by John Ruskin
PRE-RAPHAELITISM.
It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to livein this world without working: but it seems to me no less evident thatHe intends every man to be happy in his work. It is written, "in thesweat of thy brow," but it was never written, "in the breaking of thineheart," thou shalt eat bread; and I find that, as on the one hand,infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing whatwas appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs ofmischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on theother hand, no small misery is caused by over-worked and unhappy people,in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and forceupon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of theirbeing unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and a sign of somekind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people maybe happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fitfor it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense ofsuccess in it--not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony ofother people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or ratherknowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done,whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that aman may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable ofhis work, but a good judge of his work.
The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his parents ormasters have not done it for him, is to find out what he is fit for. Inwhich inquiry a man may be very safely guided by his likings, if he benot also guided by his pride. People usually reason in some suchfashion as this: "I don't seem quite fit for a head-manager in the firmof ---- & Co., therefore, in all probability, I am fit to be Chancellorof the Exchequer." Whereas, they ought rather to reason thus: "I don'tseem quite fit to be head-manager in the firm of ---- & Co., but Idaresay I might do something in a small green-grocery business; I usedto be a good judge of peas;" that is to say, always trying lower insteadof trying higher, until they find bottom: once well set on the ground, aman may build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every one inhis neighborhood by perpetual catastrophes. But this kind of humility isrendered especially difficult in these days, by the contumely thrown onmen in humble employments. The very removal of the massy bars which onceseparated one class of society from another, has rendered it tenfoldmore shameful in foolish people's, i. e. in most people's eyes, toremain in the lower grades of it, than ever it was before. When a manborn of an artisan was looked upon as an entirely different species ofanimal from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncomfortable orashamed to remain that different species of animal, than it makes ahorse ashamed to remain a horse, and not to become a giraffe. But nowthat a man may make money, and rise in the world, and associate himself,unreproached, with people once far above him, not only is the naturaldiscontentedness of humanity developed to an unheard-of extent, whatevera man's position, but it becomes a veritable shame to him to remain inthe state he was born in, and everybody thinks it his _duty_ to try tobe a "gentleman." Persons who have any influence in the management ofpublic institutions for charitable education know how common thisfeeling has become. Hardly a day passes but they receive letters frommothers who want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and makethe grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there is somethingwrong in the foundations of society, because this is not possible. Outof every ten letters of this kind, nine will allege, as the reason ofthe writers' importunity, their desire to keep their families in suchand such a "station of life." There is no real desire for the safety,the discipline, or the moral good of the children, only a panic horrorof the inexpressibly pitiable calamity of their living a ledge or twolower on the molehill of the world--a calamity to be averted at any costwhatever, of struggle, anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do notbelieve that any greater good could be achieved for the country, thanthe change in public feeling on this head, which might be brought aboutby a few benevolent men, undeniably in the class of "gentlemen," whowould, on principle, enter into some of our commonest trades, and makethem honorable; showing that it was possible for a man to retain hisdignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman, though part of histime was every day occupied in manual labor, or even in servingcustomers over a counter. I do not in the least see why courtesy, andgravity, and sympathy with the feelings of others, and courage, andtruth, and piety, and what else goes to make up a gentleman's character,should not be found behind a counter as well as elsewhere, if they weredemanded, or even hoped for, there.
Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life and manner of work havebeen discreetly chosen; then the next thing to be required is, that hedo not over-work himself therein. I am not going to say anything hereabout the various errors in our systems of society and commerce, whichappear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us toover-work ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still morefruitful cause of unhealthy toil--the incapability, in many men, ofbeing content with the little that is indeed necessary to theirhappiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause ofover-work--the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and thehope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it ispernicious; not only making men over-work themselves, but rendering allthe work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and letthe reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the bestinterests of humanity). _No great intellectual thing was ever done bygreat effort_; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and hedoes it _without_ effort. Nothing is, at present, less understood by usthan this--nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to sayit as clearly, and explain it as fully as I may.
I have said no great _intellectual_ thing: for I do not mean theassertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to methat just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a stateof intense moral effort, we are _not_ intended to be in intense physicalor intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul'swork--to the great fight with the Dragon--the taking the kingdom ofheaven by force. But the body's work and head's work are to be donequietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain areever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which thegreatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to beworked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to followthe plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at thetwilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease ofthe heart.
How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and lawwere but once sincerely, humbly understood,--that if a great thing canbe done at all, it can be done easily; that, when it is needed to bedone, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it; but _he_can do it without any trouble--without more trouble, that is, than itcosts small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less. And yetwhat truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena? Isnot the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works inexistence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, "there has been a great_effort_ here," but, "there has been a great _power_ here"? It is notthe weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we haveto recognise in all mighty things; and that is just what we now _never_recognise, but think that we are to do great things, by help of ironbars and perspiration:--alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose somepounds of our own weight.
Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposedanywise resolvable into the favorite dogma of young men, that they neednot work if they have genius. The fact is, that a man of genius isalways far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much moregood from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of theinherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all hiscapacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be whathe is: "If I _am_ anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merelyby labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it wo
uld bethe general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physicalsciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, butin whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual,steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating anddisciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicablefacility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man'sbusiness whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, butquietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such workwill be always the things that God meant him to do, and will be hisbest. No agonies nor heart-rendings will enable him to do any better. Ifhe be a great man, they will be great things; if a small man, smallthings; but always, if thus peacefully done, good and right; always, ifrestlessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despicable.
Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man should be a goodjudge of his work; and this chiefly that he may not be dependent uponpopular opinion for the manner of doing it, but also that he may havethe just encouragement of the sense of progress, and an honestconsciousness of victory: how else can he become
"That awful independent on to-morrow, Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile."
I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of such a feeling asthis is nearly unknown to half the workmen of the present day. Forwhatever appearance of self-complacency there may be in their outwardbearing, it is visible enough, by their feverish jealousy of eachother, how little confidence they have in the sterling value of theirseveral doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up; andthere is too visible distress and hopelessness in men's aspects to admitof the supposition that they have any stable support of faith inthemselves.
I have stated these principles generally, because there is no branch oflabor to which they do not apply: But there is one in which ourignorance or forgetfulness of them has caused an incalculable amount ofsuffering: and I would endeavor now to reconsider them with especialreference to it,--the branch of the Arts.
In general, the men who are employed in the Arts have freely chosentheir profession, and suppose themselves to have special faculty for it;yet, as a body, they are not happy men. For which this seems to me thereason, that they are expected, and themselves expect, to make theirbread _by being clever_--not by steady or quiet work; and are,therefore, for the most part, trying to be clever, and so living in anutterly false state of mind and action.
This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profession oremployment. A lawyer may indeed suspect that, unless he has more witthan those around him, he is not likely to advance in his profession;but he will not be always thinking how he is to display his wit. He willgenerally understand, early in his career, that wit must be left to takecare of itself, and that it is hard knowledge of law and vigorousexamination and collation of the facts of every case entrusted to him,which his clients will mainly demand; this it is which he has to be paidfor; and this is healthy and measurable labor, payable by the hour. Ifhe happen to have keen natural perception and quick wit, these will comeinto play in their due time and place, but he will not think of them ashis chief power; and if he have them not, he may still hope thatindustry and conscientiousness may enable him to rise in his professionwithout them. Again in the case of clergymen: that they are sorelytempted to display their eloquence or wit, none who know their ownhearts will deny, but then they _know_ this to _be_ a temptation: theynever would suppose that cleverness was all that was to be expected fromthem, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever sermon: even thedullest or vainest of them would throw some veil over their vanity, andpretend to some profitableness of purpose in what they did. They wouldnot openly ask of their hearers--Did you think my sermon ingenious, ormy language poetical? They would early understand that they were notpaid for being ingenious, nor called to be so, but to preach truth; thatif they happened to possess wit, eloquence, or originality, these wouldappear and be of service in due time, but were not to be continuallysought after or exhibited: and if it should happen that they had themnot, they might still be serviceable pastors without them.
Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any honest or useful workof him; but every one expects him to be ingenious. Originality,dexterity, invention, imagination, every thing is asked of him exceptwhat alone is to be had for asking--honesty and sound work, and the duedischarge of his function as a painter. What function? asks the readerin some surprise. He may well ask; for I suppose few painters have anyidea what their function is, or even that they have any at all.
And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The faculties, whichwhen a man finds in himself, he resolves to be a painter, are, Isuppose, intenseness of observation and facility of imitation. The manis created an observer and an imitator; and his function is to conveyknowledge to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taughtotherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function remained areligious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality ofthe objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, bygiving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and nonehas as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose.He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.
But he was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal Naturalism,or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which manifesteditself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention ofprinting superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. Itwas misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and hasmaintained itself through all kinds of abuse; presenting in the recentschools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its power. Thatinstinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to histrue duty--_the faithful representation of all objects of historicalinterest, or of natural beauty existent at the period_; representationssuch as might at once aid the advance of the sciences, and keep faithfulrecord of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept awayin the approaching eras of revolutionary change.
The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right moment; and let thereader consider what amount and kind of general knowledge might by thistime have been possessed by the nations of Europe, had their paintersunderstood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after disciplining themselves soas to be able to draw, with unerring precision, each the particular kindof subject in which he most delighted, they had separated into two greatarmies of historians and naturalists;--that the first had painted withabsolute faithfulness every edifice, every city, every battle-field,every scene of the slightest historical interest, precisely andcompletely rendering their aspect at the time; and that theircompanions, according to their several powers, had painted with likefidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery, and theatmospheric phenomena of every country on the earth--suppose that afaithful and complete record were now in our museums of every buildingdestroyed by war, or time, or innovation, during these last 200years--suppose that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe hadbeen penetrated, and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that thegeologist's diagram was no longer necessary--suppose that every tree ofthe forest had been drawn in its noblest aspect, every beast of thefield in its savage life--that all these gatherings were already in ournational galleries, and that the painters of the present day werelaboring, happily and earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means ofknowledge more and more within reach of the common people--would notthat be a more honorable life for them, than gaining precarious bread by"bright effects?" They think not, perhaps. They think it easy, andtherefore contemptible, to be truthful; they have been taught so alltheir lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it them. It is mostdifficult, and worthy of the greatest men's greatest effort, to render,as it should be rendered, the simplest of the natural features of theearth; but also be it remembered, no man is confined to the simplest;each may look out work for himself where he chooses, and it will bestrange if he cannot find something hard enough for him. The excuse is,however, one of the l
ips only; for every painter knows that when hedraws back from the attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener incowardice than in disdain.
I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for himself; I have notspace to suggest to him the tenth part of the advantages which wouldfollow, both to the painter from such an understanding of his mission,and to the whole people, in the results of his labor. Consider how theman himself would be elevated: how content he would become, how earnest,how full of all accurate and noble knowledge, how free fromenvy--knowing creation to be infinite, feeling at once the value of whathe did, and yet the nothingness. Consider the advantage to the people;the immeasurably larger interest given to art itself; the easy,pleasurable, and perfect knowledge conveyed by it, in every subject; thefar greater number of men who might be healthily and profitably occupiedwith it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads ofinferior talents, now left fading away in misery. Conceive all this, andthen look around at our exhibitions, and behold the "cattle pieces," and"sea pieces," and "fruit pieces," and "family pieces;" the eternal browncows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons insaucers, and foolish faces in simpers;--and try to feel what we are, andwhat we might have been.
Take a single instance in one branch of archaeology. Let those who areinterested in the history of religion consider what a treasure we shouldnow have possessed, if, instead of painting pots, and vegetables, anddrunken peasantry, the most accurate painters of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line for line, the religiousand domestic sculpture on the German, Flemish, and French cathedrals andcastles; and if every building destroyed in the French or in any othersubsequent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with thesame precision with which Gerard Douw or Mieris paint bas-reliefs ofCupids. Consider, even now, what incalculable treasure is still left inancient bas-reliefs, full of every kind of legendary interest, of subtleexpression, of priceless evidence as to the character, feelings habits,histories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered churches anddomestic buildings, rapidly disappearing over the whole ofEurope--treasure which, once lost, the labor of all men living cannotbring back again; and then look at the myriads of men, with skillenough, if they had but the commonest schooling, to record all thisfaithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked womenfrom academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with WardourStreet armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and theVicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londonerswearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Dobut think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressibleimbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in thesouthern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of theheart in you that will break too.
But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, forimagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?Yes; the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attainwhen they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Whereverimagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves withoutforcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of trainingwhich such a school of art would give them would be the best they couldreceive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present trainingconsists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and inventionhigh enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout everysentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rankattributed to these powers,--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to beattained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only invarious ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand thisthoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the samespecies of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in ourmethods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinksof bringing men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind ofgeneral recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see inyouth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of thiskind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet ofhim, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor?Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of hisboyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, thelaws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover inthe works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much belikely to come of them so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great asto break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and buildtheir own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numberingmillions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this,could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousnessof the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain andbridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material onit as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which wedesired to feed into greatness? Should we not educate the wholeintellect into general strength, and all the affections into warmth andhonesty, and look to heaven for the rest? This, I say, we should havesense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in words: but, it beingrequired to produce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting towork? We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen orsixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her;but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael thebetter; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can dohimself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, heis to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yetthis clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules,is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and aprinciple shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people'sheads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all thepersonages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order,which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly inproportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin;but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteenis to bestow upon God's work in general. This I say is the kind ofteaching which through various channels, Royal Academy lecturings, presscriticisms, public enthusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold, wegive to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters!
But we do worse than this. Within the last few years some senseof the real tendency of such teaching has appeared in some ofour younger painters. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones,our older men having become familiarised with the false system,or else having passed through it and forgotten it, not well knowingthe degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among ouryouths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to existat all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and ofconsiderable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been bornedown by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Stronginstincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence,however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearanceof impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffeningevery other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more ofit than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a littleungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust ina youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedlyto be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much ofhis work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that heshould be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, ofthe judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with uttercontempt and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, farther,that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case,one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at theexpense of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely, _a priori_,that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such asystem should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thusrende
red dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up theseconditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that picturespainted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, ofstubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little naturalperception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, towin us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention,invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, andrecommended to our respect by established authority.
We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that inproportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and tothe absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, oraffection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuitof the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, andtheir success in attaining them.
All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would havebeen impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective agesof eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totallyindependent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically perseveredin it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strangeenough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they shouldhave produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of AlbertDurer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness anduniversality of the howl which the common critics of the press haveraised against them, the utter absence of all generous help orencouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciatetheir success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can doneither the one nor the other,--these are strangest of all--unimaginableunless they had been experienced.
And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them,in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my secondletter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received ananonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparentlyhardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of pettymalignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public shouldknow this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit whichis at work against these men--how first roused it is difficult to say,for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in youngartists could have excited an hostility so determined and socruel;--hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent.That of the "absence of perspective" was one of the most curious piecesof the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeblemaundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times--I herecontradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single errorin perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But ifotherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt, ifwith the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were onearchitectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; Inever met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective todraw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensionsand curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Ourarchitects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talkingto one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several mostvaluable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle inperspective. And in this state of general science our writers for thepress take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's_Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_,are out of perspective.[97]
It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful orunwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their youngpupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly falserespecting them,[98] and the direction of the mind and sight of thepublic to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of themsimply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, signit and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to Englishart than any thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But as Icannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their picturescareful examination, and look at them at once with the indulgence andthe respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.
Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples ofthe kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that ofour modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher thanimitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I dosay that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in duetime all the more forcibly because they have received training sosevere.
For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles oftraining must be the same for all, the result in each will be as variousas the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, themodes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims areexactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to rendersome part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise trainedin convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one ofthem is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, andexcessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has amemory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and iscomparatively near-sighted.
Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One seeseverything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountainsand grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in thepebbles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can remember nothing, andinvent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoningat once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving generalimpressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopicaldissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, andcalculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before hecan do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fulness ofmatter in his subject.
Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and themarch of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire scenein broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of hissight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensibleof the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes ofcircumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent.But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows alongthe hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not aflake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, buthe has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lostplace in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so,but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remaincongregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with thosenow visibly passing before him, and these again confused with otherimages of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by insudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbolsand blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished torepresent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none ofthem escaped, for all that: they are sealed up in that strangestorehouse of his; he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day twentyyears, and paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you maytell both of these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest,that they have an important function, and that they are not to care whatRaphael did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancythe exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any ofthe qualities of the other.
I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of invention inthe first painter, that the contrast between them might be morestriking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters arereal. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with exquisitesense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his otherfaculties, the e
ye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett Millais,the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.
They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have,therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which theywere entrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating pointsof art in both directions; between them, or in various relations tothem, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned fornaming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innategenius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,earnestness, and industry in study.
It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in theworks of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value theypossess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is therewho for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet humoroustruth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is there whodoes not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he dwells onthe brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And yet thereis something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be allowedcontinually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and supplyto the Water Color Society a succession of pineapples with theregularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered thatprimrose banks are lovely; but there are other things grow wild besidesprimroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, ifhe would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he wouldpaint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as theynestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens ofthe rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back apiece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliestblue, and the soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, andpaint a gray wall of Alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like awreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not topaint bouquets in china vases.
I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for theworks of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily preventedtheir possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail; but Ithink that those of no other living artist furnish an example sostriking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work atthe exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant whenpeace had been established all over Europe, but when neither nationalcharacter nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed bypromiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement;" when, however, nearlyevery ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state ofcomparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and ofseparation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiarinterest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout wastrained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until hiseye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, andirregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; andthen, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also withinfinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he wassent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _everyone made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of thenineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindledwars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, intonothingness.
It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is thisfellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended toappreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of theirown--nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement ofstrangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had torepresent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to allhis powers (and they are magnificent ones) than any other man amongstus. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal lifeof the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he wasprepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowedwith altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters ofanimals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but theyhave in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them eitherravenous fiends or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and hadrespect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; thedignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,mingled with grace, as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint ofstrength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; allthis seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drewand himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those Europeanand Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization existwithout its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imaginationand strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intenseperception of the kind of character, but powers of artisticalcomposition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the sametime, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,as the minutiae of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of themicroscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspectof the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, inthe earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.
I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion ofdrawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and thepre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed nodefiniteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painterswho have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doingso; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrownit away on subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above hispowers, or unfit for pictorial representation. "The Cherry Woman,"exhibited in 1850, may be named as an example of the first kind; the"Burchell and Sophia" of the second (the character of Sir WilliamThornhill being utterly missed); the "Seven Ages" of the third; for thissubject cannot be painted. In the written passage, the thoughts areprogressive and connected; in the picture they must be co-existent, andyet separate; nor can all the characters of the ages be rendered inpainting at all. One may represent the soldier at the cannon's mouth,but one cannot paint the "bubble reputation" which he seeks. Mulready,therefore, while he has always produced exquisite pieces of painting,has failed in doing anything which can be of true or extensive use. Hehas, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius, but never how todirect it.
Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I shall name: I need notpoint out to any one acquainted with his earlier works, the labor, orwatchfulness of nature which they involve, nor need I do more thanallude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It will at once be grantedthat the highest merits of his pictures are throughout found in thoseparts of them which are least like what had before been accomplished;and that it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his eminentsuccess, but by a healthy love of Scotch terriers.
None of these painters, however, it will be answered, afford examplesof the rise of the highest imaginative power out of close study ofmatters of fact. Be it remembered, however, that the imaginative power,in its magnificence, is not to be found every day. Lewis has it in nomean degree; but we cannot hope to find it at its highest more than oncein an age. We _have_ had it once, and must be content.
Towards the close of the last century, among the various drawingsexecuted, according to the quiet manner of the time, in greyish blue,with brown foregrounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting rathermore than ordinary diligence and delicacy, signed W. Turner.[99] Therewas nothing, however, in them at all indicative of genius, or even ofmore than ordinary talent, unless in some of the subjects a largeperception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in thearrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingledwith delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foregro
undbecame first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with otherlocal colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken,like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more andmore refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method ofexecution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with aprecision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of everyobject. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.
During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or lesssuccess had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always onthe same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony ofwhich the key-notes are greyish green and brown; pure blues and delicategolden yellows being admitted in small quantity, as the lowest andhighest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in extremelysmall quantity in figures or other minor accessories.
Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking, works in_color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both theshade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which bestexpresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lightsand the foreground are executed in that which best expresses theirwarmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, instudies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use oftwo, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places,does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any morethan the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the idea ofcolor be in general more present to the artist's mind, when he was atwork on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in themezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness beingnot successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly expressibleby the admission of three or four, he allows himself this advantage whenit is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself with theactual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the foreground might in nature have been cold grey, but it will be drawnnevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill inthe distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;but it will be drawn nevertheless of a cool grey, because it is in thedistance.
This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great severityin many, both of the drawings and pictures executed by him during theperiod: in others more or less modified by the cautious introduction ofcolor, as the painter felt his liberty increasing; for the system wasevidently never considered as final, or as anything more than a means ofprogress: the conventional, easily manageable color, was visiblyadopted, only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to addressitself to the acquirement of the first and most necessary knowledge inall art--that of form. But as form, in landscape, implies vast bulk andspace, the use of the tints which enabled him best to express them, wasactually auxiliary to the mere drawing; and, therefore, not onlypermissible, but even necessary, while more brilliant or varied tintswere never indulged in, except when they might be introduced withoutthe slightest danger of diverting his mind for an instant from hisprincipal object. And, therefore, it will be generally found in theworks of this period, that exactly in proportion to the importance andgeneral toil of the composition, is the severity of the tint; and thatthe play of color begins to show itself first in slight and smalldrawings, where he felt that he could easily secure all that he wantedin form.
Thus the "Crossing the Brook," and such other elaborate and largecompositions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue,with a point or two of severe local color in the figures; but in theminor drawings, tender passages of complicated color occur notunfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins tointroduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simplestudies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by afully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure,add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to thesimple order of its daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds of his mostsevere drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury ofa peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which heseems to design its graceful form, and deepen with soft pencilling thebloom of its blue, after he has worked through the stern detail of hisalmost colorless drawing. A rainbow is another of his most frequentlypermitted indulgences; and we find him very early allowing the edges ofhis evening clouds to be touched with soft rose-color or gold; while,whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into his system, and can becaught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws hiswhole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual browntones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are variedand enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by theshore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of itsgolden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, andthe usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the softness anddepth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of someHighland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon itshills.
The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all thestrength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his choice ofsubject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as various as hiscolor is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give the reader whois unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their infinitude ofaims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which prevades themall, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for him; we findhim one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their family ofchickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of hisexecution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day, heis drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in agust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next he is paintingthe fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him hadacquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river ormeadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind ofmountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in theseventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works ofTurner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he hashimself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could beassigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including alarge number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawingscommissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,including nearly all farming operations,--ploughing, harrowing, hedgingand ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;then all kinds of town life--court-yards of inns, starting of mailcoaches, interiors of shops, house-buildings, fairs, elections, &c.;then all kinds of inner domestic life--interiors of rooms, studies ofcostumes, of still life, and heraldry, including multitudes ofsymbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of every kind, full of localincident; every kind of boat and method of fishing for particular fish,being specifically drawn, round the whole coast of England;--pilchardfishing at St. Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at Loch Fyne;and all kinds of shipping, including studies of every separate part ofthe vessels, and many marine battle-pieces, two in particular ofTrafalgar, both of high importance,--one of the Victory after thebattle, now in Greenwich Hospital; another of the Death of Nelson, inhis own gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery, some idealised intocompositions, others of definite localities; together with classicalcompositions, Romes and Carthages and such others, by the myriad, withmythological, historical, or allegorical figures,--nymphs, monsters, andspectres; heroes and divinities.[100]
What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously, can possiblypervade all this? This, the greatest of all feelings--an utterforgetfulness of self. Throughout the whole period with which we are atpresent concerned, Turner appears as a man of sympathy absolutelyinfinite--a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know nothing but that ofShakespeare comparable with it. A soldier
's wife resting by the roadsideis not beneath it; Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, watching the deadbodies of her sons, not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean asthat it will not interest his whole mind, and carry away his wholeheart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise himself intoharmony with it; and it is impossible to prophesy of him at any moment,whether, the next, he will be in laughter or in tears.
This is the root of the man's greatness; and it follows as a matter ofcourse that this sympathy must give him a subtle power of expression,even of the characters of mere material things, such as no other painterever possessed. The man who can best feel the difference betweenrudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more differencebetween the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would; andtherefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawingsthemselves is the speciality of whatever they represent--the thoroughstiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastnessof what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of themind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparisonof a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful:in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the externalpassion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathiseswith tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult,no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peacefulcheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched without loss of its own perfectbalance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness uponthe other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, nowseveral years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be theperfect image of the painter's mind at this period,--the drawing ofBrignal Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be gatheredfrom the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands onthe "Brignal banks," looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky isstill full of soft rays, though the sun is gone; and the Greta glancesbrightly in the valley, singing its evening-song; two white clouds,following each other, move without wind through the hollows of theravine, and others lie couched on the far away moorlands; every leaf ofthe woods is still in the delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable ofrising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing torecover it; and just behind it in the picture, almost indicated by it,the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and thestream; and around it the low churchyard wall, and the few white stoneswhich mark the resting places of those who can climb the rocks no more,nor hear the river sing as it passes.
There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same characterof mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful; yet they arenot, as I said above, more numerous than those which express hissympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost alwaysmarked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved inevery part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of hisown feelings.
One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to benoticed--its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence whichacts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, butthat which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance,of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction,so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-bookof nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscapepainter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feebleconventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote hisattention to the works of these men; and his having done so will bethought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatestmodesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirableand unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude wasproductive of unmixed mischief to him; he spoiled many of his marinepictures, as for instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the former;and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confirmed by thenotions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of thiscentury, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his compositionpictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the generalterm "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptionsof ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of mostof our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems tohave derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; and much in hissubsequent travels from far higher men, especially Tintoret and PaulVeronese. I have myself heard him speaking with singular delight of theputting in of the beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner ofTitian's Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of his works trace the slightestinfluence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at it, for though Salvatorwas a man of far higher powers than either Vandevelde or Claude, he wasa wilful and gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped byfeeble men, but could not be corrupted by false men. Besides, he hadnever himself seen classical life, and Claude was represented to him ascompetent authority for it. But he _had_ seen mountains and torrents,and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.
One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately bearsa date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated drawing,no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Secondperiod. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley,one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and bears the inscription,unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences ofthe foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W. TURNER, January 15th,1820."
The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or whatseems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember such atpresent,--a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress,with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind ofdrawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, isseen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violentblast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds whichhangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing butthis roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight ofdarkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, andluminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting outhere and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is adesolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it inlong ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof andthrough its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan withhalf-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, itspassengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little fartheron is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all hisstrength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of thedistance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.
Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accustomed to theearlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.
The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totallydifferent from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerlyhave been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seizedupon with indescribable delight, and every line of the compositionanimated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mereexpression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in someinherent feeling in the painter's mind.
The second, that although the subject is one in itself almost incapableof color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of theimpression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where itmight easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the lowminor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have beenelaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading,instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warmhues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls ofthe buildings, c
learly opposed, even in shade, to the grey of the snowwreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens and ghastly blues ofthe glacier ice, being all expressed with delicacies of transitionutterly unexampled in any previous drawings.
These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the works ofTurner's second period, as distinguished from the first,--a new energyinherent in the mind of the painter, diminishing the repose and exaltingthe force and fire of his conceptions, and the presence of Color, as atleast an essential, and often a principal, element of design.
Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find drawings of serenesubject, and perfectly quiet feeling, among the compositions of thisperiod; but the repose is in them, just as the energy and tumult were inthe earlier period, an external quality, which the painter images by aneffort of the will: it is no longer a character inherent in himself. The"Ulleswater," in the England series, is one of those which are in mostperfect peace: in the "Cowes," the silence is only broken by the dashof the boat's oars, and in the "Alnwick" by a stag drinking; but in atleast nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water, or figures are inrapid motion, and the grandest drawings are almost always those whichhave even violent action in one or other, or in all: e. g. high force ofTees, Coventry, Llanthony, Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.
The color is, however, a more absolute distinction; and we must returnto Mr. Fawkes's collection in order to see how the change in it waseffected. That such a change would take place at one time or other wasof course to be securely anticipated, the conventional system of thefirst period being, as above stated, merely a means of Study. But theimmediate cause was the journey of the year 1820. As might be guessedfrom the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day inquestion to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winterof 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on thesame journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is thealmost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, takenstrictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject beingcomparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as thelight and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, thoughthe light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. Andnaturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of dayare chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least fiveout of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we nowfind his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for thefirst time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeousfalls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with theblue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever sincebeen the themes of his mightiest thoughts.
I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was theimpression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. Whenhe first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a youngstudent; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to giveall his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he wasfree to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting hisart, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that allprevious landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison withnatural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere inkand charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast awayat once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away: the memories ofVandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they hadencumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever; and a new dawn roseover the rocks of the Siebengebirge.
There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still morecomplete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of hissuperior power in drawing, and their best hope was, that he might not beable to color. They had begun to express this hope loudly enough for itto reach his ears. The engraver of one of his most important marinepictures told me, not long ago, that one day about the period inquestion, Turner came into his room to examine the progress of theplate, not having seen his own picture for several months. It was one ofhis dark early pictures, but in the foreground was a little piece ofluxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues like those of an opal. He stoodbefore the picture for some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyouslyto the fish;--"They say that Turner can't color!" and turned away.
Under the force of these various impulses the change was total. _Everysubject thenceforth was primarily conceived in color_; and no engravingever gave the slightest idea of any drawing of this period.
The artists who had any perception of the truth were in despair; theBeaumontites, classicalists, and "owl species" in general, in as muchindignation as their dulness was capable of. They had deliberatelyclosed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where doyou put your brown tree?" A vast revelation was made to them at once,enough to have dazzled any one; but to _them_, light unendurable asincomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous,unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places atthe same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raisedagainst the Pre-Raphaelites. Those glorious old Arabian Nights, how truethey are! Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by turns, fromall the black stones beside the road, when one living soul is toiling upthe hill to get the golden water. Mocking and whispering, that he maylook back, and become a black stone like themselves.
Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a temper as a strong manmust be in, when he is forced to walk with his fingers in his ears. Heretired into himself; he could look no longer for help, or counsel, orsympathy from any one; and the spirit of defiance in which he was forcedto labor led him sometimes into violences, from which the slightestexpression of sympathy would have saved him. The new energy that wasupon him, and the utter isolation into which he was driven, were bothalike dangerous, and many drawings of the time show the evil effects ofboth; some of them being hasty, wild, or experimental, and others littlemore than magnificent expressions of defiance of public opinion.
But all have this noble virtue--they are in everything his own: thereare no more reminiscences of dead masters, no more trials of skill inthe manner of Claude or Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed uponnature only, as he saw her, or as he remembered her.
I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is especially necessaryto notice this, in order that we may understand the kind of grasp whicha man of real imagination takes of all things that are once broughtwithin his reach--grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever.
On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of particular series ofthem, we shall notice the recurrence of the same subject two, three, oreven many times. In any other artist this would be nothing remarkable.Probably most modern landscape painters multiply a favorite subjecttwenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and the clouds indifferent places, and "inventing," as they are pleased to call it, a new"effect" every time. But if we examine the successions of Turner'ssubjects, we shall find them either the records of a succession ofimpressions actually perceived by him at some favorite locality, or elserepetitions of one impression received in early youth, and again andagain realised as his increasing powers enabled him to do better justiceto it. In either case we shall find them records of _seen facts_;_never_ compositions in his room to fill up a favorite outline.
For instance, every traveller, at least every traveller of thirty years'standing, must love Calais, the place where he first felt himself in astrange world. Turner evidently loved it excessively. I have nevercatalogued his studies of Calais, but I remember, at this moment, five:there is first the "Pas de Calais," a very large oil painting, which iswhat he saw in broad daylight as he crossed over, when he got near theFrench side. It is a careful study of French fishing boats running forthe shore before the wind, with the picturesque o
ld city in thedistance. Then there is the "Calais Harbor" in the Liber Studiorum: thatis what he saw just as he was going into the harbor,--a heavy brigwarping out, and very likely to get in his way, or run against the pier,and bad weather coming on. Then there is the "Calais Pier," a largepainting, engraved some years ago by Mr. Lupton:[101] that is what hesaw when he had landed, and ran back directly to the pier to see whathad become of the brig. The weather had got still worse, the fishwomenwere being blown about in a distressful manner on the pier head, andsome more fishing boats were running in with all speed. Then there isthe "Fortrouge," Calais: that is what he saw after he had been home toDessein's, and dined, and went out again in the evening to walk on thesands, the tide being down. He had never seen such a waste of sandsbefore, and it made an impression on him. The shrimp girls were allscattered over them too, and moved about in white spots on the wildshore; and the storm had lulled a little, and there was a sunset--such asunset,--and the bars of Fortrouge seen against it, skeleton-wise.
He did not paint that directly; thought over it,--painted it a longwhile afterwards.
Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott. That is whathe saw as he was going home, meditatively; and the revolving lighthousecame blazing out upon him suddenly, and disturbed him. He did not likethat so much; made a vignette of it, however, when he was asked to do abit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards, having already doneall the rest.
Turner never told me all this, but any one may see it if he will comparethe pictures. They might, possibly, not be impressions of a single day,but of two days or three; though in all human probability they were seenjust as I have stated them;[102] but they _are_ records of successiveimpressions, as plainly written as ever traveller's diary. All of thempure veracities. Therefore immortal.
I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from the rest of hisworks. What is curious, some of them have a kind of private mark runningthrough all the subjects. Thus I know three drawings of Scarborough, andall of them have a starfish in the foreground: I do not remember anyothers of his marine subjects which have a starfish.
The other kind of repetition--the recurrence to one early impression--ishowever still more remarkable. In the collection of F. H. Bale, Esq.,there is a small drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his boyish manner,its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from nature, finishedat home. It had been a showery day; the hills were partially concealedby the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at intervals. A man wasfishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner sought a place of someshelter under the bushes; made his sketch, took great pains when he gothome to imitate the rain, as he best could; added his child's luxury ofa rainbow; put in the very bush under which he had taken shelter, andthe fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and long-legged fisherman, in thecourtly short breeches which were the fashion of the time.
Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their strongesttraining, and after the total change in his feelings and principleswhich I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series of "Englandand Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of LlanthonyAbbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch, and boy's thought.He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the fisherman tothe other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less courtlydress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all hisgained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered showerof rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better. Theresultant drawing[103] is one of the very noblest of his second period.
Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is therepetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method ofits execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year1808, or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the firstperiod. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in grey shadow, theeastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, allbeing mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cowsare standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionlessabout a hundred yards from the shore: the foreground is of broken rocks,with lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.
This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore ofUlleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time renderthe sunset colors: he went back to it therefore in the England series,and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, thesame shadows, the same cows,--they had stood in his mind, on the samespot, for twenty years,--the same boat, the same rocks, only the copseis cut away--it interfered with the masses of his color: some figuresare introduced bathing, and what was grey, and feeble gold in the firstdrawing, becomes purple, and burning rose-color in the last.
But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the series ofsubjects from Winchelsea. That in the Liber Studiorum, "Winchelsea,Sussex," bears date 1812, and its figures consist of a soldier speakingto a woman, who is resting on the bank beside the road. There is anothersmall subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of which the engravingbears date 1817. It has _two_ women with bundles, and _two_ soldierstoiling along the embankment in the plain, and a baggage waggon in thedistance. Neither of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last hedid another for the England series, of which the engraving bears date1830. There is now a regiment on the march; the baggage waggon is there,having got no further on in the thirteen years, but one of the women istired, and has fainted on the bank; another is supporting her againsther bundle, and giving her drink; a third sympathetic woman is added,and the two soldiers have stopped, and one is drinking from his canteen.
Nor is it merely of entire scenes, or of particular incidents, thatTurner's memory is thus tenacious. The slightest passages of color orarrangement that have pleased him--the fork of a bough, the casting of ashadow, the fracture of a stone--will be taken up again and again, andstrangely worked into new relations with other thoughts. There is asingle sketch from nature in one of the portfolios at Farnley, of acommon wood-walk on the estate, which has furnished passages to no fewerthan three of the most elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.
I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of memory, because Iwish it to be thoroughly seen how all his greatness, all his infiniteluxuriance of invention, depends on his taking possession of everythingthat he sees,--on his grasping all, and losing hold of nothing,--on hisforgetting himself, and forgetting nothing else. I wish it to beunderstood how every great man paints what he sees or did see, hisgreatness being indeed little else than his intense sense of fact. Andthus Pre-Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one andthe same, so far as education can influence them. They are different intheir choice, different in their faculties, but all the same in this,that Raphael himself, so far as he was great, and all who preceded orfollowed him who ever were great, became so by painting the truthsaround them as they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had beentaught to see them, except by the God who made both him and them.
There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's second period, onwhich I have still to dwell, especially with reference to what has beenabove advanced respecting the fallacy of overtoil; namely, themagnificent ease with which all is done when it is _successfully_ done.For there are one or two drawings of this time which are _not_ doneeasily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibithis powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he doesthis, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come fromhis hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent muchtime and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one sideto the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights setagainst them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a largewater-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works arethose in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts as theycame, and forgotten himself; and in these the outpouring of invention isnot less miraculous than the swiftness and obedience of
the mighty handthat expresses it. Any one who examines the drawings may see theevidence of this facility, in the strange freshness and sharpness ofevery touch of color; but when the multitude of delicate touches, withwhich all the aerial tones are worked, is taken into consideration, itwould still appear impossible that the drawing could have been completedwith _ease_, unless we had direct evidence in the matter: fortunately,it is not wanting. There is a drawing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of aman-of-war taking in stores: it is of the usual size of those of theEngland series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not appear oneof the most highly finished, but is still farther removed fromslightness. The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one-half of thepicture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharpperspective from stem to stern, with all her portholes, guns, anchors,and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of theline in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezysea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in itswaves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and severalother boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It might appear no smallexertion of mind to draw the detail of all this shipping down to thesmallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of a mansion in themiddle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been given for theeffort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the first stroke tothe last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning afterbreakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three hours, andwent out to shoot.
Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary painters,and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that if a greatthing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them nottorment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that, andrepeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can composeat all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in spite ofhimself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have kept inmost of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teachingpeople how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficientimportance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to itthan they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think ofsitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or KingLear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building orpicture. The marvellous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, thatthey do not see that what they call "principles of composition," aremere principles of common sense in everything, as well as in picturesand buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so adinner is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point,and an air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object.A picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so isa speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company wellchosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were notcomposing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do itinstinctively in his picture as well as elsewhere, if he could.Composition of this lower or common kind is of exactly the sameimportance in a picture that it is in any thing else,--no more. It iswell that a man should say what he has to say in good order andsequence, but the main thing is to say it truly. And yet we go onpreaching to our pupils as if to have a principal light was every thing,and so cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein the coursesare indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.
It is not, however, only in invention that men over-work themselves, butin execution also; and here I have a word to say to the Pre-Raphaelitesspecially. They are working too hard. There is evidence in failingportions of their pictures, showing that they have wrought so long uponthem that their very sight has failed for weariness, and that the handrefused any more to obey the heart. And, besides this, there are certainqualities of drawing which they miss from over-carefulness. For, letthem be assured, there is a great truth lurking in that common desire ofmen to see things done in what they call a "masterly," or "bold," or"broad," manner: a truth oppressed and abused, like almost every otherin this world, but an eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischiefmay have followed from men's looking for nothing else but this facilityof execution, and supposing that a picture was assuredly all right ifonly it were done with broad dashes of the brush, still the truthremains the same:--that because it is not intended that men shalltorment or weary themselves with any earthly labor, it is appointedthat the noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease anddecision of manipulation. I only wish people understood this much ofsculpture, as well as of painting, and could see that the finelyfinished statue is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a far morevulgar work than that which shows rough signs of the right hand laid tothe workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is felt by allmen, and justly felt. The freedom of the lines of nature can only berepresented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; thereare curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, andin the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught butby a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care whatexample is taken, be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardohimself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines,which no _slow_ effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites donot understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may beunited with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, andespecially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, letthem look at the drawings of John Lewis.
These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner,in his second or central period of labor. There is one more, however, tobe received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, whatwith doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showydrawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had neverseen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to himalmost every day,--engravings utterly destitute of animation, and whichhad to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over withwhite, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities,and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almostentirely to his memory and invention, living I believe mostly in London,and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses ofParliament, he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogetherunworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career.
In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey intoSwitzerland. It was then at least forty years since he had first seenthe Alps; (the source of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, whichcould not have been painted till he had seen the thing itself, bearsdate 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840 marks his fondmemory of that earliest one; for, if we look over the Swiss studies anddrawings executed in his first period, we shall be struck with hisfondness for the pass of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing inthe Farnley collection is one of the Lake of Lucerne from Fluelen; and,counting the Liber Studiorum subjects, there are, to my knowledge, sixcompositions taken at the same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,probably, several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche, andChamouni, and Lake of Geneva, are the only other Swiss scenes which seemto have made very profound impressions on him.
He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont Pilate on foot, crossedthe St. Gothard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a largenumber of colored sketches on this journey, and realised several of themon his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all thathad preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what Ishall henceforth call his Third period.
The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while thefaculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; allconventionality being done away with by the force of the impressionwhich he had received from the Alps, after his long separation fromthem. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity ofthought: most of them by deep serenity, passing in
to melancholy; all bya richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, andthe works done in following years, bear the same relation to those ofthe rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day;and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapesever yet conceived by human intellect.
Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century. Manya century may pass away before there rises such another; but whatgreatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be bestattained by following in his path; by beginning in all quietness andhopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent thethings around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of lifeto give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowingassuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness isto be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or theman of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is notsubservient, but superior. Every archaeologist, every naturalphilosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought onby long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, givingthemselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and becomeincapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the valueof the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sortinjured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, fordefinite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose intenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammerin hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in themountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mysterywith which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with whichthey are adorned in the mind of the passing traveller. In his moreinformed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of theprecipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,familiarised already to his imagination as extending in a shallowstratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearnedspectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of thesnowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminatingpoints of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web offan-like fissures radiating, in his imagination, through theircentres[104]. That in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relationsof all these things to the universe, and to man, that in the views whichhave been opened to him of natural energies such as no human mind wouldhave ventured to conceive, and of past states of being, each in some newway bearing witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistentprovidence of the Maker of all things, he has received reward wellworthy the sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense ofthe loss is not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted;and it would be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man,who, retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to thefacts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable andcredible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest itsfeatures again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should makethem dazzling with the splendor of wandering light, and involve them inthe unsearchableness of stormy obscurity; should restore to the dividedanatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with softforests, enrich the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead thethoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physicalworld, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the ArtUnion which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaeliterejection of "linear perspective" (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takesupon him to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may aswell first ascertain the difference between a Graduate and anUnder-Graduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture ofBonington's,--a professional landscape painter, observe,--for the wantof _aerial_ perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged toapologise, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blundersin _linear_ perspective as there are lines in the picture.
[98] These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, anddirectly contradicted in succession.
The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was,that the Pre-Raphaelites imitated the _errors_ of early painters.
A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence anywhere butin England, few English people, comparatively, having ever seen apicture of early Italian Masters. If they had, they would have knownthat the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just as superior to the earlyItalian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and knowledge ofeffect, as inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word,there is not a shadow of resemblance between the two styles. ThePre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. Butthey have opposed themselves as a body to that kind of teaching abovedescribed, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposedthemselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools;a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallowpride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. If theyadhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, withthe help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a newand noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artistslead them into mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come tonothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for thestrongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarianheresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branchesfrom a strong stem. I hope all things from the school.
The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well.This was asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons who hadnever looked at the pictures.
The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade. Towhich it may be simply replied that their system of light and shade isexactly the same as the Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlastthat of the Renaissance, however brilliant.
[99] He did not use his full signature, J. M. W., until about the year1800.
[100] I shall give a _catalogue raisonnee_ of all this in the thirdvolume of "Modern Painters."
[101] The plate was, however, never published.
[102] And the more probably because Turner was never fond of stayinglong at any place, and was least of all likely to make a pause of two orthree days at the beginning of his journey.
[103] Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. Sec. 14.
[104] This state of mind appears to have been the only one whichWordsworth had been able to discern in men of science; and in disdain ofwhich, he wrote that short-sighted passage in the Excursion, Book III.l. 165-190, which is, I think, the only one in the whole range of hisworks which his true friends would have desired to see blotted out. Whatelse has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so inthe intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. Butthese lines are written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; inmere want of sympathy with the men they describe; for, observe, thoughthe passage is put into the mouth of the Solitary, it is fullyconfirmed, and even rendered more scornful, by the speech which follows.
ARATRA PENTELICI
SIX LECTURES
ON THE ELEMENTS OF
SCULPTURE
GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN MICHAELMAS TERM, 1870