible. 
 And we may, perhaps, be permitted to express our hope 
 that Mr. Stanfield will — our conviction that he must — 
 if he would advance in his rank as an artist, attend 
 more to local character, and give us generally less of the 
 Stanfield limestone. He ought to study with greater atten- 
 tion the rocks which afford finer divisions and more delicate 
 parts (slates and gneiss ;) and he ought to observe more 
 fondly and faithfully those beautiful laws and lines of swell 
 and curvature, by intervals of w^hich nature sets off and re- 
 lieves the energy of her peaked outlines. He is at present 
 apt to be too rugged, and, in consequence, to lose size. Of 
 his best manner of drawing hills, I believe I can scarcely give 
 a better example than the rocks of Suli, engraved in Finden's 
 illustrations to Byron. It is very grand and perfect in all 
 parts and points. 
 
 Copley Fielding is peculiarly graceful and affectionate in 
 his drawing of the inferior mountains. But as with his clouds 
 so with his hills ; as long as he keeps to silvery films of misty 
 outline, or purple shadows ming-led with the 
 
 §27. Works of . T , 1 . , 'o 1 1 1 
 
 Copley Fielding, evening light, he IS true and beautitul ; but the 
 
 His hill feeling. , . , , j. e ' ^ -r 
 
 moment he withdraws the mass out oi its veihng- 
 mystery, he is lost. His worst drawings, therefore, are those 
 on which he has spent most time ; for he is sure to show 
 weakness wherever he gives detail. We believe that all his 
 errors proceed, as we observed before, from his not working 
 with the chalk or pencil ; and that if he would paint lialf 
 
OF THE INFERIOR MOUNTAINS. 
 
 the number of pictures in the year which he usually produces, 
 and spend his spare time in hard dry study of forms, the 
 half he painted would be soon worth double the present value 
 of all. For he really has deep and genuine feeling of hill 
 character — a far higher perception of space, elevation, incor- 
 poreal color, and all those qualities which are the poetry of 
 mountains, than any other of our water-color painters ; and 
 it is an infinite pity that he should not give to these delicate 
 feelings the power of realization, which might be attained by 
 a little labor. A few thorough studies of his favorite moun- 
 tains, Ben-Yenue or Ben-Cruachan, in clear, strong, front 
 chiaroscuro, allowing himself neither color nor mist, nor any 
 means of getting over the ground but downright drawing, 
 would, we think, open his eyes to sources of beauty of which he 
 now takes no cognizance. He ought not, however, to repeat 
 the same subjects so frequently, as the casting about of the 
 mind for means of varying them blunts the feelings to truth. 
 And he should remember that an artist, who is not making 
 progress, is nearly certain to be retrograding ; and that prog- 
 ress is not to be made by working in the study, or by mere 
 labor bestowed on the repetition of unchanging conceptions. 
 
 J. D. Harding would paint mountains very nobly, if he 
 made them of more importance in his compositions, but they 
 are usually little more than backgrounds for his foliage or 
 § 28 Works of ^uildings ; and it is his present system to make 
 J. D. Harding his back2:rounds very slio^ht. His color is very 
 
 and others. .f. ^ - . . . ^ 
 
 beautiful ; indeed, both his and Fielding s are 
 far more refined than Stanfield's. We wish he would oftener 
 take up some wild subject dependent for interest on its moun- 
 tain forms alone, as we should anticipate the highest results 
 from his perfect drawing ; and we think that such an exer- 
 cise, occasionally gone completely through, would counter- 
 act a tendency which we perceive in his present distances, 
 to become a little thin and cutting, if not incomplete. 
 
 The late G. Robson was a man most thoroughly acquainted 
 with all the characteristics of our own island hills ; and some 
 of the outlines of John Varley showed very grand feeling of 
 energy of form. 
 
62 
 
 OF THE FOMEGBOUND. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 We have now only to observe the close characteristics of 
 the rocks and soils to which the large masses of which we have 
 been speaking, owe their ultimate characters, 
 o . «... . , We have already seen that there exists a 
 
 §1. What rocks i i t • • i 
 
 were the chief marked distinction between those stratified rocks 
 
 components of an- ^ ^ -i i i • i it 
 
 cient landscape whose beds are amorphous and without subdi- 
 foreground. yision, as many limestones and sandstones, and 
 those which are divided by lines of lamination, as all slates. 
 The last kind of rock is the more frequent in nature, and 
 forms the greater part of all hill scenery ; it has, however, 
 been successfully grappled with by few, even of the moderns, 
 except Turner ; while there is no single example of any aim 
 at it or thought of it among the ancients, whose foregrounds, 
 as far as it is possible to guess at their intention through 
 their concentrated errors, are chosen from among the tufa and 
 travertin of the lower Apennines, (the ugliest as well as the 
 least characteristic rocks of nature,) and whose larger feat- 
 ures of rock scenery, if we look at them with a predetermina- 
 tion to find in them a resemblance of something, may be pro- 
 nounced at least liker the mountain limestone than anything 
 else. T shall glance, therefore, at the general characters of 
 these materials first, in order that we may be able to appreci- 
 ate the fidelity of rock-drawing on which Salvator's reputa- 
 tion has been built. 
 
 The massive limestones separate generally into irregular 
 § 2 Salvator's ^^^^^^5 tending to the form of cubes or parallel- 
 limestones. The opipeds, and terminated by tolerably smooth 
 
 real characters of ^ . 
 
 the rock. Its planes. The weather, acting on the edges of 
 tnseness of an- thesc blocks, rounds them off ; but the frost, 
 which, while it cannot penetrate nor split the 
 body of the stone, acts energetically on the angles, splits off the 
 rounded fragments, and supplies sharp, fresh, and complicated 
 
OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 63 
 
 edges. Hence the angles of such blocks are usually marked 
 by a series of steps and fractures, in which the peculiar char- 
 acter of the rock is most distinctly seen ; the effect being in- 
 creased in many limestones by the interposition of two or 
 three thinner beds between the large strata of which the block 
 has been a part ; these thin laminae breaking easily, and sup- 
 plying a number of fissures and lines at the edge of the de- 
 tached mass. Thus, as a general principle, if a rock have 
 character anywhere, it will be on the angle, and however even 
 and smooth its great planes may be, it will usually break into 
 variety where it turns a corner. In one of the most exquisite 
 pieces of rock truth ever put on canvas, the foreground of the 
 Napoleon in the Academy, 1842, this principle was beauti- 
 fully exemplified in the complicated fractures of the upper 
 angle just where it turned from the light, while the planes of 
 the rock were varied only by the modulation they owed to 
 the waves. It follows from this structure that the edges of 
 all rock being partially truncated, first by large fractures, 
 and then by the rounding of the fine edges of these by the 
 weather, perpetually present co/i^e^c transitions from the light 
 to the dark side, the planes of the rock almost always swell- 
 ing a little yVo^i the angle. 
 
 Now it will be found throughout the works of Salvator, 
 that his most usual practice was to give a concave sweep of 
 the brush for his first expression of the dark side, leaving the 
 paint darkest towards the li^rht ; by which daring: 
 
 §3. Salvator's ^, .u^^ i uu 
 
 acute angles and Original method oi procedure he has suc- 
 
 caused by the in- • i • /» i -^i /? 
 
 meeting of con- cecded in covcring his loregrounds with torms 
 av urve . which approximate to those of drapery, of rib- 
 bons, of crushed cocked hats, of locks of hair, of waves, leaves, 
 or anything, in short, flexible or tough, but which of course 
 are not only unlike, but directly contrary to the forms which 
 nature has impressed on rocks.* 
 
 * I have cut out a passage in this place which insisted on the angular 
 character of rocks, — not because it was false, but because it was incom- 
 plete, and I cannot explain it nor complete it without example. It is 
 not the absence of curves, but the suggestion of hardness tJiroughcvLxves, 
 and of the under tendencies of the inward structure, which form tho 
 
64 
 
 OF Tim FOREGROUND, 
 
 And the circular and sweeping strokes or stains which are 
 dashed at random over their surfaces, only fail of destroying 
 all resemblance whatever to rock structure from their fre- 
 §4. Peculiar dis- cfi^^nt Want of any meaning at all, and from the 
 amfrhade^in the i"^ Possibility of ouF supposing any of them to 
 rocks of nature. representative of shade. Now, if there be 
 any part of landscape in which nature develops her principles 
 of light and shade more clearly than another, it is rock ; for 
 the dark sides of fractured stone receive brilliant reflexes 
 from the lighted surfaces, on which the shadows are marked 
 with the most exquisite precision, especially because, owing 
 to the parallelism of cleavage, the surfaces lie usually in di- 
 rections nearly parallel. Hence every crack and fissure has 
 its shadow and reflected light separated with the most delic- 
 ious distinctness, and the organization and solid form of all 
 parts are told with a decision of language, which, to be fol- 
 lowed with anything like fidelity, requires the most transpar- 
 §5. Peculiar color, and the most delicate and scientific 
 fr^hf ^ocks'^of drawing. So far are the works of the old land- 
 Saivator. scape-paiutcrs from rendering this, that it is ex- 
 
 ceedingly rare to find a single passage in which the shadow 
 can even be distinguished from the dark side — they scarcely 
 seem to know the one to be darker than the other ; and the 
 strokes of the brush are not used to explain or express a form 
 known or conceived, but are dashed and daubed about with- 
 out any aim beyond the covering of the canvas. A rock," 
 the old masters appear to say to themselves, " is a great ir- 
 regular, formless, characterless lump ; but it must have shade 
 upon it, and any gray marks will do for that shade." 
 
 true characteristics of rock form ; and Salvator, whom neither here nor 
 elsewhere I have abused enough, is not wrong because he paints curved 
 rocks, but because his curves are the curves of ribbons and not of rocks ; 
 and the difference between rock curvature and other curvature I can- 
 not explain verbally, but I hope to do it hereafter by illustration ; and, 
 at present, let the reader study the rock-drawing of the Mont St. Gothard 
 subject, in the Liber Studiorum, and compare it with any examples of 
 Salvator to which he may happen to have access. All the account of 
 rocks here given is altogether inadequate, and I only do not alter it be- 
 cause I first wish to give longer study to the subject. 
 
OF THE FOREGliOUND. 
 
 65 
 
 Finally, while few, if any, of the rocks of nature are un- 
 traversed by delicate and slender fissures, whose black sharp 
 lines are the only means by which the peculiar 
 
 § 6. And total ... . 
 
 want of any ex- quality in which rocks most differ from the other 
 
 pression of hard- i • /. i i t i • i 
 
 ness or brittle- objects oi the landscape, brittleness, can be 
 effectually suggested, we look in vain among the 
 blots and stains with which the rocks of ancient art an-- 
 loaded, for any vestige or appearance of fissure or splinter 
 ing. Toughness and malleability appear to be the qualities 
 ^ ^ . whose expression is most aimed at : sometimes 
 
 § 7. Instances in ^ ^ ... . 
 
 particular pict- sponginess, softness, flexibility, tenuity, and oc- 
 casionally transparency. Take, for instance, the 
 foreground of Salvator, in No. 230 of the Dulwich Gallery. 
 There is, on the right-hand side of it, an object, which I 
 never walk through the room without contemplating for a 
 minute or two with renewed solicitude and anxiety of mind, 
 indulging in a series of very wild and imaginative conject- 
 ures as to its probable or possible meaning. I think there 
 is reason to suppose that the artist intended it either for a 
 very large stone, or for the trunk of a tree ; but any decis- 
 ion as to its being either one or the other of these must, I 
 conceive, be the extreme of rashness. It melts into the 
 ground on one side, and might reasonably be conjectured to 
 form a part of it, having no trace of woody structure or 
 color ; but on the other side it presents a series of concave 
 curves, interrupted by cogs like those of a water-wheel, which 
 the boldest theorist would certainly not feel himself war- 
 ranted in supposing symbolical of rock. The forms which this 
 substance, whatever it be, assumes, will be found repeated, 
 though in a less degree, in the foreground of No. 159, where 
 they are evidently meant for rock. 
 
 Let us contrast with this system of rock-drawing, the faith- 
 ful, scientific, and dexterous studies of nature which we find 
 ^ „ ^ ^ in the works of Clarkson Stanfield. He is a man 
 
 § 8. Compared 
 
 with the works especially to be opposed to the old masters, be- 
 ef stanfield. ^ ^ n r> 1 . 
 
 cause he usually confines himself to the same 
 
 rock subjects as they — the mouldering and furrowed crags 
 
 of the secondary formation which arrange themselves more 
 
 Vol. II.— 5 
 
66 
 
 OF THE FOBEGROUND. 
 
 or less into broad and simple masses ; and in the ren- 
 dering of these it is impossible to go beyond him. Nothing 
 can surpass his care, his firmness, or his success, in marking 
 the distinct and sharp light and shade by which the form is 
 explained, never confusing it with local color, however richly 
 his surface-texture may be given ; while the wonderful play 
 of line with which he will vary, and through which he will 
 indicate, the regularity of stratification, is almost as instruc- 
 tive as that of nature herself. I cannot point to any of his 
 works as better or more characteristic than others ; but his 
 Ischia, in the present British Institution, may be taken as a 
 fair average example. The Botallack Mine, Cornwall, en- 
 graved in the Coast Scenery, gives us a very finished and 
 generic representation of rock, whose primal organization has 
 been violently affected by external influences. We have the 
 stratification and cleavage indicated at its base, every fissure 
 being sharp, angular, and decisive, disguised gradually as it 
 rises by the rounding of the surface and the successive fur- 
 rows caused by the descent of streams. But the exquisite 
 drawing of the foreground is especially worthy of notice. 
 No huge concave sweeps of the brush, no daubing or splash- 
 ing here. Every inch of it is brittle and splintery, and the 
 fissures are explained to the eye by the most perfect, speak- 
 ing light and shade, — we can stumble over the edges of them. 
 § 9. Their ab- The East Cliff, Hastings, is another very fine 
 ineverTp^^^ example, from the exquisite irregularity with 
 which its squareness of general structure is va- 
 ried and disguised. Observe how totally contrary every 
 one of its lines is to the absurdities of Salvator. Stanfield's 
 are all angular and straight, every apparent curve made up 
 of right lines, while Salvator's are all sweeping and flourish- 
 ing like so much penmanship. Stanfield's lines pass away 
 into delicate splintery fissures. Salvator's are broad daubs 
 throughout. Not one of Stanfield's lines is like another. 
 Every one of Salvator's mocks all the rest. All Stanfield's 
 curves, where his universal angular character is massed, as on 
 the left-hand side, into large sweeping forms, are convex 
 Salvator's are every one concave. 
 
OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 67 
 
 The foregrounds of J. D. Harding and rocks of his middle 
 distances are also thoroughly admirable. He is not quite so 
 various and undulating in his line as Stanfield, and sometimes_, 
 § 10 The rocks middle distances, is wanting in solidity, 
 
 of J. D. Harding, owing to a little coufusiou of the dark side and 
 shadow with each other, or with the local color. But his 
 work, in near passages of fresh-broken, sharp-edged rock, is 
 absolute perfection, excelling Stanfield in the perfect freedom 
 and facility with which his fragments are splintered and scat- 
 tered ; true in every line without the least apparent effort. 
 Stanfield's best works are laborious, but Harding's rocks fall 
 from under his hand as if they had just crashed down the 
 hill-side, flying on the instant into lovely form. In color also 
 he incomparably surpasses Stanfield, who is apt to verge upon 
 mud, or be cold in his gray. The rich, lichenous, and change- 
 ful warmth, and delicate weathered grays of Harding's rock, 
 illustrated as they are by the most fearless, firm, and unerr- 
 ing drawing, render his w^ld pieces of torrent shore the finest 
 things, next to the work of Turner, in English foreground 
 art. 
 
 J. B. Pyne has very accurate knowledge of limestone rock, 
 and expresses it clearly and forcibly ; but it is much to be 
 regretted that this clever artist appears to be losing all sense 
 of color and is getting more and more mannered in execution, 
 evidently never studying from nature except with the pre- 
 vious determination to Pynize everything.* 
 
 * A passage which I happened to see in an Essay of Mr. Pyne's, in the 
 Art-Union, about nature's "foisting rubbish" upon the artist, 5ufi&- 
 ciently explains the cause of this decline. If Mr. Pyne will go to nature, 
 as all great men have done, and as all men who mean to be great must 
 do, that is not merely to be helped^ but to be taught by her ; and will 
 once or twice take her gifts, without looking them in the mouth, he 
 will most assuredly find — and I say this in no unkind or depreciatoiy 
 feeling, for I should say the same of all artists who are in the habit of 
 only sketching nature, and not studying hei' — that her worst is better 
 than his best. I am quite sure that if Mr. Pyne, or any other painter 
 who has hitherto been very careful in his choice of subject, will go into 
 the next turn -pike road, and taking the first four trees that he comes to 
 in the hedge, give them a day each, drawing them leaf for leaf, as far 
 
68 
 
 OF THE FOEEGROUND, 
 
 Before passing to Turner, let us take one more glance at 
 the foregrounds of the old masters, with reference, not to 
 their management of rock, which is comparatively a rare 
 
 component part of their foregrounds, but to the 
 yioose^eartrand common soil which they were obliged to paint 
 
 constantly, and whose forms and appearances 
 are the same all over the world. A steep bank of loose earth 
 of any kind, that has been at all exposed to the weather, 
 contains in it, though it may not be three feet high, features 
 capable of giving high gratification to a careful observer. It 
 is almost a fac-simile of a mountain slope of soft and decom- 
 posing rock ; it possesses nearly as much variety of character, 
 and is governed by laws of organization no less rigid. It is 
 furrowed in the first place by undulating lines, by the descent 
 of the rain, little ravines, which are cut precisely at the same 
 slope as those of the mountain, and leave ridges scarcely less 
 graceful in their contour, and beautifully sharp in their chis- 
 elling. Where a harder knot of ground or a stone occurs, 
 
 the earth is washed from beneath it, and accum- 
 hig^race^ a?d^f id- ulatcs above it, and there we have a little prec- 
 
 ness of feature. • • i ^ ^ • j. -i 
 
 ipice connected by a sweeping curve at its 
 summit with the great slope, and casting a sharp dark 
 shadow ; where the soil has been soft, it will probably be 
 washed away underneath until it gives way, and leaves a 
 jagged, hanging, irregular line of fracture ; and all these cir- 
 cumstances are explained to the eye in sunshine with the 
 most delicious clearness ; every touch of shadow being ex- 
 pressive of some particular truth of structure, and bearing 
 witness to the symmetry into which the whole mass has been 
 reduced. Where this operation has gone on long, and veg- 
 etation has assisted in softening the outlines, we have our 
 ground brought into graceful and irregular curves, of infinite 
 
 as may be, and even their smallest boughs with as much care as if they 
 were rivers, or an important map of a newly-surveyed country, he will 
 find, when he has brought them all home, that at least three out of the 
 four are better than the best he ever invented. Compare Part III. 
 Sect. I. Chap. III. § 12, 13, (the reference in the note ought to be to 
 Chap. XV. § 7.) 
 
OF THE FOREGROUND, 
 
 69 
 
 variety, but yet always so connected with each, other, and 
 guiding to each other, that the eye never feels them as sepa^ 
 rate things, nor feels inclined to count them, nor perceives a 
 likeness in one to the other ; they are not repetitions of each 
 other, but are different parts of one system. Each would be 
 imperfect without the one next to it. 
 
 Now it is all but impossible to express distinctly the par- 
 ticulars wherein this fine character of curve consists, and to 
 show in definite examples, what it is which makes one repre- 
 § 13. The ground sentation right, and another wrong. The ground 
 of Teniers. Teuicrs, for instance, in No. 139 in the Dul- 
 
 wich Gallery, is an example of all that is wrong. It is a 
 representation of the forms of shaken and disturbed soil, 
 such as we should see here and there after an earthquake, or 
 over the ruins of fallen buildings. It has not one contour 
 nor character of the soil of nature, and yet I can scarcely tell 
 you why, except that the curves repeat one another, and are 
 monotonous in their flow, and are unbroken by the delicate 
 angle and momentary pause with which the feeling of nature 
 would have touched them^ and are disunited ; so that the 
 eye leaps from this to that, and does not pass from one to 
 the other without being able to stop, drawn on by the con- 
 tinuity of line ; neither is there any undulation or furrowing 
 of watermark, nor in one spot or atom of the whole surface, 
 is there distinct explanation of form to the eye by means of a 
 determined shadow. All is mere sweeping of the brush over 
 the surface with various ground colors, without a single indi- 
 cation of character by means of real shade. 
 
 Let not these points be deemed unimportant ; the truths 
 of form in common ground are quite as valuable, (let me 
 anticipate myself for a moment,) quite as beautiful, as any 
 14 I rt ce ^^^^^^ which nature presents, and in lowland 
 of these minor landscape they present us with a species of line 
 
 parts and points. i • i • , • ' . • mi , i , • 
 
 which it IS quite impossible to obtain in any 
 other way, — the alternately flowing and broken line of moun- 
 tain scenery, which, however small its scale, is always of in- 
 estimable value, contrasted with the repetitions of organic 
 form which we are compelled to give in vegetation. A really 
 
70 
 
 OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 great artist dwells on every inch of exposed soil with care 
 and delight, and renders it one of the most essential, speak- 
 ing and pleasurable parts of his composition. And be it re- 
 membered, that the man who, in the most conspicuous part 
 of his foreground, will violate truth with every stroke of the 
 pencil, is not likely to be more careful in other parts of it ; 
 and that in the little bits which I fix upon for animadversion, 
 I am not pointing out solitary faults, but only the most 
 characteristic examples of the falsehood which is everywhere, 
 and which renders the whole foreground one mass of con- 
 §15. Theobserv- tradictions and absurdities. Nor do I myself 
 the^reii disUnS sec wherciu the great difference lies between a 
 ma^tef Tnd the "^^ster and a novice, except in the rendering of 
 '^o^ice. finer truths, of which I am at present speak- 
 
 ing. To handle the brush freely, and to paint grass and 
 weeds with accuracy enough to satisfy the eye, are accom- 
 plishments which a year or two's practice will give any man ; 
 but to trace among the grass and weeds those mysteries of 
 invention and combination, by which nature appeals to the 
 intellect — to render the delicate fissure, and descending 
 curve, and undulating shadow of the mouldering soil, with 
 gentle and fine finger, like the touch of the rain itself — to 
 find even in all that appears most trifling or contemptible, 
 fresh evidence of the constant working of the Divine power 
 " for glory and for beauty," and to teach it and proclaim it 
 to the unthinking and the unregardless — this, as it is the 
 peculiar province and faculty of the master-mind, so it is the 
 peculiar duty which is demanded of it by the Deity. 
 
 It would take me no reasonable nor endurable time, if I 
 were to point out one half of the various kinds and classes 
 of falsehood which the inventive faculties of the old masters 
 §16. The ground Succeeded in originating, in the drawing of fore- 
 of cuyp. grounds. It is not this man, nor that man, nor 
 
 one school nor another ; all agree in entire repudiation of 
 everything resembling facts, and in the high degree of ab- 
 surdity of what they substitute for them. Even Cuyp, who 
 evidently saw and studied near nature, as an artist should 
 do — not fishing for idealities, but taking what nature gave 
 
OF TEE FOREGROUND. 
 
 71 
 
 him, and thanking her for it — even he appears to have sup- 
 posed that the drawing of the earth might be trusted to 
 § 17. And of chance or imagination, and, in consequence, 
 Claude. strcws his banks with lumps of dough, instead of 
 
 stones. Perhaps, however, the beautiful foregrounds " of 
 Claude afford the most remarkable instances of childishness 
 and incompetence of all. That of his morning landscape, 
 with the large group of trees and high single-arched bridge, 
 in the National Gallery, is a pretty fair example of the kind 
 of error which he constantly falls into. I will not say any- 
 thing of the agreeable composition of the three banks, rising 
 one behind another from the water. I merely affirm that it 
 amounts to a demonstration that all three were painted in 
 the artist's study, without any reference to nature whatever. 
 In fact, there is quite enough intrinsic evidence in each of 
 them to prove this, seeing that what appears to be meant for 
 vegetation upon them, amounts to nothing more than a green 
 stain on their surfaces, the more evidently false because the 
 leaves of the trees twenty yards farther off are all perfectly 
 visible and distinct ; and that the sharp lines with which 
 each cuts against that beyond it, are not only such as crum- 
 bling earth could never show or assume, but are maintained 
 through their whole progress ungraduated, unchanging, and 
 unaffected by any of the circumstances of varying shade to 
 § 18. The entire which every One of nature's lines is inevitably 
 cMdrshness ^ of Subjected. In fact, the whole arrangement is 
 the latter. impotent Struggle of a tyro to express, by 
 
 successive edges, that approach of earth which he finds him- 
 self incapable of expressing by the drawing of the surface. 
 Claude wished to make you understand that the edge of his 
 pond came nearer and nearer : he had probably often tried 
 to do this with an unbroken bank, or a bank only varied by 
 the delicate and harmonized anatomy of nature ; and he had 
 found that owing to his total ignorance of the laws of per- 
 spective, such efforts on his part invariably ended in his re- 
 ducing his pond to the form of a round O, and making it 
 look perpendicular. Much comfort and solace of mind, in 
 such unpleasant circumstances, may be derived from in- 
 
72 
 
 OF THE FOBEGROUND. 
 
 stantly dividing the obnoxious bank into a number of suc- 
 cessive promontories, and developing their edges with com- 
 pleteness and intensity. Every school-girl's drawing, as soon 
 as her mind has arrived at so great a degree of enlighten- 
 ment as to perceive that perpendicular water is objection- 
 able, will supply us with edifying instances of this unfailing 
 resource ; and this foreground of Claude's is only one out of 
 the thousand cases in which he has been reduced 
 
 § 19. Compared , at«/»«i 
 
 with the work of to it. And if it be asKcd, how the proceeding: 
 
 Turner . a o 
 
 differs from that of nature, I have only to point 
 to nature herself, as she is drawn in the foreground of Tur- 
 ner's Mercury and Argus, a case precisely similar to Claude's, 
 of earthy crumbling banks cut away by water. It will be 
 found in this picture (and I am now describing nature's work 
 and Turner's with the same words) that the whole distance 
 is given by retirement of solid surface ; and that if ever an 
 edge is expressed, it is only felt for an instant, and then lost 
 again ; so that the eye cannot stop at it and prepare for a 
 long jump to another like it, but is guided over it, and 
 round it, into the hollow beyond ; and thus the whole re- 
 ceding mass of ground, going back for more than a quarter 
 of a mile, is made completely one — no part of it is separated 
 from the rest for an instant — it is all united, and its modu- 
 lations are members^ not divisio?is of its mass. But those 
 modulations are countless — heaving here, sinking there — now 
 swelling, now mouldering, now blending, now breaking — giv- 
 ing, in fact, to the foreground of this universal master, pre- 
 cisely the same qualities which we have before seen in his 
 hills, as Claude gave to his foreground precisely the same 
 qualities which we had before found in his hills, — infinite 
 unity in the one case, finite division in the other. 
 
 Let us, then, having now obtained some insight into the 
 principles of the old masters in foreground drawing, contrast 
 them throughout with those of our great mod- 
 
 § 20. General fea- => . . . « , 
 
 turesof Turner's ern master. The investigation of the excellence 
 of Turner's drawing becomes shorter and easier 
 as we proceed, because the great distinctions between his 
 work and that of other painters are the same, whatever the 
 
OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 73 
 
 object or subject may be ; and after once showing the gen- 
 eral characters of the particular specific forms under con- 
 sideration, we have only to point, in the works of Turner, 
 to the same principles of infinity and variety in carrying 
 them out, which we have before insisted upon with reference 
 to other subjects. 
 
 The Upper Fall of the Tees, Yorkshire, engraved in the 
 England series, may be given as a standard example of rock- 
 drawing to be opposed to the work of Salvator. We have, 
 § 21. Geological ii^ the great face of rock which divides the two 
 rockfin\h?FaU Streams, horizontal lines which indicate the real 
 of the Tees. direction of the strata, and these same lines are 
 given in ascending perspective all along the precipice on the 
 right. But we see also on the central precipice fissures 
 absolutely vertical, which inform us of one series of joints 
 dividing these horizontal strata ; and the exceeding smooth- 
 ness and evenness of the precipice itself inform us that it 
 has been caused by a great separation of substance in the 
 direction of another more important line of joints, run- 
 ning in a direction across the river. Accordingly,, we see on 
 the left that the whole summit of the precipice is divided 
 again and again by this great series of joints into vertical 
 beds, which lie against each other with their sides towards 
 us, and are traversed downwards by the same vertical lines 
 traceable on the face of the central cliff. Now, let me direct 
 especial attention to the way in which Turner has marked 
 „ _ over this ^reneral and errand unity of structure, 
 
 § 22. Their con- f , , , 
 
 vex surfaces and the modifying effccts of the weather and the 
 torrent. Observe how the whole surface of the 
 hill above the precipice on the left * is brought into one 
 smooth, unbroken curvature of gentle convexity, until it 
 comes to the edge of the precipice, and then, just on the 
 angle (compare § 2,) breaks into the multiplicity of fissure 
 which marks its geological structure. Observe how every 
 one of the separate blocks, into which it divides, is rounded 
 and convex in its salient edges turned to the weather, and 
 
 * In the light between the waterfall and the large dark mass on the 
 extreme right. 
 
74 
 
 OF THE FOREGROUND, 
 
 how every one of their inward angles is marked clear and ^ 
 sharp by the determined shadow and transparent reflex. 
 Observe how exquisitely graceful are all the curves of the 
 convex surfaces, indicating that every one of them has been 
 modelled by the winding and undulating of running water ; 
 and how gradually they become steeper as they descend, 
 § 23. And perfect Until they are torn down into the face of the 
 precipice. Finally, observe the exquisite variety 
 of all the touches which express fissure or shade ; every one 
 in varying directions and with new forms, and yet through- 
 out indicating that perfect parallelism which at once ex- 
 plained to us the geology of the rock, and falling into one 
 grand mass, treated with the same simplicity of light and 
 shade which a great portrait painter adopts in treating the 
 features of the human face ; which, though each has its 
 own separate chiaroscuro, never disturb the wholeness and 
 grandeur of the head, considered as one ball or mass. So 
 here, one deep and marked piece of shadow indicates the 
 greatest proximity of the rounded mass ; and from this 
 every shade becomes fainter and fainter, until all are lost in 
 the obscurity and dimness of the hanging precipice and the 
 shattering fall. Again, see how the same fractures just up- 
 on the edge take place with the central cliff above the right- 
 hand fall, and how the force of the water is told us by the 
 confusion of debris accumulated in its channel. In fact, the 
 great quality about Turner's drawings which more especially 
 proves their transcendent truth, is the capability they afford 
 us of reasoning on past and future phenomena, just as if we 
 had the actual rocks before us ; for this indicates not that 
 one truth is given, nor another, not that a pretty or inter- 
 esting morsel has been selected here and there, but that 
 the whole truth has been given, with all the relations of its 
 parts ; so that we can pick and choose our points of pleas- 
 c TT • _i. ure or of thought for ourselves, and reason 
 
 § 24. Various parts ^ ' ^ 
 
 tohi^us by the de^ ^P^n the wholc with the same certainty which 
 tails of the draw- we should after having climbed and hammered 
 over the rocks bit by bit. With this drawing 
 before him, a geologist could give a lecture upon the whole 
 
OF THE FOBEGROUND. 
 
 75 
 
 system of aqueous erosion, and speculate as safely upon 
 the past and future states of this very spot, as if he were 
 standing and getting wet with the spray. He would tell 
 you, at once, that the waterfall was in a state of rapid reces- 
 sion ; that it had once formed a wide cataract just at the 
 spot where the figure is sitting on the heap of debris ; and 
 that when it was there, part of it came down by the channel 
 on the left, its bed being still marked by the delicately 
 chiselled lines of fissure. He would tell you that the fore- 
 ground had also once been the top of the fall, and that the 
 vertical fissures on the right of it were evidently then the 
 channel of a side stream. He would tell you that the fall 
 was then much lower than it is now, and that being lower, it 
 had less force, and cut itself a narrower bed ; and that the 
 spot where it reached the higher precipice is marked by the 
 expansion of the wide basin which its increased violence has 
 excavated, and by the gradually increasing concavity of the 
 rocks below, which we see have been hollowed into a com- 
 plete vault by the elastic bound of the water. But neither 
 he nor I could tell you with what exquisite and finished 
 marking of every fragment and particle of soil or rock, 
 both in its own structure and the evidence it bears of these 
 great influences, the whole of this is confirmed and carried 
 out. 
 
 With this inimitable drawing we may compare the rocks 
 in the foreground of the Llanthony. These latter are not 
 divided by joints, but into thin horizontal and united beds, 
 OK 15 4.-* 1 which the torrent in its times of flood has chis- 
 
 § 25. Beautiful 
 
 instance of an ellcd awav, leaving: one exposed under another, 
 
 exception to gen- , *^ ° ^ . . ^ 
 
 erai rules in the With the Sweeping marks of its eddies upon 
 their edges. And here we have an instance of 
 an exception to a general rule, occasioned by particular and 
 local action. We have seen that the action of water over 
 any surface universally^ whether falling, as in rain, or sweep- 
 ing, as a torrent, induces convexity of form. But when we 
 have rocks in situ, as here, exposed at their edges to the vio- 
 lent action of an eddy, that eddy will cut a vault or circular 
 space for itself, (as we saw on a large scale with the high 
 
76 OF THE FOREGROUND, 
 
 water-fall,) and we have a concave curve interrupting the 
 general contours of the rock. And thus Turner (while every 
 edge of his masses is rounded, and, the moment we rise above 
 the level of the water, all is convex) has interrupted the 
 great contours of his strata with concave curves, precisely 
 where the last waves of the torrent have swept against the 
 exposed edges of the beds. Nothing could more strikingly 
 prove the depth of that knowledge by which every touch of 
 this consummate artist is regulated, that universal command 
 of subject which never acts for a moment on anything 
 conventional or habitual, but fills every corner and space 
 with new evidence of knowledge, and fresh manifestation of 
 thought. 
 
 The Lower Fall of the Tees, with the chain-bridge, might 
 serve us for an illustration of all the properties and forms of 
 vertical beds of rock, as the upper fall has of horizontal ; 
 § 26. Turner's P^^s rather to obscrvc, in detached pieces 
 
 tach^Jd^biocks^of foreground, the particular modulation of 
 weathered stone, pa^ts which cauuot be investigated in the grand 
 combinations of general mass. 
 
 The blocks of stone which form the foreground of the 
 Ulleswater are, I believe, the finest example in the world of 
 the finished drawing of rocks which have been subjected 
 to violent aqueous action. Their surfaces seem to palpitate 
 from the fine touch of the waves, and every part of them is 
 rising or falling in soft swell or gentle depression, though 
 the eye can scarcely trace the fine shadows on which this chis- 
 elling of the surface depends. And with all this, every 
 block of them has individual character, dependent on the ex- 
 pression of the angular lines of which its contours were first 
 formed, and which is retained and felt through all the modu- 
 lation and melting of the water-worn surface. And what is 
 done here in the most important part of the picture, to be 
 especially attractive to the eye, is often done by Turner with 
 lavish and overwhelming power, in the accumulated debris of 
 a wide foreground, strewed with the ruin of ages, as, for in- 
 stance, in the Junction of the Greta and Tees, where he has 
 choked the torrent bed with the mass of shattered rock, 
 
OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 77 
 
 thrown down with the profusion and carelessness of nature 
 herself ; and yet every separate block is a study, (and has 
 evidently been drawn from nature,) chiselled and varied in 
 its parts, as if it were to be the chief member of a separate 
 subject ; yet without ever losing, in a single instance, its 
 subordinate position, or occasioning, throughout the whole 
 accumulated multitude, the repetition of a single line. 
 
 I consider cases like these, of perfect finish and new con- 
 ception, applied and exerted in the drawing of every member 
 of a confused and almost countlessly-divided system, about the 
 most wonderful, as well as the most character- 
 compiicated^fore- istic passagcs of Turner's foregrounds. It is done 
 ground. j^^^ marvellously, though less distinctly, in 
 
 the individual parts of all his broken ground, as in examples 
 like these of separate blocks. The articulation of such a pas- 
 sage as the nearest bank, in the picture we - have already 
 spoken of at so great length, the Upper Fall of the Tees, 
 might serve us for a day's study, if we were to go into it part 
 by part ; but it is impossible to do this, except with the pen- 
 cil ; we can only repeat the same general observations, about 
 eternal change and unbroken unity, and tell you to observe 
 how the eye is kept throughout on solid and retiring sur- 
 faces, instead of being thrown, as by Claude, on flat and equal 
 edges. You cannot find a single edge in Turner's work ; you 
 are everywhere kept upon round surfaces, and you go back 
 on these you cannot tell how — never taking a leap, but pro- 
 gressing imperceptibly along the unbroken bank, till you find 
 yourself a quarter of a mile into the picture, beside the figure 
 at the bottom of the waterfall. 
 
 Finally, the bank of earth on the right of the grand draw- 
 ing of Penmaen Mawr, may be taken as the standard of the 
 representation of soft soil modelled by descending rain ; and 
 §28. And of loose scrve to show US how cxquisite in character 
 are the resultant lines, and how full of every 
 species of attractive and even sublime quality, if we only are 
 wise enough not to scorn the study of them. The higher the 
 mind, it may be taken as a universal rule, the less it will scorn 
 that which appears to be small or unimportant ; and the rank 
 
78 
 
 OF THE FOREGROUND. 
 
 of a painter may always be determined by observing how he 
 uses, and with what respect he views the minutiae of nature. 
 Greatness of mind is not shown by admitting small things, 
 but by making small things great under its influence. He 
 who can take no interest in what is small, will take false in- 
 terest in what is great ; he who cannot make a bank sublime, 
 will make a mountain ridiculous. 
 
 It is not until we have made ourselves acquainted with 
 these simple facts of form, as they are illustrated by the 
 slighter works of Turner, that we can become at all competent 
 „ ^_ _ . to enioy the combination of all, in such works 
 
 § 29, The unison ' 
 
 of all in the ideal as the Mercurv and Ar2:us, or Bay of Baiae, in 
 
 foregrounds of , . , , • i • i mi -,11 
 
 the Academy pic- which the mind IS at nrst bewildered by the 
 abundant outpouring of the master's knowledge. 
 Often as I have paused before these noble works, I never felt 
 on returning to them as if I had ever seen them before ; for 
 their abundance is so deep and various that the mind, accord- 
 ing to its own temper at the time of seeing, perceives some 
 new series of truths rendered in them, just as it would on re- 
 visiting a natural scene ; and detects new relations and as- 
 sociations of these truths which set the whole picture in a 
 different light at every return to it. And this effect is es- 
 pecially caused by the management of the foreground ; for 
 the more marked objects of the picture may be taken one by 
 one, and thus examined and known ; but the foregrounds of 
 Turner are so united in all their parts that the eye cannot 
 take them by divisions, but is guided from stone to stone, 
 and bank to bank, discovering truths totally different in as- 
 pect, according to the direction in which it approaches them, 
 and approaching them in a different direction, and viewing 
 them as a part of a new system, every time that it begins its 
 § 30. And the course at a new point. One lesson, however, we 
 beTeceiverfrom invariably taught by all, however approached 
 ^11- or viewed, — that the work of the Great Spirit of 
 
 nature is as deep and unapproachable in the lowest as in the 
 noblest objects, — that the Divine mind is as visible in its full 
 energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering 
 stone, as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling 
 
OF THE FOREOBOUND. 
 
 79 
 
 the foundation of the earth ; and that to the rightly perceiv- 
 ing mind, there is the same infinity, the same majesty, the 
 same power, the same unity, and the same perfection, mani- 
 fest in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, 
 in the mouldering of the dust as in the kindling of the day« 
 star. 
 
SEOTIOIT "V- 
 OF TEUTH OF WATEK. 
 
 CHAPTER 1. 
 
 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper 
 nature, and without assistance or combination, water is the 
 most wonderful. If we think of it as the source of all the 
 §1. Sketch of the. changefulness and beauty which we have seen 
 S'Tg'ency'of clouds ; then as the instrument by which the 
 earth we have contemplated was modelled into 
 symmetry, and its crags chiselled into grace ; then as, in the 
 form of snow, it robes the mountains it has made, with tliat 
 transcendent light which we could not have conceived if we 
 had not seen ; then as it exists in the form of the torrent — 
 in the iris which spans it, in the morning mist which rises 
 from it, in the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hang- 
 ing shore, in the broad lake and glancing river ; finally, in 
 that which is to all human minds the best emblem of un- 
 wearied, unconquerable power, the wild, various, fantastic, 
 tameless unity of the sea ; what shall we compare to this 
 mighty, this universal element, for glory and for beauty ? or 
 how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling ? It 
 is like trying to paint a soul. 
 
 To suggest the ordinary appearance of calm water — to lay 
 on canvas as much evidence of surface and reflection as may 
 make us understand that water is meant — is, perhaps, the 
 easiest task of art ; and even ordinary running or falling 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 81 
 
 water may be sufficiently rendered, by observing careful 
 curves of projection with a dark ground, and breaking a 
 little white over it, as we see done with iudef- 
 
 § 2. The ease ^ , i V» t i -r» • i 
 
 with which a ment and truth by Kuysdael. JtSut to paint the 
 sentation of^Tt actual play of hue on the reflective surface, or to 
 Theim^posslbiUty give the forms and fury of water when it begins 
 of a faithful one. ^^^^ itself— to give the flashing and rocket- 
 like velocity of a noble cataract, or the precision and grace of 
 the sea waves, so exquisitely modelled, though so mockingly 
 transient — so mountainous in its form, yet so cloud-like in 
 its motion — with, its variety and delicacy of color, when every 
 ripple and wreath has some peculiar passage of reflection 
 upon itself alone, and the radiating and scintillating sun- 
 beams are mixed with the dim hues of transparent depth and 
 dark rock below ; — to do this perfectly, is beyond the power 
 of man ; to do it even partially, has been granted to but one 
 or two, even of those few who have dared to attempt it. 
 
 As the general laws which govern the appearances of water 
 have equal effect on all its forms, it would be injudicious to 
 treat the subject in divisions ; for the same forces which 
 fi^overn the waves and foam of the torrent, are 
 
 §3. Difficulty of ^ „ . ^ . , , . , ' . 
 
 properly divid- equally influential on those ot the sea ; and it 
 
 ing the subject. mi i ' . . a ^^ 
 
 Will be more convenient to glance generally at 
 the system of water-painting of each school and artist, than 
 to devote separate chapters to the examination of the lake, 
 river, or sea-painting of all. We shall, therefore, vary our 
 usual plan, and look first at the water-painting of the an- 
 cients ; then at that of the moderns generally ; lastly, at 
 that of Turner. 
 
 It is necessary in the outset to state briefly one or two of 
 the optical conditions by which the appearance of the sur- 
 face of water is affected ; to describe them all would require 
 § 4. Inaccuracy ^ Separate cssay, even if I possessed the requi- 
 efffcf Imong^^^^^ site knowledge, which I do not. The accidental 
 painters. modifications under which general laws come 
 
 into play are innumerable, and often, in their extreme com- 
 plexity, inexplicable, I suppose, even by men of the most 
 extended optical knowledge. What I shall here state are a 
 Vol. 11.— G 
 
82 OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 few only of the broadest laws verifiable by the reader's im- 
 mediate observation, but of which nevertheless, I have found 
 artists frequently ignorant ; owing to their habit of sketch- 
 ing from nature without thinking or reasoning, and espe- 
 cially of finishing at home. It is not often, I believe, that 
 an artist draws the reflections in water as he sees them ; over 
 large spaces, and in weather that is not very calm, it is nearly 
 impossible to do so ; when it is possible, sometimes in haste, 
 and sometimes in idleness, and sometimes under the idea of 
 improving nature, they are slurred or misrepresented ; it is 
 so easy to give something like a suggestive resemblance of 
 calm water, that, even when the landscape is finished from 
 nature, the water is merely indicated as something that may 
 be done at any time, and then, in the home work, come the 
 cold leaden grays with some, and the violent blues and greens 
 with others, and the horizontal lines with the feeble, and the 
 bright touches and sparkles with the dexterous, and every- 
 thing that is shallow and commonplace with all. Now, the 
 fact is, that there is hardly a roadside pond or pool which 
 has not as much landscape in it as above it. It is not the 
 brown, muddy, dull thing we suppose it to be ; it has a heart 
 like ourselves, and in the bottom of that there are the boughs 
 of the tall trees, and the blades of the shaking grass, and all 
 manner of hues, of variable, pleasant light out of the sky ; 
 nay, the ugly gutter, that stagnates over the drain bars, in 
 the heart of the foul city, is not altogether base ; down in 
 that, if you will look deep enough, you may see the dark, 
 serious blue of far-off sky, and the passing of pure clouds. 
 It is at your own will that you see in that despised stream, 
 either the refuse of the street, or the image of the sky — so 
 it is with almost all other things that we unkindly despise. 
 Now, this farseeing is just the difference between the great 
 and the vulgar painter ; the common man knows the road- 
 side pool is muddy, and draws its mud ; the great painter 
 sees beneath and behind the brown surface what will take 
 him a day's work to follow, but he follows it, cost what it 
 will. And if painters would only go out to the nearest com- 
 mon and take the nearest dirty pond among the furze, and 
 
OF WATJSH, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 83 
 
 draw that thoroughly, not considering that it is water that 
 they are drawing, and that water must be done in a certain 
 way ; but drawing determinedly what they see, that is to 
 say, all the trees, and their shaking leaves, and all the hazy 
 passages of disturbing sunshine ; and the bottom seen in the 
 clearer little bits at the edge, and the stones of it, and all 
 the sky, and the clouds far down in the middle, drawn as 
 completely, and more delicately they must be, than the real 
 clouds above, they would come home with such a notion of 
 water-painting as might save me and every one else all 
 trouble of writing more about the matter ; but now they do 
 nothing of the kind, but take the ugly, round, yellow sur- 
 face for granted, or else improve it, and, instead of giving 
 that refined, complex, delicate, but saddened and gloomy re- 
 flection in the polluted water, they clear it up with coarse 
 flashes of yellow, and green, and blue, and spoil their own 
 eyes, and hurt ours ; failing, of course, still more hopelessly 
 in touching the pure, inimitable light of waves thrown loose ; 
 and so Canaletto is still thought to have painted canals, and 
 Yandevelde and Backhuysen to have painted sea, and the 
 uninterpreted streams and maligned sea hiss shame upon us 
 from all their rocky beds and hollow shores. 
 
 I approach this part of my subject with more despondency 
 than any other, and that for several reasons ; first, the water 
 painting of all the elder landscape painters, excepting a few 
 of the better passaores of Claude and Ruysdael, 
 
 § 5. Difficulty of . ui u J n • j 
 
 treating this part IS SO exccrablc, SO bcyond ail expression and ex- 
 of the subject. planatiou bad ; and Claude's and Ruysdael's 
 best so cold and valueless, that I do not know how to ad- 
 dress those who like such painting ; I do not know what 
 their sensations are respecting sea. I can perceive nothing 
 in Vandevelde or Backhuysen of the lowest redeeming 
 merit ; no power, no presence of intellect — or evidence of 
 perception — of any sort or kind ; no resemblance — even the 
 feeblest — of anything natural ; no invention — even the most 
 sluggish — of anything agreeable. Had they given us star- 
 ing green seas with hatchet edges, such as we see Her Maj- 
 esty's ships so-and-so fixed into by the heads or sterns in 
 
84 OF WATER, A8 PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 the first room of the Royal Academy, the admiration of them 
 would have been comprehensible ; there being a natural 
 predilection in the mind of men for green waves with curling 
 tops, but not for clay and wool ; so that though I can under- 
 stand, in some sort, why people admire everything else in 
 old art, why they admire Salvator's rocks, and Claude's fore- 
 grounds, and Hobbima's trees, and Paul Potter's cattle, and 
 Jan Steen's pans ; and while I can perceive in all these lik- 
 ings a root which seems right and legitimate, and to be ap- 
 pealed to ; yet when I find they can even endure the sight 
 of a Backhuysen on their room walls (I speak seriously) it 
 makes me hopeless at once. I may be wrong, or they may 
 be wrong, but at least I can conceive of no principle or 
 opinion common between us, which either can address or 
 understand in the other ; and yet I am wrong in this want 
 of conception, for I know that Turner once liked Vande- 
 velde, and I can trace the evil influence of Vandevelde on 
 most of his early sea painting, but Turner certainly could 
 not have liked Vandevelde without some legitimate cause. 
 Another discouraging point is that I cannot catch a wave, 
 nor Daguerreotype it, and so there is no coming to pure 
 demonstration ; but the forms and hues of water must al- 
 ways be in some measure a matter of dispute and feeling, 
 and the more so because there is no perfect or even tolerably 
 perfect sea painting to refer to : the sea never has been, and 
 I fancy never will be nor can be painted ; it is only sug- 
 gested by means of more or less spiritual and intelligent 
 conventionalism ; and though Turner has done enough to 
 suggest the sea mightily and gloriously, after all it is by 
 conventionalism still, and there remains so much that is un- 
 like nature, that it is always possible for those who do not feel 
 his power to justify their dislike, on very sufficient and rea- 
 sonable grounds ; and to maintain themselves obstinately 
 unreceptant of the good, by insisting on the deficiency 
 which no mortal hand can supply, and which commonly 
 is most manifest on the one hand, where most has been 
 achieved on the other. 
 
 With calm water the case is different. Facts are ascer- 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 85 
 
 tainable and demonstrable there, and by the notice of one 
 or two of the simplest, we may obtain some notion of the 
 little success arid intelligence of the elder painters in this 
 easier field, and so prove their probable failure in contending 
 with greater difficulties. 
 
 First : Water, of course, owing to its transparency, pos- 
 sesses not a perfectly reflective surface, like that of specu- 
 lum metal,, but a surface whose reflective power is dependent 
 on the angle at which the rays to be reflected 
 which regulate fall. The Smaller this angle, the greater are 
 
 the phenomena of , , , « n a. ^ t 
 
 water. First, the the number oi rays renected. JNow, according 
 iS^'rJflective sur- to the number of rays reflected is the force of 
 the image of objects above, and according to 
 the number of rays transmitted is the perceptibility of ob- 
 jects below the water. Hence the visible transparency and 
 reflective power of water are in inverse ratio. In looking 
 down into it from above, we receive transmitted rays which 
 exhibit either the bottom, or the objects floating in the 
 water ; or else if the water be deep and clear, we receive 
 very few rays, and the water looks black. In looking along 
 water we receive reflected rays, and therefore the image of 
 objects above it. Hence, in shallow water on a level shore 
 the bottom is seen at our feet, clearly ; it becomes more and 
 more obscure as it retires, even though the water do not in- 
 crease in depth, and at a distance of twelve or twenty yards 
 — more or less according to our height above the water — be- 
 comes entirely invisible, lost in the lustre of the reflected 
 surface. 
 
 Second : The brighter the objects reflected, the larger the 
 angle at which reflection is visible ; it is always to be re- 
 membered that, strictly speaking, only light objects are re- 
 §7. The inherent flccted, and that the darker ones are seen only 
 ifies^drrk^rXc- proportion to the number of rays of light 
 
 no?lffect^ bright ^^^^ ^^^7 ^^"^ 5 ^^^^ ^ ^^^^ object com- 
 paratively loses its power to affect the surface 
 of water, and the water in the space of a dark reflection is 
 seen partially with the image of the object, and partially 
 transparent. It will be found on observation that under a 
 
86 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 
 
 bank — suppose with dark trees above showing spaces of 
 bright sky, the bright sky is reflected distinctly, and the 
 bottom of the water is in those spaces not seen ; but in the 
 dark spaces of reflection we see the bottom of the water, 
 and the color of that bottom and of the water itself mingles 
 with and modifies that of the color of the trees casting the 
 dark reflection. 
 
 This is one of the most beautiful circumstances connected 
 with water surface, for by these means a variety of color and 
 a grace and evanescence are introduced in the reflection 
 otherwise impossible. Of course at great distances even 
 the darkest objects cast distinct images, and the hue of the 
 water cannot be seen, but in near water the occurrence of 
 its own color modifying the dark reflections, while it leaves 
 light ones unaffected, is of infinite value. 
 
 Take, by way of example, an extract from my own diary 
 at Venice. 
 
 " May 17th, 4 p.m. Looking east the water is calm, and 
 reflects the sky and vessels, with this peculiarity ; the sky, 
 which is pale blue, is in its reflection of the same kind of 
 blue, only a little deeper ; but the vessels^ hulls, which are 
 black, are reflected in pale sea green, i.e., the natural color of 
 the water under sunlight ; while the orange masts of the 
 vessels, wet with a recent shower, are reflected without 
 change of color, only not quite so bright as above. Dne 
 ship has a white, another a red stripe," (I ought to have 
 said horizontal along the gunwales,) ' of these the water 
 takes no notice.^ 
 
 What is curious, a boat passes across with white and 
 dark figures, the water reflects the dark ones in green, and 
 misses out all the white ; this is chiefly owing to the dark 
 images being opposed to the bright reflected sky." 
 
 I have left the passage about the white and red stripe, be- 
 cause it will be useful to us presently ; all that I wish to in- 
 sist upon here is the showing of the local color (pea green) 
 of the water in the spaces which were occupied by dark re- 
 flections, and the unaltered color of the bright ones. 
 
 Third : Clear water takes no shadow, and that for two rea- 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 87 
 
 sons ; A perfect surface of speculum metal takes no shadow, 
 (this the reader may instantly demonstrate for himself,) and 
 §8. Water takes ^ perfectly transparent body as air takes no 
 no shadow. shadow ; hence water, whether transparent or 
 reflective, takes no shadow. 
 
 But shadows, or the forms of them, appear on water fre- 
 quently and sharply : it is necessary carefully to explain the 
 causes of these, as they are one of the most eminent sources 
 of error in water painting. 
 
 First : Water in shade is much more reflective than water 
 in sunlight. Under sunlight the local color of the water is 
 commonly vigorous and active, and forcibly affects, as we 
 have seen, all the dark reflections, commonly diminishing 
 their depth. Under shade, the reflective power is in a high 
 degree increased,* and it will be found most frequently that 
 the forms of shadows are expressed on the surface of water, 
 not by actual shade, but by more genuine reflection of ob- 
 jects above. This is another most important and valuable 
 circumstance, and we owe to it some phenomena of the 
 highest beauty. 
 
 A very muddy river, as the Arno for instance at Florence, 
 is seen during sunshine of its own yellow color, rendering 
 all reflections discolored and feeble. At twilight it recovers 
 its reflective power to the fullest extent, and the mountains 
 of Carrara are seen reflected in it as clearly as if it were a 
 crystalline lake. The Mediterranean, whose determined blue 
 yields to hardly any modifying color in daytime, receives at 
 evening the image of its rocky shores. On our own seas, 
 seeming shadows are seen constantly cast in purple and 
 blue, upon pale green. These are no shadows, but the pure 
 reflection of dark or blue sky above, seen in the shadowed 
 space, refused by the local color of the sea in the sunlighted 
 spaces, and turned more or less purple by the opposition of 
 the vivid green. 
 
 * I state this merely as a fact : I am unable satisfactorily to accouDt 
 for it on optical principles, and were it otherwise, the investigation 
 would be of little interest to the general reader, and little value to the 
 artist. 
 
88 OF WATEE, AS PAINTED BY TEE ANCIENTS. 
 
 We have seen, however, above, that the local color of 
 water, while it comparatively refuses dark reflections, ac- 
 cepts bright ones without deadening them. Hence when a 
 shadow is thrown across a space of w^ater of 
 
 §9. Modification . . ^ i t i 
 
 of dark reflec- strong local color, receiving, alternately, light 
 
 tions by shadow. i i i n • • i ^. • ' 
 
 and dark renections, it has no power oi increas- 
 ing the reflectiveness of the water in the bright spaces, still 
 less of diminishing it ; hence, on all the dark reflections it is 
 seen more or less distinctly, on all the light ones it vanishes 
 altogether. 
 
 Let us take an instance of the exquisite complexity of 
 effect induced by these various circumstances in co-operation. 
 
 Suppose a space of clear water showing the bottom under 
 a group of trees, showing sky through their branches, cast- 
 ing shadows on the surface of the water, which we will sup- 
 pose also to possess some color of its own. Close to us, we 
 shall see the bottom, with the shadows of the trees clearly 
 thrown upon it, and the color of the water seen in its gen- 
 uineness by transmitted light. Farther off, the bottom will 
 be gradually lost sight of, but it will be seen in the dark re- 
 flections much farther than in the light ones. At last it 
 ceases to affect even the former, and the pure surface effect 
 takes place. The blue bright sky is reflected truly, but the 
 dark trees are reflected imperfectly, and the color of the 
 water is seen instead. Where the shadow falls on these dark 
 reflections a darkness is seen plainly, which is found to be 
 composed of the pure clear reflection of the dark trees ; 
 when it crosses the reflection of the sky, the shadow of 
 course, being thus fictitious, vanishes. 
 
 Farther, of course on whatever dust and other foulness 
 may be present in water, real shadow falls clear and dark in 
 proportion to the quantity of solid substance present. On 
 very, muddy rivers, real shadow falls in sunlight nearly as 
 sharply as on land ; on our own sea, the apparent shadow 
 caused by increased reflection, is much increased in depth by 
 the chalkiness and impurity of the water. 
 
 Farther, when surface is rippled, every ripple, up to a cer- 
 tain variable distance on each side of the spectator, and at a 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENT8. 89 
 
 certain angle between him and the sun, varying with the size 
 and shape of the ripples, reflects to him a small image of the 
 sun. Hence those dazzling fields of expanding light so often 
 seen upon the sea. 
 
 Any object that comes between the sun and these ripples, 
 takes from them the power of reflecting the sun, and in con- 
 sequence, all their light ; hence any intervening objects cast 
 apparent shadows upon such spaces of intense force, and of 
 the exact shape, and in the exact place of real shadows, and 
 yet which are no more real shadows than the withdrawal of an 
 image of a piece of white paper from a mirror is a shadow on 
 the mirror. Farther, in all shallow water, more or less in pro- 
 portion to its shallowness, but in some measure, I suppose, 
 up to depths of forty or fifty fathoms, and perhaps more, the 
 local color of the water depends in great measure on light 
 reflected from the bottom. This, however, is especially « 
 manifest in clear rivers like the Rhone, where the absence of 
 the light reflected from below forms an apparent shadow, 
 often visibly detached some distance from the floating object 
 which casts it. 
 
 § 10 Examples following extract from my own diary at 
 
 on the water of Geneva, with the subsequent one, which is a con- 
 
 the Rhone. . • /. i i • . -rr • 
 
 tinuation of that already given in part at v enice, 
 will illustrate both this and the other points we have been 
 stating. 
 
 Geneva, 21^^ Aprils Morning, 
 
 The sunlight falls from the cypresses of Rousseau's isl- 
 and straight towards the bridge. The shadows of the bridge 
 and of the trees fall on the water in leaden purple, opposed 
 to its general hue of aquamarine green. This green color is 
 caused by the light being reflected from the bottom, though 
 the bottom is not seen ; as is evident by its becoming paler 
 towards the middle of the river, where the water shoals, on 
 which pale part the purple shadow of the small bridge falls 
 most forcibly, which shadow, however, is still only apparent, 
 being the absence of this reflected light, associated with the 
 increased reflective power of the water, which in those spaces 
 
90 OF WATEB, A8 PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 reflects blue sky above. A boat swings in the shoal water; 
 its reflection is cast in a transparent pea-green, which is con- 
 siderably darker than the pale aquamarine of the surface at 
 the spot. Its shadow is detached from it just about half the 
 depth of the reflection ; which, therefore, forms a bright 
 green light between the keel of the boat and its shadow ; 
 where the shadow cuts the reflection, the reflection is darkest 
 and something like the true color of the boat ; where the 
 shadow falls out of the reflection, it is of a leaden purple, pale. 
 The boat is at an anoxic of about 20^ below. Another boat 
 nearer, in deeper water, shows no shadow, whatsoever, and 
 the reflection is marked by its transparent green, while the 
 surrounding water takes a lightish blue reflection from the 
 sky." 
 
 The above notes, after what has been said, require no com- 
 # ment ; but one more case must be stated belonging to rough 
 water. Every large wave of the sea is in ordinary circum- 
 stances divided into, or rather covered by, innumerable smaller 
 waves, each of which, in all probability, from some of its 
 edges or surfaces reflects the sunbeams ; and hence result a 
 glitter, polish, and vigorous light over the whole flank of the 
 wave, which are, of course, instantly withdrawn within the 
 space of a cast shadow, whose form, therefore, though it 
 does not affect the great body or ground of the water in the 
 least, is sufficiently traceable by the withdrawal of the high 
 lights ; also every string and wreath of foam above or within 
 the wave takes real shadow, and thus adds to the impres- 
 sion. 
 
 I have not stated one-half of the circumstances which pro- 
 duce or influence effects of shadow on water ; but lest I 
 should confuse or weary the reader, I leave him to pursue 
 the subject for himself ; enough having been stated to estab- 
 lish this general principle, that whenever shadow is seen on 
 clear water, and, in a measure, even on foul water, it is not, 
 as on land, a dark shade subduing where it falls the sunny 
 general hue to a lower tone ; but it is a space of an entirely 
 different color, subject itself, by its susceptibility of reflection, 
 to infinite varieties of depth and hue, and liable, under certain 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 91 
 
 circumstances, to disappear altogether ; and that, therefore, 
 whenever we have to paint such shadows, it is not only the 
 hue of the water itself that we have to consider, but all the 
 circumstances by which in the position attributed to them 
 such shaded spaces could be affected. 
 
 Fourth : If water be rippled, the side of every ripple next 
 to us reflects a piece of the sky, and the side of every ripple 
 farthest from us reflects a piece of the opposite sKore, or of 
 whatever obiects may be beyond the ripple. 
 
 § 11. Effect of ^ , • 1 /. 1 r. 1 • 1 r. 
 
 ripple on distant Jiut as we soon losc Sight oi the larther sides oi 
 the ripples on the retiring surface, the whole 
 rippled space will then be reflective of the sky only. Thus, 
 where calm distant water receives reflections of high shores, 
 every extent of rippled surface appears as a bright line in- 
 terrupting that reflection with the color of the sky. 
 
 Fifth : When a ripple or swell is seen at such an angle as 
 to afford a view of its farther side, it carries the reflection of 
 objects farther down than calm water would. Therefore all 
 motion in water elone^ates reflections, and throws 
 
 § 12. Elongation . ° • i i . rm 
 
 of reflections by them into coufuscd Vertical lines. The real 
 
 moving water. /. i • i • • t • i 
 
 amount oi this elongation is not distinctly vis- 
 ible, except in the case of very bright objects, and especially 
 of lights, as of the sun, moon, or lamps by a river shore, 
 whose reflections are hardly ever seen as circles or points, 
 which of course they are on perfectly calm water, but as long 
 streams of tremulous light. 
 
 But it is strange that while we are constantly in the habit 
 of seeing the reflection of the sun, which ought to be a mere 
 circle, elongated into a stream of light extending from the 
 horizon to the shore, the elongation of the reflection of a sail 
 or other object to one-half of this extent is received, if rep- 
 resented in a picture, with incredulity by the greater number 
 of spectators. In one of Turner's Venices the image of the 
 white lateen-sails of the principal boat is about twice as long 
 as the sails themselves. I have heard the truth of this simple 
 effect disputed over and over again by intelligent persons, 
 and yet on any water so exposed as the lagoons of Venice, 
 the periods are few and short when there is so little motion 
 
92 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 as that the reflection of sails a mile off shall not affect the 
 swell within six feet of the spectator. 
 
 There is, however, a strange arbitrariness about this elonga- 
 tion of reflection, which prevents it from being truly felt. If 
 we see on an extent of lightly swelling water surface the 
 image of a bank of white clouds, with masses of higher ac- 
 cumulation at intervals, the water will not usually reflect the 
 whole bank in an elongated form, but it will commonly take 
 the eminent parts, and reflect them in long straight columns 
 of defined breadth, and miss the intermediate lower parts 
 altogether ; and even in doing this it will be capricious, for 
 it will take one eminence, and miss another, with no appar- 
 ent reason ; and often when the sky is covered with white 
 clouds, some of those clouds will cast long tower-like reflec- 
 tions, and others none, so arbitrarily that the spectator is 
 often puzzled to find out which are the accepted and which 
 the refused. 
 
 In many cases of this kind it will be found rather that the 
 eye is, from want of use and care, insensible to the reflection 
 than that the reflection is not there ; and a little thought 
 and careful observation will show us that what we commonly 
 suppose to be a surface of uniform color is, indeed, affected 
 more or less by an infinite variety of hues, prolonged, like 
 the sun image, from a great distance, and that our appre- 
 hension of its lustre, purity, and even of its surface, is in no 
 small degree dependent on our feeling of these multitudi- 
 nous hues, which the continual motion of that surface pre- 
 vents us from analyzing or understanding for what they are. 
 
 Sixth : Rippled water, of which we can see the farther 
 side of the weaves, will reflect a perpendicular line clearly, a 
 bit of its length being given on the side of each wave, and 
 § 18. Effect of easily joined by the eye. But if the line slope, 
 hodionuf^^ami reflection will be excessively confused and 
 inclined images, disjointed; and if horizontal, nearly invisible. It 
 was this circumstance which prevented the red and white stripe 
 of the ships at Venice, noticed above, from being visible. 
 
 Seventh : Every reflection is the image in reverse of just 
 so much of the objects beside the water, as we could see if 
 
OB' WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 93 
 
 we were placed as much under the level of the water as we 
 are actually above it. If an object be so far back from the 
 § 14. To what bank, that if we were five feet under the water 
 S'^wsibif 1^0^ level we could not see it over the bank, then, 
 above. standing five feet above the water, we shall not 
 
 be able to see its image under the reflected bank. Hence 
 the reflection of all objects that have any slope back from 
 the water is shortened, and at last disappears as we rise 
 above it. Lakes seen from a great height appear like plates 
 of metal set in the landscape, reflecting the sky but none of 
 their shores. 
 
 Eighth : Any given point of the object above the water 
 is reflected, if reflected at all, at some spot in a vertical line 
 beneath it, so long as the plane of the water is horizontal, 
 o ^ « On rippled water a slisrht deflection sometimes 
 
 § 15 Deflection , ° 
 
 o f images o n takes place, and the image of a vertical tower 
 
 agitated water. ^^^ ^ ^^ ^ o i • i 
 
 Will slope a little away irom the wind, owing to 
 the casting of the image on the sloping sides of the ripples. 
 On the sloping sides of large waves the deflection is in pro- 
 portion to the slope. For rough practice, after the slope of 
 the wave is determined, let the artist turn his paper until it 
 becomes horizontal, and then paint the reflections of any ob- 
 ject upon it as on level water, and he will be right. 
 
 Such are the most common and general optical laws which 
 are to be taken into consideration in the painting of water. 
 Yet, in the application of them, as tests of good or bad 
 
 water paintino;", we must be cautious in the ex- 
 ile. Necessity ^ 
 
 of watchfulness trcme. An artist may know all these laws, and 
 
 as well as of sci- i • i i 
 
 ence. comply With them, and yet paint water execra- 
 
 Licenses, how , , , , , . . /» /. 
 
 taken by gieat bly ; and he may be ignorant ot every one of 
 them, and, in their turn, and in certain places, 
 violate every one of them, and yet paint water gloriously. 
 Thousands of exquisite effects take place in nature, utterly 
 inexplicable, and which can be believed only while they are 
 seen ; the combinations and applications of the above laws 
 are so varied and complicated that no knowledge or labor 
 could, if applied analytically, keep pace with them. Con- 
 stant and eager watchfulness, and portfolios filled with actual 
 
94 OF WATER, A8 PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 statements of water-effect, drawn on the spot and on the in^ 
 stant, are worth more to the painter than the most extended 
 optical knowledge ; without these all his knowledge will end 
 in a pedantic falsehood. With these it does not matter how 
 gross or how daring here and there may be his violations of 
 this or that law ; his very transgressions will be admirable. 
 
 It may be said, that this is a dangerous principle to ad- 
 vance in these days of idleness. I cannot help it ; it is true, 
 and must be affirmed. Of all contemptible criticism, the 
 most to be contemned is that which punishes great works of 
 art when they fight without armor, and refuses to feel or ac- 
 knowledge the great spiritual refracted sun of their truth, 
 because it has risen at a false angle, and burst upon them 
 before its appointed time. And yet, on the other hand, let 
 it be observed that it is not feeling, nor fancy, nor imagina- 
 tion, so called, that I have put before science, but watchful- 
 ness, experience, affection and trust in nature ; and farther 
 let it be observed, that there is a difference between the li- 
 cense taken by one man and another, which makes one license 
 admirable, and the other punishable ; and that this difference 
 is of a kind sufficiently discernible by every earnest person, 
 though it is not so explicable as that we can beforehand say 
 where and when, or even to whom, the license is to be for- 
 given. In the Paradise of Tintoret, in the Academy of 
 Venice, the Angel is seen in the distance driving Adam and 
 Eve out of the garden. Not, for Tintoret, the leading to the 
 gate with consolation or counsel ; his strange ardor of con- 
 ception is seen here as everywhere. Full speed they fly, the 
 angel and the human creatures ; the angel wrapt in an orb of 
 light floats on, stooped forward in his fierce flight, and does 
 not touch the ground ; the chastised creatures rush before 
 him in abandoned terror. All this might have been invented 
 by another, though in other hands it would assuredly have 
 been offensive ; but one circumstance which completes the 
 story could have been thought of or dared by none but Tinto- 
 ret. The Angel cast a shadow before him towards Adam 
 and Eve. 
 
 Now that a globe of light should cast a shadow is a license^ 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 95 
 
 as far as mere optical matters are concerned, of the most au- 
 dacious kind. But how beautiful is the circumstance in its 
 application here, showing that the angel, who is light to all 
 else around him, is darkness to those whom he is commis- 
 sioned to banish forever. 
 
 I have before noticed the license of Rubens in making his 
 horizon an oblique line. His object is. to carry the eye to a 
 given point in the distance. The road winds to it, the clouds 
 fl}" at it, the trees nod to it, a flock of sheep scamper towards 
 it, a carter points his whip at it, his horses pull for it, the 
 figures push for it, and the horizon slopes to it. If the hori- 
 zon had been horizontal, it would have embarrassed every- 
 thing and everybody. 
 
 In Turner's Pas de Calais there is a buoy poised on the 
 ridge of a near wave. It casts its reflection vertically down 
 the flank of the wave, which slopes steeply. I cannot tell 
 whether this is a license or a mistake ; I suspect the latter, 
 for the same thing occurs not unfrequently in Turner's seas ; 
 but I am almost certain that it would have been done wil- 
 fully in this case, even had the mistake been pointed out, for 
 the vertical line is necessary to the picture, and the eye is so 
 little accustomed to catch the real bearing of the reflections 
 on the slopes of waves that it does not feel the fault. 
 
 In one of the smaller rooms of the Uflizii at Florence, off 
 the Tribune, there are two so-called Claudes ; one a pretty 
 wooded landscape, I think a copy, the other a marine with 
 „ ^„ , . . architecture, very sweet and e^enuine. The sun 
 
 § 17. Various li- . . ' *^ . ^ . 
 
 censes or errors IS Setting at the sidc of the picture, it casts a 
 
 in water painting , r» t i ^ mi • 
 
 of Claude, Cuyp, long Stream ot light upon the water, ihis 
 stream of light is oblique, and comes from the 
 horizon, where it is under the sun, to a point near the centre 
 of the picture. If this had been done as a license, it would 
 be an instance of most absurd and unjustifiable license, as the 
 fault is detected by the eye in a moment, and there is no 
 occasion nor excuse for it. But I imagine it to be an instance 
 rather of the harm of imperfect science. Taking his im- 
 pression instinctively from nature, Claude usually did what 
 is right and put his reflection vertically under the sun ; prob- 
 
96 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 
 
 ably, however, he had read in some treatise on optics that 
 every point in this reflection was in a vertical plane between 
 the sun and spectator ; or he might have noticed walking on 
 the shore that the reflection came straight from the sun to 
 his feet, and intending to indicate the position of the spec- 
 tator, drew in his next picture the reflection sloping to the 
 supposed point, the error being excusable enough, and plau- 
 sible enough to have been lately revived and systematized.* 
 
 In the picture of Cuyp, No. 83 in the Dulwich Gallery, the 
 post at the end of the bank casts three or four radiating re- 
 flections. This is visibly neither license nor half science, but 
 pure ignorance. Again, in the picture attributed to Paul 
 Potter, No. 176, Dulwich Gallery, I believe most people must 
 feel, the moment they look at it, that there is something 
 wrong with the water, that it looks odd, and hard, and like 
 ice or lead ; and though they may not be able to tell the rea- 
 son of the impression — for when they go near they will find 
 it smooth and lustrous, and prettily painted — yet they will 
 not be able to shake off the unpleasant sense of its being like 
 a plate of bad mirror set in a model landscape among moss, 
 rather than like a pond. The reason is, that while this water 
 receives clear reflections from the fence and hedge on the left, 
 and is everywhere smooth and evidently capable of giving 
 true images, it yet reflects none of the cows. 
 
 In the Vandevelde (113) there is not a line of ripple or 
 swell in any part of the sea ; it is absolutely windless, and the 
 
 * Parsey's Convergence of Perpendiculars." I have not space here 
 to enter into any leng^thy exposure of this mistake, but reasoning is fort- 
 unately unnecessary, the appeal to experin^ent being easy. Every pict- 
 ure is the representation, as before stated, of a vertical plate of glass, 
 with what might be seen through it, drawn on its surface. Let a verti- 
 cal plate of glass be taken, and wherever it be placed, whether the sun 
 be at its side or at its centre, the reflection will always be found in a 
 vertical line under the sun, parallel with the side of the glass. The pane 
 of any window looking to sea is all the apparatus necessary for this ex- 
 periment, and yet it is not long since this very principle was disputed 
 with me by a man of much taste and information, who supposed Turner 
 to be wrong in drawing the reflection straight down at the side of hia 
 picture, as in his Lancaster Sands, and innumerable other instances. 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 97 
 
 near boat casts its image with great fidelity, which being un- 
 prolonged downwards informs us that the cahn is perfect, 
 (Rule y.,) and being unshortened informs us that we are on 
 a level with the water, or nearly so. (Rule VII.) Yet un- 
 derneath the vessel on the right, the gray shade which stands 
 for reflection breaks off immediately, descending like smoke 
 a little way below the hull, then leaving the masts and sails 
 entirely unrecorded. This I imagine to be not ignorance, 
 but unjustifiable license. Vandevelde evidently desired to 
 give an impression of great extent of surface, and thought 
 that if he gave the reflection more faithfully, as the tops of 
 the masts would come down to the nearest part of the sur- 
 face, they would destroy the evidence of distance, and appear 
 to set the ship above the boat instead of beyond it. I doubt 
 not in such awkward hands that such would indeed have been 
 the case, but he is not on that account to be excused for 
 painting his surface with gray horizontal lines, as is done by 
 nautically-disposed children ; for no destruction of distance in 
 the ocean is so serious a loss as that of its liquidity. It is 
 better to feel a want of extent in the sea, than an extent 
 which we might walk upon or play at billiards upon. 
 
 Among all the pictures of Canaletto, which I have ever 
 seen, and they are not a few, I remember but one or two 
 where there is any variation from one method of treatment of 
 § 18 And Cana- Water. He almost always covers the whole 
 1^^*^- space of it with one monotonous ripple, composed 
 
 of a coat of well-chosen, but perfectly opaque and smooth sea- 
 green, covered with a certain number, I cannot state the ex- 
 act average, but it varies from three hundred and fifty to 
 four hundred and upwards, according to the extent of canvas 
 to be covered, of white concave touches, which are very prop- 
 erly symbolical of ripple. 
 
 And, as the canal retires back from the eye, he very geo- 
 metrically diminishes the size of his ripples, until he arrives 
 at an even field of apparently smooth water. By our sixth 
 rule, this rippling water as it retires should show more and 
 more of the reflection of the sky above it, and less and less 
 of that of objects beyond it, until, at two or three hundred 
 Vol. II.— 7 
 
98 OF WATER, A8 PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 yards down the canal, the whole field of water should be one 
 even gray or blue, the color of the sky receiving no reflections 
 whatever of other objects. What does Canaletto do ? Ex- 
 actly in proportion as he retires, he displays more and more 
 of the reflection of objects, and less and less of the sky, until, 
 three hundred yards away, all the houses are reflected as clear 
 and sharp as in a quiet lake. 
 
 This, again, is wilful and inexcusable violation of truth, of 
 which the reason, as in the last case, is the painter's conscious- 
 ness of weakness. It is one of the most difficult things in the 
 world to express the light reflection of the blue sky on a dis- 
 tant ripple, and to make the eye understand the cause of the 
 color, and the motion of the apparently smooth water, es- 
 pecially where there are buildings above to be reflected, for 
 the eye never understands the want of the reflection. But it 
 is the easiest and most agreeable thing in the world to give 
 the inverted image : it occupies a vast space of otherwise 
 troublesome distance in the simplest way possible, and is un- 
 derstood by the eye at once. Hence Canaletto is glad, as any 
 other inferior workman would be, not to say obliged, to give 
 the reflections in the distance. But when he comes up close 
 to the spectator, he finds the smooth surface just as trouble- 
 some near, as the ripple would have been far off. It is a very 
 nervous thing for an ignorant artist to have a great space of 
 vacant smooth water to deal with, close to him, too far down 
 to take reflections from buildings, and yet which must be 
 made to look flat and retiring and transparent. Canaletto, 
 with his sea-green, did not at all feel himself equal to any- 
 thino: of this kind, and had therefore no resource but in the 
 white touches above described, which occupy the alarming 
 space without any troublesome necessity for knowledge or 
 invention, and supply by their gradual diminution some means 
 of expressing retirement of surface. It is easily understood, 
 therefore, why he should adopt this system, which is just what 
 any awkward workman would naturally cling to, trusting to 
 the inaccuracy of observation of the public to secure him 
 from detection. 
 
 Now in all these cases it is not the mistake or the license 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 99 
 
 itself, it is not the infringement of this or that law which con- 
 demns the picture, but it is the spirit and habit of mind in 
 c in TTru which the license is taken, the cowardice or blunt- 
 
 § 19. Why unpar- _ ^ ' 
 
 douabie. ncss of feeling, which infects every part alike, 
 
 and deprives the whole picture of vitality. Canaletto, had 
 he been a great painter, might have cast his reflections wher- 
 ever he chose, and rippled the water wherever he chose, and 
 painted his sea sloping if he chose, and neither I nor any one 
 else should have dared to say a word against him ; but he is 
 a little and a bad painter, and so continues everywhere multi- 
 plying and magnifying mistakes, and adding apathy to error, 
 until nothing can any more be pardoned in him. If it be 
 but remembered that every one of the surfaces of those mul- 
 titudinous ripples is in nature a mirror which catches, accord- 
 ing to its position, either the image of the sky or of the sil- 
 ver beaks of the gondolas, or of their black bodies and scarlet 
 draperies, or of the white marble, or the green sea-weed on 
 the low stones, it cannot but be felt that those waves would 
 have something more of color upon them than that opaque 
 dead green. Green they are by their own nature, but it is a 
 transparent and emerald hue, mixing itself with the thousand 
 reflected tints without overpowering the weakest of them ; 
 and thus, in every one of those individual weaves, the truths 
 of color are contradicted by Canaletto by the thousand. 
 
 Venice is sad and silent now, to what she w^as in his time ; 
 the canals are choked gradually one by one, and the foul 
 water laps more and more sluggishly against the rent 
 foundations ; but even yet, could I but place the reader at 
 the early morning on the quay below the Rialto, when the 
 market boats, full laden, float into groups of golden color, 
 and let him watch the dashing of the water about their glit- 
 tering steely heads, and under the shadows of the vine 
 leaves, and show him the purple of the grapes and the figs, 
 and the glowing of the scarlet gourds carried away in long 
 streams upon the waves, and among them, the crimson fish 
 baskets, plashing and sparkling, and flaming as the morn- 
 ing sun falls on their wet tawny sides, and above, the 
 painted sails of the fishing boats, orange and white, scarlet 
 
100 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 and blue, and better than all such florid color, the naked, 
 bronzed, burning limbs of the seamen, the last of the old 
 Venetian race, who yet keep the right Giorgione color 
 on their brows and bosoms, in strange contrast with the 
 sallow sensual degradation of the creatures that live in the 
 cafes of the Piazza, he would not be merciful to Canaletto 
 any more. 
 
 Yet even Canaletto, in relation to the truths he had 
 to paint, is spiritual, faithful, powerful, compared to the 
 Dutch painters of sea. It is easily understood why his green 
 §20. The Dutch P^int and concave touches should be thought 
 painters of sea. expressive of the water on which the real colors 
 are not to be discerned but by attention, which is never 
 given ; but it is not so easily understood, considering how 
 many there are who love the sea, and look at it, that Vande- 
 velde and such others should be tolerated. As I before said, 
 I feel utterly hopeless in addressing the admirers of these 
 men, because I do not know what it is in their works which 
 is supposed to be like nature. Foam appears to me to 
 curdle and cream on the wave sides and to fly, flashing from 
 their crests, and not to be set astride upon them like a 
 peruke ; and waves appear to me to fall, and plunge, and 
 toss, and nod, and crash over, and not to curl up like shav- 
 ings ; and water appears to me, when it is gray, to have the 
 gray of stormy air mixed with its own deep, heavy, thunder- 
 ous, threatening blue, and not the gray of the first coat of 
 cheap paint on a deal floor ; and many other such things 
 appear to me which, as far as I can conjecture by what is 
 admired of marine painting, appear to no one else ; yet I 
 shall have something more to say about these men presently, 
 with respect to the effect they have had upon Turner ; and 
 something more, I hope, hereafter, with the help of illustra- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a sea-piece of Ruysdael's in the Louvre * which, 
 
 * In the last edition of this work was the following passage: — **I 
 wish Ruysdael had painted one or two rough seas. I believe if he had 
 he might have saved the unhappy public from much grievous victim- 
 izing, both in mind and pocket, for he would have shown that Vande- 
 
OF WATER, AS PAmTEB BY THE ANCIENTS. 101 
 
 though nothing very remarkable in any quality of art, is at 
 least forceful, agreeable, and, as far as it goes, natural ; 
 
 the waves have much freedom of action, and 
 
 § 21. Ruysdael, -lUl 
 
 Claude, and Sal- power oi color ; the Wind blows hard over the 
 shore, and the whole picture may be studied 
 with profit as a proof that the deficiency of color and every- 
 thing else in Backhuysen's works, is no fault of the Dutch 
 sea. There is sublimity and power in every field of nature 
 from the pole to the line ; and though the painters of one 
 country are often better and greater, universally, than those 
 of another, this is less because the subjects of art are want- 
 ing anywhere, than because one country or one age breeds 
 mighty and thinking men, and another none. 
 
 RuysdaePs painting of falling water and brook scenery is 
 also generally agreeable — more than agreeable it can hardly 
 be considered. There appears no exertion of mind in any of 
 his works ; nor are they calculated to produce either harm 
 or good by their feeble influence. They are good furniture 
 pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame. 
 
 The seas of Claude are the finest pieces of water-painting 
 in ancient art. I do not say that I like them, because they 
 appear to me selections of the particular moment when the 
 sea is most insipid and characterless ; but I think that they 
 are exceedingly true to the forms and time selected, or at 
 least that the fine instances of them are so, of which there 
 are exceedingly few. 
 
 On the right hand of one of the marines of Salvator, in 
 the Pitti palace, there is a passage of sea reflecting the sun- 
 rise, which is thoroughly good, and very like Turner ; the 
 rest of the picture, as the one opposite to it, utterly virtue- 
 
 velde and Backhnysen were not quite sea-deities." The writer has to 
 thauk the editor of Murray's Handbook of Painting in Italy for pointing 
 out the oversight. He had passed many days in the Louvre before the 
 above passage was written, but had not been in the habit of pausing 
 long anywhere except in the Inst two rooms, containing the pictures of 
 the Italian school. The conjecture, however, shows that he had not ill- 
 estiraated the power of Ruysdael; nor does he consider it as in any- 
 wise unfitting him for the task he has undertaken, that for every hour 
 passed in galleries he has passed days on the sea-shore. 
 
102 OF WATER, AS PAIFTEB BY THE ANCIENTS. 
 
 less. I have not seen any other instance of Salvator's paint- 
 ing water with any care, it is usually as conventional as the 
 rest of his work, yet conventionalisai is perhaps more toler- 
 able in water-painting than elsewhere ; and if his trees and 
 rocks had been good, the rivers might have been generally 
 accepted without objection. 
 
 The merits of Poussin as a sea or water painter may, I 
 § 22. Nicholas think, be sufficiently determined by the Deluge 
 Poussin. ^jjg Louvre, where the breaking up of the 
 
 fountains of the deep is typified by the capsizing of a wherry 
 over a weir. 
 
 In the outer porch of St. Mark's at Venice, among the 
 mosaics on the roof, there is a representation of the deluge. 
 The ground is dark blue ; the rain is represented in bright 
 wliite undulating parallel stripes ; between these stripes is 
 seen the massy outline of the ark, a bit between each stripe, 
 very dark and hardly distinguishable from the sky ; but it 
 has a square window with a bright golden border, which 
 glitters out conspicuously, and leads the eye to the rest — 
 the sea below is almost concealed with dead bodies. 
 
 On the font of the church of San Frediano at Lucca, there 
 is a representation of — possibly — the Israelites and Egyp- 
 tians in the Red Sea. The sea is typified by undulating bands 
 of stone, each band composed of three plies (almost the same 
 type is to be seen in the glass-painting of the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries, as especially at Chartres). These bands 
 would perhaps be hardly felt as very aqueous, but for the 
 fish which are interwoven with them in a complicated man- 
 ner, their heads appearing at one side of every band, and 
 their tails at the other. 
 
 Both of these representatives of deluge, archaic and rude 
 as they are, I consider better, more suggestive, more inven- 
 tive, and more natural, than Poussin's. Indeed, this is not 
 saying anything very depreciatory, as regards the St. Mark's 
 one, for the glittering of the golden window through the 
 rain is wonderfully well conceived, and almost deceptive, 
 looking as if it had just caught a gleam of sunlight on its 
 panes, and there is something very sublime in the gleam of 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE ANCIENTS, 103 
 
 this light above the floating corpses. But the other in- 
 stance is sufficiently grotesque and imperfect, and yet, I 
 speak with perfect seriousness, it is, I think, very far prefer- 
 able to Poussin's. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a just medium between the 
 meanness and apathy of such a conception as his, and the 
 extravagance, still more contemptible, with which the sub- 
 ject has been treated in modern days.* I am not aware that 
 I can refer to any instructive example of this intermediate 
 course, for I fear the reader is by this time wearied of hear- 
 ing of Turner, and the plate of Turner's picture of the deluge 
 is so rare that it is of no use to refer to it. 
 
 It seems exceedingly strange that the great Venetian 
 painters should have left us no instance, as far as I know, 
 of any marine effects carefully studied. As already noted, 
 whatever passas^es of sea occur in their back- 
 
 §23. Venetians ^ 1 U ^ ^4- 4? kl 
 
 and Florentines, grounds are merely broad extents ot blue or 
 
 Conclusion. « n ' ^ i • i i 
 
 green surtace, line m color, and coming dark 
 usually against the horizon, well enough to be understood 
 as sea, (yet even that not always without the help of a ship,) 
 but utterly unregarded in all questions of completion and 
 detail. The water even in Titian's landscape is almost al- 
 ways violently though grandly conventional, and seldom 
 forms an important feature. Among the religious schools 
 very sweet motives occur, but nothing which for a moment 
 can be considered as real water-painting. Perugino's sea is 
 usually very beautifully felt ; his river in the fresco of S*^ 
 Maddalena at Florence is freely indicated, and looks level 
 and clear ; the reflections of the trees given with a rapid zig- 
 zag stroke of the brush. On the whole, I suppose that the 
 best imitations of level water surface to be found in ancient 
 art are in the clear Flemish landscapes. Cuyp's are usually 
 very satisfactory, but even the best of these attain nothing 
 more than the agreeable suggestion of calm pond or river. 
 
 * I am here, of course, speaking of the treatment of the subject as a 
 landscape only ; many mighty examples of its conception occar where 
 the sea, and all other adjuncts, are entirely subservient to the figures, 
 as with Kaffaelle and M. Angelo. 
 
104 OF WATER, A8 PAINTED BY THE MODERNS. 
 
 Of any tolerable representation of water in agitation, or un- 
 der any circumstances that bring out its power and char- 
 acter, I know no instance ; and the more capable of noble 
 treatment the subject happens to be, the more manifest in- 
 variably is the painter's want of feeling in every effort, and 
 of knowledge in every line. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE MODERNS. 
 
 There are few men among modern landscape painters, 
 who cannot paint quiet water at least suggestively, if not 
 faithfully. Those who are incapable of doing this, would 
 §1 General Scarcely be considered artists at all; and any- 
 Zr™. tapaS?- thing like the ripples of Canaletto, or the black 
 ing quiet water, ghadows of Vandevelde, would be looked upon 
 
 Thelakesof ^ ^ ' ^ 
 
 Fielding. as most Unpromising, even in the work of a 
 
 novice. Among those who most fully appreciate and render 
 the qualities of space and surface in calm water, perhaps 
 Copley Fielding stands first. His expanses of windless lake 
 are among the most perfect passages of his works ; for he 
 can give surface as well as depth, and make his lake look not 
 only clear, but, which is far more difficult, lustrous. He is 
 less dependent than most of our artists upon reflections ; and 
 can give substance, transparency, and extent, where another 
 painter would be reduced to paper ; and he is exquisitely re- 
 fined in his expression of distant breadth, by the delicate 
 line of ripple interrupting the reflection, and by aerial quali- 
 ties of color. Nothing, indeed, can be purer or more refined 
 than liis general feeling of lake sentiment, were it not for a 
 want of simplicity — a fondness for pretty, rather than im- 
 pressive color, and a consequent want of some of the higher 
 expression of repose. 
 
 Hundreds of men might be named, whose works are highly 
 §2. The calm instructive in the management of calm water. 
 Wintf ^ j.^^ioi^ Wint is singularly powerful and certain, ex- 
 land, etc. quisitely bright and vigorous in color. The late 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE MODERNS, 105 
 
 John Varley produced some noble passages. I have seen, 
 some seven years ago, works by J. Holland, w^hich were, 1 
 think, as near perfection as water-color can be carried — for 
 bona Jide truth, refined and finished to the highest degree. 
 But the power of modern artists is not brought out until they 
 have greater difficulties to struggle with. Stand for half an 
 hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on the 
 
 § 3. The character i • i i i • i i i i 
 
 of bright and vio- north Side where the rapids are long, and watch 
 lent faihng water. -^^^ ^j^^ vault of Water first bends, unbroken, in 
 pure, polished velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow 
 of the cataract, covering them with a dome of crystal twenty 
 feet thick — so swift that its motion is unseen except when a 
 foam globe from above darts over it like a falling star ; and 
 how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves, at the 
 instant that it breaks into foam ; and how all the hollows of 
 that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrys- 
 oprase ; and how, ever and anon, startling you with its 
 w^iite flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall like a 
 rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, filling 
 the air wdth lio-ht : and how, throuo^h the curdling^ wreaths 
 of the restless, crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, 
 paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky 
 through white rain-cloud ; while the shuddering iris stoops 
 in tremulous stillness overall, fading and flushing alternately 
 through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding 
 itself at last among the thick golden leaves which toss to 
 and fro in sympathy with the wild water ; their dripping 
 masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by 
 some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon 
 the mossy rocks as its roar dies away ; the dew gushing from 
 their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald 
 herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks 
 of the shore, feeding the lichens which chase and checker 
 them with purple and silver. I believe, when you have stood 
 by this for half an hour, you will have discovered that there 
 §4. As given Something more in nature than has been 
 by Nesfieid. given by Ruysdael. Probably you will not be 
 much disposed to think of any mortal work at the time ; but 
 
106 OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY THE MODEBNS. 
 
 when you look back to what you have seen, and are inclined 
 to compare it with art, you will remember — or ought to re- 
 member — Nesfield. He is a man of extraordinary feeling, 
 both for the color and the spirituality of a great waterfall ; 
 exquisitely delicate in his management of the changeful veil 
 of spray or mist ; just in his curves and contours ; and 
 unequalled in color except by Turner. None of our water- 
 color painters can approach him in the management of the 
 variable hues of clear water over weeded rocks ; but his feel- 
 ing for it often leads him a little too far, and, like Copley 
 Fielding, he loses sight of simplicity and dignity for the sake 
 of delicacy or prettiness. His waterfalls are, however, un- 
 equalled in their way ; and, if he would remember, that in 
 all such scenes there is much gloom as well as much splendor, 
 and relieve the lustre of his attractive passages of color with 
 more definite and prevalent grays, and give a little more sub- 
 stance to parts of his picture unaffected by spray, his work 
 would be nearly perfect. His seas are also most instructive ; 
 a little confused in chiaroscuro, but refined in form and ad- 
 mirable in color. 
 
 J. D. Harding is, I think, nearly unequalled in the drava^ 
 ing of running water. I do not know what Stanfield would 
 do ; I have never seen an important piece of torrent drawn 
 mu ^ • V.1 by him ; but I believe even he could scarce- 
 
 §5. The admirable *^ . 
 
 water-drawing of ly contend with the magnificent abandon of 
 
 J. D. Harding. ^ . 
 
 Harding's brush. There is perhaps nothing 
 which tells more in the drawing of water than decisive and 
 swift execution ; for, in a rapid touch the hand naturally 
 falls into the very curve of projection which is the absolute 
 truth ; while in slow finish, all precision of curve and char- 
 acter is certain to be lost, except under the hand of an un- 
 usually powerful master. But Harding has both knowledge 
 and velocity, and the fall of his torrents is beyond praise ; 
 impatient, chafing, substantial, shattering, crystalline, and 
 capricious ; full of various form, yet all apparently instan- 
 taneous and accidental, nothing conventional, nothing de- 
 pendent upon parallel lines or radiating curves ; all broken 
 up and dashed to pieces over the irregular rock, and yet all 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY THE MODERNS. 107 
 
 in unity of motion. The color also of his falling and bright 
 water is very perfect ; but in the dark and level parts of his 
 torrents he has taken up a bad gray, which has 
 !nd S^tfng^^of hurt some of his best pictures. His gray in 
 shadows under rocks or dark reflections is adv 
 mirable ; but it is when the stream is in full light, and un- 
 affected by reflections in distance, that he gets wrong. We 
 believe that the fault is in a want of expression of darkness 
 in the color, making it appear like a positive hue of the 
 water, for which it is much too dead and cold. 
 
 Harding seldom paints sea, and it is well for Stanfield that 
 he does not, or the latter would have to look to his crown. 
 All that we have seen from his hand is, as coast sea, quite 
 faultless ; we only wish he would paint it more frequently ; 
 always, however, with a veto upon French fishing-boats. In 
 'the Exhibition of 1842, he spoiled one of the most superb 
 pieces of seashore and sunset which modern art has pro- 
 duced, with the pestilent square sail of one of these clumsy 
 craft, which the eye could not escape from. 
 
 Before passing to our great sea painter, we must again refer 
 to the works of Copley Fielding. It is with his sea as with 
 § 7 The sea of Only paint one, and that an easy 
 
 Copley Fielding, one, but it is, for all that, an impressive and a 
 
 Its exceeding 
 
 grace and rapid- true One. No man has ever given, with the same 
 flashing freedom, the race of a running tide 
 under a stiff breeze, nor caught, with the same grace and 
 precision, the curvature of the breaking wave, arrested or 
 accelerated by the wind. The forward fling of his foam, 
 and the impatient run of his surges, whose quick, redoubling 
 dash we can almost hear, as they break in their haste upon 
 their own bosoms, are nature itself, and his sea gray or green 
 was, nine years ago, very right, as color ; always a little 
 wanting in transparency, but never cold or toneless. Since 
 that time, he seems to have lost the sense of greenness in 
 water, and has verged more and more on the purple and 
 black, with unhappy results. His sea was always dependent 
 for effect on its light or dark relief against the sky, even when 
 it possessed color ; but it now has lost all local color and 
 
108 OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY THE MODERNS. 
 
 transparency together, and is little more than a study of 
 chiaroscuro in an exceedingly ill-chosen gray. Besides, the 
 perpetual repetition of the same idea is singularly weakening 
 to the mind. Fielding, in ail his life, can only be considered 
 as having produced 07ie sea picture. The others are dupli- 
 cates. He ought to go to some sea of perfect clearness and 
 brilliant color, as that on the coast of Cornwall, or of the 
 Gulf of Genoa, and study it sternly in broad daylight, with 
 no black clouds nor drifting rain to help him out of his dif- 
 ficulties. Pie would then both learn his strength and add to it. 
 
 But there is one point in all his seas deserving especial 
 praise — a marked aim at character, lie desires, especially in 
 § 8. Its hi?h aim ^^^^ latter works, not so much to produce an 
 at character. agreeable picture, a scientific piece of arrange- 
 ment, or delightful melody of color, as to make us feel the 
 utter desolation, the cold, withering, frozen hopelessness of 
 the continuous storm and merciless sea. And this is pecu- 
 liarly remarkable in his denying himself all color, just in the 
 little bits which an artist of inferior mind would paint in 
 sienna and cobalt. If a piece of broken wreck is allowed to 
 rise for an instant through the boiling foam, though the blue 
 stripe of a sailor's jacket, or a red rag of a flag would do all 
 our hearts good, we are not allowed to have it ; it would 
 make us too comfortable, and prevent us from shivering and 
 shrinking as we look, and the artist, with admirable inten- 
 tion, and most meritorious self-denial, expresses his piece 
 J? o T> ^ ^ « . of wreck with a dark, cold brown. Now we 
 
 § 9. But deficiency ' 
 
 in the requisite think this aim and effort worthy of the hioh- 
 
 quality of grays. . i • i "i i 
 
 est praise, and we only wish the lesson were 
 taken up and acted on by our other artists ; but Mr. Field- 
 ino^ should remember that nothinor- of this kind can be done 
 with success unless by the most studied management of the 
 general tones of the picture ; for the eye, deprived of all 
 means of enjoying the gray hues, merely as a contrast to 
 bright points, becomes painfully fastidious in the quality of 
 the hues themselves, and demands for its satisfaction such 
 melodies and richness of gray as may in some degree atone 
 to it for the loss of points of stimulus. That gray which 
 
OF WATER, A8 PAINTED BY THE M0DEBN8, 109 
 
 would be taken frankly and freely for an expression of 
 gloom, if it came behind a yellow sail or a red cap, is exam- 
 ined with invidious and merciless intentness when there is 
 nothing to relieve it, and, if not able to bear the investiga- 
 tion, if neither agreeable nor variable in its hue, renders the 
 picture weak instead of impressive, and unpleasant instead 
 of awful. And indeed the management of nat- 
 thegrays^o?na? ure might teach him this ; for though, when 
 ^^^* using violent contrasts, she frequently makes 
 
 her gloom somewhat monotonous, the moment she gives up 
 her vivid color, and depends upon her desolation, that mo- 
 ment she begins to steal the greens into her sea-gray, and 
 the browns and yellows into her cloud-gray, and the expres- 
 sion of variously tinted light through all. Nor is Mr. Field- 
 ing without a model in art, for the Land's End, and Lowe- 
 stoffe, and Snowstorm, (in the Academy, 1842,) of Turner, 
 are nothing more than passages of the most hopeless, des- 
 olate, uncontrasted grays, and yet are three of the very 
 finest pieces of color that have come from his hand. And 
 we sincerely hope that Mr. Fielding will gradually feel the 
 necessity of such studied melodies of quiet color, and will 
 neither fall back into the old tricks of contrast, nor con- 
 tinue to paint with purple and ink. If he will only make a 
 few careful studies of gray from the mixed atmosphere of 
 spray, rain, and mist of a gale that has been three days hard 
 at work, not of a rainy squall, but of a persevering and pow- 
 erful storm, and not where the sea is turned into milk and 
 magnesia by a chalk coast, but where it breaks pure and 
 green on gray slate or white granite, as along the cliffs of 
 Cornwall, we think his pictures would present some of the 
 finest examples of high intention and feeling to be found in 
 modern art. 
 
 The works of Stanfield evidently, and at all times, proceed 
 from the hand of a man who has both thorough knowledsfe 
 §11. Works of of his subject, and thorough acquaintance with 
 perFect^^^* knowi- meaus and principles of art. We never 
 
 edge and power, ^riticise them, because we feel, the moment we 
 look carefully at the drawing of any single wave, that the 
 
110 OF WATERy AS PAINTED BY THE M0DEBN8. 
 
 knowledge possessed by the master is much greater than our 
 own, and therefore believe that if anything offends us in any 
 part of the work, it is nearly certain to be our fault, and not 
 the painter's. The local color of Stanfield's sea is singularly 
 true and powerful, and entirely independent of any tricks of 
 chiaroscuro. He will carry a mighty wave up against the 
 sky, and make its whole body dark and substantial against the 
 distant light, using all the while nothing more than chaste 
 and unexaggerated local color to gain the relief. His sur- 
 face is at once lustrous, transparent, and accurate to a hair- 
 breadth in every curve ; and he is entirely independent of 
 dark skies, deep blues, driving spray, or any other means of 
 concealing want of form, or atoning for it. He fears no dif- 
 ficulty, desires no assistance, takes his sea in open daylight, 
 under general sunshine, and paints the element in its pure 
 color and complete forms. But we wish that he were less 
 powerful, and more interestino: : or that he were 
 
 §12. But want , , -r-^. t, i ti n 
 
 of feeling. Gen- a little less Diogcnes-likc, and did not scorn all 
 truth ^presented that he does not Want. Now that he has shown 
 by modern art. what he Can do without such aids, we wish 
 he would show us what he can do with them. He is, as we 
 have already said, v^anting in what we have just been prais- 
 ing in Fielding — impressiveness. We should like him to be 
 less clever, and more affecting — less wonderful, and more ter- 
 rible ; and as the very first step toward such an end, to learn 
 how to conceal. We are, however, trenching upon matters 
 with which we have at present nothing to do ; our concern 
 is now only with truth, and one work of Stanfield alone pre- 
 sents us with as much concentrated knowledge of sea and 
 sky, as, diluted, would have lasted any one of the old mas- 
 ters his life. And let it be especially observed, how exten- 
 sive and how varied is the truth of our modern masters — 
 how it comprises a complete history of that nature of which, 
 from the ancients, you only here and there can catch a stam- 
 mering descriptive syllable — how Fielding has given us every 
 character of the quiet lake, Robson * of the mountain tarn, 
 
 * I ought before to have alluded to the works of the late G. Robson. 
 They are a little disaj^reeable in execution, but there is a feeling of the 
 
OF WATER, AS FAINTED BY TUENEB. 
 
 Ill 
 
 De Wint of the lowland river, Nesfield of the radiant cata- 
 ract, Harding of the roaring torrent, Fielding of the desolate 
 sea, Stanfield of the blue, open, boundless ocean. Arrange 
 all this in your mind, observe the perfect truth of it in all its 
 parts, compare it with the fragmentary falsities of the an- 
 cients, and then, come with me to Turner. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF WATEE, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 I BELIEVE it is a result of the experience of all artists, that 
 it is the easiest thing in the world to give a certain degree of 
 depth and transparency to water ; but that it is next thing 
 to impossible, to 2:ive a full impression of sur- 
 
 § 1. The difficulty ^ n Z.- u ' * 1 U ' 
 
 of giving surface lace. It no reflection be given — a ripple being 
 
 to smooth water. t,i ; iitii i •/» n 
 
 supposed — the water looks like lead : it reflec- 
 tion be given, it in nine cases out of ten looks morbidly clear 
 and deep, so that we always go down mto it, even when the 
 artist most wishes us to glide over it. Now, this difficulty 
 arises from the very same circumstance which occasions the 
 frequent failure in effect of the best drawn foregrounds, no- 
 ticed in Section H. Chapter III., the change, namely, of focus 
 § 2. Is dependent necessary in the eye in order to receive rays of 
 of the ey^e,^*^and light coming from different distances. Go to 
 Jh^'Sh^ys the edge of a pond, in a perfectly calm day, at 
 are perceived. some place where there is duckweed floating on 
 the surface, — not thick, but a leaf here and there. Now, you 
 may either see in the water the reflection of the sky, or you 
 may see the duckweed , out you cannot, by any effort, see 
 both together. If you look for the reflection, you will be 
 sensible of a sudden change or effort in the eye, by which it 
 adapts itself to the reception of the rays which have come all 
 the way from the clouds, have struck on the water, and so 
 been sent up again to the eye. The focus you adopt is one 
 
 character of derj) calm water in them quite unequalled, and different 
 from the works and thoughts of all other men. 
 
112 OF WATER, AS FAINTED BY TURNER, 
 
 fit for great distance ; and, accordingly, you will feel that 
 you are looking down a great way under the water, while the 
 leaves of the duckweed, though they lie upon the water at 
 the very spot on which you are gazing so intently, are felt 
 only as a vague, uncertain interruption, causing a little con- 
 fusion in the image below, but entirely indistinguishable as 
 leaves, — and even their color unknown and unperceived. 
 Unless you think of them, you will not even feel that any- 
 thing interrupts your sight, so excessively slight is their effect. 
 If, on the other hand, you make up your mind to look for 
 the leaves of the duckweed, you will perceive an instanta- 
 neous change in the effort of the eye, by which it becomes 
 adapted to receive near rays — those which have only come 
 from the surface of the pond. You will then see the delicate 
 leaves of the duckweed with perfect clearness, and in vivid 
 green ; but while you do so, you will be able to perceive 
 nothing of the reflections in the very water on which they 
 float — nothing but a vague flashing and melting of light and 
 dark hues, without form or meaning, which, to investigate, 
 or find out what they mean or are, you must quit your hold 
 of the duckweed, and plunge down. 
 
 Hence it appears, that whenever we see plain reflections of 
 comparatively distant objects, in near water, we cannot pos- 
 sibly see the surface, and vice versa ; so that when in a 
 paintincr we orive the reflections with the same 
 
 §3. Morbid clear- ^ ^ • ? i • i ' i • -i i • 
 
 ness occasioned in clcamess With which they ar6 visible m nature, 
 
 painting of water , . £ 4.11 
 
 by distinctness of we presuppose the effort oi the eye to look un- 
 
 reflections. i ^^ p t £ i i it 
 
 der the suriace, and, oi course, destroy the sur- 
 face, and induce an effect of clearness which, perhaps, the 
 artist has not particularly wished to attain, but which he has 
 found himself forced into, by his reflections, in spite of him- 
 self. And the reason of this effect of clearness appearing pre- 
 ternatural is, that people are not in the habit of looking at 
 water with the distant focus adapted to the reflections, unless 
 by particular effort. We invariably, under ordinary circum- 
 stances, use the surface focus ; and, in consequence, receive 
 nothing more than a vague and confused impression of the 
 reflected colors and lines, however clearly, calmly, and vigor* 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TUliNEB. 
 
 113 
 
 ously all may be defined underneath, if we choose to look for 
 them. We do not look for them, bat glide along over the 
 surface, catching only playing light and capricious color for 
 evidence of reflection, except where we come to images of 
 objects close to the surface, which the surface focus is of 
 course adapted to receive ; and these we see clearly, as of the 
 weeds on the shore, or of sticks rising out of the water, etc. 
 Hence, the ordinary effect of water is only to be rendered by 
 giving the reflections of the margin clear and distinct (so 
 clear they usually are in nature, that it is impossible to tell 
 where the water begins ;) but the moment we touch the re- 
 flection of distant objects, as of high trees or clouds, that in- 
 stant we must become vague and uncertain in drawing, and, 
 though vivid in color and light as the object itself, quite in- 
 M How avoided ^istinct in form and feature. If we take such 
 by Turner. ^ piece of Water as that in the foreground of 
 
 Turner's Chateau of Prince Albert, the first impression from 
 it is, — " What a wide surface ! " We glide over it a quarter 
 of a mile into the picture before w^e know where we are, and 
 yet the water is as calm and crystalline as a mirror ; but we 
 are not allowed to tumble into it, and gasp for breath as we 
 go down, — we are kept upon the surface, though that surface 
 is flashing and radiant with every hue of cloud, and sun, and 
 sky, and foliage. But the secret is in the drawing of these 
 reflections.* We cannot tell when we look at them and for 
 them, what they mean. They have all character, and are evi- 
 dently reflections of something definite and determined ; but 
 
 * Not altogether. I believe here, as in a former case, I have attributed 
 far too much influence to this change of focus. In Turner's earlier 
 works the principle is not found. In the rivers of the Yorkshire draw 
 ings, every reflection is given clearly, even to the farthest depth, and 
 yet the surface is not lost, and it would deprive the painter of much 
 power if he were not sometimes so to represent them, especially when 
 his object is repose ; it being, of course, as lawful for him to choose one 
 adaptation of the sight as another. I have, however, left the above 
 paragraphs as first written, because they are tru'^, although I think they 
 make too much of an unimportant matter. The reader may attribute 
 to them such weight as he tliinks fit. He is referred to § 11 of this 
 chapter, and to § 4 of the first chapter of this section. 
 Vol. II.— 8 
 
114 OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TUBNEB. 
 
 yet they are all uncertain and inexplicable ; playing color and 
 palpitating shade, which, though we recognize in an instant 
 for images of something, and feel that the water is bright, 
 and lovely, and calm, we cannot penetrate nor interpret : we 
 are not allowed to go down to them, and we repose, as we 
 should in nature, upon the lustre of the level surface. It is 
 in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing 
 too plainly, that the perfection of art here, as in all other 
 cases, consists. But as it was before shown in 
 
 § 5. All reflections ^ . 
 
 on distant water oection 11. Chap. 111. that the focus oi the eye 
 are is inc . required little alteration after the first half mile 
 of distance, it is evident that on the distant surface of water, 
 all reflections will be seen plainly ; for the same focus adapted 
 to a moderate distance of si!irface will receive with distinct- 
 ness rays coming from the sky, or from any other distance, 
 however great. Thus we always see the reflection of Mont 
 Blanc on the Lake of Geneva, whether we take pains to look 
 for it or not, because the water upon which it is cast is itself a 
 mile off ; but if we would see the reflection of Mont Blanc in 
 the Lac de Chede, which is close to us, we must take some 
 trouble about the matter, leave the green snakes swimming 
 upon the surface, and plunge for it. Hence reflections, if 
 viewed collectively, are always clear in proportion to the dis- 
 tance of the water on which they are cast. And now look at 
 Turner's Ulleswater, or any of his distant lake expanses, and 
 you will find every crag and line of the hills rendered in them 
 with absolute fidelity, while the near surface shows nothing 
 but a vague confusion of exquisite and lustrous tint. The 
 reflections even of the clouds will be given far off, while those 
 of near boats and figures will be confused and mixed among 
 each other, except just at the water-line. 
 
 And now we see what Vandevelde ought to have done 
 with the shadow of his ship spoken of in the first chapter of 
 this section. In such a calm, we should in nature, if we had 
 § 6. The error of looked for the reflection, have seen it clear from 
 Vandevelde. ^jj^ water-Hne to the flag on the mainmast ; but 
 in so doing, we should have appeared to ourselves to be 
 looking under the water, and should have lost all feeling of 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TURNER, 115 
 
 surface. When we looked at the surface of the sea, — as we 
 naturally should, — we should have seen the image of the hull 
 absolutely clear and perfect, because that image is cast on 
 distant water ; but we should have seen the image of the 
 masts and sails gradually more confused as they descended, 
 and the water close to us would have borne only upon its 
 surface a maze of flashing color and indefinite hue. Had 
 Vandevelde, therefore, given the perfect image of his ship, 
 he would have represented a truth dependent on a particular 
 effort of the eye, and destroyed his surface. But his busi- 
 ness was to give, not a distinct reflection, but the colors of 
 the reflection in mystery and disorder upon his near water, 
 all perfectly vivid, but none intelligible ; and had he done so, 
 the eye would not have troubled itself to search them out ; 
 it would not have cared whence or how the colors came, but 
 it would have felt them to be true and right, and rested sat- 
 isfied upon the polished surface of the clear sea. Of the per- 
 fect truth, the best examples I can give are Turner's Saltash 
 and Castle Upnor. 
 
 Be it next observed that the reflection of all near objects 
 is, by our fifth rule, not an exact copy of the parts of them 
 which we see above the water, but a totally different view 
 §7. Difference in and arrangement of them, that which we should 
 parta^^Xtwee^n Were lookiug at them from beneath, 
 
 ject^and^ita im- Hcnce we sce the dark sides of leaves hanging 
 over a stream, in their reflection, though we see 
 the light sides above, and all objects and groups of objects 
 are thus seen in the reflection under different lights, and in 
 different positions with respect to each other from those 
 which they assume above ; some which we see on the bank 
 being entirely lost in their reflection, and others which we 
 cannot see on the bank brought into view. Hence nature 
 contrives never to repeat herself, and the surface of water is 
 not a mockery, but a new view of what is above it. And 
 this difference in what is represented, as well as the ob- 
 scurity of the representation, is one of the chief sources by 
 which the sensation of surface is kept up in the reality. The 
 reflection is not so remarkable, it does not attract the eye in 
 
116 OF WATER, AB PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 the same degree when it is entirely different from the images 
 above, as when it mocks them and repeats them, and we feel 
 that the space and surface have color and character of their 
 own, and that the bank is one thing and the water another. 
 It is by not making this change manifest, and giving under- 
 neath a mere duplicate of what is seen above, that artists are 
 apt to destroy the essence and substance of water, and to 
 drop us through it. 
 
 Now one instance will be sufficient to show the exquisite 
 care of Turner in this respect. On the left-hand side of his 
 Nottingham, the water (a smooth canal) is terminated by a 
 bank fenced up with wood, on which, lust at 
 
 § 8. Illustrated « , I , . . 
 
 from the works the edge of the water, stands a white sign-post. 
 
 A quarter of a mile back, the hill on which Not- 
 tingham Castle stands rises steeply nearly to the top of the 
 picture. The upper part of this hill is in bright golden light, 
 and the lower in very deep gray shadow, against which the 
 white board of the sign-post is seen entirely in light relief, 
 though, being turned from the light, it is itself in delicate 
 middle tint, illumined only on the edge. But the image of 
 all this in the canal is very different. First, we have the re- 
 flection of the piles of the bank, sharp and clear, but under 
 this we have not what we see above it, the dark base of the 
 hill, (for this being a quarter of a mile back, we could not 
 see over the fence if we were looking from below,) but the 
 golden summit of the hill, the shadow of the under part hav- 
 ing no record nor place in the reflection. But this summit, 
 being very distant, cannot be seen clearly by the eye while 
 its focus is adapted to the surface of the water, and accord- 
 ingly its reflection is entirely vague and confused ; you can- 
 not tell what it is meant for, it is mere playing golden light. 
 But the sign-post, being on the bank close to us, will be re- 
 flected clearly, and accordingly its distinct image is seen in 
 the midst of this confusion. But it now is relieved, not 
 against the dark base, but against the illumined summit of 
 the hill, and it appears, therefore, instead of a white space 
 thrown out from blue shade, a dark gray space thrown out 
 from golden light. I do not know that any more magnificent 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TUItNEB. 
 
 example could be given of concentrated knowledge, or of the 
 daring statement of most difficult truth. For who but this 
 
 consummate artist would have had courage, even 
 less Inl judg- if he had perceived the laws which required it, 
 Se^* obsSvance to Undertake in a single small space of water, 
 
 the painting of an entirely new picture, with all 
 its tones and arrangements altered, — what was made above 
 bright by opposition to blue, being underneath made cool 
 and dark by opposition to gold ; — or would have dared to 
 contradict so boldly the ordinary expectation of the unculti- 
 vated eye, to find in the reflection a mockery for the reality ? 
 But the reward is immediate, for not only is the change most 
 grateful to the eye, and most exquisite as composition, but 
 the surface of the water in consequence of it is felt to be as 
 spacious as it is clear, and the eye rests not on the inverted 
 image of the material objects, but on the element which re- 
 ceives them. And we have a further instance in this passage 
 of the close study which is required to enjoy the works of 
 Turner, for another artist might have altered the reflection 
 or confused it, but he would not have reasoned upon it so as 
 to find out what the exact alteration must be ; and if we had 
 tried to account for the reflection, we should have found it 
 false or inaccurate. But the master mind of Turner, with- 
 out effort, showers its knowledge into every touch, and we 
 have only to trace out even his slightest passages, part by 
 part, to find in them the universal working of the deepest 
 thought, that consistency of every minor truth which admits 
 of and invites the same ceaseless study as the work of nature 
 herself. 
 
 There is, however, yet another peculiarity in Turner's 
 painting of smooth water, which, though less deserving of 
 admiration, as being merely a mechanical excellence, is not 
 § 10. The tex- ^^^^ wonderful than its other qualities, nor less 
 in'\ u*r n^e^r'^s ^^^^4^^ — ^ peculiar texture, namely, given to the 
 painting of cairn most delicate tints of the surface, when there is 
 
 water. t i * n • • 
 
 little reflection from anything except sky or at- 
 mosphere, and which, just at the points where other paint- 
 ers are reduced to paper, gives to the surface of Turner the 
 
118 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 greatest appearance of substantial liquidity. It is impossi* 
 ble to say how it is produced ; it looks like some modifica- 
 tion of body color ; but it certainly is not body color used as 
 by other men, for I have seen this expedient tried over and 
 over again without success ; and it is often accompanied by 
 crumbling touches of a dry brush, which never could have 
 been put upon body color, and which could not have shown 
 through underneath it. As a piece of mechanical excel- 
 lence, it is one of the most remarkable things in the works of 
 the master ; and it brings the truth of his water-painting up 
 to the last degree of perfection, often rendering those pas- 
 sages of it the most attractive and delightful, which from 
 their delicacy and paleness of tint, would have been weak 
 and papery in the hands of any other man. The best in- 
 stance of it I can give, is, I think, the distance of the Dev- 
 onport with the Dockyards. 
 
 After all, however, there is more in Turner's painting of 
 water surface than any philosophy of reflection, or any pecu- 
 liarity of means, can account for or accomplish ; there is a 
 § 11 Its united rfiiglit and wonder about it which will not admit 
 qualities. ^J^ys or hows. Take, for instance, the 
 
 picture of the Sun of Venice going to Sea, of 1843, respect- 
 ing which, however, there are one or two circumstances which 
 may as well be noted besides its water-painting. The reader, 
 if he has not been at Venice, ought to be made aware that 
 the Venetian fishing-boats, almost without exception, carry 
 canvas painted with bright colors, the favorite design for the 
 centre being either a cross or a large sun with many rays, 
 the favorite colors being red, orange, and black, blue occur- 
 ring occasionally. The radiance of these sails and of the 
 bright and grotesque vanes at the mast-heads under sunlight 
 is beyond all painting, but it is strange that, of constant oc- 
 currence as these boats are on all the lagoons. Turner alone 
 should have availed himself of them. Nothing could be 
 more faithful than the boat which was the principal object in 
 this picture, in the cut of the sail, the filling of it, the exact 
 height of the boom above the deck, the quartering of it with 
 color, finally and especially, the hanging of the fish-baskets 
 
OF WATER, AB FAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 119 
 
 about the bows. All these, however, are comparatively minor 
 merits, (though not the blaze of color which the artist eli- 
 cited from the right use of these circumstances,) but the pe- 
 culiar power of the picture was the painting of the sea sur- 
 face, where there were no reflections to assist it. A stream of 
 splendid color fell from the boat, but that occupied the centre 
 only; in the distance, the city and crowded boats threw 
 down some playing lines, but these still left on each side of 
 the boat a large space of water reflecting nothing but the 
 morning sky. This was divided by an eddying swell, on 
 whose continuous sides the local color of the water was seen, 
 pure aquamarine, (a beautiful occurrence of closely-observed 
 truth,) but still there remained a large blank space of pale 
 water to be treated, the sky above had no distinct details and 
 was pure faint gray, with broken white vestiges of cloud : it 
 gave no help therefore. But there the water lay, no dead 
 gray flat paint, but downright clear, playing, palpable sur- 
 face, full of indefinite hue, and retiring as regularly and visi- 
 bly back and far away, as if there had been objects all over 
 it to tell the story by perspective. Now it is the doing of 
 this which tries the painter, and it is his having done this 
 which made me say above that no man had ever painted 
 the surface of calm water but Turner." The San Benedetto, 
 looking towards Fusina, contained a similar passage, equally 
 fine ; in one of the Canale della Guidecca the specific green 
 color of the water is seen in front, with the shadows of the 
 boats thrown on it in purple ; all, as it retires, passing into 
 the pure reflective blue. 
 
 But Turner is not satisfied with this. He is never alto- 
 gether content unless he can, at the same time that he takes 
 advantage of all the placidity of repose, tell us something 
 § 12 Relation of ^^^^^^ about the past commotion of the water, 
 various circum- or of some present stirring: of tide or current 
 
 stances of past , . , . , 
 
 agitation, e t c . , which its stillness docs not show, or give us 
 
 by the most trif- , . , i • i i -T 
 
 ling incidents, as Something or other to think about and reason 
 intheCowes. ^pon, as Well as to look at. Take a few in- 
 stances. His Cowes, Isle of Wight, is a summer twilight 
 about half an hour, or more, after sunset. Intensity of re- 
 
120 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TUBNER. 
 
 pose is the great aim throughout, and the unity of tone of 
 the picture is one of the finest things that Turner has ever 
 done. But there is not only quietness, there is the very 
 deepest solemnity in the whole of the light, as well as in the 
 stillness of the vessels ; and Turner wishes to enhance this 
 feeling by representing not only repose, but power in repose, 
 the emblem, in the sea, of the quiet ships of war. Accord- 
 ingly, he takes the greatest possible pains to get his surface 
 polished, calm, and smooth, but he indicates the reflection of 
 a buoy, floating a full quarter of a mile off, by three black 
 strokes with wide intervals between them, the last of which 
 touches the water within twenty yards of the spectator. 
 Now these three reflections can only indicate the farther 
 sides of three rises of an enormous swell, and give by their 
 intervals of separation, a space of from twelve to twenty 
 yards for the breadth of each wave, including the sweep be- 
 tween them, and this swell is farther indicated by the reflec- 
 tion of the new moon falling, in a wide zigzag line. The 
 exceeding majesty which this single circumstance gives to the 
 whole picture, the sublime sensation of power and knowl- 
 edge of former exertion which we instantly receive from it, 
 if we have but acquaintance with nature enough to under- 
 stand its language, render this work not only a piece of the 
 most refined truth, (as which I have at present named it,) but 
 to my mind, one of the highest pieces of intellectual art ex- 
 isting. 
 
 Again, in the scene on the Loire, with the square precipice 
 and fiery sunset, in the Rivers of France, repose has been 
 aimed at in the same way, and most thoroughly given ; but 
 ^ the immense width of the river at this spot 
 
 §13. In scenes on ^ ^ . 
 
 the Loire and makes it look like a lake or sea, and it was 
 therefore necessary that we should be made 
 thoroughly to understand and feel that this is not the calm 
 of still water, but the tranquillity of a majestic current. 
 Accordingly, a boat swings at anchor on the right ; and the 
 stream, dividing at its bow, flows towards us in two long, 
 dark waves, especial attention to which is enforced by the 
 one on the left being brought across the reflected stream of 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TUBNER. 121 
 
 sunshine, which it separates, and which is broken in the 
 nearer water by the general undulation and agitation caused 
 by the boat's wake ; a wake caused by the waters passing it, 
 not by its going through the water. 
 
 Ao-ain, in the Confluence of the Seine and Marne, we have 
 the repose of the wide river stirred by the paddles of the 
 steamboat, (whose plashing we can almost hear, for we are 
 § 14. Expression especially compelled to look at them by their 
 caused^'^bi^ TecoU being made the central note of the composi- 
 from shore. .^ion — the blackest object in it, opposed to the 
 
 strongest light,) and this disturbance is not merely caused 
 by the two lines of surge from the boat's wake, for any 
 other painter must have given these, but Turner never rests 
 satisfied till he has told you all in his power ; and he has not 
 only given the receding surges, but these have gone on to 
 the shore, have struck upon it, and been beaten back from 
 it in another line of weaker contrary surges, whose point 
 of intersection with those of the wake itself is marked by 
 the sudden subdivision and disorder of the waves of the 
 wake on the extreme left, and whose reverted direction is 
 exquisitely given where their lines cross the calm water, 
 close to the spectator, and marked also by the sudden 
 vertical spring of the spray just where they intersect the 
 swell from the boat ; and in order that we may fully be able 
 to account for these reverted waves, we are allowed, just at 
 the extreme right-hand limit of the picture, to see the point 
 where the swell from the boat meets the shore. In the 
 Chaise de Gargantua we have the still water lulled by the 
 dead calm which usually precedes the most violent storms, 
 suddenly broken upon by a tremendotis burst of wind from 
 the gathered thunder-clouds, scattering the boats, and raising 
 § 15. Various the water into rage, except where it is sheltered 
 other instances. ^j^^ ^iiW^^ In the Jumicges and Vernon we 
 have farther instances of local agitation, caused, in the one 
 instance, by a steamer, in the other, by the large water- 
 wheels under the bridge, not, observe, a mere splashing 
 about the wheel itself, this is too far off to be noticeable, so 
 that we should not have even known that the objects be- 
 
122 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNEB, 
 
 neath the bridge were water-wheels, but for the agitation re- 
 corded a quarter of a mile down the river, where its current 
 crosses the sunlight. And thus there will scarcely ever be 
 found a piece of quiet water by Turner, without some story 
 in it of one kind or another ; sometimes a slight, but beauti- 
 ful incident — oftener, as in the Oowes, something on which 
 the whole sentiment and intention of the picture in a great 
 degree depends ; but invariably presenting some new in- 
 stance of varied knowledge and observation, some fresh ap- 
 peal to the highest faculties of the mind. 
 
 Of extended surfaces of water, as rendered by Turner, the 
 Loch Katrine and Derwent-water, of the Illustrations to Scott, 
 and the Loch Lomond, vignette in Rogers's Poems, are char- 
 § 16. Turner's actcristic instances. The first of these gives us 
 tant^expansesof most distant part of the lake entirely under 
 Srrupted^^^'rip- influence of a light breeze, and therefore 
 pi^- entirely without reflections of the objects on its 
 
 borders ; but the whole near half is untouched by the wind, 
 and on that is cast the image of the upper part of Ben-Venue 
 and of the islands. The second gives ns the surface, with 
 just so much motion upon it as to prolong, but not to destroy, 
 the reflections of the dark woods, — reflections only inter- 
 rupted by the ripple of the boat's wake. And 
 
 §17. And ripple, , , • / • 1 « ^, , , 
 
 crossed by sun- the third givcs US an example oi the whole sur- 
 face so much affected by ripple as to bring into 
 exercise all those laws which we have seen so grossly vio- 
 lated by Canaletto. We see in the nearest boat that though 
 the lines of the gunwale are much blacker and more con- 
 spicuous than that of the cutwater, yet the gunwale lines, 
 being nearly horizontal, have no reflection whatsoever ; while 
 the line of the cutwater, being vertical, has a distinct reflec- 
 tion of three times its own length. But even these tremu- 
 lous reflections are only visible as far as the islands ; beyond 
 them, as the lake retires into distance, we find it receives 
 only the reflection of the gray light from the clouds, and 
 runs in one flat white field up between the hills ; and besides 
 all this, we have another phenomenon, quite new, given to us, 
 « — the brilliant ^leam of lio-ht alonor the centre of the lake. 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 123 
 
 This is not caused by ripple, for it is cast on a surface rip- 
 pled all over ; but it is what we could not have without rip- 
 ple, — the light of a passage of sunshine. I have already 
 (Chap. I., § 9) explained the cause of this phenomenon, which 
 never can by any possibility take place on calm water, being 
 the multitudinous reflection of the sun from the sides of the 
 ripples, causing an appearance of local light and shadow ; 
 and being dependent, like real light and shadow, on the pas- 
 sage of the clouds, though the dark parts of the water are the 
 reflections of the clouds, not the shadows of them ; and the 
 bright parts are the reflections of the sun, and not the light 
 of it. This little vignette, then, will entirely complete the 
 system of Turner's universal truth in quiet water. We have 
 seen every phenomenon given by him, — the clear reflection, 
 the prolonged reflection, the reflection broken by ripple, and 
 finally the ripple broken by light and shade ; and it is espe- 
 cially to be observed how careful *he is, in this last case, when 
 he uses the apparent light and shade, to account for it by 
 showing us in the whiteness of the lake beyond, its univer- 
 sal subjection to ripple. 
 
 We have not spoken of Turner's magnificent drawing of 
 distant rivers, which, however, is dependent only on more 
 complicated application of the same laws, with exquisite per- 
 §18 His draw- spectivG. The swccps of river in theDryburgh, 
 i n g of distant (Illustrations to Scott.) and Melrose, are bold and 
 
 rivers. . . 
 
 characteristic examples, as well as the Rouen 
 from St. Catherine's Hill, and the Caudebec, in the Rivers of 
 France. The only thing which in these works requires par- 
 ticular attention, is the care with which the height of the 
 observer above the river is indicated by the loss of the reflec- 
 tions of its banks. This is, perhaps, shown most clearly in 
 the Caudebec. If we had been on a level with the river, its 
 whole surface would have been darkened b}^ the reflection of 
 the steep and high banks ; but being far above it, we can see 
 no more of the image than we could of the hill itself, if it 
 were actually reversed under the water ; and therefore we 
 see that Turner gives us only a narrow line of dark water, 
 immediately under the precipice, the broad surface reflecting 
 
324: OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 only the sky. This is also finely shown on the left-hand side 
 of the Dry burgh. 
 
 But all these early works of the artist have been eclipsed 
 by some recent drawings of Switzerland. These latter are 
 not to be described by any words^ but they must be noted 
 o.n » ^ * here not only as presentinor records of lake ef- 
 
 § 19. And of sur- j r » 
 
 face associated feet on fiTrander scale, and of more imaorinative 
 
 with mist. ^ ' ^ 
 
 character than any other of his works, but as 
 combining effects of the surface of mist with the surface of 
 water. Two or three of the Lake of Lucerne, seen from 
 above, give the melting of the mountain promontories be- 
 aeath into the clear depth, and above into the clouds ; one of 
 Constance shows the vast lake at evening, seen not as water, 
 but its surface covered with low white mist, lying league be- 
 yond league in the twilight like a fallen space of moony 
 cloud ; one of Goldau shows the Lake of Zug appearing 
 through the chasm of a thunder-cloud under sunset, its whole 
 surface one blaze of fire, and the promontories of the hills 
 thrown out against it, like spectres ; another of Zurich gives 
 the playing of the green waves of the river among white 
 streams of moonlight : two purple sunsets on the Lake of 
 Zug are distinguished for the glow obtained without positive 
 color, the rose and purple tints being in great measure brought 
 by opposition out of browns : finally, a drawing executed in 
 1845 of the town of Lucerne from the lake is unique for its 
 expression of water surface reflecting the clear green hue of 
 sky at twilight. 
 
 It will be remembered that it was said above, that Turner 
 was the only painter who had ever represented the surface of 
 calm or t\\Q force of agitated water. He obtains this expres- 
 sion of force in falling or runnine^ water by fear- 
 
 § 20, His draw- . ^ . „ ^ xx 
 
 ing of falling less and full rendering of its forms. He never 
 
 water, with pe- , ,. • i 
 
 cuiiar expression loscs himselt and his subject in the splash or the 
 of weight. ^^11 — 1^.^ presence of mind never fails as he goes 
 down ; he does not blind us with the spray, or veil the coun- 
 tenance of his fall with its own drapery. A little crumbling 
 white, or lightly rubbed paper, will soon give the effect of 
 indiscriminate foam ; but nature gives more than foam — she 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER, 
 
 125 
 
 shows beneath it, and through it, a peculiar character of ex* 
 quisitely studied form bestowed on every wave and line of 
 fall ; and it is this variety of definite character which Turner 
 always aims at rejecting, as much as possible, everything that 
 conceals or overwhelms it. Thus, in the Upper Fall of the 
 Tees, though the whole basin of the fall is blue and dim with 
 the rising vapor, yet the whole attention of the spectator is 
 directed to that which it was peculiarly difficult to render, the 
 concentric zones and delicate curves of the falling water it- 
 self ; and it is impossible to express with what exquisite ac- 
 curacy these are given. They are the characteristic of a 
 powerful stream descending without impediment or break, 
 but from a narrow channel, so as to expand as it falls. They 
 are the constant form which such a stream assumes as it de- 
 scends ; and yet I think it would be difficult to point to an- 
 other instance of their being rendered in art. You will find 
 nothing in the waterfalls even of our best painters, but 
 springing lines of parabolic descent, and splashing, shapeless 
 foam ; and, in consequence, though they make you under- 
 stand the swiftness of the water, they never let you feel the 
 weight of it ; the stream in their hands looks active, not sit- 
 § 21 Theaban leaped, not as if it fell. Now water 
 
 donment and will leap a little wav, it will leap down a weir or 
 
 plunge of great ^ . ^ ^ - ^ n ^^ ^'^ 
 
 cataracts. How ovcr a stonc, Dut it tumoles over a high fall like 
 given by him. ^^.^ ^ when wc havc lost the parabolic 
 
 line, and arrived at the catenary, — when he have lost the 
 spring of the fall, and arrived at the plunge of it, that we 
 begin really to feel its weight and wildness. Where water 
 takes its first leap from the top, it is cool, and collected, and 
 uninteresting, and mathematical, but it is when it finds that 
 it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go than it thought 
 for, that its character comes out ; it is then that it begins to 
 writhe, and twist, and sweep out zone after zone in wilder 
 stretching as it falls, and to send down the rocket-like, lance- 
 pointed, whizzing shafts at its sides, sounding for the bottom. 
 And it is this prostration, this hopeless abandonment of its 
 ponderous power to the air, \Vhich is always peculiarly ex- 
 pressed by Turner, and especially in the case before us ; while 
 
126 
 
 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 our other artists, keeping to the parabolic line, where they do 
 not lose themselves in smoke and foam, make their cataract 
 look muscular and wiry, and may consider themselves fort- 
 unate if they can keep it from stopping. I believe the maj- 
 esty of motion which Turner has given by these concentric 
 catenary lines must be felt even by those who have never 
 seen a high waterfall, and therefore cannot appreciate their 
 exquisite fidelity to nature. 
 
 In the Chain Bridge over the Tees, this passiveness and 
 swinging of the water to and fro are yet more remarkable ; 
 while we have another characteristic of a great waterfall given 
 to us, that the wind, in this instance coming up the valley 
 against the current, takes the spray up off the edges, and car- 
 ries it back in little torn, reverted rags and threads, seen in 
 delicate form against the darkness on the left. But we must 
 understand a little more about the nature of running water 
 before we can appreciate the drawing either of this, or any 
 other of Turner's torrents. 
 
 When water, not in very great body, runs in a rocky bed 
 much interrupted by hollows, so that it can rest every now 
 and then in a pool as it goes along, it does not acquire a con- 
 §22. Difference in tinuous Velocity of motiou. It pauses after ev- 
 ter, vThen^continu- ^^J leap, and curdles about, and rests a little, 
 terri^^ted^i^Thl in- ^^^^ again ; and if in this compar- 
 
 terrupted stream ativclv tranquil and rational state of mind it 
 
 fills the hollows of *^ ^ ^ 
 
 its bed. meets with an obstacle, as a rock or stone, it 
 
 parts on each side of it with a little bubbling foam, and goes 
 round ; if it comes to a step in its bed, it leaps it lightly, and 
 then after a little plashing at the bottom, stops again to take 
 breath. But if its bed be on a continuous slope, not much 
 interrupted by hollows, so that it cannot rest, or if its own 
 mass be so increased by flood that its usual resting-places are 
 not sufficient for it, but that it is perpetually pushed out of 
 them by the following current, before it has had time to tran- 
 quillize itself, it of course gains velocity with every yard that 
 it runs ; the impetus got at one leap is carried to the credit 
 of the next, until the whole stream becomes one mass of un- 
 checked, accelerating motion. Now when water in this state 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BT TURNER. 
 
 127 
 
 comes to an obstacle, it does not part at it, but clears it, like 
 a race-horse ; and when it comes to a hollow, it does not fill 
 it up and run out leisurely at the other side, but it rushes 
 down into it and comes up again on the other side, as a ship 
 into the hollow of the sea. Hence the whole appearance of 
 the bed of the stream is changed, and all the lines of the 
 water altered in their nature. The quiet stream is a succes- 
 sion of leaps and pools ; the leaps are light and springy, and 
 parabolic, and make a great deal of splashing when they tum- 
 ble into the pool ; then we have a space of quiet curdling 
 water, and another similar leap below. But the stream when 
 it has gained an impetus takes the shape of its bed, never 
 §23. But the con- stops, is equally deep and equally swift every- 
 takes^the^siia^ where, goes down into every hollow, not with a 
 of its bed. leap, but with a swing, not foaming, nor splash- 
 
 ing, but in the bending line of a strong sea-wave, and comes 
 up again on the other side, over rock and ridge, with the ease 
 of a bounding leopard ; if it meet a rock three or four feet 
 above the level of its bed, it will neither part nor foam, nor 
 express any concern about the matter, but clear it in a smooth 
 dome of water, without apparent exertion, coming down again 
 as smoothly on the other side ; the whole surface of the surge 
 being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme velocity, but 
 foamless, except in places where the form of the bed opposes 
 itself at some direct angle to such a line of fall, and causes a 
 breaker ; so that the whole river has the appearance of a deep 
 and raging sea, with this only difference, that the torrent- 
 waves always break backwards, and sea-waves forwards. 
 § 24. Its exquisite Thus, then, in the water which has gained an 
 curved hues. impetus, we have the most exquisite arrange- 
 ments of curved lines, perpetually changing from convex to 
 concave, and vice versa, following every swell and hollow of 
 the bed with their modulating grace, and all in unison of mo- 
 tion, presenting perhaps the most beautiful series of inorganic 
 forms which nature can possibly produce ; for the sea runs 
 too much into similar and concave curves with sharp edges, 
 but every motion of the torrent is united, and all its curves 
 are modifications of beautiful line. 
 
128 OF WATEE, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 We see, therefore, why Turner seizes on these curved lines 
 of the torrent, not only as being among the most beautiful 
 forms of nature, but because they are an instant expression 
 §25. Turner's utmost power and velocity, and tell us 
 
 t^e^^^ historical torrent has been flowing before we see 
 
 *^^th. it. For the leap and splash might be seen in the 
 
 sudden freakishness of a quiet stream, or the fall of a rivulet 
 over a mill-dam ; but the undulating line is the exclusive at- 
 tribute of the mountain torrent,* whose fall and fury have 
 made the valleys echo for miles ; and thus the moment we 
 see one of its curves over a stone in the foreground, we know 
 how far it has come, and how fiercely. And in the drawing 
 we have been speaking of, the lower fall of the Tees, in the 
 foreground of the Killiecrankie and Rhymer's Glen, and of 
 the St. Maurice, in Rogers's Italy, we shall find the most ex- 
 quisite instances of the use of such lines : but 
 
 § 2fi His exquis- 
 
 ite drawing of the the most perfect of all in the Llanthony Abbey, 
 
 continuous torrent , ^ , iij?. 
 
 in the Llanthony which may be Considered as the standard ot tor- 
 rent-drawing. The chief light of the picture 
 
 * On a large scale it is so, but the same lines are to be seen for the 
 moment whenever water becomes exceedingly rapid, and yet feels the 
 bottom as it passes, being nob thrown up or cast clear of it. In general, 
 the drawing of w ater fails from being too interrupted, the forms flung 
 hither and thither, and broken up and covered with bright touches, in- 
 stead of being wrought out in their real unities of curvature. It is dif- 
 ficult enough to draw a curved surface, even when it is rough and has 
 texture ; but to indicate the varied and sweeping forms of a crystalline 
 and polished substance, requires far more skill and patience than most 
 artists possess. In some respects, it is impossible. I do not suppose 
 any means of art are capable of rightly expressing the smooth, multitud- 
 inous rippling of a rapid rivulet of shallow water, giving its transparency 
 lustre and fully- developed forms ; and the greater number of the lines 
 and actions of torrent-waves are equally inexpressible. The effort 
 should, nevertheless, always be made, and whatever is sacrificed in color, 
 freedom, or brightness, the real contours ought always in some measure 
 to be drawn, as a careful draughtsman secures those of flesh, or any 
 other finely- modelled snrface. It is better, in many respects, the draw- 
 ing' should miss of being like water, than that it should miss in this one 
 rospect the grandeur of water. Many tricks of scratching and dashing 
 will bring out a deceptive resemblance ; the determined and laborious 
 rendering of contour alone secure.s subli'uiiy. 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TURNER, 
 
 129 
 
 here falls upon the surface of the stream, swelled by recent 
 rain, and its mighty waves come roiling down close to the 
 spectator, green and clear, but pale with anger, in gigantic, 
 unbroken, oceanic curves, bending into each other without 
 break or foam, though jets of fiery spray are cast into the air 
 along the rocky shore, and rise in the sunshine in dusty vapor. 
 The whole surface is one united race of mad motion ; all the 
 waves dragged, as I have described, into lines and furrows by 
 their swiftness, and every one of these fine forms is drawn 
 with the most studied chiaroscuro of delicate color, grays and 
 greens, as silvery and pure as the finest passages of Paul 
 Veronese, and with a refinement of execution which the eye 
 strains itself m looking into. The rapidity and gigantic force 
 of this torrent, the exquisite refinement of its color, and the 
 vividness of foam which is obtained through a general middle 
 tint, render it about the most perfect piece of painting of 
 running water in existence. 
 
 Now this picture is, as was noticed in our former reference 
 to it, full of expression of every kind of motion : the clouds 
 are in wild haste ; the sun is gleaming fast and fitfully through 
 § 27. And of the leaves ; the rain drifting away along the 
 renr^n ¥he Me?-" ^ill-side ; and the torrent, the principal object, 
 cury and Argus, complete the impression, is made the wildest 
 thing of all, and not only wild before us, and with us, but 
 bearing with it in its every motion, from its long course, the 
 record of its rage. Observe how differently Turner uses his 
 torrent when the spirit of the picture is repose. In the Mer- 
 cury and Argus, we have also a stream in the foreground ; 
 but, in coming down to us, we see it stopping twice in two 
 quiet and glassy pools, upon which the drinking cattle cast 
 an unstirred image. From the nearest of these, the water 
 leaps in three cascades into another basin close to us ; it 
 trickles in silver threads through the leaves at its edge, and 
 falls tinkling and splashing (though in considerable body) into 
 the pool, stirring its quiet surface, at which a bird is stooping 
 to drink, with concentric and curdling ripples which divide 
 round the stone at its farthest border, and descend in spark- 
 ling foam over the lip of the basin. Thus we find, in every 
 Vol. II. -9 
 
130 OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 case, the system of Turner's truth entirely unbroken, each 
 phase and phenomenon of nature being recorded exactly 
 where it is most valuable and impressive. 
 
 We have not, however, space to follow out the variety of 
 his torrent-drawing. The above two examples are character- 
 istic of the two great divisions or classes of torrents — that 
 whose motion is continuous, and whose motion 
 
 § 28. Various cases. ... j_ ^ ^^ ^ - p 
 
 is interrupted : all drawing oi running water 
 will resolve itself into the representation of one or other of 
 these. The descent of the distant stream in the vignette to 
 the Boy of Egremond is slight, but very striking ; and the 
 Junction of the Greta and Tees, a singular instance of the 
 bold drawing of the complicated forms of a shallow stream 
 among multitudinous rocks. A still finer example occurs in 
 a recent drawing of Dazio Grande, on the St. Gothard, the 
 waves of the Toccia, clear and blue, fretting among the gran- 
 ite debris which were brought down by the storm that de- 
 stroyed the whole road. In the Ivy bridge the subject is the 
 rest of the torrent in a pool among fallen rocks, the forms of 
 the stones are seen through the clear brown water, and their 
 reflections mingle with those of the foliage. 
 
 More determined efforts have at all periods been made in 
 sea painting than in torrent painting, yet less successful. As 
 above stated, it is easy to obtain a resemblance of broken 
 ^ 29. Sea painting, running watcr by tricks and dexterities, but 
 the sea must be legitimately drawn ; it cannot 
 be given as utterly disorganized and confused, 
 its weight and mass must be expressed, and the efforts at ex- 
 pression of it end in failure with all but the most powerful 
 men ; even with these few a partial success must be considered 
 worthy of the highest praise. 
 
 As the right rendering of the Alps depends on power of 
 drawing snow, so the right painting of the sea must depend, 
 at least in all coast scenery, in no small measure on the power 
 of drawing foam. Yet there are two conditions of foam of 
 invariable occurrence on breaking waves, of wliich I have 
 never seen the slightest record attempted ; first the thick 
 creamy curdling overlapping massy form which remains for a 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TUIINER, 131 
 
 moment only after the fall of the wave, and is seen in per- 
 fection in its running up the beach ; and secondly, the thin 
 white coating into which this subsides, which opens into oval 
 gaps and clefts, marbling the waves over their whole surface, 
 and connecting the breakers on a flat shore by long dragging 
 streams of white. 
 
 It is evident that the difficulty of expressing either of these 
 two conditions must be immense. The lapping and curdling 
 form is difficult enough to catch even w^hen the lines of its 
 undulation alone are considered ; but the lips, so to speak, 
 which lie along these lines, are full, projecting, and marked 
 by beautiful light and shade ; each has its high light, a gra- 
 dation into shadow of indescribable delicacy, a bright reflected 
 light and a dark cast shadow ; to draw all this requires labor, 
 and care, and firmness of work, which, as I imagine, must al- 
 ways, however skilfully bestowed, destroy all impression of 
 wildness, accidentalism, and evanescence, and so kill the sea. 
 Again, the openings in the thin subsided foam in their irre- 
 gular modifications of circular and oval shapes dragged hither 
 and thither, would be hard enough to draw even if they could 
 be seen on a flat surface ; instead of which, every one of the 
 openings is seen in undulation on a tossing surface, broken 
 up over small surges and ripples, and so thrown into perspec- 
 tives of the most hopeless intricacy. Now it is not easy to 
 express the lie of a pattern with oval openings on the folds 
 of drapery. I do not know that any one under the mark of 
 Veronese or Titian could even do this as it ought to be done, 
 yet in drapery much stiffness and error may be overlooked ; 
 not so in sea, — the slightest inaccuracy, the slightest want of 
 flow and freedom in the line, is attached by the eye in a mo- 
 ment of high treason, and I believe success to be impossible. 
 
 Yet there is not a wave or any violently agitated sea on 
 which both these forms do not appear, — the latter especially, 
 after some time of storm, extends over their whole surfaces ; 
 the reader sees, therefore, why I said that sea could only be 
 painted by means of more or less dexterous conventionalisms, 
 since two of its most enduring phenomena cannot be repre- 
 sented at all. 
 
132 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 Again, as respects the form of breakers on an even shore, 
 there is difficulty of no less formidable kind. There is in 
 them an irreconcilable mixture of fury and formalism. Their 
 hollow surface is marked by parallel lines, like 
 
 § 30. Character of . -n • j j ^ ji 
 
 shore-breakers, ai- tliosc ot a smooth miii-weir, and graduated by 
 so inexprcbsibie. reflected and transmitted lights of the most 
 wonderful intricacy, its curve being at the same time neces- 
 sarily of mathematical purity and precision ; yet at the top 
 of this curve, when it nods over, there is a sudden laxity and 
 giving way, the water swings and jumps along the ridge like 
 a shaken chain, and the motion runs from part to part as it 
 does through a serpent's body. Then the wind is at work on 
 the extreme edge, and instead of letting it fling itself off nat- 
 urally, it supports it, and drives it back, or scrapes it off, and 
 carries it bodily away ; so that the spray at the top is in a 
 continual transition between forms projected by their own 
 weight, and forms blown and carried off with their weight 
 overcome ; then at last, when it has come down, who shall 
 say what shape that may be called, which shape has none of 
 the great crash where it touches the beach. 
 
 I think it is that last crash which is the great taskmaster. 
 Nobody can do anything with it. I have seen Copley Field- 
 ing come very close to the jerk and nod of the lifted threat- 
 ening edge, curl it very successfully, and without any look 
 of its having been in papers, down nearly to the beach, but 
 the final fall has no thunder in it. Turner has tried hard for 
 it once or twice, but it will not do. The moment is given in 
 the Sidon of the Bible Illustrations, and more elaborately in 
 a painting of Bamborough ; in both these cases there is little 
 foam at the bottom, and the fallen breaker looks like a wall, 
 yet grand always ; and in the latter picture very beautifully 
 assisted in expression by the tossing of a piece of cable, which 
 some figures are dragging ashore, and which the breaker flings 
 into the air as it falls. Perhaps the most successful render- 
 ing of the forms was in the Hero and Leander, but there the 
 drawing was rendered easier by the powerful effect of light 
 which disguised the foam. 
 
 It is not, however, from the shore that Turner usually stud- 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 133 
 
 ies his sea. Seen from the land, the curl of the breakers, even 
 in nature, is somewhat uniform and monotonous ; the size of 
 § 31. Their effect, waves out at sea is uncomprehended, and 
 
 how injured when ^j^Qge nearer the eye seem to succeed and re- 
 seen from the »/ 
 
 ^^"^■e- semble each other, to move slowly to the beach, 
 
 and to break in the same lines and forms. 
 
 Afloat even twenty yards from the shore, we receive a 
 totally different impression. Every w^ave around us appears 
 vast — every one different from all the rest — and the breakers 
 present, now that we see them with their backs towards us, 
 the grand, extended, and varied lines of long curvature, which 
 are peculiarly expressive both of velocity and power. Reck- 
 lessness, before unfelt, is manifested in the mad, perpetual, 
 changeful, undirected motion, not of wave after wave, as it 
 appears from the shore, but of the very same water rising and 
 falling. Of waves that successively approach and break, each 
 appears to the mind a separate individual, whose part being 
 performed, it perishes, and is succeeded by another ; and there 
 is nothing in this to impress us with the idea of restlessness, 
 any more than in any successive and continuous functions of 
 life and death. But it is when we perceive that it is no suc- 
 cession of wave, but the same water constantly rising, and 
 crashing, and recoiling, and rolling in again in new forms and 
 with fresh fury, that we perceive the perturbed spirit, and 
 feel the intensity of its unwearied rage. The sensation of 
 power is also trebled ; for not only is the vastness of apparent 
 size much increased, but the whole action is different ; it is 
 not a passive wave rolling sleepily forward until it tumbles 
 heavily, prostrated upon the beach, but a sweeping exertion 
 of tremendous and living strength, which does not now ap- 
 pear to fall^ but to hurst upon the shore ; which never per- 
 ishes, but recoils and recovers. 
 
 Aiming at these grand characters of the Sea, Turner almost 
 always places the spectator, not on the shore, 
 
 § 32. Turner's ex- , / i . . I . . . 
 
 pression of heavy but twenty or thirty yards irom it, beyond the 
 rolling sea. ^^^^ range of the breakers, as in the Land's 
 
 End, Fowey, Dunbar, and Laugharne. The latter has been 
 well engraved, and may be taken as a standard of the expres- 
 
134 
 
 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TUBNER. 
 
 sion of fitfulness and power. The grand division of the whole 
 space of the sea by a few dark continuous furrows of tremen- 
 dous swell, (the breaking of one of which alone has strewed 
 the rocks in front with ruin,) furnishes us with an estimate 
 of space and strength, which at once reduces the men upon 
 the shore to insects ; and yet through this terrific simplicity 
 there is indicated a fitfulness and fury in the tossing of the 
 individual lines, which give to the whole sea a wild, unwearied, 
 reckless incoherency, like that of an enraged multitude, whose 
 masses act together in frenzy, while not one individual feels 
 as another. Especial attention is to be directed to the flat- 
 ness of all the lines, for the same principle holds in sea which 
 we have seen in mountains. All the size and sublimity of 
 nature are given not by the height, but by the breadth of her 
 masses : and Turner, by following her in her sweeping lines, 
 while he does not lose the elevation of its surges, adds in a 
 tenfold degree to their power : farther, observe the peculiar 
 expression of weight which there is in Turner's 
 
 §33. With pecn- ^ • i ^ i • j i. • u 
 
 liar expression of wavcs, precisely oi the same kind which we saw 
 ^^^^^** in his waterfall. We have not a cutting, spring- 
 
 ing, elastic line — no 'jumping or leaping in the waves : that 
 is the characteristic of Chelsea Reach or Hampstead Ponds in 
 a storm. But the surges roll and plunge with such prostration 
 and hurling of their mass against the shore, that we feel the 
 rocks are shaking under them ; and, to add yet more to this 
 impression, observe how little, comparatively, they are broken 
 by the wind ; above the floating wood, and along the shore, 
 we have indication of a line of torn spray ; but it is a mere 
 fringe along the ridge of the surge — no interference with its 
 gigantic body. The wind has no power over its tremendous 
 unity of force and weight. Finally, observe how, on the rocks 
 on the left, the violence and swiftness of the rising wave are 
 indicated by precisely the same lines which we saw were in- 
 dicative of fury in the torrent. The water on these rocks is 
 the body of the wave which has just broken, rushing up over 
 them ; and in doing so, like the torrent, it does not break, 
 nor foam, nor part upon the rock, but accommodates itself to 
 every one of its swells and hollows, with undulating lines, 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER, 
 
 135 
 
 whose grace and variety might alone serve us for a day's 
 study ; and it is only where two streams of this rushing wa- 
 ter meet in the hollow of the rock, that their force is shown 
 by the vertical bound of the spray. 
 
 In the distance of this grand picture, there are two waves 
 which entirely depart from the principle observed by all the 
 rest, and spring high into the air. They have a message for us 
 ^ _ which it is important that we should understand. 
 
 § 34. Peculiar ac- ^ ^ ^ 
 
 tion of recoiling Their leap is not a preparation for breakinfj;-, 
 
 waves. .... T 1 1 • • • 1 r 
 
 neither is it caused by their meeting with a rock. 
 It is caused by their encounter with the recoil of the preced- 
 ing wave. When a large surge, in the act of breaking, just as 
 it curls over, is hurled against the face either of a wall or of a 
 vertical rock, the sound of the blow is not a crash nor a roar; 
 it is a report as loud as, and in every respect similar to, that 
 of a great gun, and the wave is dashed back from the rock 
 with force scarcely diminished, but reversed in direction, — 
 it now recedes from the shore, and at the instant that it en- 
 counters the following breaker, the result is the vertical 
 bound of both which is here rendered by Turner. Such a 
 recoiling wave will proceed out to sea through ten or twelve 
 ranges of following breakers, before it is overpowered. The 
 effect of the encounter is more completely and palpably 
 given in the Quilleboeuf, in the Rivers of France. It is 
 peculiarly instructive here, as informing us of the nature of 
 the coast, and the force of the waves, far more clearly than 
 any spray about the rocks themselves could have done. But 
 £. OK A ^ * the effect of the blow at the shore itself is 
 
 § 35. And of the 
 
 stroke of a breaker myen in the Land's End, and vi2:nette to 
 
 on the shore. ^ . . ^ 
 
 Lycidas. Under favorable circumstances, with 
 an advancing tide under a heavy gale, where the breakers feel 
 the shore underneath them a moment before they touch the 
 rock, so as to nod over when they strike, the effect is nearly 
 incredible except to an eye-witness. T have seen the w^hole 
 body of the wave rise in one white, vertical, broad fountain, 
 eighty feet above the sea, half of it beaten so fine as to be 
 borne away by the wind, the rest turning in the air when 
 exhausted, and falling back with a weight and crash like 
 
136 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 that of an enormous waterfall. This is given most com- 
 pletely in the Lycidas, and the blow of a less violent wave 
 among broken rocks, not meeting it with an absolute wall, 
 along the shore of the Land's End. This last picture is a 
 c QA n«„«,.oi study of sea whose whole ors^anization has 
 
 § 36. Gr e n e r a 1 o 
 
 character of sea been broken up by constant recoils from a 
 
 on a rocky coast ^ *^ 
 
 given by Turner rockv coast. The Laugrhame srives the surg-e 
 
 in the Land's End. i • , ^ , . ^ 
 
 and weight or the ocean in a gale, on a com- 
 paratively level shore ; but the Land's End, the entire dis- 
 order of the surges when every one of them, divided and 
 entangled among promontories as it rolls in, and beaten 
 back part by part from walls of rock on this side and that 
 side, recoils like the defeated division of a great army, 
 throwing all behind it into disorder, breaking up the suc- 
 ceeding waves into vertical ridges, which in their turn, yet 
 more totally shattered upon the shore, retire in more hope- 
 less confusion, until the whole surface of the sea becomes 
 one dizzy whirl of rushing, writhing, tortured, undirected 
 rage, bounding, and crashing, and coiling in an anarchy of 
 enormous power, subdivided into myriads of waves, of which 
 every one is not, be it remembered, a separate surge, but 
 part and portion of a vast one, actuated by internal power, 
 and giving in every direction the mighty undulation of im- 
 petuous line which glides over the rocks and writhes in the 
 wind, overwhelming the one, and piercing the other with the 
 form, fury, and swiftness of a sheet of lambent fire. And 
 throughout the rendering of all this, there is not one false 
 curve given, not one which is not the perfect expression oi 
 visible motion ; and the forms of the infinite sea are drawn 
 throughout with that utmost mastery of art which, through 
 the deepest study of every line, makes every line appear the 
 wildest child of chance, while yet each is in itself a subject 
 and a picture different from all else around. Of the color of 
 this magnificent sea I have before spoken ; it is a solemn 
 green gray, (with its foam seen dimly through the darkness 
 of twilight,) modulated with the fulness, changefulness, and 
 sadness of a deep, wild melody. 
 
 The greater number of Turner's paintings of open sea bo* 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 137 
 
 long to a somewhat earlier period than these drawings ; nor, 
 generally speaking, are they of equal value. It appears to 
 me that the artist had at that time either less 
 
 § 87. Open seas iti* i i 
 
 of Turner's ear- knowledge oi, or less delight in, the character- 
 iier times. istios of deep water than of coast sea, and that, 
 
 in consequence, he suffered himself to be influenced by some 
 of the qualities of the Dutch sea-painters. In particular, he 
 borrowed from them the habit of casting a dark shadow on 
 the near waves, so as to bring out a stream of light behind ; 
 and though he did this in a more legitimate way than they, 
 that is to say, expressing the light by touches on the foam, 
 and indicating the shadow as cast on foamy surface, still the 
 habit has induced much feebleness and conventionality 
 in the pictures of the period. His drawing of the waves 
 was also somewhat petty and divided, small forms covered 
 W'ith white flat spray, a condition which I doubt not the art- 
 ist has seen on some of the shallow Dutch seas, but which I 
 have never met with myself, and of the rendering of which 
 therefore I cannot speak. Yet even in these, which I think 
 among the poorest works of the painter, the expressions of 
 breeze, motion, and light, are very marvellous ; and it is in- 
 structive to compare them either with the lifeless works of 
 the Dutch themselves, or with any modern imitations of them, 
 as for instance with the seas of Callcott, where all the light 
 is white and all the shadows gray, where no distinction is 
 made between water and foam, or between real and reflec- 
 tive shadow, and which are generally without evidence of 
 the artists having ever seen the sea. 
 
 Some pictures, however, belonging to this period of Turner 
 are free from the Dutch infection, and show the real power 
 of the artist. A very important one is in the possession 
 of Lord Francis Egerton, somewhat heavy in its forms, but 
 remarkable for the grandeur of distance obtained at the 
 horizon ; a much smaller, but more powerful example is the 
 Port Ruysdael in the possession of E. Bickneil, Esq., with 
 which I know of no work at all comparable for the expres- 
 sion of the white, wild, cold, comfortless waves of northern 
 sea, even though the sea is almost subordinate to the awful 
 
138 OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TUBNEB. 
 
 rolling clouds. Both these pictures are very gray. The Pas 
 de Calais has more color, and shows more art than either, yet 
 is less impressive. Recently, two marines of the same sub- 
 dued color have appeared (1843) among his more radiant 
 works. One, Ostend, somewhat forced and affected, but the 
 other, also called Port Ruysdael, is among tlie most perfect 
 sea pictures he has produced, and especially remarkable as 
 being painted without one marked opposition either of color 
 or of shade, all quiet and simple even to an extreme, so that 
 the picture was exceedingly unattractive at first sight. The 
 shadow of the pier-head on the near waves is marked solely 
 by touches indicative of reflected light, and so mysteriously 
 that when the picture is seen near, it is quite untraceable, 
 and comes into existence as the spectator retires. It is thus 
 of peculiar truth and value ; and instructive as a contrast to 
 the dark shadows of his earlier time. 
 
 Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on 
 the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission 
 for three or four days and nights, and to those who have not, 
 I believe it must be unimasrinable, not from the 
 
 §38. Effect of sea . ^ J 
 
 after prolonged mere lorcc or size oi surge, but irom the com- 
 plete annihilation of the limit between sea and 
 air. The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten, not 
 into mere creaming foam, but into masses of accumulated 
 yeast,* which hang in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave, 
 
 * The * * yesty waves " of Shakspeare have made the likeness familiar, 
 and probably most readers take the expression as merely equivalent to 
 "foamy but Shakspeare knew better. Sea-foam does not, under 
 ordinary circumstances, last a moment after it is formed, but disap- 
 pears, as above described, in a mere white film. But the foam of a pro- 
 longed tempest is altogether different; it is ''whipped'* foam, — thick, 
 permanent, and, in a foul or discolored sea, very ugly, especially in the 
 way it hangs about the tops of the waves, and gathers into clotted con- 
 cretions before the driving wind. The sea looks truly working or fer- 
 menting. The following passage from Fenimore Cooper is an interest- 
 ing confirmation of the rest of the above description, which may be 
 depended upon as entirely free from exaggeration : — For the first time 
 I now witnessed a tempest at sea. Gales,, and pretty hard ones, I had 
 often seen, but the force of the wind on this occasion as much exceeded 
 that iu ordinary galea of wind, as the force of these had ex eedt'd that 
 
OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TTJBNEB, 139 
 
 and where one curls over to break, form a festoon like a dra- 
 pery, from its edge ; these are taken up by the wind, not in 
 dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling 
 masses, which make the air white and thick as with snow, 
 only the flakes are a foot or two long each ; the surges them- 
 selves are full of foam in their very bodies, underneath, mak- 
 ing them white all through, as the water is under a great 
 cataract ; and their masses, being thus half water and half 
 air, are torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise, and 
 carried away in roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles 
 like actual water. Add to this, that when the air has been 
 exhausted of its moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea 
 is caught by it as described above, (Section III. Chapter YI. 
 § 13,) and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of 
 finely divided water, but with boiling mist ; imagine also the 
 low rain-clouds brought down to the very level of the sea, as 
 I have often seen them, w^hirling and flying in rags and frag- 
 ments from wave to wave ; and finally, conceive the surges 
 themselves in their utmost pitch of power, velocity, vastness, 
 and madness, lifting themselves in precipices and peaks, fur- 
 rowed with their whirl of ascent, through all this chaos ; and 
 you will understand that there is indeed no distinction left 
 between the sea and air ; that no object, nor horizon, nor 
 any landmark or natural evidence of position is left ; that 
 the heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and that you 
 can see no farther in any direction than you could see 
 through a cataract. Suppose the effect of the first sunbeam 
 sent from above to show this annihilation to itself, and you 
 
 of a whole-sail breeze. The seas seemed crushed ; the pressure of the 
 swooping atmosphere, as the currents of the air went howling over the 
 surface of the ocean, fairly preventing them from rising ; or where a 
 mound of water did appear, it was scooped up and borne off in spray, as 
 the axe dubs inequalities from the loj;-. When the day returned, a 
 species of lurid, sombre light was diffused over the watery waste, though 
 nothing was visible but the ocean and the ship. Even the sea-birds 
 seemed to have taken refuge in the caverns of the adjacent coast, none 
 reappearing with the dawn. The air was full of spray, and it was with 
 difficulty that the eye could penetrate as far into the humid atmosphere as 
 half a mile. " — Miles WaUingford. Half a mile is an over-estimate in coast. 
 
i40 
 
 OF WATER, AS PAINTED BY TURNER. 
 
 have the sea picture of the Academy, 1842 — the Snow-storm, 
 one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist,, and 
 light that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner. Of 
 course it was not understood ; his finest works never are ; but 
 there was some apology for the public's not comprehending 
 this, for few people have had the opportunity of seeing the sea 
 at such a time, and when they have, cannot face it. To hold 
 by a mast or a rock, and watch it, is a prolonged endurance 
 of drowning which few people have courage to go through. 
 To those who have, it is one of the noblest lessons of nature. 
 
 But, I think, the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, 
 and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is 
 that of the Slave Ship, the chief Academy picture of the 
 „ „ ^ , Exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the 
 
 § 39. T u r n e r ' s 
 
 noblest work, the Atlantic after prolonsred storm ; but the storm 
 
 painting of the . • n i n i i i 
 
 deep open sea in IS partially lulled, and the torn and streamma: 
 
 the Slave Ship. • i i *• • i . v . i 
 
 rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose 
 themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of 
 sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of 
 enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad 
 heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by 
 deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between 
 these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough 
 of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the 
 intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes 
 like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing 
 waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift 
 themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting 
 a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined 
 foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four 
 together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under 
 strength of the swell compels or permits them ; leaving 
 between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling 
 water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flash- 
 ing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed 
 from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning 
 clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, 
 and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their 
 
OF WATEB, AS PAINTED BY TURNER, 141 
 
 own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the 
 hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which 
 gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death 
 upon the guilty * ship as it labors amidst the lightning of 
 the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, 
 girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs 
 the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the 
 sunlight, — and cast far along the desolate heave of the 
 sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. 
 
 I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality 
 upon any single work, I should choose this. Its daring con- 
 ception — ideal in the highest sense of the word — is based on 
 § 40. Its united purest truth, and wrought out with the con- 
 pStection^ as "a ccntratcd knowledge of a life ; its color is abso- 
 vvhoie. lutely perfect, not one false or morbid hue in 
 
 any part or line, and so modulated that every square inch of 
 canvas is a perfect composition ; its drawing as accurate as 
 fearless ; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of motion ; its 
 tones as true as they are wonderful ; "j" and the whole picture 
 dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions — 
 (completing thus the perfect system of all truth, which we 
 have shown to be formed by Turner's works) — the power, 
 majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable Sea. 
 
 * She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near sea ia 
 encumbered with corpses. 
 
 \ There is a piece of tone of the same kind, equal in one parb, but 
 not so united with the rest of the picture, in the storm scene illustrative 
 of the Antiquary, — a sunset light on polished sea. I ought to have 
 particularly mentioned the sea in the Lowestoffe, as a piece of the cut- 
 ting motion of shallow water, under storm, altogether in gray, which 
 should be especially contrasted, as a piece of color, with the grays of 
 Vandevelde. And the sea in the Great Yarmouth should have been 
 noticed for its expression of water in violent agitation, seen in enor- 
 mous extent from a great elevation. There is almost every form of 
 sea in it, — rolling waves dashing on the pier — successive breakers 
 rolling to the shore — a vast horizon of multitudinous waves — and 
 winding canals of calm water along the sands, bringing fragments of 
 bright sky down into their yellow waste. There is hardly one of the 
 views of the Southern Coast which does not give some new condition 
 or circumstance of sea. 
 
142 
 
 OF fEUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 OF TEUTH OF VEGETATION. -CONCLUSION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION". 
 
 We have now arrived at the consideration of what was, 
 with the old masters, the subject of most serious and per- 
 petual study. If they do not give us truth here, they can- 
 § 1. T^requent have tho^fao^lty of truth in them ; for 
 age"irthe°wOTks foliage is the chief component part of all their 
 of the old masters, pictures, and is finished by them with a care 
 and labor which, if bestowed without attaining truthj must 
 prove either their total bluntness of perception, or total 
 powerlessness of hand. With the Italian school I can 
 scarcely recollect a single instance in which foliage does not 
 form the greater part of the picture ; in fact, they are rather 
 painters of tree-portrait than landscape painters ; for rocks, 
 and sky, and architecture are usually mere accessories and 
 backgrounds to the dark masses of laborious foliage, of 
 which the composition principally consists. Yet we shall be 
 less detained by the examination of foliage than by our 
 former subjects ; since where specific form is organized and 
 complete, and the occurrence of the object universal, it is 
 easy, without requiring any laborious attention in the 
 reader, to demonstrate to him quite as much of the truth or 
 falsehood of various representations of it, as may serve to 
 * determine the character and rank of the painter. 
 
 It will be best to begin as nature does, with the stems and 
 branches, and then to put the leaves on. And in speaking 
 of trees generally, be it observed, when I say all trees, I 
 mean only those ordinary forest or copse trees of Europe, 
 which are the chief subjects of the landscape painter. I do 
 
OF TBUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 143 
 
 not mean to include every kind of foliage which by any 
 accident can find its way into a picture, but the ordinary 
 trees of ^]urope, — oak, elm, ash, hazel, willow, birch, beech, 
 poplar, chestnut, pine, mulberry, olive, ilex, carubbe, and 
 such others. I do not purpose to examine the character- 
 istics of each tree ; it will be enough to observe the laws 
 ^ ^ common to all. First, then, neither the stems 
 
 § 2. Laws common ' ^ 
 
 to all forest trees, nor the bouo^hs of auv of the above trees taper. 
 
 Their branches do i i ^ i ttt-i 
 
 not taper, but only except where they fork. Wherever a stem 
 sends off a branch, or a branch a lesser bough, 
 or a lesser bough a bud, the stem or the branch is, on the in- 
 stant, less in diameter by the exact quantity of the branch 
 or the bough they have sent off, and they remain of the 
 same diameter ; or if there be any change, rather increase 
 than diminish until they send off another branch or bough. 
 This law is imperative and without exception ; no bough, 
 nor stem, nor twig, ever tapering or becoming narrower 
 towards its extremity by a hairbreadth, save where it parts 
 with some portion of its substance at a fork or bud, so that 
 if all the twigs and sprays at the top and sides of the tree, 
 which are, and have beeUj could be united without loss of 
 space, they would form a round log of the diameter of the 
 trunk from which they spring. 
 
 But as the trunks of most trees send off twigs and sprays 
 of light under foliage, of which every individual fibre takes 
 precisely its own thickness of wood from the parent stem, and 
 as many of these drop off, leaving nothing but 
 
 § 3. Appearance j xi • ' j. 
 
 of tapering caused a Small excresceiice to record their existence, 
 by fiequent buds, ^j^^^.^ -g frequently a slight and delicate appear- 
 ance of tapering bestowed on the trunk itself ; while the same 
 operation takes place much more extensively in the branches, 
 it being natural to almost all trees to send out from their 
 young limbs more wood than they can support, which, as the 
 stem increases, gets contracted at the point of insertion, so 
 as to check the flow of the sap, and then dies and drops off, 
 leaving all along the bough, first on one side, then on another, 
 a series of small excrescences, sufficient to account for a de- 
 gree of tapering, which is yet so very slight, that if we select 
 
144 
 
 OF TMUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 a portion of a branch with no real fork or living bough to 
 divide it or diminish it, the tapering is scarcely to be detected 
 by the eye ; and if we select a portion without such evidences 
 of past ramification, there will be found none w^hatsoever. 
 
 But nature takes great care and pains to conceal this uni- 
 formity in her boughs. They are perpetually parting with 
 little sprays here and there, which steal away their substance 
 cautiously, and where the eye does not perceive 
 nal'ure'to conceal the theft, Until, a little way above, it feels the 
 
 the parallelism. i ^ £ j.\ 
 
 loss ; and in the upper parts or the tree, the 
 ramifications take place so constantly and delicately, that the 
 eifect upon the eye is precisely the same as if the boughs ac- 
 tually tapered, except here and there, where some avaricious 
 one, greedy of substance, runs on for two or three yards with- 
 out parting with anything, and becomes ungraceful in so 
 doing. 
 
 Hence we see that although boughs may, and must be rep- 
 resented as actually tapering, they must only be so when 
 they are sending off foliage and sprays, and when they are at 
 § 5. The degree of such a distance that the particular forks and 
 
 inarbe^represint^ divisioUS CaUUOt be evident to the eye ; and far- 
 ed as continuous, ther, even in such circumstances the tapering 
 never can be sudden or rapid. No bough ever, with appear- 
 ance of smooth tapering, loses more than one tenth of its 
 diameter in a length of ten diameters. Any greater diminu- 
 tion than this must be accounted for by visible ramification, 
 and must take place by steps, at each fork. 
 
 And therefore we see at once that the stem of Gaspar Pous- 
 sin's tall tree, on the right of the I^a Riccia, in the National 
 Gallery, is a painting of a carrot or a parsnip, not of the 
 §6. The trees of trunk of a tree. For, being so near that every 
 Gaspar Poussin ; individual leaf is visible, we should not have seen, 
 in nature, one branch or stem actually tapering. We should 
 have received an impression of graceful diminution ; but we 
 should have been able, on examination, to trace it joint by 
 joint, fork by fork, into the thousand minor supports of the 
 leaves. Gaspar Poussin's stem, on the contrary, only sends 
 off four or five minor branches altogether, and both it and 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 145 
 
 they taper violently, and without showing why or wherefore 
 — without parting with a single twig — without showing one 
 vestige of roughness or excrescence — and leaving, therefore, 
 their unfortunate leaves to hold on as best they may. The 
 latter, however, are clever leaves, and support themselves as 
 swarming bees do, hanging on by each other. 
 
 But even this piece of work is a jest to the perpetration 
 of the bough at the left-hand upper corner of the picture 
 opposite to it, — the View near Albano. This latter is a rep- 
 § 7. And of the resentation of an ornamental group of ele- 
 gfne?aDy,''de7 phauts' tusks, with feathers tied to the ends of 
 this law. them. Not the wildest imagination could ever 
 
 conjure up in it the remotest resemblance to the bough of a 
 tree. It might be the claws of a witch — the talons of an 
 eagle — the horns of a fiend ; but it is a full assemblage of 
 every conceivable falsehood which can be told respecting foli- 
 age — a piece of work so barbarous in every way, that one 
 glance at it ought to prove the complete charlatanism and 
 trickery of the whole system of the old landscape painters. 
 For I will depart for once from my usual plan, of abstaining 
 from all assertion of a thing's being beautiful or otherwise ; 
 I will say here, at once, that such drawing as this is as ugly 
 as it is childish, and as painful as it is false ; and that the 
 man who could tolerate, much more, who could deliberately 
 set down such a thing on his canvas, had neither eye nor feel- 
 ing for one single attribute of excellence of God's works. 
 He might have drawn the other stem in excusable ignorance, 
 or under some false impression of being able to improve upon 
 nature ; but this is conclusive and unpardonable. Again, 
 take the stem of the chief tree in Claude's Narcissus. It is 
 a very faithful portrait of a large boa-constrictor, with a 
 handsome tail ; the kind of trunk which young ladies at fash- 
 ionable boarding-schools represent with nosegays at the top 
 of them, by way of forest scenery. 
 
 Let us refresh ourselves for a moment, by looking at the 
 § 8 The truth need not go to Turner, we will go 
 
 as it is given by to the man who, next to him, is unquestionably 
 
 J. D. Harding. . ' ^ ^ . . ' . ^ ^ ^ 
 
 the greatest master of foliage m Europe — J. D, 
 Vol II.— 10 
 
146 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 Harding. Take the trunk of the^ largest stone-pine, Plate 
 25, in the Park and the Forest. For the first nine or ten 
 feet from the ground it does not lose one hairbreadth of its 
 diameter. But the shoot, broken off just under the crossing 
 part of the distant tree, is followed by an instant diminu- 
 tion of the trunk, perfectly appreciable both by the eye and the 
 compasses. Again, the stem maintains undiminished thick- 
 ness, up to the two shoots on the left, from the loss of which 
 it suffers again perceptibly. On the right, immediately 
 above, is the stump of a very large bough, whose loss re- 
 duces the trunk suddenly to about two-thirds of what it was 
 at the root. Diminished again, less considerably, by the 
 minor branch close to this stump, it now retains its diameter 
 up to the three branches, broken off just under the head, 
 where it once more loses in diameter, and finally branches into 
 the multitude of head-boughs, of which not one will be 
 found tapering in any part, but losing themselves gradually 
 by division among their offshoots and spray. This is nature, 
 and beauty too. 
 
 But the old masters are not satisfied with drawing carrots 
 for boughs. Nature can be violated in more ways than one, 
 and the industry with which they seek out and adopt every 
 
 § 9. Boughs, in conceivable mode of contradicting her is mat- 
 consequence of. /» n*x J. Tx* 'J^i? 
 
 this law, must ter oi no Small interest. It is evident, irom 
 thTy'^'dVvTdl'! what we have above stated of the structure of 
 Those of the old trccs, that as no bouo-hs diminish where they 
 
 masters often do ' » ... 
 
 not- do not fork, so they cannot fork without dimin- 
 
 ishing. It is impossible that the smallest shoot can be sent 
 out of a bough without a diminution of the diameter above it ; 
 g.nd wherever a branch goes off it must not only be less in 
 diameter than the bough from which it springs, but the bough 
 beyond the fork must be less by precisely the quantity of the 
 branch it has sent off.* Now observe the bough underneath 
 
 * It sometimes happens that a morbid direction of growth will cause 
 an exception here and there to this rule, the bough swelling beyond its 
 legitimate size ; knots and excrescences, of course, sometimes interfere 
 with the effect of diminution. I believe that in the laurel, when it 
 grows large and old, singular instances may be found of thick upper 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 147 
 
 the first bend of the great stem in Claude's Narcissus ; it 
 sends off four branches like the ribs of a leaf. The two low- 
 est of these are both quite as thick as the parent stem, and 
 the stem itself is much thicker after it has sent off the first 
 one than it was before. The top boughs of the central tree, 
 in the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, ramify in the same sci- 
 entific way. 
 
 But there are further conclusions to be drawn from this 
 great principle in trees. As they only diminish where they 
 divide, their increase of number is in precise proportion to 
 their diminution of size, so that whenever we 
 
 § 10. Boughs must . . \ , , 
 
 multiply as they come to the extremities ot boughs, we must have 
 
 diminish. Those , ^ j> ai ' . ^ i - j» 
 
 of the old masters a multitude ot sprays sutticient to make up, it 
 ^*^"^** they were united, the bulk of that from which 
 
 they spring. Where a bough divides into two equal ramifi- 
 cations, the diameter of each of the two is about two-thirds 
 that of the single one, and the sum* of their diameters, there- 
 fore, one-fourth greater than the diameter of the single one. 
 Hence, if no boughs died or were lost, the quantity of wood 
 in the sprays would appear one-fourth greater than would be 
 necessary to make up the thickness of the trunk. But the lost 
 boughs remove the excess, and therefore, speaking broadly, 
 the diameters of the outer boughs put together would gen- 
 erally just make up the diameter of the trunk. Precision in 
 representing this is neither desirable nor possible. All that 
 is required is just so much observance of the general principle 
 as may make the eye feel satisfied that there is something 
 like the same quantity of wood in the sprays which there is 
 in the stem. But to do this, there must be, what there always 
 is in nature, an exceeding complexity of the outer sprays. 
 This complexity gradually increases towards their extremities, 
 of course exactly in proportion to the slenderness of the twigs. 
 The slenderer they become, the more there are of them, until 
 at last, at the extremities of the tree, they form a mass of in- 
 
 boughs and over quantity of wood at the extremities. All these acci- 
 dents or exceptions are felt as such by the eye. They may occasionally 
 be used by the painter in savage or grotesque scenery, or as points of 
 contrast, but are no excuse for his ever losing sight of the general law. 
 
148 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 tricacy, which in winter, when it can be seen, is scarcely dis' 
 tinguishable from fine herbage, and is beyond all power of 
 definite representation ; it can only be expressed by a mass 
 of involved strokes. Also, as they shoot out in every direc- 
 tion, some are nearer, some more distant ; some distinct, some 
 faint ; and their intersections and relations of distance are 
 marked with the most exquisite gradations of aerial perspec- 
 tive. Now it will be found universally in the works of 
 Claude, Gaspar, and Salvator, that the boughs do not get in 
 the least complex or multiplied towards the extremities — that 
 each large limb forks only into two or three smaller ones, each 
 of which vanishes into the air without any cause or reason for 
 such unaccountable conduct — unless that the mass of leaves 
 transfixed upon it or tied to it, entirely dependent on its sin- 
 gle strength, have been too much, as well they may be, for 
 its powers of solitary endurance. This total ignorance of tree 
 structure is shown throughout their works. The Sinon before 
 Priam is an instance of it in a really fine work of Claude's, 
 but the most gross examples are in the works of Salvator. 
 § 11. Bough-draw- 1^ appears that this latter artist was hardly in 
 ing of Salvator. ^j^^ of studying from nature at all after 
 
 his boyish ramble among the Calabrian hills ; and I do not 
 recollect any instance of a piece of his bough-drawing which 
 is not palpably and demonstrably a made-up phantasm of the 
 studio, the proof derivable from this illegitimate tapering 
 being one of the most convincing. The painter is always vis- 
 ibly embarrassed to reduce the thick boughs to spray, and 
 feeling (for Salvator naturally had acute feeling for truth) 
 that the bough was wrong when it tapered suddenly, he 
 accomplishes its diminution by an impossible protraction ; 
 throwing out shoot after shoot until his branches straggle all 
 across the picture, and at last disappear unwillingly where 
 there is no room for them to stretch any farther. The con- 
 sequence is, that whatever leaves are put upon such boughs 
 have evidently no adequate support, their power of leverage 
 is enough to uproot the tree ; or if the boughs are left bare, 
 they have the look of the long tentacula of some complicated 
 marine monster, or of the waving endless threads of bunchy 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 'l49 
 
 sea-weed, instead of the fimi, upholding, braced, and bending 
 grace of natural boughs. I grant that this is in a measure 
 done by Salvator from a love of ghastliness, and that in cer- 
 tain scenes it is in a sort allowable ; but it is in a far greater 
 degree done from pure ignorance of tree structure, as is suf- 
 ficiently proved by the landscape of the Pitti palace, Peace 
 burning the arms of War ; where the spirit of the scene is 
 intended to be quite other than ghastly, and yet the tree 
 branches show the usual errors in an extraordinary degree ; 
 every one of their arrangements is impossible, and the trunk 
 qf the tree could not for a moment support the foliage it is 
 loaded with. So also in the pictures of the Guadagni palace. 
 And even where the skeleton look of branches is justifiable or 
 desirable, there is no occasion for any violation of natural 
 laws. I have seen more spectral character in the real limbs 
 of a blasted oak, than ever in Salvator's best monstrosities ; 
 more horror is to be obtained by right combination of inven- 
 tive line, than by drawing tree branches as if they were wing- 
 bones of a pterodactyle. All departure from natural forms 
 to give fearfulness is mere Germanism ; it is the work of 
 fancy, not of imagination,* and instantly degrades whatever 
 it affects to third-rate level. There is nothing more marked 
 in truly great men, than their power of being dreadful with- 
 out being false or licentious. In Tintoret's Murder of Abel, 
 the head of the sacrificed firstling lies in the corner of the 
 foreground, obscurely sketched in, and with the light gleam- 
 ing upon its glazed eyes. There is nothing exaggerated about 
 the head, but there is more horror got out of it, and more of 
 death suggested by its treatment, than if he had turned all 
 the trees of his picture into skeletons, and raised a host of 
 demons to drive the club. 
 
 It is curious that in Salvator's sketches or 
 
 § 12. All these 
 
 errors especially etchino^s there is less that is wrons' than in his 
 
 shown in Claude's . . e ^ 
 
 sketches, and paintings, — there seems a fresher remembrance 
 work of G. Pous- of nature about them. Not so with Claude. It 
 ^ ^* is only by looking over his sketches, in the Brit- 
 
 * Compare Part III. Sect. II. Chap. IV. § 6, 7. 
 
150 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 ish Museum, that a complete and just idea is to be formed of his 
 capacities of error ; for the feeling and arrangement of many 
 of them are those of an advanced age, so that we can scarcely 
 set them down for what they resemble — the work of a boy ten 
 years old ; and the drawing being seen without any aids of 
 tone or color to set it off, shows in its naked falsehood. The 
 windy landscape of Poussin, opposite the Dido and -^neas, 
 in the National Gallery, presents us, in the foreground tree, 
 with a piece of atrocity which I think, to any person who 
 candidly considers it, may save me all farther trouble of dem- 
 onstrating the errors of ancient art. I do not in the least 
 suspect the picture : the tones of it, and much of the handling, 
 are masterly ; yet that foreground tree comprises every con- 
 ceivable violation of truth which the human hand can commit, 
 or head invent, in drawing a tree — except only, that it is not 
 drawn root uppermost. It has no bark, no roughness nor 
 character of stem ; its boughs do not grow out of each other, 
 but are stuck into each other ; they ramify without diminish- 
 ing, diminish without ramifying, are terminated by no com- 
 plicated sprays, have their leaves tied to their ends, like the 
 heads of Dutch brooms ; and finally, and chiefly, they are 
 evidently not made of wood, but of some soft elastic sub- 
 stance, which the wind can stretch out as it pleases, for there 
 is not a vestige of an angle in any one of them. Now, the 
 13 I bit ^^^^^^^ wind that ever blew upon the earth, 
 of the angles of could not take the angles out of the bough of a 
 en"out''of^themby tree an iuch thick. The whole bough bends 
 together, retaining its elbows, and angles, and 
 natural form, but affected throughout with curvature in each 
 of its parts and joints. That part of it which was before 
 perpendicular being bent aside, and that which was before 
 sloping, being bent into still greater inclination, the angle at 
 which the two parts meet remains the same ; or if the strain 
 be put in the opposite direction, the bough will break long 
 before it loses its angle. You will find it difficult to bend the 
 angles out of the youngest sapling, if they be marked ; and 
 absolutely impossible, with a strong bough. You may break 
 it, but you will not destroy its angles. And if you watch a 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 151 
 
 tree in the wildest storm, you will find that though all its 
 boughs are bending, none lose their character but the utmost 
 shoots and sapling spray. Hence Gaspar Poussin, by his bad 
 drawing, does not make his storm strong, but his tree weak ; 
 he does not make his gust violent, but his boughs of India- 
 rubber. 
 
 These laws respecting vegetation are so far more impera- 
 tive than those which were stated respecting water, that the 
 greatest artist cannot violate them without danger, because 
 § 14. Bough-draw- they are laws resulting from organic structure, 
 ing of Titian. which it is always painful to see interrupted ; 
 on the other hand, they have this in common with all laws, 
 that they may be observed with mathematical precision, yet 
 with no grateful result ; the disciplined eye and the life in the 
 woods are worth more than all botanical knowledge. For 
 there is that about the growing of the tree trunk, and that 
 grace in its upper ramification which cannot be taught, and 
 which cannot even be seen but by eager watchfulness. There 
 is not an Exhibition passes, but there appear in it hundreds 
 of elaborate paintings of trees, many of them executed from 
 nature. For three hundred years back, trees have been drawn 
 with affection by all the civilized nations of Europe, and yet 
 I repeat boldly, what I before asserted, that no men but Ti- 
 tian and Turner ever drew the stem of a tree. 
 
 Generally, I think, the perception of the muscular qualities 
 of the tree trunk incomplete, except in men who have studied 
 the human figure, and in loose expression of those characters, 
 the painter who can draw the living muscle seldom fails ; but 
 the thoroughly peculiar lines belonging to woody fibre, can 
 only be learned by patient forest study ; and hence in all the 
 trees of the merely historical painters, there is fault of some 
 kind or another, commonly exaggeration of the muscular 
 swellings, or insipidity and want of spring in curvature, or 
 fantasticism and unnaturalness of arrangement, and especially 
 a want of the peculiar characters of bark which express the 
 growth and age of the tree ; for bark is no mere excrescence, 
 lifeless and external — it is a skin of especial significance in 
 its indications of the organic form beneath ; in places under 
 
152 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 the arms of the tree it wrinkles up and forms fine lines round 
 the trunk, inestimable in their indication of the direction of 
 its surface ; in others, it bursts or peels longitudinally, and 
 the rending and bursting of it are influenced in direction and 
 degree by the under-growth and swelling of the woody fibre, 
 and are not a mere roughness and granulated pattern of the 
 hide. Where there are so many points to be observed, some 
 are almost always exaggerated, and others missed, according 
 to the predilections of the painter. Rembrandt and Albert 
 Durer have given some splendid examples of woody texture, 
 but both miss the grace of the great lines. Titian took a 
 larger view and reached a higher truth, yet (as before no- 
 ticed) from the habit of drawing the figure, he admits too 
 much flaccidity and bend, and sometimes makes his tree trunks 
 look flexible like sea-weed. There is a peculiar stiffness and 
 spring about the curves of the wood, which separates them 
 completely from animal curves, and which especially defies 
 recollection or invention ; it is so subtile that it escapes but 
 too often, even in the most patient study from nature ; it lies 
 within the thickness of a pencil line. Farther, the modes of 
 ramification of the upper branches are so varied, inventive, 
 and graceful, that the least alteration of them, even in the 
 measure of a hair-breadth, spoils them ; and though it is 
 sometimes possible to get rid of a troublesome bough, acci- 
 dentally awkward, or in some minor respects to assist the 
 arrangement, yet so far as the real branches are copied, the 
 hand libels their lovely curvatures even in its best attempts 
 to follow them. 
 
 These two characters, the woody stiffness hinted through 
 muscular line, and the inventive grace of the upper boughs, 
 have never been rendered except by Turner ; he does not 
 § 15. Bough-draw- ^i^i^ely draw them better than others, but he is 
 ing of Turner. -^j^^ Only man who has ever drawn them at all. 
 Of the woody character, the tree subjects of the Liber Studi- 
 orum afford marked examples ; the Cephalus and Procris, 
 scenes near the Grand Chartreuse and Blair Athol, Juvenile 
 Tricks, and Hedging and Ditching, may be particularized ; 
 in the England series, the Bolton Abbey is perhaps a more 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 153 
 
 characteristic and thoroughly Turneresque example than 
 any. 
 
 Of the arrangement of the upper boughs, the ^sacus and 
 Hesperie is perhaps the most consummate example, the ab- 
 solute truth and simplicity and freedom from anything like 
 fantasticism or animal form being as marked on the one hand, 
 as the exquisite imaginativeness of the lines on the other : 
 among the Yorkshire subjects the Aske Hall, Kirby Lonsdale 
 Churchyard, and Brignall Church are most characteristic : 
 among the England subjects the Warwick, Dartmouth Cove, 
 Durham, and Chain Bridge over the Tees, where the piece 
 of thicket on the right has been well rendered by the en- 
 graver, and is peculiarly expressive of the aerial relations and 
 play of light among complex boughs. The vignette at the 
 opening of Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, that of Chiefswood 
 Cottage in the Illustrations to Scott's Works, and the Chateau 
 de la belle Gabrielle, engraved for the Keepsake, are among 
 the most graceful examples accessible to every one ; the 
 Crossing the Brook wdll occur at once to those acquainted 
 with the artist's gallery. The drawing of the stems in all 
 these instances, and indeed in all the various and frequent 
 minor occurrences of such subject throughout the painter's 
 works is entirely unique, there is nothing of the same kind 
 in art. 
 
 Let us, however, pass to the leafage of the elder landscape 
 painters, and see if it atones for the deficiencies 
 variety and sym- of the stems. One of the most remarkable 
 characters of natural leafage is the constancy 
 with which, while the leaves are arranged on the spray with 
 exquisite regularity, that regularity is modified in their actual 
 effect. For as in every group of leaves some are seen side- 
 ways, 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 them- 
 selves 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 
 
154 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 disorder of innumerable 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, bi^t never enough to repeat in one group 
 what was done in another — never enough to prevent the eye 
 from feeling that, however regular and mathematical may be 
 the structure of parts, what 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 do not twist it about 
 as you work,) you find one form of a leaf exactly like an- 
 other ; perhaps you 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 2:0 to Gaspar Poussin, and take 
 
 § 17 Perfect reg- . . 
 
 ularity of Pous- ouc of his sprays where they 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 precisely the same as its 
 neighbor, 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 de- 
 scribed, one bunch to each claw. 
 
 But if nature is so various when you have a bough 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 
 tdoa^^S^nature^s the sky, a confusion which you might as well 
 foliage. 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 always trans- 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 155 
 
 parent, 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 hollow^s ; 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 gray network down the glossy stems, and 
 resting in quiet checkers upon the glittering earth ; but all 
 penetrable 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 w^reath 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. 
 
 Now, with thus much of nature in your mind, go to Gaspar 
 Poussin's View near Albano, in the National Gallery. It is 
 ^ the very subject to unite all these effects, — a sloping bank 
 § 19. How con- shaded with intertwined forest ; — and what has 
 See^-^pattems *of Gr^-spar givcu US ? A mass of smooth, opaque, 
 G. Poussin. varnished brown, without one interstice, one 
 change o^ hue, or any vestige of leafy structure in its inte- 
 rior, 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, al- 
 ways 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 carefully made darker and darker as it re- 
 cedes from each until it comes to the edsre of the next, ae-ainst 
 which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins 
 to decline again, until the canvas is covered, with about as 
 
156 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION'. 
 
 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 favor of the old masters can for a moment sup- 
 pose to resemble trees ? It is exactly what the most igno- 
 rant beginner, trying to make a complete drawing, w^ould lay 
 down, — exactly the conception 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 inferior 
 tree-painters. I will not insult Harding by mentioning his 
 work after it, but take Creswick, for instance, and match one 
 § 20 How foi sparkling bits of green leafage with this 
 
 lowed by Ores- tree -pattern of Poussin's. I do not say there 
 
 wick. . T . , . . , , 
 
 IS not a dignity and impressiveness about the 
 old landscape, owing to its simplicity ; and I am very far 
 from calling Creswick's good tree-painting ; it is false in 
 color 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 
 Foussin'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 gray, 
 aerial transparency of the stunted copse on the left, and the 
 entangling of the boughs where the light near foliage de- 
 taches 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 accidently from the shadow, and presenting, as the 
 masses of all trees do, in general outline, a resemblance to 
 the specific forms of the leaves of which they are composed. 
 Turn over the page, and look into the weaving of the foliage 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 157 
 
 and sprays against the dark night-sky, how near they are, 
 yet how untraceable ; see how the moonlight creeps up un- 
 derneath 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 confu- 
 sion, 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 ex- 
 ceeding harmony and repose. She is so intricate that her 
 minuteness of parts becomes to the eye, at a 
 l^si.^Perfectuni- distance, one united veil or cloud of leaves, 
 
 foUage. destroy the evenness of which is perhaps a 
 
 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 be- 
 comes fainter and fainter, as it retires, with the most deli- 
 cate 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 great- 
 est possible advantage, by throwing it across some quiet, 
 visionary passage of dimness and rest. 
 
 It is here that Hobbima and Both fail. They can paint 
 oak leafage faithfully, but do not know where 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 
 
 § 22. Total want -, i . ^ •> 
 
 of it in Both and work Only gives two Icavcs 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 impossi- 
 ble that leaves should be separately seen, yet, being incapa- 
 ble 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. Never- 
 theless there is a genuine aim in their works, and their fail- 
 ure is rather to be attributed to ignorance of art, than to 
 
158 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 such want of sense for nature as we find in Claude or Poussin ; 
 and when 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 on the 
 left in Turner's Marly.^ We have there perfect and cease- 
 less intricacy to oppose to Poussin, — perfect and unbroken 
 § 23. How ren- repose to oppose to Hobbima ; and in the unity 
 dered by Turner, ^^^^^ ^-^e perfection of truth. This 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 intermin- 
 gled light and leafage, instead of perpetual repetition of one 
 mechanical touch. 
 
 I have already spoken (Section II. Chapter lY. § 15,) of 
 the way in which mystery and intricacy are carried even into 
 the nearest leaves of the foreground, and noticed the want of 
 „ ^. such intricacy even in the best works of the old 
 
 § 24. The near 
 
 leafage of mastcrs. Claudc's are particularly deficient, for 
 
 Claude. Hismid- . • i i /. i 
 
 die distances are 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 Section II. 
 Chapter III. § 7,) nor sparkling lights, nor confused intersec- 
 tions of their own forms and lines ; and the perpetual repe- 
 tition of the same shape of leaves and the same arrangement, 
 relieved from a black ground, is more like an ornamental pat- 
 tern for dress than the painting of a foreground. Never- 
 theless, the foliage of Claude, in his middle distances, is the 
 finest and truest part of his pictures, and, on the whole, af- 
 fords the best example of good drawing to be found in an- 
 cient art. It is always false in color, 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, flex- 
 
 * This group I have before noticed as singularly (but, I doubt not, 
 accidentally, and in consequence of the love of the two great painters 
 for the same grand forms) resembling that introduced by Tintoret in 
 the background of his Cain and Abel. 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION 
 
 159 
 
 ible, abundant, intricate ; and, in all but color and connec- 
 tion with stems, very nearly right. Of the perfect painting 
 of thick, leafy foreground, Turner's Mercury and Argus, and 
 Oakhainpton, are the standards.^ 
 
 The last and most important truth to be observed respect- 
 ing trees, is that their boughs alvi^ays, in finely grown indi- 
 viduals, bear among themselves such a ratio of length as to 
 § 25. Universal describe with their extremities a symmetrical 
 treS^^n^symmei^ curve, Constant for each species ; and within 
 ncai curves. ^j^-g (jupve all the irregularities, segments, and 
 divisions of the tree are included, each bough 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 
 
 * The above paragraphs I have left as originally written, because they 
 are quite true as far as they reach ; but like many other portions of 
 this essay, they take in a very 8mall portion of the truth. I shall not 
 add to them at present, because I can explain my meaning better in 
 our consideration of the laws of beauty ; but the reader must bear in 
 mind that what :'s above stated refers, throughout, to large masses of 
 foliage seen under broad sunshine, — and it has especial reference to 
 Turner's enormous scale of scene, and intense desire of light. In twi- 
 light, when tree-forms are seen against sky, other laws come into operr.- 
 tion, as well as in subject of narrow limits and near foreground. It is, 
 I think, to be regretted that Turner does not in his Academy pictures 
 sometimes take more confined and gloomy subjects, like that grand one, 
 near the Chartreuse, of the Liber Studiorum, wherein his magnificent 
 power of elaborating close foliage might be developed ; but, for the 
 present, let the reader, with respect to what has been here said of close 
 foliage, note the drawing of the leaves in that plate, in the ^sacus and 
 Hesperie, and the Cephalus, and the elaboration of the foregrounds in the 
 Yorkshire drawings; let him compare what is said of Turner's foliage 
 painting above in Part II. Sect. I. Chap. VII. g 40, § 41, and of Titian's 
 previously, as well as Part III. Sect. I. Chap. VIIL, and Sect. II. Chap. 
 IV. g 21. I shall hereafter endeavor to arrange the subject in a more 
 systematic manner ; but what additional observations I may have to 
 make will none of them be in any wise more favorable to Gaspar, Sal- 
 va-t-QT' oi: Hobbima, than the above paragraphs. 
 
160 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 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 neighbors, 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 im- 
 patience of the upper shoots frequently breaks the line ; but 
 in perfect and mature trees, every bough does its duty com- 
 pletely, 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 
 § 26 Altogether ^^^wnmost. The old masters paid no attention 
 unobserved by whatsoever to this s^reat principle. They swing: 
 
 the old masters. i . i i i \ 
 
 Always given by 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 extremi- 
 ties.* 
 
 But I need scarcely tell any one in the slightest degree ac- 
 quainted with the works of Turner, how rigidly and con- 
 stantly he adheres to this principle of nature ; taking in his 
 highest compositions the perfect ideal form, every spray be- 
 ing 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 in- 
 variably hinting the constant tendency in all, and thus, in 
 
 * Perhaps in some instances, this may be 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 individ- 
 ual 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- 
 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. 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 161 
 
 spite of his abundant complexity, he arranges his trees under 
 simpler and grander forms than any other artist, even among 
 the moderns. 
 
 It was above asserted that J. D. Harding is, after Turner, 
 the greatest master of foliage in Europe ; I ought, however, 
 to state that my knowledge of the modern landscape of Ger- 
 § 27 Foliage ^^^^J ^^^Y limited, and that, even with respect 
 painting on the to France and Italy, I judge rather from the 
 general tendency of study and character of mind 
 visible in the annual Exhibition of the Louvre, and in some 
 galleries of modern paintings at Milan, Venice, and Florence, 
 than from any detailed acquaintance with the works of their 
 celebrated painters. Yet I think I can hardly be mistaken. 
 I have seen nothing to induce me to take a closer survey ; no 
 life know^ledge or emotion in any quarter ; nothing but the 
 meanest and most ignorant copyism of vulgar details, coupled 
 with a style of conception resembling that of the various litho- 
 graphic ideals on the first leaves of the music of pastoral bal- 
 lads. An exception ought, however, to be made in favor of 
 French etching ; some studies in black and white may be seen 
 in the narrow passages of the Louvre of very high merit, show- 
 ing great skill and delicacy of execution, and most determined 
 industry ; (in fact, I think when the French artist fails, it is 
 never through fear of labor ;) nay, more than this, some of 
 them exhibit acute perception of landscape character and 
 great power of reaching simple impressions of gloom, wild- 
 ness, sound, and motion. Some of their illustrated works also 
 exhibit these powers in a high degree ; there is a spirit, fire, 
 and sense of reality about some of the wood-cuts to the large 
 edition of Paul and Virginia, and a determined rendering of 
 separate feeling in each, such as we look for in vain in our 
 own ornamental works.* But the French appear to have no 
 teaching such as might carry them beyond this ; their entire 
 ignorance of color renders the assumption of the brush in- 
 stantly fatal, and the false, forced, and impious sentiment of 
 
 * On the other hand, nothing can be more exquisitely ridiculous than 
 the French illustrations of a second or third-rate order, as those to the 
 Harmonies of Lamartine. 
 Vol. II.— 11 
 
162 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 the nation renders anything like grand composition altogether 
 impossible. 
 
 It is therefore only among good artists of our own school 
 that I think any fair comparison can be instituted, and I wish 
 to assert Harding's knowledge of foliage more distinctly, be- 
 cause he neither does -justice to himself, nor is, 
 
 § 28. Foliage of ^ , i • i - ^ .^ n i i • o ^^ . 
 
 J. D. Harding, i think, rightly estimated by his fellow-artists. 
 
 Its deficiencies. t ^ l^ i. ^ i 
 
 1 shall not make any invidious remarks respect- 
 ing individuals, but I think it necessary to state generally, 
 that the style of foliage painting chiefly characteristic of the 
 pictures on the line of the Royal Academy is of the most de- 
 graded kind ; * and that, except Turner and Mulready, we 
 have, as far as I know, no Royal Academician capable of 
 painting even the smallest portion of foliage in a dignified 
 or correct manner ; all is lost in green shadows with glitter- 
 ing yellow lights, white trunks with black patches on them, 
 and leaves of no species in particular. Much laborious and 
 clever foliage drawing is to be found in the rooms of the New 
 Water-Color Society ; but we have no one in any wise com- 
 parable to Harding for thorough knowledge of the subject, 
 for power of expression in a sketch from nature, or for natural 
 and unaffected conception in the study. 
 
 Maintaining for him this high position, it is necessary that 
 I should also state those deficiencies which appear to me to 
 conceal his real power, and in no small degree to prevent his 
 progress. 
 
 His over-fondness for brilliant execution I have already 
 noticed. He is fonder of seeing something tolerably like a 
 tree produced with few touches, than something very like a 
 tree produced with many. Now, it is quite al- 
 
 §29, His brill- , , , 1 . „ 1 . . i? 1 . 
 
 iancy of execu- lowable that Occasionally, and in portions or his 
 
 tion too manifest. . , > . i i» !/»• 
 
 picture, a great artist should indulge himselt in 
 this luxury of sketching, yet it is a perilous luxury ; it blunts 
 the feeling and weakens the hand. I have said enough in 
 various places respecting the virtues of negligence and of 
 
 * Of Stanfield's foliage I remember too little to enable me to form any 
 definite judjrment ; it is a pity that he so much neglects this noble ele- 
 ment of landscape. 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 163 
 
 finish, (compare above the chapter on Ideas of Power in Part 
 1. Sect. II., and Part III. Sect. I. Ch. X. § 4,) and I need only 
 say here, therefore, that Harding's foliage is never suffi- 
 ciently finished, and has at its best the look of a rapid 
 sketch from nature touched upon at home. In 1843, (I 
 think,) there was a pretty drawing in the rooms of the 
 Water-Color Society, — the clear green water of a torrent 
 resting among stones, with copse-like wood on each side, a 
 bridge in the distance, a white flower (water-lily ?) catching 
 the eye in front ; the tops of the trees on the left of this 
 picture were mere broad blots of color dashed upon the sky 
 and connected by stems. I allow the power necessary to at- 
 tain any look of foliage by such means, but it is power 
 abused : b}" no such means can any of the higher virtue and 
 impressiveness of foliage be rendered. In the use of body 
 color for near leaves, his execution is also too hasty ; often 
 the touches are mere square or round dots, which can be un- 
 derstood only for foliage by their arrangement. This fault was 
 especially marked in the trees of his picture painted for the 
 Academy two years ago ; they were very nearly shapeless, 
 and could not stand even in courtesy for walnut leaves, for 
 which, judging by the make of the tree, they must have been 
 intended. 
 
 His drawing of boughs is, in all points of demonstrable 
 law, right, and very frequently easy and graceful also ; yet 
 it has two eminent faults, the first, that the flow of the bough 
 is sacrificed to its texture, the pencil checkino- 
 
 § 30. His bough- ' ^ . . ^ 
 
 drawing and itseli and hcsitatmg at dots, and stripes, and 
 knots, instead of following the grand and un- 
 broken tendency of growth : the second, that however good 
 the arrangement may be as far as regards merely flexibility, 
 intricacy, and freedom, there are none of those composed 
 groups of line which are unfailing in nature. Harding's work 
 is not grand enough to be natural. The drawings in the 
 park and the forest, are, I believe, almost facsimiles of 
 sketches made from nature ; yet it is evident at once that in 
 all of them nothing but the general lie and disposition of the 
 boughs has been taken from the tree, and that no single 
 
164 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 branch or spray has been faithfully copied or patiently stud- 
 ied. 
 
 This want of close study necessarily causes several deficien- 
 cies of feeling respecting general form. Harding's choice is 
 always of tree forms comparatively imperfect, leaning this 
 way and that, and unequal in the lateral arrangements of 
 foliage. Such forms are often graceful, always picturesque, 
 but rarely grand ; and when systematically adopted, untrue. 
 It requires more patient study to attain just feeling of the 
 dignity and character of a purely formed tree with all its 
 symmetries perfect. 
 
 One more cause of incorrectness I may note, though it is 
 not peculiar to the artist's tree-drawing, but attaches to his 
 general system of sketching. In Harding's valuable work 
 on the use of the Lead Pencil, there is one prin- 
 
 § 31. Local color, , . . ^ 
 
 how far expres- ciplc advanced which I believe to be false and 
 
 sible in black and , i ^ p ^ ' , ' 
 
 white, and with dangerous, that the local color or objects is not 
 what advantage, ^j^^j-^j^y rendered. I think the instance 
 
 given is that of some baskets, whose darkness is occasioned 
 solely by the touches indicating the wicker-work. Now, I 
 believe, that an essential difference between the sketch of a 
 great and of a comparatively inferior master is, that the 
 former is conceived entirely in shade and color, and its 
 masses are blocked out with reference to both, while the in- 
 ferior draughtsman checks at textures and petty characters 
 of object. If Rembrandt had had to sketch such baskets, he 
 would have troubled himself very little about the wicker- 
 work ; but he would have looked to see where they came 
 dark or light on the sand, and where there were any spark- 
 ling points of light on the wet osiers. These darks and lights 
 he would have scratched in with the fastest lines he could, 
 leaving no white paper but at the wet points of lustre ; if he 
 had had time, the wicker-work would have come afterwards.* 
 * It is true that many of Rembrandt's etchings are merely in line, 
 but it may be observed that the subject is universally conceived in light 
 and shade, and that the lines are either merely guides in the arrange- 
 ment, or an exquisite indication of the key-notes of shade, on which the 
 after-system of it is to be based — portions of fragmentary finish, show- 
 ing the completeness of the conception. 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION. 
 
 165 
 
 And I think, that the first thing to be taught to any pupil, 
 is neither how to manage the pencil, nor how to attain char- 
 acter of outline, but rather to see where things are light and 
 where they are dark, and to draw them as he sees them, 
 never caring whether his lines be dexterous or slovenly. The 
 result of such study is the immediate substitution of down- 
 right drawing for symbolism, and afterwards a judicious 
 moderation in the use of extreme lights and darks ; for where 
 local colors are really drawn, so much of what seems violently 
 dark is found to come light against something else, and so 
 much of what seems high light to come dark against the sky, 
 that the draughtsman trembles at finding himself plunged 
 either into blackness or whiteness, and seeks, as he should, 
 for means of obtaining force without either. 
 
 It is in consequence of his evident habit of sketching 
 more with a view to detail and character than to the great 
 masses, that Harding's chiaroscuro is frequently crude, scat- 
 tered, and petty. Black shadows occur under his distant 
 trees, white high lights on his foreground rocks, the foliage 
 and trunks are divided by violent oppositions into separate 
 masses, and the branches lose in spots of moss and furrow- 
 ings of bark their soft roundings of delicate form, and their 
 grand relations to each other and the sky. 
 
 It is owing to my respect for the artist, and my belief in 
 his power and conscientious desire to do what is best, that I 
 have thus extended these somewhat unkind remarks. On the 
 § 32. Opposition Other hand, it is to be remembered, that his 
 ma^rTer^^ and knowledge of nature is most extended, and his 
 great knowledge, dexterity of drawing most instructive, especially 
 considering his range of subject ; for whether in water, rock, 
 or foliage, he is equally skilful in attaining whatever he de- 
 sires, (though he does not always desire all that he ought ;) 
 and artists should keep in mind, that neither grandeur of 
 manner nor truth of system can atone for the want of this 
 knowledge and this skill. Constable's manner is good and 
 great, but being unable to draw even a log of wood, much 
 more a trunk of a tree or a stone, he left his works destitute 
 of substance, mere studies of effect without any expression 
 
166 
 
 OF TRUTH OF VEGETATION, 
 
 of specific knowledge ; and thus even what is great in them 
 has been productive, I believe, of very great injury in its en- 
 couragement of the most superficial qualities of the English 
 school. 
 
 The foliage of David Cox has been already noticed (pref- 
 ace to second edition), It is altogether exquisite in color, 
 and in its impressions of coolness, shade, and mass ; of its 
 , drawing: I cannot say anythinor, but that I should 
 
 §33. Foliage of ° . / *^ ^ 
 
 Cox, Fielding, be sorry to see it better. Copley Fielding's is 
 
 and Cattermole. i i i • i i • . 
 
 remarkable tor its intricacy and elegance ; it is, 
 however, not free from affectation, and, as has been before 
 remarked, is always evidently composed in the study. The 
 execution is too rough and woolly ; it is wanting in simplic- 
 ity, sharpness, and freshness, — above all in specific charac- 
 ter ; not, however, in his middle distances, where the rounded 
 masses of forest and detached blasted trunks of fir are usu- 
 ally very admirable. Cattermole has very grand conceptions 
 of general form, but wild and without substance, and there- 
 fore incapable of long maintaining their attractiveness, es- 
 pecially lately, the execution having become in the last de- 
 gree coarse and affected. This is bitterly to be regretted, for 
 few of our artists would paint foliage better, if he would 
 paint it from nature, and with reverence. 
 
 Hunt, I think, fails, and fails only, in foliage ; fails, as the 
 Daguerreotype does, from over-fidelity ; for foliage will not 
 be imitated, it must be reasoned out and suggested ; yet 
 § 34. Hunt and Hunt is the Only man we have who can paint 
 howTibe^'^nTer- the real leaf green under sunlight, and, in this 
 r^^ht^^and^offen* respect, his trees are delicious, — summer itself, 
 sive if otherwise. Creswick has sweet feeling, and tries for the 
 real green too, but, from want of science in his shadows, 
 ends in green paint instead of green light ; in mere local 
 color, instead of color raised by sunshine. One example is 
 enough to show where the fault lies. In his picture of the 
 Weald of Kent, in the British Institution this year, there 
 was a cottage in the middle distance with white walls, and 
 a red roof. The dark sides of the white walls and of the roof 
 were of the same color, a dark purple — wrong for both. 
 
OF TRUTH OF VEOETATION. 
 
 167 
 
 Repeated inaccuracies of this kind necessarily deprive even 
 the most brilliant color of all appearance of sunshine, and 
 they are much to be deprecated in Creswick, as he is one of 
 the very few artists who do draw from nature and try for 
 nature. Some of his thickets and torrent-beds are most 
 painfully studied, and yet he cannot draw a bough nor a 
 stone. I suspect he is too much in the habit of studying 
 only large views on the spot, and not of drawing small por- 
 tions thoroughly. I trust it will be seen that these, as all 
 other remarks that I have made throughout this volume on 
 particular works, are not in depreciation of, or unthankful- 
 ness for, what the artist has done, but in the desire that he 
 should do himself more justice and more honor. I have much 
 pleasure in Creswick's works, and I am glad always to see 
 them admired by others. 
 
 I shall conclude this sketch of the foliage art of England, 
 by mention of two artists, whom I believe to be representa- 
 tive of a considerable class, admirable in their reverence and 
 § 35. Conclusion, patience of study, yet unappreciated by the 
 neu and^ s Pal- P^^t)lic, bccause what they do is unrecommended 
 by dexterities of handling. The forest studies 
 of J. Linnell are peculiarly elaborate, and, in many points, 
 most skilful ; they fail perhaps of interest, owing to over- 
 fulness of detail and a want of generalization in the effect ; 
 but even a little more of the Harding sharpness of touch 
 would set off their sterling qualities, and make them felt. A 
 less known artist, S. Palmer, lately admitted a member of the 
 Old Water-Color Society, is deserving of the very highest 
 place among faithful followers of nature. His studies of 
 foreign foliage especially are beyond all praise for care and 
 fulness. 1 have never seen a stone pine or a cypress drawn 
 except by him ; and his feeling is as pure and grand as his 
 lidelity is exemplary. He has not, however, yet, I think, dis- 
 covered what is necessary and unnecessary in a great picture; 
 and his works, sent to the Society's rooms, have been most 
 unfavorable examples of his power, and have been generally, 
 as yet, in places where all that is best in them is out of 
 sight. I look to him, nevertheless, unless he lose himself in 
 
168 GENERAL REMARKS RESPECTING 
 
 over-reverence for certain conventionalisms of the elder 
 schools, as one of the probable renovators and correctors of 
 whatever is failing or erroneous in the practice of English 
 art. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 GENERAL REMARKS RESPECTING THE TRUTH OF TURNER. 
 
 We have now arrived at some general conception of the 
 extent of Turner's knowledge, and the truth of his practice, 
 by the deliberate examination of the characteristics of the 
 _ . four e;'reat elements of landscape — sky, earth, 
 
 §1. No necessity ^ . r J? ^> 
 
 of entering into water, and ve^etatiou. I have not thous^ht it 
 
 cliscussio n o f ^ ^ ^ 
 
 architectural necessary to devote a chapter to architecture, 
 because enough has been said on this subject in 
 Part II. Sect. 1. Chap. VII. ; and its general truths, which 
 are those with which the landscape painter, as such, is chiefly 
 concerned, require only a simple and straightforward appli- 
 cation of those rules of which every other material object of 
 a landscape has required a most difficult and complicated ap- 
 plication. Turner's knowledge of perspective probably adds 
 to his power in the arrangement of every order of subject ; 
 but ignorance on this head is rather disgraceful than knowl- 
 edge meritorious. It is disgraceful, for instance, that any 
 man should commit such palpable and atrocious errors in or- 
 dinary perspective as are seen in the quay in Claude's sea- 
 piece, No. 14, National Gallery, or in the curved portico of 
 No. 30 ; but still these are not points to be taken into con- 
 sideration 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. Neither is there any- 
 thing particularly belonging to architecture, as such, which 
 it is any credit to an artist to observe or represent ; it is only 
 a simple and clear field for the manifestation of his knowl- 
 edge of general laws. Any surveyor or engineer could have 
 drawn the steps and balustrade in the Hero and Leander, as 
 
THE TRUTH OF TURNER, 
 
 169 
 
 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 for general illustration 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 be- 
 side the former of these for overwhelming grandeur and sim- 
 plicity of effect, and inexhaustible intricacy of parts. I have 
 then only a few remarks farther to offer respecting the gen- 
 eral character of all those truths which we have been hith- 
 erto endeavoring 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 ap- 
 ^2 Extreme dif P^^^^^^^^ t)y any eye or feeling undisciplined by 
 ficuity of iiius- the most perfect and practical anatomical knowl- 
 
 trating ot ex- . r» i ^ -i 
 
 plaining the edge, it rcsts ou points or such traceless and 
 highest truth. 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, soli- 
 tary and supreme ; while the finest of M. Angelo's works, 
 considered with respect to truth alone, are said to be only on 
 a level with antiques of the second class, under the Apollo 
 and Venus, that is, tw4) 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 pecul- 
 iar truth of each line consisted ? Could any words that he 
 could use make us feel the hairbreadth of depth and dis- 
 tance 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 endeavor to explain 
 to us by words some taste or other subject of sense, of 
 which we had no experience. And so it is with all truths of 
 the highest order ; they are separated from those of average 
 precision by points of extreme delicacy, which none but the 
 cultivated eye can in the least feel, and to express which, all 
 
170 GENERAL REMARKS RESPECTING 
 
 ■words are absolutely meaningless and useless. Consequent* 
 ly, in all that I have been saying of the truth of artists, I 
 „ „ have been able to point out only coarse, broad, 
 
 § 3. The positive ^ ^ j ? j 
 
 rank of Turner is and explicable matters ; I have been perfectly 
 
 in no degree ^ ^ \ /j-j-iti t 
 
 shown in the unable to cxpress (and indeed 1 have made no 
 but^oniy his^rS cndcavor to express) the finely drawn and distin- 
 tive rank. guished truth in which all the real excellence of 
 
 art consists. All those truths which I have been able to ex- 
 plain and demonstrate in Turner, are such as any artist of or- 
 dinary 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 indeed proved that they have been neg- 
 lected, and disgracefully 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 con- 
 ception of his own positive rank as a Painter of Nature. 
 But it stands to reason, that the men, vrho in broad, simple, 
 and demonstrable matters are perpetually violating truth, will 
 not be particularly accurate or careful in carrying out deli- 
 cate and refined, and undemonstrable 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 lina, and shadow of a line. 
 And such is, indeed, the case with every touch of this con- 
 „ , _ , summate artist : the essential excellence — all 
 
 § 4. The exceed- ^ ' 
 
 ing refinement of that Constitutes the real and exceedino; value of 
 
 his truth. i . i -i t i • 
 
 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 ascertained except by the highest of tests — the keen 
 feeling attained by extended knowledge and long study. 
 Two lines are laid on canvas ; one is right and another wrong. 
 There is no difference between them appreciable by the com- 
 passes — none appreciable by the ordinary 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 communicated to the other : it would be unjust 
 
THE TRUTH OF TURNER. 
 
 171 
 
 if it could, for that feeling and sight have been the reward 
 of years of labor. And there is, indeed, nothing in Turner 
 rr^t- . — not one dot nor line — whose meanin^r can be 
 
 §5. There IS ^ 
 
 nothing in his understood without knowledge : because he 
 
 works which can . i • • i 
 
 be enjoyed with- ncvcr aims at sensual impressions, but at the 
 out knowledge, ^^^p f^^y^\ truth, which Only meditation can dis- 
 cover, 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 en- 
 joyed by minds capable of going through the same process, 
 and discovering the reasons for the choice. And, as there 
 § 6. And noth- is nothing in his works which can be enjoyed 
 edle^'^n^noTen- without knowledge, so there is nothing in them 
 able us to enjoy, which knowledge wiU not enable us to enjoy. 
 There is no test of our acquaintance with nature so absolute 
 and unfailing as the degree of admiration we feel for Turn- 
 er's painting. Precisely as we are shallow in our knowledge, 
 vulgar in our feeling, and contracted in our views of princi- 
 ples, will the works of this artist be stumbling-blocks or fool- 
 ishness 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 be- 
 fore 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 not before 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 shall receive 
 fresh illustration of his principles — fresh confirmation of his 
 facts. We shall feel, wherever we go, that he has been there be- 
 fore 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 ac- 
 count for, and what we still dislike in his works, has reason 
 
172 BESPEGTING THE TRVTH OF TURNER. 
 
 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 mind ; 
 he has not, like some few artists, been without childhood ; 
 his course of study has been as evidently as it has been 
 §7 His former swiftly progressive, and in different stages of 
 rank and prog- the struo^pfle, sometimes one order of truth, 
 
 ress. ^ oo ^ ^ 7 
 
 sometimes another, has been aimed at or omit- 
 ted. 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 ab- 
 § 8. standing sorbed in what succeeded, or abandoned only if 
 works! ITeTr incompatible, and never abandoned without a 
 Snse^quence *of ^^^^ 5 ^Tid his present works present the sum 
 their fulness. ^^d perfection of his accumulated knowledge, 
 delivered with the impatience and passion of one who feels 
 too much, and knows too 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 instinctive 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 vainness of the color 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 knows her now too well, he can- 
 not palter over the material littleness 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 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM, 173 
 
 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 glori- 
 ous nature, whose I am and whom I serve. Let other ser- 
 vants 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." 
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 
 COKCLUSIOIN'. MODERN ART AIS^D MODERN" CRITICISM. 
 
 We have only, in conclusion, to offer a few general re- 
 marks respecting modern art and modern criticism. 
 
 We wish, in the first place, to remove the appearance of 
 invidiousness and partiality which the constant prominence 
 § 1 The entire ^^"^^^ present portion of the work to the 
 
 prominence hith- productious of One artist, Can scarcely fail of 
 
 erto given to the . . . t /» t ^xn 
 
 works of one ar- bearing in the minds oi most readers. When 
 by our not being we pass to the examination of what is beautiful 
 
 able to take cog- ^ •• . ^ ^^ p jir»i 
 
 nizance of char- and expressive m art, we shall irequently nnd 
 acter. ^ 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 comparison 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 in- 
 tellect, that one is in all points greater or nobler than another. 
 We shall probably find something 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 accomplished by 
 other modes of thought, and directions of aim. We shall, 
 indeed, find a wider range and grasp in one man than in 
 
174 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 another ; but yet it will be our own fault if we do not dis- 
 cover something in the most limited range of mind which is 
 different from, and in its way better than, anything presented 
 to us by the more grasping intellect. We all know that the 
 nightingale 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, which bore a part among the mel- 
 odies of creation no less essential than that of the more 
 richly-gifted bird ? And thus we shall find and feel that 
 § 2. The feelings whatever difference may exist between the in- 
 aJe^?ncapIbi?^^of tcllectual powcrs of One artist and another, yet 
 full comparison, wherever there is any true genius, there will be 
 some peculiar lesson which even the humblest will teach us 
 more sweetly and perfectly than those far above them in 
 prouder attributes of mind ; and we should be as mistaken as 
 we should be unjust and invidious, if we refused to receive 
 §3 Butthefidei ^^^^ their pecuHar message with gratitude and 
 ity and truth of veneration, merely because it was a sentence 
 
 each are capable i -r* i • t 
 
 of real compari- and not a volume. JDut the case is dinerent 
 when we examine their relative 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 feel- 
 ing may direct their choice to this or that objact, but the 
 fidelity with which they treat either the one or the other, is 
 dependent 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 individual. Those feelings 
 which direct Cox to the painting 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 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, 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 175 
 
 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 
 §4. Especially have chosen to represent. It is also to be re- 
 \^^Z\y m^Iiie^^^^ mcmbcrcd that these faculties of sense and 
 ment^ of^aii^Tb- ^^^^^^J i^^t partial in their effect; they will 
 jects. not induce fidelity in the rendering of one class 
 
 of object, and fail of doing so in another. 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, will be equally unerring in trac- 
 ing the character of cloud ; and the quick memory which 
 seizes and retains the circumstances of a flying effect of 
 shadow or color, will be equally effectual in fixing the im- 
 pression of the instantaneous form of a moving figure or a 
 breaking wave. There are indeed one or two broad distinc- 
 tions in the nature of the senses, — a sensibility to color, for 
 instance, being very different from a sensibility 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, etc., without possessing sensibility at all. But 
 wherever we have, in the drawing of any one object, sufficient 
 evidence of real intellectual power, of the sense which per- 
 ceives the essential 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 oper- 
 ate equally on whatever is subjected to them, and that the 
 §5. No man artist will be equally great and masterly in his 
 wen7 ifle^^can drawing of all that he attempts. Hence we may 
 draw nothing else, j^^ quite sure that wherever an artist appears to 
 be truthful in one branch of art, and not in another, the ap- 
 parent truth is either owing to some trickery of imitation, or 
 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 ren- 
 dering of this, his power of doing more will be perpetually 
 
176 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 showing itself in accessories 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- 
 Color Society, with so keen an eye for truth, or with power 
 so universal. And this is the reason for the exceeding prom- 
 inence 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 maintain the same superiority in their 
 works, to whatever class of subject they may be directed. 
 And thus we 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 wanting in those faculties of the hand and mind which 
 insure perfect fidelity to nature : it will be only hereafter, 
 when we are at liberty to take full cognizance 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. 
 
 But as far as we have gone at present, and with respect only 
 to the material truth, which is all that we have been able to 
 investigate, the conclusion to w^hich we must be led is as 
 § 6. General con- clear as it is inevitable : that modern artists, as 
 
 cl'jsionsto be de- i p ^^ • a • ' 
 
 rived from our a body, are far more ]ust and full in their views 
 Son. ^^^^^ 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 view, the only per- 
 fect landscape painter whom the world has ever seen. 
 
 Nor are we disposed to recede from our assertion made in 
 Sec. I. Ch. I. § 10, that this material truth is indeed a per- 
 fect test of the relative rank of painters, though it does not 
 in itself constitute that rank. We shall be able 
 
 § 7. Truth, a ^ , -, , , i -, i 
 
 standard of all to prove that truth and beauty, knowledge and 
 
 excellence. . • , • • • i i • . i • 
 
 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 superiority is, in matters 
 
MODERJSr ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 177 
 
 of feeling, one of kind, not of degree. Superiority of degree 
 implies a superseding of others, superiority of kind only sus- 
 taining 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 requirements of art, beauty 
 and character, their contributions are all equally necessary 
 and desirable, because different, and however inferior in 
 position or rank, are still perfect of their kind ; their infe- 
 riority 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 artists. 
 We have, living with us, and painting for us, 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 mo- 
 ment. Let us next inquire what is the rank of our critics. 
 § 8. Modem crit- Pnblic tastc, I bclievc, as far as it is the en- 
 Sf^ssoFpubjic courager and supporter of art has been the same 
 in all ages, — a fitful and vacillating current of 
 vague impression, perpetually liable to change, subject to 
 epidemic desires, and agitated by infectious passion, the 
 slave of fashion, and the fool of fancy, but yet always dis- 
 tinguishing with singular clearsightedness, between that 
 which is best and that which 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 minis- 
 § 9. Yet associat- tering to its misguided will. Public taste may 
 degTe? of^Yudg^ thus degrade a race of men capable of the high- 
 est efforts in art into the 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 wnploy both in painting curl^, and feathers, and brace- 
 lets. Hence, generally speaking, there is no comparative in- 
 justice done, no false elevation of the fotil above the man of 
 Vol. II.— 12 
 
178 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 mind, provided only that the man of mind will conde- 
 scend to supply the particular article which the public 
 chooses to want. Of course a thousand modifying cir- 
 cumstances interfere with the action of the general rule ; 
 but, taking one case with another, twe shall very con- 
 stantly 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 
 press. 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. 
 
 Now none are capable of doing this, but those whose prin- 
 ciples of judgment are based both on thorough practical 
 knowledge of art, and on broad general views of what is true 
 §11. Quaiifica- and right, without reference to what has been 
 fm^disrhlTg- done at one time or another, or in one school or 
 "^s^*- 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 original in 
 his feeling and aim, rebuked or maligned for not being like 
 Wordsworth or Coleridge, than a great painter criticised for 
 not putting us in mind of Claude or Poussin. But such ref- 
 erences to former excellence are the only refuge and re- 
 source of persons endeavoring 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 whole tone of modern criticism 
 
 §12. General in- . . /. i . 
 
 capability of — as far as it IS worthy oi being called criticism 
 
 modern critics. iY?-.ii -xj. j ^'ij? 
 
 — sumciently shows it to proceed entirely irom 
 persons altogether unversed in practice, 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 hav- 
 ing any just idea of the real ends or capabilities of lancj^cape 
 art, consider nothing right which is not based on the con- 
 ventional principles of the ancients, and nothing true which 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM, 179 
 
 has more of nature in it than of Claude. But it is strange 
 that while the noble and unequalled works of modern land- 
 scape painters are thus maliprned and misunder- 
 
 §13. Andincon- ^ _ . . . ^ , ^ 
 
 sistency with stood, 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 endeavor to hamper our great 
 landscape painters with rules derived from consecrated blun- 
 ders. 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, 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 greenroom, 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 per- 
 sons who are disgusted by what is pure and noble, should be 
 delighted with what is vicious and degraded ; but it is sin- 
 gular 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 criticisms where 
 they might be applied with truth, and productive of benefit ; 
 but w^e 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 
 § 14. How the begin this chapter with any intent of wasting 
 ^^^advTnce ^the time on these small critics, but in the hope 
 cause of art. 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 
 
180 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 its impulses, without checking its energies, and really to ad- 
 Vance both the cause of the artist, and the taste of the public. 
 
 One of the most morbid symptoms of the general taste of 
 the present day, is a too great fondness for unfinished works. 
 Brilliancy and rapidity of execution are everywhere sought 
 § 15. Morbid fond- highest good, and so that a picture be 
 
 ness at the pres- cleverly handled as far as it is carried, little re- 
 en t day tor un- ^ ' 
 
 finished works, gard is paid to its imperfection as a whole. 
 Hence some artists are permitted, and others compelled, to 
 confine themselves to a manner of working altogether destruc- 
 tive of their powers, and to tax their energies, not to concen- 
 trate the greatest quantity of thought on the least possible 
 space of canvas, but to produce the greatest quantity of glit- 
 ter and claptrap in the shortest possible time. To the idler 
 and the trickster in art, no system can be more advanta- 
 geous ; but to the man who is really desirous of doing some- 
 thing worth having lived for — to a man of industry, energy, 
 or feeling, we believe it to be the cause of the most bitter 
 discouragement. If ever, working upon a favorite subject 
 or a beloved idea, he is induced to tax his powers to the ut- 
 most, and to spend as much time upon his picture as he feels 
 necessary 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 compelled either to fall 
 back upon mechanism, or to starve. Now the press should 
 
 especially endeavor to convince the public, that 
 thepubiicdefraud by this purchasc of imperfect pictures they not 
 themselves. ^^|^ prevent all progress and development of 
 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 
 §17. And in pan- "that a perfect drawing is, simply as a source of 
 SL^uin'them- delight, better worth a hundred guineas than a 
 
 drawing half as finished is worth thirty. On the 
 otlier hand, the body of our artists should be kept in mind, that 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 181 
 
 by indulging the public with rapid 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 labored 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 command the picture, will soon find the picture com- 
 mand the price. And it ouorht to be a rule with 
 
 § 18. Necessity .\ . i 4. • . 1 
 
 of finishing works every painter never to let a picture leave his 
 of art perfectly, ^^g^j while it is 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 details and facts are altogether imperfect and unsatisfac- 
 tory. 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 im- 
 proves. 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 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." 
 
182 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 But, on the other hand, though incomplete pictures 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 
 
 %Vi^. Sketches not -r-i i -i \ i i i i n 
 
 sufficiently en- every liixhibition, and a room should be allotted 
 couraged. drawings and designs of figures in the Acad- 
 
 emy. We should be heartily glad to see the room vrhich is 
 now devoted to bad drawings of incorporeal and imaginary 
 architecture — of things which never were, and which, thank 
 Heaven ! never will be — occupied 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 be toler- 
 ated but simple bona fide imitation of nature. They have 
 no business to ape the execution of masters, — to utter weak 
 § 20. Brilliancy of ^ud disjointed repetitions of other men's words, 
 forTs^atTnvention mimic the gcstuFcs of the preacher, without 
 ed*^ i*n young ^ar- understanding his meaning or sharing in his emo- 
 *ists. tions. We do not want their crude ideas of com- 
 
 position, their unformed conceptions of the Beautiful, their 
 unsystematized 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 com- 
 position ; for it is without materials : we reprobate their 
 choice ; for it is without comparison. Their duty is neither 
 to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, 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 hand- 
 ling ; for it is a sign that they are satisfied with their work, 
 and have tried to do nothing more than they 
 Lter'^^Llifges of wcrc able to do. Their work should be full of 
 all students. failures ; for these are the signs of efforts. They 
 should keep to quiet colors — grays and browns ; and, making 
 the early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to 
 be their object of emulation, should go to nature in all single- 
 ness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, 
 having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her mean- 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 183 
 
 ing, and remember her instruction, rejecting nothing, select- 
 ing nothing, and scorning nothing ; believing all things to 
 be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth. Then, 
 when their memories 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 mas- 
 ters, 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 before bowed, 
 in the same submission, to a higher Authority and Master. 
 
 Among our greater artists, the chief want, at the present 
 day, is that of solemnity and definite purpose. We have too 
 much picture-manufacturing, too much making up of lay 
 §22. Necessity figurcs with a Certain quantity of foliage, and a 
 3 Z '™ certain quantity of sky, and a certain quantity 
 singleness of aim. 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 
 humor, 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 was the case with 
 Barret and Varley, we are generally put off with stale repeti- 
 tions of eternal composition ; a great tree, and some goats, 
 and a bridge and a lake, and the temple at Tivoli, etc. Now 
 we should like to see our artists working out, with all exer- 
 tion of their concentrated powers, such marked pieces of 
 landscape character as might bear upon them the impres- 
 sion of solemn, earnest, and pervading thought, definitely 
 directed, and aided by every accessory of detail, color, and 
 idealized form, which the disciplined feeling, accumulated 
 knowledge, and unspared labor of the painter could supply. 
 I have alluded, in the second preface, to the deficiency of 
 our modern artists in these great points of earnestness and 
 completeness ; and I revert to it, in conclusion, as their para- 
 mount failing, and one fatal in many ways to the interests of 
 art. Our landscapes are all descriptive, not reflective, agree- 
 
184 MODEBlSr ART AND MODERN CRITICISM, 
 
 able and conversational, but not impressive nor didactic. 
 They have no other foundation than 
 
 ' ' That vivacious versatility, 
 Which many people take for want of heart. 
 They err ; 'tis merely what is called ^ mobility 
 A thing of temperament, and not of art^ 
 Though seeming so from its supposed facility. 
 
 This makes your actors, artists^ and romancers ; 
 Little that's great — but much of what is clever." 
 
 Only it is to be observed that — in painters — this vivacity 
 is not always versatile. It is to be wished that it were, 
 but it is no such easy matter to be versatile in painting. 
 Shallowness of thought insures not its variety, nor rapidity 
 of production its originality. Whatever may be the case in 
 literature, facility is in art inconsistent with invention. The 
 artist who covers most canvas always shows, even in the sum 
 of his works, the least expenditure of thought.* I have 
 never seen more than four works of John Lewis on the walls 
 of the Water-Color Exhibition ; I have counted forty from 
 other hands ; but have found in the end that the forty were 
 a multiplication of one, and the four a concentration of forty. 
 And therefore I would earnestly plead with all our artists, 
 that they should make it a law never to repeat themselves ; 
 for he who never repeats himself will not produce an in- 
 ordinate number of pictures, and he who limits himself in 
 number gives himself at least the opportunity of completion. 
 Besides, all repetition is degradation of the art ; it reduces 
 it from headwork to handwork ; and indicates something 
 like a persuasion on the part of the artist that nature is ex- 
 haustible or art perfectible ; perhaps, even, by him exhausted 
 and perfected. All copyists are contemptible, but the copyist 
 of himself the most so, for he has the worst original. 
 
 Let then every picture be painted with earnest intention 
 
 * Of course this assertion does not refer to the differences in mode 
 of execution, which enable one painter to work faster or slower than 
 another, but only to the exertion of mind, commonly manifested by 
 the artist, according i^s he is sparing or prodigal of production. 
 
 \ 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM, 185 
 
 of impressing on the spectator some elevated emotion, and 
 exhibiting to him some one particular, but exalted, beauty. 
 
 Let a real subject be carefully selected, in itself 
 be^tiSr^Vene^a^ suggcstive of, and replete with, this feeling and 
 
 beauty ; let an effect of light and color be 
 taken which may harmonize with both ; and a sky, not 
 invented, but recollected, (in fact, all so-called invention is 
 in landscape nothing more than appropriate recollection — 
 good in proportion as it is distinct.) Then let the details of 
 the foreground be separately studied, especially those plants 
 which appear peculiar to the place : if any one, however 
 unimportant, occurs there, which occurs not elsewhere, it 
 should occupy a prominent position ; for the other details, 
 the highest examples of the ideal forms * or characters 
 
 * ''Talk pf improving nature when it is nature — Nonsense. ''—^jE^. F. 
 Rippingille. I have not yet spoken of the difference — even in what we 
 commonly call Nature — between imperfect and ideal form : the study 
 of this difficult question must, of course, be deferred until we have ex- 
 amined the nature of our impressions of beauty ; but it may not be out 
 of place here to hint at the want of care in many of our artists to dis- 
 tinguish between the real work of nature and the diseased results of 
 man's interference with her. Many of the works of our greatest artists 
 have for their subjects nothing but hacked and hewn remnants of 
 farm-yard vegetation, branded root and branch, from their birth, by 
 the prong and the pruning-hook ; and the feelings once accustomed to 
 take pleasure in such abortions, can scarcely become perceptive of 
 forms truly ideal. I have just said (182) that young painters should go 
 to nature trustingly, — rejecting nothing, and selecting nothing : so 
 they should ; but they must be careful that it is nature to whom they 
 go — nature in her liberty — not as servant- of -all-work in the hands of 
 the agriculturist, nor stiffened into court-dress by the landscape gar- 
 dener. It must be the pure, wild volition and energy of the creation 
 which they follow — not subdued to the furrow, and cicatrized to the 
 pollard— not persuaded into proprieties, nor pampered into diseases. 
 Let them work by the torrent-side, and in the forest shadows ; not by 
 purling brooks and under " tonsile shades." It is impossible to enter 
 here into discussion of what man can or cannot do, by assisting natural 
 operations : it is an intricate question : nor can I, without anticipating 
 what I shall have hereafter to advance, show how or why it happens 
 that the racehorse is not the artist's ideal of a horse, nor a prize tulip 
 his ideal of a flower ; but so it is. As far as the painter is concerned, 
 man never touches nature but to spoil ; — he operates on her as a barber 
 
186 MOBEBN ABT AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 which he requires are to be selected by the artist from his 
 former studies, or fresh studies made expressly for the pur- 
 pose, leaving as little as possible — nothing, in fact, beyond 
 their connection and arrangement — to mere imagination. 
 Finally, when his picture is thus perfectly realized in all its 
 parts, let him dash as much of it out as he likes ; throw, if 
 he will, mist around it — darkness — or dazzling and confused 
 light — whatever, in fact, impetuous feeling or vigorous imag- 
 ination may dictate or desire ; the forms, once so laboriously 
 realized, will come out whenever they do occur with a start- 
 ling and impressive truth, which the uncertainty in which they 
 are veiled will enhance rather than diminish ; and the imag- 
 ination, strengthened by discipline and fed with truth, will 
 achieve the utmost of creation that is possible to finite mind. 
 
 The artist who thus works will soon find that he cannot 
 repeat himself if he would ; that new fields of exertion, new 
 subjects of contemplation open to him in nature day by day, 
 
 would on the Apollo ; and if he sometimes increases some particular 
 power or excellence, — strength or agility in the animal — tallness, or 
 fruitfulness, or solidity in the tree, — he invariably loses that balance of 
 good qualities which is the chief sign of perfect specific form ; above 
 all, he destroys the appearance of free wlition and felicity, which, as I 
 shall show hereafter, is one of the essential characters of organic 
 beauty. Until, however, I can enter into the discussion of the nature 
 of beauty, the only advice I can safely give the young painter, is to 
 keep clear of clover-fields and parks, and to hold to the unpenetrated 
 forest and the un furrowed hill. There he will find that every influence 
 is noble, even when destructive — that decay itself is beautiful, — and 
 that, in the elaborate and lovely composition of all things, if at first 
 sight it seems less studied than the works of men, the appearance of 
 Art is only prevented by the presence of Power. 
 
 ' ' Nature never did betray 
 The heart that loved her : 'tis her privilege, 
 Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
 From joy to joy ; for she can so inform 
 The mind that is within us, so impress 
 With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
 With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men 
 Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
 Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
 Is full of blessings." 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 187 
 
 and that, while others lament the weakness of their inven- 
 tion, he has nothing to lament but the shortness of life. 
 
 And now but one word more, respecting the great artist 
 whose works have formed the chief subject of this treatise. 
 All the greatest qualities of those works — all that is mental 
 § 24. Duty of them, has not yet been so much as touched 
 resp?cT^\o^ \he ^poi^» Nouc but their lightest and least essential 
 works of Turner, excellences have been proved, and, therefore, the 
 enthusiasm with which I speak of them must necessarily ap- 
 pear overcharged and absurd. It might, perhaps, have been 
 \ more prudent to have withheld the full expression of it till I 
 had shown the full grounds for it ; but once written, such 
 expression must remain till I have justified it. And, indeed, 
 I think there is enough, even in the foregoing pages, to show 
 that these works are, as far as concerns the ordinary critics 
 of the press, above all animadversion, and above all praise ; 
 and that, by the public, they are not to be received as in any 
 way subjects or matters of opinion, but of Faith. We are not 
 to approach them to be pleased, but to be taught ; not to form 
 a judgment, 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 public 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, 
 consistent, systematic, and completed poems. We desire 
 that he should follow out his own thoughts and intents of 
 heart, without reference to any human authority. But we re- 
 quest, in all humility, that those thoughts may be seriously 
 and loftily given ; and that the whole power of his unequalled 
 intellect may be exerted in the production of such works as 
 may remain forever for the teaching of the nations. In all 
 that he says, we believe ; in all that he does we trust."* It 
 
 * It has been hinted, in some of the reviews of the Second Volume of 
 this work, that the writer's respect for Turner has diminished since the 
 
188 MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM, 
 
 is therefore that we pray him to utter nothing lightly — to do 
 nothing regardlessly. He stands upon an eminence, from 
 which he looks back over the universe of God, and forward 
 over the generations of men. Let every work of his hand be 
 a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each ex- 
 ertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy, — 
 adoration to the Deity, — revelation to mankind. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 The above passage was written in the year 1843 ; too late. 
 It is true that soon after the publication of this work, the 
 abuse of the press, which had been directed against Turner 
 with unceasing virulence during the production of his noblest 
 works, sank into timid animadversion, or changed into unin- 
 telligent praise ; but not before illness, and, in some degree, 
 mortification, had enfeebled the hand and chilled the heart of 
 the painter. 
 
 This year (1851) he has no picture on the walls of the 
 Academy ; and the Times of May 3d says, " We miss those 
 works of INSPIRATION ! " 
 
 above passage was written. He would, indeed, have been deserving of 
 little attention if, with the boldness manifested on the preceding pages, 
 he had advanced opinions based on so shallow foundation as that the 
 course of three years could affect modification of them. He was justi- 
 fied by the sudden accession of power which the great artist exhibited 
 at the period when this volume was first published, as well as by the 
 low standard of the criticism to which he was subjected, in claiming, 
 with respect to his then works, a submission of judgment, greater in- 
 deed than may generally be accorded to even the highest human intel- 
 lect, yet not greater than such a master might legitimately claim from 
 such critics ; and the cause of the peculiar form of advocacy into which 
 the preceding chapters necessarily fell, has been already stated more 
 than once. In the following sections it became necessary, as they 
 treated a subject of intricate relations, and peculiar difficulty, to obtain 
 a more general view of the scope and operation of art, and to avoid all 
 conclusions in any wise referable to the study of particular painters. 
 The reader will therefore find, not that lower rank is attributed to Tur- 
 ner, but that he is now compared with the greatest men, and occupies 
 his true position among the most noble of all time. 
 
MODERN ART AND MODERN CRITICISM. 
 
 189 
 
 We miss ! Who misses ? — The populace of England rolls 
 by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington, little 
 thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and 
 prancing amazons, and goodly merchandise of precious stones 
 and gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been, 
 but that the light which has faded from the walls of the 
 Academy is one which a million of Koh-i-Noors could not re- 
 kindle, and that the year 1851 will in the far future be re- 
 membered less for what it has displayed than for what it has 
 withdrawn. 
 
 Denmark Hill, June^ 1851. 
 
PART III 
 OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY. 
 
 OF THE THEOEETIC FACULTY. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 OF THE RANK AND RELATIONS OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 
 
 Although the hasty execution and controversial tone of 
 the former portions of this essay have been subjects of fre- 
 quent regret to the writer, yet the one was in some measure 
 § 1. With what excusable in a work referred to a temporary 
 iXbl^'pproich- end, and the other unavoidable, in one directed 
 against particular opinions. Nor are either of 
 any necessary detriment to its availableness as a foundation 
 for more careful and extended survey, in so far as its province 
 was confined to the assertion of obvious and visible facts, the 
 verification of which could in no degree be dependent either 
 on the care with which they might be classed, or the temper 
 in which they were regarded. Not so with respect to the 
 investigation now before us, which, being not of things out- 
 ward, and sensibly demonstrable, but of the value and mean- 
 ing of mental impressions, must be entered upon with a 
 modesty and cautiousness proportioned to the difficulty of 
 determining the likeness, or community of such impressions, 
 as they are received by different men, and with seriousness 
 proportioned to the importance of rightly regarding those 
 
BANK AND BELATI0N8 OF THEORETIC FACULTY. 191 
 
 faculties over which we have moral power, and therefore in 
 relation to which we assuredly incur a moral responsibility. 
 There is not the thing left to the choice of man to do or not 
 to do, but there is some sort of degree of duty involved in 
 his determination ; and by how much the more, therefore, 
 our subject becomes embarrassed by the cross influences of 
 variously admitted passion, administered discipline, or en- 
 couraged affection, upon the minds of men, by so much the 
 more it becomes matter of weight and import to observe by 
 what laws we should be guided, and of what responsibilities 
 regardful, in all that we admit, administer, or encourage. 
 
 Nor indeed have I ever, even in the preceding sections, 
 spoken with levity, though sometimes perhaps with rashness. 
 I have never treated the subject as other than demanding 
 § 2 And of what ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ scHous examination, and taking high 
 iniportance con- place among those which justify as they reward 
 our utmost ardor and earnestness of pursuit. 
 That it justifies them must be my present task to prove ; that 
 it demands them has never been doubted* Art, properly so 
 called, is no recreation ; it cannot be learned at spare mo- 
 ments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It 
 is no handiwork for drawing-room tables ; no relief of the 
 ennui of boudoirs ; it must be understood and undertaken 
 seriously or not at all. To advance it men's lives must be 
 given, and to receive it their hearts. " Le peintre Rubens s' 
 amuse a etre ambassadeur," said one with whom, but for his 
 own words, we might have thought that effort had been ab- 
 sorbed in power, and the labor of his art in its felicity. — " E 
 faticoso lo studio della pittura, et sempre si fa il mare mag- 
 giore," said he, who of all men was least likely to have left 
 us discouraging report of anything that majesty of intellect 
 could grasp, or continuity of labor overcome.* But that this 
 labor, the necessity of which in all ages has been most frankly 
 admitted by the greatest men, is justifiable in a moral point 
 of view, that it is not the pouring out of men's lives upon 
 the ground, that it has functions of usefulness addressed to 
 
 * Tintoret. (Ridolfi. Vita.) 
 
192 OF THE BANK AND BELATI0N8 OF 
 
 the weightiest of human interests, and that the objects of it 
 have calls upon us which it is inconsistent alike with our hu- 
 man dignity and our heavenward duty to disobey — has never 
 been boldly asserted nor fairly admitted ; least of all is it 
 likely to be so in these days of dispatch and display, where 
 vanity, on the one side, supplies the place of that love of art 
 which is the only effective patronage, and on the other, of 
 the incorruptible and earnest pride which no applause, no 
 reprobation, can blind to its shortcomings nor beguile of its 
 hope. 
 
 And yet it is in the expectation of obtaining at least a 
 partial acknowledgment of this, as a truth influential both of 
 aim and conduct, that I enter upon the second division of 
 my subject. The time I have already devoted to the task I 
 should have considered altogether inordinate, and that which 
 I fear may be yet required for its completion would have 
 been cause to me of utter discouragement, but that the ob- 
 ject I propose to myself is of no partial nor accidental im- 
 portance. It is not now to distinguish between disputed 
 degrees of ability in individuals, or agreeableness in can- 
 vases, it is not now to expose the ignorance or defend the 
 principles of party or person. It is to summon the moral 
 energies of the nation to a forgotten duty, to display the use, 
 force, and function of a great body of neglected sympathies 
 and desires, and to elevate to its healthy and beneficial oper- 
 ation that art which, being altogether addressed to them, 
 rises or falls with their variableness of vigor, — now leading 
 them with Tyrtsean fire, now singing them to sleep with baby 
 murmurings. 
 
 Only as I fear that with many of us the recommendation 
 of our own favorite pursuits is rooted more in conceit of our- 
 selves, than affection towards others, so that sometimes in 
 our very pointinsr of the way, we had rather 
 
 § 3. The doubt- , , *^ . ^ . « . , ^ V^ . . i , , 
 
 fill force of the that the intricacy oi it should be admired than 
 term utility, enfolded, whence a natural distrust of such 
 recommendation may well have place in the minds of those 
 who have not yet perceived any value in the thing praised, 
 and because also, men in the present century understand the 
 
THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 
 
 193 
 
 word Useful in a strange way, or at least (for the word has 
 been often so accepted from the beginning of time) since in 
 these days, they act its more limited meaning farther out, 
 and give to it more practical weight and authority, it will be 
 well in the outset that I define exactly what kind of utility I 
 mean to attribute to art, and especially to that branch of it 
 which is concerned with those impressions of external beauty 
 whose nature it is our present object to discover. 
 
 That is to everything created, pre-eminently useful, which 
 enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions ap- 
 pointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may de- 
 § 4 Its proper termine what is chiefly useful to man, it is nec- 
 s®^^^®- essary first to determine the use of man himself. 
 
 Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant 
 me this follow me no farther, for this I propose always to as- 
 sume) is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to ad- 
 vance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant 
 happiness. 
 
 Whatever enables us to fulfil this function, is in the pure 
 and first sense, of the word useful to us. Pre-eminently 
 therefore whatever sets the glory of God more brightly be- 
 fore us. But things that only help us to exist, are in a sec- 
 ondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if they be looked 
 for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would be better 
 that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disap- 
 point the purposes of existence. 
 
 And yet people speak in this working age, when they 
 speak from their hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, 
 and raiment were alone useful, and as if sight, thought, and 
 X. , admiration * were all profitless, so that men in- 
 
 § 5. How falsely ' ... 
 
 applied in these solently Call themsclves Utilitarians, who would 
 turn, if they had their way, themselves and their 
 race into vegetables ; men who think, as far as such can be 
 said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the 
 raiment than the body, who look to the earth as a stable, and 
 to its fruit as fodder ; vinedressers and husbandmen, who 
 
 * We live by admiration, hope, and love. (Excursion, Book IV.) 
 Vol II.— 13 
 
194 OF THE BANK AND RELATIONS OF 
 
 love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better 
 than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden ; 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the 
 wood they hew and the water they draw, are better than 
 the pine-forests that cover the mountains like the shadow 
 of God, and than the great rivers that move like his eternity. 
 And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that though 
 God " hath made everything beautiful in his time, also he 
 hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out 
 the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." 
 
 This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like 
 oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or con- 
 tinuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of 
 § 6. The evil con- nations, in their struggles for existence, in 
 inteTpTeta^ticTn^ their infancy, their impotence, or even their 
 S'natfonli disorganization, they have higher hopes and 
 power. nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes 
 
 the serious mind ; out of the salvation, the grateful heart ; 
 out of the endurance, the fortitude ; out of the deliver- 
 ance, the faith ; but now when they have learned to live 
 under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of 
 regard for each other ; and when they have done away with 
 violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem 
 arising out of their rest, evils that vex less and mortify 
 more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and 
 ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep 
 though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people 
 at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes 
 of fear also, a fear greater than of sword and sedition ; that 
 dependence on God may be forgotten because the bread is 
 given and the water is sure, that gratitude to him may cease 
 because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance 
 of a natural law, that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst 
 the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place 
 of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vain-glory, 
 and love in dissimulation,* that enervation may succeed to 
 
 * Rom. xii. 9. 
 
THE THEOBETIG FACULTY. 
 
 195 
 
 strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words 
 and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the 
 girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of 
 human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sun- 
 shine ; the iris colors its agitation, the frost fixes upon its 
 repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of 
 stones, which so long as they are torrent-tossed, and thunder- 
 stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is 
 silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them 
 and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into 
 dust. 
 
 And though I believe that we have salt enough of ardent 
 and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from 
 this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with 
 § 7 How to be anxiety, in all matter however trivial, in all 
 averted. directions however distant. And at this time, 
 
 when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as 
 grape-shot do the sea, when their great sagene is drawing 
 and twitching the ancient frame and strength of England 
 together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms and 
 rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of 
 manufactures, when there is not a monument throughout the 
 cities of Europe, that speaks of old years and mighty 
 people, but it is being swept away to build cafes and 
 gaming-houses ; * when the honor of God is thought to con- 
 
 * The extent of ravage among works of art, or of historical interest, 
 continually committiDg throughout the continent may, perhaps, be in 
 some measure estimated from the following facts, to which the ex- 
 perience of every traveller may add indefinitely : 
 
 At Beauvois — The magnificent old houses supported on columns of 
 workmanship (so far as I recollect) unique in the north of France, at 
 the corner of the market-place, have recently been destroyed for the 
 enlarging of some ironmongery and grocery warehouses. The arch 
 across the street leading to the cathedral has been destroyed also, for 
 what purpose, I know not. 
 
 At Rouen — The last of the characteristic houses on the quay is now 
 disappearing. When I was last there, I witnessed the destruction of 
 the noble gothic portal of the church of St. Nicholas, whose position 
 interfered with the courtyard of an hotel ; the greater part of the 
 ancient churches are used as smithies, or warehouses for goods. So 
 
196 OF THE RANK AND RELATIONS OF 
 
 gist in the poverty of his temple, and the column is short- 
 ened, and the pinnacle shattered, the color denied to the 
 casement, and the marble to the altar, while exchequers are 
 
 also at Tours (St. Julien). One of the most interesting and superb 
 pieces of middle-age domestic architecture in Europe, opposite the west 
 front of the cathedral, is occupied as a cafe, and its lower story con- 
 cealed by painted wainscotings ; representing, if I recollect right, two- 
 penny rolls surrounded by circles of admiring cherubs. 
 
 At Geneva — The wooden projections or loggias which were once the 
 characteristic feature of the city, have been entirely removed within 
 the last ten years. 
 
 At Pisa — The old Baptistery is at this present time in process of being 
 
 restored," that is, dashed to pieces, and common stone painted black 
 and varnished, substituted for its black marble. In the Campo Santo, 
 the invaluable frescoes, which might be protected by merely glazing the 
 arcades, are left exposed to wind and weather. While I was there last 
 year I saw a monument put up against the lower part of the wall, to 
 some private person ; the bricklayers knocked out a large space of the 
 lower brickwork, with what beneficial effect to the loose and blistered 
 stucco on which the frescoes are painted above, I leave the reader to 
 imagine ; inserted the tablet, and then plastered over the marks of the 
 insertion, destroying a portion of the border of one of the paintings. 
 The greater part of Giotto's "Satan before God," has been destroyed 
 by the recent insertion of one of the beams of the roof. 
 
 The tomb of Antonio Puccinello, which was the last actually put up 
 against the frescoes, and which destroyed the terminal subject of the 
 Giotto series, bears date 1808. 
 
 It has been proposed (or at least it is so reported) that the church of 
 La Spina should be destroyed in order to widen the quay. 
 
 At Florence — One of the most important and characteristic streets, 
 that in which stands the church of Or San Michele, has been within the 
 last five years entirely destroyed and rebuilt in the French style ; con- 
 sisting now almost exclusively of shops of bijouterie and parfumerie. 
 Owing to this direction of public funds, the fronts of the Duomo, Santa 
 Croce, St. Lorenzo, and half the others in Florence remain in their 
 original bricks. 
 
 The old refectory of Santa Croce, containing an invaluable Cenacolo, 
 if not by Giotto, at least one of the finest works of his school, is used as 
 a carpet manufactory. In order to see the fresco, I had to get on the 
 top of a loom. The cenacolo (of Eaffaelle ?) recently discovered, I saw 
 when the refectory it adorns was used as a coach-house. The fresco, 
 which gave Raffaelle the idea of the Christ of the Transfiguration, is in 
 an old wood shed at San Miniato, concealed behind a heap of faggots. 
 In June, last year, I saw Gentile de Fabriano's picture of the Adora* 
 
TEE THEORETIC FACULTY. 197 
 
 exhausted in luxury of boudoirs, and pride of reception- 
 rooms ; when we ravage without a pause all the loveliness of 
 creation which God in giving pronounced good, and destroy 
 without a thought all those labors which men have given their 
 lives, and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have left 
 for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their 
 hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail, there is need, 
 bitter need, to bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that 
 to live is nothing, unless to live be to know Him by whom 
 we live, and that he is not to be known by marring his fair 
 works, and blotting out the evidence of his influences upon 
 his creatures, not amid the hurry of crowds and crash of in- 
 novation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing in- 
 
 tion of the Magi, belonging to the Academy of Florence, put face up- 
 most in a shower of rain in an open cart ; on my suggesting the possi- 
 bility of the rain hurting it, an old piece of matting was thrown over 
 its face, and it was wheeled away *'per essere pulita." What fate this 
 signified, is best to be discovered from the large Perugino in the 
 Academy ; whose divine distant landscape is now almost concealed by 
 the mass of French ultramarine, painted over it apparently with 
 a common house brush, by the picture cleaner. 
 
 Not to detain the reader by going through the cities of Italy, I will 
 only further mention, that at Padua, the rain beats through the west 
 window of the Arena chapel, and runs down over the frescoes. That at 
 Venice, in September last, I saw three buckets set in the scuola di San 
 Kocco to catch the rain which came through the canvases of Tintoret on 
 the roof ; and that while the old works of art are left thus unprotected, 
 the palaces are being restored in the following modes. The English 
 residents knock out bow windows to see up and down the canal. The 
 Italians paint all the marble white or cream color, stucco the fronts, 
 and paint them in blue and white stripes to imitate alabaster. (This 
 has been done with Danieli's hotel, with the north angle of the church 
 of St. Mark, there replacing the real alabasters which have been torn 
 down, with a noble old house in St. Mark's place, and with several in 
 the narrow canals.) The marbles of St. Mark's, and carvings, are 
 being scraped down to make them look bright — the lower arcade of the 
 Doge's palace is whitewashed — the entrance porch is being restored — 
 the operation having already proceeded so far as the knocking off of the 
 heads of the old statues — an iron railing painted black and yellow has 
 been put round the court. Faded tapestries, and lottery tickets (the 
 latter for the benefit of charitable institutions) are exposed for sale in 
 the council chambers. 
 
198 
 
 OF THE RANK AND RELATIONS OF 
 
 telligences which he gave to men of old. He did not teach 
 them how to build for glory and for beauty, he did not give 
 them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on 
 and down from death to death, generation after generation, 
 that we, foul and sensual as we are, might give the carved 
 work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer ; 
 he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild 
 waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up 
 under as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure 
 diseases ; he brings not up his quails by the east wind, only 
 to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men : he has not 
 heaped rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor 
 clothed the grass of the field only for the oven. 
 
 All science and all art may be divided into that which is sub- 
 ^ servient to life, and which is the obiect of it. 
 
 § 8. Division of , ' . , , 
 
 the pursuits of As subservicnt to life, or practical, their results 
 
 men into subser- . /? j i? i 
 
 vientand objec- are, in the common sense oi the word, useiul. 
 *^^^* , As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in 
 
 the common sense, useless ; and yet the step between prac- 
 tical and theoretic science is the step between the miner and 
 the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist ; and the step 
 between practical and theoretic art is that between the brick- 
 layer and the architect, between the plumber and the artist, 
 and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to 
 greater ; so that the so-called useless part of each profession 
 does by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind as- 
 sume the superior and more noble place, even though books 
 be sometimes written, and that by writers of no ordinary 
 mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for the years 
 of toil which have traced the greater part of the combina- 
 tions of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a 
 cheap way of refining sugar, and date the eminence of the 
 philosopher, whose life has been spent in the investigation 
 of the laws of light, from the time of his inventing an im- 
 provement in spectacles. 
 
 But the common consent of men proves and accepts the 
 proposition, that whatever part of any pursuit ministers to 
 the bodily comforts, and admits of material uses, is ignoble, 
 
THE TIIEOEETIG FACULTY. 
 
 199 
 
 and whatsoever part is addressed to the mind only, is noble; 
 and that geology does better in reclothing dry bones and re- 
 vealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds 
 of iron ; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of 
 heaven than in teaching navigation ; botany better in dis- 
 playing structure than in expressing juices ; surgery better 
 in investigating organization than in setting limbs ; only it 
 is ordained that, for our encouragement, every s^^p we make 
 in the more exalted range of science adds something also to 
 its practical applicabilities ; that all the great phenomena of 
 nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, 
 by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the 
 glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet 
 such kind influences and so much of material blessing as to 
 be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desi^^ by 
 them with such single desire as the imperfection of theiWiat- 
 ure may admit ; * that the strong torrents which, in their 
 own gladness fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales 
 with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field 
 to feed and barge to bear ; that the fierce flames to which 
 the Alp owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, tem- 
 per for us the metal vein and quickening spring ; and that 
 for our incitement, I say not our reward, for knowledge is 
 its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their pre- 
 ciousness, and stars their times. 
 
 It would appear, therefore, that those pursuits which 
 § 9. Their reia- 3,re altogether theoretic, whose results are de- 
 tive dignities. sirable or admirable in themselves and for their 
 own sake, and in which no farther end to which their pro- 
 ductions or discoveries are referred, can interrupt the con- 
 templation of things as they are, by the endeavor to discover 
 of what selfish uses they are capable (and of this order are 
 §10. How re- painting and sculpture), ought to take rank 
 eSng notions of above all pursuits which have any taint in them 
 tWeanHmagin- subserviency to life, in so far as all such ten- 
 ative faculties. dency is the sign of less eternal and less holy 
 
 * Hooker, Eccl. Pol. Book I. chap. ii. § 3. 
 
200 OF THE BANK AND RELATIONS 
 
 function.* And such rank these two sublime arts would in- 
 deed assume in the minds of nations, and become objects of 
 corresponding efforts, but for two fatal and widespread er- 
 rors respecting the great faculties of mind concerned in them. 
 
 The first of these, or the theoretic faculty, is concerned 
 with the moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. 
 And the error respecting it is the considering and calling it 
 aesthetic, d%rading it to a mere operation of sense, or per- 
 haps worse, of custom, so that the arts which appeal to it 
 sink into a mere amusement, ministers to morbid sensibili- 
 ties, ticklers and fanners of the soul's sleep. 
 
 The second great faculty is the imaginative, which the 
 mind exercises in a certain mode of regarding or combining 
 the ideas it has received from external nature, and the oper- 
 atio^^of which become in their turn objects of the theoretic 
 facif^ to other minds. 
 
 And the error respecting this faculty is, that its function 
 is one of falsehood, that its operation is to exhibit things as 
 they are noty and that in so doing it mends the works of 
 God. 
 
 Now, as these are the two faculties to which I shall have 
 occasion constantly to refer during that examination of the 
 ideas of beauty and relation on which we are now entering, 
 § 11. Object of because it is only as received and treated by 
 tion. these, that those ideas become exalted and profit- 
 
 able, it becomes necessary for me, in the outset, to explain 
 their power and define their sphere, and to vindicate, in the 
 
 * I do not assert that the accidental utility of a theoretic pursuit, as of 
 botany for instance, in any way degrades it, though it cannot be con- 
 sidered as elevating it. But essential utility, a purpose to which the 
 pursuit is in some measure referred, as in architecture, invariably de- 
 grades, because then the theoretic part of the art is comparatively lost 
 sight of ; and thus architecture takes a level below that of sculpture 
 or painting, even when the powers of mind developed in it are of the 
 same high order. 
 
 When we pronounce the name of Giotto, our venerant thoughts are 
 at Assisi and Padua, before they climb the Campanile of Santa Maria 
 del Fiore. And he who would raise the ghost of Michael Ang:^lo, must 
 haunt the Sistine and Sb. Lorenzo, not St. Peter's. 
 
OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 
 
 201 
 
 system of our nature, their true place for the intellectual 
 lens and moral retina by which and on which our informing 
 thoughts are concentrated and represented. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY AS CONCERNED WITH PLEAS- 
 URES OF SENSE. 
 
 I PROCEED therefore first, to examine the nature of what 
 §1 Explanation ^^^^ Called the Theoretic faculty, and to jus- 
 of the term "the- tifv mv Substitution of the term " theoretic " for 
 
 oretic," . 
 
 aesthetic, which is the one commonly employed 
 with reference to it. 
 
 Now the term " sesthesis " properly signifies mere sensual 
 perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of 
 bodies, in which sense only, if we would arrive at any accu- 
 rate conclusions on this difficult subject, it should always be 
 used. But I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are 
 in any way sensual, — they are neither sensual nor intellect- 
 ual, but moral, and for the faculty receiving them, whose dif- 
 ference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavor 
 to explain, no term can be more accurate or convenient than 
 that employed by the Greeks, " theoretic," which I pray per- 
 mission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation of 
 the faculty itself, Theoria. 
 
 Let us begin at the lowest point, and observe, first, what 
 § 2. 01 the dif- differences of dignity may exist between dif- 
 i^'^Xasurer'ilf ferent kinds of aesthetic or sensual pleasure, 
 sense. properly so called. 
 
 Now it is evident that the being common to brutes, or pe- 
 culiar to man, can alone be no rational test of inferiority, or 
 dignity in pleasures. We must not assume that man is the 
 nobler animal, and then deduce the nobleness of his delights ; 
 but we must prove the nobleness of the delights, and thence 
 the nobleness of the animal. The dignity of affection is no 
 
202 OF THE THEOBETIG FACULTY 
 
 way lessened because a large measure of it may be found in 
 lower animals, neither is the vileness of gluttony and lust 
 abated because they are common to men. It is clear, there- 
 fore, that there is a standard of dignity in the pleasures and 
 passions themselves, by which we also class the creatures ca- 
 pable of, or suffering them. 
 
 The first great distinction, we observe, is that noted of 
 Aristotle, that men are called temperate and intemperate 
 with regard to some, and not so with respect to others, and 
 that those, with respect to which they are so 
 
 §3. Use of the \ ^ , i , , 
 
 terms Temperate called, are, by common consent, held to be the 
 
 and Intemperate, ^-j^g^^ But Aristotlc, thoUgh CXquisitcly Subtlc 
 
 in his notation of facts, does not frequently give us satisfac- 
 tory account of, or reason for them. Content with stating 
 the fact of these pleasures being held the lowest, he shows 
 not why this estimation of them is just, and confuses the 
 reader by observing casually respecting the higher pleasures, 
 what is indeed true, but appears at first opposed to his own 
 position, namely, that *^ men may be conceived, as also in 
 these taking pleasure, either rightly, or more or less than is 
 right." * Which being so, and evident capability of excess 
 or defect existing in pleasures of this higher order, we ought 
 to have been told how it happens that men are not called in- 
 temperate when they indulge in excess of this kind, and 
 what is that difference in tlie nature of the pleasure which 
 diminishes the criminality of its excess. This let us attempt 
 to ascertain. 
 
 Men are held intemparate (dKoXao-rot) only when their de- 
 sires overcome or prevent the action of their reason, and 
 they are indeed intemperate in the exact degree in which 
 such prevention or interference takes place, and 
 
 § 4. Right use of n .X . . -. 
 
 the term "intern- SO are actually aKoAa(rT06, in many mstances, and 
 with respect to many resolves, which lower not 
 the world's estimation of their temperance. For so long as 
 it can be supposed that the reason has acted imperfectly ow- 
 ing its own imperfection, or to the imperfection of the prem- 
 
 * cos Set, Ktti Ka9' virepfioA^y Koi iWeiipiy, 
 
AS CONCERNED WITH PLEASURES OF SENSE, 203 
 
 ises submitted to it, (as when men give an inordinate pref- 
 erence to their own pursuits, because they cannot, in the 
 nature of things, have sufficiently experienced the goodness 
 and benefit of others,) and so long as it may be presumed 
 that men have referred to reason in what they do, and have 
 not suffered its orders to be disobeyed through mere impulse 
 and desire, (though those orders may be full of error owing 
 to the reason's own feebleness,) so long men are not held 
 intemperate. But when it is palpably evident that the rea- 
 son cannot have erred but that its voice has been deadened 
 or disobeyed, and that the reasonable creature has been 
 dragged dead round the walls of his own citadel by mere 
 passion and impulse, — then, and then only, men are of all 
 held intemperate. And this is evidently the case with re- 
 spect to inordinate indulgence in pleasures of touch and 
 taste, for these, being destructive in their continuance not 
 only of all other pleasures, but of the very sensibilities by 
 which they themselves are received, and as this penalty is 
 actually known and experienced by those indulging in them, 
 so that the reason cannot but pronounce right respecting 
 their perilousness, there is no palliation of the wrong choice • 
 and the man, as utterly incapable of will,* is called intemper 
 ate, or d/coAao-ro?. 
 
 It would be well if the reader would for himself follow out 
 this subject, which it would be irrelevant here to pursue 
 farther, observing how a certain degree of intemperance is 
 suspected and attributed to men with respect to higher im- 
 pulses ; as, for instance, in the case of anger, or any other 
 passion criminally indulged, and yet is not so attributed, as 
 in the case of sensual pleasures ; because in anger the rea- 
 son is supposed not to have had time to operate, and to be 
 itself affected by the presence of the passion, which seizes 
 the man involuntarily and before he is aware ; whereas, in 
 the case of the sensual pleasures, the act is deliberate, and 
 determined on beforehand, in direct defiance of reason. Nev- 
 ertheless, if no precaution be taken against immoderate an- 
 
 * Comp. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. Book i. chap. 8. 
 
204 OF THE THEOBETIG FACULTY 
 
 ger, and the passions gain upon the man, so as to be evi- 
 dently wilful and unrestrained, and admitted contrary to all 
 reason, we begin to look upon him as, in the real sense of 
 the word, intemperate, or aKoXao-ro?, and assign to him, in 
 consequence, his place among the beasts, as definitely as if he 
 had yielded to the pleasurable temptations of touch or taste. 
 
 We see, then, that the primal ground of inferiority in 
 §5 Grounds of ^^^^^^ pleasures is that which proves their in- 
 inferiority in ttie dul^euce to be coutrarv to reason ! namely, 
 
 X)leasures which i-t . , " 
 
 arc subjects of their dcstructiveness upon prolongation, and 
 intemperance. incapability of co-existing continually with 
 
 other delights or perfections of the system. 
 
 And this incapability of continuance directs us to the sec- 
 ond cause of their inferiority ; namely, that they are given 
 to us as subservient to life, as instruments of our preservation 
 — compelling us to seek the things necessary to our being, 
 and that, therefore, when this their function is fully per- 
 formed, they ought to have an end ; and can be only arti- 
 ficially, and under high penalty, prolonged. But the pleas- 
 ures of sight and hearing are given as gifts. They answer 
 not any purposes of mere existence, for the distinction of all 
 that is useful or dangerous to us might be made, and often 
 is made, by the eye, without its receiving the slightest pleas- 
 ure of sight. We might have learned to distinguish fruits 
 and grain from flowers, without having any superior pleasure 
 in the aspect of the latter. And the ear might have learned 
 to distinguish the sounds that communicate ideas, or to recog- 
 nize intimations of elemental danger without perceiving either 
 music in the voice, or majesty in the thunder. And as these 
 pleasures have no function to perform, so there is no limit to 
 their continuance in the accomplishment of their end, for 
 they are an end in themselves, and so may be perpetual with 
 all of us — being in no way destructive, but rather increasing 
 in exquisiteness by repetition. 
 
 Herein, then, we find very sufficient ground for the higher 
 § 6. Evidence of estimation of these delights, first, in their being 
 JlifaKu'res'^o?^^^^^ eternal and inexhaustible, and secondly, in their 
 and hearing. being evidently no means or instrument of life. 
 
AS CONCERNED WITH PLEASURES OF SENSE. 205 
 
 but an object of life. Now in whatever is an object of life, in 
 whatever may be infinitely and for itself desired, we may be 
 sure there is something of divine, for God will not make any- 
 thing an object of life to his creatures which does not point 
 to, or partake of, Himself. And so, though we were to re- 
 gard the pleasures of sight merely as the highest of sensual 
 pleasures, and though they were of rare occurrence, and, 
 when occurring, isolated and imperfect, there would still be a 
 supernatural character about them, owing to their perma- 
 nence and self-sufficiency, where no other sensual pleasures 
 are permanent or self-sufficient. But when, instead of being 
 scattered, interrupted, or chance-distributed, they are gath- 
 ered together, and so arranged to enhance each other as by 
 chance they could not be, there is caused by them not only a 
 feeling of strong affection towards the object in which they 
 exist, but a perception of purpose and adaptation of it to 
 our desires ; a perception, therefore, of the immediate opera- 
 tion of the Intelligence which so formed us, and so feeds us. 
 
 Out of which perception arise joy, admiration, and grati- 
 tude. 
 
 Now the mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I 
 call assthesis ; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful per- 
 ception of it I call theoria. For this, and this only, is the 
 full comprehension and contemplation of the beautiful as a 
 gift of God, a gift not necessary to our being, but added to, 
 and elevating it, and twofold, first of the desire, and secondly 
 of the thing desired. 
 
 And that this joyfulness and reverence are a necessary part 
 of theoretic pleasure is very evident when we consider that, 
 by the presence of these feelings, even the lower and more 
 §7. How the sensual pleasures may be rendered theoretic, 
 mly be'^Sted Thus Aristotle has subtly noted, that " we call 
 in rank. men intemperate so much with respect to the 
 
 scents of roses or herb-perfumes as of ointments and of con- 
 diments," (though the reason that he gives for this be futile 
 enough.) For the fact is, that of scents artificially prepared 
 the extreme desire is intemperance, but of natural and God- 
 given scents, which take their part in the harmony and pleas- 
 
206 
 
 OF' THE THEOBETIG FACULTY 
 
 antness of creation, there can hardly be intemperance ; not 
 that there is any absolute difference between the two kinds, 
 but that these are likely to be received with gratitude and 
 joyfulness rather than those, so that we despise the seeking 
 of essences and unguents, but not the sowing of violets along 
 our garden banks. But all things may be elevated by affec- 
 tion, as the spikenard of Mary, and in the Song of Solomon, 
 the myrrh upon the handles of the lock, and that of Isaac 
 concerning his son. And the general law for all these pleas- 
 ures is, that when sought in the abstract and ardently, they 
 are foul things, but when received with thankfulness and with 
 reference to God's glory, they become theoretic ; and so I 
 can find something divine in the sweetness of wild fruits, as 
 well as in the pleasantness of the pure air, and the tenderness 
 of its natural perfumes that come and go as they list. 
 
 It will be understood why I formerly said in the chapter 
 respecting ideas of beauty, that those ideas were the sub- 
 ject of moral and not of intellectual, nor altogether of sen- 
 sual perception ; and why I spoke of the pleasures connected 
 „ o T ^ , with them as derived from those material 
 
 § 8. I d e a s of 
 
 beauty how es- sources which are as^reeable to our moral nature 
 
 sentially moral. , . . /. • si -n • • 
 
 in its purity and perfection." For, as it is nec- 
 essary to the existence of an idea of beauty, that the sen- 
 sual pleasure which may be its basis, should be accompanied 
 first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the per- 
 ception of kindness in a superior Intelligence, finally with 
 thankfulness and veneration towards that Intelligence itself, 
 and as no idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea 
 of beauty, until it be made up of these emotions, any more 
 than we can be said to have an idea of a letter of which we 
 perceive the perfume and the fair writing, without under- 
 standing the contents of it, or intent of it ; and as these 
 emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable by, 
 any operation of the intellect, it is evident that the sensa- 
 tion of beauty is not sensual on the one hand, nor is it in- 
 tellectual on the other, but is dependent on a pure, right, and 
 open state of the heart, both for its truth and for its inten- 
 sity, insomuch that even the right after action of the intel- 
 
AS CONCERNED WITH PLEASURES OF SENSE. 207 
 
 lect upon facts of beauty so apprehended, is dependent on 
 the acuteness of the heart feeling about them ; and thus the 
 Apostolic words come true, in this minor respect as in all 
 others, that men are alienated from the life of God, through 
 the ignorance that is in them, having the understanding dark- 
 ened because of the hardness of their hearts, and so being 
 past feeling, give themselves up to lasciviousness ; for we 
 do indeed see constantly that men having naturally acute 
 perceptions of the beautiful, yet not receiving it with a pure 
 heart, nor into their hearts at all, never comprehend it, nor 
 receive good from it, but make it a mere minister to their de- 
 sires, and accompaniment and seasoning of lower sensual 
 pleasures, until all their emotions take the same earthly 
 stamp, and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of lust. 
 
 Nor is what the world commonly understands by the culti- 
 §9 How de- ^^^^^^ taste, anything more or better than 
 graded by heart- this, at Icast in timcs of corrupt and over-pam- 
 
 less reception 
 
 pered civilization, when men build palaces and 
 plant groves and gather luxuries, that they and their devices 
 may hang in the corners of the world like fine-spun cob- 
 webs, with greedy, puffed-up, spider-like lusts in the middle. 
 And this, which in Christian times is the abuse and corrup- 
 tion of the sense of beauty, was in that Pagan life of which 
 St. Paul speaks, little less than the essence of it, and the best 
 they had ; for I know not that of the expressions of affec- 
 tion towards external nature to be found among Heathen 
 writers, there are any of which the balance and leading 
 thought cleaves not towards the sensual parts of her. Her 
 beneficence they sought, and her power they shunned, her 
 teaching through both, they understood never. The pleas- 
 ant influences of soft winds and ringing streamlets, and 
 shady coverts ; of the violet couch, and plane-tree shade,* 
 they received, perhaps, in a more noble way than we, but 
 they found not anything except fear, upon the bare moun- 
 § 10. How exalt- ghostly glen. The Hybla heather 
 
 ed by affection, they loved more for its sweet hives than its 
 
 * Plato, Phsedrus, § 9. 
 
208 OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY 
 
 purple hues. But the Christian theoria seeks not, though it 
 accepts, and touches with its own purity, what the Epicurean 
 sought, but finds its food and the objects of its love every- 
 where, in what is harsh and fearful, as well as what is kind, 
 nay, even in all that seems coarse and commonplace ; seizing 
 that which is good, and delighting more sometimes at find- 
 ing its table spread in strange places, and in the presence of 
 its enemies, and its honey coming out of the rock, than if all 
 were harmonized into a less wondrous pleasure ; hating only 
 what is self-sighted and insolent of men's work, despising all 
 that is not of God, unless reminding it of God, yet able to 
 find evidence of him still, where all seems forgetful of him, 
 and to turn that into a witness of his working which was 
 meant to obscure it, and so with clear and unoffended sight 
 beholding him forever, according to the written promise, — 
 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE. 
 
 Hitherto we have observed only the distinctions of 
 _ ^ disrnity amon^ pleasures of sense, considered 
 
 §1. By what test i or ? 
 
 is the health of merely as such, and the way in which any of 
 
 the perceptive . . . , . . , 
 
 faculty to be de- them may become theoretic in being received 
 
 termined? • i , j? ^^ 
 
 With right leehng. 
 But as we go farther, and examine the distinctive nature 
 of ideas of beauty, we shall, I believe, perceive something in 
 them besides aesthetic pleasure, which attests a more impor- 
 tant function belonging to them than attaches to other sen- 
 sual ideas, and exhibits a more exalted character in the faculty 
 by which they are received. And this was what I alluded to, 
 when I said in the chapter already referred to (§ 1), that " we 
 may indeed perceive, as far as we are acquainted with the 
 nature of God, that we have been so constructed as in a 
 healthy state of mind to derive pleasure from whatever things 
 are illustrative of that nature." 
 
IN IMPliESSIONS OF SENSE. 
 
 209 
 
 This point it is necessary now farther to develop. 
 
 Our first inquiry must evidently be, how we are authorized 
 to affirm of any man's mind, respecting impressions of sight, 
 that it is in a healthy state or otherwise. What canon or test 
 is there by which we may. determine of these impressions that 
 they are or are not rightly esteemed beautiful ? To what 
 authority, when men are at variance with each other on this 
 subject, shall it be deputed to judge which is right ? or is 
 there any such authority or canon at all ? 
 
 For it does not at first appear easy to prove that men ought 
 to like one thing rather than another, and although this is 
 granted generally by men's speaking of bad or good taste, it 
 is frequently denied when we pass to particulars, by the as- 
 sertion of each individual that he has a right to his opinion — 
 a right which is sometimes claimed even in moral matters, 
 though then palpably without foundation, but which does not 
 appear altogether irrational in matters aesthetic, wherein little 
 operation of voluntary choice is supposed possible. It would 
 appear strange, for instance, to assert, respecting a particular 
 person who preferred the scent of violets to roses, that he had 
 no right to do so. And yet, while I have said that the sensa- 
 tion of beauty is intuitive and necessary, as men derive pleas- 
 ure from the scent of a rose, I have assumed that there are 
 some sources from which it is rightly derived, and others 
 from w^hich it is wrongly derived, in other words that men 
 have no right to think some things beautiful, and no right 
 to remain apathetic with regard to others. 
 
 Hence then arise two questions, according to the sense in 
 which the word right is taken ; the first, in what way an im- 
 § 2. And in what pression of scnse may be deceptive, and there- 
 terms Right and ^^^^ ^ conclusion respecting it untrue ; and the 
 tLhed^f it^s^on- second, in what way an impression of sense, or 
 elusions? the preference of one, may be a subject of will, 
 
 and therefore of moral duty or delinquency. 
 
 To the first of these questions, I answer that we cannot 
 speak of the immediate impression of sense as false, nor of 
 its preference to others as mistaken, for no one can be de- 
 ceived respecting the actual sensation he perceives or prefers. 
 Vol. II.— 14 
 
210 OF ACCURACY AND INACCUBACY 
 
 But falsity may attach to his assertion or supposition, eithei 
 that what he himself perceives is from the same object per- 
 ceived by others, or is always to be by himself perceived, or 
 is always to be by himself preferred ; and when we speak of 
 a man as wrong in his impressions of sense, we either mean 
 that he feels differently from all, or a majority, respecting a 
 certain object, or that he prefers at present those of his im- 
 pressions, which ultimately he will not prefer. 
 
 To the second I answer, that over immediate impressions 
 and immediate preferences we have no power, but over ulti- 
 mate impressions, and especially ultimate preferences we 
 have ; and that, though we can neither at once choose whether 
 we shall see an object, red, green, or blue, nor determine to 
 like the red better than the blue, or the blue better than the 
 red, yet we can, if we choose, make ourselves ultimately sus- 
 ceptible of such impressions in other degrees, and capable of 
 pleasures in them in different measure ; and because, wher- 
 ever power of any kind is given, there is responsibility at- 
 tached, it is the duty of men to prefer certain impressions of 
 sense to others, because they have the power of doing so, 
 this being precisely analogous to the law of the moral world, 
 whereby men are supposed not only capable of governing 
 their likes and dislikes, but the whole culpability or propriety 
 of actions is dependent upon this capability, so that men are 
 guilty or otherwise, not for what they do, but for what they 
 desire, the command being not, thou shalt obey, but thou shalt 
 love, the Lord thy God, which, if men were not capable of 
 governing and directing their affections, would be the com- 
 mand of an impossibility. 
 
 I assert, therefore, that even with respect to impressions 
 §3 What power sensc, we havc a power of preference, and a 
 we have over im- correspondin^T dutv, and T shall show first the 
 
 pressions of sense. ^ o ./ 
 
 nature of the power, and afterwards the nature 
 
 of the duty. 
 
 Let us take an instance from one of the lowest of the 
 senses, and observe the kind of power we have over the im- 
 pressions of lingual taste. On the first offering of two dif- 
 ferent things to the palate, it is not in our power to prevent 
 
IN IMPBES8I0N8 OF SENSE, 
 
 211 
 
 or comusittid the instinctive preference. One will be unavoid- 
 ably and helplessly preferred to the other. But if the same 
 two things be submitted to judgment frequently and atten- 
 tively, it will be often found that their relations change. 
 The palate, which at first perceived only the coarse and 
 violent qualities of either, will^ as it becomes more experi- 
 enced, acquire greater subtilty and delicacy of discrimina- 
 tion, perceiving in both agreeable or disagreeable qualities 
 at first unnoticed, which on conti*iued experience will prob- 
 ably became more influential thar* the first impressions ; and 
 whatever this final verdict may h^», it is felt by the person 
 who gives it, and received by o^.k^rs as a more correct one 
 than the first. 
 
 So, then, the power we have ov^r the preference of im- 
 pressions of taste is not actual pur immediate, but only a 
 power of testing and comparing them frequently and care- 
 fully, until that which is the more permanent, 
 acuteness^of a" the more Consistently agreeable, be determined, 
 tention. ^\xt when the instrument of taste is thus in 
 
 some degree perfected and rendered subtile, by its being 
 practised upon a single object, its conclusions will be more 
 rapid with respect to others, and it will be able to distin- 
 guish more quickly in other things, and even to prefer at once, 
 those qualities which are calculated finally to give it most 
 pleasure, though more capable with respect to those on which 
 it is more frequently exercised ; whence people are called 
 judges with respect to this or that particular object of taste. 
 
 Now that verdicts of this kind are received as authorita- 
 tive by others, proves another and more important fact, 
 namely, that not only changes of opinion take place in con- 
 sequence of experience, but that those chan2:es 
 
 § 5. Ultimate ^ „ .5 ^ . . . « . 
 
 conclusions uni- are irom variation of opinion to unity ot opin- 
 ion ; and that whatever may be the differences 
 of estimate among unpractised or uncultivated tastes, there 
 will be unity of taste among the experienced. And that 
 therefore the operation of repeated trial and experience is 
 to arrive at principles of preference in some sort common to 
 all, and which are a part of our nature. 
 
212 OF AC CUBA CT AND INAOGUEACY 
 
 I have selected the sense of taste for an instance, because 
 it is the least favorable to the position T hold, since there is 
 more latitude allowed, and more actual variety of verdict in 
 the case of this sense than of any other ; and yet, however 
 susceptible of variety even the ultimate approximations of 
 its preferences may be, the authority of judges is distinctly 
 allowed, and we hear every day the admission, by those of 
 unpractised palate, that they are, or may be wrong in their 
 opinions respecting the real pleasurableness of things either 
 to themselves, or to others. 
 
 The sense, however, in which they thus use the word 
 " wrong " is merely that of falseness or inaccuracy in con- 
 § 6 What duty ^^^^ion, not of moral delinquency. But there 
 is attached to is as I havc stated, a duty, more or less imper- 
 
 this power over , 7^7 1 
 
 impressions of ativc, attached to every power we possess, and 
 therefore to this powder over the lower senses as 
 well as to all others. 
 
 And this duty is evidently to bring every sense into that 
 state of cultivation, in which it shall both form the truest 
 conclusions respecting all that is submitted to it, and pro- 
 cure us the greatest amount of pleasure consistent with its 
 due relation to other senses and functions. Which three 
 constituents of perfection in sense, true judgment, maximum 
 sensibility, and right relation to others, are invariably co- 
 existent and involved one by the other, for the true judg- 
 ment is the result of the high sensibility, and the high 
 sensibility of the right relation. Thus, for instance, with 
 respect to pleasures of taste, it is our duty not to devote 
 such inordinate attention to the discrimination of them as 
 must be inconsistent with our pursuit, and destructive of 
 our capacity of higher and preferable pleasures, but to culti- 
 vate the sense of them in that way which is consistent with 
 all other good, by temperance, namely, and by such atten- 
 tion as the mind at certain resting moments may fitly pay 
 even to so ignoble a source of pleasure as this, by which dis- 
 cipline we shall bring the faculty of taste itself to its real 
 maximum of sensibility ; for it may not be doubted but that 
 health, hunger, and such general refinement of bodily habits 
 
IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE. 
 
 213 
 
 as shall make the body a perfect and fine instrument in all 
 respects, are better promoters of actual sensual enjoyment 
 of taste, than the sickened, sluggish, hard-stimulated fas- 
 tidiousness of Epicurism. 
 
 So also it will certainly be found with all the senses, that 
 they individually receive the greatest and purest pleasure 
 when they are in right condition and degree of subordination 
 p ^ „ .to all the rest : and that bv the over cultiva- 
 
 § 7. How reward- ^ ^ . »• 
 
 e(i- tion of any one, (for morbid sources of pleasure 
 
 and correspondent temptations to irrational indulgence, con- 
 fessedly are attached to all,) we shall add more to their power 
 as instruments of punishment than of pleasure. 
 
 We see then, in this example of the lowest sense, that the 
 power we have over sensations and preferences depends 
 mainly on the exercise of attention through certain prolonged 
 periods, and that by this exercise, we arrive at ultimate, con- 
 stant, and common sources of agreeableness, casting o£E those 
 which are external, accidental, and individual. 
 
 That then which is required in order to the attainment of 
 accurate conclusions respecting the essence of the beautiful, 
 is nothing more than earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to 
 our impressions of it, by which those which are 
 with respect to shallow, false, or peculiar to times and tempera- 
 ideas of beauty, ments, may be distinguished from those that 
 are eternal. And this dwelling upon, and fond contempla- 
 tion of them, (the anschauung of the Germans,) is perhaps 
 as much as was meant by the Greek theoria ; and it is indeed 
 a very noble exercise of the souls of men, and one by which 
 they are peculiarly distinguished from the anima of lower 
 creatures, which cannot, I think, be proved to have any ca- 
 pacity of contemplation at all, but only a restless vividness 
 of perception and conception, the " fancy " of Hooker (Eccl. 
 Pol. Book i. Chap. vi. 2). And yet this dwelling upon them 
 comes not up to that which I wish to express by the word 
 theoria, unless it be accompanied by full perception of their 
 being a gift from and manifestation of God, and by all those 
 other nobler emotions before described, since not until so felt 
 is their essential nature comprehended. 
 
214 OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY 
 
 But two very important points are to be observed respect- 
 ing the direction and discipline of the attention in the early 
 stages of judgment. The first, that, for many beneficent pur'- 
 poses, the nature of man has been made recon* 
 
 § 9. Errors indue- -i i i i ^ , • n 
 
 ed by the power cilablc by custom to many things naturally pain- 
 of habit. .^^ even improper for it, and that 
 
 therefore, though by continued experience, united with 
 thought, we may discover that which is best of several, yet 
 if we submit ourselves to authority or fashion, and close our 
 eyes, we may be by custom made to tolerate, and even to love 
 and long for, that which is naturally painful and pernicious 
 to us, whence arise incalculable embarrassments on the sub- 
 ject of art. 
 
 The second, that, in order to the discovery of that which is 
 best of two things, it is necessary that both should be equally 
 submitted to the attention ; and therefore that we should 
 have so much faith in authority as shall make 
 
 § 10. The neces- , , , , i • i 
 
 sity of submis- US repeatedly observe and attend to that which 
 stages ^of ^judg^ is Said to be right, even though at present we 
 may not feel it so. And in the right mingling 
 of this faith with the openness of heart, which proves all 
 things, lies the great difficulty of the cultivation of the taste, 
 as far as the spirit of the scholar is concerned, though even 
 when he has this spirit, he may be long retarded by having 
 evil examples submitted to him by ignorant masters. 
 
 The temper, therefore, by which right taste is formed, 
 is, first, patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it, 
 it does not trample upon it lest it should be pearls, even 
 though it look like husks, it is a good ground, soft, pen- 
 etrable, retentive, it does not send up thorns of unkind 
 thoughts, to choke the weak seed, it is hungry and thirsty 
 too, and drinks all the dew that falls on it, it is an honest 
 and good heart, that shows no too ready springing before the 
 sun be up, but fails not afterwards ; it is distrustful of itself, 
 so as to be ready to believe and to try all things, and yet so 
 trustful of itself, that it will neither quit what it has tried, nor 
 take anything without trying. And that pleasure which it 
 has in things that it finds true and good, is so great that it 
 
IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE. 215 
 
 cannot possibly be led aside by any tricks of fashion, nor dis- 
 eases of vanity, it cannot be cramped in its conclusions by 
 partialities and hypocrisies, its visions and its delights are too 
 penetrating, too living, for any whitewashed object or shallow 
 fountain long to endure or supply. It clasps all that it loves 
 so hard, that it crushes it if it be hollow. 
 
 Now, the conclusions of this disposition are sure to be event- 
 ually right, more and more right according to the general 
 maturity of all the powers, but it is sure to come right at 
 last, because its operation is in analogy to, and 
 scope o?matured in harmony with, the whole spirit of the Chris- 
 judgment, ti^n moral system, and that which it will ulti- 
 mately love and rest in, are great sources of happiness com- 
 mon to all the human race, and based on the relations they 
 hold to their Creator. 
 
 These common and general sources of pleasure are, I be- 
 lieve, a certain seal, or impress of divine work and character, 
 upon whatever God has wrought in all the world ; only, it 
 being necessary for the perception of them, that their con- 
 traries should also be set before us, these divine qualities, 
 though inseparable from all divine works, are yet suffered to 
 exist in such varieties of degree, that their most limited mani- 
 festation shall, in opposition to their most abundant, act as a 
 foil or contrary, just as we conceive of cold as contrary to 
 heat, though the most extreme cold we ca» produce or con- 
 ceive is not inconsistent with an unknown amount of heat in 
 the body. 
 
 Our purity of taste, therefore, is best tested by its uni- 
 versality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we may 
 be sure that our cause for likine: is of a finite 
 
 § 12. How distin- i /. i -r» • /. • i 
 
 guishabie from and lalsc nature. But if we can perceive beauty 
 in everything of God's doing, we may argue that 
 we have reached the true perception of its universal laws. 
 Hence, false taste may be known by its fastidiousness, by its 
 demands of pomp, splendor, and unusual combination, by its 
 enjoyment only of particular styles and modes of things, and 
 by its pride also, for it is forever meddling, mending, accumu- 
 lating, and self-exulting, its eye is always upon itself, and it 
 
216 OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY 
 
 tests all things around it by the way they fit it. But true 
 taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, lay- 
 ing its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting 
 its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy, 
 lamenting over itself and testing itself by the way that it fits 
 things. And it finds whereof to feed, and whereby to grow, 
 in all things, and therefore the complaint so often made by 
 young artists that they have not within their reach materials, 
 or subjects enough for their fancy, is utterly groundless, and 
 the sign only of their own blindness and inefficiency ; for 
 there is that to be seen in every street and lane of every city, 
 that to be felt and found in every human heart and counte- 
 nance, that to be loved in every road-side weed and moss-grown 
 wall, which in the hands of faithful men, may convey emotions 
 of glory and sublimity continual and exalted. 
 
 Let therefore the young artist beware of the spirit of 
 choice, * it is an insolent spirit at the best and commonly a 
 base and blind one too, checking all progress and blasting all 
 power, encourao^ino: weaknesses, pamperins: par- 
 
 §13.Thedanger f. ' A ^ xJ ^1 14- 4- * 
 
 of a spirit of tialities, and teaching us to look to accidents or 
 choice. nature for the help and the joy which should 
 
 come from our own hearts. He draws nothing well who thirsts 
 not to draw everythmg ; when a good painter shrinks, it is 
 because he is humbled, not fastidious, when he stops, it is be- 
 cause he is surf^ted, and not because he thinks nature has 
 given him 'unkindly food, or that he fears famine, f I have 
 seen a man of true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to 
 look at the channellings that recent rain had traced in a heap 
 of cinders. 
 
 And here is evident another reason of that duty which we 
 owe respecting impressions of sight, namely, to discipline our- 
 §14. And crimi- selves to the enjoyment of those which are eter- 
 naiity. jj^^j their nature, not only because these are 
 
 the most acute, but because they are the most easily, con- 
 
 * ^'Nothing' comes amiss, — 
 A good digestion turneth all to health." — G. Herbert. 
 \ Yet note the difference between the choice that comes of pride, and 
 the choice that comes of love, and compare Chap. xv. § 6. 
 
IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE. 
 
 217 
 
 stantly, and unselfishly attainable. For had it been ordained 
 by the Almighty that the highest pleasures of sight should 
 be those of most difficult attainment, and that to arrive at 
 them it should be necessary to accumulate gilded palaces 
 tower over tower, and pile artificial mountains around insinu- 
 ated lakes, there would have been a direct contradiction be- 
 tween the unselfish duties and inherent desires of every in- 
 dividual. But no such contradiction exists in the system of 
 Divine Providence, which, leaving it open to us, if we will, 
 as creatures in probation, to abuse this sense like every other, 
 and pamper it with selfish and thoughtless vanities as we 
 pamper the palate with deadly meats, until the appetite of 
 tasteful cruelty is lost in its sickened satiety, incapable of 
 pleasure unless, Caligula like, it concentrate the labor of a 
 million of lives into the sensation of an hour, leaves it also 
 open to us, by humble and loving ways, to make ourselves 
 susceptible of deep delight from the meanest objects of crea- 
 tion, and of a delight which shall not separate us from our 
 fellows, nor require the sacrifice of any duty or occupation, 
 but which shall bind us closer to men and to God, and be 
 with us always, harmonized with every action, consistent with 
 every claim, unchanging and eternal. 
 
 Seeing then that these qualities of material objects which 
 are calculated to give us this universal pleasure, are demon- 
 strably constant in their address to human nature, they must 
 ^ beloner in some measure to whatever has been 
 
 § 15. How cer- ^ ^ 
 
 tain conclusions esteemed beautiful throughout successive ages 
 are by reason de- of the world (and they are also by their defini- 
 
 monstrable. .. ni i r»/^i\mi 
 
 tion common to all the works oi (jrod). i here- 
 fore it is evident that it must be possible to reason them out, 
 as well as to feel them out ; possible to divest every object 
 of that which makes it accidentally or temporarily pleasant, 
 and to strip it bare of distinctive qualities, until we arrive at 
 those which it has in common with all other beautiful things, 
 which we may then safely affirm to be the cause of its ulti- 
 mate and true delightfulness. 
 
 Now this process of reasoning will be that which I shall 
 endeavor to employ in the succeeding investigations, a pro- 
 
 \ 
 
218 OF ACCURACY AND INACCUBACY 
 
 cess perfectly safe, so long as we are quite sure that we are 
 reasoning concerning objects which produce in us one and 
 § 16. With what the Same sensation, but not safe if the sensation 
 UabUitiestoerror. produced be of a different nature, though it 
 may be equally agreeable ; for what produces a different 
 sensation must be a different cause. And the difficulty of 
 reasoning respecting beauty arises chiefly from the ambiguity 
 of the word, which stands in different people's minds for to- 
 tally different sensations, for which there can be no common 
 cause. 
 
 When, for instance, Mr. Alison endeavors to support his 
 position that " no man is sensible to beauty in those objects 
 with regard to which he has not previous ideas," by the re- 
 mark that " the beauty of a theory, or of a relic of antiquity, 
 is unintelligible to a peasant," we see at once that it is hope- 
 less to argue with a man who, under his general term beauty, 
 may, for anything we know, be sometimes speaking of math- 
 ematical demonstrability and sometimes of historical inter- 
 est ; while even if we could succeed in limiting the term to 
 the sense of external attractiveness, there would be still 
 room for many phases of error ; for though the beauty of a 
 snowy mountain and of a human cheek or forehead, so far 
 as both are considered as mere matter, is the same, and trace- 
 able to certain qualities of color and line, common to both, 
 and by reason extricable, yet the flush of the cheek and 
 moulding of the brow, as they express modesty, affection, or 
 intellect, possess sources of agreeableness which are not com- 
 mon to the snowy mountain, and the interference of whose 
 influence we must be cautious to prevent in our examination 
 of those which are material and universal.* 
 
 The first thing, then, that we have to do, is accurately to 
 § 17. The term discriminate and define those appearances from 
 I'irnirab^^B 'in^he which wc are about to rcason as belonging to 
 outset. Divided bcautv, propcrlv SO Called, and to clear the 
 
 into typical and j ^ r l j ' 
 
 >^itai- ground of all the confused ideas and erroneous 
 
 * Compare Spenser. (Hymn to Beauty.) 
 " But ah, believe me, there is more than so, 
 That works such wonders in the minds of men." 
 
IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE. 
 
 219 
 
 theories with which the misapprehension or metaphorical use 
 of the term has encumbered it. 
 
 By the term beauty, then, properly are signified two 
 things. First, that external quality of bodies already so 
 often spoken of, and which, whether it occur in a stone, 
 flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical, which, as I 
 have already asserted, may be shown to be in some sort typi- 
 cal of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall, for 
 distinction's sake, call typical beauty ; and, secondarily, the 
 appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things, 
 more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect 
 life in man. And this kind of beauty I shall call vital beauty. 
 
 Any application of the word beautiful to other appear- 
 ances or qualities than these, is either false or metaphorical, 
 as, for instance, to the splendor of a discovery, the fitness of 
 a proportion, the coherence of a chain of reasoning, or the 
 power of bestowing pleasure w^hich objects receive from as- 
 sociation, a power confessedly great, and interfering, as we 
 shall presently find, in a most embarrassing way with the at- 
 tractiveness of inherent beauty. 
 
 But in order that the mind of the reader may not be 
 biassed at the outset by that which he may happen to have 
 received of current theories respecting beauty, founded on 
 the above metaphorical uses of the word, (theories which are 
 less to be reprobated as accounting falsely for the sensations 
 of which they treat, than as confusing two or more pleasur- 
 able sensations together,) I shall briefly glance at the four 
 erroneous positions most frequently held upon this subject, 
 before proceeding to examine those typical and vital proper- 
 ties of things, to which I conceive that all our original con- 
 ceptions of beauty may be traced. 
 
220 
 
 OF FALSE OPINIONS HELD 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF FALSE OPINIONS HELD CONCERNING BEAUTY. 
 
 I PURPOSE at present to speak only of four of the more 
 § 1. Of the false Current opinions respecting beauty ,/f or of the 
 tr uth^ is beautyl^ crrors Connected with the pleasurableness of pro- 
 and vice versa, portion, and of the expression of right feelings 
 in the countenance, I shall have opportunity to treat in the 
 succeeding chapters ; (compare Ch. VI. Ch. XVI,)/ 
 
 Those erring or inconsistent positions which I would at 
 once dismiss are, the first, that the beautiful is the true, the 
 second, that the beautiful is the useful, the third, that it is 
 dependent on custom, and the fourth, that it is dependent 
 on the association of ideas. 
 
 To assert that the beautiful is the true, appears, at first, 
 like asserting that propositions are matter, and matter prop- 
 ositions. But giving the best and most rational interpretation 
 we can, and supposing the holders of this strange position 
 to mean only that things are beautiful which appear what 
 they indeed are, and ugly which appear what they are not, 
 we find them instantly contradicted by each and every con- 
 clusion of experience. A stone looks as truly a stone as a 
 rose looks a rose, and yet is not so beautiful ; a cloud may 
 look more like a castle than a cloud, and be the more beau- 
 tiful on that account. The mirage of the desert is fairer than 
 its sands ; the false image of the under heaven fairer than 
 the sea. I am at a loss to know how any so untenable a posi- 
 tion could ever have been advanced ; but it may, perhaps, 
 have arisen from some confusion of the beauty of art with 
 the beauty of nature, and from an illogical expansion of the 
 very certain truth, that nothing is beautiful in art, which, 
 professing to be an imitation, or a statement, is not as such 
 in some sort true. 
 
 That the beautiful is the useful, is an assertion evidently 
 
CONGERNim BEAUTY. 221 
 
 based on that limited and false sense of the latter term which 
 I have already deprecated. As it is the most degrading and 
 ^ . , danererous supposition which can be advanced 
 
 §2. Of the false & rr , . . 
 
 opinion that on the subiect, SO, fortunately, it is the most 
 
 beauty is useful- iiii it' p it*- 
 
 ness. Compare palpably absurd. it is to coniound admiration 
 Chap. xu. § 5. hunger, love with lust, and life with sensa- 
 
 tion ; it is to assert that the human creature has no ideas and 
 no feelings, except those ultimately referable to its brutal 
 appetites. It has not a single fact nor appearance of fact to 
 support it, and needs no combating, at least until its advo- 
 cates have obtained the consent of the majority of mankind, 
 that the most beautiful productions of nature are seeds and 
 roots ; and of arc, spades and millstones. 
 
 Somewhat more rational grounds appear for the assertion 
 that the sense of the beautiful arises from familiarity with 
 the object, though even this could not long be maintained 
 §3. ofthefaise by a thinking person. For all that can be al- 
 beautjT results legcd in defence of such a supposition is, that 
 Comp^re^^cS. familiarity deprives some objects which at first 
 ^•§1- appeared ugly, of much of their repulsiveness, 
 
 whence it is as rational to conclude that familiarity is the 
 cause of beauty, as it would be to argue that because it is 
 possible to acquire a taste for olives, therefore custom is the 
 cause of lusciousness in grapes. / Nevertheless, there are 
 some phenomena resulting from the tendency of our nature 
 to be influenced by habit of which it may be well to observe 
 the limits. 
 
 Custom has a twofold operation : the one to deaden the 
 frequency and force of repeated impressions, the other to en- 
 dear the familiar object to the affections.yC^ommpnly, where 
 §4. The twofold the mind is vigorous, and the power of sensa- 
 tom.^^it'd?^^^^^^ tion very perfect, it has rather the last operation 
 sensation, but than the first I with meaner minds, the first 
 
 confirms airec- ^ ' 
 
 takes place in the higher degree, so that they 
 are commonly characterized by a desire of excitement, and 
 the want of the loving, fixed, theoretic power.^^But both 
 take place in some degree with all men, so tha^J^s life ad- 
 vances, impressions of all kinds become less rapturous owing 
 
222 
 
 OF FALSE OPINIONS HELD 
 
 to their repetition. It is however beneficently ordained that 
 repulsiveness shall be diminished by custom in a far greater 
 degree than the sensation of beauty, so that the anatomist 
 in a little time loses all sense of horror in the torn flesh, and 
 carous bone, while the sculptor ceases not to feel to the close 
 of his life, the deliciousness of every line of the outward 
 frame. So then as in that with which we are made familiar, 
 the repulsiveness is constantly diminishing, and such claims 
 as it may be able to put forth on the affections are daily be- 
 coming stronger, while in what is submitted to us of new or 
 strange, that which may be repulsive is felt in its full force, 
 while no hold is as yet laid on the affections, there is a very 
 strong preference induced in most minds for that to which 
 they are not accustomed over that they know not, and this 
 § 5. But never is Strongest in those which are least open to 
 dcItroyTth r es- sensations of positive beauty. But however far 
 sence of beauty. ^]^jg operation may be carried, its utmost effect 
 is but the deadening and approximating the sensations of 
 beauty and ugliness. It never mixes nor crosses, nor in any 
 way alters them ; it has not the slightest connection with 
 nor power over their nature. ^By tasting two wines alter- 
 nately, we may deaden our perception of their flavor ; nay, 
 we may even do more than can ever be done in the case of 
 sight, we may confound the two flavors together. But it will 
 hardly be argued therefore that custom is the cause of either 
 flavoiy^ Awd's o, though by habit we may deaden the effect 
 of ugliness or beauty, it is not for that reason to be affirmed 
 that habit is the cause of either sensation. We may keep a 
 skull beside us as long as we please, we may overcome its 
 repulsiveness, we may render ourselves capable of perceiving 
 many qualities of beauty about its lines, we may contemplate 
 it for years together if we will, it and nothing else, but we 
 shall not get ourselves to think as well of it as of a child's 
 fair face. 
 
 It would be easy to pursue the subject farther, but I be- 
 § 6 Instances l^^^e that every thoughtful reader will be perfect- 
 ly well able to supply farther illustrations, and 
 sweep away the sandy foundations of the opposite theory, 
 
CONGEllJSfING BEAUTY. 
 
 223 
 
 unassisted. Let it, however, be observed, that in spite of all 
 custom, an Englishman instantly acknowledges, and at first 
 sight, the superiority of the turban to the hat, or of the plaid 
 to the coat, that whatever the dictates of immediate fashion 
 may compel, the superior gracefulness of the Greek or mid- 
 dle age costumes is invariably felt, and that, respecting what 
 has been asserted of negro nations looking with disgust on 
 the white face, no importance whatever-is to be attached to 
 the opinions of races who have never received any ideas of 
 beauty whatsoever, (these ideas being only received by minds 
 under some certain degree of cultivation,) and whose dis- 
 gust arises naturally from what they may suppose to be a 
 sign of weakness or ill health. It would be futile to pro- 
 ceed into farther detail. I pass to the last and most weighty 
 theory, that the agreeableness in objects which we call beauty 
 is the result of the association with them of agreeable or in- 
 teresting ideas. 
 
 Frequent has been the support, and wide the acceptance 
 of this supposition, and yet I suppose that no two consecu- 
 tive sentences were ever written in defence of it, without 
 §7 Of thefaise i^^^^lving either a contradiction or a confusion 
 opinion that of tcrms-- Thus Alison, "There are scenes un- 
 
 beauty depends , ' 
 
 on the associa- doubtcdlv more beautif ul than Runnymede, yet 
 
 tion of ideas. . . , ' ; 
 
 to those who recollect the great event that 
 passed there, there is no scene perhaps which so strongly 
 seizes on the imagination." Hera we are wonder-struck at 
 the audacious obtuseness which would prove the power of 
 imagination by its overcoming that very other power (of 
 inherent beauty) whose existence the arguer denies. / For 
 the only logical conclusion which can possibly be drawn 
 from the above sentence is, that imaofination is not the 
 source of beauty, for although no scene seizes so strongly 
 on the imagination, yet there are scenes " more beautiful 
 than Runnymede." And though instances of self-contradic- 
 tion as laconic and complete as this are to be found in few 
 writers except Alison, yej/if the arguments on the subject 
 be fairly sifted from the mass of confused language with 
 which they are always encumbered and placed in logical 
 
224 
 
 OF FALSE OPINIONS HELD 
 
 form, they will be found invariably to involve one of these 
 two syllogisms, either, association gives pleasure, and beauty 
 gives pleasure, therefore association is beauty. Or, the 
 power of association is stronger than the power of beauty, 
 therefore the power of association is the power of beauty. 
 Nevertheless it is necessary for us to observe the real 
 . . . value and authority of association in the moral 
 
 § 8. Association. i i • i /. i , ^ 
 
 Is, 1st, rational, system, and how ideas oi actual beauty may be 
 ciency as a cause affcctcd by it. Otherwise we shall be liable to 
 of beauty. embarrassment throughout the whole of the 
 succeeding argument. 
 
 Association is of two kinds. Rational and accidental. By 
 rational association I understand the interest which any 
 object may bear historically as having been in some way 
 connected with the affairs or affections of men ; an interest 
 shared in the minds of all who are aware of such connection : 
 which to call beauty is mere and gross confusion of terms, 
 it is no theory to be confuted, but a misuse of language to 
 be set aside, a misuse involving the positions that in unin- 
 habited countries the vegetation has no grace, the rock no 
 dignity, the cloud no color, and that the snowy summits of 
 the Alps receive no loveliness from the sunset light, because 
 they have not been polluted by the wrath, ravage, and mis- 
 ery of men. 
 
 By accidental association, I understand the accidental con- 
 nection of ideas and memories with material things, owing 
 to which those material things are regarded as agreeable or 
 § 9. Association Otherwise, according to the nature of the feel- 
 extent^of its^^^ ^^^^ recollcctious they summon ; the associa- 
 fluence. tion being commonly involuntary and oftentimes 
 
 so vague as that no distinct image is suggested by the object, 
 but we feel a painfulness in it or pleasure from it, without 
 knowing wherefore. Of this operation of the mind (which is 
 that of which I spoke as causing inextricable embarrassments 
 on the subject of beauty) the experience is constant, so that its 
 more energetic manifestations require no illustration. But 
 I do not think that the minor degrees and shades of this 
 great influence have been sufficiently appreciated. Not 
 
CONCERNma BEAUTY, 
 
 225 
 
 only all vivid emotions and all circumstances of exciting 
 interest leave their light and shadow on the senseless things 
 and instruments among which or through whose agency they 
 have been felt or learned, but I believe that the eye cannot 
 rest on a material form, in a moment of depression or exul- 
 tation, without communicating to that form a spirit and a 
 life, a life which will make it afterwards in some deorree 
 loved or feared, a charm or a painfulness for which we shall 
 be unable to account even to ourselves, which will not in- 
 deed be perceptible, except by its delicate influence on our 
 judgment in cases of complicated beauty. Let the eye but 
 rest on a rough piece of branch of curious form during a 
 conversation with a friend, rest, however, unconsciously, 
 and though the conversation be forgotten, though every 
 circumstance connected with it be as utterly lost to the 
 memory as though it had not been, yet the eye will, through 
 the whole life after, take a certain pleasure in such boughs 
 which it had not before, a pleasure so slight, a trace of feel- 
 ing so delicate as to leave us utterly unconscious of its pecul- 
 iar power, but undestroyable by any reasoning, a part, 
 thenceforward, of our constitution, destroyable only by the 
 same arbitrary process of association by which it was cre- 
 ated. Reason has no effect upon it whatsoever. And there 
 is probably no one opinion which is formed by any of us, in 
 matters of taste, which is not in some degree influenced by 
 unconscious association of this kind. In many who have no 
 definite rules of judgment, preference is decided by little 
 else, and thus, unfortunately, its operations are mistaken 
 for, or rather substituted for, those of inherent beauty, and 
 its real position and value in the moral system is in a great 
 measure overlooked. 
 
 For I believe that mere pleasure and pain have less asso- 
 ciative power than duty performed or omitted, and that the 
 great use of the associative faculty is not to add beauty to 
 § 10. The dignity ^Tiaterial things, but to add force to the con- 
 of its function, gcience. But for this external and all-powerful 
 witness, the voice of the inward guide might be lost in each 
 particular instance, almost as soon as disobeyed ; the echo of 
 Vol. II.— 15 
 
226 
 
 OF FALSE OPINIONS HELD 
 
 it in after time, whereby, though perhaps feeble as warning, 
 it becomes powerful as punishment, might be silenced, and 
 the strength of the protection pass away in the lightness of 
 the lash. Therefore it has received the power of enlisting 
 external and unmeaning things in its aid, and transmitting 
 to all that is indifferent, its own authority to reprove or re- 
 ward, so that, as we travel the way of life, v^e have the 
 choice, according to our working, of turning all the voices 
 of nature into one song of rejoicing, and all her lifeless creat- 
 ures into a glad company, whereof the meanest shall be 
 beautiful in our eyes, by its kind message, or of withering 
 and quenching her sympathy into a fearful, withdrawn, si- 
 lence of condemnation, or into a crying out of her stones, and 
 a shaking of her dust against us. Nor is it any marvel that 
 the theoretic faculty should be overpowered by this moment- 
 ous operation, and the indifferent appeals and inherent glories 
 of external things in the end overlooked, when the perfec- 
 tion of God's works is felt only as the sweetness of his prom- 
 ises, and their admirableness only as the threatenings of his 
 power. 
 
 y But it is evident that the full exercise of this noble func- 
 tion of the associative faculty is inconsistent with absolute 
 and incontrovertible conclusions on subjects of theoretic 
 §11. How it is preference. For it is quite impossible for any 
 iTpressTons ""'o^^ individual to distinguish in himself the uncon- 
 beauty. scious Underworking of indefinite association, 
 
 peculiar to him individually, from those great laws of 
 choice under which he is comprehended with all his race. 
 And it is well for us that it is so, the harmony of God's 
 good work is not in us interrupted by this mingling of uni- 
 versal and peculiar principles ; for by these such difference 
 is secured in the feelings as shall make fellowship itself more 
 delightful, by its inter-communicate character, and such va- 
 riety of feeling also in each of us separately as shall make us 
 capable of enjoying scenes of different kinds and orders, in- 
 stead of morbidly seeking for some perfect epitome of the 
 beautiful in one ; and also that deadening by custom of the- 
 oretic impressions to which I have above alluded, is counter- 
 
CONGERmNG BEAUTY. 
 
 227 
 
 balanced by the pleasantness of acquired association ; and 
 the loss of the intense feeling of the youth, which had no 
 need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied, or any inter- 
 est, unborrowed from the eye," is replaced by the gladness 
 of conscience, and the vigor of the reflecting and imagina- 
 tive faculties, as they take their wide and aged grasp of the 
 great relations between the earth and its dead people. 
 
 In proportion therefore to the value, constancy, and effi- 
 ciency of this influence, we must be modest and cautious in 
 the pronouncing of positive opinions on the subject of 
 „ . , ^ beauty. For every one of us has peculiar sources 
 
 § 12. And what y ^ . . 
 
 caution it ren- of cnioyment necessarily opened to him in cer- 
 
 ders necessary in . ii- i-i 
 
 the examination tain sccnes and things, sources which are sealed 
 to others, and we must be wary on the one hand, 
 of confounding these in ourselves with ultimate conclusions 
 of taste, and so forcing them upon all as authoritative, and 
 on the other of supposing that the enjoyments of others 
 which we cannot share are shallow or unwarrantable, because 
 incommunicable. I fear, for instance, that in the former 
 portion of this work I may have attributed too much com- 
 munity and authority to certain affections of my own for 
 scenery inducing emotions of wild, impetuous, and enthu- 
 siastic characters, and too little to those which I perceive in 
 others for things peaceful, humble, meditative, and solemn. 
 So also between youth and age there will be found differ- 
 ences of seeking, which are not wrong, nor of false choice in 
 either, but of different temperament, the youth sympathiz- 
 ing more with the gladness, fulness, and magnificence of 
 things, and the gray hairs with their completion, sufficiency 
 and repose. And so, neither condemning the delights of 
 others, nor altogether distrustful of our own, we must ad- 
 vance, as we live on, from what is brilliant to what is pure, 
 and from what is promised to what is fulfilled, and from what 
 is our strength to what is our crown, only observing in all 
 things how that which is indeed wrong, and to be cut up 
 from the root, is dislike, and not affection. For by the very 
 nature of these beautiful qualities, which T have defined to 
 be the signature of God upon his works, it is evident that in 
 
228 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 whatever we altogether dislike, we see not all ; that the 
 keenness of our vision is to be tested by the expansiveness of 
 our love, and that as far as the influence of association has 
 voice in the question, though it is indeed possible that the 
 inevitable painfulness of an object, for which we can render 
 no sufficient reason, may be owing to its recalling of a sorrow, 
 it is more probably dependent on its accusation of a crime. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY : — FIRST, OF INFINITY, OR THE TYPE 
 OF DIYINE INCOMPREHENSIBILITY. 
 
 The subject being now in some measure cleared of embar- 
 rassment, let us briefly distinguish those qualities or types on 
 whose combination is dependent the power of mere material 
 §1. Impossibility loveliness. I pretend neither jto enumerate uor 
 t^ating'^Jhrsub^ perceive them all, for it may be generally ob- 
 j®^*- served that whatever good there may be, desir- 
 
 able by man, more especially good belonging to his moral 
 nature, there will be a corresponding agreeableness in what- 
 ever external object reminds him of such good, whether it 
 remind him by arbitrary association or by typical resemblance, 
 and that the infinite ways, whether by reason or experience 
 discoverable, by which matter in some sort may remind us of 
 moral perfections, are hardly within any reasonable limits to 
 be explained, if even by any single mind they might all be 
 traced. Yet certain palpable and powerful modes there are, 
 by observing which, we may come at such general conclusions 
 on the subject as may be practically useful, and more than 
 these I shall not attempt to obtain. 
 
 And first, I would ask of the reader to enter upon the sub- 
 § % With what j^^^ v^\\)ci me, as far as may be, as a little child, 
 simplicity of feel- j^i^dins: himsclf of all conventional and author- 
 
 in{? to be ap- o 
 
 proached. itative thoughts, and especially of such associ- 
 
 ations as arise from his respect for Pagan art, or which are in 
 any wuy traceable to classical readings. I recollect that 
 
OF INFINITY. 
 
 229 
 
 Mr. Alison traces his first perceptions of beauty in external 
 nature to this most corrupt source, thus betraying so total 
 and singular a want of natural sensibility as may well excuse 
 the deficiencies of his following arguments. For there was 
 never yet the child of any promise (so far as the theoretic 
 faculties are concerned) but awaked to the sense of beauty 
 with the first gleam of reason ; and I suppose there are few, 
 among those who love nature otherwise than by profession 
 and at second-hand, who look not back to their youngest and 
 least-learned days as those of the most intense, superstitious, 
 insatiable, and beatific perception of her splendors. And the 
 bitter decline of this glorious feeling, though many note it 
 not, partly owing to the cares and weight of manhood, which 
 leave them not the time nor the liberty to look for their lost 
 treasure, and partly to the human and divine affections which 
 are appointed to take its place, yet has formed the subject 
 not indeed of lamentation, but of holy thankfulness for the 
 witness it bears to the immortal origin and end of our nature, 
 to one whose authority is almost without appeal in all ques- 
 tions relating to the influence of external things upon the 
 pure human soul. 
 
 ** Heaven lies about us in our infancy, — 
 Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 Upon the growiDg boy. 
 
 But he beholds the light, and whence it flows 
 He sees it in his joy. 
 
 The youth, who daily farther from the east 
 
 Must travel, still is nature's priest. 
 
 And by the vision splendid 
 
 Is on his way attended. 
 
 At length the Man perceives it die away 
 
 And fade into the light of common day." 
 
 And if it were possible for us to recollect all the unaccount- 
 able and happy instincts of the careless time, and to reason 
 upon them with the maturer judgment, we might arrive at 
 more rapid and right results than either the philosophy or the 
 sophisticated practice of art have yet attained. But we lose 
 the perceptions before we are capable of methodizing or com- 
 paring them. 
 
230 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 One, however, of these child instincts, I believe that few 
 forget ; the emotion, namely, caused by all open ground, or 
 lines of any spacious kind against the sky, behind which 
 p o mt, thercmisht be conceived the sea. It is an emo- 
 
 § 3. The child ^ ^ 
 
 instinct respect- tion morc Dure than that caused by the sea itself, 
 
 ing space. , . . . 
 
 for I recollect distinctly running down behind 
 the banks of a high beach to get their land line cutting against 
 the sky, and receiving a more strange delight from this than 
 from the sight of the ocean : I am not sure that this feeling 
 is common to all children, (or would be common if they were 
 all in circumstances admitting it), but I have ascertained it 
 to be frequent among those who possess the most vivid sen- 
 sibilities for nature ; and I am certain that the modification 
 of it, which belongs to our after years, is common to all, the 
 love, namely, of a light distance appearing over a compara- 
 tively dark horizon. This I have tested too frequently to be 
 mistaken, by offering to indifferent spectators forms of equal 
 abstract beauty in half tint, relieved, the one against dark 
 sky, the other against a bright distance. The preference is 
 invariably given to the latter, and it is very certain that this 
 preference arises not from any supposition of there being 
 greater truth in this than the other, for the same preference 
 is unhesitatingly accorded to the same effect in nature her- 
 § 4. Continued Whatever beauty there may result from 
 
 in after life. effccts of light on foreground objects, from the 
 dew of the grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the 
 birch trunk, or the fair daylight hues of darker things, (and 
 joyfulness there is in all of them), there is yet a light which 
 the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beau- 
 tiful, the light of the declining or breaking day, and the 
 flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green 
 sky of the horizon ; a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps more 
 acute, but having more of spiritual hope and longing, less of 
 animal and present life, more manifest, invariably, in those 
 of more serious and determined mind, (I use the word seri- 
 ous, not as being opposed to cheerful, but to trivial and vol- 
 atile ;) but, I think, marked and unfailing even in those of 
 the least thoughtful dispositions. I am willing to let it rest 
 
OF INFINITY. 
 
 231 
 
 on the determination of every reader, whether the pleasure 
 which he has received from these effects of calm and lumi- 
 nous distance be not the most singular and memorable of 
 which he has been conscious, whether all that is dazzling in 
 color, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be not of 
 evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared with the 
 still small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or 
 the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark, troublous-edged sea. 
 
 Let us try to discover that which effects of this kind pos- 
 sess or suggest, peculiar to themselves, and which other ef- 
 oi. . fects of li2:ht and color possess not. H\\qvq must 
 
 §5. Whereto °. . ^ t i 
 
 this instinct is be somethiusT in them of a peculiar character, 
 
 traceable. ox » 
 
 and that, whatever it be, must be one of the 
 primal and most earnest motives of beauty to human sen- 
 sation. 
 
 Do they show finer characters of form than can be devel- 
 oped by the broader daylight ? Not so ; for their power is 
 almost independent of the forms they assume or display ; it 
 matters little whether the bright clouds be simple or mani- 
 fold, whether the mountain line be subdued or majestic, the 
 fairer forms of earthly things are by them subdued and dis- 
 guised, the round and muscular growth of the forest trunks 
 is sunk into skeleton lines of quiet shade, the purple clefts 
 of the hill-side are labyrinthed in the darkness, the orbed 
 spring and whirling wave of the torrent have given place to 
 a white, ghastly, interrupted gleaming. Have they more per- 
 fection or fulness of color ? Not so ; for their effect is oft- 
 entimes deeper when their hues are dim, than when they 
 are blazoned with crimson and pale gold ; and assuredly, in 
 the blue of the rainy sky, in the many tints of morning flow- 
 ers, in the sunlight on summer foliage and field, there are 
 more sources of mere sensual color-pleasure than in the single 
 streak of wan and dying light. It is not then by nobler 
 form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is not by intensity 
 of light, (for the sun itself at noon-day is effectless upon the 
 feelings,) that this strange distant space possesses its attract- 
 ive power. But there is one thing that it has, or suggests^ 
 which no other object of sight suggests in equal degree, and 
 
232 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 that is, — -Infinity. It is of all visible things the least mate- 
 rial, the least finite, the farthest withdrawn from the earth 
 prison-house, the most typical of the nature of God, the most 
 suggestive of the glory of His dwelling-place. For the sky 
 of night, though we may know it boundless, is dark, it is a 
 studded vault, a roof that seems to shut us in and down, but 
 the bright distance has no limit, we feel its infinity, as we re- 
 joice in its purity of light. 
 
 Now not only is this expression of infinity in distance most 
 precious wherever we find it, however solitary it may be, and 
 however unassisted by other forms and kinds of beauty, 
 § 6. Infinity how th^X value that no such other forms 
 
 necessary m art. ^jjj altogether recompense us for its loss ; and 
 much as I dread the enunciation of anything that may seem 
 like a conventional rule, I have no hesitation in asserting, that 
 no work of any art, in which this expression of infinity is pos- 
 sible, can be perfect, or supremely elevated without it, and 
 that, in proportion to its presence, it will exalt and render 
 impressive even the most tame and trivial themes. And I 
 think if there be anyone grand division, by which it is at all 
 possible to set the productions of painting, so far as their 
 mere plan or system is concerned, on our right and left hands, 
 it is this of light and dark background, of heaven light or of 
 object light. For I know not any truly great painter of any 
 time, who manifests not the most intense pleasure in the lu- 
 minous space of his backgrounds, or who ever sacrifices this 
 pleasure where the nature of his subject admits of its attain- 
 ment, as on the other hand I know not that the habitual use 
 of dark backgrounds can be shown as having ever been co- 
 existent with pure or high feeling, and, except in the case of 
 Rembrandt, (and then under peculiar circumstances only,) 
 with any high power of intellect. It is however necessary 
 carefully to observe the following modifications of this broad 
 principle. 
 
 The absolute necessity, for such indeed I consider it, is of 
 §7. Conditions no more than such a mere luminous distant 
 of Its necessity, p^^j^^ may give to the feelings a species of 
 escape from all the finite objects about them. There is a 
 
OF INFINITY. 
 
 233 
 
 spectral etching of Rembrandt, a presentation of Christ in 
 the temple, where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring 
 by its gems out of the gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it 
 there is a subdued window light seen in the opening between 
 two columns, without which the impressiveness of the whole 
 subject would, I think, be incalculably brought down. I can- 
 not tell whether I am at present allowing too much weight 
 to my own fancies and predilections, but without so much 
 escape into the outer air and open heaven as this, I can take 
 permanent pleasure in no picture. 
 
 And I think I am supported in this feeling by the unani- 
 mous practice, if not the confessed opinion, of all artists. 
 The painter of portrait is unhappy without his conventional 
 ^ ^ , ^ , white stroke under the sleeve, or beside the arm- 
 
 § 8. And connect- ^ ^ ^ ^ ' 
 
 ed analogies. chair ; the painter of interiors feels like a caged 
 bird, unless he can throw a window open, or set the door 
 ajar ; the landscapist dares not lose himself in the forest 
 without a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor 
 ventures out in rain, unless he may somewhere pierce to a 
 better promise in the distance, or cling to some closing gap 
 of variable blue above ; — escape, hope, infinity, by whatever 
 conventionalism sought, the desire is the same in all, the in- 
 stinct constant, it is no mere point of light that is wanted 
 in the etching of Rembrandt above instanced, a gleam of 
 armor or fold of temple curtain would have been utterly val- 
 ueless, neither is it liberty, for though we cut down hedges 
 and level hills, and give what waste and plain we choose, on 
 the right hand and the left, it is all comfortless and unde- 
 sired, so long as we cleave not a way of escape forward ; 
 and however narrow and thorny and difficult the nearer path, 
 it matters not, so only that the clouds open for us at its close. 
 Neither will any amount of beauty in nearer form, make us 
 content to stay with it, so long as we are shut down to that 
 alone, nor is any form so cold or so hurtful but that we may 
 look upon it with kindness, so only that it rise against the 
 infinite hope of light beyond. The reader can follow out the 
 analogies of this unassisted. 
 
 But although this narrow portal of escape be all that is 
 
234 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 absolutely necessary, I think that the dignity of the painting 
 increases with the extent and amount of the expression. With 
 the earlier and mis^htier painters of Italy, the 
 
 §9.Howthedig- . f ^ 1 • ^- ^ £ 
 
 nity of treatment practice IS commonly to leave their distance of 
 to the expression pure and Open sky, of such simplicity, that it in 
 of infinity. nowise shall interfere with or draw the attention 
 from the interest of the figures, and of such purity, that es- 
 pecially towards the horizon, it shall be in the highest degree 
 expressive of the infinite space of heaven. I do not mean 
 to say that they did this with any occult or metaphysical 
 motives. They did it, I think, with the child-like, unpretend- 
 ing simplicity of all earnest men ; they did what they loved 
 and felt ; they sought what the heart naturally seeks, and 
 gave what it most gratefully receives ; and I look to them as 
 in all points of principle (not, observe, of knowledge or em- 
 pirical attainment) as the most irrefragable authorities, pre- 
 cisely on account of the child-like innocence, which never 
 deemed itself authoritative, but acted upon desire, and not 
 upon dicta, and sought for sympathy, not for admiration. 
 
 And so we find the same simple and sweet treatment, the 
 open sky, the tender, unpretending, horizontal white clouds, 
 the far winding and abundant landscape, in Giotto, Taddeo, 
 Gaddi, Laurati, Angelico, Benozzo, Ghirlandajo, Francia, 
 Perugino, and the young Raffaelle, the first symptom of con- 
 ventionality appearing in Peru2rino, who, thousrh 
 
 §10. Examples . ^ / 
 
 among the South- With intense lecling ot light and color he carried 
 ern schools. glory of his luminous distance far beyond all 
 
 his predecessors, began at the same time to use a somewhat 
 morbid relief of his figures against the upper sky. Thus in 
 the Assumption of the Florentine Academy, in that of I'An- 
 nunziata ; and of the Gallery of Bologna, in all which pict- 
 ures the lower portions are incomparably the finest, owing 
 to the light distance behind the heads. Raffaelle, in his fall, 
 betrayed the faith he had received from his father and his 
 master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the Madonna 
 del Cardellino, the chamber-wall of the Madonna della Sedi- 
 ola — and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino. Yet it is 
 curious to observe how much of the dii^nity even of his later 
 
OF INFINITY, 
 
 235 
 
 pictures, depends on such portions as the green light of the 
 lake, and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the tribune, 
 and how the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Im- 
 pannata, is redeemed into something like elevated character, 
 merely by the light of the linen window from which it takes 
 its name. 
 
 That which by the Florentines was done in pure simplicity 
 of heart, was done by the Venetians with intense love of the 
 color and splendor of the sky itself, even to the frequent sacri- 
 §11 Among the fi^^i^^g ^f their subject to the passion of its dis- 
 venetians. tancc. In Carpaccio, John Bellini, Giorgione, 
 Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret, the preciousness of the lumi- 
 nous sky, so far as it might be at all consistent with their sub- 
 ject, is nearly constant ; abandoned altogether in portraiture 
 only, seldom even there, and never with advantage. Titian 
 and Veronese, who had less exalted feeling than the others, 
 affording a few instances of exception, the latter overpower- 
 ing his silvery distances with foreground splendor, the other 
 sometimes sacrificing them to a luscious fulness of color, as 
 in the Flagellation in the Louvre, by a comparison of which 
 with the unequalled majesty of the Entombment opposite, 
 the whole power and applicability of the general principle 
 may at once be tested. 
 
 But of the value of this mode of treatment there is a far- 
 ther and more convincing proof than its adoption either by 
 the innocence of the Florentine or the ardor of the Venetian, 
 12 A th ^^^^^y? ^^^^ when retained or imitated from them 
 painters of land- by the landscape painters of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, when appearing in isolation from all other 
 good, among the weaknesses and paltrinesses of Claude, the 
 mannerisms of Gaspar, and the caricatures and brutalities of 
 Salvator, it yet redeems and upholds all three, conquers all 
 foulness by its purity, vindicates all folly by its dignity, and 
 puts an uncomprehended power of permanent address to the 
 human hearty upon the lips of the senseless and the profane.* 
 
 * In one of the smaller rooms of the Pitti palace, over the door, is a 
 temptation of St. Anthony, by Salvator, wherein such power as the 
 artist possessed is fully manifested, with little, comparatively, that is 
 
236 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 Now, although I doubt not that the general value of this 
 treatment will be acknowledged by all lovers of art, it is not 
 certain that the point to prove which I have brought it for- 
 §13. other modes ^ard, wiU be as readily conceded, namely, the 
 ir 'of^^iLfinity^'is i^i^erent power of all representations of infinity 
 over the human heart ; for there are, indeed, 
 countless associations of pure and religious kind, which com- 
 bine with each other to enhance the impression, when pre- 
 sented in this particular form, whose power I neither deny 
 nor am careful to distinguish, seeing that they all tend to 
 the same Divine point, and have reference to heavenly hopes ; 
 delights they are in seeing the narrow, black, miserable 
 earth fairly compared with the bright firmament, reachings 
 forward unto the things that are before, and joyfulness in 
 the apparent though unreachable nearness and promise of 
 them. But there are other modes in which infinity may be 
 represented, which are confused by no associations of the 
 kind, and which would, as being in mere matter, appear triv- 
 ial and mean, but for their incalculable influence on the forms 
 of all that we feel to be beautiful. The first of these is the 
 curvature of lines and surfaces, wherein it at first appears 
 §14. The beauty f Utile to iusist upou any resemblance orsugges- 
 of curvature. q£ infinity, siuce there is certainly in our 
 
 ordinary contemplation of it, no sensation of the kind. But 
 
 offensive. It is a vigorous and ghastly thought, in that kind of horror 
 which is dependent on scenic effect, perhaps unrivalled, and I shall have 
 ocxjasion to refer to it again in speaking of the powers of imagination. 
 I allude to it here, because the sky of the distance affords a remarkable 
 instance of the power of light at present under discussion. It is formed 
 of flakes of black cloud, with rents and openings of intense and lurid 
 green, and at least half of the impressiveness of the picture depends on 
 these openings. Close them, make the sky one mass of gloom, and the 
 spectre will be awful no longer. It owes to the light of the distance 
 both its size and its spirituality. The time would fail me if I were to 
 name the tenth part of the pictures which occur to me, whose vulgarity 
 is redeemed by this circumstance alone, and yet let not the artist trust 
 to such morbid and conventional use of it as may be seen in the com- 
 mon blue and yellow effectism of the present day. Of the value of 
 moderation and simplicity in the use of this, as of all other sources of 
 pleasurable emotion, I shall presently have occasion to speak farther. 
 
OF INFINITY. 
 
 237 
 
 I have repeated again and again that the ideas of beauty 
 are instinctive, and that it is only upon consideration, and 
 even then in doubtful and disputable way, that they appear 
 in their typical character ; neither do I intend at all to in- 
 sist upon the particular meaning which they appear to my- 
 self to bear, but merely on their actual and demonstrable 
 agreeableness, so that, in the present case, while I assert pos- 
 itively, and have no fear of being able to prove, that a curve 
 of any kind is more beautiful than a right line, I leave it to 
 the reader to accept or not, as he pleases, that reason of its 
 agreeableness, which is the only one that I can at all trace, 
 namely, that every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes 
 of direction. 
 
 That all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed ex- 
 clusively of curves will, I believe, be at once allowed ; but 
 that which there will be need more especially to prove, is the 
 
 subtility and constancy of curvature in all nat- 
 stant in^exteraai ural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except 
 
 in crystals, in certain mountain forms admitted 
 for the sake of sublimity or contrast, (as in the slope of de- 
 bris,) in rays of light, in the levels of calm water and alluvial 
 land, and in some few organic developments, there are no 
 lines nor surfaces of nature without curvature, though as we 
 before saw in clouds, more especially in their under lines 
 towards the horizon, and in vast and extended plains, right 
 lines are often suggested which are not actual. Without 
 these we could not be sensible of the value of the contrasting 
 curves, and while, therefore, for the most part, the eye is fed 
 in natural forms with a grace of curvature which no hand 
 nor instrument can follow, other means are provided to give 
 beauty to those surfaces which are admitted for contrast, as 
 in water by its reflection of the gradations which it possesses 
 not itself. In freshly-broken ground, which nature has not 
 yet had time to model, in quarries and pits which are none 
 of her cutting, in those convulsions and evidences of convul- 
 sion, of whose influence on ideal landscape I shall presently 
 have occasion to speak, and generally in all ruin and disease, 
 and interference of one order of being with another, (as in 
 
238 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 the cattle line of park trees,) the curves vanish, and violently 
 opposed or broken and unmeaning lines take their place. 
 
 What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shades and 
 colors. It is there infinity, and divides them into an infinite 
 number of degrees. Absolutely, without gradation no natural 
 §16. The beauty surfacc cau possibly be, except under circum- 
 of gradation. stauccs of SO rare conjunction as to amount to 
 a lusus naturae ; for we have seen that few surfaces are 
 without curvature, and every curved surface must be gra- 
 dated by the nature of light, which is most intense when 
 it impinges at the highest angle, and for the gradation 
 of the few plane surfaces that exist, means are provided in 
 local color, aerial perspective, reflected lights, etc., from 
 which it is but barely conceivable that they should ever 
 escape. Hence for instances of the complete absence of 
 gradation we must look to man's work, or to his disease 
 and decrepitude. Compare the gradated colors of the rain- 
 bow with the stripes of a target, and the gradual concen- 
 tration of the youthful blood in the cheek with an abrupt 
 patch of rouge, or with the sharply drawn veining of old 
 age. 
 
 Gradation is so inseparable a quality of all natural shade 
 and color that the eye refuses in art to understand anything 
 as either, which appears without it, while on the other hand 
 §17. How found "©arly all the gradations of nature are so sub- 
 in Nature. ^'1^ between degrees of tint so slightly 
 separated, that no human hand can in any wise equal, or do 
 anything more than suggest the idea of them. In propor- 
 tion to the space over which gradation extends, and to its 
 invisible subtility, is its grandeur, and in proportion to its 
 narrow limits and violent degrees, its vulgarity. In Cor- 
 reggio, it is morbid and vulgar in spite of its refinement of 
 execution, because the eye is drawn to it, and it is made the 
 most observable and characteristic part of the picture ; 
 whereas natural gradation is forever escaping observation to 
 that degree that the greater part of artists in working from 
 nature see it not, (except in certain of its marked develop- 
 ments,) but either lay down such continuous lines and colors, 
 
OF INFINITY. 
 
 239 
 
 as are both disagreeable and impossible, or, receiving the 
 necessity of gradation as a principle instead of a fact, use 
 it in violently exaggerated measure, and so lose both the 
 dignity of their own work, and by the constant dwelling of 
 their eyes upon exaggerations, their sensibility to that of 
 the natural forms. So that we find the majority of painters 
 divided between the two evil extremes of insufficiency and 
 affectation, and only a few of the greatest men capable of 
 making gradation constant and yet extended over enormous 
 spaces and within degrees of narrow difference, as in the 
 body of a high light. 
 
 From the necessity of gradation results what is commonly 
 given as a rule of art, though its authority as a rule obtains 
 only from its being a fact of nature, that the extremes of 
 §18. Howneces- ^igh light and pure color, can exist only in 
 saryinArt. points. The commou rules respecting sixths 
 and eighths, held concerning light and shade, are entirely 
 absurd and conventional ; according to the subject and the 
 effect of light, the greater part of the picture will be or 
 ought to be light or dark ; but that principle which is not 
 conventional, is that of all light, however high, there is some 
 part that is higher than the rest, and that of all color, how- 
 ever pure, there is some part that is purer than the rest, and 
 that generally of all shade, however deep, there is some part 
 deeper than the rest, though this last fact is frequently 
 sacrificed in art, owing to the narrowness of its means. But 
 on the right gradation or focussing of light and color 
 depends in great measure, the value of both. Of this, I 
 have spoken sufficiently in pointing out the singular con- 
 stancy of it in the works of Turner. Part II. Sect. 11. Chap. 
 11. § 17. And it is generally to be observed that even raw 
 and valueless color, if rightly and subtilely gradated will in 
 some measure stand for light, and that the most transparent 
 and perfect hue will be in some measure unsatisfactory, if 
 entirely unvaried. I believe the early skies of Raffaelle owe 
 their luminousness more to their untraceable and subtile 
 gradation than to inherent quality of hue. 
 
 Such are the expressions of infinity which we find in 
 
240 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 creation, of which the importance is to be estimated, rather 
 by their frequency than their distinctness. Let, however, the 
 o in T « v. reader bear constantly in mind that I insist not 
 
 § 19. Infinity not ^ ^ ^ 
 
 rightly implied on his acceptinoT any interpretation of mine, but 
 
 byvastness. i- i n- ^ i 
 
 only on his dwelling so long on those objects, 
 which he perceives to be beautiful, as to determine whether 
 the qualities to which I trace their beauty, be necessarily 
 there or no. Farther expressions of infinity there are in the 
 mystery of nature, and in some measure in her vastness, but 
 these are dependent on our own imperfections, and there- 
 fore, though they produce sublimity, they are unconnected 
 with beauty. For that which we foolishly call vastness is, 
 rightly considered, not more wonderful, not more impressive, 
 than that which we insolently call littleness, and the infinity 
 of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable, not con- 
 cealed, but incomprehensible : it is a clear infinity, the dark- 
 ness of the pure unsearchable sea. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 OF UNITY, OR THE TYPE OF THE DIVINE COMPREHENSIVENESS. 
 
 All things," says Hooker, (God only excepted,) be- 
 sides the nature which they have in themselves, receive ex- 
 ternally some perfection from other things." Hence the ap- 
 , pearance of separation or isolation in anythino:, 
 
 §1. The general ^ ..... ^ . . ^ . 
 
 conception of di- and OI seli-depeudence, is an appearance oi im- 
 perfection : and all appearances of connection 
 and brotherhood are pleasant and right, both as significative 
 of perfection in the things united, and as typical of that 
 Unity which we attribute to God, and of which our true con- 
 ception is rightly explained and limited by Dr. Brown in his 
 XCII. lecture ; that Unity which consists not in his own 
 singleness or separation, but in the necessity of his inherence 
 in all things that be, without which no creature of any kind 
 could hold existence for a moment. Which necessity of Di- 
 vine essence I think it better to speak of as comprehensive- 
 
OF UNITY, 
 
 241 
 
 ness, than as unity, because unity is often understood in the 
 sense of oneness or singleness, instead of universality, whereas 
 the only Unity which by any means can become grateful or 
 an object of hope to men, and whose types therefore in ma- 
 terial things can be beautiful, is that on which turned the 
 last words and prayer of Christ before his crossing of the 
 Kidron brook. " Neither pray I for these alone, but for 
 them also which shall believe on me through their word. That 
 they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee." 
 
 And so there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any 
 creature, but it is capable of an unity of some kind with 
 other creatures, and in that unity is its perfection and theirs, 
 and a pleasure also for the beholdins: of all other 
 
 § 2. The glory of ^ i i i i o i - p 
 
 all things is their creatures that can behold, oo the unity oi 
 spirits is partly in their sympathy, and partly 
 in their giving and taking, and always in their love ; and 
 these are their delight and their strength, for their strength 
 is in their co-working and army fellowship, and their delight 
 is in the giving and receiving of alternate and perpetual cur- 
 rents of good, their inseparable dependency on each other's 
 being, and their essential and perfect depending on their 
 Creator's : and so the unity of earthly creatures is their 
 power and their peace, not like the dead and cold peace of 
 undisturbed stones and solitary mountains, but the living 
 peace of trust, and the living power of support, of hands that 
 hold each other and are still : and so the unity of -matter is, 
 in its noblest form, the organization of it which builds it up 
 into temples for the spirit, and in its lower form, the sweet 
 and strange affinity, which gives to it the glory of its orderly 
 elements, and the fair variety of change and assimilation that 
 turns the dust into the crystal, and separates the waters that 
 be above the firmament from the waters that be beneath, and 
 in its lowest form ; it is the working and walking and cling- 
 ing together that gives their power to the winds, and its 
 syllables and soundings to the air, and their weight to the 
 waves, and their burning to the sunbeams, and their stability 
 to the mountains, and to every creature whatsoever opera- 
 tion is for its glory and for others' good. 
 Vol. II.— 16 
 
242 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY, 
 
 Now of that which is thus necessary to the perfection of 
 all things, all appearance, sign, type, or suggestion must be 
 beautiful, in whatever matter it may appear. And so to the 
 perfection of beauty in lines, or colors, or forms, or masses, 
 or multitudes, the appearance of some species of unity is in 
 the most determined sense of the word essential. 
 
 But of the appearances of unity, as of unity itself, there 
 are several kinds which it will be found hereafter convenient 
 to consider separately. Thus there is the unity of different 
 §3. The sever- and Separate things, subjected to one and the 
 ty.^subjectionai' Same influence, which may be called subjectional 
 quence^^'and^^of ^^^^J? ^^^^ Unity of the clouds, as they 
 
 membership. 2iVe driven by the parallel winds, or as they are 
 ordered by the electric currents, and this the unity of the 
 sea waves, and this of the bending and undulation of the 
 forest masses, and in creatures capable of will it is the unity 
 of will or of inspiration. And there is unity of origin, which 
 we may call original unity, which is of things arising from 
 one spring and source, and speaking always of this their 
 brotherhood, and this in matter is the unity of the branches 
 of the trees, and of the petals and starry rays of flowers, and 
 of the beams of light, and in spiritual creatures it is their 
 filial relation to Him from whom they have their being. And 
 there is unity of sequence, which is that of things chat form 
 links in chains, and steps in ascent, and stages \x% journeys, 
 and this, in matter, is the unity of communicable forces in 
 their continuance from one thing to another, and it is the 
 passing upwards and downwards of beneficent effects among 
 all things, and it is the melody of sounds, and the beauty of 
 continuous lines, and the orderly succession of motions and 
 times. And in spiritual creatures it is their own constant 
 building up by true knowledge and continuous reasoning to 
 higher perfection, and the singleness and straightforwardness 
 of their tendencies to more complete communion with God. 
 And there is the unity of membership, which we may call 
 essential unity, which is the unity of things separately im- 
 perfect into a perfect whole, and this is the great unity of 
 which other unities are but parts and means, it is in matter 
 
OF UNITY. 
 
 243 
 
 the harmony of sounds and consistency of bodies, and among 
 spiritual creatures, their love and happiness and very life in 
 God. 
 
 Now* of the nature of this last kind of unity, the most im- 
 portant whether in moral or in those material things with 
 which we are at present concerned, there is this necessary to 
 
 4 TJn't of observed, that it cannot exist between things 
 membership, similar to cach other. Two or more equal and 
 
 ow secured. like things Cannot be members one of another, 
 nor can they form one, or a whole thing. Two they must 
 remain, both in nature and in our conception, so long as they 
 remain alike, unless they are united by a third different from 
 both. Thus the arms, which are like each other, remain two 
 arms in our conception. They could not be united by a third 
 arm, they must be united by something which is not an arm, 
 and which, imperfect without them as they without it, shall 
 form one perfect body ; nor is unity even thus accomplished, 
 without a difference and opposition of direction in the set- 
 ting on of the like members. Therefore among all things 
 which are to have unity of membership one with another, 
 there must be difference or variety ; and though it is possi- 
 ble that many like things may be made members of one body, 
 yet it is remarkable that this structure appears characteristic 
 of the lower creatures, rather than the higher, as the many 
 legs of the caterpillar, and the many arms and suckers of the 
 radiata, and that, as we rise in order of being, the number 
 of similar members becomes less, and their structure com- 
 monly seems based on the principle of the unity of two 
 things by a third, as Plato has it in the Timseus, § II. 
 
 Hence, out of the necessity of unity, arises that of variety, 
 a necessity often more vividly, though never so deeply felt, 
 because lying at the surfaces of things, and assisted by an 
 § 5 Variety Why ^^A^^i^tial principle of our nature, the love of 
 required. change, and the power of contrast. But it is 
 
 a mistake which has led to many unfortunate results, in 
 matters respecting art, to insist on any inherent agreeable- 
 ness of variety, without reference to a farther end. For it 
 is not even true that variety as such, and in its highest de- 
 
244 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 gree, is beautiful. A patched garment of many colors is by 
 no means so ageeeable as one of a single and continuous 
 hue ; the splendid colors of many birds are eminently pain- 
 ful from their violent separation and inordinate variety, 
 w^hile the pure and colorless swan is, under certain circum- 
 stances, the most beautiful of all feathered creatures.* A 
 forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable in 
 effect, f a mass of one species of tree is sublime. It is there- 
 fore only harmonious and chordal variety, that variety which 
 is necessary to secure and extend unity, (for the greater the 
 number of objects, which by their differences become mem- 
 bers of one another, the more extended and sublime is their 
 unity,) which is rightly agreeable, and so I name not variety 
 as essential to beauty, because it is only so in a secondary 
 and casual sense. J 
 
 Of the love of change as a principle of human nature, and 
 the pleasantness of variety resulting from it, something has 
 already been said, (Ch. IV. § 4,) only as there I was oppos- 
 ing the idea that our being familiar with objects 
 Its* influence^on was the cause of our delight in them, so here, I 
 beauty. have to opposc the contrary position, that their 
 
 strangeness is the cause of it. For neither familiarity nor 
 strangeness have more operation on, or connection with, 
 impressions of one sense than of another, and they have less 
 power over the impressions of sense generally, than over the 
 
 * Compare Chap. ix. § 5, note. 
 
 f Spenser's various forest is the Forest of Error. 
 
 X It must be matter of no small wonderment to practical men to 
 observe how grossly the nature and connection of unity and variety 
 have been misunderstood and misstated, by those writers upon taste, 
 who have been guided by no experience of art; most singularly per- 
 haps by Mr. Alison, who, confounding unity with uniformity, and lead- 
 ing his readers through thirty pages of discussion respecting uniform- 
 ity and variety, the intelligibility of which is not by any means in- 
 creased by his supposing uniformity to be capable of existence in single 
 things ; at last substitutes for these two terms, sufficiently contradic- 
 tory already, those of similarity and dissimilarity, the reconciliation of 
 which opposites in one thing we must, I believe, leave Mr. Alison to 
 accomplish. 
 
OF UNITY, 
 
 245 
 
 intellect in its joyful accepting of fresh knowledge, and 
 dull contemplation of that it has long possessed. Only in 
 their operation on the senses they act contrariiy at different 
 times, as for instance the newness of a dress or of some kind 
 of unaccustomed food may make it for a time delightful, but 
 as the novelty passes away, so also may the delight, yielding 
 to disgust or indifference, which in their turn, as custom be- 
 gins to operate, may pass into affection and craving, and 
 that which was first a luxury, and then a matter of indiffer- 
 ence, becomes a necessity : * whereas in subjects of the intel- 
 lect, the chief delight they convey is dependent upon their 
 being newly and vividly comprehended, and as they become 
 subjects of contemplation they lose their value, and become 
 tasteless and unregarded, except as instruments for the 
 reaching of others, only that though they sink down into the 
 shadowy, effectless, heap of things indifferent, which we 
 pack, and crush down, and stand upon, to reach things new, 
 they sparkle afresh at intervals as we stir them by throwing 
 a new stone into the heap, and letting the newly admitted 
 lights play upon them. And both in subjects of the intel- 
 lect and the senses it is to be remembered, that the love of 
 change is a weakness and imperfection of our nature, and 
 implies in it the state of probation, and that it is to teach us 
 that things about us here are not meant for our continual 
 possession or satisfaction, that ever such passion of change 
 was put in us as that " custom lies upon us with a weight, 
 heavy as frost, and deep almost as life," and only such weak 
 back and baby grasp given to our intellect as that the best 
 things we do are painful, and the exercise of them grievous, 
 being continued without intermission, so as in those very 
 actions whereby we are especially perfected in this life we 
 ery mv, 1 ^ are not able to persist." And so it will be 
 
 § 7. The love of ^ 
 
 change. How found that they are the weakest-minded and the 
 
 morbid and evil, -i ^ ^ ^ 
 
 hardest-hearted men that most love variety and 
 change, for the weakest-minded are those who both wonder 
 most at things new, and digest w^orst things old, in so far 
 
 * Ka\ rh ravra irpirreiv ttoWolkis i-j^v* — rh yap avy7]6€s r)^v Kol rh fxe- 
 ra^dWiLU ijBu' us fv^ii/ yap yiyverai ^^Tj-^aKkeiv, — Arisb. Rhet. I. II. 30. 
 
246 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY, 
 
 that everything they have lies rusty, and loses lustre for 
 want of use ; neither do they make any stir among their 
 possessions, nor look over them to see what may be made of 
 them, nor keep any great store, nor are householders with 
 storehouses of things new and old, but they catch at the 
 new-fashioned garments, and let the moth and thief look 
 after the rest ; and the hardest-hearted men are those that 
 least feel the endearing and binding power of custom, and 
 hold on by no cords of affection to any shore, but drive with 
 the waves that cast up mire and dirt. And certainly it is 
 not to be held that the perception of beauty and desire of 
 it, are greatest in the hardest heart and weakest brain ; but 
 the love of variety is so, and therefore variety can be no 
 cause of the beautiful, except, as I have said, when it is nec- 
 essary for the perception of unity, neither is there any bet- 
 ter test of that which is indeed beautiful than its surviving 
 or annihilating the love of change ; and this is a test which 
 the best judges of art have need frequently to use ; and the 
 wisest of them will use it always, for there is much in art 
 that surprises by its brilliancy, or attracts by its singularity, 
 that can hardly but by course of time, though assuredly it 
 will by course of time, be winnowed away from the right and 
 real beauty whose retentive power is forever on the increase, 
 a bread of the soul for which the hunger is continual. 
 
 Receiving, therefore, variety only as that which accom- 
 §8. Theconduc- plishes Unity, or makes it perceived, its opera- 
 wfrds^unU*/^of ^^^^ fouud to be Very precious, both in that 
 subjection. which I have called unity of subjection, and unity 
 of sequence, as well as in unity of membership ; for although 
 things in all respects the same may, indeed, be subjected to 
 one influence, yet the power of the influence, and their obe- 
 dience to it, is best seen by varied operation of it on their in- 
 dividual differences, as in clouds and waves there is a glorious 
 unity of rolling, wrought out by the wild and wonderful dif- 
 ferences of their absolute forms, which, if taken away, would 
 leave in them only multitudinous and petty repetition, instead 
 of the majestic oneness of shared passion. And so in the 
 waves and clouds of human multitude when they are filled 
 
OF UNITY, 
 
 247 
 
 with one thought, as we find frequently in the works of the 
 early Italian men of earnest purpose, who despising, or hap- 
 pily ignorant of, the sophistications of theories, and the pro- 
 prieties of composition, indicated by perfect similarity of ac- 
 tion and gesture on the one hand, and by the infinite and 
 truthful variation of expression on the other, the most sublime 
 strength because the most absorbing unity, of multitudinous 
 passion that ever human heart conceived. Hence, in the 
 cloister of St. Mark's, the intense, fixed, statue-like silence 
 of ineffable adoration upon the spirits in prison at the feet of 
 Christ, side by side, the hands lifted, and the knees bowed, 
 and the lips trembling together ; * and in St. Domenico of 
 Fiesole, f that whirlwind rush of the Angels and the re- 
 deemed souls round about him at his resurrection, so that we 
 hear the blast of the horizontal trumpets mixed with the dy- 
 ing clangor of their ingathered wings. The same great feel- 
 ing occurs throughout the works of the serious men, though 
 most intensely in Angelico, and it is well to compare with it 
 the vileness and falseness of all that succeeded, when men 
 had begun to bring to the cross foot their systems instead of 
 their sorrow. Take as the most marked and degraded in- 
 stance, perhaps, to be anywhere found, Bronzino's treat- 
 ment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits in 
 prison,) in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, 
 which, vile as it is in color, vacant in invention, void in light 
 and shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening 
 offensivenesses, is of all its voids most void in this, that 
 the academy models therein huddled together at the bottom, 
 
 * Fra Angelico's fresco, in a cell of the upper cloister. He treated 
 the subject frequently. Another characteristic example occurs in the 
 Vita di Christo of the Academy, a series now unfortunately destroyed by 
 the picture cleaners. Simon Memmi in Santa Maria Novella (Chapelle 
 des Espagnols) has g-iven another very beautiful instance. In Giotto 
 the priDciple is universal, though his multitudes are somewhat more 
 dramatically and powerfully varied in gesture than Angelico's. In Mino 
 da Fiesole's altar-piece in the church of St. Ambrogiot at Florence, 
 close by Cosimo Rosselli's fresco, there is a beautiful example in mar- 
 ble. 
 
 f The Predella of the picture behind the altar. 
 
248 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 show not so much unity or community of attention to the 
 academy model with the flag in its hand above, as a street 
 crowd would be to a fresh-staged charlatan, ^ome point to 
 the God who has burst the gates of death, as if the rest were 
 incapable of distinguishing him for themselves, and others 
 turn their backs upon him, to show their unagitated faces to 
 the spectator. 
 
 In unity of sequence, the effect of variety is best exempli- 
 fied by the melodies of music, wherein by the differences of 
 the notes, they are connected with each other in certain 
 pleasant relations. This connection taking" place 
 
 § 9. And towards f ... . . , . , 
 
 unity ofse- in quantities IS proportion, respecting which cer- 
 quence. ^^.^ general principles must be noted, as the 
 
 subject is one open to many errors, and obscurely treated of 
 by writers on art. 
 
 Proportion is of two distinct kinds. Apparent : when it 
 takes place between qualities for the sake of connection only, 
 without any ultimate object or casual necessity ; and con- 
 §10. The nature structive : whcu it has reference to some func- 
 ift, of apparent ^^^^ ^o be discharged by the quantities, depend- 
 proportion. jj^g their proportion. From the confusion 
 of these two kinds of proportion have arisen the greater part 
 of the erroneous conceptions of the influence of either. 
 
 Apparent proportion, or the sensible relation of quantities, 
 is one of the most important means of obtaining unity be- 
 tween things which otherwise must have remained distinct 
 in similarity, and as it may consist with every other kind of 
 unity, and persist when every other means of it fails, it may 
 be considered as lying at the root of most of our impressions 
 of the beautiful. There is no sense of rightness, or wrong- 
 ness connected with it, no sense of utility, propriety, or ex- 
 pediency. These ideas enter only where the proportion of 
 quantities has reference to some function to be performed 
 by them. It cannot be asserted that it is right or that it is 
 wrong that A should be to B, as B to C ; unless A, B, and 
 C have some desirable operation dependent on that relation. 
 But nevertheless it may be highly agreeable to the eye that 
 A, B, and C, if visible things, should have visible connection 
 
OF UNITY, 
 
 240 
 
 of ratio, even though nothing be accomplished by such con- 
 nection. On the other hand, constructive proportion, or tlie 
 adaptation of quantities to functions, is agreeable not to the 
 eye, but to the mind, which is cognizant of the function to 
 be performed. Thus the pleasantness or rightness of the 
 proportions of a column depends not on the mere relation of 
 diameter and height, (which is not proportion at all, for pro- 
 portion is between three terms at least,) but on three other 
 involved terms, the strength of materials, the weight to be 
 borne, and the scale of the building. The proportions of a 
 wooden column are wrong in a stone one, and of a small 
 building wrong in a large one,* and this owing solely to me- 
 
 * It seems never to have been rightly understood, even by the more 
 intelligent among our architects, that proportion is in any way connect- 
 ed with positive size ; it seems to be held among them that a small 
 building may be expanded to a large one merely by proportionally ex- 
 panding all its parts : and that the harmony will be equally agreeable 
 on whatever scale it be rendered. Now this is true of apparent pro- 
 portion, but utterly false of constructive ; and, as much of the value of 
 architectural proportion is constructive, the error is often productive 
 of the most painful results. It may be best illustrated by observing 
 the conditions of proportion in animals. Many persons have thought- 
 lessly claimed admiration for the strength — supposed gigantic — of in- 
 sects and smaller animals ; because capable of lifting weights, leaping 
 distances, and surmounting obstacles, of proportion apparently over- 
 whelming. Thus the Formica Herculanea will lift in its mouth, and 
 brandish like a baton, sticks thicker than itself and six times its length, 
 all the while scrambling over crags of about the proportionate height of 
 the ClifPs of Dover, three or four in a minute. There is nothing extra- 
 ordinary in this, nor any exertion of strength necessarily greater than 
 human, in proportion to the size of the body. For it is evident that if 
 the size and strength of any creature be expanded or diminished in pro- 
 portion to each other, the dis:ance through which it can leap, the time 
 it can maintain exertion, or any other third term resultant, remains 
 constant ; that is, diminish weight of powder and of ball proportionately, 
 and the distance carried is constant or nearly so. Thus, a grasshop- 
 per, a man, and a giant 100 feet high, supposing their muscular strength 
 equally proportioned to their size, can or could all leap, not proportion- 
 ate distance, but the same or nearly the same distance — say, four feet 
 the grasshopper, or forty-eight times his length ; six feet the man or 
 his length exactly ; ten feet the giant or the tenth of his length. Hence 
 all small animals can, aeteris paribus^ perform feats of strength and 
 
250 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 chanical considerations, which have no more to do with ideas 
 of beauty, than the relation between the- arms of a lever, 
 adapted to the raising of a given weight ; and yet it is highly 
 
 agility, exactly so much greater than those to be executed by large 
 ones, as the animals themselves are smaller ; and to enable an elephant 
 to leap like a grasshopper, he must be endowed with strength a million 
 times greater in propoi^tion to his size. Now the consequence of this 
 general mechanical law is, that as we increase the scale of animals, 
 their means of power, whether muscles of motion or bones of support, 
 must be increased in a more than proportionate degree, or they be- 
 come utterly unwieldy, and incapable of motion ; — and there is a limit 
 to this increase of strength. If the elephant had legs as long as a 
 spider's, no combination of animal matter that could be hide-bound 
 would have strength enough to move them : to support the megathe- 
 rium, we must have a humerus a foot in diameter, though perhaps not 
 more than two feet long, and that in a vertical position under him, 
 while the gnat can hang on the window frame, and poise himself to 
 sting, in the middle of crooked stilts like threads ; stretched out to ten 
 times the breadth of his body on each side. Increase the size of the 
 megatherium a little more, and no phosphate of lime will bear him ; 
 he would crush his own legs to powder. (Compare Sir Charles Bell, 
 Bridge water Treatise on the Hand," p. 296, and the note.) Hence 
 there is not only a limit to the size of animals, in the conditions of mat- 
 ter, but to their activity also, the largest being always least capable of 
 exertion ; and this would be the case to a far greater extent, but that 
 nature beneficently alters her proportions as she increases her scale ; 
 giving, as we have seen, long legs and enormous wings to the smaller 
 tribes, and short and thick proportion to the larger. So in vegetables 
 — compare the stalk of an ear of oat, and the trunk of a pine, the me- 
 chanical relations being in both the same. So also in waves, of which 
 the large never can be mere exaggerations of the small, bat have dif- 
 ferent slopes and curvatures : so in mountains and all things else, neces- 
 sarily, and from ordinary mechanical laws. Whence in architecture, 
 according to the scale of the building, its proportions must be altered ; 
 and I have no hesitation in calling that unmeaning exaggeration of 
 parts in St. Peter's, of flutings, volutes, friezes, etc., in the propor- 
 tions of a smaller building, a vulgar blunder, and one that destroys all 
 the majesty that the building ought to have had — and still more I 
 should so call all imitations and adaptations of large buildings on a 
 small scale. The true test of right proportion is that it shall itself in- 
 form us of the scale of the building, and be such that even in a draw- 
 ing it shall instantly induce the conception of the actual size, or size in- 
 tended. I know not what Fuseli means by that aphorism of his : — 
 Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness — proportion, of 
 
OF UNITY. 
 
 251 
 
 agreeable to perceive that such constructive proportion has 
 been duly observed, as it is agreeable to see that anything 
 is fit for its purpose or for ours, and also that it has been the 
 result of intelligence in the workman of it, so that we some- 
 times feel a pleasure in apparent non-adaptation, if it be a 
 sign of ingenuity ; as in the unnatural and seemingly im- 
 possible lightness of Gothic spires and roofs. 
 
 Now, the errors against which I would caution the reader 
 in this matter are three. The first, is the overlooking or de- 
 nial of the power of apparent proportion, of which power 
 neither Burke nor any other writer whose works I have met 
 with, takes cognizance. The second, is the attribution of 
 beaut]/ to the appearances of constructive proportion. The 
 third, the denial with Burke of a7i7/ value or agreeableness 
 in constructive proportion. 
 
 Now, the full proof of the influence of appar- 
 
 § 11. The value of . j , £ '^^ ^ f- 
 
 apparent propor- cut proportion, i must reservc lor illustration 
 
 tion. in curvature, it x • ^ i 
 
 by diagram ; one or two instances however may 
 be given at present for the better understanding of its nature. 
 
 We have already asserted that all curves are more beauti- 
 ful than right lines. All curves, however, are not equally 
 beautiful, and their differences of beauty depend on the dif- 
 ferent proportions borne to each other by those infinitely small 
 right lines of which they may be conceived as composed. 
 
 When these lines are equal and contain equal angles, there 
 can be no connection or unity of sequence in them. The 
 resulting curve, the circle, is therefore the least beautiful of 
 all curves. 
 
 When the lines bear to each other some certain proportion ; 
 or when, the lines remaining equal, the angles vary ; or when 
 by any means whatsoever, and in whatever complicated modes, 
 such differences as shall imply connection are established be- 
 tween the infinitely small segments, the resulting curves be- 
 
 grandeur. All Gothic styles of Architecture are huge. The Greek 
 alone is grand." When a building is vast, it ought to look so ; and the 
 proportion is right which exhibits its vastness. Nature loses no size by 
 her proportion ; her buttressed mountains have more of Gothic than of 
 Greek in them. 
 
252 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 come beautiful. The simplest of the beautiful curves are the 
 conic, and the various spirals ; but it is as rash as it is diffi- 
 cult to endeavor to trace any ground of superiority or infe- 
 riority among the infinite numbers of the higher curves. I 
 believe that almost all are beautiful in their own nature, and 
 that their comparative beauty depends on the constant quan- 
 tities involved in their equations. Of this point I shall speak 
 hereafter at greater length. 
 
 The universal forces of nature, and the individual energies 
 of the matter submitted to them, are so appointed and bal- 
 anced, that they are continually bringing out curves of this 
 kind in all visible forms, and that circular lines 
 lre^ib?2nedf become nearly impossible under any circum- 
 stances. The gradual acceleration, for instance, 
 of velocity, in streams that descend from hill-sides, as it grad- 
 ually increases their power of erosion increases in the same 
 gradual degree the rate of curvature in the descent of the 
 slope, until at a certain degree of steepness this descent 
 meets, and is concealed by the right line of the detritus. The 
 junction of this right line with the plain is again modified by 
 the farther bounding of the larger blocks, and by the succes- 
 sively diminishing proportion of landslips caused by erosion 
 at the bottom, so that the whole line of the hill is one of cur- 
 vature, first, gradually increasing in rapidity to the maximum 
 steepness of which the particular rock is capable, and then 
 decreasing in a decreasing ratio, until it arrives at the plain 
 level. This type of form, modified of course more or less by 
 the original boldness of the mountain, and dependent both 
 on its age, its constituent rock, and the circumstances- of its 
 exposure, is yet in its general formula applicable to all. So 
 the curves of all things in motion, and of all organic forms, 
 most rudely and simply in the shell spirals, and in their most 
 complicated development in the muscular lines of the higher 
 animals. 
 
 This influence of apparent proportion, a proportion, be it 
 observed, which has no reference to ultimate ends, but which 
 is itself, seemingly, the end and object of operation in many 
 of the forces of nature, is therefore at the root of all our de- 
 
OF UNITY. 
 
 253 
 
 light in any beautiful form whatsoever. For no form can be 
 beautiful which is not composed of curves whose unity is se- 
 cured by relations of this kind. 
 
 Not only however in curvature, but in all associations of 
 lines whatsoever, it is desirable that there should be reciprocal 
 relation, and the eye is unhappy without perception of it. It 
 is utterly vain to endeavor to reduce this pro- 
 
 § 13. Apparent . . i p 'i. • 
 
 proportion in mei- portion to finite rules, tor it IS as various as 
 odiesof line. musical melody, and the laws to which it is sub- 
 ject are of the same general kind, so that the determination 
 of right or wrong proportion is as much a matter of feeling 
 and experience as the appreciation of good musical composi- 
 tion ; not but that there is a science of both, and principles 
 which may not be infringed, but that within these limits the 
 liberty of invention is infinite, and the degrees of excellence 
 infinite also, whence the curious error of Burke in imagining 
 that because he could not fix upon some one given proportion 
 of lines as better than any other, therefore proportion had no 
 value nor influence at all, which is the same as to conclude 
 that there is no such thing as melody in music, because there 
 are melodies more than one. 
 
 The argument of Burke on this subject is summed up in 
 the following words : — " Examine the head of a beautiful 
 horse, find what proportion that bears to his body and to his 
 limbs, and what relations these have to each 
 
 §14. Error of , ^ , , i -, i 
 
 Burke in this mat- Other, and when you have settled these propor- 
 *^^* tions, as a standard of beauty, then take a dog 
 
 or cat, or any other animal, and examine how far the same 
 proportions between their heads and their necks, between 
 those and the body, and so on, are found to hold ; I think we 
 may safely say, that they differ in every species, yet that 
 there are individuals found in a great many species, so dif- 
 fering, that have a very striking beauty. Now if it be allowed 
 that very different, and even contrary forms and dispositions, 
 are consistent with beauty, it amounts, I believe, to a con- 
 cession, that no certain measures operating from a natural 
 principle are necessary to produce it, at least so far as the 
 brute species is concerned." 
 
254 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY, 
 
 In this argument there are three very palpable fallacies : 
 the first is the rough application of measurement to the heads, 
 necks, and limbs, without observing the subtile differences 
 of proportion and position of parts in the members themselves, 
 for it would be strange if the different adjustment of the ears 
 and brow in the dog and horse, did not require a harmonizing 
 difference of adjustment in the head and neck. The second 
 fallacy is that above specified, the supposition that proportion 
 cannot be beautiful if susceptible of variation, whereas the 
 whole meaning of the term has reference to the adjustment 
 and functional correspondence of infinitely variable quanti- 
 ties. And the third error is the oversight of the very im- 
 portant fact, that, although " different and even contrary 
 forms and dispositions are consistent with beauty," they are 
 by no means consistent with equal degrees of beauty, so that, 
 while we find in all the presence of such proportion and har- 
 mony of form, as gifts them with positive agreeableness con- 
 sistent with the station and dignity of each, we perceive, also, 
 such superiority of proportion in some (as the horse, eagle, 
 lion, and man for instance) as may best be in harmony with 
 the nobler functions and more exalted powers of the animals. 
 
 And this allowed superiority of some animal forms to others 
 is, in itself, argument against the second error above named, 
 that of attributing the sensation of beauty to the perception 
 of expedient or constructive proportion. For 
 proportion. Its in- everything that God has made is equally well 
 fluence in plants. QQ^gtructed with reference to its intended func- 
 tions. But all things are not equally beautiful. The mega- 
 therium is absolutely as well proportioned, with the view of 
 adaptation of parts to purposes, as the horse or the swan ; 
 but by no means so handsome as either. The fact is, that the 
 perception of expediency of proportion can but rarely affect 
 our estimates of beauty, for it implies a knowledge which w^e 
 very rarely and imperfectly possess, and the want of which 
 we tacitly acknowledge. 
 
 Let us consider that instance of the proportion of the stalk 
 of a plant to its head, given by Burke. In order to judge 
 of the expediency of this proportion, we must know, First, 
 
OF UNITY. 
 
 255 
 
 the scale of the plant (for the smaller the scale, the longer 
 the stem may safely be). Secondly, the toughness oi the ma- 
 terials of the stem and the mode of their mechanical struct- 
 ure. Thirdly, the specific gravity of the head. Fourthly, 
 the position of the head which the nature of fructification re- 
 quires. Fifthly, the accidents and influences to which the 
 situation for which the plant was created is exposed. Until 
 we know all this, we cannot say that proportion or dispropor- 
 tion exists, and because we cannot know all this, the idea of 
 expedient proportion enters but slightly into our impression 
 of vegetable beauty, but rather, since the existence of the 
 plant proves that these proportions have been observed, and 
 we know that nothing but our own ignorance prevents us 
 from perceiving them, we take the proportion on credit, and 
 are delighted by the variety of results which the Divine in- 
 telligence has attained in the various involutions of these 
 quantities, and perhaps most when, to outward appearance, 
 such proportions have been violated ; more by the slender- 
 ness of the campanula than the security of the pine. 
 
 What is obscure in plants, is utterly incomprehensible in 
 animals, owing to the greater number of means employed and 
 functions performed. To judge of expedient proportion in 
 them, we must know all that each member has 
 ' to do, all its bones, all its muscles, and the amount 
 of nervous energy communicable to them ; and yet, foras- 
 much as we have more experience and instinctive sense of the 
 strength of muscles than of wood, and more practical knowl- 
 edge of the use of a head or afoot than of a flower or a stem, we 
 are much more likely to presume upon our judgment respect- 
 ing proportions here, we are very apt to assert that the plesio- 
 saurus and camelopard have necks too long, that the turnspit 
 has legs too short, and the elephant a body too ponderous. 
 
 But' the painfulness arising from the idea of this being the 
 case is occasioned partly by our sympathy with the animal, 
 partly by our false apprehension of incompletion in the Divine 
 work,* nor in either case has it any connection with impres- 
 
 * For the just and severe reproof of which, compare Sir Charles Bell, 
 (on the hand,) pp. 31, 32. 
 
256 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY, 
 
 sions of that typical beauty of which we are at present speak- 
 ing ; though some, perhaps, with that vital beauty which will 
 hereafter come under discussion. 
 
 I wish therefore the reader to hold, respecting proportion 
 generally, First, That apparent proportion, or the melodious 
 connection of quantities, is a cause of unity, and therefore 
 one of the sources of all beautiful form. Sec- 
 § 17. Summary. ^^^^ ^ That Constructive proportion is agreeable 
 to the mind when it is known or supposed, and that its seem- 
 ing absence is painful in alike degree, but that this pleasure 
 and pain have nothing in common with those dependent on 
 ideas of beauty. 
 
 Farther illustrations of the value of unity I shall reserve 
 for our detailed examination, as the bringing them forward 
 here would interfere with the general idea of the subject- 
 matter of the theoretic faculty which 'I wish succinctly to 
 convey. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 OF REPOSE, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE PERMANENCE. 
 
 There is probably no necessity more imperatively felt by 
 the artist, no test more unfailing of the greatness of artisti- 
 cal treatment, than that of the appearance of repose, and yet 
 , there is no quality whose semblance in mere 
 
 § 1. Universal . 
 
 feeling respect- matter is more difficult to define or illustrate. 
 
 ing the necessity . . . , 
 
 of repose in art. Nevertheless, I beheve that our instinctive love 
 s sources. of it, as well as the cause to which I attribute 
 that love, (although here also, as in the former cases, I contend 
 not for the interpretation, but for the fact,) will be readily 
 allowed by the reader. As opposed to passion, changeful- 
 ncss, or laborious exertion, repose is the especial and separat- 
 ing characteristic of the eternal mind and power ; it is the 
 "I am" of the Creator opposed to the I become" of all 
 creatures ; it is the sign alike of the supreme knowledge 
 which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is 
 incapable of labor, the supreme volition which is incapable of 
 
OF REPOSE, 
 
 257 
 
 change ; it is the stillness of the beams of the eternal cham« 
 bers laid upon the variable waters of ministering creatures ; 
 and as we saw before that the infinity which was a type of 
 the Divine nature on the one hand, became yet more desira- 
 ble on the other from its peculiar address to our prison hopes, 
 and to the expectations of an unsatisfied and unaccomplished 
 existence, so the types of this third attribute of the Deity 
 might seem to have been rendered farther attractive to mor- 
 tal instinct, through the infliction upon the fallen creature 
 of a curse necessitating a labor once unnatural and still most 
 painful, so that the desire of rest planted in the heart is no 
 sensual nor unworthy one, but a longing for renovation and 
 for escape from a state whose every phase is mere prepara- 
 tion for another equally transitory, to one in which perma- 
 nence shall have become possible through perfection. Hence 
 the great call of Christ to men, that call on which St. Augus- 
 tine fixed essential expression of Christian hope, is accom- 
 panied by the promise of rest ; * and the death bequest of 
 Christ to men is peace. 
 
 Repose, as it is expressed in material things, is either a 
 simple appearance of permanence and quietness, as in the 
 massy forms of a mountain or rock, accompanied by the lull- 
 §2 Repose cffcct of all mighty sight and sound, which 
 
 how expressed in all feel and nonc define, (it would be less sacred 
 
 matter. . . ^ 
 
 if more explicable,) 'ivhovcnv Slopiojv Kopv<^ai re koL 
 €j>dpayy€s, or else it is repose proper, the rest of things in 
 which there is vitality or capability of motion actual or imag- 
 ined ; and with respect to these the expression of repose is 
 greater in proportion to the amount and sublimity of the ac- 
 tion which is not taking place, as well as to the intensity of the 
 negation of it. Thus we speak not of repose in a stone, be- 
 cause the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor 
 vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once 
 seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a 
 noble sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the 
 under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its motion 
 
 * Matt. xi. 28. 
 
 Vol. II.— 17 
 
258 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now 
 great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights 
 in nothing more than the enhancing of the characters of re- 
 pose, effects this usually by either attributing to things vis- 
 ibly energetic an ideal stability, or to things visibly stable an 
 ideal activity or vitality. Hence Wordsworth, of the cloud, 
 which in itself having too much of changef ulness for his pur- 
 pose, is spoken of as one " that heareth not the loud winds 
 when they call, and moveth altogether, if it move at all." 
 And again of children, which, that it may remove from them 
 the child restlessness, the imagination conceives as rooted 
 flowers " Beneath an old gray oak, as violets, lie." On the 
 other hand, the scattered rocks, which have not, as such, vi- 
 tality enough for rest, are gifted with it by the living image: 
 they " lie couched around us like a flock of sheep." 
 
 Thus, as we saw that unity demanded for its expression 
 what at first miarht have seemed its contrary 
 
 § 3. The neces- . . . v , j i» • 
 
 sity to repose of (variety) SO repose demands for its expression 
 an implied energy. ^j^^ implied Capability of its opposite, energy, 
 and this even in its lower manifestations, in rocks and stones 
 and trees. By comparing the modes in which the mind is 
 disposed to regard the boughs of a fair and vigorous tree, 
 motionless in the summer air, with the effect produced by one 
 of these same boughs hewn square and used for threshold or 
 lintel, the reader will at once perceive the connection of vi- 
 tality with repose, and the part they both bear in beauty. 
 
 But that which in lifeless things ennobles them by seeming 
 to indicate life, ennobles higher creatures by indicating the 
 exaltation of their earthly vitality into a Divine vitality ; 
 §4. Mental re- raising the life of sense into the life of 
 
 pose, how noble, f^ith — faith, whether we receive it in the sense 
 of adherence to resolution, obedience to law, regardfulness 
 of promise, in which from all time it has been the test as the 
 shield of the true being and life of man, or in the still 
 higher sense of trustfulness in the presence, kindness, and 
 word of God ; in which form it has been exhibited under the 
 Christian dispensation. For whether in one or other form, 
 whether the faithfulness of men whose path is chosen and 
 
OF REPOSE. 
 
 259 
 
 portion fixed, in the following and receiving of that path 
 and portion, as in the Thermopylag camp ; or the happier 
 faithfulness of children in the good giving of their Father, 
 and of subjects in the conduct of their king, as in the 
 " Stand still and see the salvation of God " of the Red Sea 
 shore, there is rest and peacefulness, the "standing still" in 
 both, the quietness of action determined, of spirit unalarmed, 
 of expectation unimpatient : beautiful, even when ' based 
 only as of old, on the self-command and self-possession, the 
 persistent dignity or the uncalculating love of the creature,* 
 but more beautiful yet when the rest is one of humility in- 
 stead of pride, and the trust no more in the resolution we 
 have taken, but in the hand we hold. 
 
 Hence I think that there is no desire more intense or more 
 exalted than that which exists in all rightly disciplined 
 minds for the evidences of repose in external signs, and what 
 
 I cautiously said respecting infinity, I say fear- 
 sai vaiue^'ara lessly respecting repose, that no work of art can 
 test of art. great without it, and that all art is great fh 
 
 proportion to the appearance of it. It is the most unfailing 
 test of beauty, whether of matter or of motion, nothing can be 
 ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not, and 
 in strict proportion to its appearance in the work is the 
 majesty of mind to be inferred in the artificer. Without re- 
 gard to other qualities, we may look to this for our evidence, 
 and by the search for this alone we may be led to the rejec- 
 * The universal instinct of repose, 
 
 The longing for confirmed tranquillity 
 
 Inward and outward, humble, yet sublime. 
 
 The life where hope and memory are as one. 
 
 Earth quiet and unchanged ; the human soul 
 
 Consistent in self rule ; and heaven revealed 
 
 To meditation, in that quietness." 
 
 Wordsworth. Excursion, Book ill. 
 But compare carefully (for this is put into the mouth of one diseased 
 N in thought and erring in seeking) the opening of the ninth book ; and 
 observe the difference between the mildew of inaction, — the slumber 
 of Death ; and the Patience of the Saints — the Rest of the Sabbath 
 Eternal. (Rev. xiv. 13.) 
 Compare also. Chap. I. § 6. 
 
260 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 tion of all that is base, and the accepting of all that is good 
 and great, for the paths of wisdom are all peace. We shall 
 see by this light three colossal images standing up side by 
 side, looming in their great rest of spirituality above the 
 whole world horizon, Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante ; 
 and then, separated from their great religious thrones only 
 by less fulness and earnestness of Faith, Homer, and Shaks- 
 peare ; and from these we may go down step by step among 
 the mighty men of every age, securely and certainly observ- 
 ant of diminished lustre in every appearance of restlessness 
 and effort, until the last trace of true inspiration vanishes in 
 the tottering affectations or the tortured insanities of mod- 
 ern times. There is no art, no pursuit, whatsoever, but its 
 results may be classed by this test alone ; everything of evil 
 is betrayed and winnowed away by it, glitter and confusion 
 and glare of color, inconsistency or absence of thought, 
 forced expression, evil choice of subject, over accumulation 
 of materials, whether in painting or literature, the shallow 
 affd unreflecting nothingness of the English schools of art, 
 the strained and disgusting horrors of the French, the dis- 
 torted feverishness of the German : — pretence, over decora- 
 tion, over division of parts in architecture, and again in mu- 
 sic, in acting, in dancing, in whatsoever art, great or mean, 
 there are yet degrees of greatness or meanness entirely de- 
 pendent on this single quality of repose. 
 
 Particular instances are at present both needless and can- 
 not but be inadequate ; needless, because I suppose that 
 every reader, however limited his experience of art, can 
 § 6 Instances in ^^^PP^^ many for himself, and inadequate, be- 
 the Laocoon and causc uo number of them could illustrate the 
 
 Q?lies6iis« 
 
 full extent of the influence of the expression. I 
 believe, however, that by comparing the disgusting convul- 
 sions of the Laocoon, with the Elgin Theseus, we may obtain 
 a general idea of the effect of the influence, as shown by its 
 absence in one, and presence in the other, of two works 
 which, as far as artistical merit is concerned, are in some 
 measure parallel, not that I believe, even in this respect, the 
 Laocoon justifiably comparable with the Theseus. I suppose 
 
OF REPOSE. 
 
 261 
 
 that no group has exercised so pernicious an influence on art 
 as this, a subject ill chosen, meanly conceived and un- 
 naturally treated, recommended to imitation by subtleties of 
 execution and accumulation of technical knowledge.* 
 
 * I would also have the reader compare with the meagre lines and 
 contemptible tortures of the Laocoon, tae awfulness and quietness of 
 M. Angelo's treatment of a subject in most respects similar, (the plague 
 of the Fiery Serpents,) but of which the choice was justified both by 
 the place which the event holds in the typical system he had to arrange, 
 and by the grandeur of the plague itself, in its multitudinous grasp, and 
 its mystical salvation ; sources of sublimity entirely wanting to the 
 slaughter of the Dardan priest. It is good to see how his gigantic in- 
 tellect reaches after repose, and truthfully finds it, in the falling hand 
 of the near figure, and in the deathful decline of that whose hands are 
 held up even in their venom coldness to the cross ; and though irrele- 
 vant to our present purpose, it is well also to note how the grandeur of 
 this treatment results, not merely from choice, but from a greater 
 knowledge and more faithful rendering of truth. For whatever knowl- 
 edge of the human frame there may be in the Laocoon, there is cer- 
 tainly none of the habits of serpents. The fixing of the snake's head 
 in the side of the principal figure is as false to nature, as it is poor in 
 composition of line. A large serpent never wants to bite, it wants to 
 hold, it seizes therefore always where it can hold best, by the ex- 
 tremities, or throat, it seizes once and forever, and that before it coils, 
 following up the seizure with the twist of its body round the victim, as 
 invisibly swift as the twist of a whip lash round any hard object it may 
 strike, and then it holds fast, never moving the jaws or the body, if its 
 prey has any power of struggling left, it throws round another coil, 
 without quitting the hold with the jaws ; if Laocoon had had to do with 
 real serpents, instead of pieces of tape with heads to them, he would 
 have been held still, and not allowed to throw his arms or legs about. 
 It is most instructive to obsearve the accuracy of Michael Angelo in the 
 rendering of these circumstances ; the binding of the arms to the body, 
 and the knotting of the whole mass of agony together, until we hear 
 the crashing of the bones beneath the grisly sliding of the engine folds. 
 Note also the expression in all the figures of another circumstance, 
 the torpor and cold numbness of the limbs induced by the serpent 
 venom, which, though justifiably overlooked by the sculptor of the 
 Laocoon, as well as by Virgil — in consideration of the rapidity of the 
 death by crushing, adds infinitely to the power of the Florentine's con- 
 ception, and would have been better hinted by Virgil, than that 
 sickening distribution of venom on the garlands. In fact, Virgil has 
 missed both of truth and impressiveness everyway — the ''morsu de- 
 pascitur" is unnatural butchery — the '^perlusus veneno" gratuitous 
 
262 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 In Christian art, it would be well to compare the feeling 
 of the finer among the altar tombs of the middle ages, with 
 §7. And in altar ^^^7 monumental works after Michael Angelo, 
 tombs. perhaps more especially with works of Roubil^ 
 
 liac or Canova. 
 
 In the Cathedral of Lucca, near the entrance door of the 
 north transept, there is a monument of Jacopo della Quercia's 
 to Ilaria di Caretto, the wife of Paolo Guinigi. I name it 
 not as more beautiful or perfect than other examples of the 
 same period, but as furnishing an instance of the exact and 
 right mean between the rigidity and rudeness of the earlier 
 monumental effigies, and the morbid imitation of life, sleep, 
 or death, of which the fashion has taken place in modern 
 times.* She is lying on a simple couch, with a hound at her 
 
 foulness — the *^clamores horrendos," impossible degradation; com- 
 pare carefully the remarks on this statue in Sir Charles Bell's Essay on 
 Expression, (third edition, p. 192) where he has most wisely and un- 
 controvertibly deprived the statue of all claim to expression of energy 
 and fortitude of mind, and shown its common and coarse intent of mere 
 bodily exertion and agony, while he has confirmed Payne Knight's just 
 condemnation of the | assage in Virgil. 
 
 If the reader wishes to see the opposite or imaginative view of the 
 subject, let him compare Winkelmann; and Schiller, Letters on 
 Esthetic Culture. 
 
 * Whenever, in monumental work, the sculptor reaches a deceptive 
 appearance of life or death, or of concomitant details, he has gone too 
 far. The statue should be felt for such, not look like a dead or sleep- 
 ing body ; it should not convey the impression of a corpse, nor of sick 
 and outwearied flesh, but it should be the marble image of death or 
 weariness. So the concomitants should be distinctly marble, severe and 
 monumental in their lines, not shroud, not bedclothes, not actual 
 armor nor brocade, not a real soft pillow, not a downright hard stuffed 
 mattress, but the mere type and suggestion of these : a certain rudeness 
 and incompletion of finish is very noble in all. Not that they are to be 
 unnatural, such lines as are given should be pure and true, and clear of 
 the hardness and mannered rigidity of the strictly Gothic types, but 
 lines so few and grand as to appeal to the imagination only, and always 
 to stop short of realization. There is a monument put up lately by a 
 modern Italian sculptor in one of the side chapels of Santa Croce, the 
 face fine and the execution dexterous. But it looks as if the per- 
 son had been restless all night, and the artist admitted to a faithful 
 study of the disturbed bedclothes in the morning. 
 
OF SYMMETRY. 
 
 263 
 
 feet, not on the side, but with the head laid straight and 
 simply on the hard pillow, in which, let it be observed, there 
 is no effort at deceptive imitation of pressure. It is under- 
 stood as a pillow, but not mistaken for one. The hair is 
 bound in a flat braid over the fair brow, the sweet and 
 arched eyes are closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is set 
 and quiet, there is that about them which forbids breath, 
 something which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image 
 of both. The hands are not lifted in prayer, neither folded, 
 but the arms are laid at length upon the body, and the hands 
 cross as they fall. The feet are hidden by the drapery, and 
 the forms of the limbs concealed, but not their tenderness. 
 
 If any of us, after staying for a time beside this tomb, 
 could see through his tears, one of the vain and unkind en- 
 cumbrances of the grave, which, in these hollow and heart- 
 less days, feigned sorrow builds to foolish pride, he would, I 
 believe, receive such a lesson of love as no coldness could re- 
 fuse, no fatuity forget, and no insolence disobey. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 OF SYMMETRY, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE JUSTICE. 
 
 We shall not be long detained by the consideration of this, 
 the fourth constituent of beauty, as its nature is universally 
 felt and understood. In all perfectly beautiful objects, there 
 § 1. Symmetry, is found the Opposition of one part to another 
 fou^d fn organic ^ reciprocal balance obtained ; in animals 
 nature. ^^iQ balance being commonly between opposite 
 
 sides, (note the disagreeableness occasioned by the excep- 
 tion in flat fish, having the eyes on one side of the head,) 
 but in vegetables the opposition is less distinct, as in the 
 boughs on opposite sides of trees, and the leaves and sprays 
 on each side of the boughs, and in dead matter less perfect 
 still, often amounting only to a certain tendency towards a 
 balance, as in the opposite sides of valleys and alternate 
 windings of streams. In things in which perfect symmetry 
 
264 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 is from their nature impossible or improper, a balance must 
 be at least in some measure expressed before they can be be- 
 held with pleasure. Hence the necessity of what artists re- 
 §2, Howneces- q^ire as Opposing lines or masses in composi- 
 saryinart. tion, the propriety of which, as well as their 
 value, depends chiefly on their inartificial and natural inven- 
 tion. Absolute equality is not required, still less absolute 
 similarity. A mass of subdued color may be balanced by a 
 point of a powerful one, and a long and latent line overpow- 
 ered by a short and conspicuous one. The only error against 
 which it is necessary to guard the reader with respect to 
 symmetry, is the confounding it with proportion, though it 
 seems strange that the two terms could ever have been used 
 as synonymous. Symmetry is the opposition of equal quan- 
 tities to each other. Proportion the connection of unequal 
 quantities with each other. The property of a tree in send- 
 ing out equal boughs on opposite sides is symmetrical. Its 
 sending out shorter and smaller towards the top, propor- 
 tional. In the human face its balance of opposite sides is 
 symmetry, its division upwards, proportion. 
 
 Whether the agreeableness of symmetry be in any way re- 
 ferable to its expression of the Aristotelian Icrorrjs, that is to 
 say of abstract justice, I leave the reader to determine ; I 
 §3. To what its ^^^J assert respecting it, that it is necessary to 
 Slwl!" v'aii! (dignity of every form, and that by the re- 
 ous instances. moval of it we shall render the other elements of 
 beauty comparatively ineffectual : though, on the other hand, 
 it is to be observed that it is rather a mode of arrangement 
 of qualities than a quality itself ; and hence symmetry has 
 little power over the mind, unless all the other constituents 
 of beauty be found together with it. A form may be sym- 
 metrical and ugly, as many Elizabethan ornaments, and yet 
 not so ugly as it had been if unsymmetrical, but bettered al- 
 ways by increasing degrees of symmetry ; as in star figures, 
 wherein there is a circular symmetry of many like members, 
 whence their frequent use for the plan and ground of orna- 
 mental designs ; so also it is observable that foliage in which 
 the leaves are concentrically grouped, as in the chestnuts, 
 
OF SYMMETRY. 
 
 265 
 
 and many shrubs — rhododendrons for instance — (whence the 
 perfect beauty of the Alpine rose) — is far nobler in its effect 
 than any other, so that the sweet chestnut of all trees most 
 fondly and frequently occurs in the landscape of Tintoret and 
 Titian, beside which all other landscape grandeur vanishes : 
 and even in the meanest things the rule holds, as in the kaleid- 
 oscope, wherein agreeableness is given to forms altogether ac- 
 cidental merely by their repetition and reciprocal opposi- 
 tion ; which orderly balance and arrangement are essential 
 to the perfect operation of the more earnest and solemn quali- 
 ties of the beautiful, as being heavenly in their nature, and 
 contrary to the violence and disorganization of sin, so that 
 the seeking of them and submission to them is always marked 
 in minds that have been subjected to high moral discipline, 
 constant in all the great religious painters, to the degree of 
 being an offence and a scorn to men of less tuned and tran- 
 quil feeling. Equal ranks of saints are placed on each side 
 § 4. Especially in picture, if there be a kneeling figure on 
 
 religious art. side, there is a corresponding one on the 
 
 other, the attendant angels beneath and above are arranged 
 in like order. The Raffaelle at Blenheim, the Madonna di St. 
 Sisto, the St. Cicilia, and all the works of Perugino, Francia, 
 and John Bellini present some such form, and the balance at 
 least is preserved even in pictures of action necessitating 
 variety of grouping, as always by Giotto ; and by Ghirlan- 
 dajo in the introduction of his chorus-like side figures, and by 
 Tintoret most eminently in his noblest work, the Crucifixion, 
 where not only the grouping but the arrangement of light is 
 absolutely symmetrical. Where there is no symmetry, the 
 effects of passion and violence are increased, and many very 
 sublime pictures derive their sublimity from the want of it, 
 but they lose proportionally in the diviner quality of beauty. 
 In landscape the same sense of symmetry is preserved, as we 
 shall presently see, even to artificialness, by the greatest men, 
 and it is one of the principal sources of deficient feeling in 
 the landscapes of the present day, that the symmetry of nat- 
 ure is sacrificed to irregular picturesqueness. Of this, how- 
 ever, hereafter. 
 
266 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY, 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OF PURITY, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE ENERGY. 
 
 It may at first appear strange that I have not in my enu- 
 meration of the types of Divine attributes, included that 
 which is certainly the most visible and evident of fill, as v^ell 
 § 1 The influ most distinctly expressed in Scripture ; 
 
 enceof light as a God IS lis^ht, and in Him is no darkness at all. 
 
 sacred symbol. i«ni i n 
 
 But I could not logically class the presence of 
 an actual substance or motion with mere conditions and 
 modes of being, neither could I logically separate from any of 
 these, that which is evidently necessary to the perception 
 of all. And it is also to be observed, that though the love 
 of light is more instinctive in the human heart than any 
 other of the desires connected with beauty, we can hardly 
 separate its agreeableness in its own nature from the sense of 
 its necessity and value for the purposes of life, neither the 
 abstract painfulness of darkness from the sense of danger 
 and incapacity connected with it ; and note also that it is 
 not all light, but light possessing the universal qualities of 
 beauty, diffused or infinite rather than in points, tranquil, not 
 startling and variable, pure, not sullied or oppressed, which 
 is indeed pleasant and perfectly typical of the Divine nature. 
 
 Observe, however, that there is one quality, the idea of 
 which had been just introduced in connection with light, 
 which might have escaped us in the consideration of mere 
 §2 Theideaof "^^^^^^5 namely purity, and yet I think that the 
 purity connected original notion of this quality is altoarether ma- 
 
 withit. ? , ^ , 1 , .1 1 1 
 
 teriai, and has only been attributed to color 
 when such color is suggestive of the condition of matter from 
 which we originally received the idea. For I see not in the 
 abstract how one color should be considered purer than an- 
 other, except as more or less compounded, whereas there is 
 certainly a sense of purity or impurity in the most compound 
 and neutral colors, as well as in the sim^Dlest, a quality diffi- 
 
OF PURITY. 
 
 267 
 
 cult to define, and which the reader will probably be sur- 
 prised by my calling the type of energy, with which it has 
 certainly little traceable connection in the mind. 
 
 I believe, however, if we carefully analyze the nature of 
 our ideas of impurity in general, we shall find them refer es- 
 pecially to conditions of matter in which its various elements 
 § 3. Originally are placed in a relation incapable of healthy or 
 ditio'^n^^Pmat" Proper operation ; and most distinctly to con- 
 
 ditions in which the negation of vital or ener- 
 getic action is most evident, as in corruption and decay of 
 all kinds, wherein particles which once, by their operation 
 on each other, produced a living and energetic whole, are 
 reduced to a condition of perfect passiveness, in which they 
 are seized upon and appropriated, one by one, piecemeal, by 
 whatever has need of them, without any power of resistance 
 or energy of their own. And thus there is a peculiar pain- 
 fulness attached to any associations of inorganic with organic 
 matter, such as appear to involve the inactivity and feeble- 
 ness of the latter, so that things which are not felt to be foul 
 in their own nature, yet become so in association with things 
 of greater inherent energy ; as dust or earth, which in a 
 mass excites no painful sensation, excites a most disagreeable 
 one when strewing or staining an animal's skin, because it 
 implies a decline and deadening of the vital and healthy 
 § 4. Associated powcr of the skiu. But all reasoning aV^out this 
 thTpowtr'^f the impression is rendered difficult, by the host of 
 fluence^ of 'clear- ^ssociated idcas Connected with it ; for the ocu- 
 
 lar sense of impurity connected with corruption is 
 infinitely enhanced by the offending of other senses and by 
 the grief and horror of it in its own nature, as the special 
 punishment and evidence of sin, and on the other hand, the 
 ocular delight in purity is mingled, as I before observed, 
 with the love of the mere element of light, as a type of wis- 
 dom and of truth ; whence it seems to me that we admire the 
 transparency of bodies, though probably it is still rather owing 
 to our sense of more perfect order and arrangement of par- 
 ticles, and not to our love of light, that we look upon a piece 
 of rock crystal as purer than a piece of marble, and on the 
 
268 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 marble as purer than a piece of chalk. And let it be ob- 
 served also that the most lovely objects in nature are only 
 partially transparent. I suppose the utmost possible sense 
 of beauty is conveyed by a feebly translucent, smooth, but 
 not lustrous surface of white, and pale warm red, subdued 
 §5. Perfect by the most pure and delicate grays, as in the 
 
 beauty ofsur-r! j.' £ j.\ \. £ • j.\ 
 
 face, in what nner portions oi the human irame ; in wreaths 
 consisting. snow, and in white plumage under rose light,* 
 
 so Viola of Olivia in Twelfth Night, and Homer of Atrides 
 wounded. f And I think that transparency and lustre, both 
 beautiful in themselves, are incompatible with the highest 
 beauty because they destroy form, on the full perception of 
 which more of the divinely character of the object depends 
 than upon its color. Hence, in the beauty of snow and of 
 flesh, so much translucency is allowed as is consistent with 
 
 * The reader will observe that I am speaking at present of mere ma- 
 terial qualities. If he would obtain perfect ideas respecting loveliness 
 of luminous surface, let him closely observe a swan with its wings ex- 
 panded in full light five minutes before sunset. The human cheek or 
 the rose leaf are perhaps hardly so pure, and the forms of snow, though 
 individually as beautiful, are less exquisitely combined. 
 
 f obs 5' ore ris r i\€(J)avTa yvvrj (polyiKi fiLrjvri 
 
 So Spenser of Shamefacedness, an exquisite piece of glowing color — 
 and sweetly of Belphoebe — (so the roses and lilies of all poets.) Compare 
 the making of the image of Florimell. 
 
 ''The substance whereof she the body made 
 Was purest snow, in massy mould congealed, 
 Which she had gathered in a shady glade 
 Of the Riphoean hills. 
 The same she tempered with fine mercury. 
 And mingled them with perfect vermily." 
 With Una he perhaps overdoes the white a little. She is two degrees 
 of comparison above snow. Compare his questioning in the Hymn to 
 Beauty, about that mixture made of colors fair ; and goodly tempera- 
 ment, of pure complexion . 
 
 Hath white and red in it such wondrous power 
 That it can pierce through the eyes into the heart ? " 
 
 Where the distinction between typical and vital beauty is very glori- 
 ously carried out. 
 
OF PURITY. 
 
 269 
 
 the full explanation of the forms, while we are suffered to re- 
 ceive more intense impressions of light and transparency from 
 other objects which, nevertheless, owing to their necessarily 
 unperceived form, are not perfectly nor affectingly beautiful. 
 A fair forehead outshines its diamond diadem. The sparkle 
 of the cascade withdraws not our eyes from the snowy sum- 
 mits in their evening silence. 
 
 It may seem strange to many readers that I have not 
 spoken of purity in that sense in which it is most frequently 
 used, as a type of sinlessness. I do not deny that the fre- 
 § 6. Purity only qucut metaphorical use of it in Scripture may 
 type^^o^^'^dni^^s^ have and ought to have much influence on the 
 sympathies with which we regard it, and that 
 probably the immediate agreeableness of it to most minds 
 arises far more from this source than from that to which I 
 have chosen to attribute it. But, in the first place, if it be 
 indeed in the signs of Divine and not of human attributes 
 that beauty consists, I see not how the idea of sin can be 
 formed with respect to the Deity, for it is an idea of a rela- 
 tion borne by us to Him, and not in any way to be attached 
 to his abstract nature. And if the idea of sin is incapable 
 of being formed with respect to Him, so also is its negative, 
 for we cannot form an idea of negation, where we cannot 
 form an idea of presence. If for instance one could con- 
 ceive of taste or flavor in a proposition of Euclid, so also 
 might we of insipidity, but if not of the one, then not of 
 the other. So that, in speaking of the goodness of God, it 
 cannot be tha^t we mean anything more than his Love, Mer- 
 cifulness, and Justice, and these attributes I have shown to 
 be expressed by other qualities of beauty, and I cannot trace 
 any rational connection between them and the idea of spot- 
 lessness in matter. Neither can I trace any more distinct re- 
 lation between this idea, and any of the virtues which make 
 up the righteousness of man, except perhaps those of truth 
 and openness, of which I have already spoken as more ex- 
 pressed by the transparency than the mere purity of mat- 
 ter. So that I conceive the whole use of the terms purity, 
 spotlessness, etc., in moral subjects, to be merely metaphori- 
 
270 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 cal, and that it is rather that we illustrate these virtues by 
 the desirableness of material purity, than that we desire ma- 
 terial purity because it is illustrative of these virtues. 
 
 I repeat, then, that the only idea which I think can be le- 
 gitimately connected with purity of matter, is this of vital 
 and energetic connection among its particles, and that the 
 idea of foulness is essentially connected with dissolution and 
 death. Thus the purity of the rock, contrasted with the 
 § 7 Energy how ^^ulness of dust or mould, is expressed by the 
 expressed by pu- epithet " livinsT," verv sinorularly sfiven in the 
 
 rity of matter. ^ ^ ^^ ^ . i i 
 
 rock, in almost all languages ; singularly I say, 
 because life is almost the last attribute one would ascribe to 
 stone, but for this visible energy, and connection of its parti- 
 cles : and so of water as opposed to stagnancy. And I do not 
 think that, however pure a powder or dust may be, the idea 
 of beauty is ever connected with it, for it is not the mere 
 purity, but the active condition of the substance which is de- 
 sired, so that as soon as it shoots into crystals, or gathers 
 into efflorescence, a sensation of active or real purity is re- 
 ceived which was not felt in the calcined caput mortuum. 
 
 And again in color. I imagine that the quality of it which 
 we term purity is dependent on the full energizing of the 
 rays that compose it, whereof if in compound hues any are 
 overpowered and killed by the rest, so as to 
 
 § 8. And of color. , \ , ^ ^ ' ^X. 
 
 be oi no value nor operation, loulness is the 
 consequence ; while so long as all act together, whether side 
 by side, or from pigments seen one through the other, so 
 that all the coloring matter employed comes into play in the 
 harmony desired, and none be quenched nor killed, purity 
 results. And so in all cases I suppose that pureness is made 
 to us desirable, because expressive of the constant presence 
 and energizing of the Deity in matter, through which all 
 things live and move, and have their being, and that foulness is 
 painful as the accompaniment of disorder and decay, and al- 
 ways indicative of the withdrawal of Divine support. And 
 the practical analogies of life, the invariable connection of 
 outward foulness with mental sloth and degradation, as well 
 as with bodily lethargy and disease, together with the con- 
 
OF MODERATION. 
 
 271 
 
 trary indications of freshness and purity belonging to every 
 healthy and active organic frame, (singularl}'^ seen in the 
 effort of the young leaves when first their inward energy 
 prevails over the earth, pierces its corruption, and shakes 
 its dust away from their own white purity of life,) all 
 these circumstances strengthen the instinct by associations 
 countless and irresistible. And then, finally, with the idea 
 §9. Spirituality, of puHty comcs that of Spirituality, for the es- 
 how so expressed, g^j^^-g^i characteristic of matter is its inertia, 
 whence, by adding to its purity or energy, we may in some 
 measure spiritualize even matter itself. Thus in the descrip- 
 tions of the Apocalypse it is its purity that fits it for its 
 place in heaven ; the river of the water of life, that proceeds 
 out of the throne of the Lamb, is clear as crystal, and the 
 pavement of the city is pure gold, like unto clear glass.* 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 OF MODERATIOlSr, OR THE TYPE OF GOVERISTMENT BY LAW. 
 
 Of objects which, in respect of the qualities hitherto con- 
 sidered, appear to have equal claims to regard, we find, never- 
 theless, that certain are preferred to others in consequence 
 
 * I have not spoken here of any of the associations connected with 
 warmth or coolness of color, they are partly connected with vital beauty, 
 compare Chap. xiv. § 22, 23, and partly with impressions of the sub- 
 lime, the discussion of which is foreign to the present subject; purity, 
 however, it is which gives value to both, for neither warm nor cool 
 color, can be beautiful, if impure. 
 
 Neither have I spoken of any questions relating to melodies of color, 
 a subject of separate science— whose general principle lias been already 
 stated in the seventh chapter respecting unity of sequence. Those qual- 
 ities only are here noted which give absolute beauty, whether to sepa- 
 rate color or to melodies of it — for all melodies are not beautiful, but 
 only those which are expressive of certain pleasant or solemn emotions ; 
 and the rest startling, or curious, or cheerful, or exciting, or sublime, 
 but not beautiful, (and so in music.) And all questions relating to this 
 grandeur, cheerfulnes«, or other characteristic impression of color must 
 be considered under the head of ideas of relation. 
 
272 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY, 
 
 of an attractive power, usually expressed by the terms 
 "chastenesSj refinement, or elegance," and it appears also 
 § 1. Meaning of that things which in other respects have little 
 ness^^an^^ Refin^^^ them of natural beauty, and are of forms al- 
 
 together simple and adapted to simple uses, are 
 capable of much distinction and desirableness in consequence 
 of these qualities only. It is of importance to discover the 
 real nature of the ideas thus expressed. 
 
 Something of the peculiar meaning of the words is refer- 
 able to the authority of fashion and the exclusiveness of 
 pride, owing to which that which is the mode of a particular 
 
 time is submissively esteemed, and that which 
 
 § 2. How refer- . i - * „ t m i 
 
 able to tempo- by its costlincss or its rarity is of difficult attam- 
 
 rary fashions, ^ . . i i i 
 
 ment, or in any way appears to have been chosen 
 as the best of many things, (which is the original sense of 
 the words elegant and exquisite,) is esteemed for the witness 
 it bears to the dignity of the chooser. 
 
 But neither of these ideas are in any way connected with 
 eternal beauty, neither do they at all account for that agree- 
 ableness of color and form which is especially termed chaste- 
 ness, and which it would seem to be a characteristic of rightly 
 trained mind in all things to prefer, and of common minds to 
 reject. 
 
 There is however another character of artificial produc- 
 tions, to which these terms have partial reference, which it is 
 of some importance to note, that of finish, exactness, or re- 
 finement, which are commonly desired in the 
 
 §3. How to the , „ • i i i • i-rr- i /. 
 
 perception of works of men, owing both to their difficulty of 
 
 completion. t ^ . i . . • 
 
 accomplishment and consequent expression or 
 care and power (compare Chapter on Ideas of Power, Part I. 
 Sect, i.,) and from their greater resemblance to the working 
 of God, whose absolute exactness," says Hooker, all things 
 imitate, by tending to that which is most exquisite in every 
 particular." And there is not a greater sign of the imper- 
 fection of general taste, than its capability of contentment 
 with forms and things which, professing completion, are yet 
 not exact nor complete, as in the vulgar with wax and clay 
 and china figures, and in bad sculptors with an unfinished 
 
OF MODERATION. 
 
 273 
 
 and clay-like modelling of surface, and curves and angles of 
 no precision or delicacy ; and in general, in all common and 
 unthinking persons with an imperfect rendering of that which 
 might be pure and fine, as church-wardens are content to lose 
 the sharp lines of stone carving under clogging obliterations 
 of w^hitewash, and as the modern Italians scrape away and 
 polish white all the sharpness and glory of the carvings on 
 their old churches, as most miserably and pitifully on St. 
 4 F' / h b -'^^^^'^ Venice, and the Baj)tisteries of Pis- 
 
 grekt masters es- toja and Pisa, and many others ; so also the de- 
 teemed essential. T T /, 1 . , • 11 , 
 
 light of vulgar painters in coarse and slurred 
 painting, merely for the sake of its coarseness,* as of Spagno- 
 
 * It is to be carefully noted that when rude execution is evidently not 
 the result of imperfect feeling and desire (as in these men above named, 
 it is) but of thought ; either impatient, which there was necessity to 
 note swiftly, or impetuous, which it was well to note in mighty man- 
 ner, as pre-eminently and in both kinds the case with Tintoret, and 
 often with Michael Angelo, and in lower and more degraded modes with 
 Rubens, and generally in the sketches and first thoughts of great mas- 
 ters ; there is received a very noble pleasure, connected both with ideas 
 of power (compare again Part I. Sect. ii. Chap. I.) and with certain ac- 
 tions of the imagination of which we shall speak presently. But this 
 pleasure is not received from the beauty of the work, for nothing can 
 be perfectly beautiful unless complete, but from its simplicity and suf- 
 ficiency to its immediate purpose, where the purpose is not of beauty at 
 all, as often in things rough-hewn, pre-eminently for instance in the 
 stones of the foundations of the Pitti and Strozzi palaces, whose noble 
 rudeness is to be opposed both to the useless polish, and the barbarous 
 rustications of modem times, (although indeed this instance is not with- 
 out exception to be received, for the majesty of these rocky buildings 
 depends also in some measure upon the real beauty and finish of the 
 natural curvilinear fractures, opposed to the coarseness of human chis- 
 elling,) and again, as it respects works of higher art, the pleasure of their 
 hasty or imperfect execution is not indicative of their beauty, but of 
 their majesty and fulness of thought and vastness of power. Shade is 
 only beautiful when it magnifies and sets forth the forms of fair things, 
 so negligence is only noble when it is, as Fuseli hath it, the shadow 
 of energy." Which that it may be, secure the substance and the shade 
 will follow, but let the artist beware of stealing the manner of giant in- 
 tellects when he has not their intention, and of assuming large modes of 
 treatment when he has little thoughts to treat. There is large differ- 
 ence between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience 
 Vol. II.— 18 
 
274 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 letto, Salvator, or Murillo, opposed to the divine finish which 
 the greatest and mightiest of men disdained not, but rather 
 wrought out with painfulness and life spending ; as Leon- 
 ardo and Michael Angelo, (for the latter, however many 
 things he left unfinished, did finish, if at all, with a refine- 
 ment that the eye cannot follow, but the feeling only, as in 
 the Pieta of Genoa,) and Perugino always, even to, the gild- 
 ing of single hairs among his angel tresses, and the young 
 Raffaelle, when he was heaven taught, and Angelico, and 
 Pinturicchio, and John Bellini, and all other such serious and 
 loving men. Only it is to be observed that this finish is not 
 a part or constituent of beauty, but the full and ultimate 
 rendering of it, so that it is an idea only connected with 
 the works of men, for all the works of the Deity are finished 
 with the same, that is, infinite care and completion : and so 
 what degrees of beauty exist among them can in no way be 
 dependent upon this source, inasmuch as there are between 
 them no degrees of care. And therefore, as there certainly 
 is admitted a difference of degree in what we call chasteness, 
 even in Divine work, (compare the hollyhock or the sun- 
 flower with the vale lily,) we must seek for it some other ex- 
 planation and source than this. 
 
 And if, bringing down our ideas of it from complicated 
 objects to simple lines and colors, we analyze and regard them 
 carefully, I think we shall be able to trace them to an under- 
 current of constantly asrreeable feelinsf, excited 
 
 ^ 5 liXoclGr&tioii o 
 
 its nature aud by the appearance in material things of a self- 
 ^^^"®* restrained liberty, that is to say, by the image 
 
 of that acting of God with regard to all his creation, where- 
 of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we 
 have more to do, or because we are satisfied with what we have done. 
 Tintoret, who prayed hard, and hardly obtained, that he might be per- 
 mitted, the charge of his colors only being borne, to paint a new built 
 house from base to battlement, was not one to shun labor, it is the 
 pouring in upon him of glorious thoughts in inexpressible multitude 
 that his sweeping hand follows so fast. It is as easy to know the slight- 
 ness of earnest haste from the slightness of blunt feeling, indolence, 
 or affectation, as it is to know the dust of a race, from the dust of dis- 
 solution. 
 
OF MODERATION. 
 
 275 
 
 in, though free to operate in whatever arbitrary, sudden, 
 violent, or inconstant ways he will, he yet, if we may rever- 
 ently so speak, restrains in himself this his omnipotent liberty, 
 and works always in consistent modes, called by us laws. 
 And this restraint or moderation, according to the words of 
 Hooker, (" that which doth moderate the force and power, 
 that which doth appoint the form and measure of working, 
 the same we term a law,") is in the Deity not restraint, such 
 as it is said of creatures, but, as again says Hooker, the 
 very being of God is a law to his working," so that every 
 appearance of painfulness or want of power and freedom in 
 material things is wrong and ugly ; for the right restraint, 
 the image of Divine operation, is both in them, and in men, 
 a willing and not painful stopping short of the utmost degree 
 to which their power might reach, and the appearance of fet- 
 tering or confinement is the cause of ugliness in the one, as 
 the slightest painfulness or effort in restraint is a sign of sin 
 in the other. 
 
 I have put this attribute of beauty last, because I consider 
 it the girdle and safeguard of all the rest, and in this respect 
 the most essential of all, for it is possible that a certain de- 
 § 6. It is the gir- g^^® bcauty may be attained even in the ab- 
 die of beauty. sence of One of its other constituents, as some- 
 times in some measure without symmetry or without unity. 
 But the least appearance of violence or extravagance, of the 
 want of moderation and restraint, is, I think, destructive of 
 all beauty whatsoever in everything, color, form, motion, 
 language, or thought, giving rise to that which in color we 
 call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in lan- 
 guage coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened ; 
 which qualities are in everything most painful, because the 
 sis^ns of disobedient and irregular operation. 
 
 § 7. How found in.^^, . . ^ ^ 
 
 natural curves And herein we at last nnd the reason of that 
 and colors. which has been so often noted respecting the sub- 
 
 tilty and almost invisibility of natural curves and colors, and 
 why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which 
 fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beau- 
 tiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character 
 
276 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, 
 as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the relig- 
 ious painters ; and thus in color it is not red, but rose-color 
 Avhich is most beautiful, neither such actual green as we find 
 in summer foliage partly, and in our painting of it constantly ; 
 but such gray green as that into which nature modifies her 
 distant tints, or such pale green and uncertain as we see in 
 sunset sky, and in the clefts of the glacier and the chryso- 
 prase, and the sea-foam ; and so of all colors, not that they 
 may not sometimes be deep and full, but that there is a sol- 
 emn moderation even in their very fulness, and a holy refer- 
 ence beyond and out of their own nature to great harmonies 
 by which they are governed, and in obedience to which is 
 their glory. Whereof the ignorance is shown in all evil col- 
 orists by the violence and positiveness of their hues, and by 
 dulness and discordance consequent, for the very brilliancy 
 and real jDower of all color is dependent on the chastening of 
 it, as of a voice on its gentleness, and as of action on its 
 § 8. How difficult calmness, and as all moral vigor on self-com- 
 of attainment, yet ^land. And therefore as that virtue which men 
 
 essential to all 
 
 f^ood. last, and with most difficulty attain unto, and 
 
 which many attain not at all, and yet that which is essential 
 to the conduct and almost to the being of all other virtues, 
 since neither imagination, nor invention, nor industry, nor 
 sensibility, nor energy, nor any other good having, is of full 
 avail without this of self-command, whereby works truly mas- 
 culine and mighty are produced, and by the signs of which 
 they are separated from that lower host of things brilliant, 
 magnificent and redundant, and farther yet from that of the 
 loose, the lawless, the exaggerated, the insolent, and the pro- 
 fane, I would have the necessity of it foremost among all our 
 inculcating, and the name of it largest among all our inscrib- 
 ing, in so far that, over the doors of every school of Art, I 
 would have this one word, relieved out in deep letters of pure 
 gold, — Moderation. 
 
GENERAL INFERENCES. 
 
 277 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 GENERAL INFERENCES RESPECTING TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 I HAVE now enumerated, and in some measure explained 
 those characteristics of mere matter by which I conceive it 
 becomes agreeable to the theoretic faculty, under whatever 
 form, dead, organized, or animated, it may pre- 
 
 § 1. The sub- • i/» t -n i i • i t 
 
 ject incompletely sent itscli. It Will be our tasK in the succeeding 
 mitting o?*^gen- volumc to examine, and illustrate by examples, 
 eral conclusions, ^j^^ mode in which these characteristics appear 
 in every division of creation, in stones, mountains, waves, 
 clouds, and all organic bodies ; beginning with vegetables, 
 and then taking instances in the range of animals from the 
 mollusc to man ; examining how one animal form is nobler 
 than another, by the more mai^i|est presence of these attri- 
 butes, and chiefly endeavoring to show how much there is of 
 admirable and lovely, even in what is commonly despised. 
 At present I have only to mark the conclusions at which we 
 have as yet arrived respecting the rank of the theoretic fac- 
 ulty, and then to pursue the inquiry farther into the nature 
 of vital beauty. 
 
 As I before said, I pretend not to have enumerated all the 
 sources of material beauty, nor the analogies connected with 
 them ; it is probable that others may occur to many readers, 
 or to myself as I proceed into more particular inquiry, but I 
 am not careful to collect all conceivable evidence on the sub- 
 ject. I desire only to assert and prove some certain princi- 
 ples, and by means of these to show, in some measure, the 
 inherent worthiness and glory of God's works and something 
 of the relations they bear to each other and to us, leaving the 
 subject to be fully pursued, as it only can be, by the ardor 
 and affection of those whom it may interest. 
 
 The qualities above enumerated are not to be considered as 
 stamped upon matter for our teachinsr or enioy- 
 
 §2. Typical beau- / i i ^i i? 
 
 tynot created for ment Only, but as the necessary consequence or 
 mans&ace. ^j^^ perfection of God's working, and the inevi- 
 
278 
 
 OF TYPICAL BEAUTY. 
 
 table stamp of his image on what he creates. For it would 
 
 be inconsistent with his Infinite perfection to work imperfectly 
 in any place, or in any matter ; wherefore we do not find that 
 flowers and fair trees, and kindly skies, are given only where 
 man may see them and be fed by them, but the Spirit of God 
 works everywhere alike, where there is no eye to see, cover- 
 ing all lonely places with an equal glory, using the same pen- 
 cil and outpouring the same splendor, in the caves of the waters 
 where the sea-snakes swim, and in the desert where the satyrs 
 dance, among the fir-trees of the stork, and the rocks of the 
 conies, as among those higher creatures whom 
 
 §3. But degrees , , , ui 'i. £ V.' i • 
 
 of it for his sake he has made capable witnesses oi his working, 
 admitted. Nevertheless, I think that the admission of differ- 
 
 ent degrees of this glory and image of himself upon creation, 
 has the look of something meant especially for us ; for al- 
 though, in pursuance of the appointed system of government 
 by universal laws, these sa'rt% degrees exist where we cannot 
 witness them, yet the existence of degrees at all seems at first 
 unlikely in Divine work, and I cannot see reason for it unless 
 that palpable one of increasing in us the understanding gf 
 the sacred characters by showing us the results of their com- 
 parative absence. For I know not that if all things had been 
 equally beautiful, we could have received the idea of beauty 
 at all, or if we had, certainly it had become a matter of in- 
 difference to us, and of little thought, whereas through the 
 beneficent ordaining of degrees in its manifestation, the hearts 
 of men are stirred by its occasional occurrence in its noblest 
 form, and all their energies are awakened in the pursuit of 
 it, and endeavor to arrest it or recreate it for themselves. 
 
 But whatever doubt there may be respecting the 
 age'n^nfhenceYo exact amount of modification of created things 
 be received. admitted with reference to us, there can be none 
 respecting the dignity of that faculty by which we receive 
 the mysterious evidence of their divine origin. The fact of 
 our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or 
 semblance of Divine attributes, and from nothing but that 
 which is so, is the most glorious of all that can be demon- 
 strated of human nature ; it not only sets a great gulf of specific 
 
OF VITAL BEAUTY. AS RELATIVE. 279 
 
 separation between us and the lower animals, but it seems a 
 promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious, 
 with the Being whose darkened manifestations we here feebly 
 and unthinkingly delight in. Probably to every order of in- 
 telligence more of his image becomes palpable in all around 
 them, and the glorified spirits and the angels have perceptions 
 as much more full and rapturous than ours, as ours than those 
 of beasts and creeping things. And receiving it, as we must, 
 for an universal axiom that " no natural desire can be entirely 
 frustrate," and seeing that these desires are indeed so unfail- 
 ing in us that they have escaped not the reasoners of any 
 time, but were held divine of old, and in even heathen coun- 
 tries, * it cannot be but that there is in these visionary pleas- 
 ures, lightly as we now regard them, cause for thankfulness, 
 ground for hope, anchor for faith, more than in all the other 
 manifold gifts and guidances, wherewith God crowns the 
 years, and hedges the paths of men. 
 
 CHAPTER XIL 
 
 or YITAL BEAUTY. FIRST, AS RELATIYE. 
 
 I PROCEED more particularly to examine the nature of that 
 second kind of beauty of which I spoke in the third chapter, 
 as consisting in the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of 
 „ ^ _ . . function in livinsr thino^s." I have already 
 
 § 1. Transition . i . 
 
 from typical to noticed the example of very pure and hisrh 
 
 vital Beauty. . i i i • i • i /. i • t 
 
 typical beauty which is to be found in the lines 
 and gradations of unsullied snow : if, passing to the edge of 
 a sheet of it, upon the lower Alps, early in May, we find, as 
 we are nearly sure to find, two or three little round openings 
 pierced in it, and through these emergent, a slender, pensive, 
 
 * 'H Te\eia ^v^ai^ovia. dccoprjriK-ff ris iariy ivepyeia. * * rois [jlcu yap 
 Oedis &7ras 6 jSios fxaKoipioSy ro7s S' audpuirois^ €<p^ t(TOi/ bfxoiujfxd ri rrjs rotdvrris 
 iuepye'ias vTvapx^^- toSu S'^AAojj/ CvV^ ov8ev €vSaiiJ.ou€i. eTreiS); ovda/bLTf Koivoo- 
 v€i Ocwpias. — Arist. Eth. Lib. 10th. The concluding book of the Ethics 
 should be carefully read. It is all most valuable. 
 
280 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 fragile flower* whose small dark, purple-fringed bell hangs 
 down and shudders over the icy cleft that it has cloven, as if 
 partly wondering at its own recent grave, and partly dying 
 of very fatigue after its hard won victory ; we shall be, or 
 we ought to be, moved by a totally different impression of 
 loveliness from that which we receive among the dead ice and 
 the idle clouds. There is now uttered to us a call for 
 sympathy, now offered to us an image of moral purpose and 
 achievement, which, however unconscious or senseless the 
 creature may indeed be that so seems to call, cannot be 
 heard without affection, nor contemplated without worship, 
 by any of us whose heart is rightly tuned, or whose mind is 
 clearly and surely sighted. 
 
 Throughout the whole of the organic creation every being 
 in a perfect state exhibits certain appearances, or evidences, 
 of happiness, and besides is in its nature, its desires, its 
 modes of nourishment, habitation, and death, illustrative or 
 expressive of certain moral dispositions or principles. Now, 
 first, in the keenness of the sympathy which we feel in the 
 happiness, real or apparent, of all organic beings, and which, 
 as we shall presently see, invariably prompts us, from the joy 
 we have in it, to look upon those as most lovely which are 
 most happy ; and secondly, in the justness of the moral 
 sense which rightly reads the lesson they are all intended to 
 teach, and classes them in orders of worthiness and beauty 
 according to the rank and nature of that lesson, whether it 
 be of warning or example, of those that wallow or of those 
 that soar, of the fiend-hunted swine by the Gennesaret lake, 
 or of the dove returning to its ark of rest ; in our right 
 accepting and reading of all this, consists, I say, the ulti- 
 mately perfect condition of that noble theoretic faculty, 
 whose place in the system of our nature I have already 
 partly vindicated with respect to typical, but which can 
 only fully be established with respect to vital beauty. 
 
 Its first perfection, therefore, relating to vital beauty, is 
 the kindness and unselfish fulness of heart, which receives 
 
 * Soldanella Alpina. 
 
 V 
 
RELATIVE. 
 
 281 
 
 the utmost amount of pleasure from the happiness of all 
 things. Of which in high degree the heart of man is incap- 
 §2. The perfec- able, neither what intense enjoyment the angels 
 ^e't?c''k*cui^^^^^^ may have in all that they see of things that 
 Xrbeaut>s'*i^ ^ove and live, and in the part they take in the 
 charity. shedding of God's kindness upon them, can 
 
 we know or conceive : only in proportion as we draw near to 
 God, and are made in measure like unto him, can we increase 
 this our possession of charity, of which the entire essence is 
 in God only. 
 
 Wherefore it is evident that even the ordinary exercise of 
 this faculty implies a condition of the whole moral being in 
 some measure right and healthy, and that to the entire ex- 
 ercise of it there is necessary the entire perfection of the 
 Christian character, for he who loves not God, nor his 
 brother, cannot love the grass beneath his feet and the 
 creatures that fill those spaces in the universe which he 
 needs not, and which live not for his uses ; nay, he has 
 seldom grace to be grateful even to those that love him and 
 serve him, while, on the other hand, none can love God nor 
 his human brother without lovins: all thin^fs which his Father 
 loves, nor without looking upon them every one as in that 
 respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, if in 
 the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched 
 more truly. Wherefore it is good to read of that kindness 
 and humbleness of St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke never to 
 bird nor to cicala, nor even to wolf and beast of prey, but as 
 his brother ; and so we find are moved the minds of all good 
 and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from the 
 Mariner of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught 
 in the Heartleap well, 
 
 Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride, 
 With sorrow of the nieanest thing that feels," 
 
 and again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added 
 teaching of that gift, which we have from things beneath 
 us, in thanks for the love they cannot equally return ; that 
 anguish of our own, 
 
282 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 Is tempered and allayed by sympathies, 
 Aloffc descending and descending deep, 
 Even to the inferior kinds," 
 
 so that I know not of anything more destructive of the 
 whole theoretic faculty, not to say of the Christian character 
 and human intellect, than those accursed sports in which 
 man makes of himself, cat, tiger, serpent, chaetodon, and 
 alligator in one, and gathers into one continuance of cruelty 
 for his amusement all the devices that brutes sparingly and 
 at intervals use against each other for their necessities.* 
 
 As we pass from those beings of whose happiness and pain 
 we are certain to those in which it is doubtful or only seem- 
 ing, as possibly in plants, (though I would fain hold, if I 
 §3. Only with might, "the faith that every flower enjoys the 
 Te'sr^afflS air it breathes," neither do I ever crush or 
 than sympathy, gather One without some pain,) yet our feeling 
 for them has in it more of sympathy than of actual love, as 
 receiving from them in delight far more than we can give ; 
 for love, I think, chiefly grows in giving, at least its essence 
 is the desire of doing good, or giving happiness, and we can- 
 not feel the desire of that which we cannot conceive, so that 
 if we conceive not of a plant as capable of pleasure, we can- 
 not desire to give it pleasure, that is, we cannot love it in 
 the entire sense of the term. 
 
 Nevertheless, the sympathy of very lofty and sensitive minds 
 usually reaches so far as to the conception of life in the plant, 
 and so to love, as with Shelley, of the sensitive plant, and 
 Shakspeare always, as he has taught us in the sweet voices 
 of Ophelia and Perdita, and Wordsworth always, as of the 
 daffodils, and the celandine. 
 
 It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold. 
 
 This neither is its courage, nor its choice, 
 
 But its necessity in being old," — 
 * I would have Mr. Landseer, before he gives us any more writhing 
 otters, or yelping x^acks, reflect whether that which is best worthy of 
 contemplation in a hound be its ferocity, or in an otter its agony, or in 
 a human being its victory, hardly achieved even with the aid of its 
 more sagacious brutal allies over a poor little fish-catching creature, a 
 foot long. 
 
II EL ATI VB, 
 
 283 
 
 and so all other great poets (that is to say, great seers ; *) 
 nor do I believe that any mind, however rude, is without 
 some slight perception or acknowledgment of joyfulness in 
 breathless things, as most certainly there are none but feel 
 instinctive delight in the appearances of such enjoyment. 
 
 For it is matter of easy demonstration, that setting the 
 characters of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by 
 every organic form is in proportion to its appearance of 
 . , . healthy vital energ-y ; as in a rose-bush, settins^ 
 
 § 4. W h i c h i s ' i n i • r. 
 
 proportioned to aside all Considerations of gradated liushing of 
 of energy^ln^the color and fair folding of line, which it shares 
 plants. with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find in 
 
 and through all this, certain signs pleasant and acceptable 
 as signs of life and enjoyment in the particular individual 
 plant itself. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, 
 to be constantly exercising that function, and as it seems 
 solely for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true 
 that reflection will show us that the plant is not living for 
 itself alone, that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives 
 as well as receives, but no sense of this whatsoever mingles 
 with our perception of physical beauty in its forms. Those 
 forms which appear to be necessary to its health, the sym- 
 metry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid 
 green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the 
 plant's own happiness and perfection ; they are useless to 
 us, except as they give us pleasure in our sympathizing with 
 that of the plant, and if we see a leaf withered or shrunk or 
 worm-eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel it to be most painful, 
 not because it hurts iis^ but because it seems to hurt the plant, 
 and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and failure of 
 life in it, 
 
 . That the amount of pleasure we receive is in exact propor- 
 tion to the appearance of vigor and sensibility in the plant, 
 is easily proved by observing the effect of those which show 
 
 * Compare Milton. 
 
 ''They at her coming sprung 
 And touched by her fair tendance, gladlier grew. " 
 
284 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 the evidences of it in the least degree, as, for instance, any 
 of the cacti not in flower. Their masses are heavy and simple, 
 their growth slow, their various parts jointed on one to ano- 
 ther, as if they were buckled or pinned together instead of 
 growing out of each other, (note the singular imposition in 
 many of them, the prickly pear for instance, of the fruit upon 
 the body of the plant, so that it looks like a swelling or dis- 
 ease,) and often farther opposed by harsh truncation of line 
 as in the cactus truncatophylla. All these circumstances so 
 concur to deprive the plant of vital evidences, that we receive 
 from it more sense of pain than of beauty ; and yet even 
 here, the sharpness of the angles, the symmetrical order and 
 strength of the spines, the fresh and even color of the body, 
 are looked for earnestly as signs of healthy condition, our 
 pain is increased by their absence, and indefinitely increased 
 if blotches, and other appearances of bruise and decay inter- 
 fere with that little life which the plant seems to possess. 
 
 The same singular characters belong in animals to the Crust- 
 acea, as to the lobster, crab, scorpion, etc., and in great 
 measure deprive them of the beauty which we find in higher 
 orders, so that we are reduced to look for their beauty to 
 single parts and joints, and not to the whole animal. 
 
 Now I wish particularly to impress upon the reader that all 
 these sensations of beauty in the plant arise from our unsel- 
 fish sympathy with its happiness, and not from any view of 
 § 5. This sympa- the qualities in it which may bring good to us, 
 and does "not^re- ^^^^ cven from our acknowledgment in it of any 
 gard utility. moral condition beyond that of mere felicity ; 
 for such an acknowledgment, belongs to the second operation 
 of the theoretic faculty (compare § 2,) and not to the sym- 
 pathetic part which we are at present examining ; so that we 
 even find that in this respect, the moment we begin to loqjc 
 upon any creature as subordinate to some purpose out of it- 
 self, some of the sense of organic beauty is lost. Thus, when 
 we are told that the leaves of a plant are occupied in decom- 
 posing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin 
 to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gaso- 
 meter. It has become a machine ; some of our sense of its 
 
RELATIVE, 
 
 285 
 
 happiness is gone ; its emanation of inherent life is no longer 
 pure. The bending trunk, waving to and fro in the wind 
 above the waterfall, is beautiful because it is happy, though 
 it is perfectly useless to us. The same trunk, hewn down and 
 thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It serves as a 
 bridge,- — it has become useful ; it lives not for itself, and its 
 beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent 
 on its lines and colors, not on its functions. Saw it into 
 planks, and though now adapted to become permanently use- 
 ful, its whole beauty is lost forever, or to be regained only in 
 part when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from 
 use, and left it to receive from the hand of nature the velvet 
 moss and varied liChen, which may again suggest ideas of in- 
 herent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of 
 life. 
 
 There is something, I think, peculiarly beautiful and in- 
 structive in this unselfishness of the theoretic faculty, and in 
 its abhorrence of all utility which is based on the pain or de- 
 struction of any creature, for in such ministering to each other 
 as is consistent witli the essence and energy of both, it takes 
 delight, as in the clothing of the rock by the herbage, and the 
 feeding of the herbage by the stream. 
 
 But still more distinct evidence of its being indeed the ex- 
 pression of happiness to which we look for our first pleasure 
 in organic form, is to be found in the way in which we regard 
 the bodily frame of animals : of which it is to 
 with respect^ to be notcd first, that there is not anything which 
 
 animals. . , , « 
 
 causes so intense and tormenting a sense of ug- 
 liness as any scar, wound, monstrosity, or imperfection which 
 seems inconsistent with the animal's ease and health ; and 
 that although in vegetables, where there is no immediate sense 
 of pain, we are comparatively little hurt by excrescences and 
 irregularities, but are sometimes even delighted with them, 
 and fond of them, as children of the oak-apple, and sometimes 
 look upon them as more interesting than the uninjured con- 
 ditions, as in the gnarled and knotted trunks of trees ; yet 
 the slightest approach to anything of the kind in animal form 
 is regarded with intense horror, merely from the sense of pain 
 
286 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 it conveys. And, in the second place, it is to be noted that 
 whenever we dissect the animal frame, or conceive it as dis- 
 § 7. And it is de- sected, and substitute in our ideas the neatness 
 de^iXs^of^mechi mechanical contrivance for the pleasure of the 
 nism. animal ; the moment we reduce enjoyment to in- 
 
 genuity, and volition to leverage, that instant all sense of 
 beauty disappears. Take, for instance, the action of the limb of 
 the ostrich, which is beautiful so long as we see it in its swift 
 uplifting along the desert sands, and trace in the tread of it 
 her scorn of the horse and his rider, but would infinitely lose 
 of its impressiveness, if we could see the spring ligament play- 
 ing backwards and forwards in alternate jerks over the tu- 
 bercle at the hock joint. Take again the action of the dorsal 
 fin of the shark tribe. So long as we observe the uniform en- 
 ergy of motion in the whole frame, the lash of the tail, bound 
 of body, and instantaneous lowering of the dorsal, to avoid 
 the resistance of the water as it turns, there is high sense of 
 organic power and beauty. But when we dissect the dorsal, 
 and find that its superior ray is supported in its position by 
 a peg in a notch at its base, and that when the fin is to be 
 lowered, the peg has to be taken out, and when it is raised 
 put in again ; although we are filled with wonder at the in- 
 genuity of the mechanical contrivance, all our sense of beauty 
 is gone, and not to be recovered until we again see the fin 
 playing on the animal's body, apparently by its own will alone, 
 with the life running along its rays. It is by a beautiful or- 
 dinance of the Creator that all these mechanisms are con- 
 cealed from sight, though open to investigation, and that in 
 all which is outwardly manifested we seem to see his presence 
 rather than his workmanship, and the mysterious breath of 
 life, rather than the manipulation of matter. 
 
 As, therefore, it appears from all evidence that it is the 
 sense of felicity which we first desire in organic form, it is 
 evident from reason, as demonstrable by experience, that 
 those forms will be the most beautiful (always, observe, leav- 
 ing typical beauty out of the question) which exhibit most 
 of power, and seem capable of most quick and joyous sensa- 
 tion. Hence we find gradations of beauty from the apparent 
 
EELATIVE, 
 
 287 
 
 impenetrableness of hide and slow motion of the elephant and 
 rhinoceros, from the foul occupation of the vulture, from the 
 earthy struggling of the worm, to the brilliancy of the but- 
 terfly, the buoyancy of the lark, the swiftness of the fawn 
 and the horse, the fair and kingly sensibility of man. 
 
 Thus far then, the theoretic faculty is concerned with the 
 happiness of animals, and its exercise depends on the culti- 
 vation of the affections only. Let us next observe how it is 
 o o . concerned with the moral functions of animals, 
 
 § 8. The second 
 
 perfection of the and therefore how it is dependent on the culti- 
 
 theoietic faculty , . a i rnu • 
 
 asconcerned vation Oi every moral sense. inere is not any 
 tice of mora^ Organic creature, but in its history and habits it 
 judgment. shall exemplify or illustrate to us some moral 
 excellence or deficiency, or some point of God's providential 
 governm.ent, which it is necessary for us to know. Thus the 
 functions and the fates of animals are distributed to them, 
 with a variety which exhibits to us the dignity and results of 
 almost every passion and kind of conduct, some filthy and 
 slothful, pining and unhappy ; some rapacious, restless, and 
 cruel ; some ever earnest and laborious, and, 1 think, unhappy 
 in their endless labor, creatures, like the bee, that heap up 
 riches and cannot tell who shall gather them, and others em- 
 ployed like angels in endless offices of love and praise. Of 
 which when, in right condition of mind, we esteem those 
 most beautiful, whose functions are the most noble, whether 
 as some, in mere energy, or as others, in moral honor, so that 
 we look with hate on the foulness of the sloth, and the subt- 
 lety of the adder, and the rage of the hyena : with the honor 
 due to their earthly wisdom we invest the earnest ant and 
 unwearied bee ; but we look with full perception of sacred 
 function to the tribes of burning plumage and choral voice.* 
 And so what lesson we might receive for our earthly conduct 
 from the creeping and laborious things, was taught us by 
 that earthly king who made silver to be in Jerusalem as 
 stones (yet thereafter was less rich towards God). But from 
 
 * Type of the wise — who soar, but never roam, 
 
 True to the kindred points of heaven and home." 
 
 (Wordsworth.— To the Skylark.) 
 
2S8 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY, 
 
 the lips of an heavenly King, who had not where to lay his 
 head, we were taught what lesson we have to learn from those 
 higher creatures who sow not, nor reap, nor gather into 
 barns, for their Heavenly Father feedeth them. 
 
 There is much difficulty in the way of our looking with 
 this rightly brJanced judgment on the moral functions of the 
 animal tribes, owing to the independent and often opposing 
 § 9 How imped- characters of typical beauty, which are among 
 ed. them, as it seems, arbitrarily distributed, so 
 
 that the most fierce and cruel are often clothed in the live- 
 liest colors, and strengthened by the n5blest forms, with this 
 only exception, that so far as I know, there is no high beauty 
 in any slothful animal, but even among those of prey, its 
 characters exist in exalted measure upon those that range 
 and pursue, and are in equal degree withdrawn from those 
 that lie subtly and silently in the covert of the reed and fens. 
 But that mind only is fully disciplined in its theoretic power, 
 which can, when it chooses, throwing off the sympathies and 
 repugnancies with which the ideas of destructiveness or of 
 innocence accustom us to regard the animal tribes, as well as 
 those meaner likes and dislikes which arise, I think, from the 
 greater or less resemblance of animal powers to our own, 
 can pursue the pleasures of typical beauty down to the scales 
 of the alligator, the coils of the serpent, and the joints of 
 the beetle ; and again, on the other hand, regardless of the 
 impressions of typical beauty, accept from each creature, 
 great or small, the more important lessons taught by its po- 
 sition in creation as sufferer or chastiser, as lowly or having 
 dominion, as of foul habit or lofty aspiration, and from the 
 several perfections which all illustrate or possess, courage, 
 perseverance, industry, or intelligence, or, higher yet, of 
 love and patience, and fidelity and rejoicing, and never 
 § lu. The influ- Wearied praise. Which moral perfections that 
 signs in ef^xel ^^cy indeed are productive, in proportion to 
 ^^o"- their expression, of instant beauty instinct- 
 
 ively felt, is best proved by comparing those parts of ani- 
 mals in which they are definitely expressed, as for in- 
 stance the eye, of which we shall find those ugliest which 
 
RELATIVE, 
 
 289 
 
 have in them no expression nor life wliatever, but a corpse- 
 like stare, or an indefinite meaningless glaring, as 'in some 
 lights, those of owls and cats, and mostly of insects and 
 of all creatures in which the eye seems rather an external, 
 optical instrument than a bodily member through which 
 emotion and virtue of soul may be expressed, (as preemi- 
 nently in the chameleon,) because the seeming want of sensi- 
 bility and vitality in a living creature is the most painful of all 
 wants. And next to these in ugliness come the eyes that 
 gain vitality indeed, but only by means of the expression of 
 intense malignity, as in the serpent and alligator ; and next 
 to these, to whose malignity is added the virtue of subtlety 
 and keenness, as of the lynx and hawk ; and then, by di- 
 minishing the malignity and increasing the expressions of 
 comprehensiveness and determination, we arrive at those of 
 the lion and eagle, and at last, by destroying malignity alto- 
 gether, at the fair eye of the herbivorous tribes, wherein the 
 superiority of beauty consists always in the greater or less 
 sw^eetness and gentleness primarily, as in the gazelle, camel, 
 and ox, and in the greater or less intellect, secondarily, as in 
 the horse and dog, and finally, in gentleness and intellect 
 both in man. And again, taking the mouth, another source 
 of expression, we find it ugliest where it has none, as mostly 
 in fish, or perhaps where w^ithout gaining much in expres- 
 sion of any kind, it becomes a formidable destructive instru- 
 ment, as again in the alligator, and then, by some increase of 
 expression, we arrive at birds' beaks, wherein there is more 
 obtained by the different ways of setting on the mandibles 
 than is commonly supposed, (compare the bills of the duck 
 and the eagle,) and thence we reach the finely developed lips 
 of the carnivora, which nevertheless lose that beauty they 
 have, in the actions of snarling and biting, and from these 
 we pass to the nobler because gentler and more sensible, of 
 the horse, camel, and fawn, and so again up to man, only 
 the re is less traceableness of the principle in the mouths of 
 the lower animals, because they are in slight measure only 
 capable of expression, and chiefly used as instruments, and 
 that of low function, whereas in man the mouth is given 
 Vol. II.— 19 
 
290 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 most definitely as a means of expression, beyond and above 
 its lower functions. Compare the remarks of Sir Charles 
 Bell on this subject in his Essay on Expression, and compare 
 the mouth of the negro head given by him (p. 28, third edi- 
 tion) with that of Raffaelle's St. Catherine. I shall illustrate 
 the subject farther hereafter by giving the mouth of one of 
 the demons of Orcagna's Inferno, with projecting incisors, 
 and that of a fish and a swine, in opposition to pure gram- 
 inivorous and human forms ; but at present it is sufficient 
 for my purpose to insist on the single great principle, that, 
 wherever expression is possible, and uninterfered with by 
 characters of typical beauty, which confuse the subject ex- 
 ceedingly as regards the mouth, (for the typical beauty of 
 the carnivorous lips is on a grand scale, while it exists in 
 very low degree in the beaks of birds,) wherever, I say, 
 these considerations do not interfere, the beauty of the ani- 
 mal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral or 
 intellectual virtue expressed by it ; and wherever beauty 
 exists at all, there is some kind of virtue to which it is ow- 
 ing, as the majesty of the lion's eye is owing not to its fe- 
 rocity, but to its seriousness and seeming intellect, and of the 
 lion's mouth to its strength and sensibility, and not its gnash- 
 ing of teeth, nor wrinkling in its wrath ; and farther be it 
 noted, that of the intellectual or moral virtues, the moral are 
 those which are attended with most beauty, so that the gen- 
 tle eye of the gazelle is fairer to look upon than the more 
 keen glance of men, if it be unkind. 
 
 Of the parallel effects of expression upon plants there is 
 little to be noted, as the mere naming of the subject cannot 
 but bring countless illustrations to the mind of every reader : 
 §11. As also in ^^^7 this, that, as we saw they were less sus- 
 piants. ceptible of our sympathetic love, owing to the 
 
 absence in them of capability of enjoyment, so they are less 
 open to the affections based upon the expression of moral 
 virtue, owing to their want of volition ; so that even on those 
 of them which are deadly and unkind we look not without 
 pleasure, the more because this their evil operation cannot 
 be by them outwardly expressed, but only by us empirically 
 
RELATIVE. 
 
 291 
 
 known ; so that of the outward seemings and expressions of 
 plants, there are few but are in some way good and therefore 
 beautiful, as of humility, and modesty, and love of places 
 and things, in the reaching out of their arms, and clasping of 
 their tendrils ; and energy of resistance, and patience of suf- 
 ferino:, and beneficence one towards another in shade and 
 protection, and to us also in scents and fruits (for of their 
 healing virtues, however important to us, there is no more 
 outward sense nor seeming than of their properties mortal 
 or dangerous). 
 
 Whence, in fine, looking to the whole kingdom of organic 
 nature, we find that our full receiving of its beauty depends 
 first on the sensibility and then on the accuracy and touch- 
 § 12. Recapituia- stouc faithfulucss of the heart in its moral judg- 
 ments, so that it is necessary that ^e should not 
 only love all creatures well, but esteem them in that order 
 which is according to God's laws and not according to our 
 own human passions and predilections, not looking for swift- 
 ness, and strength, and cunning, rather than for patience 
 and kindness, still less delighting in their animosity and cru- 
 elty one towards another, neither, if it may be avoided, in- 
 terfering with the working of nature in any way, nor, w^hen 
 we interfere to obtain service, judging from the morbid con- 
 ditions of the animal or vegetable so induced ; for we see 
 every day the theoretic faculty entirely destroyed in those 
 who are interested in particular animals, by their delight in 
 the results of their own teaching, and by the vain straining 
 of curiosity for new forms such as nature never intended, as 
 the disgusting types for instance, . which we see earnestly 
 sought for by the fanciers of rabbits and pigeons, and con- 
 stantly in horses, substituting for the^ true and balanced 
 beauty of the free creature some morbid development of a 
 single power, as of swiftness in the racer, at the expense, in 
 certain measure, of the animal's healthy constitution and 
 fineness of form ; and so the delight of horticulturists in the 
 spoiling of plants ; so that in all cases we are to beware of 
 such opinions as seem in any way referable to human pride, 
 or even to the grateful or pernicious infliuence of things upon 
 
292 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 ourselves, and to cast the mind free, and out of ourselves, 
 humbly, and yet always in that noble position of pause above 
 the other visible creatures, nearer God than they, which we 
 authoritatively hold, thence looking down upon them, and 
 testing the clearness of our moral vision by the extent, and 
 fulness, and constancy of our pleasure in the light of God's 
 love as it embraces them, and the harmony of his holy laws, 
 that forever bring mercy out of rapine, and religion out of 
 wrath. 
 
 CHAPTER XIIL 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. SECONDLY, AS GENERIC. 
 
 Hitherto we have observed the conclusions of the theoretic 
 faculty with respect to the relations of happiness, and of 
 more or less exalted function existing between different or- 
 §1 The beauty ^^^^ Organic being. But we must pursue the 
 of fulfilment of inquiry farther yet, and observe what impres- 
 
 appointed func- . t»i ^ 
 
 tion in every aui- sions of bcauty are Connected with more or less 
 perfect fulfilment of the appointed function by 
 different individuals of the same species. We are now no 
 longer called to pronounce upon worthiness of occupation or 
 dignity of disposition ; but both employment and capacity 
 being known, and the animal's position and duty fixed, we 
 have to regard it in that respect alone, comparing it with 
 other individuals of its species, and to determine how far it 
 worthily executes its office ; whether, if scorpion, it hath 
 poison enough, or if tiger, strength enough, or if dove, inno- 
 cence enough, to sustain rightly its place in creation, and 
 come up to the perfect idea of dove, tiger, or scorpion. 
 
 In the first or sympathetic operation of the theoretic fac- 
 ulty, it will be remembered, we receive pleasure from the 
 signs of mere happiness in living things. In the second theo- 
 retic operation of comparing and judging, we constituted 
 ourselves such judges of the lower creatures as Adam was 
 made by God when tht^y were brought to him to be named, 
 
GENEBIG. 
 
 293 
 
 and we allowed of beauty in them as they reached, more or 
 less, to that standard of moral perfection by which we test 
 ourselves. But, in the third place, we are to come down 
 again from the judgment seat, and taking it for granted that 
 every creature of God is in some way good, and has a duty 
 and specific operation providentially accessory to the well- 
 being of all, we are to look in this faith to that employment 
 and nature of each, and to derive pleasure from their entire 
 perfection and fitness for the duty they have to do, and in their 
 entire fulfilment of it : and so we are to take pleasure and 
 find beauty in the magnificent binding together of the jaws 
 of the ichthyosaurus for catching and holding, and in the 
 adaptation of the lion for springing, and of the locust for de- 
 stroying, and of the lark for singing, and in every creature 
 for the doing of that which God has made it to do. Which 
 faithful pleasure in the perception of the perfect operation of 
 lower creatures I have placed last among the perfections of 
 the theoretic faculty concerning them, because it is commonly 
 last acquired, both owing to the humbleness and trustfulness 
 of heart which it demands, and because it implies a knowl- 
 edge of the habits and structure of every creature, such as 
 we can but imperfectly possess. 
 
 The perfect idea of the form and condition in which all 
 the properties of the species are fully developed, is called the 
 ideal of the species. The question of the nature of ideal 
 § 2. The two conception of species, and of the mode in which 
 w^o^ ideah" the mind arrives at it, has been the subject of 
 action^ of ^he^irn^ much discussion, and source of so much em- 
 agmation. barrassment, chiefly owing to that unfortunate 
 distinction between idealism and realism which leads most 
 people to imagine the ideal opposed to the real, and therefore 
 false^ that I think it necessary to request the reader's most 
 careful attention to the following positions. 
 
 Any work of art which represents, not a material object, but 
 the mental conception of a material object, is, in the primary 
 sense of the word ideal ; that is to say, it represents an idea, 
 and not a thing. Any work of art which represents or realizes 
 a material object, is, in the primary sense of the term, unideaL 
 
294 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 Ideal works of art, therefore, in this first sense, represent 
 the result of an act of imagination, and are good or bad in 
 proportion to the healthy condition and general power of the 
 imagination, whose acts they represent. 
 
 Unideal works of art (the studious production of which is 
 termed realism) represent actual existing things, and are 
 good or bad in proportion to the perfection of the represen- 
 tation. 
 
 All entirely bad works of art may be divided into those 
 which, professing to be imaginative, bear no stamp of imagi- 
 nation, and are therefore false, and those which, professing 
 to be representative of matter, miss of the representation and 
 are therefore nugatory. 
 
 It is the habit of most observers to regard art as represen- 
 tative of matter, and to look only for the entireness of repre- 
 sentation ; and it was to this view of art that I limited the 
 arguments of the former sections of the present work, wherein 
 having to oppose the conclusions of a criticism entirely based 
 upon the realist system, I was compelled to meet that criti- 
 cism on its own grounds. But the greater part of works of 
 art, more especially those devoted to the expression of ideas 
 of beauty, are the results of the agency of imagination, their 
 worthiness depending, as above stated, on the healthy con- 
 dition of the imagination. 
 
 Hence it is necessary for us, in order to arrive at conclu- 
 sions respecting the worthiness of such works, to define and 
 examine the nature of the imaginative faculty, and to deter- 
 mine first what are the signs or conditions of its existence at 
 all ; and secondly, what are the evidences of its healthy and 
 efiicient existence, upon which examination I shall enter in 
 the second section of the present part. 
 
 But there is another sense of the word ideal besides this, 
 and it is that with which we are here concerned. It is evi- 
 dent that, so long as we use the word to signify that art 
 §3. Ortoperfec- which represents ideas and not things, we may 
 tion of type. truly of the art which represents an 
 
 idea of Caliban, and not real Caliban, as of the art which 
 represents an idea of Antinous, and not real Antinous. For 
 
GENERIC. 
 
 295 
 
 that is as much imagination which conceives the monster as 
 which conceives the man. ]f, however, Caliban and Antia- 
 ous be creatures of the same species, and the form of the one 
 contain not the fully developed types or characters of the 
 species, while the form of the other presents the greater part 
 of them, then the latter is said to be a form more ideal than 
 the other, as a nearer approximation to the general idea or 
 conception of the species. 
 
 Now it is evident that this use of the word ideal is much 
 less accurate than the other, from which it is derived, for it 
 rests on the assumption that the assemblage of all the char- 
 §4 This last acters of a species in their perfect development 
 curate,^yet to^be cannot cxist but in the imagination. For if it 
 retained. actually and in reality exist, it is not right 
 
 to call it ideal or imaginary ; it would be better to call it 
 characteristic or general, and to reserve the word ideal for 
 the results of the operation of the imagination, either on 
 the perfect or imperfect forms. 
 
 Nevertheless, the word ideal has been so long and univer- 
 sally accepted in this sense, that I think it better to con- 
 tinue the use of it, so only that the reader will be careful to 
 observe the distinction in the sense, according to the subject 
 matter under discussion. At present then, using it as ex- 
 pressive of the noble generic form which indicates the full 
 perfection of the creature in all its functions, I wish to exam- 
 ine how far this perception exists or may exist in nature, and 
 if not in nature, how it is by us discoverable or imaginable. 
 
 Now it is better, when we wish to arrive at truth, always 
 to take familiar instances, wherein the mind is not likely to 
 be biassed by any elevated associations or favorite theories. 
 
 Let us ask therefore, first, what kind of ideal 
 
 §5. Of Ideal form. m i t 
 
 First, in the lower form may be attributed to a limpet or an oyster, 
 that is to say, whether all oysters do or do not 
 come up to the entire notion or idea of an oyster. I appre- 
 hend that, although in respect of size, age, and kind of feed- 
 ing, there may be some difference between them, yet of those 
 which are of full size and healthy condition there will be 
 found many which fulfil the conditions of an oyster in every 
 
296 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 respect, and that so perfectly, that we could not, by combin- 
 ing the features of two or more together, produce a more 
 perfect oyster than any that we see. I suppose also, that, 
 out of a number of healthy fish, birds, or beasts of the same 
 species, it would not be easy to select an individual as supe- 
 rior to all the rest ; neither by comparing two or more of the 
 nobler examples together, to arrive at the conception of a 
 form superior to that of either ; but that, though the acci- 
 dents of more abundant food or more fitting habitation may 
 induce among them some varieties of size, strength, and color, 
 yet the entire generic form would be presented by many, 
 neither would any art be able to add to or diminish from it. 
 
 It is, therefore, hardly right to use the word ideal of the 
 generic forms of these creatures, of which we see actual ex- 
 amples ; but if we are to use it, then be it distinctly under- 
 §6. inwhatcon- stood that their ideality consists in the full de- 
 sistent. velopment of all the powers and properties of 
 
 the creature as such, and is inconsistent with accidental 
 or imperfect developments, and even with great variation 
 from average size, the ideal size being neither gigantic nor 
 diminutive, but the utmost grandeur and entireness of pro- 
 portion at a certain point above the mean size ; for as more 
 individuals always fall short of generic size than rise above 
 it, the generic is above the average or mean size. And this 
 perfection of the creature invariably involves the utmost 
 possible degree of all those properties of beauty, both typical 
 and vital, which it is appointed to possess. 
 
 Let us next observe the conditions of ideality in vegetables. 
 Out of a large number of primroses or violets, I apprehend 
 that, although one or two might be larger than all the rest, 
 I 7. Ideal form the greater part would be very sufficient prim- 
 in vegetables. ^^^^^ j violets. And that we could, by no study 
 nor combination of violets, conceive of a better violet than 
 many in the bed. And so generally of the blossoms and 
 separate members of all vegetables. 
 
 But among the entire forms of the complex vegetables, as 
 of oak-trees, for instance, there exists very large and constant 
 difference, some being what we hold to be fine oaks, as in 
 
GENERIC, 
 
 297 
 
 parks, and places where they are taken care of, and have their 
 own way, and some are but poor and mean oaks, which have 
 had no one to take care of them, but have been obliged to 
 maintain themselves. 
 
 That which we have to determine is, whether ideality be 
 predicable of the fine oaks only, or whether the poor and 
 mean oaks also may be considered as ideal, that is, coming 
 up to the conditions of oak, and the general notion of oak. 
 
 Now there is this difference between the positions held in 
 creation by animals and plants, and thence in the dispositions 
 with which we regard them ; that the animals, being for the 
 § a The differ- most part locomotivc, are capable both of living 
 between ^°pian£ where they choose, and of obtaining what food 
 and animals. they Want, and of fulfilling all the conditions 
 necessary to their health and perfection. For which reason 
 they are answerable for such health and perfection, and we 
 should be displeased and hurt if we did not find it in one in- 
 dividual as well as another. 
 
 But the case is evidently different with plants. They are 
 intended fixedly to occupy many places comparatively unfit 
 for them, and to fill up all the spaces where greenness, and 
 coolness, and ornament, and oxygen are wanted, and that 
 with very little reference to their comfort or convenience. 
 Now it would be hard upon the plant if, after being tied to 
 a particular spot, where it is indeed much wanted, and is a 
 great blessing, but where it has enough to do to live, whence 
 it cannot move to obtain what it wants or likes, but must 
 stretch its unfortunate arms here and there for bare breath 
 and light, and split its way among rocks, and grope for sus- 
 tenance in unkindly soil ; it would be hard upon the plant, 
 I say, if under all these disadvantages, it were made answer- 
 able for its appearance, and found fault with because it was 
 not a fine plant of the kind. And so we find it ordained that 
 in order that no unkind comparisons may be 
 
 § 9. Admits of va- . , i i i 
 
 riety in the ideal drawn between one and another, there are not 
 of the former. appointed to plants the fixed number, position, 
 and proportion of members which are ordained in animals, 
 (and any variation from which in these is unpardonable,) but 
 
298 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 a continually varying number and position, even among the 
 more freely growing examples, admitting therefore all kinds 
 of license to those which have enemies to contend with, and 
 that without in any way detracting from their dignity and 
 perfection. 
 
 So then there is in trees no perfect form which can be fixed 
 upon or reasoned out as ideal ; but that is always an ideal 
 oak which, however poverty-stricken, or hunger-pinched, or 
 tempest-tortured, is yet seen to have done, under its ap- 
 pointed circumstances, all that could be expected of oak. 
 
 The ideal, therefore, of the park oak is that to which I al- 
 luded in the conclusion of the former part of this work, full 
 size, united terminal curve, equal and symmetrical range of 
 branches on each side. The ideal of the mountain oak may 
 be anything, twisting, and leaning, and shattered, and rock- 
 encumbered, so only that amidst all its misfortunes, it main- 
 tain the dignity of oak ; and, indeed, I look upon this kind 
 of tree as more ideal than the other, in so far as by its efforts 
 and struggles, more of its nature, enduring power, patience 
 in waiting for, and ingenuity in obtaining what it wants, is 
 brought out, and so more of the essence of oak exhibited, 
 than under more fortunate conditions. 
 
 And herein, then, we at last find the cause of that fact 
 which we have twice already noted, that the exalted or seem- 
 ingly improved condition, whether of plant or animal, induced 
 § 10. Ideal form by human interference, is not the true and ar- 
 stro^l^brcu^^^^ tistical ideal of it.* It has been well shown by 
 vation. Herbert,f that many plants are found alone 
 
 on a certain soil or subsoil in a wild state, not because such 
 soil is favorable to them, but because they alone are capable 
 
 * I speak not here of those conditions of vegetation which have es- 
 pecial reference to man, as of seeds and fruits, whose sweetness and 
 farina seem in great measure given, not for the plant's sake, but for 
 his, and to which therefore the interruption in the harmony of creation 
 of which he was the cause is extended, and their sweetness and larger 
 measure of good to be obtained only, by his redeeming labor. His curse 
 h.LS fallen on the corn and the vine, and the wild barley misses of its 
 fulness, that he may eat bread by the sweat of his brow. 
 
 f J ournal of the Horticultural Society. Part I. 
 
GENERIC. 
 
 299 
 
 of existing on it, and because all dangerous rivals are by its 
 inhospitality removed. Now if we withdraw the plant from 
 this position, which it hardly endures, and supply it with the 
 earth, and maintain about it the temperature that it delights 
 in ; withdrawing from it at the same time all rivals which, in 
 such conditions nature would have thrust upon it, we shall 
 indeed obtain a magnificently developed example of the plant, 
 colossal in size, and splendid in organization, but we shall 
 utterly lose in it that moral ideal which is dependent on its 
 right fulfilment of its appointed functions. It was intended 
 and created by the Deity for the covering of those lonely 
 spots where no other plant could live ; it has been thereto 
 endowed with courage, and strength, and capacities of en- 
 durance unequalled ; its character and glory are not there- 
 fore in the gluttonous and idle feeling of its own over luxuri- 
 ance, at the expense of other creatures utterly destroyed and 
 rooted out for its good alone, but in its right doing of its 
 hard duty, and forward climbing into those spots of forlorn 
 hope where it alone can bear witness to the kindness and 
 presence of the Spirit that cutteth out rivers among the 
 rocks, as it covers the valleys with corn : and there, in its 
 vanward place, and only there, where nothing is withdrawn 
 for it, nor hurt by it, and where nothing can take part of its 
 honor, nor usurp its throne, are its strength, and fairness, and 
 price, and goodness in the sight of God, to be truly esteemed. 
 
 The first time that I saw the soldanella alpina, before 
 spoken of, it was growing, of magnificent size, on a sunny 
 Alpine pasture, among bleating of sheep and lowing of cat- 
 §11 Instance in associated with a profusion of geum mon- 
 the Soldanella tanum, and ranunculus pyrenaeus* I noticed 
 
 and Ranunculus, , ^ ^ 
 
 it only because new to me, nor perceived any 
 peculiar beauty in its cloven flower. Some days after, I 
 found it alone, among the rack of the higher clouds, and 
 howling of glacier winds, and, as I described it, piercing 
 through an edge of avalanche, which in its retiring had left 
 the new ground brown and lifeless, and as if burned by 
 recent fire ; the plant was poor and feeble, and seemingly 
 exhausted with its efforts, but it was then that I compre- 
 
300 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY, 
 
 hended its ideal character, and saw its noble function and 
 order of glory among the constellations of the earth. 
 
 The ranunculus glacialis might perhaps, by cultivation, bje 
 blanched from its wan and corpse-like paleness to purer 
 white, and won to more branched and lofty development of 
 its ragged leaves. But the ideal of the plant is to be found 
 only in the last, loose stones of the moraine, alone there ; 
 wet with the cold, unkindly drip of the glacier water, and 
 trembling as the loose and steep dust to which it clings 
 yields ever and anon, and shudders and crumbles away from 
 about its root. 
 
 And if it be asked how this conception of the utmost 
 beauty of ideal form is consistent with what we formerly 
 argued respecting the pleasantness of the appearance of 
 § 12 The beauty ^^^i^i^J creature, let it be observed, and 
 
 of repose and fe- forever held, that the ris^ht and true happiness 
 
 licitv, how con- . . , . . , 
 
 sistent with such of every creature, is m this very discharge of its 
 function, and in those efforts by which its 
 strength and inherent energy are developed : and that the 
 repose of which we also spoke as necessary to all beauty, is, 
 as was then stated, repose not of inanition, nor of luxury, 
 nor of irresolution, but the repose of magnificent energy and 
 being ; in action, the calmness of trust and determination ; 
 in rest, the consciousness of duty accomplished and of 
 victory won, and this repose and this felicity can take place 
 as well in the midst of trial and tempest, as beside the 
 waters of comfort ; they perish only when the creature is 
 either unfaithful to itself, or is afflicted by circumstances 
 unnatural and malignant to its being, and for the contend- 
 inof with which it was neither fitted nor ordained. Hence 
 
 o 
 
 that rest which is indeed glorious is of the chamois couched 
 breathless on his granite bed, not of the stalled ox over his 
 fodder, and that happiness which is indeed beautiful is in 
 the bearing of those trial tests which are appointed for the 
 proving of every creature, whether it be good, or whether it 
 be evil ; and in the fulfilment to the uttermost of every com- 
 mand it has received, and the out-carrying to the uttermost 
 of every power and gift it has gotten from its God. 
 
GENERIC. 
 
 301 
 
 Therefore the task of the painter in his pursuit of ideal 
 form is to attain accurate knowledge, so far as may be in his 
 power, of the character, habits, and peculiar virtues and 
 §13 Theideaiity duties of every species of being ; down even to 
 the stone, for there is an ideality of stones ac- 
 cording to their kind, an ideality of granite and slate and 
 marble, and it is in the utmost and most exalted exhibition 
 of such individual character, order, and use, that all ideality 
 of art consists. The more cautious he is in assigning the 
 right species of moss to its favorite trunk, and the right 
 kind of weed to its necessary stone, in marking the definite 
 and characteristic leaf, blossom, seed, fracture, color, and in- 
 ward anatomy of everything, the more truly ideal his work 
 becomes. All confusion of species, all careless rendering of 
 character, all unnatural and arbitrary association, is vulgar 
 and unideal in proportion to its degree. 
 
 § 14. How con- It is to be noted, however, that nature some- 
 ima^ginative fac^ times in a measure herself conceals these gen- 
 eric differences, and that when she displays 
 them it is commonly on a scale too small for human hand to 
 follow. 
 
 The pursuit and seizure of the generic differences in their 
 concjpalment, and the display of them on a larger and more 
 palpable scale, is one of the wholesome and healthy opera- 
 tions of the imagination of which we are presently to speak.* 
 
 Generic differences being commonly exhibited by art in 
 different manner and way from that of their natural occur- 
 rence, are in this respect more strictly and truly ideal in art 
 than in reality. 
 
 This only remains to be noted, that, of all creatures whose 
 existence involves birth, progress, and dissolution, ideality is 
 predicable all through their existence, so that they be per- 
 ^, ^ feet with reference to their supposed period 
 
 § 15. Ideality, how . . . . 
 
 belonging to ages of beiup^. Thus there is an ideal of infancy, 
 
 and conditions. ipit pii ■^ ^ 
 
 oi youth, oi old age, ot death, and ot decay. 
 But when the ideal form of the species is spoken of or con- 
 
 * Compare Sect. II. Chap. IV. 
 
302 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 ceived in general terms, the form is understood to be of that 
 period when the generic attributes are perfectly developed, 
 and previous to the commencement of their decline. At 
 which period all the characters of vital and typical beauty 
 are commonly most concentrated in them, though the arrange- 
 ment and proportion of these characters varies at different 
 periods, youth having more of the vigorous beauty, and age 
 of the reposing ; youth of typical outward fairness, and age 
 of expanded and etherealized moral expression ; the babe, 
 again, in some measure atoning in gracefulness for its want 
 of strength, so that the balanced glory of the creature con- 
 tinues in solemn interchange, perhaps even 
 
 ** Filling more and more with crystal light, 
 As pensive evening deepens into night." 
 
 Hitherto, however, we have confined ourselves to the ex- 
 amination of ideal form in the lower animals, and we have 
 found that, to arrive at it, no combination of forms nor ex- 
 ertion of fancy is required, but only simple choice among 
 those naturally presented, together with careful investiga- 
 tion and anatomizing of the habits of the creatures. I fear 
 we shall arrive at a very different conclusion, in considering 
 the ideal form of man. 
 
 CHAPTER XIY. 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. THIRDLY, IN MAN*. 
 
 Having thus passed gradually through all the orders and 
 fields of creation, and traversed that goodly line of God's 
 happy creatures who " leap not, but express a feast, where 
 § 1. Condition of all the guests sit close, and nothing wants," 
 ure ^eXreirdif^ without finding any deficiency which human in- 
 of The lower anl- vention might supply, nor any harm which hu- 
 "^^^^^ man interference might mend, we come at last 
 
 to set ourselves face to face with ourselves, expecting that 
 in creatures made after the image of God we are to find 
 
IN MAN. 
 
 303 
 
 comeliness and completion more exquisite than in the fowls 
 of the air and the things that pass through the paths of the 
 sea. 
 
 But behold now a sudden change from all former experi- 
 ence. No longer among the individuals of the race is there 
 equality or likeness, a distributed fairness and fixed type 
 visible in each, but evil diversity, and terrible stamp of vari- 
 ous degradation ; features seamed with sickness, dimmed by 
 sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shad- 
 owed by sorrow, branded with remorse ; bodies consumed 
 with sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dis- 
 honored in foul uses ; intellects without power, hearts with- 
 out hope, minds earthly and devilish ; our bones full of the 
 sin of our youth, the heaven revealing our iniquity, the earth 
 rising up against us, the roots dried up beneath, and the 
 branch cut off above ; well for us only, if, after beholding 
 this our natural face in a glass, we desire not straightway to 
 forget what manner of men we be. 
 
 Herein there is at last something, and too much, for that 
 short stopping intelligence and dull perception of ours to ac- 
 complish, whether in earnest fact, or in the seeking for the 
 outward imae^e of beauty : — to undo the devil's 
 
 § 2. What room ° i i i i i i 
 
 here for ideaiiza- work, to Tcstorc to the body the grace and the 
 power which inherited disease has destroyed, to 
 return to the spirit the purity, and to the intellect the grasp 
 that they had in Paradise. Now, first of all, this work, be it 
 observed is in no respect a work of imagination. Wrecked 
 we are, and nearly all to pieces ; but that little good by which 
 we are to redeem ourselves is to be got out of the old wreck, 
 beaten about and full of sand though it be ; and not out of 
 that desert island of pride on which the devils split first, and 
 we after them : and so the only restoration of the body that 
 we can reach is not to be coined out of our fancies, but to be 
 collected out of such uninjured and bright vestiges of the old 
 seal as we can find and set together, and so the ideal of the 
 features, as the good and perfect soul is seen in them, is not 
 to be reached by imagination, but by the seeing and reach- 
 ing forth of the better part of the soul to that of which it 
 
304 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY, 
 
 must first know the sweetness and goodness in itself, before 
 it can much desire, or rightly find, the signs of it in others. 
 
 I say much desire and rightly find, because there is not 
 any soul so sunk but that it shall in some measure feel the 
 impression of mental beauty in the human features, and de- 
 test in others its own likeness, and in itself despise that 
 which of itself it has made. 
 
 Now, of the ordinary process by which the realization of 
 ideal bodily form is reached, there is explanation enough in 
 all treatises on art, and it is so far well comprehended that I 
 §3. Howthecon- need not stay long to consider it. So far as the 
 bodiir idLi*^is sight and knowledge of the human form, of the 
 reached. purest race, exercised from infancy constantly, 
 
 but not excessively in all exercises of dignity, not in twists 
 and straining dexterities, but in natural exercises of running, 
 casting, or riding ; practised in endurance, not of extraordi- 
 nary hardship, for that hardens and degrades the body, but 
 of natural hardship, vicissitudes of winter and summer, and 
 cold and heat, yet in a climate where none of these are se- 
 vere ; surrounded also by a certain degree of right luxury, 
 so as to soften and refine the forms of strength ; so far as 
 the sight of all this could render the mental intelligence of 
 what is right in human form so acute as to be able to ab- 
 stract and combine from the best examples so produced, that 
 which was most perfect in each, so far the Greek conceived 
 and attained the ideal of bodily form : and on the Greek 
 modes of attaining it, as well as on what he produced, as a 
 perfect example of it, chiefly dwell those writers whose opin- 
 ions on this subject I have collected ; wholly losing sight of 
 what seems to me the most important branch of the inquiry, 
 namely, the influence for good or evil of the mind upon the 
 bodily shape, the wreck of the mind itself, and the modes by 
 which we may conceive of its restoration. 
 , „ Now, the operation of the mind upon the 
 
 § 4. Modifications . . ^ 
 
 of the bodily ideal body, and evidence of it thereon, may be con- 
 owing to influence •!! ^ p ^^ ' i ^ ^ i 
 of mind. First, sidcred Under the loilowing three general heads. 
 
 o intellect. First, the operation of the intellectual pow- 
 
 ers upon the features, in the fine cutting and chiselling of 
 
IN MAN. 
 
 305 
 
 them, and removal from them of signs of sensuality and 
 sloth, by which they are blunted and deadened, and substitu- 
 tion of energy and intensity for vacancy and insipidity, (by 
 which wants alone the faces of many fair w^omen are utterly 
 spoiled and rendered valueless,) and by the keenness given 
 to the eye and fine moulding and development to the brow, 
 of which effects Sir Charles Bell has well noted the desira- 
 bleness and opposition to brutal types, (p. 59, third edition ;) 
 only this he has not sufficiently observed, that there are 
 certain virtues of the intellect in measure inconsistent with 
 each other, as perhaps great subtlety with great comprehen- 
 siveness, and high analytical with high imaginative power, 
 or that at least, if consistent and compatible, their signs 
 upon the features are not the same, so that the outward form 
 cannot express both, without in a measure expressing nei- 
 ther ; and so there are certain separate virtues of the out- 
 ward form correspondent with the more constant employ- 
 ment or more prevailing capacity of the brain, as the piercing 
 keenness, or open and reflective comprehensiveness of the 
 eye and forehead, and that all these virtues of form are ideal, 
 only those the most so which are the signs of the worthiest 
 powers of intellect, though which these be, we will not at 
 present stay to inquire. 
 
 The second point to be considered in the influence of mind 
 upon body, i^ the mode of operation and conjunction of the 
 ^ ^ „ , moral feeling^s on and with the intellectual pow- 
 
 § 5. Secondly, of ° . . . . ^ 
 
 the moral feel- ers, and then their conjoint influence on the 
 bodily form. Now, the operation of the right 
 moral feelings on the intellect is always for the good of the 
 latter, for it is not possible that selfishness should reason 
 rightly in any respect, but must be blind in its estimation of 
 the worthiness of all things, neither anger, for that overpow- 
 ers the reason or outcries it, neither sensuality, for that over- 
 grows and chokes it, neither agitation, for that has no time 
 to compare things together, neither enmity, for that must be 
 unjust, neither fear, for that exaggerates all things, neither 
 cunning and deceit, for that which is voluntarily untrue will 
 soon be unwittingly so : but the great reasoners are self-com- 
 VoL. II.— 20 
 
306 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 mand, and trust unagitated, and deep-looking Love, and 
 Faith, which as she is above Reason, so she best holds the 
 reins of it from her high seat : so that they err grossly who 
 think of the right development even of the intellectual type 
 as possible, unless we look to higher sources of beauty first. 
 Nevertheless, though in their operation upon them the moral 
 feelings are thus elevatory of the mental faculties, yet in 
 their conjunction with them they seem to occupy, in their 
 own fulness, such room as to absorb and overshadow all else, 
 so that the simultaneous exercise of both is in a sort impos- 
 sible ; for which cause we occasionally find the moral part in 
 full development and action, without corresponding expand- 
 ing of the intellect (though never without healthy condition 
 of it,) as in that of Wordsworth, 
 
 * ' In such high hour 
 
 Of visitation from the Living God, 
 
 Thought was not ; 
 
 only I think that if we look far enough, we shall find that it 
 is not intelligence itself, but the immediate act and effort of 
 a laborious, struggling, and imperfect intellectual faculty, 
 with which high moral emotion is inconsistent ; and that 
 though we cannot, while we feel deeply, reason shrewdly, yet 
 I doubt if, except when we feel deeply, we can ever compre- 
 hend fully ; so that it is only the climbing and mole-like 
 piercing, and not the sitting upon their centraj throne, nor 
 emergence into light, of the intellectual faculties which the 
 full heart feeling allows not. Hence, therefore, in the indi- 
 cations of the countenance, they are only the hard cut lines, 
 and rigid settings, and wasted hollows, that speak of past 
 effort and painfulness of mental application, which are in- 
 consistent with expression of moral feeling, for all these are 
 of infelicitous augury ; but not the full and serene develop- 
 ment of habitual command in the look, and solemn thought 
 in the brow, only these, in their unison with the signs of 
 emotion, become softened and gradually confounded with a 
 serenity and authority of nobler origin. But 
 
 § C. What beauty „, ,., i i-i • /p 
 
 ia bestowed by of the swcetness which that higher serenity (or 
 happiness,) and the dignity which that higher 
 
IN MAK 
 
 307 
 
 authority (of Divine law, and not human reason,) can and 
 must stamp on the features, it would be futile to speak here 
 at length, for I suppose that both are acknowledged on all 
 hands, and that there is not any beauty but theirs to which 
 men pay long obedience : at all events, if not by sympa- 
 thy discovered, it is not in words explicable with what Di- 
 vine lines and lights the exercise of godliness and charity 
 will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, 
 neither to what darkness their departure will consign the 
 loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of 
 which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness 
 upon the features, neither on them only, but on the whole 
 body, both the intelligence and the moral faculties have op- 
 eration, for even all the movem.ent and gestures, however 
 slight, are different in their modes according to the mind 
 that governs them, and on the gentleness and decision of 
 just feeling there follows a grace of action, and through con- 
 • tinuance of this a grace of form, which by no discipline may 
 be taught or attained. 
 
 The third point to be considered with respect to the cor- 
 poreal expression of mental character is, that there is a cer- 
 tain period of the soul culture when it begins to interfere 
 § 7 How the ^^^^ some of the characters of typical beauty 
 soul culture in- belons^insT to the bodily frame, the stirrins: of 
 
 terferes harm- - i, . i i ni i i 
 
 fully with the the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the 
 bodily Ideal. moral enthusiasm burning its way out to heaven, 
 through the emaciation of the earthen vessel ; and that there 
 is, in this indication of subduing of the mortal by the immor- 
 tal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range 
 than that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, 
 I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul, than of 
 the fair and ruddy countenance of Daniel. 
 
 Now, be it observed that in our consideration of these 
 „ Q . three directions of mental influence, we have 
 
 § 8. The mcon- ^ ' 
 
 sistency among several times been compelled to stop short of 
 
 the effects of the . \ ^ 
 
 mental virtues on definite conclusions owing to the apparent in- 
 
 the form. . <» • n t i - 
 
 consistency oi certain excellences and beauties 
 to which they tend, as, first, of different kinds of intellect with 
 
308 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY, 
 
 each other ; and secondly, of the moral faculties with the in- 
 tellectual, (and if we had separately examined the moral 
 emotions, we should have found certain inconsistencies among 
 them also,) and again of the soul culture generally with the 
 bodily perfections. Such inconsistencies we should find in 
 the perfections of no other animal. The strength or swift- 
 ness of the dog are not inconsistent with his sagacity, nor is 
 bodily labor in the ant or bee destructive of their acuteness 
 of instinct. And this peculiarity of relation among the per- 
 fections of man is no result of his fall or sinfulness, but an 
 evidence of his greater nobility, and of the goodness of God 
 towards him. For the individuals of each race of lower ani- 
 §9. Is a sign of mals, being not intended to hold among each 
 pcSl'towTrds^the Other thosc relations of charity which are the 
 privilege of humanity, are not adapted to each 
 other's assistance, admiration, or support, by differences of 
 power and function. But the love of the human race is in- 
 creased by their individual differences, and the unity of the 
 creature, as before we saw of all unity, made perfect by each 
 having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest 
 by a thousand various necessities and various gratitudes, hu- 
 mility in each rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which 
 he finds not in himself, and each being in some respect the 
 complement of his race. Therefore, in investigating the signs 
 of the ideal or perfect type of humanity, we must not pre- 
 sume on the singleness of that type, and yet, on the other 
 hand, we must cautiously distinguish between differences 
 conceivably existing in a perfect state, and differences result- 
 ing from immediate and present operation of the Adamite 
 curse. Of which the former are differences that bind, and 
 the latter that separate. For although we can suppose the 
 ideal or perfect human heart, and the perfect human intelli- 
 gence, equally adapted to receive every right sensation and 
 pursue every order of truth, yet as it is appointed for some to 
 be in authority and others in obedience, some in solitary func- 
 tions and others in relative ones, some to receive and others 
 to give, some to teach and some to discover ; and as all these 
 varieties of office are not only conceivable as existing in a 
 
IN MAN. 
 
 309 
 
 perfect state of man, but seem almost to be implied by it, and 
 at any rate cannot be done away with but by a total change 
 of his constitution and dependencies, of which the imagi- 
 nation can take no hold ; so there are habits and capacities 
 of expression induced by these various offices, w^hich admit of 
 §10. Consequent Hiany Separate idcals of equal perfection, accord- 
 d fff e n c'e'^of ^^^^ functions of the creatures, so that 
 
 there is an ideal of authority, of judgment, of 
 affection, of reason, and of faith ; neither can any combina- 
 tion of these ideals be attained, not that the just judge is to 
 be supposed incapable of affection, nor the king incapable 
 of obedience, but as it is impossible that any essence short of 
 the Divine should at the same instant be equally receptive of 
 all emotions, those emotions which, by right and order, have 
 the most usual victory, both leave the stamp of their habit- 
 ual presence on the body, and render the individual more 
 and more susceptible of them in proportion to the frequency 
 of their prevalent recurrence ; added to which causes of dis- 
 tinctive character are to be taken into account the differences 
 of age and sex, which, though seemingly of more finite influ- 
 ence, cannot be banished from any human conception. David, 
 ruddy and of a fair countenance, with the brook stone of de- 
 liverance in his hand, is not more ideal than David leaning on 
 the old age of Barzillai, returning chastened to his kingly 
 home. And they who are as the angels of God in heaven, 
 yet cannot be conceived as so assimilated that their different 
 experiences and affections upon earth shall then be forgotten 
 and effectless : the child taken early to his place cannot be 
 imagined to wear there such a body, nor to have such thoughts, 
 as the glorified apostle who has finished his course and kept 
 the faith on earth. And so whatever perfections and likeness 
 of love we may attribute to either the tried or the crowned 
 creatures, there is the difference of the stars in glory among 
 them yet ; differences of original gifts, though not of occu- 
 pying till their Lord come, different dispensations of trial and 
 of trust, of sorrow and support, both in their own inward, 
 variable hearts, and in their positions of exposure or of peace, 
 of the gourd shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat 
 
310 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 of day or eleventh hour, of the house unroofed by faith, and 
 the clouds opened by revelation : differences in warning, in 
 mercies, in sicknesses, in signs, in time of calling to account ; 
 like only they all are by that which is not of them, but the 
 gift of God's unchangeable mercy. " I will give unto this 
 last even as unto thee." 
 
 Hence, then, be it observed, that what we must deter- 
 minedly banish from the human form and countenance in our 
 seeking of its ideal, is not everything which can be ultimately 
 § 11. The effects traced to the Adamite fall for its cause, but 
 cLseare'^o'bedfs- ^^^J immediate operation and presence of 
 SgS'ofUsimr- the degrading power or sin. For there is not 
 diate activity. ^j^y part of our feeling of nature, nor can there 
 be through eternity, which shall not be in some way influ- 
 enced and affected by the fall, and that not in any way of deg- 
 radation, for the renewing in the divinity of Christ is a 
 nobler condition than ever that of Paradise, and yet through- 
 out eternity it must imply and refer to the disobedience, and 
 the corrupt state of sin and death, and the suffering of Christ 
 himself, which can we conceive of any redeemed soul as for 
 an instant forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow ? 
 Neither are the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us 
 is inconceivable, being only as it were a softness and silence 
 in the pulse of an infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state 
 even of the unfallen, for the angels who rejoice over repent- 
 ance cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as they try 
 and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard 
 hearts with the brooding of their kind wings. So that we 
 § 12. Which lat- have not to banish from the ideal countenance 
 banished^^ from evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, 
 ideal form. j^or cvcu of past and conquered sin, but only 
 the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate cold- 
 ness and hoUowness of any good emotion. And hence in 
 that contest before noted, between the body and the soul, 
 we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered 
 and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitterpain 
 upon it, and yet without ever diminishing the purity of its 
 ideal ; and because it is not in the power of any human im- 
 
m MAN, 
 
 311 
 
 agination to reason out or conceive the countless modifica- 
 tions of experience, suffering, and separated feeling, which 
 have modelled and written their indelible images in various 
 order upon every human countenance, so no right ideal can 
 be reached by any combination of feature nor by any mould- 
 ing and melting of individual beauties together, and still less 
 without model or example conceived ; but there is a perfect 
 ideal to be wrought out of every face around us that has on 
 its forehead the writing and the seal of the angel ascending 
 from the East,* by the earnest study and penetration of the 
 written history thereupon, and the banishing of the blots and 
 stains, wherein we still see in all that is human, the visible 
 and instant operation of unconquered sin. 
 
 Now I see not how any of the steps of the argument by 
 which we have arrived at this conclusion can be evaded, and 
 yet it would be difficult to state anything more directly op- 
 §13. Ideal form posite to the usual teaching and practice of ar- 
 teined *by^^por- ^^^ts. It is usual to hear portraiture opposed to 
 traiture. ^]^^ pursuit of ideality, and yet we find that no 
 
 face can be ideal which is not a portrait. Of this general 
 principle, however, there are certain modifications which we 
 must presently state ; let us first, however, pursue it a little 
 farther, and deduce its practical consequences. 
 
 These are, first, that the pursuit of idealism in humanity, 
 as of idealism in lower nature, can be successful only when 
 followed through the most constant, patient, and humble 
 rendering of actual models, accompanied with that earnest 
 mental as well as ocular study of each, which can interpret 
 all that is written upon it, disentangle the hieroglyphics of 
 its sacred history, rend the veil of the bodily temple, and 
 rightly measure the relations of good and evil contend- 
 ing within it for mastery,f that everything done without such 
 study must be shallow and contemptible, that generalization 
 or combination of individual character will end less in the 
 mending than the losing of it, and, except in certain instances 
 of which we shall presently take note, is valueless and vapid, 
 
 * Rev. vii. 2. f Compare Part. II. Sec. L Chap. III. § 6. 
 
312 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 even if it escape being painful from its want of truth, which 
 in these days it often in some measure does, for we indeed 
 find faces about us w^ith want enough of life or wholesome 
 §14. Instances character in them to justify anything. And that 
 eHf^the ^ideai habit of the old and great painters of introduc- 
 Masters. jj^g portrait into all their highest works, I look 
 
 to, not as error in them, but as the very source and root 
 of their superiority in all things, for they were too great and 
 too humble not to see in every face about them that which 
 was above them, and which no fancies of theirs could match 
 nor take place of, wherefore we find the custom of portrait- 
 ure constant with them, both portraiture of study and for 
 purposes of analysis, as with Leonardo ; and actual, pro- 
 fessed, serviceable, hardworking portraiture of the men of 
 their time, as with Raffaelle, and Titian, and Tintoret ; and 
 portraiture of Love, as with Fra Bartolomeo of Savonarola, 
 and Simon Memmi of Petrarch, and Giotto of Dante, and 
 Gentile Bellini of a beloved imagination of Dandolo, and with 
 Raffaelle constantly ; and portraiture in real downright ne- 
 cessity of models, even in their noblest works, as was the 
 practice of Ghirlandajo perpetually, and Masaccio and Raf- 
 faelle, and manifestly of the men of highest and purest ideal 
 purpose, as again, Giotto, and in his characteristic monkish 
 heads, Angelico, and John Bellini, (note especially the St. 
 Christopher at the side of that mighty picture of St. Jerome, 
 at Venice,) and so of all : which practice had indeed a peril- 
 ous tendency for men of debased mind, who used models 
 such as and where they ought not, as Lippi and the cor- 
 rupted Raffaelle ; and is found often at exceeding disadvan- 
 tage among men who looked not at their models with intel- 
 lectual or loving penetration, but took the outside of them, 
 or perhaps took the evil and left the good, as Titian in that 
 Academy study at Venice which is called a St. John, and all 
 workers whatsoever that I know of, after Raffaelle's time, as 
 Guido and the Caracci, and such others : but it is neverthe- 
 less the necessary and sterling basis of all ideal art, neither 
 has any great man ever been able to do without it, nor 
 dreamed of doing without it even to the close of his days. 
 
IN MAN, 
 
 313 
 
 And therefore there is not any greater sign of the utter 
 want of vitality and hopefulness in the schools of the present 
 day than that unhappy prettiness and sameness under which 
 §15. Evil results they mask, or rather for which they barter, in 
 tic^iT'Lton their lentile thirst, all the birthright and power 
 times. q£ nature, which prettiness, wrought out and 
 
 spun fine in the study, out of empty heads, till it hardly bet- 
 ters the blocks on which dresses and hair are tried in bar- 
 bers' windows and milliners' books, cannot but be revolting to 
 any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to the 
 divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he 
 meets in the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, 
 outreaching all efforts of conception as all power of realiza- 
 tion, were it Raffaelle's three times over, even when the glory 
 of the wedding garment is not there. 
 
 So far, then, of the use of the model and the preciousness 
 of it in all art, from the highest to the lowest. But the use 
 of the model is not all. It must be used in a certain way, 
 § 16. The right ^his choice of right or wrong way all 
 
 use of the model. Q^J. e^jg are at stake, for the art, which is of no 
 power without the model, is of pernicious and evil power if 
 the model be wrongly used. What the right use is, has been 
 at least established, if not fully explained, in the argument 
 by which we arrived at the general principle. 
 
 The right ideal is to be reached, we have asserted, only 
 by the banishment of the immediate signs of sin upon the 
 countenance and body. How, therefore, are the signs of sin 
 to be known and separated ? 
 
 No intellectual operation is here of any avail. There is 
 not any reasoning by which the evidences of depravity are 
 to be traced in movements of muscle or forms of feature ; 
 there is not any knowledge, nor experience, nor diligence of 
 comparison that can be of avail. Here, as throughout the 
 operation of the theoretic faculty, the perception is alto- 
 §17 Ideal form ^^^^^^ moral, an instinctive love and clinging 
 to be reached to the lines of lio^ht. Nothinp* but love can read 
 
 only by love. T • i i 
 
 the letters, nothing but sympathy catch the 
 sound, there is no pure passion that can be understood or 
 
314: 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY, 
 
 painted except by pureness of heart ; the foul or blunt feel- 
 ing will see itself in everything, and set down blasphemies ; 
 it will see Beelzebub in the casting out of devils, it will find 
 its god of flies in every alabaster box of precious ointment. 
 Tiie indignation of zeal towards God (nemesis) it will take 
 for anger against man, faith and veneration it will miss of, 
 as not comprehending, charity it will turn into lust, compas- 
 sion into pride, every virtue it will go over against, like 
 Shimei, casting dust. But the right Christian mind will in 
 like manner find its own image wherever it exists, it will seek 
 for what it loves, and draw it out of all dens and caves, and 
 it will believe in its being, often when it cannot see it, and al- 
 ways turn away its eyes from beholding vanity ; and so it will 
 lie lovingly over all the faults and rough places of the human 
 heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard, and black, 
 and broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, and 
 yet catching light for them to make them fair, and that must 
 be a steep and unkindly crag indeed which it cannot cover. 
 
 Now of this spirit there will always be little enough in the 
 world, and it cannot be given nor taught by men, and so it 
 is of little use to insist on it farther, only I may note some 
 § 18 Practical P^^^^^^^^ points respecting the ideal treatment 
 principles deduc- of human form, which may be of use in these 
 thoughtless days. There is not the face, I have 
 said, which the painter may not make ideal if he choose, but 
 that subtile feeling which shall find out all of good that there 
 is in any given countenance is not, except by concern for 
 other things than art, to be acquired. But certain broad in- 
 dications of evil there are which the bluntest feeling may 
 perceive, and which the habit of distinguishing and casting 
 out of would both ennoble the schools of art, and lead in 
 time to greater acuteness of perception with respect to the 
 less explicable characters of soul beauty. 
 
 Those signs of evil which are commonly most manifest on 
 § 19. Expressions the human features are roughly divisible into 
 ?woon<ie^1harl ^hcse four kinds, the signs of pride, of scusual- 
 acter. 1st. Pride, j^y^ q£ ie^,T^ and of cruclty. Any one of which 
 will destroy the ideal character of the countenance and h^^dy. 
 
IN MAK 
 
 315 
 
 Now of these, the first, pride, is perhaps the most destruc- 
 tive of all the four, seeing it is the undermost and original 
 story of all sin ; and it is base also from the necessary fool- 
 ishness of it, because at its best, that is when grounded on a 
 just estimation of our own elevation or superiority above cer- 
 tain others, it cannot but imply that our eyes look downward 
 only, and have never been raised above our own measure, for 
 there is not the man so lofty in his standing nor capacity but 
 he must be humble in thinking of the cloud habitation and 
 far sight of the angelic intelligences above him, and in per- 
 ceiving what infinity there is of things he cannot know nor 
 even reach unto, as it stands compared with that little body 
 of things he can reach, and of which nevertheless he can alto- 
 gether understand not one ; not to speak of that wicked and 
 fond attributing of such excellency as he may have to him- 
 self, and thinking of it as his own getting, which is the real 
 essence and criminality of pride, nor of those viler forms of 
 it, founded on false estimation of things beneath us and ir- 
 rational contemning of them : but taken at its best, it is still 
 base to that degree that there is no grandeur of feature which 
 it cannot destroy and make despicable, so that the first step 
 towards the ennoblinoj- of any face is the riddinor 
 
 § 20. Portraiture . „ . . ^ • i • i , 
 
 ancient and mod- it oi its Vanity ; to which aim there cannot be 
 anything more contrary than that principle of 
 portraiture which prevails with us in these days, whose end 
 seems to be the expression of vanity throughout, in face and 
 in all circumstances of accompaniment, tending constantly 
 to insolence of attitude, and levity and haughtiness of ex- 
 pression, and worked out farther in mean accompaniments 
 of worldly splendor and possession, together with hints or 
 proclamations of what the person has done or supposes him- 
 self to have done, which, if known, it is gratuitous in the 
 portrait to exhibit, and if unknown, it is insolent in the por- 
 trait to proclaim ; whence has arisen such a school of por- 
 traiture as must make the people of the nineteenth century 
 the shame of their descendants, and the butt of all time. To 
 which practices are to be opposed both the glorious severity 
 of Holbein, and the mighty and simple modesty of Raffaelle, 
 
316 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoret, with whom armor does not 
 constitute the warrior, neither silk the dame. And from 
 what feeling the dignity of that portraiture arose is best 
 traceable at Venice, where we find their victorious doges 
 painted neither in the toil of battle nor the triumph of 
 return, nor set forth with thrones and curtains of state, but 
 kneeling always crownless, and returning thanks to God for 
 his help, or as priests, interceding for the nation in its afflic- 
 tion. Which feeling and its results have been so well traced 
 out by Rio,* that I need not speak of it farther. 
 
 That second destroyer of ideal form, the appearance of 
 sensual character, though not less fatal in its operation on 
 § 21. Secondly, modern art, is more difficult to trace, owing to 
 Sensuality. ' -^g peculiar subtlcty. For it is not possible to 
 say by what minute differences the right conception of the 
 human form is separated from that which is luscious and 
 foul : for the root of all is in the love and seeking of the 
 painter, who, if of impure and feeble mind, will cover all 
 that he touches with clay staining, as Bandinelli puts a foul 
 scent of human flesh about his marble Christ, and as many 
 whom I will not here name, among moderns ; but if of mighty 
 mind or pure, may pass through all places of foulness, and 
 none will stay upon him, as Michael Angelo, or he will bap- 
 tize all things and wash them with pure water, as our own 
 Stothard. Now, so far as this power is dependent on the 
 seeking of the artist, and is only to be seen in the work of 
 good and spiritually-minded men, it is vain to attempt to 
 teach or illustrate it, neither is it here the place to take note 
 of the way in which it belongs to the representation of the 
 mental image of things, instead of things themselves, of 
 which we are to speak in treating of the imagination ; but 
 thus much mav here be noted of broad, practi- 
 
 § 22. How con- • . i " i • p n i • • 
 
 nected with im cal principle, that the purity of flesh painting" 
 
 purity of color. -, ^ • -J Ul ' 
 
 depends in very considerable measure on the in- 
 tensity and warmth of its color. For if it be opaque, and 
 clay cold, and colorless, and devoid of all the radiance and 
 
 * De la Poesie Chretienne. Forme de I'Art. Chap. VIII. 
 
IN MAN. 
 
 317 
 
 value of flesh, the lines of its true beauty, being severe and 
 firm, will become so hard in the loss of the glow and grada- 
 tion by which nature illustrates them, that the painter will 
 be compelled to sacrifice them for a luscious fulness and 
 roundness, in order to give the conception of flesh ; which, 
 being done, destroys ideality of form as of color, and gives 
 all over to lasciviousness of surface ; showing also that the 
 painter sought for this, and this only, since otherwise he had 
 not taken a subject in which he knew himself compelled to 
 surrender all sources of dignity. Whereas, right splendor 
 of color both bears out a nobler severity of form, and is in 
 itself purifying and cleansing, like fire, furnishing also to 
 the painter an excuse for the choice of his subject, seeing 
 that he may be supposed as not having painted it but in the 
 admiration of its abstract glory of color and form, and with 
 no unworthy seekinor. ;But the mere power of 
 
 §23. And pre- ^ / i • i m, • 
 
 vented by its periect and glowing color will in some sort re- 
 spiendor. deem even a debased tendency of mind itself, 
 
 as eminently the case with Titian, who, though of little feel- 
 ing, and often treating base subjects, or elevated subjects 
 basely, as in the disgusting Magdalen of the Pitti palace, 
 and that of the Barberigo at Venice, yet redeems all by his 
 glory of hue, so that he cannot paint altogether coarsely ; 
 and with Giorgione, who had nobler and more serious intel- 
 lect, the sense of nudity is utterly lost, and there is no need 
 nor desire of concealment any more, but his naked figures 
 move among the trees like fiery pillars, and lie on the grass 
 like flakes of sunshine.* With the religious painters on the 
 §24. Or by sever- Other hand, such nudity as they were compelled 
 ity of drawing, treat is redeemed as much by severity of form 
 and hardness of line as by color, so that generally their 
 draped figures are preferable, as in the Francia of our own 
 gallery. But these, with Michael Angelo and the Venetians, 
 except Titian, form a great group, pure in sight and aim, be- 
 tween which and all other schools by which the nude has 
 been treated, there is a gulf fixed, and all the rest, compared 
 
 * As in the noble Louvre picture. 
 
318 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 with them, seem striving how best to illustrate that of 
 Spenser. 
 
 Of all God's works, which doe this worlde adorn, 
 There is no one more faire, and excellent 
 Than is man's body both for power and forme 
 Whiles it is kept in sober government. 
 But none than it more foul and indecent 
 Distempered through misrule and passions bace." 
 
 Of these last, however, with whom ideality is lost, there are 
 some worthier than others, according to that measure of color 
 they reach, and power they possess, whence much may be 
 forsfiven to Rubens, (as to our own Etty.) less, 
 
 §25. Degrees of • i ^ • i , ^ ' ' 
 
 descent in this re- as 1 think, to Uorrcggio, who With less apparent 
 
 spect : Rubens, j • -i . v ' /? • t 
 
 Correggio, and and evident coarseness has more or inherent 
 sensuality, wrought out with attractive and lus- 
 cious refinement, and that alike in all subjects, as in the Ma- 
 donna of the Incoronazione, over the high altar of San Gio- 
 vanni at Parma, of which the head and upper portion of the 
 figure, now preserved in the library, might serve as a model 
 of attitude and expression to a ballet figurante: * and again 
 in the lascivious St. Catherine of the Giorno, and in the Cha- 
 rioted Diana, (both at Parma,) not to name any of his works 
 of aim more definitely evil. Beneath which again will fall 
 the works devoid alike of art and decency, as that Susannah 
 of Guido, in our own gallery, and so we may descend to the 
 absolute clay of the moderns, only noticing in all how much 
 of what is evil and base in subject or tendency, is redeemed 
 by what is pure and right in hue, so that I do not assert that 
 the purpose and object of many of the grander painters of the 
 nude, as Titian for instance, was always elevated, but only 
 § 26. And modem ^^^^ ^\^o Cannot paint the lamp of fire 
 within the earthen pitcher, must take other 
 weapons in our left hands. And it is to be noted, also, that 
 in climates where the body can be more openly and frequently 
 visited by sun and weather, the nude both comes to be re- 
 
 * The Madonna turns her back to Christ, and bends her head over her 
 shoulder to receive the crown, the arms being folded with studied grace 
 over the bosom. 
 
IN MAN, 
 
 319 
 
 garded in a way more grand and pure, as necessarily awak- 
 ening no ideas of base kind, (as pre-eminently with the 
 Greeks,) and also from that exposure receives a firmness and 
 sunny elasticity very different from the silky softness of the 
 clothed nations of the north, where every model necessarily 
 looks as if accidentally undressed ; and hence from the very 
 fear and doubt with which we approach the nude, it becomes 
 expressive of evil, and for that daring frankness of the old 
 men, which seldom missed of human grandeur, even when it 
 failed of holy feeling, we have substituted a mean, carpeted, 
 gauze-veiled, mincing sensuality of curls and crisping pins, 
 out of which I believe nothing can come but moral enervation 
 and mental paralysis. 
 
 Respecting those two other vices of the human face, the 
 expressions of fear and ferocity, there is less to be noted, as 
 they only occasionally enter into the conception of character ; 
 
 only it is most necessary to make careful dis- 
 
 § 27. Thirdly, fe- . ^ . i • /. 
 
 rocity and fear, tmction between the conception oi power, de- 
 
 The latter how to ^ . • , • . . • n 
 
 be distinguished structiveness, or majesty, in matter, mtiuence, or 
 from awe. agent, and the actual fear of any of these, for 
 
 it is possible to conceive of terribleness, without being in a 
 position obnoxious to the danger of it, and so without fear, 
 and the feeling arising from this contemplation of dreadful- 
 ness, ourselves being in safety, as of a stormy sea from the 
 shore, is properly termed awe, and is a most noble passion ; 
 whereas fear, mortal and extreme, may be felt respecting 
 things ignoble, as the falling from a window, and without any 
 conception of terribleness or majesty in the thing, or the ac- 
 cident dreaded ; and even when fear is felt respecting things 
 sublime, as thunder, or storm of battle, yet the tendency of 
 it is to destroy all power of contemplation of their majesty, 
 and to freeze and shrink all the intellect into a shaking heap 
 of clay, for absolute acute fear is of the same unworthiness 
 and contempt from whatever source it arise, and degrades the 
 mind and the outward bearing of the body alike, even though 
 it be amons: hail of heaven and fire runnins^ 
 
 §28. Holy fear, i ^ a 
 
 how distinct from along the ground. And so among the children 
 human terror. God, while there is always that fearful and 
 
320 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 bowed apprehension of his majesty, and that sacred dread of 
 all offence to him, which is called the fear of God, yet of real 
 and essential fear there is not any but clinging of confidence to 
 him, as their Rock, Fortress, and Deliverer, and perfect love, 
 and casting out of fear, so that it is not possible that while 
 the mind is rightly bent on him, there should be dread of any- 
 thing either earthly or supernatural, and the more dreadful 
 seems the height of his majesty, the less fear they feel that 
 dwell in the shadow of it, (" Of whom shall I be afraid ? ") so 
 that they are as David was, devoted to his fear ; whereas, on 
 the other hand, those who, if they may help it, never conceive 
 of God, but thrust away all thought and memory of him, and 
 in his real terribleness and omnipresence fear him not nor 
 know him, yet are of real, acute, piercing, and ignoble fear 
 haunted for evermore ; fear inconceiving and desperate that 
 calls to the rocks, and hides in the dust ; and hence the pe- 
 culiar baseness of the expression of terror, a baseness attrib- 
 uted to it in all times, and among all nations, as of a passion 
 § 29. Ferocity is atheistical, brutal, and profane. So also, it is 
 withfear itfun- ^Iways joined with ferocity, which is of all pas- 
 pardonabieness. sions the Icast humau ; for of sensual desires 
 there is license to men, as necessity ; and of vanity there is 
 intellectual cause, so that when seen in a brute it is pleasant 
 and a sign of good wit ; and of fear there is at times neces- 
 sity and excuse, as being allowed for prevention of harm ; 
 but of ferocity there is no excuse nor palliation, but it is pure 
 essence of tiger and demon, and it casts on the human face 
 the paleness alike of the horse of Death, and the ashes of 
 hell. 
 
 Wherefore, of all subjects that can be admitted to sight, 
 the expressions of fear and ferocity are the most foul and 
 detestable, and so there is in them I know not what sym- 
 § 30 Such ex P^^^^^^^ attractiveness for minds cowardly and 
 pressions how basc, as the vulsTar of most nations, and foras- 
 
 8011 ght by paint- i ,i -i i j i t_ 
 
 ers powerless and much as they are easily rendered by men who 
 impious. render nothing else, they are often trusted 
 
 in by the herd of painters incapable and profane, as in that 
 monstrous abortion of the first room of the Louvre, called the 
 
IN MAN, 
 
 321 
 
 Deluge, whose su'bject is pure, acute, mortal fear ; and so 
 generally the senseless horrors of the modern French schools, 
 spawn of the guillotine : also there is not a greater test of 
 grandeur or meanness of mind than the expressions it will 
 seek for and develop in the features and forms of men in 
 fierce strife, whether determination and devotion, and all the 
 other attributes of that unselfishness which constitutes hero- 
 ism, as in the warrior of Agasias ; and distress not agitated 
 nor unworthy, though mortal, as in the Dying Gladiator, or 
 brutal ferocity and butchered agony, of which the lowest and 
 least palliated examples are those battles of Salvator Rosa, 
 which none but a man, base-born and thief-bred, could have 
 dwelt upon for an instant without sickening, of which I will 
 only name that example in the Pitti palace, wherein the chief 
 figure in the foreground is a man with his arm cut off at the 
 shoulder, run through the other hand into the breast with a 
 lance.* And manifold instances of the same feeling are to 
 be found in the repainting of the various representations of 
 the Inferno, so common through Italy, more especially that 
 of Orcagna's in the Campo Santo, wherein the few figures 
 near the top that yet remain untouched are grand in their 
 severe drawing and expressions of enduring despair, while 
 those below, repainted by Solazzino, depend for their expres- 
 siveness upon torrents of blood ; so in the Inferno of Santa 
 Maria Novella, and of the Arena chapel, not to speak of the 
 horrible images of the Passion, by which vulgar Romanism 
 has always striven to excite the languid sympathies of its un- 
 taught flocks. Of which foulness let us reason no farther, 
 the very image and memory of them being pollution, only 
 noticing this, that there has always been a morbid tendency 
 in Romanism towards the contemplation of bodily pain, ow- 
 ing to the attribution of saving power to it, which, like every 
 other moral error, has been of fatal effect in art, leaving not 
 
 * Compare Michelet, (Du Pretre, de la Femme, de la Famille,) Chap. 
 III. note. He uses language too violent to be quoted ; but excuses Sal- 
 vator by reference to the savage character of the Thirty Years* War. 
 That this excuse has no validity may be proved by comparing the paint* 
 er's treatment of other subjects. See Sec. 11. Chap. III. ^ 19, note. 
 Vol. II.— 21 
 
322 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 altogether without the stain and blame of it, even the high- 
 est of the pure Romanist painters ; as Fra Angelico, for in- 
 stance, who, in his Passion subjects, always insists weakly on 
 the bodily torture, and is unsparing of blood ; and Giotto, 
 though his treatment is usually grander, as in that Crucifixion 
 over the door of the Convent of St. Mark's, where the blood is 
 hardly actual, but issues from the feet in a typical and con- 
 ventional form, and becomes a crimson cord which is twined 
 strangely beneath about a skull ; only that which these holy 
 men did to enhance, even though in their means mistaken, 
 the impression and power of the sufferings of Christ, or of 
 his saints, is always in a measure noble, and to be distin- 
 guished with all reverence from the abominations of the ir- 
 religious painters following, as of Camillo Procaccini, in one 
 of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the Brera, at Milan, and 
 other such, whose names may be w^ell spared to the reader. 
 
 These, then, are the four passions whose presence in any 
 degree on the human face is degradation. But of all passion 
 it is to be generally observed, that it becomes ignoble either 
 §31 Of passion when entertained respecting unworthy objccts, 
 generally. ^^d therefore shallow or unjustifiable, or when 
 
 of impious violence, and so destructive of human dignity. 
 Thus grief is noble or the reverse, according to the dignity 
 and worthiness of the object lamented, and the grandeur of 
 the mind enduring it. The sorrow of mortified vanity or 
 avarice is simply disgusting, even that of bereaved affection . 
 may be base if selfish and unrestrained. All grief that con- 
 vulses the features is ignoble, because it is commonly shallow 
 and certainly temporary, as in children, though in the shock 
 and shiver of a strong man's features under sudden and vio- 
 lent grief there may be something of sublime. The grief of 
 Guercino's Hagar, in the Brera gallery at Milan, is partly 
 despicable, partly disgusting, partly ridiculous ; it is not the 
 grief of the injured Egyptian, driven forth into the desert 
 with the destiny of a nation in her heart, but of a servant of 
 § 32. It is never work, turned away for stealing tea and sugar. 
 Mbfted^-aMeast Oommou painters forget that passion is not ab- 
 on the face. jsolutcly and in itself great or violent, but only 
 
IN MAN. 
 
 323 
 
 in proportion to the weakness of the mind it has to deal with; 
 and that in exaggerating its outward signs, they are not ex- 
 alting the passion, but evaporating the hero.* They think 
 too much of passions as always the same in their nature, for- 
 getting that the love of Achilles is different from the love of 
 Paris, and of Alcestis from that of Laodamia. The use and 
 value of passion is not as a subject in contemplation in it- 
 self, but as it breaks up the fountains of the great deep of 
 the human mind, or displays its mightiness and ribbed maj- 
 esty, as mountains are seen in their stability best among the 
 coil of clouds ; whence, in fine, I think it is to be held that 
 all passion which attains overwhelming power, so that it is 
 not as resisting, but as conquered, that the creature is con- 
 templated, is unfit for high art, and destructive of the ideal 
 character of the countenance : and in this respect, I cannot 
 but hold Raffaelle to have erred in his endeavor to express 
 passion of such acuteness in the human face ; as in the frag- 
 ment of the Massacre of the Innocents in our own gallery, 
 (wherein, repainted though it be, I suppose the purpose of 
 the master is yet to be understood,) for if such subjects are 
 to be represented at all, their entire expression may be given 
 without degrading the face, as we shall presently see done 
 with unspeakable power by Tintoret,f and I think that all 
 subjects of the kind, all human misery, slaughter, famine, 
 plague, peril, and crime, are better in the main avoided, as of 
 unprofitable and hardening influence, unless so far as out of 
 the suffering, hinted rather than expressed, we may raise'into 
 nobler relief the eternal enduring of fortitude and affection, 
 of mercy and self-devotion, or when, as by the threshing-floor 
 of Ornan, and by the cave of Lazarus, the angel of the Lord 
 is to be seen in the chastisement, and his love to be mani- 
 fested to the despair of men. 
 
 Thus, then, we have in some sort enumerated those evil 
 signs which are most necessary to be shunned in the seeking 
 
 * * ' The fire, that mounts the liquor, till it run o'er 
 In seemiDg to augment it, wastes it." 
 
 Henry VIII. 
 
 t Sec. II. Chap. III. g 22. 
 
324 
 
 OF VITAL BEAUTY. 
 
 of ideal beauty,* though it is not the knowledge of them, 
 but the dread and hatred of them, which will effectually aid 
 §33. Recapituia- painter ; as on the other hand it is not by 
 mere admission of the loveliness of good and 
 holy expression that its subtile characters are to be traced. 
 Raffaelle himself, questioned on this subject, made doubtful 
 answer ; he probably could not trace through what early 
 teaching, or by what dies of emotion the image had been 
 sealed upon his heart. Our own Bacon, who well saw the 
 impossibility of reaching it by the combination of many sep- 
 arate beauties, yet explains not the nature of that kind of 
 felicity " to which he attributes success. I suppose those 
 who have conceived and wrought the loveliest things, have 
 done so by no theorizing, but in simple labor of love, and 
 could not, if put to a bar of rationalism, defend all points 
 of what they had done, but painted it in their own delight, 
 and to the delight of all besides, only always with that re- 
 spect of conscience and " fear of swerving from that which 
 is rig-ht, which maketh dilio^ent observers of circumstances 
 the loose regard whereof is the nurse of vulgar folly, no less 
 than 3fblomon's attention thereunto was of natural further- 
 ances the most effectual to make him eminent above others, 
 for he gave good heed, and pierced everything to the very 
 ground." f 
 
 With which good heed, and watching of the instants when 
 men feel warmly and rightly, as the Indians do for the dia- 
 mond in their washing of sand, and that with the desire 
 and hope of finding true good in men, and not with the 
 ready vanity that sets itself to fiction instantly, and carries 
 its potter's wheel about with it always, (off which there will 
 come only clay vessels of regular shape after all,) instead of 
 
 * Let it be observed that it is always of beauty, not of human char- 
 acter in its lower and criminal modifications, that we have been speak- 
 ing. That variety of character, therefore, which we have affirmed to 
 be necessary, is the variety of Giotto and Angelico, not of Hogarth, 
 Works concerned with the exhibition of general character, are to be 
 spoken of in the consideration of Ideas of Relation. 
 
 f Hooker, Book V. Chap. I. g 2. 
 
THE TIlEOIiETIG FACULTY. 
 
 825 
 
 the pure mirror that can show the seraph standing by the 
 human body — standing as signal to the heavenly land ; * 
 with this heed and this charity, there are none of us that 
 may not bring down that lamp upon his path of which Spen- 
 ser sang : — 
 
 That beauty is not, as fond men misdeem 
 An outward show of things, that only seem ; 
 Bub that fair lamp, from whose celestial ray 
 That light proceeds, which kindleth lover's fire, 
 Shall never be extinguished nor decay. 
 But when the vital spirit^, do expire, 
 Unto her native planet shall retire. 
 For it is heavenly born and cannot die, 
 Being a parcel of the purest sky." 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 
 
 Of the sources of beauty open to us in the visible world, 
 we have now obtained a view which, though most feeble in 
 its grasp and scanty in its detail, is yet general in its range. 
 §1. There are no Of no other sources than these visible can we, 
 Amotion of belu^- ©^^rt in our present condition of exist- 
 
 ty more than ^ncc, conceive. For what revelations have been 
 
 those round m " 
 
 things visible. made to humanity inspired, or caught up to 
 heaven of things to the heavenly region belonging, have 
 been either by unspeakable words which it is not lawful for 
 a man to utter, or else by their very nature incommunicable, 
 except in types and shadows ; and ineffable by words be- 
 
 * " Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, 
 And by the holy rood, 
 A man all lif?ht, a seraph man 
 By every corse there stood. 
 This seraph band, each waved his hand, 
 It was a heavenly sight ; 
 They stood as signals to the land. 
 Each one a lovely light. " 
 
 Ancient Mariner. 
 
326 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING 
 
 longing to earth, for of things different from the visible, 
 words appropriated to the visible can convey no image. 
 How different from earthly gold that clear pavement of the 
 city might have seemed to the eyes of St. John, we of unre- 
 ceived sight cannot know ; neither of that strange jasper and 
 sardine can we conceive the likeness which he assumed that 
 sat on the throne above the crystal sea ; neither what seem- 
 ing that was of slaying that the Root of David bore in the 
 midst of the elders ; neither what change it was upon the 
 form of the fourth of them that walked in the furnace of 
 Dura, that even the wrath of idolatry knew for the likeness 
 of the Son of God. The knowing that is here permitted to 
 us is either of things outward only, as in those it is whose 
 eyes faith never opened, or else of -that dark part that her 
 glass shows feebly, of things supernatural, that gleaming of 
 the Divine form among the mortal crowd, which all may 
 catch if they will climb the sycamore and wait ; nor how 
 much of God's abiding at the house may be granted to those 
 that so seek, and how much more may be opened to them in 
 the breaking of bread, cannot be said ; but of that only we can 
 reason which is in a measure revealed to all, of that which is 
 by constancy and purity of affection to be found in the things 
 § 2. What imper- and the beings around us upon earth. Now, 
 
 fection exists in ^^ j.\ • i i x !_ 
 
 visible things, among all those things whose beauty we have 
 im^inLtion*^re^' hitherto examined, there has been a measure of 
 movable. imperfection. Either inferiority of kind, as the 
 
 beauty of the lower animals, or resulting from degradation, 
 as in man himself ; and although in considering the beauty 
 of human form, we arrived at some conception of restoration, 
 yet we found that even the restoration must be in some re- 
 spect imperfect, as incapable of embracing all qualities, moral 
 and intellectual, at once, neither to be freed from all signs 
 of former evil done or suffered. Consummate beauty, there- 
 fore, is not to be found on earth, though often such intense 
 measure of it as shall drown all capacity of receiving ; neither 
 is it to be respecting humanity legitimately conceived. But 
 by certain operations of the imagination upon ideas of beauty 
 received frotu things around us, it is possible to conceive re- 
 
THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 327 
 
 specting superhuman creatures (of that which is more tharv 
 creature, no creature ever conceived) a beauty in some sort 
 §3. Which how- greater than we see. Of this beauty, however, 
 ourpre?ent%on- impossible to determine anything until we 
 elusions. have traced the imaginative operations to which 
 
 it owes its being, of which operations this much may be pre- " 
 maturely said, that they are not creative, that no new ideas 
 are elicited by them, and that their whole function is only a 
 certain dealing with, concentrating or mode of regarding the 
 impressions received from external things, that therefore, in 
 the beauty to which they will conduct us, there will be found 
 no new element, but only a peculiar combination or phase 
 of those elements that we now know, and that therefore we 
 may at present draw all the conclusions with respect to the 
 rank of the theoretic faculty, which the knowledge of its 
 subject matter can warrant. 
 
 We have seen that this subject matter is referable to four 
 general heads. It is either the record of conscience, printed 
 §4. The four in things external, or it is a symbolizing of Di- 
 wMch^the^pieas^ viue attributes in matter, or it is the felicity of 
 drri^ed'Te^aii Hviug things, or the perfect fulfilment of their 
 divine. duties and functions. In all cases it is some- 
 
 thing Divine, either the approving voice of God, the glorious 
 symbol of him, the evidence of his kind presence, or the 
 obedience to his will by him induced and supported. 
 
 All these subjects of contemplation are such as we may 
 suppose will remain sources of pleasure to the perfected 
 spirit throughout eternity. Divine in their nature they are 
 addressed to the immortal part of men. 
 
 There remain, however, two points to be noticed before I 
 §5. whatobjec- ^an hope that this conclusion will be frankly ac- 
 madeto'h^con- ^^ptcd by the reader. If it be the moral part 
 elusion. Qf which beauty addresses itself, how does 
 
 it happen, it will be asked, that it is ever found in the works 
 of impious men, and how is it possible for such to desire or 
 conceive it ? 
 
 On the other hand, how does it happen that men in high 
 state of moral culture are often insensible to the influence 
 
328 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING 
 
 of material beauty, and insist feebly upon it as an instru- 
 ment of soul culture. 
 
 These two objections I shall endeavor briefly to answer, 
 not that they can be satisfactorily treated without that de- 
 tailed examination of the whole body of great works of art, 
 on which I purpose to enter in the following volume. For 
 the right determination of these two questions is indeed the 
 whole end and aim of my labor, (and if it could be here accom- 
 plished, I should bestow^ no effort farther,) namely, the proving 
 that no supreme power of art can be attained by impious 
 men ; and that the neglect of art, as an interpreter of divine 
 things, has been of evil consequence to the Christian world. 
 
 At present, however, I would only meet such objections 
 as must immediately arise in the reader's mind. 
 
 And first, it will be remembered that I have, throughout 
 the examination of typical beauty, asserted its instinctive 
 power, the moral meaning of it being only discoverable by 
 §6. Typical faithful thought. Now this instinctive sense of 
 Setic^i^pu^r^ it ^^aries in intensity among men, being given, 
 sued. Instances. ^j^^ hearing ear of music, to some more than 
 to others : and if those to whom it is given in large meas- 
 ure be unfortunately men of impious or unreflecting spirit, 
 it is very possible that the perceptions of beauty should be 
 by them cultivated on principles merely aesthetic, and so lose 
 their hallowing power ; for though the good seed in them is 
 altogether divine, yet, there being no blessing in the spring- 
 ing thereof, it brings forth wild grapes in the end. And yet 
 these wild grapes are well discernible, like the deadly gourds 
 of Gilgal. There is in all works of such men a taint and 
 stain, and jarring discord, blacker and louder exactly in pro- 
 portion to the moral deficiency, of which the best proof and 
 measure is to be found in their treatment of the human form, 
 (since in landscape it is nearly impossible to introduce defi- 
 nite expression of evil,) of which the highest beauty has been 
 attained only once, and then by no system taught painter, 
 but by a most holy Dominican monk of Fiesole ; and be- 
 neath him all stoop lower and lower in proportion to their 
 inferior sanctity, though with more or less attainment of that 
 
THE THE GEE TIC FACULTY, 
 
 329 
 
 which is noble, according to their intellectual power and 
 earnestness, as Raffaelle in his St. Cecilia, (a mere study of 
 a passionate, dark-eyed, large formed Italian model,) and 
 even Perugino,r in that there is about his noblest faces a 
 shortcoming, indefinable ; an absence of the full out-pouring 
 of the sacred spirit that there is in Angelico ; traceable, I 
 doubt not, to some deficiencies and avaricious flaws of his 
 heart, whose consequences in his conduct were such as to 
 give Yasari hope that his lies might stick to him (for the 
 contradiction of which in the main, if there be not contradic- 
 tion enough in every line that the hand of Perugino drew, 
 compare Rio, de la Poesie Chretienne, and note also what 
 Rio has singularly missed observing, that Perugino, in his 
 portrait of himself in the Florence gallery, has put a scroll 
 into the hand, with the words Timete Deum," thus surely 
 indicating that which he considered his duty and message :) 
 and so all other even of the sacred painters, not to speak of 
 the lower body of men in whom, on the one hand, there is 
 marked sensuality and impurity in all that they seek of 
 beauty, as in Correggio and Guido, or, on the other, a want 
 in measure of the sense of beauty itself, as in Rubens and 
 „ . ^ Titian, showing: itself in the adoption of coarse 
 
 § 7. How inter- ? & r ^ 
 
 rupted by false types of feature and form ; sometimes also (of 
 which I could find instances in modern times,) 
 in a want of evidence of delight in what they do ; so that, 
 after they have rendered some passage of exceeding beauty, 
 they will suffer some discordant point to interfere with it, 
 and it will not hurt them, as if they had no pleasure in that 
 which was best, but had done it in inspiration that was not 
 profitable to them, as deaf men might touch an instrument 
 with a feeling in their heart, which yet returns not outwardly 
 upon them, and so know not when they play false : and 
 sometimes by total want of choice, for there is a choice of 
 love in all rightly tempered men, not that ignorant and inso- 
 lent choice which rejects half nature as empty of the right, 
 but that pure choice that fetches the right out of every- 
 thing ; and where this is wanting, we may see men walking 
 up and down in dry places, finding no rest, ever and anon 
 
330 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS BESPECTING 
 
 doing something noble, and yet not following it up, but- 
 dwelling the next instant on something impure or profitless 
 with the same intensity and yet impatience, so that they are 
 ever wondered at and never sympathized with, and while 
 they dazzle all, they lead none ; and then, beneath these 
 again, we find others on whose works there are definite signs 
 of evil mind, ill-repressed, and then inability to avoid, and 
 at last perpetual seeking for and feeding upon horror and 
 ugliness, and filthiness of sin, as eminently in Salvator and 
 Caravaggio, and the lower Dutch schools, only in these last 
 less painfully as they lose the villanous in the brutal, and the 
 horror of crime in its idiocy. 
 
 But secondly, it is to be noted that it is neither by us unas- 
 certainable what moments of pure feeling or aspiration may 
 occur to men of minds apparently cold and lost, nor by us to 
 §8 Greatness and pronounced through what instruments, and 
 truth are some- in what strausTelv occurrcut voices, God may 
 
 times bythe . 
 
 Deity sustained choose to communicate good to men. It seems 
 
 and spoken in , i /» i ^ • , -i n 
 
 and through evil to me that much oi what IS great, and to all 
 men beneficial, has been wrought by those 
 who neither intended nor knew the good they did, and that 
 many mighty harmonies have been discoursed by instru- 
 ments that had been dumb or discordant, but that God 
 knew their stops. The Spirit of Prophecy consisted with 
 the avarice of Balaam, and the disobedience of Saul. Could 
 we spare from its page that parable, which he said, who saw 
 the vision of the Almighty, falling into a trance, but hav- 
 ing his eyes open, though we know that the sword of his 
 punishment was then sharp in its sheath beneath him in the 
 plains of Moab ? or shall we not lament with David over the 
 shield cast away on the Gilboa mountains, of him to whom 
 God gave another heart that day when he turned his back to 
 go from Samuel ? It is not our part to look hardly, nor to 
 look always, to the character or the deeds of men, but to 
 accept from all of them, and to hold fast that which we can 
 prove good, and feel to be ordained for us. We know that 
 whatever good there is in them is itself divine, and wherever 
 we see the virtue of ardent labor and self-surrendering to 
 
THE THEORETIC FACULTY, 
 
 331 
 
 a single purpose, wherever we find constant reference made 
 to the written scripture of natural beauty, this at least we 
 know is great and good, this we know is not granted by the 
 counsel of God, without purpose, nor maintained without re- 
 sult : Their interpretation we may accept, into their labor 
 we may enter, but they themselves must look to it, if what 
 they do has no intent of good, nor any reference to the 
 Giver of all gifts. Selfish in their industry, unchastened in 
 their wills, ungrateful for the Spirit that is upon them, 
 they may yet be helmed by that Spirit whithersoever the 
 Governor listeth ; involuntary instruments they may become 
 of others' good ; unwillingly they may bless Israel, doubt- 
 ingly discomfit Amalek, but shortcoming there will be of 
 their glory, and sure of their punishment. « 
 
 I believe I shall be able, incidentally, in succeeding in- 
 vestigations, to prove this shortcoming, and to examine the 
 sources of it, not absoMtely indeed, (seeing that all reason- 
 ing on the characters of men must be treacherous, our knowl- 
 edge on this head being as corrupt as it is scanty, while even 
 in living with them it is impossible to trace the working, or 
 estimate the errors of great and self-secreted minds,) but at 
 least enough to establish the general principle upon such 
 grounds of fact as may satisfy those who demand the practi- 
 cal proof (often in a measure impossible) of things which can 
 ^ 9 The second ^^^^^^7 ^e doubted in their rational conse- 
 objection arising quencc. At present, it would be useless to 
 
 from the coldness , , 
 
 of Christian men enter on an examination for which we have no 
 
 to external beauty. tip 
 
 materials ; and i proceed, tnereiore, to notice 
 that other and opposite error of Christian men in thinking 
 that there is little use or value in the o'peration of the 
 theoretic faculty, not that I at present either feel myself 
 capable, or that this is the place for the discussion of that 
 vast question of the operation of taste (as it is called) on the 
 minds of men, and the national value of its teaching, but I 
 wish shortly to reply to that objection which might be urged 
 to the real moral dignity of the faculty, that many Christian 
 men seem to be in themselves without it, and even to dis- 
 countenance it in others. 
 
332 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING 
 
 It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on aesthetic cult- 
 ure, that the sense of beauty never farthered the performance 
 of a single duty. 
 
 Although this gross and inconceivable falsity will hardly 
 be accepted by any one in so many terms, seeing that there 
 are few so utterly lost but that they receive, and know that 
 they receive, at certain moments, strength of some kind, or 
 rebuke from the appealingsof outward things; and that it is 
 not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a 
 rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly 
 poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, 
 flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling 
 upon him out of the sky ; though, I say, this falsity is not 
 wholly and in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and 
 practically so in much of the doing and teaching even of holy 
 men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer 
 but seldom to those things in which it*is most abundantly and 
 immediately shown ; though they insist much on his giving 
 of bread, and raiment, and health, (which he gives to all in- 
 ferior creatures,) they require us not to thank him for that 
 glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to per- 
 ceive : they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they 
 send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even, they dwell on 
 the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of de- 
 light. Now there are reasons for this, manifold, in the toil 
 ^ , and warfare of an earnest mind, which, in its ef- 
 
 §10. Reasons for ^ ^ ' ' 
 
 this coldness in forts at the raisinsc of men from utter loss and 
 
 the anxieties of . i t i • 
 
 the world. These misery, has oftcn but little time or disposition to 
 wrought and take heed of anything more than the bare life, 
 criminal. ^^^^ ^£ thosc SO occupied it is not for us to judge, 
 
 but I think, that, of the weaknesses, distresses, vanities, 
 schisms, and sins, which often even in the holiest men, di- 
 minish their usefulness, and mar their happiness, there would 
 be fewer if, in their struggle with nature fallen, they sought 
 for more aid from nature undestroyed. It seems to me that 
 the real sources of bluntness in the feelings towards the 
 splendor of the grass and glory of the flower, are less to be 
 found in ardor of occupation, in seriousness of compassion, or 
 
THE THEORETIC FACULTY. 
 
 333 
 
 heavenliness of desire, than in the turning of the eye at in- 
 tervals of rest too selfishly within ; the want of power to 
 shake off the anxieties of actual and near interest, and to 
 leave results in God's hands ; the scorn of all that does not 
 seem immediately apt for our purposes, or open to our un- 
 derstanding, and perhaps something of pride, which desires 
 _ ^ rather to investisrate than to feel. 1 believe that 
 
 § 11. Evil con- ^ 
 
 seque^nces of the Toot of almost every schism and heresy from 
 which the Christian church has ever suffered, 
 has been the effort of men to earn, rather than to receive, 
 their salvation ; and that the reason that preaching is so 
 commonly ineffectual is, that it calls on men oftener to 
 work for God,^han to behold God working for them. If, for 
 every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a claim 
 upon their hearts ; if for every assertion of God's demands 
 from them, we could substitute a display of his kindness to 
 them ; if side by side with every w^arning of death, we could 
 exhibit proofs and promises of immortality ; if, in fine, in- 
 stead of assuming the being of an awful Deity, which men, 
 though they cannot and dare not deny, are always unwilling, 
 sometimes unable, to conceive, we were to show them a near, 
 visible, inevitable, but all beneficent Deity, whose presence 
 makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer 
 §12 Theoriathe ^^^^ children sitting in the market-place. At 
 service of Heav- all events, whatever may be the inability in this 
 present life to mingle the full enjoyment of the 
 Divine works with the full discharge of every practical duty, 
 and confessedly in many cases this must be, let us not attrib- 
 ute the inconsistency to any indignity of the faculty of con- 
 templation, but to the sin and the suffering of the fallen 
 state, and the change of order from the keeping of the gar- 
 den to the tilling of the ground. We cannot say how far it 
 is right or agreeable with God's will, while men are perishing 
 round about us, while grief, and pain, and wrath, and impiety, 
 and death, and all the powers of the air, are working wildly 
 and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that 
 any of us should take hand from the plough ; but this we 
 know, that there will come a time when the service of God 
 
334 
 
 THE TEEOBETIG FACULTY. 
 
 shall be the beholding of him ; and though in these stormy 
 seas, where we are now driven up and down, his Spirit is 
 dimly seen on the face of the waters, and we are left to cast 
 anchors out of the stern, and wish for the day, that day will 
 come, when, with the evangelists on the crystal and stable 
 sea, all the creatures of God shall be full of eyes within, and 
 there shall be *^ no more curse, but his servants shall serve 
 him, and shall see his face.'* 
 
 OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY, 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 OF THE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION. 
 
 We have hitherto been exclusively occupied with those 
 § 1 A partial ex- sourccs of pleasure which exist in tho external 
 tTe'watilfnl^ Creation, and which in any faithful copy of it 
 to be attempted. must to a Certain extent exist also. 
 
 These sources of beauty, however, are not presented by any 
 very great work of art in a form of pure transcript. They 
 invariably receive the reflection of the mind under whose 
 shadow they have passed, and are modified or colored by its 
 image. 
 
 This modification is the Work of Imagination. 
 
 As, in the course of our succeeding investigation, we shall 
 be called upon constantly to compare sources of beauty ex- 
 isting in nature with the images of them presented by the 
 human mind, it is very necessary for us shortly to review the 
 
OF THE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION. 335 
 
 conditions and limits of the imaginative faculty, and to as- 
 certain by what tests we may distinguish its sane, healthy, 
 and profitable operation, from that which is erratic, diseased, 
 and dangerous. 
 
 It is neither desirable nor possible here to examine or illus- 
 trate in full the essence of this mighty faculty. Such an ex- 
 amination would require a review of the whole field of litera- 
 ture, and would alone demand a volume. Our present task 
 is not to explain or exhibit full portraiture of this function 
 of the mind in all its relations, but only to obtain some cer- 
 tain tests by which we may determine whether it be very 
 imagination or no, and unmask all impersonations of it, and 
 this chiefly with respect to art, for in literature the faculty 
 takes a thousand forms, according to the matter it has 
 to treat, and becomes like the princess of the Arabian tale, 
 sword, eagle, or fire, according to the war it wages, some- 
 times piercing, sometimes soaring, sometimes illumining, re- 
 taining no image of itself, except its supernatural power, so 
 that I shall content myself with tracing that particular form 
 of it, and unveiling those imitations of it only, which are to 
 be found, or feared, in painting, referring to other creations 
 of mind only for illustration. 
 
 Unfortunately, the works of metaphysicians will afford us 
 in this most interesting inquiry no aid whatsoever. They 
 who are constantly endeavoring to fathom and explain the 
 D o mv, 1 * essence of the faculties of mind, are sure in the 
 
 § 2. The works of ^ ' ^ 
 
 the metaphysicians end to losc sisrht of all that Cannot be explained, 
 
 how nugatory with ^ ■^ p \ \ -i ^ 
 
 respect to this (though it may be defined and lelt,) and be- 
 facuity. cause, as I shall presently show, the essence of 
 
 the imaginative faculty is utterly mysterious and inexplicable, 
 and to be recognized in its results only, or in the negative 
 results of its absence, the metaphysicians, as far as I am ac- 
 quainted with their works, miss it altogether, and never reach 
 higher than a definition of fancy by a false name. 
 
 What I understand by fancy will presently appear, not that 
 I contend for nomenclature, but only for distinction between 
 two mental faculties, by whatever name they be called, one 
 the source of all that is great in the poetic arts ; the other 
 
836 OF THE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION 
 
 merely decorative and entertaining, but which are often con- 
 founded together, and which have so much in common as to 
 render strict definition of either difficult. 
 
 Dugald Stewart's meagre definition may serve us for a 
 starting point. "Imagination," he says, "includes concep- 
 tion or simple apprehension, which enables us to form a no- 
 § 3. The defini- tion of those former objects of perception or of 
 art? how' inade^ knowledge, out of which we are to make a selec- 
 tion ; abstraction, which separates the selected 
 materials from the qualities and circumstances which are 
 connected with them in nature ; and judgment or taste, 
 which selects the materials and directs their combination. 
 To these powers we may add that particular habit of associa- 
 tion to which I formerly gave the name of fancy, as it is this 
 which presents to our choice all the different materials which 
 are subservient to the efforts of imagination, and which may 
 therefore be considered as forming the ground-work of 
 poetical genius." 
 
 (By fancy in this passage, we find on referring to the 
 chapter treating of it, that nothing more is meant than the 
 rapid occurrence of ideas of sense to the mind.) 
 
 Now, in this definition, the very point and purpose of all 
 the inquiry is missed. We are told that judgment or taste 
 " directs the combination." In order that anything may be 
 directed, an end must be previously determined: What is the 
 faculty that determines this end ? and of what frame and 
 make, how boned and fleshed, how conceived or seen, is the 
 end itself ? Bare judgment, or taste, cannot approve of 
 what has no existence ; and yet by Dugald Stewart's defini- 
 tion we are left to their catering among a host of concep- 
 tions, to produce a combination which, as they work for, 
 they must see and approve before it exists. This power of 
 prophecy is the very essence of the whole matter, and it is 
 just that inexplicable part which the metaphysician misses. 
 
 As might be expected from his misunderstanding of the 
 faculty, he has given an instance entirely nugatory.* It 
 
 * He continues thus, *^ To illustrate these observations, let us con- 
 sider the steps by which Milton must have proceeded, in creating his 
 
OF TEE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION. 337 
 
 would be difficult to find in Milton a passage in which less 
 power of imagination was shown, than the description of 
 §4. This instance Eden, if, as I suppose, this be the passage meant, 
 nugatory. beginning of the fourth book, in which 
 
 I can find three expressions only in which this power is 
 shown, the burnished with golden rind, hung amiable " of 
 the Hesperian fruit, the lays forth her purple grape " of 
 the vine and the ''fringed bank with myrtle crowned," of 
 the lake, and these are not what Stewart meant, but only 
 that accumulation of bowers, groves, lawns, and hillocks, 
 § 5. Various in- which is not imagination at all, but composi- 
 stances. tion, and that of the commonest kind. Hence, 
 
 if we take any passage in which there is real imagination, 
 we shall find Stewart's hypothesis not only inefficient and 
 obscure, but utterly inapplicable. 
 Take one or two at random. 
 
 On the other side, 
 
 Incensed with indignation, Satan stood 
 Unterrified, and like a comet burned 
 That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge 
 In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair 
 Shakes pestilence and war." 
 
 (Note that the word incensed is to be taken in its literal 
 and material sense, set on fire.) What taste or judgment was 
 it that directed this combination? or is there nothing more 
 than taste or judgment here ? 
 
 imaginary garden of Eden. When he first proposed to himself that 
 subject of description, it is reasonable to suppose that a variety of the 
 most striking scenes which he had seen, crowded into his mind. The 
 association of ideas suggested them and the power of conception 
 placed each of them before him with all its beauties and imperfections. 
 In every natural scene, if we destine it for any particular purpose, 
 there are defects and redundancies, which art may sometimes, but 
 cannot always correct. But the power of imagination is unlimited. 
 She can create and annihilate, and dispose at pleasure her woods, her 
 rocks, and her rivers. Milton, accordingly, would not copy his Eden 
 from any one scene, but would select from each the features which 
 were most eminently beautiful. The power of abstraction enabled him 
 to make the separation, and taste directed him in the selection." 
 Vol. II.— 22 
 
338 OF THE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION. 
 
 " Ten paces huge 
 He back recoiled ; the tenth on bended knee 
 His massy spear upstaid, as if on earth 
 Winds under ground, or waters forcing way 
 Sidelong had pushed a mountain from his seat 
 Half -sunk with all his pines. 
 
 Together both ere the high lawns appeared 
 Under the opening eyelids of the morn, 
 We drove a field, and both together heard 
 What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn. 
 
 Missing thee, I walk unseen 
 On the dry smooth shaven green, 
 To behold the wandering moon 
 Riding near her highest noon, 
 Like one that had been led astray^ 
 Through the heavens' wide pathless way, 
 And oft as if her head she bowed 
 Stooping through a fleecy cloud." 
 
 It is evident that Stewart's explanation utterly fails in all 
 these instances, for there is in them no " combination" v^^hat- 
 soever, but a particular mode of regarding the qualities or 
 appearances of a single thing, illustrated and conveyed to us 
 by the image of another ; and the act of imagination, observe, 
 is not the selection of this image, but the mode of regarding 
 the object. 
 
 But the metaphysician's definition fails yet more utterly, 
 when we look at the imagination neither as regarding, nor 
 combining, but as penetrating. 
 
 My gracious Silence, Hail : 
 
 Wouldst thou have laughed, had I come coffiu'd home 
 That weep'st to see me triumph. Ah ! my dear. 
 Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, 
 And mothers that lack sons. " 
 
 How did Shakspeare know that Virgilia could not speak ? 
 
 This knowledge, this intuitive and penetrative perception, 
 is still one of the forms, the highest, of imagination, but there 
 is no combination of images here. 
 
 We find, then, that the imagination has three totally dis- 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE, 
 
 339 
 
 tinct functions. It combines, and by combination creates 
 new forms ; but the secret principle of this combination has 
 §6, The three op- not been shown by the analysts. Again, it 
 Siagination. Pen- treats or regards both the simple images and 
 tivf ^^contempia- Combinations in peculiar ways ; and, 
 
 thirdly, it penetrates, analyzes, and reaches 
 truths by no other faculty discoverable. These its three 
 functions, I shall endeavor to illustrate, but not in this order : 
 the most logical mode of treatment would be to follow the 
 order in which commonly the mind works ; that is, penetrat- 
 ing first, combining next, and treating or regarding, finally ; 
 but this arrangement would be inconvenient, because the acts 
 of penetration and of regard are so closely connected, and so 
 like in their relations to other mental acts, that I wish to ex- 
 amine them consecutively, and the rather, because they have 
 to do with higher subject matter than the mere act of com- 
 bination, whose distinctive nature, that property which makes 
 it imagination and not composition, it will I think be best to 
 explain at setting out, as we easily may, in subjects familiar 
 and material. I shall therefore examine the imaginative fac- 
 ulty in these three forms ; first, as combining or associative ; 
 secondly, as analytic or penetrative ; thirdly, as regardant or 
 contemplative. 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 In order to render our inquiry as easy as possible, we shall 
 consider the dealing of the associative imagination with the 
 simplest possible matter, that is, — with conceptions of mate- 
 § 1. Of simple ^ial things. First, therefore, we must define the 
 conception. nature of these conceptions themselves. 
 
 After beholding and examining any material object, our 
 knowledge respecting it exists in two different forms. Some 
 facts exist in the brain in a verbal form, as known, but not 
 conceived, as, for instance, that it was heavy or lightjj that 
 
340 
 
 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 it was eight inches and a quarter long, etc., of which length 
 we cannot have accurate conception, but only such a con- 
 ception as might attach to a length of seven inches or nine ; 
 and which fact we may recollect without any conception of 
 the object at all. Other facts respecting it exist in the brain 
 in a visible form, not always visible, but voluntarily visible, 
 as its being white, or having such and such a complicated 
 shape, as the form of a rose-bud, for instance, which it would 
 be difficult to express verbally, neither is it retained by the 
 brain in a verbal form, but a visible one, that is, when we 
 wish for knowledge of its form for immediate use, we sum- 
 mon up a vision or image of the thing ; we do not remem- 
 ber it in words, as we remember the fact that it took so many 
 days to blow, or that it was gathered at such and such a 
 time. 
 
 The knowledge of things retained in this visible form is 
 called conception by the metaphysicians, which term I shall 
 retain ; it is inaccurately called imagination by Taylor, in 
 the passage quoted by Wordsworth in the preface to his 
 poems, not but that the term imagination is etymologically 
 and rightly expressive of it, but we want that term for a 
 higher faculty. 
 
 There are many questions respecting this faculty of con- 
 ception of very great interest, such as the exact amount of 
 aid that verbal knowledge renders so visible, (as, for instance, 
 the verbal knowledore that a flower has five, or 
 
 § 2. How con- , . . ' 
 
 nected with ver- scvcu, or ten petals, or that a muscle is insert- 
 bai knowledge. such and such a point of the bone, aids 
 
 the conception of the flower or the limb ;) and again, what 
 amount of aid the visible knowledge renders to the verbal, 
 as for instance, whether any one, being asked a question 
 about some animal or thing, which instantly and from verbal 
 knowledge he cannot answer, may have such power of sum- 
 moning up the image of the animal or thing as to ascertain 
 the fact, by actual beholding, (which I do not assert, but can 
 conceive to be possible ;) and again, what is that indefinite 
 and subtile character of the conception itself in most men, 
 which admits not of being by themselves traced or realized, 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE, 
 
 341 
 
 and yet is a sure test of likeness in any representation of the 
 thing ; like an intaglio, with a front light on it, whose lines 
 cannot be seen, and yet they will lit one definite form only, 
 and that accurately ; these and many other questions it is 
 irrelevant at present to determine,* since to forward our 
 present purpose, it will be well to suppose the conception, 
 aided by verbal knowledge, to be absolutely perfect, and we 
 will suppose a man to retain such clear image of a large num- 
 ber of the material things he has seen, as to be able to set 
 down any of them on paper with perfect fidelity and absolute 
 memory f of their most minute features. 
 
 In thus setting them down on paper, he works, I suppose, 
 exactly as he would work from nature, only copying the re- 
 membered image in his mind, instead of the real thing. He 
 is, therefore, still nothing more than a copyist. There is no 
 exercise of imagination in this whatsoever. 
 
 But over these images, vivid and distinct as nature her- 
 self, he has a command which over nature he has not. He 
 can summon any that he chooses, and if, therefore, any 
 §3 How used in g^^up of them which he received from nature be 
 coraposition. not altogether to his mind, he is at liberty to 
 remove some of the component images, add others foreign, 
 and re-arrange the whole. 
 
 Let us suppose, for instance, that he has perfect knowledge 
 of the forms of the Aiguilles Verte and Argentiere, and of 
 the great glacier between them at the upper extremity of the 
 valley of Chamonix. The forms of the mountains please him^ 
 but the presence of the glacier suits not his purpose. He 
 removes the glacier, sets the mountains farther apart, and 
 introduces between them part of the valley of the Rhone. 
 
 This is composition, and is what Dugald Stewart mistook 
 for imagination, in the kingdom of which noble faculty it has 
 no part nor lot. 
 
 The essential characters of composition, properly so called, 
 
 * Compare Chapter IV. of this Section. 
 
 f On the distinction rightly made by the metaphysicians between con- 
 ception absolute and conception accompanied by reference to past time, 
 (or memory,) it is of no necessity here to insist. 
 
342 
 
 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE, 
 
 are these. The mind which desires the new feature sum- 
 mons up before it those images which it supposes to be of 
 _ ^ ^ the kind wanted, of these it takes the one which 
 
 § 4. Character- ' 
 
 isticsof composi- it supposes to be fittest, and tries it : if it will 
 
 tion. . . ' .1-1 1 . , 
 
 not answer, it tries another, until it has obtained 
 such an association as pleases it. 
 
 In this operation, if it be of little sensibility, it regards 
 only the absolute beauty or value of the images brought be- 
 fore it ; and takes that or those which it thinks fairest or 
 most interesting, without any regard to their sympathy with 
 those for whose company they are destined. Of this kind is 
 all vulgar composition ; the " Mulino " of Claude, described 
 in the preface to the first part, being a characteristic ex- 
 ample. 
 
 If the mind be of higher feeling, it will look to the sym- 
 pathy or contrast of the features, to their likeness or dissimi- 
 larity ; it will take, as it thinks best, features resembling or 
 discordant, and if when it has put the.m together, it be not 
 satisfied, it will repeat the process on the features themselves, 
 cutting away one part and putting in another, so working 
 more and more delicately down to the lowest details, until by 
 dint of experiment, of repeated trials and shiftings, and con- 
 stant reference to principles, (as that two lines must not 
 mimic one another, that one mass must not be equal to an- 
 other,) etc., it has morticed together a satisfactory result. 
 
 This process will be more and more rapid and effective, in 
 proportion to the artist's powers of conception and associa- 
 tion, these in their turn depending on his knowledge and 
 experience. The distinctness of his powers of conception 
 will give value, point, and truth to every fragment that he 
 draws from memory. His powers of association, and his 
 § 5 What pow knowledge of nature will pour out before him in 
 ers are implied trreatcr or Icss number and appositeness the im- 
 
 by it. The first ^ 
 
 of the three func- agcs from which to choosc. Ilis experience 
 fancy. g^i(]gg ^o quick discernment in the com- 
 
 bination, when made, of the parts that are offensive and re- 
 quire change. 
 
 The most elevated power of mind of all these, is that of 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 343 
 
 association, by which images apposite or resemblant, or of 
 whatever kind wanted, are called up quickly and ia multi- 
 tudes. When this power is very brilliant, it is called fancy, 
 not that this is the only meaning of the word fancy, but it is 
 the meaning of it in relation to that function of the imagi- 
 nation which we are here considering : for fancy has three 
 functions ; one subordinate to each of the three functions of 
 the imagination. 
 
 Great differences of power are manifested among artists in 
 this respect, some having hosts of distinct images always at 
 their command, and rapidly discerning resemblance or con- 
 trast ; others having few images, and obscure, at their dis- 
 posal, nor readily governing those they have. 
 
 Where the powers of fancy are very brilliant, the picture 
 becomes highly interesting ; if her images are systematically 
 and rightly combined, and truthfully rendered, it will be- 
 come even impressive and instructive ; if wittily and curi- 
 ously combined, it will be captivating and entertaining. 
 
 But all this time the imagination has not once shown itself. 
 §6 Imagination ^^^^ (cxcept the gift of fancy) may be taught, 
 fefted^^ ^ani- all this is easily comprehended and analyzed ; 
 
 but imagination is neither to be taught, nor by 
 any efforts to be attained, nor by any acuteness of discern- 
 ment dissected or analyzed. 
 
 We have seen that in composition the mind can only take 
 cognizance of likeness or dissimilarity, or of abstract beauty 
 among the ideas it brings together. But neither likeness 
 nor dissimilarity secures harmony. We saw in the chapter 
 on unity that likeness destroyed harmony or unity of mem- 
 bership, and that difference did not necessarily secure it, but 
 only that particular imperfection in each of the harmonizing 
 parts which can only be supplied by its fellow part. If, 
 therefore, the combination made is to be harmonious, the artist 
 must induce in each of its component parts (suppose two 
 only, for simplicity's sake,) such imperfection as that the 
 other shall put it right. If one of them be perfect by itself, 
 the other will be an excrescence. Both must be faulty when 
 separate, and each corrected by the presence of the other. If 
 
344 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 he can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful ; it will be 
 a whole, an organized body with dependent members ; — he is 
 an inventor. If not, let his separate features be as beautiful, 
 as apposite, or as resemblant as they may, they form no whole. 
 They are two members glued together. He is only a car- 
 penter and joiner. 
 
 Now, the conceivable imperfections of any single feature 
 are infinite. It is impossible, therefore, to fix 
 
 § 7. Imagination « . . , 
 
 is the correlative upon a form of impcrf cctiou in the one, and try 
 perfeTt^^^^coin;^- with this all the forms of imperfection of the 
 nent parts. other Until One fits ; but the two imperfections 
 must be co-relatively and simultaneously conceived. 
 
 This is imagination, properly so called, imagination associ- 
 ative, the grandest mechanical power that the human intelli- 
 gence possesses, and one which will appear more and more 
 marvellous the longer we consider it. By its operation, two 
 ideas are chosen out of an infinite mass, (for it evidently mat- 
 ters not whether the imperfections be conceived out of the 
 infinite number conceivable, or selected out of a number recol- 
 lected,), two ideas which are separately wrong, which together 
 shall be right, and of whose unity, therefore, the idea must 
 be formed at the instant they are seized, as it is only in tha.t 
 unity that either are good, and therefore only the conception 
 of that unity can prompt the preference. Now, what is that 
 prophetic action of mind, which, out of an infinite mass of 
 things that cannot be tried together, seizes, at the same in- 
 stant two that are fit for each other, together right ; yet each 
 disagreeable alone. 
 
 This operation of mind, so far as I can see, is 
 aiogy^with^\^m- absolutely inexplicable, but there is something 
 
 agination. ti ... i . . 
 
 like It in chemistry. 
 " The action of sulphuric acid on metallic zinc affords an 
 instance of what was once called disposing affinity. Zinc de- 
 composes pure water at common temperatures with extreme 
 slowness ; but as soon as sulphuric acid is added, decomposi- 
 tion of the water takes place rapidly, though the acid merely 
 unites with oxide of zinc. The former explanation was, that 
 the affinity of the acid for oxide of zinc disposed the metal to 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 345 
 
 unite with oxygen, and thus enabled it to decompose water ; 
 that is, the oxide of zinc was supposed to produce an effect 
 previous to its existence. The obscurity of this explanation 
 arises from regarding changes as consecutive, which are in 
 reality simultaneous. There is no succession in the process, 
 the oxide of zinc is not formed previously to its combination 
 with the acid, but at the same instant. There is, as it were, 
 but one chemical change, which consists in the combination 
 at one and the same moment of zinc with oxygen, and of ox- 
 ide of zinc with the acid ; and this change occurs because 
 these two affinities, acting together, overcome the attraction 
 of oxygen and hydrogen for one another." * 
 
 Now, if the imaginative artist will permit us, with all defer- 
 ence, to represent his combining intelligence under the figure 
 of sulphuric acid ; and if we suppose the fragment of zinc to 
 be embarrassed among infinitely numerous fragments of di- 
 verse metals, and the oxygen dispersed and mingled among 
 gases countless and indistinguishable, we shall have an excel- 
 lent type in material things of the action of the imagination 
 on the immaterial. Both actions are, I think, inexplicable, 
 for however simultaneous the chemical changes may be, yet 
 the causing power is the affinity of the acid for what has no 
 existence. It is neither to be explained how that affinity 
 operates on atoms uncombined, nor how the artist's desire for 
 an unconceived whole prompts him to the selection of neces- 
 sary divisions. 
 
 Now, this operation would be wonderful enough, if it were 
 concerned with two ideas only. But a powerfully imagina- 
 tive mind seizes and combines at the same instant, not only 
 ^ two, but all the important ideas of its poem or 
 
 and dignity^^lf picture, and while it works with any one of them, 
 imagination. Same iustaut Working with and modi- 
 
 fying all in their relations to it, never losing sight of their 
 bearings on each other ; as the motion of a snake's body goes 
 through all parts at once, and its volition acts at the same 
 instant in coils that go contrary ways. 
 
 * Elements of Chemistry, by the late Edward Turner, M.D. Part 
 II., Sec. IV. 
 
346 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 This faculty is indeed something that looks as if man were 
 made after the image of God. It is inconceivable, admira- 
 ble, altogether divine ; and yet wonderful as it may seem, it 
 is palpably evident that no less an operation is necessary for 
 the production of any great work, for, by the definition of 
 unity of membership, (the essential characteristic of great- 
 ness,) not only certain couples or groups of parts, but all 
 the. parts of a noble work must be separately imperfect ; 
 each must imply, and ask for all the rest, and the glory of 
 every one of them must consist in its relation to the rest, 
 neither while so much as one is wanting can any be right. 
 And it is evidently impossible to conceive in each separate 
 feature, a certain want or wrongness which can only be cor- 
 rected by the other features of the picture, (not by one or 
 two merely, but by all,) unless together with the want, we 
 conceive also of what is wanted, that is of all»the rest of the 
 work or picture. Hence Fuseli : — 
 
 " Second thoughts are admissible in painting and poetry 
 only as dressers of the first conception ; no great idea was 
 ever formed in fragments.." 
 
 " He alone can conceive and compose who sees the whole 
 at once before him." 
 
 There is, however, a limit to the power of all human im- 
 agination. When the relations to be observed are absolute- 
 ly necessary, and highly complicated, the mind cannot grasp 
 them, and the result is a total deprivation of all 
 
 §10. Its limits. - . . . . , 
 
 power oi imagination associative in such mat- 
 ter. For this reason, no human mind has ever conceived a 
 new animal. For as it is evident that in an animal, every 
 part implies all the rest ; that is, the form of the eye involves 
 the form of the brow and nose, these the form of the fore- 
 head and lip, these of the head and chin, and so on, so that 
 it is physically impossible to conceive of any one of these 
 members, unless we conceive the relation it bears to the 
 whole animal ; and as this relation is necessary, certain, and 
 complicated, allowing of no license or inaccuracy, the intelv 
 lect utterly fails under the load, and is reduced to mere com- 
 position, putting the bird's wing on men's shoulders, or half 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 347 
 
 the human body to half the horse's, in doing which there is no 
 action of imagination, but only of fancy ; though in the treat- 
 ment and contemplation of the compound form there may be 
 much imagination, as we shall presently see. (Chap. III. § 30.) 
 
 The matter, therefore, in which associative imagination can 
 § 11. How mani- be shown is that which admits of great license 
 ment^ of ^ uncer- Variety of arrangements, and in which a 
 
 Scien^y^^nius- Certain amount of relation only is required ; as 
 trated. especially in the elements of landscape paint- 
 
 ing, in which best it may be illustrated. 
 
 When an unimaginative painter is about to draw a tree, 
 (and we will suppose him, for better illustration of the point 
 in question, to have good feeling and correct knowledge of 
 the nature of trees,) he probably lays on his paper such a 
 general form as he knows to be characteristic of the tree to 
 be drawn, and such as he believes will fall in agreeably with 
 the other masses of his picture, which we will suppose partly 
 prepared. When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it 
 has done something he did not intend it to do. It has mim- 
 icked some prominent line, or overpowered some necessary 
 mass. He begins pruning and changing, and after several 
 experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form which does no ma- 
 terial mischief to any other. To this form he proceeds to 
 attach a trunk, and having probably a received notion or 
 rule (for the unimaginative painter never works without a 
 principle) that tree trunks ought to lean first one way and 
 then the other as they go up, and ought not to stand under 
 the middle of the tree, he sketches a serpentine form of req- 
 uisite propriety ; when it has gone up far enough, that is 
 till it begins to look disagreeably long, he will begin to ram- 
 ify it, and if there be another tree in the picture with two 
 large branches, he knows that this, by all laws of composition, 
 ought to have three or four, or some different number ; one 
 because he knows that if three or four branches start from 
 the same point they will look formal, therefore he makes them 
 start from points one above another, and because equal dis- 
 tances are improper, therefore they shall start at unequal 
 distances. When they are fairly started, he knows they 
 
348 
 
 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE, 
 
 must undulate or go backwards and forwards, which accord- 
 ingly he makes them do at random ; and because he knows 
 that all forms ought to be contrasted, therefore he makes one 
 bend down while the other three go up. The three that go 
 up he knows must not go up without interfering with each 
 other, and so he makes two of them cross. He thinks it also 
 proper that there should be variety of character in them, so 
 he makes the one that bends down graceful and flexible, and 
 of the two that cross, he splinters one and makes a stump 
 of it. He repeats the process among the more complicated 
 minor boughs, until coming to the smallest, he thinks farther 
 care unnecessary, but draws them freely, and by chance. 
 Having to put on the foliage, he will make it flow properly 
 in the direction of the tree's growth, he will make all the 
 extremities graceful, but will be grievously plagued by find- 
 ing them come all alike, and at last will be obliged to spoil a 
 number of them altogether, in order to obtain opposition. 
 They will not, however, be united in this their spoliation, but 
 will remain uncomfortably separate and individually ill-tem- 
 pered. He consoles himself by the reflection that it is un- 
 natural for all of them to be equally perfect. 
 
 Now I suppose that through the whole of this process he 
 has been able to refer to his definite memory or conception 
 of nature for every one of the fragments he has successively 
 §12. Laws of art, added, that the details, color, fractures, inser- 
 Jhe 'unfmagina- ^ions, ctc, of his boughs, are all either actual 
 recollections or based on secure knowledge of 
 the tree, (and herein I allow far more than is commonly the 
 case with unimaginative painters.) But as far as the pro- 
 cess of combination is concerned, it is evident that from be- 
 ginning to end his laws have been his safety, and his plague 
 has been his liberty. He has been compelled to work at ran- 
 dom, or under the guidance of feeling only, whenever there 
 was anything left to his own decisiouo He has never been 
 decided in anything except in what he must or must not do. 
 He has walked as a drunken man on a broad road, his guides 
 are the hedges ; and between these limits, the broader the 
 way, the worse he gets on. 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 349 
 
 The advance of the imaginative artist is precisely the re- 
 verse of this. He has no laws. He defies all restraint, and 
 cuts down all hedges. There is nothing within the limits of 
 o . ^ .n- natural possibility that he dares not do, or that 
 
 § 13. Are by the ^ ^ . ^ 
 
 imaginative he allows the necessity of doing. The laws of 
 
 painter despised. *^ . 
 
 Tests of imagina- nature he knows, these are to nim no restraint. 
 
 They are his own nature. All other laws or 
 limits he sets at utter defiance, his journey is over an un- 
 trodden and pathless plain. But he sees his end over the 
 waste from the first, and goes straight at it, never losing 
 sight of it, nor throwing away a step. Nothing can stop 
 him, nothing turn him aside ; falcons and lynxes are of slow 
 and uncertain sight compared with his. He saw his tree, 
 trunk, boughs, foliage and all, from the first moment ; not 
 only the tree but the sky behind it ; not only that tree or 
 sky, but all the other great features of his picture : by what 
 intense power of instantaneous selection and amalgamation 
 cannot be explained, but by this it may be proved and tested, 
 that if we examine the tree of the unimaginative painter, we 
 shall find that on removing any part or parts of it, the rest 
 will indeed suffer, as being deprived of the proper develop- 
 ment of a tree, and as involving a blank space that wants 
 occupation ; but the portions left are not made discordant 
 or disagreeable. They are absolutely and in themselves as 
 valuable as they can be, every stem is a perfect stem, and 
 every twig a graceful twig, or at least as perfect and as grace- 
 ful as they were before the removal of the rest. But if we 
 try the same experiment on the imaginative painter's work, 
 and break off the merest stem or twig of it, it all goes to 
 pieces like a Prince Rupert's drop. There is not so much as 
 a seed of it but it lies on the tree's life, like the grain upon 
 the tongue of Chaucer's sainted child. Take it away, and 
 the boughs will sing to us no longer. All is dead and cold. 
 §14 The monot- This then is the first sign of the presence of 
 ony of unimagin- real imagination as opposed to composition. But 
 
 ative treatment. , . . , . 
 
 here is another not less important. 
 We have seen that as each part is selected and fitted by 
 the unimaginative painter, he renders it, in itself, as beauti- 
 
350 
 
 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 f ul as he is able. If it be ugly, it remains so, he is incapable 
 of correcting it by the addition of another ugliness, and 
 therefore he chooses all his features as fair as they may be 
 (at least if his object be beauty.) But a small proportion 
 only of the ideas he has at his disposal will reach his stand- 
 ard of absolute-beauty. The others will be of no use to him, 
 and among those which he permits himself to use, there will 
 be so marked a family likeness, that he will be more and 
 more cramped, as his picture advances, for want of material, 
 and tormented by multiplying resemblances, unless disguised 
 by some artifice of light and shade or other forced difference, 
 and with all the differences he can imagine, his tree will yet 
 show a sameness and sickening repetition in all its parts, and 
 all his trees will be like one another, except so far as one 
 leans east and another west, one is broadest at the top and 
 another at the bottom, while through all this insipid repeti- 
 tion, the means by which he forces contrast, dark boughs 
 opposed to light, rugged to smooth, etc., will be painfully 
 evident, to the utter destruction of all dignity and repose. 
 
 The imapfinative work is necessarily the absolute 
 
 § 15. Imagina- • /. n i • a n • 
 
 tion never re- oDDOSitc of all this. As all its parts are imper- 
 
 peats itself. . . . 
 
 feet, and as there is an unlimited supply of im- 
 perfection, (for the ways in which things may be wrong are 
 infinite,) the imagination is never at a loss, nor ever likely to 
 repeat itself ; nothing comes amiss to it, but whatever rude 
 matter it receives, it instantly so arranges that it comes right; 
 all things fall into their place and appear in that place per- 
 fect, useful, and evidently not to be spared, so that of its 
 combinations there is endless variety, and every intractable 
 and seemingly unavailable fragment that we give to it, is 
 instantly turned to some brilliant use, and made the nucleus 
 of a new group of glory ; however poor or common the gift, 
 it will be thankful for it, treasure it up, and pay in gold, and 
 it has that life in it and fire, that wherever it passes, among 
 the dead bones and dust of things, behold a shaking, and the 
 bones come together, bone to his bone. 
 
 And now we find what noble sympathy and unity there is 
 between the imaginative and theoretic faculties. Both agree 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 351 
 
 in this, that they reject nothing, and are thankful for all ; 
 but the theoretic faculty takes out of everything that which 
 § 16. Keiation of is beautiful, while the imaginative faculty takes 
 Scui^Tjrfhe liold of the very imperfections which the theo- 
 theoretic. retic rejects, and by means of these angles and 
 
 roughnesses, it joints and bolts the separate stones into a 
 mighty temple, wherein the theoretic faculty in its turn, 
 does deepest homage. Thus sympathetic in their desires, 
 harmoniously diverse in their operation, each working for 
 the other with what the other needs not, all things external 
 to man are by one or other turned to good. 
 
 Now we have hitherto, for the sake of clearness, opposed 
 the total absence of imagination to the perfect presence of 
 it, in order to make the difference between composition and 
 imagination thoroughly understood. But if we are to give 
 „ examples of either the want or the presence of 
 
 § 17. Modifica- , ^ . . \ . 
 
 tionofits mani- the powcr, it IS neccssary to note the circum- 
 stances by which both are modified. In the 
 first place, few artists of any standing are totally devoid of 
 this faculty, some small measure of it most of them possess, 
 though of all the forms of intellect, this, and its sister, pen- 
 etrative imagination, are the rarest and most precious ; but 
 few painters have reached eminence without some leaven of 
 it, whether it can be increased by practice I doubt. On the 
 other hand, fewer still are possessed of it in very high de- 
 gree, and even with the men of most gigantic power in this 
 respect, of whom, I think, Tintoret stands far the head, there 
 are evident limits to its exercise, and portions to be found 
 in their works that have not been included in the original 
 grasp of them, but have been suggested and incorporated 
 during their progress, or added in decoration ; and with the 
 great mass of painters there are frequent flaws and failures 
 in the' conception, so that, when they intend to produce a 
 perfect work they throw their thought into different experi- 
 mental forms, and decorate it and discipline it long before 
 realizing it, so that there is a certain amount of mere com- 
 position in the most imaginative works ; and a grain or two 
 of imagination commonly in the most artificial. And again, 
 
352 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 whatever portions of a picture are taken honestly and with- 
 out alteration from nature, have, so far as they go, the look 
 of imagination, because all that nature does is imaginative, 
 that is, perfect as a whole, and made up of imperfect feat- 
 ures ; so that the painter of the meanest imaginative power 
 may yet do grand things, if he will keep to strict portraiture, 
 and it would be well if all artists were to endeavor to do so, 
 for if they have imagination, it will force its way in spite of 
 them, and show itself in their every stroke, and if not, they 
 will not get it by leaving nature, but only sink into nothing- 
 ness. 
 
 Keeping these points in view, it is interesting to observe 
 the different degrees and relations of the imagination, as ac- 
 companied with more or less feeling or desire of harmony, 
 §18. Instances yis^or of Conception, or constancv of reference 
 
 of absence of im- i p " 
 
 agination.— to truth. Of men of name, perhaps Claude is 
 Poussfn. ^^^^^^ the best instance of a want of imagination, 
 nearly total, borne out by painful but untaught study of nat- 
 ure, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form, with none 
 whatever for harmony of expression. In Gaspar Poussin, 
 we have the same want of imagination disguised by more 
 masculine qualities of mind, and grander reachings after sym- 
 pathy. Thus in the sacrifice of Isaac in our own gallery, the 
 spirit of the composition is solemn and unbroken ; it would 
 have been a grand picture if the forms of the mass of foliage 
 on the right, and of the clouds in the centre, had not been 
 hoplessly unimaginative. The stormy wind of the picture of 
 Dido and Eneas blows loudly through its leaves, but the total 
 want of invention in the cloud forms bears it down beyond 
 redemption. The foreground tree of the La Riccia (compare 
 Part II. Sec. VI. Chap. I., § 6.) is another characteristic in- 
 stance of absolute nullit}' of imagination. 
 
 In Salvator, the imagination is vigorous, the composition 
 § 19 Its pres- dcxtcrous and clever, as in the St. Jerome of the 
 Brera Gallery, the Diogenes of the Pitti, and 
 Titian, Tintoret. ^]^^ pictures of the Guadagni palace. All are 
 rendered valueless by coarseness of feeling and habitual non- 
 reference to nature. 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 353 
 
 All the landscape of Nicolo Poussiri is imaginative, but the 
 development of the power in Tintoret and Titian is so un- 
 approachably intense that the mind unwillingly rests else- 
 where. The four landscapes v^hich occur to me as the most 
 magnificently characteristic are, first, the Flight into Egypt, of 
 the Scuola di San Rocco (Tintoret ;) secondly, the Titian of 
 the Camuccini collection at Rome, with the figures by John 
 Bellini ; thirdly,- Titian's St. Jerome, in the Brera Gallery at 
 Milan ; and fourthly, the St. Pietro Martire, which I name 
 last, in spite of its importance, because there is something 
 unmeaning and unworthy of Titian about the undulation of 
 the trunks, and the upper part of it is destroyed by the in- 
 trusion of some dramatic clouds of that species which I have 
 enough described in our former examination of the central 
 cloud region, § 13. 
 
 I do not mean to set these four works above the rest of 
 the landscape of these masters ; I name them only because 
 the landscape is in them prominent and characteristic. It 
 would be well to compare with them the other backgrounds 
 of Tintoret in the Scuola, especially that of the Temptation 
 and the Agony in the Garden, and the landscape of the two 
 large pictures in the church of La Madonna delP Orto. 
 § 20. And Tur- ^ut for immediate and close illustration, it is 
 "^^* perhaps best to refer to a work more accessi- 
 
 ble, the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, in Liber Studi- 
 orum. 
 
 I know of no landscape more purely or magnificently im- 
 aginative or bearing more distinct evidence of the relative and 
 simultaneous conception of the parts. Let the reader first 
 cover with his hand the two trunks that rise against the sky 
 on the right, and ask himself how any termination of the cen- 
 tral mass so itgly as the straight trunk which he will then 
 painfully see, could have been conceived or admitted without 
 simultaneous conception of the trunks he has taken away on 
 the right ? Let him again conceal the whole central mass, 
 and leave these two only, and again ask himself whether any- 
 thing so ugly as that bare trunk in the shape of a Y, could 
 have been admitted without reference to the central mass ? 
 Vol. II.— 23 
 
354 OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 Then let him remove from this trunk its two arms, and try 
 the effect ; let him again remove the single trunk on the ex- 
 treme right ; then let him try the third trunk without the 
 excrescence at the bottom of it ; finally, let him conceal the 
 fourth trunk from the right, with the slender boughs at the 
 top ; he will find in each case that he has destroyed a feature 
 on which everything else depends, and if proof be required 
 of the vital power of still smaller features, let him remove the 
 sunbeam that comes through beneath the faint mass of trees 
 on the hill in the distance. * 
 
 It is useless to enter into farther particulars ; the reader 
 may be left to his ow^n close examination of this and of the 
 other works of Turner, in which he will always find the asso- 
 ciative imagination developed in the most profuse and mar- 
 vellous modes, especially in the drawing of foliage and skies, 
 in both of which the presence or absence of the associative 
 power may best be tested in all artists. I have, however, 
 confined my present illustrations chiefly to foliage, because 
 other operations of the imagination besides the associative, 
 interfere extensively in the treatment of sky. 
 
 There remains but one question to be determined relating 
 § 21 The due ^^^^ faculty, what operation, namely, suppos- 
 function of As- ino^ it posscsscd in his^h dee^ree, it has or ousrht 
 
 sociative imagi- i -i « ^ 
 
 nation with re- to havc lu the artist s treatment of natural scen- 
 
 spect to nature. 
 
 ery. 
 
 I have just said that nature is always imaginative, but it 
 does not follow that her imagination is always of high sub- 
 ject, or that the imagination of all the parts is of a like and 
 sympathetic kind ; the boughs of every bramble bush are 
 imaginatively arranged, so are those of every oak and cedar ; 
 but it does not follow that there is imaginative sympathy be- 
 tween bramble and cedar. There are few natural scenes 
 whose harmonies are not conceivably improvable either by 
 banishment of some discordant point, or by addition of some 
 sympathetic one ; it constantly happens that there is a pro- 
 fuseness too great to be comprehended, or an inequality in 
 
 * This ray of light, however, has an imaginative power of another 
 kind presently to be spoken of. Compare Chap. IV. § 18. 
 
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE. 
 
 355 
 
 the pitch, meaning, and intensity of different parts. The 
 imagination will banish all that is extraneous, it will seize 
 out of the many threads of different feeling which nature 
 has suffered to become entangled, one only, and where that 
 seems thin and likely to break, it will spin it stouter, and in 
 doing this, it never knots, but weaves in the new thread, so 
 that all its work looks as pure and true as nature itself, and 
 cannot be guessed from it but by its exceeding simplicity, 
 {known from it, it cannot be,) so that herein we j&nd another 
 test of the imaginative work, that it looks always as if it had 
 been gathered straight from nature, whereas the unimagina- 
 tive shows its joints and knots, and is visibly composition. 
 
 And here then we arrive at an important conclusion 
 (though one somewhat contrary to the positions commonly 
 held on the subject,) namely, that if anything looks unnat- 
 § 22 The sign of ural, there can be no imagination in it (at least 
 t'^r^reJ^oe not associative.) We frequently hear works 
 of absolute truth. ^^^^ ^^^^ ^j.^^]^ jj^ them, justified or elevated 
 
 on the score of being imaginative. Let it be understood once 
 for all, that imagination never designs to touch anything but 
 truth, and though it does not follow that where there is the 
 appearance of truth, there has been imaginative operation, of 
 this we may be assured, that where there is appearance of 
 falsehood, the imagination has had no hand.* 
 
 For instance, the landscape above* mentioned of Titian's 
 St. Jerome may, for aught I know, be a pure transcript of a 
 rocky slope covered with chestnuts aniong his native moun- 
 tains. It has all the look of a sketch from nature ; if it be 
 not, the imagination developed in it is of the highest order ; 
 if it be, the imagination has only acted in the suggestion of 
 the dark sky, of the shape of the flakes of solemn cloud, and 
 of the gleam of russet light along the distant ground.f 
 
 * Compare Chap. III. § 30. 
 
 f It is said at Venice that Titian took the trees of the St. Pietro Mar- 
 tiere out of his garden opposite Murano. I think this unlikely ; there 
 is something about the lower trunks that has a taint of composition : 
 the thought of the whole, however, is thoroughly fine. The back- 
 grouiids of the frescoes at Padua are also very characteristic, and the 
 
356 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 Again, it is impossible to tell whether the two nearest 
 trunks of the ^sacus and Hesperie of the Liber Studiorum, 
 especially the large one on the right with the ivy, have been 
 invented, or taken straight from nature, they have all the 
 look of accurate portraiture. I can hardly imagine anything 
 so perfect to have been obtained except from the real thing ; 
 but we know that the imagination must have begun to oper- 
 ate somewhere, we cannot tell where, since the multitudinous 
 harmonies of the rest of the picture could hardly in any real 
 scene have continued so inviolately sweet. 
 
 The final tests, therefore, of the work of associative imagi- 
 nation are its intense simplicity, its perfect harmony, and its 
 absolute truth. It may be a harmony, majestic, or humble, 
 abrupt, or prolonged, but it is always a governed and perfect 
 whole, evidencing in all its relations the weight, prevalence, 
 and universal dominion of an awful, inexplicable Power ; a 
 chastising, animating, and disposing Mind. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OF IMAGINATION PENETEATIVB. 
 
 Thus far we have been defining that combining operation 
 of the imagination, which appears to be in a sort mechanical, 
 yet takes place in the same inexplicable modes, whatever be 
 §1. Imagination Order of Conception submitted to it, though 
 cem'ed''nof'w?th ^ chosc to illustrate it by its dealings with mere 
 the combining but matter before takin^r coo-nizance of any nobler 
 
 apprehendmg of ^ & o J ^ 
 
 things. subjects of imagery. We must now examine 
 
 the dealing of the imagination with its separate conceptions, 
 and endeavor to understand not only its principles of selec- 
 tion, but its modes of apprehension with respect to what it 
 selects. 
 
 well-known wood-cut of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, one of the 
 mightiest of existing landscape thoughts ; and yet it is pure portraiture 
 of pine and Spanish chestnut. 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 357 
 
 When Milton's Satan first " rears from off the pool, his 
 mighty stature," the image of Leviathan before suggested 
 not being yet abandoned, the effect on the fire- 
 
 § 2. Milton's and .-, 'v-i .CxU u j ^ 
 
 Dante's descrip- wave IS described as oi the upheaved monster 
 tion of flame. ^j^^ ocean Stream. 
 
 On each hand the flames, 
 
 Driven backwards, slope their pointiDg spires, and rolled 
 In billows, leave in the midst a horrid vale." 
 
 And then follows a fiercely restless piece of volcanic im- 
 agery : 
 
 As when the force 
 Of subterranean wind transports a hill 
 Torn from Peloras, or the shattered side 
 Of thundering ^tna, whose combustible 
 And fuell'd entrails thence conceiving fire. 
 Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, 
 And leave a singed bottom, all involved 
 With stench and smoke ; such resting found the sole 
 Of unblest feet." 
 
 Yet I think all this is too far detailed, and deals too much 
 with externals ; we feel rather the form of the fire-waves than 
 their fury, we walk upon them too securely, and the fuel, sub- 
 limation, smoke, and singeing, seem to me images only of 
 partial combustion ; they vary and extend the conception, 
 but they lower the thermometer. Look back, if you will, 
 and add to the description the glimmering of the livid flames ; 
 the sulphurous hail and red lightning ; yet altogether, how- 
 ever they overwhelm us with horror, fail of making us thor- 
 oughly, unendurably hot. The intense essence of flame has 
 not been given. Now hear Dante : — 
 
 " Feriami U Sole in su Tomero destro 
 Che gia raggiando tutto TOccidente 
 Mutam in bianco aspetto di eilestro, 
 Ed 10 f acea con Vomhra piu rovenie 
 Parer la fiamma.^'' 
 
 That is a slight touch ; he has not gone to ^tna nor Pel- 
 orus for fuel j but we shall not soon recover from it — he has 
 
358 OF IMAGINATION PENETBATIVE. 
 
 taken our breath away and leaves us gasping. No smoke 
 nor cinders there. Pure, white, hurtling, formless flame ; very 
 fire crystal, we cannot make spires nor waves of it, nor divide 
 it, nor walk on it, there is no question about singeing soles 
 of feet. It is lambent annihilation. 
 
 Such is always the mode in which the highest imaginative 
 faculty seizes its materials. It never stops at crusts or ashes, 
 or outward images of any kind, it ploughs them all aside, and 
 § 3. The imagina- pluugcs iuto the Very Central fiery heart, nothing 
 by^the^Tnnermost ^^^^ ^^^^^ Content its Spirituality, whatever sem- 
 voint. blances and various outward shows and phases 
 
 its subject may possess, go for nothing, it gets within all 
 fence, cuts down to the root, and drinks the very vital sap of 
 that it deals with ; once there it is at liberty to throw up what 
 new shoots it will, so always that the true juice and sap be 
 in them, and to prune and twist them at its pleasure, and 
 bring them to fairer fruit than grew on the old tree ; but all 
 this pruning and twisting is work that it likes not, and often 
 does ill ; its function and gift are the getting at the root, its 
 nature and dignity depend on its holding things always by 
 the heart. Take its hand from off the beating of that, and 
 it will prophesy no longer ; it looks not in the eyes, it judges 
 not by the voice, it describes not by outward features, all 
 that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms from within. 
 
 It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling 
 this penetrating, possession-taking faculty, imagination. Be 
 it so, the name is of little consequence ; the faculty itself, 
 called by what name we will, I insist upon as 
 
 § 4. It acts intui- , , . „ , « mi 
 
 tively and with- the highest intellectual power of man. I here 
 
 out reasoning. . . . . . ^ , . , , , 
 
 IS no reasoning in it, it works not by algebra, 
 nor by integral calculus, it is a piercing, Pholas-like mind's 
 tongue that works and tastes into the very rock heart, no 
 matter what be the subject submitted to it, substance or 
 spirit, all is alike, divided asunder, joint and marrow, what- 
 ever utmost truth, life, principle, it has. laid bare, and that 
 which has no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its or- 
 iginal smoke at a touch. The whispers at men's ears it lifts 
 into visible angels. Vials that have lain sealed in the deep 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 359 
 
 sea a thousand years it unseals, and brings out of them 
 Genii. 
 
 Every great conception of poet or painter is held and 
 treated by this faculty. Every character that is so much as 
 touched by men like JEschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shaks- 
 peare, is by them held by the heart ; and every circumstance 
 or sentence of their being, speaking, or seeming, is seized 
 by process from within, and is referred to that inner secret 
 spring of which the hold is never lost for an instant ; so that 
 every sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, 
 opens for us a way down to the heart, leads us to the centre, 
 and then leaves us to gather what more we may ; it is the 
 open sesame of a huge, obscure, endless cave, with inexhaust- 
 ible treasure of pure gold scattered in it : the wandering 
 about and gathering the pieces may be left to any of us, all 
 can accomplish that ; but the first opening of that invisible 
 door in the rock is of the imagination only. 
 
 Hence there is in every word set down by the imaginative 
 mind an awful under-current of meaning, and evidence and 
 shadow upon it of the deep places out of which it has come. 
 § 5. Signs of it oftcu obscurc, often half told, for he who 
 
 in language. wrotc it, in his clcar seeing of the things be- 
 neath, may have been impatient of detailed interpretation, 
 but if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us 
 always securely back to that metropolis of the soul's domin- 
 ion from which we may follow out all the ways and tracks 
 to its farthest coasts. 
 
 I think the "Quel giorno piti non vi leggemmo avante " of 
 Francesca di Rimini, and the " He has no children " of Mac- 
 duff are as fine instances as can be given, but the sign and 
 mark of it are visible on every line of the four great men 
 above instanced. 
 
 The imaginative writer, on the other hand, as he has never 
 ^ pierced to the heart, so he can never touch it : 
 
 §6 Absence ot ^ . ' . , , , 
 
 imagination, it he has to paint a passion, he remembers the 
 
 how shown. , . p - ^ ^^ • p ' 
 
 external signs oi it, he collects expressions oi it 
 from other writers, he searches for similes, he composes, ex- 
 aggerates, heaps term on term, figure on figure, till we 
 
360 
 
 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 groan beneath the cold, disjointed heap ; but it is all faggot 
 and no fire, the life breath is not in it, his passion has the 
 form of the Leviathan, but it never makes the deep boil, he 
 fastens us all at anchor in the scaly rind of it, our sympa- 
 thies remain as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. 
 
 And that virtue of originality that men so strain after, is 
 not newness, as they vainly think, (there is nothing new,) it 
 is only genuineness ; it all depends on this single glorious 
 faculty of getting to the spring of things and working out 
 from that ; it is the coolness, and clearness, and delicious- 
 ness of the water fresh from the fountain head, opposed to the 
 thick, hot, unrefreshing drainage from other men's meadows. 
 
 This freshness, however, is not to be taken for an infallible 
 . . siffn of imasrination, inasmuch as it results also 
 
 §7. Distinction ^ , ,^ ' 
 
 between imagin- trom a viviQ Operation oi lancy, whose parallel 
 ation and fancy. ^jj-g division of the imaginative fac- 
 
 ulty it is here necessary to distinguish. 
 
 I believe it will be found that the entirely unimaginative 
 mind sees nothing of the object it has to dwell upon or de- 
 scribe, and is therefore utterly unable, as it is blind itself, to 
 set anything before the eyes of the reader.* 
 
 The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of 
 the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail. f 
 
 The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes 
 them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, 
 in its giving of outer detail. 
 
 Take an instance. A writer with neither imagination nor 
 fancy, describing a fair lip, does not see it, but thinks about 
 it, and about what is said of it, and calls it well-turned, or 
 rosy, or delicate, or lovely, or afflicts us with some other 
 quenching and chilling epithet. Now hear fancy speak, — 
 ' * Her lips were red, and one was thin, 
 Compared with that was next her chin, 
 Some bee had stung it newly." X 
 
 * Compare Arist. Rhet. III. 11. 
 
 f For the distinction between fancy and simple conception, see Chap. 
 IV. § 3. 
 
 X I take this and the next instance from Leigh Hunt's admirable piece 
 of criticism, Imagination and Fancy,'' which ought to be read with 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 361 
 
 The real, red, bright being of the lip is there in a moment. 
 But it is all outside ; no expression yet, no mind, Let us go 
 a step farther with Warner, of fair Rosamond struck by 
 Eleanor. 
 
 " With that she dashed her on the lips 
 So dyed double red ; 
 Hard was the heart that gave the blow, 
 Soft were those lips that bled." 
 
 The tenderness of mind begins to mingle with the outside 
 color, the imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shel- 
 ley — 
 
 Lamp of life, thy lips are burning 
 Through the veil that seems to hide them, 
 As the radiant lines of morning 
 Through thin clouds, ere they divide them." 
 
 There dawns the entire soul in that morning ; yet we may 
 stop if we choose at the image still external, at the crimson 
 clouds. The imagination is contemplative rather than pene- 
 trative. Last, hear Hamlet, — 
 
 Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how 
 oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, 
 your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on 
 a roar ? " 
 
 There is the essence of lip, and the full power of the im- 
 agination. 
 
 Again, compare Milton's flowers in Lycidas with Perdita's. 
 In Milton it happens, I think, generally, and in the case be- 
 fore us most certainly, that the imagination is mixed and 
 broken with fancy, and so the strength of the imagery is 
 part of iron and part of clay. 
 
 care, and to which, though somewhat loosely arranged, I may refer for 
 all the filling up and illustration that the subject requires. With re- 
 spect to what has just been said respecting want of imagination, com- 
 pare his criticism of Addison's Cato, p. 28. I cannot, however, confirm 
 his judgment, nor admit his selection of instances, among painters : he 
 has looked to their manner only and habitual choice of subject, without 
 feeling their power ; and has given work to the coarseness, mindlessness, 
 and eclecticism of Guido and the Carracci, which in its poetical de- 
 mand of tenderness might have foiled Pinturicchio.; of dignity, Leo- 
 nardo ; and of color, Giorgione. 
 
363 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 Bring the rathe primrose, that forsaken dies (Imagination) 
 
 The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, (Nugatory) 
 The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, — (Fancy) 
 
 The glowing violet, (Imagination) 
 
 The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine, (Fancy, vulgar) 
 
 With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head, (Imagination) 
 
 And every flower that sad embroidery wears." (Mixed) 
 
 Then hear Perdita : — 
 
 O, Proserpina, 
 For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall 
 From Dis's wagon. Daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty. Violets, dim, 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses 
 That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady 
 Most incident to maids." 
 
 Observe how the imagination in these last lines goes into 
 the very inmost soul of every flower, after having touched 
 them all at first with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of 
 Proserpine's ; and gilded them with celestial gathering, and 
 never stops on their spots, or their bodily shape, while Mil- 
 ton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us off with that 
 unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that without this bit 
 of paper-staining would have been the most precious to us 
 of all. " There is pansies, that's for thoughts." 
 
 So I believe it will be found throughout the operation of 
 the fancy, that it has to do with the outsides of things, and 
 is content therewith : of this there can be no doubt in such 
 § 8 Fancy how P^^'^^S^'^ thsit description of Mab, so often 
 involved with im- given as an illustration of it, and many other 
 instances will be found in Leigh Hunt's work 
 already referred to. Only some embarrassment is caused by 
 passages in which fancy^is seizing the outward signs of emo- 
 tion, understanding them as such, and yet, in pursuance of 
 her proper function, taking for her share, and for that which 
 she chooses to dwell upon, the outside sign rather than the 
 emotion. Note in Macbeth that brilliant instance. 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 363 
 
 Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky 
 And fan our people cold." 
 
 The outward shiver and coldness of fear is seized on, and 
 irregularly but admirably attributed by the fancy to the 
 drift of the banners. Compare Solomon's Song where the 
 imagination stays not at the outside, but dwells on the fear- 
 ful emotion itself ? 
 
 Who is she that looked forth as the morning ; fair as the naoon, 
 clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners ? " 
 
 Now, if this be the prevailing characteristic of the two 
 faculties, it is evident that certain other collateral differences 
 will result from it. Fancy, as she stays at the externals, can 
 § 9. Fancy is never feel. She is one of the hardest hearted of 
 never serious. intellectual faculties, or rather one of the 
 
 most purely and simply intellectual. She cannot be made 
 serious,* no edge-tools but she will play with ; whereas the 
 imagination is in all things the reverse. She cannot be 
 but serious ; she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too 
 earnestly, ever to smile. There is something in the heart of 
 everything, if we can reach it, that we shall not be inclined to 
 laugh at. The dvi^pLOfxov yiXao-fjia of the sea is on its surface, 
 not in the deep. 
 
 And thus there is reciprocal action between the intensity 
 of moral feeling and the power of imagination ; for, on the 
 one hand, those who have keenest sympathy are those who 
 § 10. Want of ^^^^ closest and pierce deepest, and hold se- 
 seriousness the curesti and, on the other, those who have so 
 
 bar to high art , ' ' ^ 
 
 time*^^ pj^esent pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things, 
 are filled with the most intense passion and gen- 
 tleness of sympathy. Hence, I suppose that the powers of 
 the imagination may always be tested by accompanying ten- 
 derness of emotion, and thus, ^as Byron said,) there is no 
 tenderness like Dante's, neither any intensity nor serious- 
 ness like his, such seriousness that it is incapable of perceiv- 
 ing that which is commonplace or ridiculous, but fuses all 
 
 * Fancy, in her third function may, however, become serious, and 
 gradually rise into imagination in doing so. Compare Chap. IV. § 5. 
 
364 
 
 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 down into its white-hot fire ; and, on the other hand, I sup- 
 pose the chief bar to the action of imagination, and stop to 
 all greatness in this present age of ours, is its mean and shal- 
 low love of jest and jeer, so that if there be in any good and 
 lofty work a flaw or failing, or undipped vulnerable part 
 where sarcasm may stick or stay, it is caught at, and pointed 
 at, and buzzed about, and fixed upon, and stung into, as a 
 recent wound is by flies, and nothing is ever taken seriously 
 nor as it was meant, but always, if it may be, turned the 
 wrong way, and misunderstood ; and while this is so, there 
 is not, nor cannot be any hope of achievement of high things; 
 men dare not open their hearts to us, if we are to broil them 
 on a thorn-fire. 
 
 This, then, is one essential difference between imagination 
 and fancy, and another is like it and resultant from it, that 
 the imagination being at the heart of things, poises herself 
 § 11 imagina- ^ti\\ quiet, and brooding ; compre- 
 
 nationis quiet; hendinsT all around her with her fixed look, but 
 
 fancy, restless. i « • i • i /. i • 
 
 the fancy staying at the outside of things, can- 
 not see them all at once, but runs hither and thither, and 
 round and about to see more and more, bounding merrily 
 from point to point, and glittering here and there, but neces- 
 sarily always settling, if she settle at all, on a point only, 
 never embracing the whole. And from these single points 
 she can strike out analogies and catch resemblances, which, 
 so far as the point she looks at is concerned, are true, but 
 would be false, if she could see through to the other side. 
 This, however, she cares not to do, the point of contact is 
 enough for her, and even if there be a gap left between the 
 two things and they do not quite touch, she will spring from 
 one to the other like an electric spark, and be seen brightest 
 in her leaping. 
 
 Now these differences between the imagination and the 
 „ ^„ ^ fancy hold, not onlv in the way they lay hold of 
 
 § 12. The de- ' . - ^ . 
 
 tailing operation separate Conceptions, but even in the points they 
 
 of fancy. ^ i /. i-i 
 
 occupy of time, for the fancy loves to run hither 
 and thither in time, and to follow long chains of circum- 
 stances from link to link ; but the imagination, if it may, 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 365 
 
 gets holds of a moment or link in the middle that implies all 
 the rest, and fastens there. Hence Fuseli's aphorism, In- 
 vention never suffers the action to expire, nor the spectator's 
 fancy to consume itself in preparation, or stagnate into re- 
 pose. It neither begins from the egg, nor coldly gathers the 
 remains." 
 
 In Retsch's illustrations to Schiller's Kampf mit dem Dra- 
 chen, we have an instance, miserably feeble indeed, but char- 
 acteristic, and suited to our present purpose, of the detail- 
 ing, finishing action of the fancy. The dragon is drawn from 
 head to tail, vulture eyes, serpent teeth, forked tongue, fiery 
 crest, armor, claws and coils as grisly as may be ; his den is 
 drawn, and all the dead bones in it, and all the savage for- 
 est-country about it far and wide ; we have him from the 
 beginning of his career to the end, devouring, rampant, vic- 
 torious over whole armies, gorged with death ; we are pres- 
 ent at all the preparations for his attack, see him receive his 
 death-wound, and our anxieties are finally becalmed by see- 
 ing him lie peaceably dead on his back. 
 
 All the time we have never got into the dragon heart, we 
 have never once felt real pervading horror, nor sense of the 
 creature's being ; it is throughout nothing but an ugly com- 
 13 And su position of claw and scale. Now take up Tur- 
 gcstiye, of the ncr's Jason, Liber Studiorum, and observe how 
 imagination. imagination can concentrate all this, and in- 
 
 finitely more, into one moment. No far forest country, no 
 secret paths, nor cloven hills, nothing but a gleam of pale 
 horizontal sky, that broods over pleasant places far away, 
 and sends in, through the wild overgrowth of the thicket, a 
 ray of broken daylight into the hopeless pit. No flaunting 
 plumes nor brandished lances, but stern purpose in the turn 
 of the crestless helmet, visible victory in the drawing back 
 of the prepared right arm behind the steady point. No more 
 claws, nor teeth, nor manes, nor stinging tails. We have 
 the dragon, like everything else, by the middle. We need 
 see no more of him. All his horror is in that fearful, slow, 
 grinding upheaval of the single coil. Spark after spark of 
 it, ring after ring, is sliding into the light, the slow glitter 
 
366 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 steals along him step by step, broader and broader, a light- 
 ing of funeral lamps one by one, quicker and quicker ; a mo- 
 ment more, and he is out upon us, all crash and blaze among 
 those broken trunks ; — but he will be nothing then to what 
 he is now. 
 
 Now, it is necessary here very carefully to distinguish be- 
 tween that character of the work which depends on the im- 
 agination of the beholder, and that which results from the 
 §14. This Bug- imagination of the artist, for a work is often 
 oppoIeTto ^va^ Called imaginative when it merely leaves room 
 ^^'^^y- for the action of the imagination ; whereas 
 
 though nearly all imaginative works do this, yet it may be 
 done also by works that have in them no imagination at all. 
 A few shapeless scratches or accidental stains on a wall ; or 
 the forms oi clouds, or any other complicated accidents, will 
 set the imao-ination to work to coin somethinor out of them, 
 and all paintings in which there is much gloom or mystery, 
 possess therein a certain sublimity owing to the play 
 given to the beholder's imagination, without, necessarily, 
 being in the slightest degree imaginative themselves. The 
 vacancy of a truly imaginative work results not from 
 absence of ideas, or incapability of grasping and detailing 
 them, but from the painter having told the whole pith and 
 power of his subject and disdaining to tell more, and the 
 sign of this being the case is, that the imagination of the be- 
 holder is forced to act in a certain mode, and feels itself over- 
 powered and borne away by that of the painter, and not able 
 to defend itself, nor go which way it will, and the value of 
 the work depends on the truth, authority, and inevitability of 
 this suggestiveness, and on the absolute right choice of the 
 critical moment. Now observe in this work of Turner's, that 
 the whole value of it depends on the character of curve as- 
 sumed by the serpent's body ; for had it been a mere semi- 
 circle, or gone down in a series of smaller coils, it would have 
 been in the first case, ridiculous, as false and unlike a ser- 
 pent, and in the second, disgusting, nothing more than an 
 exaggerated viper, but it is that coming straight at the right 
 hand which suggests the drawing forth of an enormous 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 367 
 
 weight, and gives the bent part its springing look, that fright- 
 ens us. Again, remove the light trunk * on the left, and 
 observe how useless all the gloom of the picture would have 
 been, if this trunk had not given it depth and holloioness. 
 Finally and chiefly, observe that the painter is not satisfied 
 even with all the suggestiveness thus obtained, but to make 
 sure of us, and force us, whether we will or no, to walk his 
 way, and not ours, the trunks of the trees on the right are 
 all cloven into yawning and writhing heads and bodies, 
 and alive with dragon energy all about us, note espe- 
 cially the nearest with its gaping jaws and claw-like branch 
 at the seeming shoulder ; a kind of suggestion which in it- 
 self is not imaginative, but merely fanciful, (using the term 
 fancy in that third sense not yet explained, corresponding 
 to the third office of imagination ;) but it is imaginative in 
 its present use and application, for the painter addresses 
 thereby that morbid and fearful condition of mind which he 
 has endeavored to excite in the spectator, and which in real- 
 ity would have seen in every trunk and bough, as it pene- 
 trated into the deeper thicket, the object of its terror. 
 
 It is nevertheless evident, that however suggestive the work 
 or picture may be, it cannot have effect unless we are our- 
 selves both watchful of its very hint, and capable of under- 
 §15 Imagination ^^^'^^^'^^ Carrying it out, and although I 
 addresses itself to thiiik that this DOwcr of Continuing" or accept- 
 
 iraagination, . / /.pt • • ^ 
 
 mg the direction of feeling given is less a 
 peculiar gift, like that of the original seizing, than a faculty 
 dependent on attention, and improvable by cultivation ; yet, 
 to a certain extent, the imaginative work will not, I think, 
 be rightly esteemed except by a mind of some correspond- 
 ing power ; not but that there is an intense enjoyment in 
 minds of feeble yet light conception in the help and food 
 they get from those of stronger thought ; but a certain im- 
 aginative susceptibility is at any rate necessary, and above 
 all things, earnestness and feeling, so that assuredly a work of 
 high conceptive dignity will be always incomprehensible and 
 
 * I am describing from a proof : in bad impressions this trunk is 
 darkened. 
 
368 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 valueless except in those who go to it in earnest and give it 
 time ; and this is peculiarly the case when the imagination 
 acts not merely on the immediate subject, nor in giving a 
 fanciful and peculiar character to prominent objects, as we 
 Instances from ^^^^ 3^^^ sccn, but busics itsclf throughout in 
 the works of Tin- expressing occult and far-sought sympathies in 
 every minor detail, of which action the most 
 sublime instances are found in the works of Tintoret, whose 
 intensity of imagination is such that there is not the com- 
 monest subject to which he will not attach a range of sug- 
 gestiveness almost limitless, nor a stone, leaf, or shadow, nor 
 anything so small, but he will give it meaning and oracular 
 voice. 
 
 In the centre of the gallery at Parma, there is a canvas of 
 Tintoret's, whose sublimity of conception and grandeur of 
 color are seen in the highest perfection, by their opposition 
 §16 The Entomb- morbid and vulgar sentimentalism of 
 
 Correggio. It is an Entombment of Christ, 
 with a landscape distance, of whose technical composition 
 and details I shall have much to say hereafter, at present I 
 speak only of the thought it is intended to convey. An 
 ordinary or unimaginative painter would have made promi- 
 nent, among his objects of landscape, such as might natural- 
 ly be supposed to have been visible from the sepulchre, and 
 shown with the crosses of Calvary, some portion of Jeru- 
 salem, or of the Valley of Jehoshaphat. But Tintoret has a 
 far higher aim. Dwelling on the peculiar force of the event 
 before him, as the fulfilment of the final prophecy respecting 
 the passion, " He made his grave with the wicked and with 
 the rich in his death," he desires to direct the mind of the 
 spectator to this receiving of the body of Christ, in its con- 
 trast with the houseless birth and the desert life. And, 
 therefore, behind the ghastly tomb-grass that shakes its 
 black and withered blades above the rocks of the sepulchre, 
 there is seen, not the actual material distance of the spot it- 
 self, (though the crosses are shown faintly,) but that to which 
 the thoughtful spirit would return in vision, a desert place, 
 where the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 369 
 
 nests, and against the barred twilight of the melancholy sky 
 are seen the mouldering beams and shattered roofing of a 
 ruined cattle-shed, the canopy of the nativity. 
 
 Let us take another instance. No subject has been more 
 frequently or exquisitely treated by the religious painters 
 than that of the Annunciation, though as usual, the most 
 § 17. The Annun- perfect type of its pure ideal has been given by 
 ciation. Angelico, and by him with the most radiant 
 
 consummation (so far as I know) in a small reliquary in the 
 sacristy of St^. Maria Novella. The background there, how- 
 ever, is altogether decorative ; but in the fresco of the cor- 
 ridor of St. Mark's, the concomitant circumstances are of 
 exceeding loveliness. The Virgin sits in an open loggia, 
 resembling that of the Florentine church of L'Annunziata. 
 Before her is a meadow of rich herbage, covered with daisies. 
 Behind her is seen through the door at the end of the loggia, 
 her chamber with its single grated window, through which 
 a star-light beam of light falls into the silence. All is ex- 
 quisite in feeling, but not inventive nor imaginative. Severe 
 would be the shock and painful the contrast, if we could pass 
 in an instant from that pure vision to the wild thought of 
 Tintoret. For not in meek reception of the adoring mes- 
 senger, but startled by the rush of his horizontal and rattling 
 wings, the virgin sits, not in the quiet loggia, not by the 
 green pasture of the restored soul, but houseless, under the 
 shelter of a palace vestibule ruined and abandoned, with the 
 noise of the axe and the hammer in her ears, and the tumult 
 of a city round about her desolation. The spectator turns 
 away at first, revolted, from the central object of the picture, 
 forced painfully and coarsely forward, a mass of shattered 
 brickwork, with the plaster mildewed away from it, and the 
 mortar mouldering from its seams ; and if he look again, either 
 at this or at the carpenter's tools beneath it, will perhaps see 
 in the one and the other, nothing more than such a study of 
 scene as Tintoret could but too easily obtain among the ruins 
 of his own Venice, chosen to give a coarse explanation of 
 the calling and the condition of the husband of Mary. But 
 there is more meant than this. When he looks at the com- 
 VoL. II.— 24 
 
370 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 position of the picture, he will find the whole symmetry of it 
 depending on a narrow line of light, the edge of a carpen- 
 ter's square, which connects these unused tools with an ob- 
 ject at the top of the brickwork, a white stone, four square, 
 the corner-stone of the old edifice, the base of its supporting 
 column. This, I think, sufficiently explains the typical char- 
 acter of the whole. The ruined house is the Jewish dispen- 
 sation, that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is 
 the Christian ; but the corner-stone of the old building re- 
 mains, though the builder's tools lie idle beside it, and the 
 stone which the builders refused is become the Headstone 
 of the corner. 
 
 In this picture, however, the force of the thought hardly 
 atones for the painfulness of the scene and the turbulence of 
 its feeling. The power of the master is more strikingly shown 
 § 18. The Bap- treatment of a subject which, however im- 
 
 itstreatmenrby po^tant, and howcvcr deep in its meaning, sup- 
 various painters. pHes not to the Ordinary painter material enough 
 ever to form a picture of high interest ; the Baptism of Christ. 
 From the purity of Giotto to the intolerable, inconceivable 
 brutality of Salvator,* every order of feeling has been dis- 
 played in its treatment ; but I am aware of no single case, 
 except this of which I am about to speak, in which it has 
 formed an impressive picture. 
 
 Giotto's, in the Academy of Florence, engraved in the 
 series just published, (Galleria delle belle Arti,) is one of the 
 most touching I know, especially in the reverent action of 
 the attendant angels, and Leonardo's angel in that of Andrea 
 del Verrocchio is very beautiful, but the event is one whose 
 character and importance are ineffable upon the features : the 
 
 * The picture is in the Guadagni palace. It is one of the most im- 
 portant landscapes Salvator ever painted. The figures are studied from 
 street beggars. On the one side of the river, exactly opposite the point 
 where the Baptism of Christ takes place, the painter, with a refinement 
 of feeling peculiarly his own, has introduced some ruffians stripping off 
 their shirts to bathe. He is fond of this incident. It occurs again in 
 one of the marines of the Pitti palace, with the additional interest of a 
 foreshortened figure, swimming on its back, feet foremost, exactly in 
 the stream of light to which the eye is principally directed. 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 371 
 
 descending dove hardly affects us, because its constant sym- 
 bolical occurrence hardens us, and makes us look on it as a 
 mere type or letter, instead of the actual presence of the 
 Spirit ; and by all the sacred painters the power that might 
 be put into the landscape is lost, for though their use of foli- 
 age and distant sky or mountain is usually very admirable, 
 as we shall see in the fifth chapter, yet they cannot deal with 
 near water or rock, and the hexagonal and basaltic protuber- 
 ances of their river shore are I think too painful to be endured 
 even by the most acceptant mind, as eminently in that of 
 Angelico, in the Vita di Christo, which, as far as I can judge, 
 is a total failure in action, expression, and all else ; and in 
 general it is in this subject especially, that the greatest paint- 
 ers show their weakness. For this reason, I suppose, and 
 feeling the difficulty of it, Tintoret has thrown into it his ut- 
 most strength, and it becomes noble in his hands by his most 
 singularly imaginative expression, not only of the immediate 
 fact, but of the whole train of thought of which it is sugges- 
 tive ; and by his considering the baptism not only as the 
 submission of Christ to the fulfilment of all righteousness, 
 but as the opening of the earthly struggle with the prince 
 of the powers of the air, which instantly beginning in the 
 temptation, ended only on the cross. 
 
 The river flows fiercely under the shadow of a great rock. 
 From its opposite shore, thickets of close, gloomy foliage rise 
 against the rolling chasm of heaven, through which breaks 
 19 B T' t t brightness of the descending Spirit. Across 
 ' these, dividing them asunder, is stretched a hori- 
 zontal floor of flaky cloud, on which stand the hosts of heaven. 
 Christ kneels upon the water, and does not sink ; the figure 
 of St. John is indistinct, but close beside his raised right arm 
 there is a spectre in the black shade ; the fiend, harpy -shaped, 
 hardly seen, glares down upon Christ with eyes of fire, wait- 
 ing his time. Beneath this figure there comes out of the mist 
 a dark hand, the arm unseen, extended to a net in the river, 
 the spars of which are in the shape of a cross. Behind this 
 the roots and under stems of the trees are cut away by the 
 cloud, and beneath it, and through them, is seen a vision of 
 
373 
 
 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 wild, melancholy, boundless light, the sweep of the desert, 
 and the figure of Christ is seen therein alone, with his arms 
 lifted as in supplication or ecstacy, borne of the Spirit into 
 the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 
 
 There are many circumstances which combine to give to 
 this noble work a more than usually imaginative character. 
 The symbolical use of the net, which is the cross net still 
 used constantly in the canals of Venice, and common through- 
 out Italy, is of the same character as that of the carpenter's 
 tools in the Annunciation ; but the introduction of the spec- 
 tral figure is of bolder reach, and yet more, that vision of the 
 after temptation which is expressly indicated as a subject of 
 thought rather than of sight, because it is in a part of the 
 scene, which in fact must have been occupied by the trunks 
 of the trees whose tops are seen above ; and another circum- 
 stance completes the mystic character of the whole, that the 
 flaky clouds which support the angelic hosts take on the 
 right, where the light first falls upon them, the shape of the 
 head of a fish, the well-known type both of the baptismal 
 sacrament, and of Christ. 
 
 But the most exquisite instance of this imaginative power 
 occurs in an incident in the background of the Crucifixion. 
 I will not insult this marvellous picture by an effort at a 
 § 20. The Cruci- verbal account of it. I would not whitewash it 
 fixion. with praise, and I refer to it only for the sake 
 
 of two thoughts peculiarly illustrative of the intellectual fac- 
 ulty immediately under discussion. In the common and most 
 catholic treatment of the subject, the mind is either painfully 
 directed to the bodily agony, coarsely expressed by outward 
 anatomical signs, or else it is permitted to rest on that coun- 
 tenance inconceivable by man at any time, but chiefly so in 
 this its consummated humiliation. In the first case, the rep- 
 resentation is revolting ; in the second, inefficient, false, and 
 sometimes blasphemous. None even of the greatest religious 
 painters have ever, so far as I know, succeeded here ; Giotto 
 and Angelico were cramped by the traditional treatment, and 
 the latter especially, as before observed, is but too apt to in- 
 dulge in those points of vitiated feeling which attained their 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 373 
 
 worst development among the Byzantines : Perugino fails in 
 his Christ in almost every instance (of other men than these 
 after them v/e need not speak.) But Tintoret here, as in all 
 other cases, penetrating into the root and deep places of his 
 subject, despising all outward and bodily appearances of pain, 
 and seeking for some means of expressing, not the rack of 
 nerve or sinew, but the fainting of the deserted Son of God 
 before his Eloi cry, and yet feeling himself utterly unequal 
 to the expression of this by the countenance, has on the one 
 hand filled his picture with such various and impetuous mus- 
 cular exertion that the body of the Crucified is, by compari- 
 son, in perfect repose, and on the other has cast the counte- 
 nance altogether into shade. But the agony is told by this, 
 and by this only, that though there yet remains a chasm of 
 light on the mountain horizon where the earthquake dark- 
 ness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory about 
 the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the color 
 of ashes.* 
 
 But the great painter felt he had something more to do 
 yet. Not only that agony of the Crucified, but the tumult 
 of the people, that rage which invoked his blood upon them 
 and their children. Not only the brutality of the soldier, 
 the apathy of the centurion, nor any other merely instru- 
 mental cause of the Divine suffering, but the fury of his own 
 people, the noise against him of those for whom he died, 
 were to be set before the eye of the understanding, if the 
 power of the picture was to be complete. This rage, be it 
 remembered, was one of disappointed pride ; and the dis- 
 appointment dated essentially from the time, when but five 
 days before, the King of Zion came, and was received with 
 hosannahs, riding upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. 
 To this time, then, it was necessary to direct the thoughts, 
 for therein are found both the cause and the character, the 
 excitement of, and the witness against, this madness of the 
 
 * This circumstance, like most that lie not at the surface, has escaped 
 Fuseli, though his remarks on the general tone of the picture are very- 
 good, as well as his opposition of it to the treatment of Rubens. (Lect- 
 ure IX.) 
 
374 OF IMAGINATION PENETEATIVE. 
 
 people. In the shadow behind the cross, a man, riding on 
 an ass colt, looks back to the multitude, while he points 
 with a rod to the Christ crucified. The ass is feeding on the 
 remnants of withered palm-leaves. 
 
 With this master-stroke I believe I may terminate all illus- 
 tration of the peculiar power of the imagination over the 
 feelings of the spectator, by the elevation into dignity and 
 meaning of the smallest accessory circumstances. But I 
 have not yet sufficiently dwelt on the fact from which this 
 power arises, the absolute truth of statement of the central 
 fact as it was, or must have been. Without this truth, this 
 awful first moving principle, all direction of the feelings is 
 useless. That which we cannot excite, it is of no use to 
 know how to govern. 
 
 I have before alluded. Sect. I. Chap. XIY., to the pain- 
 fulness of Raffaelle's treatment of the massacre of the inno- 
 cents. Fuseli affirms of it that, in dramatic gradation he 
 §21. TheMassa- discloscd all the mother through every image of 
 ere of innocents, p^^^ terror." If this be SO, I think the 
 
 philosophical spirit has prevailed over the imaginative. The 
 imagination never errs, it sees all that is, and all the relations 
 and bearings of it, but it would not have confused the mortal 
 frenzy of maternal terror with various development of mater- 
 nal character. Fear, rage, and agony, at their utmost pitch, 
 sweep away all character : humanity itself would be lost in 
 maternity, the woman would become the mere personifica- 
 tion of animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary 
 representations of this subject are, I think, false and cold : 
 the artist has not heard the shrieks, nor mingled with the 
 fugitives, he has sat down in his study to twist features 
 methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so Tin- 
 toret. Knowing or feeling, that the expression of the hu- 
 man face was in such circumstances not to be rendered, and 
 that the effort could only end in an ugly falsehood, he de- 
 nies himself all aid from the features, he feels that if he is to 
 place himself or us in the midst of that maddened multitude, 
 there can be no time allowed for watching expression. Still 
 less does he depend on details of murder or ghastliness of 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 375 
 
 death ; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but there 
 is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The 
 scene is the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble 
 floor is fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that 
 our eyes seem to become bloodshot and strained with strange 
 horror and deadly vision ; a lake of life before them, like the 
 burning seen of the doomed Moabite on the water that came 
 by the way of Edom ; a huge flight of stairs, without para- 
 pet, descends on the left ; down this rush a crowd of women 
 mixed with the murderers ; the child in the arms of one has 
 been seized by the limbs, she hurls herself over the edge, 
 and falls head down-most, dragging the child out of the grasp 
 by her weight ; — she will be dashed dead in a second : two 
 others are farther in flight, they reach the edge of a deep 
 river, — the water is beat into a hollow by the force of their 
 plunge ; — close to us is the great struggle, a heap of the 
 mothers entangled in one mortal writhe with each other and 
 the swords, one of the murderers dashed down and crushed 
 beneath them, the sword of another caught by the blade and 
 dragged at by a woman's naked hand ; the youngest and 
 fairest of the women, her child just torn away from a death 
 grasp and clasped to her breast with the grip of a steel vice, 
 falls backwards helplessly over the heap, right on the sword 
 points ; all knit together and hurled down in one hopeless, 
 frenzied, furious abandonment of body and soul in the effort 
 to save. Their shrieks ring in our ears till the marble seems 
 rending around us, but far back, at the bottom of the stairs, 
 there is something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It 
 is a woman, sitting quiet, — quite quiet — still as any stone, she 
 looks down steadfastly on her dead child, laid along on the 
 floor before her, and her hand is pressed softly upon her brow. 
 This, to my mind, is the only imaginative ; that is, the 
 Various ^^^J true, real, heartfelt representation of the 
 works in the scu- beino' and actuality of the subiect in existence.* 
 
 ola di San Rocco. ° . 
 
 I should exhaust the patience of the reader if I 
 
 * Note the shallow and uncomprehending notice of this picture by 
 Fuseli. His description of the treatment of it by other painters is 
 however, true, terse, and valuable. 
 
376 
 
 OF IMAGINATION PENETEATIVE. 
 
 were to dwell at length on the various stupendous develop- 
 ments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San 
 Rocco alone. I would fain join a while in that solemn pause 
 of the journey into Egypt, where the silver boughs of the shad- 
 owy trees lace with their tremulous lines the alternate folds 
 of fair clouds, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie across 
 the streams of blue between those rosy islands, like the white 
 wakes of wandering ships ; or watch beside the sleep of the 
 disciples among those massy leaves that lie so heavily on the 
 dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the 
 agony, and toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as 
 the troop of the betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the 
 olives ; or wait through the hour of accusing beside the 
 judgment seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except 
 the one figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale 
 like a pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the 
 § 23. The Last Godhcad, half wrapt in the whiteness of the 
 trelteTby f^l shroud. Of thcse and all the other thoughts of 
 ous painters. indescribable power that are now fading from 
 the walls of those neglected chambers, I may perhaps en- 
 deavor at some future time to preserve some image and 
 shadow more faithfully than by words ; but I shall at pres- 
 ent terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a work 
 of less touching, but more tremendous appeal, the Last Judg- 
 ment in the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto. In this sub- 
 ject, almost all realizing or local statement had been carefully 
 avoided by the most powerful painters, they judging it bet- 
 ter to represent its chief circumstances as generic thoughts, 
 and present them to the mind in a typical or abstract form. 
 In the judgment of Angelico the treatment is purely typical, 
 a long Campo Santo, composed of two lines of graves, stretches 
 away into the distance ; on the left side of it rise the con- 
 demned ; on the right the just. With Giotto and Orcagna, 
 the conception, though less rigid, is equally typical, no effort 
 being made at the suggestion of space, and only so much 
 ground represented as is absolutely necessary to support the 
 near figures and allow space for a few graves. Michael An- 
 gelo in no respect differs in his treatment, except that his 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 877 
 
 figures are less symmetrically grouped, and a greater con- 
 ception of space is given by their various perspective. No 
 interest is attached to his background in itself. Fra Bartol- 
 omeo, never able to grapple with any species of sublimity 
 except that of simple religious feeling, fails most signally in 
 this mighty theme.* His group of the dead, including not 
 more than ten or twelve figures, occupies the foreground only, 
 behind them a vacant plain extends to the foot of a cindery 
 volcano, about whose mouth several little black devils like 
 spiders are skipping and crawling. The judgment of quick 
 and dead is thus expressed as taking place in about a rood 
 square, and on a dozen of people at a time ; the whole of the 
 space and horizon of the sky and land being left vacant, and 
 the presence of the Judge of all the earth made more finite 
 than the sweep of a whirlwind or a thunder-storm. 
 
 By Tintoret only has this unmanageable event been grap- 
 pled with in its verity ; not typically nor symbolically, but 
 as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only 
 § 24. By Tin- One traditional circumstance he has received with 
 toret. Dante and Michael Angelo, the boat of the con- 
 
 demned ; but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in 
 the adoption of this image, he has not stopped at the scowl- 
 ing ferryman of the one nor at the sweeping blow and demon 
 dragging of the other, Vjut, seized Hylas-like by the limbs, 
 and tearing up the earth in his agon}^, the victim is dashed 
 into his destruction ; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the 
 fiery lake that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the 
 earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one 
 white, ghastly cataract, the river of the wrath of God, roar- 
 ing down into the gulf where the world has melted with its 
 fervent heat, choked with the ruin of nations, and the limbs 
 of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. 
 Bat like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the 
 earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling 
 and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and 
 startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the 
 
 * Fresco in an out-house of the Ospedale St\ Maria Nuova at Flor- 
 ence. 
 
378 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed 
 by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way 
 unseeing to Siloam Pool ; shaking off one by one the dreams 
 of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangor of the trum- 
 pets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, 
 by the white light of the new Heaven^ until the great vortex 
 of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment seat : 
 the firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, 
 that drifts, and floats, and falls in the interminable, inevita- 
 ble light ; the bright clouds are darkened with them as with 
 thick snow, currents of atom life in the arteries of heaven, 
 now soaring up slowly, farther, and higher, and higher still, 
 till the eye and the thought can follow no farther; borne up, 
 wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel powers in- 
 visible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the 
 breath of their condemnation. 
 
 Now, I wish the reader particularly to observe throughout 
 all these works of Tintoret, the distinction of the imagina- 
 tive verity from falsehood on the one hand, and from real- 
 § 25. The imag- ism on the Other. The power of every picture 
 how'distinguishJd (depends on the penetration of the imagination 
 from realism. {^^q the TRUE nature of the thing represented, 
 and on the utter scorn of the imagination for all shackles 
 and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way of its 
 suggestiveness. In the Baptism it cuts away the trunks of 
 trees as if they were so much cloud or vapor, that it may ex- 
 hibit to the thought the completed sequency of the scene ;* 
 in the Massacre, it covers the marble floor with visionary 
 light, that it may strike terror into the spectator without 
 condescending to butchery ; it defies the bare fact, but cre- 
 ates in him the fearful feeling ; in the Crucifixion it annihi- 
 lates locality, and brings the palm-leaves to Calvary, so only 
 that it may bear the mind to the mount of Olives, as in the 
 entombment it brings the manger to Jerusalem, that it may 
 take the heart to Bethlehem ; and all this it does in the dar- 
 
 * The same thing is done yet more boldly in the large composition of 
 the ceiLng ; the plague of fiery serpents; a part of the host, and an- 
 other sky horizon are seen through an opening in the ground. 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 379 
 
 ing consciousness of its higher and spiritual verity, and in 
 the entire knowledge of the fact and substance of all that it 
 touches. The imaginary boat of the demon angel expands 
 the rush of the visible river into the descent of irresistible 
 condemnation ; but to make that rush and roar felt by the 
 eye and heard by the ear, the rending of the pine branches 
 above the cataract is taken directly from nature ; it is an 
 abstract of Alpine storm. Hence v^hile we are always 
 placed face to face with whatever is to be told, there is in 
 and beyond its reality a voice supernatural ; and that which 
 is doubtful in the vision has strength, sinew, and assured- 
 ness, built up in it by fact. 
 
 Let us, however, still advance one step farther, and ob- 
 §26. Theimagi- scrve the imaginative power deprived of all aid 
 rfested in^^BcSipt- f^om chiaroscuro, color, or any other means of 
 concealing the frame-work of its thoughts. 
 
 It was said by Michael Angelo that " non ha I'ottimo scul- 
 tore alcun concetto, Ch'un marmo solo in se non circoscriva," 
 a sentence which, though in the immediate sense intended by 
 the writer it may remind us a little of the indignation of Boi- 
 leau's Pluto, " II s'ensuit de la que tout ce qui se peut dire 
 de beau, est dans les dictionnaires, — il n'y a que les paroles 
 qui sont transpos^es," yet is valuable, because it shows us 
 that Michael Angelo held the imagination to be entirely ex- 
 pressible in rock, and therefore altogether independent, in 
 its own nature, of those aids of color and shade by which it 
 is recommended in Tintoret, though the sphere of its opera- 
 tion is of course by these incalculably extended. But the 
 presence of the imagination may be rendered in marble as 
 deep, thrilling, and awful as in painting, so that the sculptor 
 seek for the soul and govern the body thereby. 
 
 Of unimaginative work, Bandinelli and Canova supply us 
 with characteristic instances of every kind, the Hercules and 
 §27 Bandinelli Cacus of the former, and its criticism by Cel- 
 Canoya, Mino da \m\ will occur at oncc to everv one : the dis- 
 
 iiesole. ' ^ . 
 
 gusting statue now placed so as to conceal Gi- 
 otto's important tempera picture in Santa Croce is a better in- 
 stance, but a still more impressive lesson might be received 
 
380 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 by comparing the inanity of Canova's garland grace, and ball- 
 room sentiment with the intense truth, tenderness, and power 
 of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose chisel leaves many a hard 
 edge, and despises down and dimple, but it seems to cut light 
 and carve breath, the marble burns beneath it, and becomes 
 transparent with very spirit. Yet Mino stopped at the hu- 
 man nature ; he saw the soul, but not the ghostly presences 
 about it ; it was reserved for Michael Angelo to pierce 
 deeper yet, and to see the indwelling angels. No man's soul 
 is alone : Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart 
 or the angel by the hand, the light or the fear of the spirit- 
 ual things that move beside it may be seen on the body ; and 
 that bodily form with Buonaroti, white, solid, distinct ma- 
 , terial, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or 
 the habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth 
 §28 Michael An- Sistine Adam that begins to burn ; the 
 
 geio- woman embodied burst of adoration from his 
 
 sleep ; the twelve great torrents of the Spirit of God that 
 pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay ; the 
 waiting in the shadow of futurity of those through whom the 
 promise and presence of God went down from the Eve to the 
 Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent, 
 foreseeing, faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the build- 
 ing stones of the word of God, building on and on, tier by 
 tier, to the Refused one, the head of the corner ; not only 
 these, not only the troops of terror torn up from the earth 
 by the four quartered winds of the Judgment, but every 
 fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became 
 instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the 
 words be few ; the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from 
 his sepulchre, bound hand and foot by his grave clothes, it 
 is left for us to loose him ; the strange spectral wreath of 
 the Florence Pieta, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, 
 full of pain and death, among the faint purple lights that 
 cross and perish under the obscure dome of St*. Maria del 
 Fiore, the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet 
 passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among 
 the pagan formalisms of the Uifizii, far away, showing them- 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 381 
 
 selves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine 
 torrent do by their dancing among the dead stones, though, 
 the stones be as white as they : * and finally, and perhaps 
 more than all, those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor 
 of day- — not of morning nor evening, but of the departure 
 and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of the souls 
 of men — together with the spectre sitting in the shadow of 
 the niche above them ; f all these, and all else that I could 
 
 * The Bacchus. There is a small statue opposite it also — unfinished ; 
 but ''a spirit still." 
 
 f I would have insisted more on the ghostly vitality of this dreadful 
 statue ; but the passage referring to it in Rogers's Italy supersedes all 
 further description. I suppose most lovers of art know it by heart. 
 
 " Nor then forget that chamber of the dead. 
 Where the gigantic shapes of Night and Day, 
 Turned into stone, rest everlastingly ; 
 Yet still are breathing, and shed round at noon 
 A twofold influence, — only to be felt — 
 A light, a darkness, mingling each with each ; 
 Both, and yet neither. There, from age to age, 
 Two ghosts are sitting on their sepulchres. 
 That is the Duke Lorenzo. Mark him well. 
 He meditates, his head upon his hand. 
 What from beneath his helm-like bonnet scowls ? 
 Is it a face, or but an eyeless skull ? 
 *Tis lost in shade ; yet, like the basilisk, 
 It fascinates, and is intolerable. 
 His mien is noble, most majestical ! 
 Then most so, when the distant choir is heard 
 At morn or eve — nor fail thou to attend 
 Od that thrice -hallowed day, when all are there; 
 When all, propitiating with solemn songs, 
 Visit the Dead. Then wilt thou feel his power ! " 
 
 It is strange that this should be the only written instance (as far as I 
 recollect) of just and entire appreciation of Michael Angelo's spiritual 
 power. It is perhaps owing to the very intensity of his imagination 
 that he has been so little understood — for, as I before said, imagination 
 can never be met by vanity, nor without earnestness. His Florentine 
 followers saw in him an anatomist and posture-master — and art was 
 finally destroyed by the influence over admiring idiocy of the greatest 
 mind that art ever inspired. 
 
382 
 
 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE, 
 
 name of his forming, have borne, and in themselves retain 
 and exercise the same inexplicable power — inexplicable be- 
 cause proceeding from an imaginative perception almost 
 superhuman, which goes whither we cannot follow, and is 
 where we cannot come ; throwing naked the final, deepest 
 root of the being of man, whereby he grows out of the in- 
 visible, and holds on his God home.* 
 
 * I have not chosen to interrupt the argument respecting the essence 
 of the imaginative faculty by any remarks on the execution of the im- 
 aginative hand ; but we can hardly leave Tintoret and Michael Angelo 
 without some notice of the pre-eminent power of execution exhibited 
 by both of them, in consequence of their vigor and clearness of concep- 
 tion ; nor without again warning the lower artist from confounding 
 this velocity of decision and impatience with the velocity of affectation 
 or indolence. Every result of real imagination we have seen to be a 
 truth of some sort ; and it is the characteristic of truth to be in some 
 way tangible, seizable, distinguishable, and clear, as it is of falsehood 
 to be obscure, confused, and confusing. Not but that many, if not 
 most truths have a dark side, a side by which they are connected with 
 mysteries too high for us, — nay, I think it is commonly but a poor and 
 miserable truth which the human mind can walk all round, but at all 
 events they have one side by which we can lay hold of them, and feel 
 that they are downright adamant, and that their form, though lost in 
 cloud here and there, is unalterable and real, and not less real and rocky 
 because infinite, and joined on, St. MichaeFs mount-like to a far main- 
 land. So then, whatever the real imagination lays hold of, as it is a 
 truth, does not alter into anything else as the imaginative part works 
 at it and feels over it and finds out more of it, but comes out more and 
 more continually, all that is found out pointing to and indicating still 
 more behind, and giving additional stability and reality to that which 
 is discovered already. But if it be fancy or any other form of pseudo- 
 imagination which is at work, then that which it gets hold of may not 
 be a truth, but only an idea, which will keep giving way as soon as we 
 try to take hold of it and turning into something else, so that as we go 
 on copying it, every part will be inconsistent with all that has gone be- 
 fore, and at intervals it will vanish altogether, and leave blanks which 
 must be filled up by any means at hand. And in these circumstances, 
 the painter, unable to seize his thought, because it has not substance 
 nor bone enougli to bear gmsping, is liable to catch at every line that 
 he lays down, for help and suggestion, and to be led away by it to some- 
 thing else, which the first effort to realize dissipates in like manner, 
 placing another phantom in its stead, until out of the Iragmencs of 
 thciie successive phantoms he has glued together a vague, mindless, in^ 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 383 
 
 Now, in all these instances, let it be observed, for it is to 
 that end alone that I have been arguing all along, that the 
 virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and in- 
 §29.Becapituia. tensity of gaze, (not by reasoning, but by its 
 tion. The per- authoritative opening and revealing: power.) a 
 
 feet function of . i i i • ^ I 
 
 the imagination more esseutial truth than IS seen at the surface 
 
 is the intuitive « i . x i • 
 
 perception of ui- ot things, i repeat that it matters not whether 
 timatetrut . ^^^^ reader is willing to call this faculty imagina- 
 tion or no, I do not care about the name ; but I would be 
 understood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean 
 
 voluntary whole, a mixture of all that was trite or common in each of 
 the successive conceptions, for that is necessarily what is first caught a 
 heap of things with the bloom off and the chill on, laborious, unnatural, 
 inane, with its emptiness disguised by affectation, and its tastelessness 
 salted by extravagance. 
 
 Necessarily, from these modes of conception, three vices of execution 
 must result ; and these are necessarily found in all those parts of the 
 work where any trust has been put in conception, and only to be 
 avoided in portions of actual portraiture (for a thoroughly unimagina- 
 tive painter can make no use of a study — all his studies are guesses and 
 experiments, all are equally wrong, and so far felt to be wrong by him- 
 self, that he will not work by any of them, but will always endeavor to 
 improve upon them in the picture, and so lose the use of them). These 
 three vices of execution are then — first, feebleness of handling, owing 
 to uncertainty of intention ; secondly, Intentional carelessness of han- 
 dling, in the hope of getting by accident something more than was meant ; 
 and lastly, violence and haste of handling, in the effort to secure as 
 much as possible of the obscure image of which the mind feels itself 
 losing hold. (I am throughout, it will be observed, attributing right 
 feeling to the unimaginative painter ; if he lack this, his execution may 
 be cool and determined, as he will set down falsehood without blush- 
 ing, and ugliness without suffering.) Added to these various evidences 
 of weakness, will be the various vices assumed for the sake of conceal- 
 ment ; morbid refinements disguising feebleness — or insolence and 
 coarseness to cover desperation. When the imagination is powerful, 
 the resulting execution is of course the contrary of all this : its first 
 steps will commonly be impetuous, in clearing its ground and getting at 
 its first conception — as we know of Michael Angelo in his smiting his 
 blocks into shape, (see the passage quoted by Sir Charles Clarke in the 
 Essay on Expression, from Blaise de Vigenere,) and as it is visible in the 
 handling of Tintoret always : as the work approaches completion, the 
 stroke, while it remains certain and firm, because its end is always 
 known, may frequently become slow and careful, both on account of 
 
384 OF IMAGINATION PENETBATIVE. 
 
 this, the true foundation of all art which exercises eternal 
 authority over men's minds ; (all other imagination than this 
 is either secondary and contemplative, or utterly spurious ;) 
 the base of whose authority and being is its perpetual thirst 
 
 the difficulty of following the pure lines of conception, and because 
 there is no fear felt of the conception's vanishing before it can be real- 
 ized ; but generally there is a certain degree of impetuosity visible in the 
 works of all the men of high imagination, when they are not working 
 from a study, showing itself in Michael Angelo by the number of blocks 
 he left unfinished, and by some slight evidences in those he completed 
 of his having worked painfully towards the close ; so that, except the 
 Duke Lorenzo, the Bacchus of the Florentine gallery, and the Pieta of 
 Genoa, I know not any of his finished works in which his mind is as 
 mightily expressed as in his marble sketches ; only, it is always to be 
 observed that impetuosity or rudeness of hand is not necessarily — and, 
 if imaginative, is never — carelessness. In the two landscapes at the 
 end of the Scuola di San Kocco, Tintoret has drawn several large tree 
 trunks with two strokes of his brush — one for the dark, and another for 
 the light side ; and the large rock at the foot of the picture of the 
 Temptation is painted with a few detached touches of gray over a flat 
 brown ground ; but the touches of the tree-trunks have been followed 
 by the mind as they went down with the most painful intensity through 
 their every undulation ; and the few gray strokes on the stone are so 
 considered that a better stone cone could not be painted if we took a 
 month to it : and I suppose, generally, it would be utterly impossible 
 to give an example of execution in which less was left to accident, or 
 in which more care was concentrated in every stroke, than the seem- 
 ingly regardless and impetuous handling of this painter. 
 
 On the habit of both Tintoret and Michael Augelo to work straight 
 forward from the block and on the canvas, without study or model, it 
 is needless to insist ; for though this is one of the most amazing proofs 
 of their imaginative power, it is a dangerous precedent. No mode of 
 execution ought ever to be taught to a young artist as better than an- 
 other ; he ought to understand the truth of what he has to do, felicitous 
 execution will follow as a matter of course ; and if he feels himself ca- 
 pable of getting at the right at once, he will naturally do so without ref- 
 erence to precedent. He ought to hold always that his duty is to attain 
 the highest result he can, — but that no one has any business with the 
 means or time he has taken. If it can be done quickly, let it be so 
 done ; if not, let it be done at any rate. For knowing his way he is 
 answerable, and therefore must not walk doubtingly ; but no one can 
 blame him for walking cautiously^ if the way be a narrow one, with a 
 slip on each side. He may pause, but he must not hesitate, — and 
 tremble, but must not vacillate. 
 
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 385 
 
 of truth and purpose to be true. It has no food, no delight, 
 no care, no perception, except of truth ; it is forever looking 
 under masks, and burning up mists ; no fairness of form, no 
 majesty of seeming will satisfy it ; the first condition of its 
 existence is incapability of being deceived ; and though it 
 sometimes dwells upon and substantiates the fictions of fancy, 
 yet its own operation is to trace to their farthest limit the 
 true laws and likelihoods even of the fictitious creation. This 
 has been well explained by Fuseli, in his allusion to the Cen- 
 taur of Zeuxis ; and there is not perhaps a greater exertion 
 of imaginative power than may be manifested in following 
 out to their farthest limits the necessary consequences of such 
 arbitrary combination ; but let not the jests of the fancy be 
 confounded with that after serious work of the imagination 
 which gives them all the nervous verity and substance of 
 which they are capable. Let not the monsters of Chinese 
 earthenware be confounded with the Faun, Satyr, or Centaur. 
 
 How different this definition of the imagination may be 
 from the idea of it commonly entertained among us, I can 
 hardly say, because I have a very indistinct idea of what 
 is usually meant by the term. I hear modern 
 
 §30. Imagina- ^ xi • i i • • • 
 
 tion, how vulgar- works Constantly praised as being imaginative, 
 
 ly understood. •i-it . • ^ p I'l 
 
 m which i can trace no virture oi any kind ; 
 but simple, slavish, unpalliated falsehood and exaggeration ; 
 I see not what merit there can be in pure, ugly, resolute fic- 
 tion ; it is surely easy enough to be wrong ; there are many 
 ways of being unlike nature. I understand not what virtue 
 that is which entitles one of these ways to be called imagi- 
 native, rather than another ; and I am still farther embar- 
 rassed by hearing the portions of those works called espe- 
 cially imaginative in which there is the most effort at minute 
 and mechanical statement of contemptible details, and in 
 which the artist would have been as actual and absolute in 
 imitation as an echo, if he had known how. Against con- 
 victions which I do not understand, I cannot argue ; but I 
 may warn the artist that imagination of this strange kind, is 
 not capable of bearing the time test ; nothing of its doing 
 ever has continued its influence over men ; and if he desires 
 Vol. II.— 25 
 
386 OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE. 
 
 to take place among the great men of older time, there is but 
 one way for it ; and one kind of imagination that will stand 
 the immortal light : I know not how far it is by effort cul- 
 tivable ; but we have evidence enough before us to show in 
 what direction that effort must be made. 
 
 We have seen (§ 10) that the imagination is in no small 
 degree dependent on acuteness of moral emotion ; in fact, 
 all moral truth can only thus be apprehended — and it is ob- 
 §3i.Hovvitscui- servable, generally, that all true and deep emo- 
 pJnto't on the ^^^^ imaginative, both in conception and ex- 
 morai feelings, pression ; and that the mental sight becomes 
 sharper with every full beat of the heart ; and, therefore, all 
 egotism, and selfish care, or regard, are in proportion to their 
 constancy, destructive of imagination ; whose play and power 
 depend altogether on our being able to forget ourselves and 
 enter like possessing spirits into the bodies of things about 
 us. 
 
 Again, as the life of imagination is in the discovering of 
 truth, it is clear it can have no respect for sayings or opin- 
 ions : knowing in itself when it has invented truly — restless 
 § 32 On inde- tormented except when it has this knowl- 
 pendenceofmind, edge, its sense of success or failure is too acute 
 to be affected by praise or blame. Sympathy it desires — but 
 can do without ; of opinions it is regardless, not in pride, 
 but because it has no vanity, and is conscious of a rule of ac- 
 tion and object of aim in which it cannot be mistaken ; partly, 
 also, in pure energy of desire and longing to do and to invent 
 more and more, which suffer it not to suck the sweetness of 
 praise — unless a little, with the end of the rod in its hand, 
 and without pausing in its march. It goes straight forward 
 up the hill ; no voices nor mutterings can turn it back, nor 
 petrify it from its purpose.* 
 
 Finally, it is evident, that like the theoretic faculty, the 
 imasrination must be fed constantly by external 
 
 §33. And on ha- * ^ -n . i 
 
 bitual reference to nature — after the illustrations we have given, 
 "*'^"^^* this may seem mere truism, for it is clear that 
 
 * That which we know of the lives of M. Angelo and Tintoret is emi- 
 nently illustrative of this temper. 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE, 
 
 387 
 
 to the exercise of the penetrative faculty a subject of penetra- 
 tion is necessary ; but I note it because many painters of 
 powerful mind have been lost to the world by their suffering 
 the restless writhing of their imagination in its cage to take 
 place of its healthy and exulting activity in the fields of nat- 
 ure. The most imaginative men always study the hardest, 
 and are the most thirsty for new knowledge. Fancy plays 
 like a squirrel in its circular prison, and is happy ; but imag- 
 ination is a pilgrim on the earth — and her home is in heaven. 
 Shut her from the fields of the celestial mountains — bar her 
 from breathing their lofty, sun-warmed air ; and we may as 
 well turn upon her the last bolt of the tower of famine, and 
 give the keys to the keeping of the wildest surge that washes 
 Capraja and Gorgon a. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 We have, in the two preceding chapters, arrived at defi- 
 nite conclusions respecting the power and essence of the 
 imaginative faculty. In these two acts of penetration and 
 §1. Imagination Combination, its separating and characteristic 
 n?t^pa?t^o^^^^^ attributes are entirely developed ; it remains 
 essence, but only f qj, Qj^jy obscrve a Certain habit or mode 
 
 a habit or mode 
 
 of the faculty. of Operation in which it frequently delights, and 
 by which it addresses itself to our perceptions more forcibly, 
 and asserts its presence more distinctly than in those mighty 
 but more secret workings wherein its life consists. 
 
 In our examination of the combining imagination, we chose 
 to assume the first or simple conception to be as clear in the 
 absence as in the presence of the object of it. This, I sup- 
 pose, is in point of fact never the case, nor is an approxima- 
 tion to such distinctness of conception alwaj^s a characteristic 
 of the imaginative mind. Many persons have thorough and 
 felicitous power of drawing from memory, yet never origi- 
 nate a thought, nor excite an emotion. 
 
388 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 The form in which conception actually occurs to ordinary- 
 minds appears to derive value and preciousness from that in- 
 definiteness v^hich we alluded to in the second chapter, (§ 2,) 
 § 2. The ambigu- there is an unfailing charm in the memory 
 ity of conception. ^^^^ anticipation of things beautiful, more sunny 
 and spiritual than attaches to their presence ; for with their 
 presence it is possible to be sated, and even wearied, but 
 with the imagination of them never ; in so far that it needs 
 some self-discipline to prevent the mind from falling into a 
 morbid condition of dissatisfaction with all that it immedi- 
 ately possesses, and continual longing for things absent ; and 
 yet I think this charm is not justly to be attributed to the 
 mere vagueness and uncertainty of the conception, except 
 thus far, that of objects whose substantial presence was ugly 
 or painful the sublimity and impressiveness, if there were any, 
 is retained in the conception, while the sensual offensiveness 
 is withdrawn ; thus circumstances of horror may be safely 
 touched in verbal description, and for a time dwelt upon by 
 the mind, as often by Homer and Spenser, (by the latter fre- 
 quently with too much grossness, as in the description of the 
 combat of the Red-Cross Knight with Errour,) which could 
 not for a moment be regarded or tolerated in their reality, or 
 on canvas ; and besides this mellowing and softening opera- 
 tion on those it retains, the conceptive faculty has the power 
 of letting go many of them altogether out of its groups of 
 ideas, and retaining only those where the meminisse juvabit 
 will apply ; and in this way the entire group of memories be- 
 comes altogether delightful ; but of those parts of anything 
 § 3. Is not in itself whicli are in themselves beautiful, I think the 
 ^^thi'cLfm of indistinctness no benefit, but that the brighter 
 fan: things. they are the better ; and that the peculiar charm 
 
 we feel in conception results from its grasp and blending of 
 ideas rather than from their obscurity, for we do not usually 
 recall, as we have seen, one part at a time only of a pleasant 
 scene, one moment only of a happy day ; but together with 
 each single object we summon up a kind of crowded and in- 
 volved shadowing forth of all the other glories with which it 
 was associated, and into every moment we concentrate an 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 389 
 
 epitome of the day ; and it will happen frequently that even 
 when the visible objects or actual circuaistances are not in 
 numbers remembered ; yet the feeling and joy of them is ob- 
 tained we know not how or whence, and so with a kind of 
 conceptive burning glass we bend the sunshine of all the day, 
 and the fulness of all the scene upon every point that we suc- 
 cessively seize ; and this together with more vivid action of 
 fancy, for I think that the wilful and playful seizure of the 
 points that suit her purpose and help her springing, whereby 
 she is distinguished from simple conception, takes place more 
 easily and actively with the memory of things than in pres- 
 ence of them. But, however this be, and I confess that there 
 is much that I cannot satisfactorily to myself unravel with 
 respect to the nature of simple conception ; it is evident that 
 this agreeableness, whatever it be, is not by art attainable, 
 for all art is in some sort realization ; it may be the realiza- 
 tion of obscurity or indefiniteness, but still it must differ from 
 the mere conception of obscurity and indefiniteness ; so that 
 whatever emotions depend absolutely on imperfectness of 
 conception, as the horror of Milton's Death, cannot be ren- 
 dered by art, for art can only lay hold of things which have 
 shape, and destroys by its touch the fearfulness or pleasur- 
 ableness of those which shape have none. 
 
 But on this indistinctness of conception, itself compara- 
 tively valueless and unaffecting, is based the operation of the 
 imaginative faculty with which we are at present concerned, 
 § 4. But gives to and in which its glory is consummated ; where- 
 i?s^rega^Tant ^y, depriving the subject of material and bodily 
 power over them, gj^ap^^ ^^d regarding such of its qualities only 
 as it chooses for particular purpose, it forges these qualities 
 together in such groups and forms as it desires, and gives to 
 their abstract being consistency and reality, by striking them 
 as it were with the die of an image belonging to other matter, 
 which stroke having once received, they pass current at once 
 in the peculiar conjunction and for the peculiar value desired. 
 
 Thus, in the description of Satan quoted in the first chapter, 
 " And like a comet burned," the bodily shape of the angel is 
 destroyed, the inflaming of the formless spirit is alone re- 
 
390 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE, 
 
 garded ; and this, and his power of evil associated in one 
 fearful and abstract conception are stamped to give them 
 distinctness and permanence with the image of the comet, 
 "thd,t fires the length of Ophiuchus huge." Yet this could 
 not be done, but that the image of the comet itself is in a 
 measure indistinct, capable of awful expansion, and full of 
 threatening and fear. Again, in his fall, the imagination 
 binds up the thunder, the resistance, the massy prostration, 
 separates them from the external form, and binds them to- 
 gether by the help of that image of the mountain half-sunk; 
 which again would be unfit but for its own indistinctness, 
 and for that glorious addition " with all his pines," whereby 
 a vitality and spear-like hostility are communicated to its fall- 
 ing form, and the fall is marked as not utter subversion, but 
 sinking only, the pines remaining in their uprightness, and 
 unity, and threatening of darkness upon the descended preci- 
 pice : and again in that yet more noble passage at the close 
 of the fourth book, where almost every operation of the con- 
 templative imagination is concentrated ; the angelic squad- 
 ron first gathered into one burning mass by the single ex- 
 pression " sharpening in mooned horns," then told out in 
 their unity and multitude and stooped hostility, by the im- 
 age of the wind upon the corn ; Satan endowed with godlike 
 strength and endurance in that mighty line, "like Teneriffe 
 or Atlas, unremoved,'* with infinitude of size the next in- 
 stant, and with all the vagueness and terribleness of spiritual 
 power, by the " horror plumed," and the " what seemed both 
 spear and shield." 
 
 The third function of fancy, already spoken of as subordi- 
 nate to this of the imagination, is the highest of which she 
 is capable ; like the imagination, she beholds in the things 
 o mu ^1,. , * submitted to her treatment thin^rs different 
 
 § 5. The third of- . 
 
 lice of fancy dis- from the actual : but the su^fsrestions she fol- 
 
 tinc^uished from . ,. 
 
 imagination con- lows are not m their nature essential in the 
 
 templative. , . i t i i • ^ 
 
 object contemplated ; and the images result- 
 ing, instead of illustrating, may lead the mind away from it, 
 and change the current of contemplative feeling ; for as in 
 her operation parallel to imagination penetrative, we saw her 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 391 
 
 dwelling upon external features, while the nobler sister, fac- 
 ulty, entered within, so now, when both, from what they see 
 and know in their immediate object, are conjuring up im- 
 ages illustrative or elevatory of it, the fancy necessarily sum- 
 mons those of mere external relationship, and therefore of un- 
 affecting influence; while the imagination, by every ghost she 
 raises, tells tales about the prison-house, and therefore never 
 loses her power over the heart, nor her unity of emotion. On 
 the other hand, the regardant or contemplative action of 
 fancy is in this different from, and in the nobler, than that 
 mere seizing and likeness-catching operation we saw in her 
 before ; that when contemplative, she verily believes in the 
 truth of the vision she has summoned, loses sight of actuality, 
 and beholds the new and spiritual image faithfully and even 
 seriously ; whereas before, she summoned no spiritual image, 
 but merely caught the vivid actuality, or the curious resem- 
 blance of the real object ; not that these two operations are 
 separate, for the fancy passes gradually from mere vivid right 
 of reality, and witty suggestion of likeness, to a ghostly 
 sight of what is unreal ; and through this, in proportion as 
 she begins to feel, she rises towards and partakes of imagina- 
 tion itself, for imagination and fancy are continually united, 
 and it is necessary, when they are so, carefully to distinguish 
 the feelingless part which is fancy's, from the sentient part, 
 which is imagination's. Let us take a few instances. Here 
 is fancy, first, very beautiful, in her simple capacity of like- 
 ness-catching: — 
 
 To-day we purpose — aye, this hour we mount 
 To spur three leagues towards the Apennine. 
 Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count 
 His dewy rosary on the eglantine." 
 
 Seizing on the outside resemblances of bead form, and on 
 the slipping from their threading bough one by one, the 
 fancy is content to lose the heart of the thing, the solemnity 
 of prayer : or perhaps I do the glorious poet wrong in say- 
 ing this, for the sense of a sun worship and orison in begin- 
 ning its race, may have been in his mind ; and so far as it 
 
392 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE.. 
 
 was so, the passage is imaginative and not fanciful. But 
 that which most readers would accept from it, is the mere 
 flash of the external image, in whose truth the fancy herself 
 does not yet believe and therefore is not yet contemplative. 
 Here, however, is fancy believing in the images she creates : — 
 
 *'It feeds the quick growth of the serpent-vine, 
 And the dark linked ivy tangling wild 
 And budding, blown, or odor faded blooms, 
 Which star the winds with points of colored light 
 As they rain through them ; and bright golden globes 
 Of fruit suspended in their own green heaven,^'' 
 
 It is not, observe, a mere likeness that is caught here ; but 
 the flowers and fruit are entirely deprived by the fancy of 
 their material existence, and contemplated by her seriously 
 and faithfully as stars and worlds ; yet it is only external 
 likeness that she catches ; she forces the resemblance, and 
 lowers the dignity of the adopted image. 
 
 Next take two delicious stanzas of fancy regardant, (be- 
 lieving in her creations,) followed by one of heavenly im- 
 agination, from Wordsworth's address to the daisy ; — 
 
 A Nun demure — of lowly port ; 
 
 Or sprightly maiden — of Love's court, 
 
 In thy simplicity the sport 
 
 Of all temptations. 
 
 A Queen in crown of rubies drest, 
 
 A starveling in a scanty vest, 
 
 Are all as seems to suit thee best, — 
 
 Thy appellations. 
 
 I see thee glittering from afar, 
 And then thou art a pretty star, — 
 Not quite so fair as many are 
 In heaven above thee. 
 Yet like a star, with glittering crest, 
 Self -poised in air thou seem'st to rest ; — 
 May peace come never to his nest 
 Who shall reprove thee. 
 
 Sweet flower — for by that name at last, 
 
 When all my reveries are past, 
 
 I call thee, and to that cleave fast. 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 393 
 
 Sweet silent creature, 
 That breath'st with me, in sun and air, 
 Do thou, as thou art wont, repair 
 My heart with gladness, and a share 
 Of thy meek nature. " 
 
 Observe how spiritual, yet how wandering and playful the 
 fancy is in the first two stanzas, and how far she flies from 
 the matter in hand, never stopping to brood on the character 
 § 6. Various in- ^^^J images she summons, and yet 
 
 stances. £qj. ^ moment truly seeing and believing in them 
 
 all ; while in the last stanza the imagination returns with its 
 deep feeling to the heart of the flower, and " cleaves fasV'^ to 
 that. Compare the operation of the imagination in Coleridge, 
 on one of the most trifling objects that could possibly have 
 been submitted to its action. 
 
 The thin blue flame 
 Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not : 
 Only that film which fluttered on the grate 
 Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing*. 
 Methinks its motion in this hush of nature 
 Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live, 
 Making it a companionable form, 
 Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling spirit 
 By its own moods interprets ; everywhere. 
 Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 
 And makes a toy of thought." 
 
 Lastly, observe the sweet operation of fancy regardant, in 
 the following well-known passage from Scott, where both her 
 beholding and transforming powers are seen in their sim- 
 plicity. 
 
 The rocky summits — split and rent. 
 Formed turret, dome, or battlement. — 
 Or seemed fantastically set 
 With cupola or minaret. 
 Nor were these earth-born castles bare, 
 Nor lacked they many a banner fair, 
 For from their shivered brows displayed, 
 Far o'er th' unfathomable glade, 
 
394 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 All twinkling with the dew-drop sheen, 
 The brier-rose fell, in streamers green. — 
 And creeping shrubs of thousand dyes 
 Waved in the west wind's summer sighs." 
 
 Let the reader refer to this passage, with its pretty tremu- 
 lous conclusion above the pine tree, " where glistening stream- 
 ers waved and danced," and then compare with it the follow- 
 ing, where the imagination operates on a scene nearly 
 similar. 
 
 Gray rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemm'd 
 The struggling brook ; tall spires of windle strae 
 Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope, 
 And nought but knarled roots of ancient pines, 
 Branchless and blasted, clench' d with grasping roots 
 
 Th' unwilling soil 
 
 A gradual change was here. 
 
 Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away^ 
 The smooth brow gathers^ and the hair grows thin 
 And white ; and where irradiate dewy eyes 
 Had shone^ gleam stony orbs ; so from his steps 
 Bright flowers departed^ and the heautifid shade 
 Of the green groves^ with all their odorous winds 
 And musical motions 
 
 . Where the pass extends 
 Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks. 
 And seems with its accumulated crags 
 To overhang the world ; for wide expand 
 Beneath the wan stars, and descending moon, 
 Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, 
 Dim tracts and vast^ robed in the lustrous gloom 
 Of leaden-colored eveUy and flery hills 
 Mingling their flames with twilight on the verge 
 Of the remote horizon. The near scene 
 In naked, and severe simplicity 
 Made contrast with the universe. A pine 
 Rock-rooted, stretch' d athwart the vacancy 
 Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast. 
 Yielding one only response at each pause. 
 In most familiar cadence, with the howl, 
 The thunder, and the hiss of homeless streams, 
 Mingling its solemn song. 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 395 
 
 In this last passage, the mind never departs from its sol- 
 emn possession of the solitary scene, the imagination only 
 giving weight, meaning, and strange human sympathies to 
 all its sights and sounds. 
 
 In that from Scott,* — the fancy, led away by the outside 
 resemblance of floating form and hue to the banners, loses 
 the feeling and possession of the scene, and places herself in 
 circumstances of character completely opposite to the quiet- 
 ness and grandeur of the natural objects ; this would have 
 been unjustifiable, but that the resemblance occurs to the 
 mind of the monarch, rather than to that of the poet ; and 
 it is that, which of all others, would have been the most 
 likely to occur at the time ; in this point of view it has high 
 imaginative propriety. Of the same fanciful character is that 
 transformation of the tree trunks into dragons noticed be- 
 fore in Turner's Jason ; and in the same way this becomes 
 imaginative as it exhibits the effect of fear in disposing to 
 morbid perception. Compare with it the real and high ac- 
 tion of the imagination on the same matter in Wordsworth's 
 Yew trees (w^hich I consider the most vigorous and solemn 
 bit of forest landscape ever painted) : — 
 
 ' ' Each particular trunk a growth 
 
 Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, 
 
 Up coiling and inveterately convolved, 
 
 Not uninformed with Phantasy^ and looks 
 
 That threaten the ^profane. " 
 
 It is too long to quote, but the reader should refer to it : 
 let him note especially, if painter, that pure touch of color, 
 "^by sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged." 
 
 * Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly dream- 
 ing of Shelley over clouds and waves with the masculine and magnifi- 
 cent grasp of men and things which we find in Scott ; it only happens 
 that these two passages are more illustrative, by the likeness of the 
 scenery they treat, than any others I could have opposed; and that 
 Shelley is peculiarly distinguished by the faculty of contemplative im- 
 agination. Scott's healthy and truthful feeling would not allow him 
 to represent the benighted hunter provoked by loss of game, horse, 
 and way at once, as indulging in any more exalted flights of imagina- 
 tion than those naturally consequent on the contrast between the 
 night's lodging he expected, and that which befitted him. 
 
396 02^ IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 In the same way, the blasted trunk on the left, in Tur- 
 ner's drawing of the spot where Harold fell at the battle of 
 Hastings, takes, where its boughs first separate, the shape 
 of the head of an arrow ; this, which is mere fancy in itself, 
 is imagination as it supposes in the spectator an excited con- 
 dition of feeling dependent on the history of the spot. 
 
 I have been led perhaps into too great detail in illustrat- 
 ing these points ; but I think it is of no small importance 
 to prove how in all cases the imagination is based upon, 
 § 7. Morbid or ^-ud appeals to, a deep heart feeling ; and how 
 nervous fancy, faithful and earnest it is in contemplation of the 
 subject matter, never losing sight of it, or disguising it, but 
 depriving it of extraneous and material accidents, and regard- 
 ing it in its disembodied essence. I have not, however, suf- 
 ficiently noted in opposition to it, that diseased action of the 
 fancy which depends more on nervous temperament than in- 
 tellectual power ; and which, as in dreaming, fever, insanity, 
 and other morbid conditions of mind, is frequently a source 
 of daring and inventive conception ; and so the visionary ap- 
 pearances resulting from various disturbances of the frame 
 by passion, and from the rapid tendency of the mind to in- 
 vest with shape and intelligence the active influences about 
 it, as in the various demons, spirits, and fairies of all imag- 
 inative nations ; which, however, I consider are no more to 
 be ranked as right creations of fancy or imagination than 
 things actually seen and heard ; for the action of the nerves 
 is I suppose the same, whether externally caused, or from 
 within, although very grand imagination may be shown by 
 the intellectual anticipation and realization of such impres- 
 sions ; as in that glorious vignette of Turner's to the voyage 
 of Columbus. Slowly along the evening sky they went." 
 Note especially therein, how admirably true to the natural 
 form, and yet how suggestive of the battlement he has ren- 
 dered the level flake of evening cloud. 
 
 §8 The action ^ believe that it is unnecessary for me to 
 of contemplative enter into farther detail of illustration respect- 
 
 imagmation is . . p p ^^ • pi 
 
 not to be ex- ing thesc pomts ; for fuller explanation of the 
 pressed by art. operations of the contemplative faculty on 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE, 397 
 
 things verbally expressible, the reader may be referred to 
 Wordsworth's preface to his poems ; it only remains for us, 
 here, to examine how far this imaginative or abstract con- 
 ception is to be conveyed by the material art of the sculptor 
 or the painter. 
 
 Now, it is evident that the bold action of either the fancy 
 or the imagination, dependent on a bodiless and spiritual 
 image of the object, is not to be by lines or colors represented. 
 We cannot, in the painting of Satan fallen, suggest any im- 
 age of pines or crags, — neither can we assimilate the brier and 
 the banner, nor give human sympathy to the motion of the 
 film, nor voice to the swinging of the pines. 
 
 Yet certain powers there are, within due limits, of marking 
 the thing represented with an ideal character ; and it was to 
 these powers that I alluded in defining the 
 narrow^^Smits?— meaning of the term ideal, in the thirteenth 
 
 1st. Abstract ren- i, i?-! ^' j* tt^ ' j. • 
 
 dering of form chapter oi the preceding section, ri or it is by 
 without color. ^j^.g operation that the productions of high art 
 are separated from those of the realist. 
 
 And, first, there is evidently capability of separating color 
 and form, and considering either separately. Form we find 
 abstractedly considered by the sculptor, how far it would be 
 possible to advantage a statue by the addition of color, I vent- 
 ure not to affirm ; the question is too extensive to be here 
 discussed. High authorities and ancient practice, are in fa- 
 vor of color ; so the sculpture of the middle ages : the two 
 statues of Mino da F]iesole in the church of St^. Caterina at 
 Pisa have been colored, the irises of the eyes painted dark, 
 and the hair gilded, as also I think the Madonna in St^. Maria 
 della Spina ; the eyes have been painted in the sculptures 
 of Orcagna in Or San Michele, but it looks like a remnant of 
 barbarism, (compare the pulpit of Guida da Como, in the 
 church of San Bartolomeo at Pistoja,) and I have never seen 
 color on any solid forms, that did not, to my mind, neutralize 
 all other power ; the porcelains of Luca della Robbia are 
 painful examples, and in lower art, Florentine mosaic in re- 
 lief ; gilding is more admissible, and tells sometimes sweetly 
 upon figures of quaint design, as on the pulpit of St*, Maria 
 
398 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 Novella, while it spoils the classical ornaments of the mould- 
 ings. But the truest grandeur of sculpture I believe to be 
 in the white form ; something of this feeling may be owing 
 to the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of obtaining truly 
 noble color upon it, but if we could color the Elgin marbles 
 with the flesh tint of Giorgione, I had rather not have it done. 
 
 Color, without form, is less frequently obtainable, and it 
 may be doubted whether it be desirable : yet I think that to 
 the full enjoyment of it, a certain abandonment of form is 
 § 10 Of color i^^c^ssary ; sometimes by reducing it to the 
 without form. shapeless glitter of the gem, as often Tintoret 
 and Bassano ; sometimes by loss of outline and blending of 
 parts, as Turner ; sometimes by flatness of mass, as often 
 Giorgione and Titian. How far it is possible for the painter 
 to represent those mountains of Shelley as the poet sees them, 
 " mingling their flames with twilight," I cannot say ; but my 
 impression is, that there is no true abstract mode of consider- 
 ing color ; and that all the loss of form in the works of Titian 
 or Turner, is not ideal, but the representation of the natural 
 conditions under which bright color is seen ; for form is always 
 in a measure lost by nature herself when color is very vivid. 
 
 Again, there is capability of representing the essential 
 character, form, and color of an object, without external text- 
 ure. On this point much has been said by Reynolds and 
 § 11. Or of both c>thers, and it is, indeed, perhaps the most un- 
 without texture, failing charactei^stic of great manner in paint- 
 ing. Compare a dog of Edwin Landseer with a dog of Paul 
 Veronese. In the first, the outward texture is wrought out 
 with exquisite dexterity of handling, and minute attention to 
 all the accidents of curl and gloss which can give appearance 
 of reality, while the hue and power of the sunshine, and the 
 truth of the shadow on all these forms is necessarily neglected, 
 and the large relations of the animal as a mass of color to the 
 sky or ground, or other parts of the picture, utterly lost. This 
 is realism at the expense of ideality, it is treatment essentially 
 unimaginative.* With Veronese, there is no curling nor crisp- 
 
 * I do not mean to withdraw the praise I have given, and shall always 
 be willing to give such pictures as the Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 399 
 
 ing, no glossiness nor sparkle, hardly even hair, a mere type 
 of hide, laid on with a few scene-painter's touches. But the 
 essence of dog is there, the entire magnificent, generic animal 
 type, muscular and living, and with broad, pure, sunny day- 
 light upon him, and bearing his true and harmonious relation 
 of color to all color about him. This is ideal treatment. 
 
 The same treatment is found in the works of all the great- 
 est men, they all paint the lion more than his mane, and the 
 horse rather than his hide ; and I think also they are more 
 careful to obtain the right expression of large and universal 
 light and color, than local tints ; for the warmth of sunshine, 
 and the force of sun-lighted hue are always sublime on what- 
 ever subject they may be exhibited ; and so also are light 
 and shade, if grandly arranged, as may be well seen in an 
 etching of Rembrandt's of a spotted shell, which he has made 
 altogether sublime by broad truth and large ideality of light 
 and shade ; and so I have seen frequent instances of very 
 grand ideality in treatment of the most commonplace still 
 life, by our own Hunt, where the petty glosses and delica- 
 cies, and minor forms, are all merged in a broad glow of suf- 
 fused color ; so also in pieces of the same kind by Etty, 
 where, however, though the richness and play of color are 
 greater, and the arrangement grander, there is less expres- 
 sion of light, neither is there anything in modern art that can 
 be set beside some choice passages of Hunt in this respect. 
 § 12. Abstraction Again, it is possible to represent objects ca- 
 senSn o?ant- P^-ble of various accidcnts in a generic or sym- 
 
 malform. boUcal form. 
 
 How far this may be done with things having necessary 
 form, as animals, I am not prepared to say. The lions of the 
 Egyptian room in the British Museum, and the fish beside^ 
 Michael Angelo's Jonah, are instances ; and there is imagin- 
 ative power about both which we find not in the more per- 
 fectly realized Florentine boar, nor in Raffaelle's fish of the 
 
 and to all in which the character and inner life of animals are developed. 
 But all lovers of art must regret to find Mr. Landseer wasting his ener- 
 gies on such inanities as the Shoeing," and sacrificing color, expres- 
 sion, and action, to an imitation of glossy hide. 
 
400 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 draught. And yet the propriety and nobility of these types 
 depend on the architectural use and character of the one, 
 and on the typical meaning of the other : we should be 
 grieved to see the forms of the Egyptian lion substituted 
 for those of Raffaelle's in its struggle with Samson, nor would 
 the whale of Michael Angelo be tolerated in the nets of Gen- 
 nesaret. So that I think it is only when the figure of the 
 creature stands not for any representation of vitality, but 
 merely for a letter or type of certain symbolical meaning, or 
 else is adopted as a grand form of decoration or support in 
 architecture, that such generalization is allowable, and in 
 such circumstances I think it necessary, always provided it 
 be based, as in the instances given I conceive it to be, upon 
 thorough knowledge of the creature symbolized and wrought 
 out by a master hand ; and these conditions being observed, 
 I believe it to be vmht and necessary in archi- 
 
 § 13. Either when f . 
 
 it iP symbolically tecture to modify all animal forms by a severe 
 architectural stamp, and in symbolical use of 
 them, to adopt a typical form, to which practice the con- 
 trary, and its evil consequences are ludicrously exhibited 
 in the St. Peter of Carlo Dolci in the Pitti palace, which 
 owing to the prominent, glossy-plumed and crimson-combed 
 cock, is liable to be taken for the portrait of a poulterer, only 
 let it be observed that the treatment of the animal form 
 here is offensive, not only from its realization, but from the 
 pettiness and meanness of its realization ; for it might, in 
 other hands but Carlo Dolci's, have been a sublime cock, 
 though a real one, but in his, it is fit for nothing but the 
 spit. Compare as an example partly of symbolical treat- 
 ment, partly of magnificent realization, that supernatural 
 lion of Tintoret, in the picture of the Doge Loredano before 
 the Madonna, with the plumes of his mighty wings clashed 
 together in cloudlike repose, and the strength of the sea 
 winds shut within their folding. And note farther the dif- 
 ference between the t3''pical use of the animal, as in this case, 
 and that of the fish of Jonah, and (again the fish before men- 
 tioned whose form is indicated in the clouds of the baptism), 
 and the actual occurrence of the creature itself, with con- 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 401 
 
 cealed meaning, as the ass colt of the crucifixion, which it 
 was necessary to paint as such, and not as an ideal form. 
 
 I cannot enter here into the question of the exact degree 
 of severity and abstraction necessary in the forms of living 
 things architecturally employed ; my own feeling on the 
 subject is, though I dare not lay it down as a 
 Lcturai^ ^decora- principle, (with the Parthenon pediment stand- 
 ing against me like the shield of A jax,) that no 
 perfect representation of animal form is right in architect- 
 ural decoration. For my own part, I had much rather see 
 the metopes in the Elgin room of the British Museum, and 
 the Parthenon without them, than have them together, and 
 I would not surrender, in an architectural point of view, one 
 mighty line of the colossal, quiet, life-in-death statue moun- 
 tains in Egypt with their narrow fixed eyes and hands on 
 their rocky limbs, nor one Romanesque fa9ade with its por- 
 phyry mosaic of indefinable monsters, nor one Gothic mould- 
 ing of rigid saints and grinning goblins, for ten Parthenons ; 
 and, I believe, I could show some rational ground for this 
 seeming barbarity if this were the place to do so, but at 
 present I can only ask the reader to compare the effect of 
 the so-called barbarous ancient mosaics on the front of St. 
 Mark's, as they have been recorded, happily, by the faithful- 
 ness of the good Gentile Bellini, in one of his pictures now 
 in the Venice gallery, with the veritably barbarous pictorial 
 substitutions of the fifteenth century, (one only of the old 
 mosaics remains, or did remain till lately, over the northern 
 door, but it is probably by this time torn down by some of 
 the Venetian committees of taste,) and also I would have 
 the old portions of the interior ceiling, or of the mosaics of 
 Murano and Torcello, and the glorious Cimabue mosaic of 
 Pisa, and the roof of the Baptistery at Parma, (that of the 
 Florence Baptistery is a bad example, owing to its crude 
 whites and complicated mosaic of small forms,) all of which 
 are as barbarous as they can well be, in a certain sense, but 
 mighty in their barbarism, with any architectural decorations 
 whatsoever, consisting of professedly perfect animal forms, 
 from the vile frescoes of Federigo Zuccaro at Florence to 
 Vol. II.— 26 
 
402 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 the ceiling of the Sistine, and again compare the professed- 
 ly perfect sculpture of Milan Cathedral with the statues of 
 §15. Exception the porches of Ohartres ; only be it always ob- 
 superimposed^or^- Served that it is not rudeness and ignorance of 
 nament. ^^t^ but intellectually awful abstraction that I 
 
 uphold, and also be it noted that in all ornament, which takes 
 place in the general effect merely as so much fretted stone, 
 in capitals and other pieces of minute detail, the forms may 
 be, and perhaps ought to be, elaborately imitative ; and in 
 this respect again, the capitals of St. Mark's church, and of 
 the Doge's palace at Venice may be an example to the archi- 
 tects of all the world, in their boundless inventiveness, un- 
 failing elegance, and elaborate finish ; there is more mind 
 poured out in turning a single angle of that church than would 
 serve to build a modern cathedral ; * and of the careful finish 
 of the work, this may serve for example, that one of the 
 capitals of the Doge's palace is formed of eight heads oi 
 different animals, of which one is a bear's with a honey- 
 comb in the mouth, whose carved cells are hexagonal. 
 
 So far, then, of the abstraction proper to architecture, and 
 to symbolical uses, of which I shall have occasion to speak 
 hereafter at length, referring to it only at present as one of 
 §16. Abstraction the Operations of imagination contemplative; 
 hnp?rfection*^^S Other abstractions there are which are neces- 
 materiais. sarily Consequent on the imperfection of mate- 
 
 rials, as of the hair in sculpture, which is necessarily treated 
 in masses that are in no sort imitative, but only stand for hair, 
 
 * I have not brought forward any instances of the imaginative pow- 
 er in architecture, as my object is not at present to exhibit its opera- 
 tion in all matter, but only to define its essence ; but it may be well to 
 note, in our own new houses of Parliament, how far a building ap- 
 proved by a committee of Taste, may proceed without manifestation 
 either of imagination or composition ; it remains to be seen how far 
 the towers may redeem it ; and I allude to it at present unwillingly, 
 and only in the desire of influencing, so far as I may, those who have the 
 power to prevent the adoption of a design for a bridge to take the place 
 of Westminster, which was exhibited in 1844 at the Royal Academy, 
 professing to be in harmony with the new building, but which was fit 
 only to carry a railroad over a canal. 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 403 
 
 and have the grace, flow, and feeling of it without the text- 
 ure or division, and other abstractions there are in which the 
 form of one thing is fancifully indicated in the matter of 
 another ; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the 'use of which, 
 in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy 
 charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own gallery, which 
 the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo, in Wil- 
 son's Niobe, and again the phantom vignette of Turner al- 
 ready noticed ; only such operations of the imagination are 
 to be held of lower kind and dangerous consequence, if fre- 
 quently trusted in, for those painters only have the right im- 
 aginative power who can set the supernatural form before us 
 fleshed and boned like ourselves.* Other abstractions occur, 
 frequently, of things which have much accidental variety of 
 §17 Abstractions f^™? waves, on Greek sculptures in suc- 
 
 of things capa- ccssive volutcs, and of clouds often in support- 
 
 ble of varied ac- . . ^ , ^ ^ 
 
 cident are not im- ing volumes in the sacred pictures; but these 
 
 aginative. ^ ^ ,ii ^ p • . .. 
 
 i do not look upon as results oi imagination at 
 all, but mere signs and letters ; and whenever a very highly 
 imaginative mind touches them, it always realizes as far. as 
 may be. Even Titian is content to use at the top of his St. 
 Pietro Martiri, the conventional, round, opaque cloud, which 
 cuts his trees open like a gouge ; but Tintoret, in his picture 
 of the Golden Calf, though compelled to represent the Sinai 
 under conventional form, in order that the receiving of the 
 tables might be seen at the top of it, yet so soon as it is 
 possible to give more truth, he is ready with it ; he takes a 
 grand fold of horizontal cloud straight from the flanks' of 
 the Alps, and shows the forests of the mountains through its 
 misty volumes, like sea-weed through deep sea.f Neverthe- 
 less, when the realization is impossible, bold symbolism is of 
 § 18. Yet some- ^^^^ highest value, and in religious art, as we 
 times valuable. shall presently see, even necessary, as of the 
 rays of light in the Titian woodcut of St. Francis before 
 
 * Comp. Ch. V. § 5. 
 
 f All the clouds of Tintoret are sublime ; the worst that I know in 
 art are Correggio's, especially in the Madonna della Scudella, and Dome 
 of Parma. 
 
404 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 noticed ; and sometimes the attention is directed by some 
 such strange form to the meaning of the image, which may 
 be missed if it remains in its natural purity, (as, I suppose, 
 few in looking at the Oephalus and Procris of Turner, note 
 the sympathy of those faint rays that are just drawing back 
 and dying between the trunks of the far-off forest, with the 
 ebbing life of the nymph ; unless, indeed, they happen to 
 recollect the same sympathy marked by Shelley in the Alas- 
 tor ;) but the imagination is not shown in any such modifi- 
 cations ; however, in some cases they may be valuable (in 
 the Cephalus they would be utterly destructive,) and I note 
 them merely in consequence of their peculiar use in religious 
 art, presently to be examined. 
 
 The last mode we have here to note in which the imao:ina- 
 § 19 Exaggera- ^^^^ regardant may be expressed in art is ex- 
 tion. Its laws afiffiferation, of which, as it is the vice of all bad 
 
 and limits. First, ^ ^ 
 
 in scale of repre- artists, and may be constantly resorted to with- 
 
 sentation. , . o * . . . 
 
 out any warrant oi imagination, it is necessary 
 to note strictly the admissable limits. 
 
 In the first place, a colossal statue is necessarily no more 
 an exaggeration of what it represents than a miniature is a 
 diminution, it need not be a representation of a giant, but a 
 representation, on a large scale, of a man ; only it is to be 
 observed, that as any plane intersecting the cone of rays be- 
 tween us and the object, must receive an image smaller than 
 the object ; a small image is rationally and completely ex- 
 pressive of a larger one ; but not a large of a small one. 
 Hence I think that all statues above the Elgin standard, or 
 that of Michael Angelo's Night and Morning, are, in a meas- 
 ure, taken by the eye for representations of giants, and I 
 think them always disagreeable. The amount of exaggera- 
 tion admitted by Michael Angelo is valuable because it sep- 
 arates the emblematic from the human form, and gives greater 
 freedom to the grand lines of the frame ; for notice of his 
 scientific system of increase of size I may refer the reader to 
 Sir Charles Bell's remarks on the statues of the Medici 
 chapel ; but there is one circumstance which Sir Charles has 
 not noticed, and in the interpretation of which, therefore, it 
 
OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE, 405 
 
 is likely I may be myself wrong ; that the extremities are 
 singularly small in proportion to the limbs, by which means 
 there is an expression given of strength and activity greater 
 than in the ordinary human type, which appears to me to be 
 an allowance for that alteration in proportion necessitated by 
 increase of size, of which we took note in Chap. VI. of the 
 first section, § 10, note ; not but that Michael Angelo always 
 makes the extremities comparatively small, but smallest, com- 
 paratively, in his largest works ; so I think, from the size of 
 the head, it may be conjectured respecting the Theseus of the 
 Elgins. Such adaptations are not necessary when the exag- 
 gerated image is spectral : for as the laws of matter in that 
 case can have no operation, we may expand the form as 
 far as we choose, only let careful distinction be made between 
 the size of the thing represented, and the scale of the repre- 
 sentation. The canvas on which Fuseli has stretched his 
 Satan in the schools of the Royal Academy is a mere con- 
 cession to inability. He might have made him look more 
 gigantic in one of a foot square. 
 
 Another kind of exaggeration is of things whose size is 
 variable to a size or degree greater than that usual with them, 
 as in waves and mountains ; and there are hardly any limits 
 § 20. Secondly, to this exaggeration so long as the laws which 
 of ^v'afiet^y^if nature observes in her increase be observed. 
 
 Thus, for instance : the form and polished sur- 
 face of a breaking ripple three inches high, are not repre- 
 sentation of either the form or the surface of the surf of a 
 storm, nodding ten feet above the beach ; neither would the 
 cutting ripple of a breeze upon a lake if simply exaggerated, 
 represent the forms of Atlantic surges ; but as nature in- 
 creases her bulk, she diminishes the angles of ascent, and in- 
 creases her divisions ; and if we would represent surges of 
 size greater than ever existed, which it is lawful to do, we 
 must carry out these operations to still greater extent. Thus, 
 Turner, in his picture of the Slave Ship, divides the whole 
 sea into two masses of enormous swell, and conceals the hori- 
 zon by a gradual slope of only two or three degrees. This 
 is intellectual exaggeration. In the Academy exhibition of 
 
406 OF IMAGINATION CONTEMPLATIVE. 
 
 1843, there was, in one of the smaller rooms, a black picture 
 of a storm, in which there appeared on the near sea, just 
 about to be overwhelmed by an enormous breaker, curling 
 right over it, an object at first sight liable to be taken for a 
 walnut shell, but which, on close examination, proved to be a 
 ship with mast and sail, with Christ and his twelve disciples 
 in it. This is childish exaggeration, because it is impossible, 
 by the laws of matter and motion, that such a breaker should 
 ever exist. Again in mountains, we have repeatedly observed 
 the necessary building up and multitudinous division of the 
 higher peaks, and the smallness of the slopes by which they 
 usually rise. We may, therefore, build up the mountain as 
 high as we please, but we must do it in nature's way, and not 
 in impossible peaks and precipices ; not but that a daring 
 feature is admissible here and there, as the Matterhorn is 
 admitted by nature ; but we must not compose a picture out 
 of such exceptions ; we may use them, but they must be as 
 exceptions exhibited. I shall have much to say, when we 
 come to treat of the sublime, of the various modes of treating 
 mountain form, so that at present I shall only point to an 
 unfortunate instance of inexcusable and effectless exaggera- 
 tion in the distance of Turner's vignette to Milton, (the temp- 
 tation on the mountain,) and desire the reader to compare it 
 with legitimate exaggeration, in the vignette to the second 
 part of Jacqueline, in Rogers's poems. 
 
 Another kind of exaggeration is necessary to retain the 
 characteristic impressions of nature on reduced scale ; it is 
 not possible, for instance, to give the leafage of trees in its 
 proper proportion, when the trees represented 
 
 § 21. Thirdly, nec- ^ \ ^ ^. . -ii. 
 
 essary in expres- are large, without entirely losing their grace oi 
 
 sion of character- ^ i? ±.C u i. St ' 
 
 istic features on lorm and curvature ; oi this the best proot is 
 
 diminished scale. « i ' ,^ ^ , t-\ ^ 1-*t_ 
 
 found in the Calotype or Daguerreotype, which 
 fail in foliage, not only because the green rays are ineffective, 
 but because, on the small scale of the image, the reduced 
 leaves lose their organization, and look like moss attached to 
 sticks. In order to retain, therefore, the character of flexi- 
 bility and beauty of foliage, the painter is often compelled 
 to increase the proportionate size of the leaves, and to ar-^ 
 
OF THE SVPERHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 407 
 
 range them in generic masses. Of this treatment compare 
 the grand examples throughout the Liber Studiorum. It is 
 by such means only that the ideal character of objects is to 
 be preserved ; as we before observed in the 13th chapter of 
 the first section. In all these cases exaggeration is only law- 
 ful as the sole means of arriving at truth of impression when, 
 strict fidelity is out of the question. 
 
 Other modes of exaggeration there are, on which I shall 
 not at present farther insist, the proper place for their dis- 
 cussion being in treating of the sublime, and these which I 
 have at present instanced are enough to establish the point 
 at issue, respecting imaginative verity, inasmuch as we find 
 that exaggeration itself, if imaginative, is referred to princi- 
 ples of truth, and of actual being. 
 
 We have now, I think, reviewed the various modes in which 
 imagination contemplative may be exhibited in art, and ar- 
 rived at all necessary certainties respecting the essence of the 
 § 22. Recapitu- f^culty I which wc havc found in all its three 
 functions, associative of truth, penetrative of 
 truth, and contemplative of truth ; and having no dealings 
 nor relations with any kind of falsity. One task, how- 
 ever, remains to us, namely, to observe the operation of the 
 theoretic and imaginative faculties together, in the attempt 
 at realization to the bodily sense of beauty supernatural and 
 divine. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 OF THE SUPEEHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 In our investigation in the first section of the laws of 
 beauty, we confined ourselves to the observation of lower 
 nature, or of humanity. We were prevented from proceeding 
 to deduce conclusions respectiner divine ideality 
 
 §1. The subject , 4. • ..l, /ir j • • 1 
 
 is not to be here by our not having then established any principles 
 treated in detail. j.(3spg(>|-ijjg ^\^q imaginative faculty, by which, 
 
 under the discipline of the theoretic, such ideality is con- 
 ceived. I had purposed to conclude the present section by a 
 
408 OF THE SUPEBHUMAN IDEAL, 
 
 careful examination of this subject ; but as this is evidently 
 foreign to the matter immediately under discussion, and in- 
 volves questions of great intricacy respecting the develop- 
 ment of mind among those pagan nations who are supposed 
 to have produced high examples of spiritual ideality, I believe 
 it will be better to delay such inquiries until we have con- 
 cluded our detailed observation of the beauty of visible nat- 
 ure ; and I shall therefore at present take notice only of one 
 or two broad principles, which were referred to, or implied, 
 in the chapter respecting the human ideal, and without the 
 enunciation of which that chapter might lead to false con- 
 clusions. 
 
 There are four ways in which beings supernatural may be 
 conceived as manifestinp; themselves to human 
 
 § 2. The conceiv- mi r> i i 
 
 able modes of scnsc. The first, by external types, signs, or in- 
 
 manif estation of^ r-\ s , -\r 'in 
 
 Spiritual Beings nucnces ; as (jrod to Moses in the names oi the 
 arefoui. bush, and to Elijah in the voice of Horeb. 
 
 The second, by the assuming of a form not properly belong- 
 ing to them ; as the Holy Spirit of that of a Dove, the second 
 person of the Trinity of that of a Lamb ; and so such mani- 
 festations, under angelic or other form, of the first person of 
 the Trinity, as seem to have been made to Abraham, Moses, 
 and Ezekiel. 
 
 The third, by the manifestation of a form properly belong- 
 ing to them, but not necessarily seen ; as of the Risen Christ 
 to his disciples when the doors were shut. And the fourth, 
 by their operation on the human form, which they influence 
 or inspire, as in the shining of the face of Moses. 
 
 It is evident that in all these cases, wherever there is form 
 at all, it is the form of some creature to us known. It is no 
 new form peculiar to spirit nor can it be. We can conceive 
 §3. And these are of none. Our inquiry is simply, therefore, by 
 crerture^forms fa- ^^^^^ modifications those crcature forms to us 
 miliar to us. known, as of a lamb, a bird, or a human creat- 
 ure, may be explained as signs or habitations of Divinity, 
 or of angelic essence, and not creatures such as they seem. 
 
 This may be done in two ways. First, by effecting some 
 change in the appearance of the creature inconsistent with 
 
OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 409 
 
 its actual nature, as by giving it colossal size, or unnatural 
 color, or material, as of gold, or silver, or flame, instead of 
 § 4 Supernatural ^^^^^5 taking avvay its property of matter 
 
 character may be alto2^ether, and formins; it of lio^ht or shade, or 
 
 impressed on . ° , ^ . /. i 
 
 these either by m an intermediate step, of cloud, or vapor : or 
 
 phenomena incon- , . . . , . , , 
 
 sistent with their explaining it by terrible concomitant circum- 
 
 common nature . « n • ^ i i i 
 
 (compare Chap, stauccs, as ot wounds in the body, or strange 
 IV., § iG). lights and seemings round about it ; or by 
 
 joining of two bodies together as in angels' wings. Of all 
 which means of attaining supernatural character (which 
 though, in their nature ordinary and vulgar, are yet effec- 
 tive and very glorious in mighty hands) we have already 
 seen the limits in speaking of the imagination. 
 
 But the second means of obtaining supernatural character 
 is that with which we are now concerned, namely, retaining 
 the actual form in its full and material presence, and without 
 § 5. Or by inher- f rom any external interpretation whatsoever, 
 ent Dignity. raisc that form by mere inherent dignity to 
 
 such a pitch of power and impressiveness as cannot but assert 
 and stamp it for superhuman. 
 
 On the north side of the Oampo Santo at Pisa, are a series 
 of paintings from the Old Testament History by Benozzo 
 Gozzoli. In the earlier of these angelic presences, mingled 
 with human, occur frequently, illustrated by no awfulness of 
 light, nor incorporeal tracing. Clear revealed they move, in 
 human forms, in the broad daylight and on the open earth, 
 side by side, and hand in hand with men. But they never 
 miss of the angel. 
 
 He who can do this has reached the last pinnacle and ut- 
 most power of ideal, or any other art. He stands in no need 
 thenceforward, of cloud, nor lightning, nor tempest, nor terror 
 of mystery. His sublime is independent of the elements. It 
 is of that which shall stand when they shall melt with fervent 
 heat, and light the firmament when the sun is as sackcloth 
 of hair. 
 
 6 It Of th consider by what means this has been 
 
 expression of in- effected, SO far as they are by analysis trace- 
 bpiration. ^^j^ ^ ^^^^ ^^^^ here, as always, 
 
410 OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 we find that the greater part of what has been rightly ac- 
 complished has been done by faith and intense feeling, and 
 cannot, by aid of any rules or teaching, be either tried, 
 estimated, or imitated. 
 
 And first, of the expression of supernatural influence on 
 forms actually human, as of sibyl or prophet. It is evident 
 that not only here is it unnecessary, but we are not altogether 
 at liberty to trust for expression to the utmost ennobling of 
 the human form ; for we cannot do more than this, when that 
 form is to be the actual representation, and not the recipient 
 of divine presence. Hence, in order to retain the actual hu- 
 manity definitely, we must leave upon it such signs of the 
 operation of sin and the liability to death as are consistent 
 with human ideality, and often more than these, definite signs 
 of immediate and active evil, when the prophetic spirit is to 
 be expressed in men such as were Saul and Balaam ; neither 
 may we ever, with just discrimination, touch the utmost lim- 
 its of beauty in human form when inspiration is to be ex- 
 pressed, and not angelic or divine being ; of which reserve 
 and subjection the most instructive instances are found in the 
 works of Angelico, who invariably uses inferior types for the 
 features of humanity, even glorified, (excepting always the 
 Madonna,) nor ever exerts his full power of beauty either in 
 feature or expression, except in angels or in the Madonna or 
 in Christ. Now the expression of spiritual influence without 
 supreme elevation of the bodily type we have seen to be a 
 work of imagination penetrative, and we found it accom- 
 plished by Michael Angelo ; but I think by him only. I am 
 aware of no one else who, to my mind, has expressed the in- 
 spiration of prophet or sibyl ; this, however, I affirm not, but 
 shall leave to the determination of the reader, as the prin- 
 ciples at present to be noted refer entirely to that elevation 
 of the creature form necessary when it is actually represen- 
 tative of a spiritual being. 
 
 I have affirmed in the conclusion of the first 
 
 § 7. No represen- » i i • i • 
 
 tation of that scction that " of that which IS more than creat- 
 than creature is ure, no creaturc ever conceived." I think this 
 pobsibie. almost self-evident, for it is clear that the illim- 
 
OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 411 
 
 itableness of Divine attributes cannot be by matter repre- 
 sented, (though it may be typified,) and I believe that all who 
 are acquainted with the range of sacred art will admit, not 
 only that no representation of Christ has ever been even par- 
 tially successful, but that the greatest painters fall therein 
 below their accustomed level ; Perugino and Fra Angelico 
 especially ; Leonardi has I think done best, but perhaps the 
 beauty of the fragment left at Milan, (for in spite of all that 
 is said of repainting and destruction, that Cenacolo is still 
 the finest in existence) is as much dependent on the very un- 
 traceableness resulting from injury as on its original perfec- 
 tion. Of more daring attempts at representation of Divinity 
 we need not speak ; only this is to be noted respecting them, 
 that though by the ignorant Romanists many such efforts 
 were made under the idea of actual representation, (note the 
 way in which Cellini speaks of the seal made for the Pope,) 
 by the nobler among them I suppose they were intended, 
 and by us at any rate they may always be received, as mere 
 symbols, the noblest that could be employed, but as much 
 symbols still as a triangle, or the Alpha and Omega ; nor do 
 I think that the most scrupulous amongst Christians ought 
 to desire to exchange the power obtained by the use of this 
 symbol in Michael Angelo's creation of Adam and of Eve 
 for the effect which would be produced by the substitution 
 of a triangle or any other sign in place of it. Of these ef- 
 forts then we need reason no farther, but may limit our- 
 selves to considering the purest modes of giving a concep- 
 tion of superhuman but still creature form, as of angels ; in 
 equal rank with whom, perhaps, we may without offence 
 place the mother of Christ : at least we must so regard the 
 type of the Madonna in receiving it from Romanist painters.* 
 
 * I take no note of the representation of evil spirits, since throughout 
 we have been occupied in the pursuit of beauty ; but it may be ob- 
 served generally that there is great difficulty to be overcome in attempts 
 of this kind, because the elevation of the form necessary to give it spir- 
 ituality destroys the appearance of evil ; hence even the greatest paint- 
 ers have been reduced to receive aid from the fancy, and to eke out all 
 they could conceive of malignity by help of horns, hoofs, and claws. 
 Giotto's Satan in the Campo Santo, with the serpent guawiDg the heart, 
 
412 
 
 OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 And first, much is to be done by right modification of ac- 
 cessory circumstances, so as to express miraculous power ex- 
 ercised over them by the spiritual creature. There is a beau- 
 „ ^ „ , tiful instance of this in John Bellini's picture of 
 
 § a Supernat- ^ ^ xr • mi ♦ • 
 
 uiai character ex- bt. Jcrome at Venice. Ihe samt sits upon a 
 
 pressed by modi- i ^• t/? 
 
 fication of acces- rocK, his grand lorm denned against clear green 
 open sky ; he is reading, a noble tree springs 
 out of a cleft in the rock, bends itself suddenly back to form 
 a rest for the volume, then shoots up into the sky. There is 
 something very beautiful in this obedient ministry of the 
 lower creature ; but be it observed that the sweet feeling of 
 the whole depends upon the service being such as is consist- 
 ent with its nature. It is not animated, it does not listen to 
 the saint, nor bend itself towards him as if in affection, this 
 would have been mere fancy, illegitimate and effectless. But 
 the simple bend of the trunk to receive the book is miracu- 
 lous subjection of the true nature of the tree; it is therefore 
 imaginative, and very touching. 
 
 It is not often however that the religious painters even go 
 this length ; they content themselves usually with impress- 
 ing on the landscape perfect symmetry and order, such as 
 may seem consistent with, or induced by the spiritual nature 
 § 9. Landscape they would represent. All signs of decay, dis- 
 piiuters.^^^^Tt^s turbance, and imperfection, are also banished ; 
 inenSy^%mmet- doiug this it is evident that some unnat- 
 
 J^icai. uralness and singularity must result, inasmuch 
 
 is fine ; so many of the fiends of Orcagna, and always those of Michael 
 Angelo. Tintoret in the Temptation, with his usual truth of invention, 
 has represented the evil spirit under the form of a fair angel, the wings 
 burning with crimson and silver, the face sensual and treacherous. It 
 is instructive to compare the results of imagination associated with 
 powerful fancy in the demons of these great painters, or even in such 
 nightmares as that of Salvator already spoken of. Sect. I. Chap. V. § 12 
 (note,) with the simple ugliness of idiotic distortion in the meaningless 
 terrorless monsters of Bronzino in the large picture of the UflBzii, where 
 the painter, utterly uninventive, having assembled all that is abomi- 
 nable of hanging flesh, bony limbs, crane necks, staring eyes, and strag- . 
 gling hair, cannot yet by the sum and substance of all obtain as much 
 real fearf ulness as an imaginative painter could throw into the turn of 
 a lip or the knitting of a brow. 
 
OF THE SUPERIIUMAJSr IDEAL. 
 
 413 
 
 as there are no veritable forms of landscape but express or 
 imply a state of progression or of imperfection. All moun- 
 tain forms are seen to be produced by convulsion and mod- 
 elled by decay ; the finer forms of cloud have stories in them 
 about storm ; all forest grouping is wrought out with vari- 
 eties of strength and growth among its several members, and 
 bears evidences of struggle with unkind influences. All such 
 appearances are banished in the supernatural landscape ; the 
 trees grow straight, equally branched on each side, and of 
 such slight and feathery frame as shows them never to have 
 encountered blight or frost or tempest. The mountains stand 
 up in fantastic pinnacles ; there is on them no trace of tor- 
 rent, no scathe of lightning ; no fallen fragments encumber 
 their foundations, no worn ravines divide their flanks ; the 
 seas are always waveless, the skies always calm, crossed only 
 by fair, horizontal, lightly wreathed, white clouds. 
 
 In some cases these conditions result partly from feeling, 
 partly from ignorance of the facts of nature, or incapability 
 of representing them, as in the first type of the treatment 
 § 10. Landscape of fouud in Giotto and his school ; in others they 
 BenozzoGozzoii. observed ou principle, as by Benozzo Goz- 
 
 zoli, Perugino, and Raffaelle. There is a beautiful instance 
 by the former in the frescoes of the Ricardi palace, where 
 behind the adoring angel groups the landscape is governed 
 by the most absolute symmetry ; roses and pomegranates, 
 their leaves drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves 
 in fair and perfect order about delicate trellises ; broad stone 
 pines and tall cypresses overshadow them, bright birds hover 
 here and there in the serene sky, and groups of angels, hand 
 joined with hand, and wing with wing, glide and float 
 through the glades of the unentangled forest. But behind 
 the human figures, behind the pomp and turbulence of the 
 Kingly procession descending from the distant hills the 
 spirit of the landscape is changed. Severer mountains rise 
 in the distance, ruder prominences and less flowery vary the 
 nearer ground, and gloomy shadows remain unbroken be- 
 neath the forest branches. 
 
 The landscape of Perugino, for grace, purity and as much 
 
414 
 
 OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL, 
 
 of nature as is consistent with the above-named conditions, 
 is unrivalled ; and the more interesting because in him cer- 
 tainly whatever limits are set to the rendering of nature pro- 
 ceed not from incapability. The sea is in the distance almost 
 always, then some blue promontories and undulating dewy 
 park ground, studded with glittering trees ; in the landscape 
 T , - of the fresco in S*^. Maria Maddalena at Flor- 
 
 § 11. Landscape of 
 
 Perugino and Raf- ence there is more variety than is usual with 
 
 faelle. . . 
 
 him ; a gentle river winds round the bases of 
 rocky hills, a river like our own Wye or Te«s in their love- 
 liest reaches; level meadows stretch away on its opposite side; 
 mounds set with slender-stemmed foliage occupy the nearer 
 ground, a small village with its simple spire peeps from the for- 
 est at the bend of the valley, and it is remarkable that in archi- 
 tecture thus employed neither Perugino nor any other of the 
 ideal painters ever use Italian forms but always Transalpine, 
 both of church and castle. The little landscape which forms 
 the background of his own portrait in the Uffizii is another 
 highly finished and characteristic example. The landscape of 
 Raffaelle was learned from his father, and continued for some 
 time little modified, though expressed with greater refinement. 
 It became afterward conventional and poor, and in some cases 
 altogether meaningless. The hay stacks and vulgar trees be- 
 hind the St. Cecilia at Bologna form a painful contrast to the 
 pure space of mountain country in the Perugino opposite.* 
 
 In all these cases, while I would uphold the landscape thus 
 § 12 Such Land ^"^P^^J^^ treated, as worthy of all admira- 
 scape is not to be tion, I should be sorrv to advance it for imita- 
 
 imitated. . ' . . , . . 
 
 tion. What is right m its mannerism arose 
 from keen feeling in the painter : imitated without the same 
 
 * I have not thought it necessary to give farther instances at present, 
 since I purpose hereafter to give numerous examples of this kind of 
 ideal landscape. Of true and noble landscape, as such, I am aware of 
 no instances except where least they might have been expected, among 
 the sea- bred Venetians. Ghirlandajo shows keen, though prosaic, sense 
 of nature in that view of Venice behind an Adoration of Magi in the 
 Uffizii, but he at last walled himself up among gilded entablatures. 
 Masaccio indeed has given one grand example in the fresco of the 
 Tribute Money, but its color is now nearly lost. 
 
OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL, 
 
 415 
 
 feeling, it would be painful ; the only safe mode of following 
 in such steps is to attain perfect knowledge of nature herself, 
 and then to suffer our own feelings to guide us in the selection 
 of what is fitting for any particular purpose. Every painter 
 ought to paint what he himself loves, not what others have 
 loved ; if his mind be pure and sweetly toned, what he loves 
 will be lovely; if otherwise, no example can guide his selection, 
 no precept govern his hand ; and farther let it be distinctly 
 observed, that all this mannered landscape is only right under 
 the supposition of its being a background to some supernatural 
 presence ; behind mortal beings it would be wrong, and by it- 
 self, as landscape, ridiculous ; and farther, the chief virtue of 
 it results from the exquisite refinement of those natural de- 
 tails consistent with its character from the botanical drawing 
 of the flowers and the clearness and brightness of the sky. 
 
 Another mode of attaining supernatural character is by 
 purity of color almost shadowless, no more darkness being 
 allowed than is absolutely necessary for the explanation of 
 the forms, and the vividness of the effect enhanced as far as 
 may be by use of gilding, enamel, and other jewellery. I 
 §13. Color, and think the smaller works of Angelico are perfect 
 Their^use in rep- Hiodels in this respect ; the glories about the 
 '^r'^^e^.tl l^eads being of beaten rays of gold, on which 
 the light plays and changes as the spectator 
 moves ; (and which therefore throw the purest flesh color 
 out in dark relief) and such color and light being obtained 
 by the enamelling of the angel wings as of course is utterly 
 unattainable by any other expedient of art ; the colors of 
 the draperies alw^ays pure and pale ; blue, rose, or tender 
 green, or brown, but never dark or gloomy ; the faces of 
 the most celestial fairness, brightly flushed : the height and 
 glow^ of this flush are noticed by Constantin as reserved by 
 the older painters for spiritual beings, as if expressive of 
 light seen through the body. 
 
 I cannot think it necessary while I insist on the value of 
 all these seemingly childish means when in the hands of a 
 noble painter, to assert also their futility and even absurdity 
 if employed by no exalted power. I think the error has com- 
 
416 OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 monly been on the side of scorn, and that we reject much in 
 our foolish vanity, which if wiser and more earnest we should 
 delight in. But two points it is very necessary to note in 
 the use of such accessories. 
 
 The first that the ornaments used by Angelico, Giotto, and 
 Perugino, but especially by Angelico, are always of a generic 
 and abstract character. They are not diamonds, nor bro- 
 cades, nor velvets, nor c^old embroideries ; thev 
 
 §14. Decoration ' ^ 1 ^A ^ ^ ' ^ f 
 
 so used must be are mere spots oi gold or of color, simple pat- 
 generic. terns upon textureless draperies ; the angel wings 
 
 burn with transparent crimson and purple and amber, but 
 they are not set forth with peacock's plumes ; the golden 
 circlets gleam with changeful light, but they are not beaded 
 with elaborate pearls nor set with studied sapphires. 
 
 In the works of Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, and many 
 other painters following, interesting examples may be found 
 of the opposite treatment ; and as in Lippi the heads are 
 usually very sweet, and the composition severe, the degrad- 
 ing effect of the realized decorations and imitated dress may 
 be seen in him simply, and without any addition of paiiiful- 
 ness from other deficiencies of feeling. The larger of the 
 two pictures in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, but for this 
 defect, would have been a very noble ideal work. 
 
 The second point to be observed is that brightness of color 
 is altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony ; and 
 that the sacred painters must not be followed in their frank- 
 § 15. And color ^^ss of unshadowed color unless we can also f ol- 
 P^^®* low them in its clearness. As far as I am ac- 
 
 quainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem to 
 be entirely ignorant of the value of color as an assistant of 
 feeling, and to think that hardness, dryness, and opacity are 
 its virtues as employed in religious art ; whereas I hesitate 
 not to affirm that in such art more than in any other, clear- 
 ness, luminousness and intensity of hue are essential to right 
 impression ; and from the walls of the Arena chapel in their 
 rainbow play of brilliant harmonies, to the solemn purple 
 tones of Perugino's fresco in the Albizzi palace, I know not 
 any great work of sacred art which is not as precious in color 
 
OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL, 
 
 417 
 
 as in all other qualities (unless indeed it be a Crucifixion of 
 Fra Angelico in the Florence Academy, which has just been 
 glazed and pumiced and painted and varnished by the pict- 
 ure-cleaners until it glares from one end of the picture gal- 
 lery to the other;) only the pure white light and delicate hue 
 of the idealists, whose colors are by preference such as we have 
 seen to be the most beautiful in the chapter on Purity are 
 carefully to be distinguished from the golden light and deep 
 pitched hue of the school of Titian whose virtue is the grand- 
 eur of earthly solemnity, not the glory of heavenly rejoicing. 
 
 But leaving these accessory circumstances and touching 
 the treatment of the bodily form, it is evident in the first 
 place that whatever typical beauty the human body is cap- 
 § 16. Ideal form ^^^^ posscssing must be bestowed upon it 
 Cf ^what"^ wie^y ^^^^ '^^ understood as spiritual. And there- 
 susceptibie. fQj.^ thosc general proportions and types which 
 are deducible from comparison of the nobler individuals of the 
 race, must be adopted and adhered to ; admitting among 
 them not, as in the human ideal, such varieties as result from 
 past suffering, or contest with sin, but such only as are con- 
 sistent with sinless nature or are the signs of instantly or 
 continually operative affections ; for though it is conceivable 
 that spirit should suffer, it is inconceivable that spiritual 
 frame should retain like the stamped inelastic human clay, 
 the brand of sorrow past, unless fallen. 
 
 ' ' His face, 
 
 Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care 
 Sat on his faded cheek." 
 
 Yet so far forth the angelic ideal is diminished, nor could this, 
 be suffered in pictorial representation. 
 
 Again, such muscular development as is necessary to the 
 perfect beautv of the body, is to be rendered, 
 
 § 17. Anatomical V> , i ^ i . i 
 
 development how JbSut that which IS neccssary to strength, or 
 which appears to have been the result of labo- 
 rious exercise, is inadmissible. No herculean form is spirit- 
 ual, for it is degrading the spiritual creature to suppose it 
 operative through impulse of bone and sinew ; its power is 
 iuimaterial and constant, neither dependent on, nor developed 
 Vol. II.— 27 
 
418 OF THE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 by exertion. Generally, it is well to conceal anatomical de- 
 velopment as far as may be ; even Michael Angelo's anatomy 
 interferes with his divinity ; in the hands of lower men the 
 angel becomes a preparation. How far it is possible to sub- 
 due or generalize the naked form I venture not to affirm, but 
 I believe that it is best to conceal it as far as may be, not 
 with draperies light and undulating, that fall in with, and ex- 
 hibit its princij3al lines, but with draperies severe and linear, 
 such as were constantly employed before the time of Raffaelle. 
 1 recollect no single instance of a naked angel that does not 
 look boylike or childlike, and unspiritualized ; even Fra Barto- 
 lomeo's might with advantage be spared from the pictures at 
 Lucca, and, in the hands of inferior men, the sky is merely en- 
 cumbered with sprawling infants; those of Domenichino in the 
 Madonna del Rosario, and Martyrdom of St. Agnes, are pecu- 
 liarly offensive, studies of bare-legged children howling and 
 kicking in volumes of smoke. Confusion seems to exist in 
 the minds of subsequent painters between Angels and Cupids. 
 
 Farther, the qualities of symmetry and repose are of pe- 
 culiar value in spiritual form. We find the former most ear- 
 nestly sought by all the great painters in the arrangement of 
 §18. Symmetry. hair, whcrciu no loosely flowing nor varied 
 How valuable. form is admitted, but all restrained in undis- 
 turbed and equal ringlets ; often, as in the infant Christ of 
 Fra Angelico, supported on the forehead in forms of sculpt- 
 uresque severity. The Angel of Masaccio, in the Deliverance 
 of Peter, grand both in countenance and motion, loses much of 
 his spirituality because the painter has put a little too much 
 of his own character into the hair, and left it disordered. 
 
 Of repose, and its exalting power, I have already said 
 § 19 Th • fl ^"^^^^^ present purpose, though I have 
 
 enceof Greek art, not insisted ou the peculiar manifestation of it 
 how dangerous. Christian ideal as opposed to the pagan. 
 
 But this, as well as all other questions relating to the par- 
 ticular development of the Greek mind, is foreign to the 
 immediate inquiry, which therefore I shall here conclude in 
 the hope of resuming it in detail after examining the laws of 
 beauty in the inanimate creation ; always, however, holding 
 
OF TEE SUPERHUMAN IDEAL. 419 
 
 this for certain, that of whatever kind or degree the short 
 coming may be, it is not possible but that short coming should 
 be visible in every pagan conception, when set beside Chris- 
 tian ; and believing, for my own part, that there is not only 
 deficiency, but such difference in kind as must make all Greek 
 conception full of danger to the student in proportion to his 
 admiration of it ; as I think has been fatally seen in its ef- 
 fect on the Italian schools, when its pernicious element first 
 mingled with their solemn purity, and recently in its influ- 
 ence on the French historical painters : neither can I from 
 my present knowledge fix upon an ancient statue which ex- 
 presses by the countenance any one elevated character of 
 soul, or any single enthusiastic self-abandoning affection, 
 much less any such majesty of feeling as might mark the 
 features for supernatural. The Greek could not conceive a 
 § 20. Its scope, spirit ; he could do nothing without limbs ; his 
 how limited. ^ finite god, talking, pursuing, and going 
 
 journeys;* if at any time he was touched with a true 
 feeling of the unseen powers around him, it was in the field 
 of poised battle, for there is something in the near coming of 
 the shadow of death, something in the devoted fulfilment of 
 mortal duty, that reveals the real God, though darkly ; that 
 pause on the field of Plataea was not one of vain superstition ; 
 the two white figures that blazed along the Delphic plain, 
 when the earthquake and the fire led the charge from Olym- 
 pus, were more than sunbeams on the battle dust ; the sacred 
 cloud, with its lance light and triumph singing, that went 
 down to brood over the masts of Salamis, was more than 
 morning mist among the olives ; and yet what were the 
 Greek's thoughts of his god of battle ? No spirit power was 
 in the vision ; it was a being of clay strength and human 
 passion, foul, fierce, and changeful ; of penetrable arms and 
 vulnerable flesh. Gather what we may of great, from pagan 
 
 * I know not anything in the range of art more unspiritual than the 
 Apollo Bel videre; the raising of the fingers of the right hand in surprise 
 at the truth of the arrow is altogether human, and would be vulgar in 
 a prince, much more in a deity. The sandals destroy the divinity of the 
 foot, and the lip is curled with mortal passion. 
 
420 
 
 OF THE SUPEMHUMAN IDEAL. 
 
 chisel or pagan dream, and set it beside the orderer of Chris- 
 tian warfare, Michael the Archangel : not Milton's " with 
 hostile brow and visage all inflamed," not even Milton's in 
 kingly treading of the hills of Paradise, not Raffaelle's with 
 the expanded wings and brandished spear, but Perugino's 
 with his triple crest of traceless plume unshaken in heaven, 
 his hand fallen on his crossleted sword, the truth girdle 
 binding his undinted armor ; God has put his power upon 
 him, resistless radiance is on his limbs, no lines are there of 
 earthly strength, no trace on the divine features of earthly 
 anger ; trustful and thoughtful, fearless, but full of love, in- 
 capable except of the repose of eternal conquest, vessel and 
 instrument of Omnipotence, filled like a cloud with the victor 
 light, the dust of principalities and powers beneath his feet, 
 the murmur of hell against him heard by his spiritual ear like 
 the winding of a shell on the far-off sea-shore. 
 
 It is vain to attempt to pursue the comparison ; the two 
 orders of art have in them nothing common, and the field of 
 sacred history, the intent and scope of Christian feeling, are 
 too wide and exalted to admit of the juxtaposi- 
 
 § 21. Conclusion. . „ , , ji? /- 
 
 tion oi any other sphere or order oi conception ; 
 they embrace all other fields like the dome of heaven. With 
 what comparison shall we compare the types of the martyr 
 saints,the St. Stephen of Fra Bartolomeo, with his calm fore- 
 head crowned by the stony diadem, or the St. Catherine of Raf- 
 faelle looking up to heaven in the dawn of the eternal day, 
 with her lips parted in the resting from her pain ? or with 
 what the Madonnas of Francia and Pinturicchio, in whom the 
 hues of the morning and the solemnity of the eve, the glad- 
 ness in accomplished promise, and sorrow of the sword- 
 pierced heart, are gathered into one human lamp of ineffable 
 love ? or with what the angel choirs of Angelico, with the 
 flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, 
 and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the 
 glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea, listening, in the 
 pauses of alternate song, for the prolonging of the trumpet 
 blast, and the answering of psaltery and cymbal, throughout 
 the endless deep and from all the star shores of heaven ? 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 421 
 
 ADDENDA. 
 
 Although the plan of the present portion of this work 
 does not admit of particular criticism, it will neither be use- 
 less nor irrelevant to refer to one or two works, lately before 
 the public, in the Exhibitions of the Royal Academy, which 
 either illustrate, or present exceptions to, any of the preced- 
 ing statements. I would first mention, with reference to what 
 has been advanced respecting the functions of Associative 
 Imagination, the very important work of Mr. Linnell, the 
 " Eve of the Deluge ; " a picture upheld by its admirers (and 
 these were some of the most intelligent judges of the day) 
 for a work of consummate imaginative power ; while it was 
 pronounced by the public journals to be " a chaos of uncon- 
 cocted color." If the writers for the press had been aware of 
 the kind of study pursued by Mr. Linnell through many labo- 
 rious years, characterized by an observance of nature scru- 
 pulously and minutely patient, directed by the deepest sensi- 
 bility, and aided by a power of drawing almost too refined 
 for landscape subjects, and only to be understood by reference 
 to his engravings after Michael Angelo, they would have felt 
 it to be unlikely that the work of such a man should be en- 
 tirely undeserving of respect. On the other hand, the grounds 
 of its praise were unfortunately chosen ; for, though possess- 
 ing many merits, it had no claim whatever to be ranked among 
 productions of Creative art. It would perhaps be difficult to 
 point to a work so exalted in feeling, and so deficient in in- 
 vention. The sky had been strictly taken from nature, this 
 was evident at a glance ; and as a study of sky it was every 
 way noble. To the purpose of the picture it hardly contrib- 
 uted ; its sublimity was that of splendor, not of terror ; and 
 its darkness that of retreating, not of gathering, storm. The 
 
422 
 
 ADDENDA. 
 
 features of the landscape were devoid alike of variety and 
 probability ; the division of the scene by the central valley and 
 winding river at once theatrical and commonplace ; and the 
 foreground, on which the light was intense, alike devoid of 
 dignity in arrangement, and of interest in detail. 
 
 The falseness or deficiency of color in the works of Mr. 
 Landseer has been remarked above. The writer has much 
 pleasure in noticing a very beautiful exception in the picture 
 of the " Random Shot," certainly the most successful render- 
 ing he has ever seen of the hue of snow under warm but sub- 
 dued light. The subtlety of gradation from the portions of 
 the wreath fully illumined, to those which, feebly tinged by 
 the horizontal rays, swelled into a dome of dim purple, dark 
 against the green evening sky ; the truth of the blue shad- 
 ows, with which this dome was barred, and the depth of deli- 
 cate color out of which the lights upon the footprints were 
 raised, deserved the most earnest and serious admiration ; 
 proving, at the same time, that the errors in color, so fre- 
 quently to be regretted in the works of the painter, are the 
 result rather of inattention than of feeble perception. A 
 curious proof of this inattention occurs in the disposition of 
 the shadows in the background of the " Old Cover Hack," 
 No. 229. One of its points of light is on the rusty iron han- 
 dle of a pump, in the shape of an S. The sun strikes the 
 greater part of its length, illuminating the perpendicular por- 
 tion of the curve ; yet shadow is only cast on the wall behind 
 by the returning portion of the lower extremity.' A smile 
 may be excited by the notice of so trivial a circumstance ; but 
 the simplicity of the error renders it the more remarkable, 
 and the great masters of chiaroscuro are accurate in all such 
 minor points ; a vague sense of greater truth results from 
 this correctness, even when it is not in particulars analyzed 
 or noted by the observer. In the small but very valuable 
 Paul Potter in Lord Westminster's collection, the body of one 
 of the sheep under the hedge is for the most part in shadow, 
 but the sunlight touches the extremity of the back. The sun 
 is low, and the shadows feeble and distorted ; yet that of the 
 sunlighted fleece is cast exactly in its true place and proper-* 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 423 
 
 tion beyond that of the hedge. The spectator may not ob- 
 serve this ; yet, unobserved, it is one of the circumstances 
 which make him feel the picture to be full of sunshine. 
 
 As an example of perfect color, and of the most refined 
 handling ever perhaps exhibited in animal painting, the 
 Butcher's Dog in the corner of Mr. Mulready's " Butt," No. 
 160, deserved a whole room of the Academy to himself. This, 
 with the spaniel in the " Choosing the Wedding Gown," and 
 the two dogs in the hayfield subject (Burchell and Sophia), dis- 
 plays perhaps the most wonderful, because the most dignified, 
 finish in the expression of anatomy and covering — of muscle 
 and hide at once, and assuredly the most perfect unity of 
 drawing and color, which the entire range of ancient and 
 modern art can exhibit. Albert Durer is indeed the only 
 rival who might be suggested ; and, though greater far in 
 imagination, and equal in draughtsmanship, Albert Durer 
 was less true and less delicate in hue. In sculpturesque ar- 
 rangement both masters show the same degree of feeling : 
 any of these dogs of Mulready might be taken out of the can- 
 vas and cut in alabaster, or, perhaps better, struck upon a coin. 
 Every lock and line of the hair has been grouped as it is on a 
 Greek die ; and if this not always without some loss of ease 
 and of action, yet this very loss is ennobling, in a period when 
 all is generally sacrificed to the great coxcombry of art, the 
 affectation of ease. 
 
 Yet Mr. Mulready himself is not always free from affecta- 
 tion of some kind ; mannerism, at least, there is in his treat- 
 ment of tree trunks. There is a ghastliness about his labored 
 anatomies of them, as well as a want of specific character. 
 Why need they be always flayed ? The hide of a beech tree, 
 or of a birch or fir, is nearly as fair a thing as an animal's ; 
 glossy as a dove's neck barred with black like a zebra, or 
 glowing in purple grey and velvet brown like furry cattle in 
 sunset. Why not paint these as Mr. Mulready paints other 
 things, as they are ? that simplest, that deepest of all secrets, 
 which gives such majesty to the ragged leaves about the edges 
 of the pond in the Gravel-pit," (No. 125,) and imparts a 
 strange interest to the grey ragged urchins disappearing be- 
 
424 
 
 ADDENDA. 
 
 hind the bank, that bank so low, so familiar, so sublime ! 
 What a contrast between the deep sentiment of that com- 
 monest of all common, homeliest of all homely, subjects, and 
 the lost sentiment of Mr. Stanfield's " Amalfi " the chief land- 
 scape of the year, full of exalted material, and mighty crags, 
 and massy seas, grottoes, precipices, and convents, fortress- 
 towers and cloud-capped mountains, and all in vain, merely 
 because that same simple secret has been despised ; because 
 nothing there is painted as it is ! The picture was a most 
 singular example of the scenic assemblage of contradictory 
 theme which is characteristic of Picturesque, as opposed to 
 Poetical, composition. The lines chosen from Rogers for a 
 titular legend were full of summer, glowing with golden light, 
 and toned with quiet melancholy : 
 
 To him who sails 
 Under the shore, a few white villages. 
 Scattered above, below, some in the clouds, 
 Some on the margin of the dark bluC sea, 
 And glittering thro* their lemon groves, announce 
 The region of Amalfi. Then, half -fallen, 
 A lonely watch-tower on the precipice, 
 Their ancient landmark, comes — long may it last I 
 And to the seaman, in a distant age, 
 Though now he little thinks how large his debt, 
 Serve for their monument." 
 
 Prepared by these lines for a dream upon deep, calm waters, 
 under the shadow and scent of the close lemon leaves, the 
 spectator found himself placed by the painter, wet through, 
 in a noisy fishing boat, on a splashing sea, with just as much 
 on his hands as he could manage to keep her gunwale from 
 being stove in against a black rock ; and with a heavy grey 
 squall to windward. (This squall, by the by, was the very 
 same which appeared in the picture of the Magra of 1847, 
 and so were the snowy mountains above ; only the squall at 
 Amalfi entered on the left, and at the Magra on the right.) 
 Now the scenery of Amalfi is impressive alike in storm or calm, 
 and the writer has seen the Mediterranean as majestic and as 
 southern-looking in its rage as in its rest. But it is treating 
 both the green water and woods unfairly to destroy their 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 425 
 
 peace without expressing their power ; and withdraw from 
 them their sadness and their sun, without the substitution of 
 any effect more terrific than that of a squall at the Nore. 
 The snow on the distant mountains chilled what it could not 
 elevate, and was untrue to the scene besides ; there is no 
 snow on the Monte St. Angelo in summer except what is kept 
 for the Neapolitan confectioners. The great merit of the pict- 
 ure was its rock-painting ; too good to have required the aid 
 of the exaggeration of forms which satiated the eye through- 
 out the composition. 
 
 Mr. F. R. Pickersgill's "Contest of Beauty" (No. 515.), 
 and Mr. Uwins's "Vineyard Scene in the South of France," 
 were, after Mr. Mulready's works, among the most interest- 
 ing pieces of color in the Exhibition. The former, very rich 
 and sweet in its harmonies, and especially happy in its con- 
 trasts of light and dark armor ; nor less in the fancy of the 
 little Love who, losing his hold of the orange boughs, was 
 falling ignominiously without having time to open his wings. 
 The latter was a curious example of what I have described as 
 abstraction of color. Strictly true or possible it was not ; a 
 vintage is usually a dusty and dim-looking procedure ; but 
 there were poetry and feeling in Mr. Uwins's idealization of 
 the sombre black of the veritable grape into a luscious ultra- 
 marine purple, glowing among the green leaves like so much 
 painted glass. The figures were bright and graceful in the 
 extreme and most happily grouped. Little else that could 
 be called color was to be seen upon the walls of the Exhibi- 
 tion, with the exception of the smaller works of Mr. Etty. 
 Of these, the single head, "Morning Prayer," (No. 25.), and 
 the "Still Life" (No. 73.), deserved, allowing for their pe- 
 culiar aim, the highest praise. The larger subjects, more es- 
 pecially the St. John, were wanting in the merits peculiar 
 to the painter ; and in other respects it is alike painful and 
 useless to allude to them. A very important and valuable 
 work of Mr. Harding was placed, as usual, where its merits 
 could be but ill seen, and where its chief fault, a feebleness 
 of color in the principal light on the distant hills, was 
 apparent. It was one of the very few views of the year 
 
426 
 
 ADDENDA. 
 
 which were transcripts, nearly without exaggeration, of the 
 features of the localities. 
 
 Among the less conspicuous landscapes, Mr. W. E. Digh- 
 ton's "Hay Meadow Corner" deserved especial notice; it 
 was at once vigorous, fresh, faithful, and unpretending, the 
 management of the distance most ingenious, and the paint- 
 ing of the foreground, with the single exception of Mr. Mul- 
 ready's above noticed, unquestionably the best in the room. 
 I have before had occasion to notice a picture by this artist, 
 " A Hayfield in a Shower," exhibited in the British Institu- 
 tion in 1847, and this year (1848) in the Scottish Academy, 
 whose sky, in qualities of rainy, shattered, transparent grey, 
 I have seldom seen equalled ; nor the mist of its distance, 
 expressive alike of previous heat and present beat of rain. I 
 look with much interest for other works by this painter. 
 
 A hurried visit to Scotland in the spring of this year, 
 while it enables the writer to acknowledge the ardor and 
 genius manifested in very many of the works exhibited in 
 the Scottish Academy, cannot be considered as furnishing 
 him with sufficient grounds for specific criticism. He cannot, 
 however, err in testifying his concurrence in the opinion ex- 
 pressed to him by several of the most distinguished members 
 of that Academy, respecting the singular merit of the works 
 of Mr. H. Drummond. A cabinet picture of " Banditti on 
 the Watch," appeared to him one of the most masterly, un- 
 affected, and sterling pieces of quiet painting he has ever 
 seen from the hand of a living artist ; and the other works 
 of Mr. Drummond were alike remarkable for their manly and 
 earnest finish, and their sweetness of feeling. 
 
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