This is the American imprint of the pamphlet first published by Smith Elder, also in 1851.
TO FRANCIS HAWKSWORTH FAWKES, ESQ., OF FARNLEY,
These Pages,
WHICH OWE THEIR PRESENT FORM TO ADVANTAGES GRANTED BY HIS
KINDNESS, ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED, BY HIS OBLIGED FRIEND, JOHN
RUSKIN.
Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of
“Modern Painters,” I ventured to give the following
ad-
vice to the young artists of England:—
“They should go to nature in all singleness of heart,
and walk with
her laboriously and trustingly, having no
other thought but how best to penetrate her
meaning; re-
jecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”
Advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite la-
bour and humiliation in
the following it; and was there-
fore, for the most part, rejected.
It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very
letter, by a group of
men who, for their reward, have been
assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I
ever re-
collect seeing issue from the public press. I have, there-
fore, thought
it due to them to contradict the directly false
statements which have been made
respecting their works;
and to point out the kind of merit which, however deficient
in some respects, those works possess beyond the possibility
of dispute.
It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends
no
man to live in this world without working: but it
seems to me no less evident that He
intends every man to
be happy in his work. It is written, “in the sweat of
thy brow,” but it was never written, “in the breaking of
thine heart,” 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 what was
appointed for them to do,
and set in motion various springs of mischief in matters
in which they should have had no concern, so on the other
hand, no small misery
is caused by over-worked and un-
happy people, in the dark views which they
necessarily
take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.
Were it
not so, I believe the fact of their being unhappy is
in itself a violation of divine
law, and a sign of some kind
of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that
peo-
ple may be happy in their work, these three things are
needed: They must be
fit for it: They must not do too
much of it: and they must have a sense of success in
it—
not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of
other people
for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or ra-
ther knowledge, 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 a man may be happy, it
is necessary that he should not only
be capable of his
work, but a good judge of his work.
The first thing then that he has to do, if unhappily his
parents or masters
have not done it for him, is to find out
what he is fit for. In which inquiry a man
may be very
safely guided by his likings, if he be not also guided by
his pride.
People usually reason in some such fashion as
this: “ I don't seem quite
fit for a head-manager in the
firm of ——& Co.,
therefore, in all probability, I am
fit to be Chancellor of the
Exchequer.” Whereas, they
ought rather to reason thus: “I don't
seem quite fit to
be head-manager in the firm of ——& Co.,
but I dare
say I might do something in a small greengrocery busi-
ness; I used to
be a good judge of pease;” that is to say,
always trying lower instead of
trying higher, until they
find bottom: once well set on the ground, a man may
build up by degrees, safely, instead of disturbing every
one in his
neighbourhood by perpetual catastrophes. But
this kind of humility is rendered
especially difficult in
these days, by the contumely thrown on men in humble
employments. The very removal of the massy bars which
once separated one class
of society from another, has ren-
dered it tenfold more shameful in foolish people's,
i.e. in
most people's eyes, to remain in the lower grades of it,
than ever it
was before. When a man born of an artisan
was looked upon as an entirely different
species of animal
from a man born of a noble, it made him no more uncom-
fortable
or ashamed to remain that different species of
animal, than it makes a horse ashamed
to remain a horse,
and not to become a giraffe. But now that a man may
make
money, and rise in the world, and associate himself
unreproached, with people once
far above him, not only
is the natural discontentedness of humanity developed to
an unheard-of extent, whatever a man's position, but it
becomes a veritable
shame to him to remain in the state
he was born in, and everybody thinks it his duty to try to
be a “gentleman.” Persons who
have any influence in
cation know
how common this feeling has become. Hard-
ly a day passes but they receive letters
from mothers who
want all their six or eight sons to go to college, and make
the
grand tour in the long vacation, and who think there
is something wrong in the
foundations of society, because
this is not possible. Out of every ten letters of
this kind,
nine will allege, as the reason of the writers' importunity,
their
desire to keep their families in such and 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 horror of the inexpressibly pitiable
calamity of their
living a ledge or two lower on the molehill of the
world—
a calamity to be averted at any cost whatever, of struggle,
anxiety, and shortening of life itself. I do not believe
that any greater good
could be achieved for the country,
than the change in public feeling on this head,
which
might be brought about by a few benevolent men, undeni-
ably in the class
of “gentlemen,” who would, on principle,
enter into some of our
commonest trades, and make them
honourable; showing that it was possible for a man to
re-
tain his dignity, and remain, in the best sense, a gentleman,
though part of
his time was every day occupied in manual
labour, or even in serving customers over a
counter. I do
not in the least see why courtesy, and gravity, and sym-
pathy with
the feelings of others, and courage, and truth,
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 were demanded, or even hoped for,
there.
Let us suppose, then, that the man's way of life and
manner of work have been
discreetly chosen; then the
next thing to be required is, that he do not over-work
him-
self therein. I am not going to say anything here about
the various errors
in our systems of society and commerce,
pear) to force us to over-work ourselves merely that we may
live;
nor about the still more fruitful cause of unhealthy
toil—the
incapability, in many men, of being content with
the little that is indeed necessary
to their happiness. I have
only a word or two to say about one special cause of
over-
work—the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things,
and
the hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts:
hope as vain as it is pernicious;
not only making men
over-work themselves, but rendering all the work they do
unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let the
reader be assured of
this (it is a truth all-important to the
best interests of humanity). No
great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort; a great thing can only
be
done by a great man, and he does it without effort.
No-
thing is, at present, less understood by us than this—no-
thing is
more necessary to be understood. Let me try to
say it as clearly, and explain it as
fully as I may.
I have said no great intellectual thing: for I do not
mean
the assertion to extend to things moral. On the
contrary, it seems to me that just
because we are intended,
as long as we live, to be in a state of intense moral
effort,
we are not intended to be in intense physical or
intellec-
tual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul's
work—to the great fight with the Dragon—the taking the
kingdom of heaven by force. But the body's work and
head's work are to be done
quietly, and comparatively
without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are ever to be
strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the
greatest quantity of
work is to be got out of them: they
are never to be worked furiously, but with
tranquillity
and constancy. We are to follow the plough from sun-
rise to sunset,
but not to pull in race-boats at the twilight:
we shall get no fruit of that kind of
work, only disease
the heart.
How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this
great truth and law were
but once sincerely, humbly un-
derstood,—that if a great thing can be done
at all, it can
be done easily; that, when it is needed to be done, 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 it
costs small people to do small things; nay, per-
haps, with less. And yet what truth
lies more openly on
the surface of all human phenomena? Is not the evidence
of
Ease on the very front of all the greatest works in ex-
istence? 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 not the weariness of mortality, but the
strength of divinity,
which we have to recognise in all
mighty things; and that is just what we now never recog-
nise, but think that we are to do great things, by help
of iron bars and perspiration:—alas! we shall do no-
thing that way
but lose some pounds of our own weight.
Yet, let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth
be supposed anywise
resolvable into the favorite dogma of
young men, that they need not work if they have
genius.
The fact is that a man of genius is always far more ready
to work than other
people, and gets so much more good
from the work that he does, and is often so little
conscious
of the inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to
ascribe all his
capacity to his work, and to tell those who
ask how he came to be what he is:
“If I am anything,
which I much doubt, I made myself so
merely by labour.”
This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would
be
the general tone of men whose genius had been devot-
ed to the physical sciences. Genius in
the Arts must
commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it
will always be
distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-
directed, happy, and faithful labour in
accumulating and
disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incom-
it is no man's business whether he has genius or not:
work he must,
whatever he is, but quietly and steadily;
and the natural and unforced results of such
work will be
always the things that God meant him to do, and will be
his best. No agonies
nor heart-rendings will enable him
to do any better. If he be a great man, they will be
great
things; if a small man, small things; but always, if
thus peacefully done, good and
right; always, if rest-
lessly and ambitiously done, false, hollow, and despica-
ble.
Then the third thing needed was, I said, that a man
should be a good judge of his
work; and this chiefly that
he may not be dependent upon popular opinion for the
manner of
doing it, but also that he may have the just
encouragement of the sense of progress, and
an honest
consciousness of victory: how else can he become
I am persuaded that the real nourishment and help of
such a feeling as this is
nearly unknown to half the work-
men of the present day. For whatever appearance of
self-complacency there may be in their outward bearing,
it is visible enough, by their
feverish jealousy of each
other, how little confidence they have in the sterling value
of
their several doings. Conceit may puff a man up, but
never prop him up; and there is too
visible distress and
hopelessness in men's aspects to admit of the supposition
that they
have any stable support of faith in themselves.
I have stated these principles generally, because there
is no branch of labour to
which they do not apply: But
there is one in which our ignorance or forgetfulness of
them
has caused an incalculable amount of suffering: and
reference to it,—the branch of the Arts.
In general, the men who are employed in the Arts
have freely chosen their
profession, and suppose them-
selves to have special faculty for it; yet, as a body, they
are not happy men. For which this seems to me the
reason, that they are expected, and
themselves expect, to
make their bread by being clever—not by
steady or quiet
work; and are, therefore, for the most part, trying to be
clever, and so
living in an utterly false state of mind and
action.
This is the case, to the same extent, in no other profes-
sion or employment. A
lawyer may indeed suspect that,
unless he has more wit than 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 will
generally understand, early in his career, that wit must
be left
to take care of itself, and that it is hard knowledge
of law and vigorous examination 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 paid for;
and this is healthy and measurable labour,
payable by
the hour. If he happen to have keen natural perception
and quick wit, these
will come into play in their due
time and place, but he will not think of them as his
chief
power; and if he have them not, he may still hope that
industry and
conscientiousness may enable him to rise in
his profession without them. Again in the case
of clergy-
men: that they are sorely tempted to display their eloquence
or wit, none who
know their own hearts will deny, but then
they know this to be a temptation: they never would sup-
pose that cleverness was all that was to be
expected from
them, or would sit down deliberately to write a clever ser-
mon: even the
dullest or vainest of them would throw some
veil over their vanity, and pretend to some profitableness
of their hearers—Did you think my sermon ingenious, or
my language
poetical? They would early understand
that they were not paid for being ingenious, nor
called to
be so, but to preach truth; that if they happened to pos-
sess wit, eloquence, or
originality, these would appear
and be of service in due time, but were not to be
contin-
ually sought after or exhibited: and if it should happen
that they had them not,
they might still be serviceable
pastors without them.
Not so with the unhappy artist. No one expects any
honest or useful work of him;
but every one expects him
to be ingenious. Originality, dexterity, invention, imagin-
ation,
every thing is asked of him except what alone is to
be had for asking—honesty
and sound work, and the due
discharge of his function as a painter. What function?
asks
the reader in some surprise. He may well ask; for
I suppose few painters have any idea
what their function
is, or even that they have any at all.
And yet surely it is not so difficult to discover. The
faculties, which when a man
finds in himself, he resolves
to be a painter, are, I suppose, intenseness of observation
and facility of imitation. The man is created an observer
and an imitator; and his
function is to convey knowledge
to his fellow-men, of such things as cannot be taught
otherwise than ocularly. For a long time this function
remained a religious one: it was to
impress upon the
popular mind the reality of the objects of faith, and the
truth of the
histories of Scripture, by giving visible form
to both. That function has now passed away,
and none
has 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 nat-
of Europe, at the moment when the invention of printing
superseded their
legendary labours, was no false instinct.
It was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came
at the
right time, and has maintained itself through all kinds of
abuse; presenting in the
recent schools of landscape, per-
haps only the first fruits of its power. That instinct was
urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to
his true duty—the faithful representation of all objects of historical interest, or of natural beauty
existent at the period; representations such as might at once aid the
advance of
the sciences, and keep faithful record of every
monument of past ages which was likely to
be swept
away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.
The instinct came, as I said, exactly at the right mo-
ment; and let the reader
consider what amount and kind
of general knowledge might by this time have been pos-
sessed
by the nations of Europe, had their painters under-
stood and obeyed it. Suppose that, after
disciplining
themselves so as to be able to draw, with unerring preci-
sion, each the
particular kind of subject in which he most
delighted, they had separated into two great
armies of
historians and naturalists;—that the first bad painted
with absolute
faithfulness every edifice, every city, every
battle-field, every scene of the slightest
historical interest,
precisely and completely rendering their aspect at the
time; and that
their companions, according to their sev-
eral powers, had painted with like fidelity the
plants and
animals, the natural scenery, and the atmospheric phe-
nomena of every country on
the earth—suppose that a
faithful and complete record were now in our museums
of every building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation,
during these last 200
years—suppose that each recess of
every mountain chain of Europe had been
penetrated, and
its rocks drawn with such accuracy that the geologist's dia-
of the forest had been drawn in its noblest
aspect, every
beast of the field in its savage life—that all these gather-
ings
were already in our national galleries, and that the
painters of the present day were
labouring, happily and
earnestly, to multiply them, and put such means of
knowledge more
and more within reach of the common
people—would not that be a more honourable life for
them, than gaining precarious bread by “bright effects?”
They think
not, perhaps. They think it easy, and there-
fore contemptible, to be truthful; they have
been taught
so all their lives. But it is not so, whoever taught it
them. It is most
difficult, and worthy of the greatest
men's greatest effort, to render, as it should be
rendered,
the simplest of the natural features of the earth; 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 be strange if he cannot find something hard
enough for him. The excuse is,
however, one of the lips
only; for every painter knows that when he draws back
from the
attempt to render nature as she is, it is oftener
in cowardice than in disdain.
I must leave the reader to pursue this subject for him-
self; I have not space to
suggest to him the tenth part of
the advantages which would follow, both to the painter
from such an understanding of his mission, and to the
whole people, in the results of his
labour. Consider how
the man himself would be elevated: how content he
would become, how
earnest, how full of all accurate and
noble knowledge, how free from
envy—knowing creation
to be infinite, feeling at once the value of what he 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 con-
veyed by it,
in every subject; the far greater number of
it as a means of livelihood; the useful direction of myriads
of inferior
talents, now left fading away in misery. Con-
ceive all this, and then look around at our
exhibitions,
and behold the “cattle pieces,” and “sea
pieces,” and
“fruit pieces,” and “family
pieces;” the eternal brown
cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and
sliced
lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers;—and try
to feel what we
are, and what we might have been.
Take a single instance in one branch of archæology.
Let those who are
interested in the history of religion con-
sider what a treasure we should now have
possessed, if,
instead of painting pots, and vegetables, and drunken
peasantry, the most
accurate painters of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries had been set to copy, line
for
line, the religious and domestic sculpture on the German,
Flemish, and French
cathedrals and castles; and if every
building destroyed in the French or in any other
subse-
quent revolution, had thus been drawn in all its parts with
the same precision with
which Gerard Douw or Mieris
paint basreliefs of Cupids. Consider, even now, what
in-
calculable treasure is still left in ancient basreliefs, full of
every kind of legendary
interest, of subtle expression, of
priceless evidence as to the character, feelings,
habits, his-
tories, of past generations, in neglected and shattered
churches and domestic
buildings, rapidly disappearing
over the whole of Europe—treasure which, once
lost, the
labour of all men living cannot bring back again; and then
look at the myriads
of men, with skill enough, if they had
but the commonest schooling, to record all this
faithfully,
who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked
women from academy
models, or idealities of chivalry
fitted out with Wardour Street armour, or eternal scenes
from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the Vicar of Wakefield,
or mountain sceneries with young
idiots of Londoners
foregrounds. Do but think of these things in the breadth
of their
inexpressible imbecility, and then go and stand
before that broken basrelief in the
southern gate of Lin-
coln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the heart in
you that
will break too.
But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly
asked, for imagination
and invention, for poetical power,
or love of ideal beauty? Yes; the highest, the noblest
place—that which these only can attain when they are all
used in the cause, and
with the aid of truth. Wherever
imagination and sentiment are, they will either show them-
selves without forcing, or, if capable of artificial develop-
ment, the kind of training
which such a school of art would
give them would be the best they could receive. The in-
finite
absurdity and failure of our present training con-
sists mainly in this, that we do not rank
imagination and
invention high enough, and suppose that they can be
taught. Throughout every sentence that I ever have writ-
ten, the reader will find the same
rank attributed to these
powers,—the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
at-
tained, increased, or in anywise modified by teaching, only
in various ways capable of
being concealed or quenched.
Understand this thoroughly; know once for all, that a
poet on
canvas is exactly the same species of creature as
a poet in song, and nearly every error in
our methods of
teaching will be done away with. For who among us
now thinks of bringing
men up to be poets?—of producing
poets by any kind of general recipe or method
of cul-
tivation? Suppose even that we see in youth that which
we hope may, in its
development, become a power of this
kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to
make a poet of him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet,
steady, rational labour?
Should we force him to perpe-
tual spinning of new crudities out of his boyish brain,
laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to
discover in
the works of previous writers? Whatever
gifts the boy had, would much be likely to come of
them
so treated? unless, indeed, they were so great as to break
through all such snares of
falsehood and vanity, and build
their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in
cases numbering millions against units, the natural gifts
were too weak to do this, could
any thing come of such
training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole
man? But
if we had sense, should we not rather restrain
and bridle the first flame of invention in
early youth,
heaping material on it as one would on the first sparks and
tongues of a fire
which we desired to feed into greatness?
Should we not educate the whole intellect into
general
strength, and all the affections into warmth and honesty,
and look to heaven for
the rest? This, I say, we should
have sense enough to do, in order to produce a poet in
words: but, it being required to produce a poet on canvas,
what is our way of setting to
work? We begin, in all
probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that
Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her;
but that Raphael is perfection,
and that the more he co-
pies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Ra-
phael, he is
to try what he can do himself in a Ra-
phaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say,
he is
to try to do something very clever, all out of his own
head, but yet this clever
something is to be properly sub-
jected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light
occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal sha-
dow occupying one-third of the
same; that no two peo-
ple's head in the picture are to be turned the same way,
and that all
the personages represented are to possess ideal
beauty of the highest order, which ideal
beauty consists
partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions
but partly also in that degree of improvement which the
youth of sixteen is
to bestow upon God's work in general.
This I say is the kind of teaching which through
various
channels, Royal Academy lecturings, press criticisms,
public enthusiasm, and not
least by solid weight of gold,
we give to our young men. And we wonder we have no
painters!
But we do worse than this. Within the last few years
some sense of the real
tendency of such teaching has ap-
peared in some of our 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 knowing
the degree
of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among
our
youths,—increased,—matured into resolute action.
Necessarily, to
exist at all, it needed the support both of
strong instincts and of considerable
self-confidence, other-
wise it must at once have been borne down by the weight
of general
authority and received canon law. Strong in-
stincts are apt to make men strange, and rude;
self-con-
fidence, however well founded, to give much of what
they do or say the appearance
of impertinence. Look at
the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other
sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
it than was needed to enable
him to do his work, yet it is
not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this
stub-
bornness and self-trust in a youth, labouring in an art of
which the executive part is
confessedly to be best learnt
from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of
his
work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or
that he should be regarded with
disfavour by many, even
the most temperate, of the judges trained in the system he
was
breaking through, and with utter contempt and repro-
bation by the envious and the dull.
Consider, farther,
present case, one of which the main characteristic was the
pursuit of beauty
at the expense of manliness and truth;
and it will seem likely, à
priori, that the men intended
successfully to resist the influence of such a system
should
be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus
rendered dead to the
temptation it presented. Summing
up these conditions, there is surely little cause for
surprise
that pictures painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceed-
ingly young men, of
stubborn instincts and positive self-
trust, and with little natural perception of beauty,
should
not be calculated, at the first glance, to win us from works
enriched by
plagiarism, polished by convention, invested
with all the attractiveness of artificial
grace, and recom-
mended to our respect by established authority.
We should, however, on the other hand, have antici-
pated, that in proportion to the
strength of character re-
quired for the effort, and to the absence of distracting
sen-
timents, whether respect for precedent, or affection for
ideal beauty, would be the
energy exhibited in the pursuit
of the special objects which the youths proposed to
them-
selves, and their success in attaining them.
All this has actually been the case, but in a degree
which it would have been
impossible to anticipate. That
two youths, of the respective ages of eighteen and twenty,
should have conceived for themselves a totally independ-
ent and sincere method of study,
and enthusiastically
persevered in it against every kind of dissuasion and oppo-
sition, is
strange enough; that in the third or fourth year
of their efforts they should have
produced works in many
parts not inferior to the best of Albert Durer, this is per-
haps not
less strange. But the loudness and universality
of the howl which the common critics of
the press have
raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help
or
encouragement from those who can both measure their
laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the
other,—these are strangest of all—unimaginable unless
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
in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an anony-
mous
letter respecting one of them, from some person ap-
parently hardly capable of spelling, and
about as vile a
specimen of petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I
think it well that
the public should know this, and so get
some insight into the sources of the spirit which
is at
work against these men—how first roused it is difficult to
say, for one
would hardly have thought that mere eccen-
tricity in young artists could have excited an
hostility so
determined and so cruel;—hostility which hesitated at no
assertion, however impudent. That of the “absence of
perspective”
was one of the most curious pieces of the hue
and cry which began with the Times, and died
away in
feeble maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in
the Times—I
here contradict it directly for the second
time. There was not a single error in
perspective in three
out of the four pictures in question. But if otherwise,
would it have
been any thing remarkable in them? I
doubt, if, with the exception of the pictures of
David
Roberts, there were one architectural drawing in perspec-
tive on the walls of the
Academy; I never met but with
two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
draw a
Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral
dimensions and curvatures might be
calculated to scale
from the drawing. Our architects certainly do not, and
it was but the
other day that, talking to one of the most
distinguished among them, the author of several
most
valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to
science our writers for the press take it upon
them to tell
us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's
, and the
bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's
, are
out of perspective
It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been * It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art Union † These false statements may be reduced to three principal heads, The first, the current fallacy of society as well as of the press, was, A falsehood of this kind could not have obtained credence any where
ungraceful or unwise in
the Academicians themselves to
have defended their young pupils, at least by
diction of statements directly false respecting
them
which
repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite rejection
of
“linear perspective” (by-the-bye, the next time J. B. takes upon
him
to speak of any one connected with the Universities, he may as well first
ascertain the difference between a Graduate and an Under-Graduate), the
second plate
given should have been of a picture of Bonington's,—a pro-
fessional
landscape painter, observe,—for the want of aerial
perspective,
in which the Art Union itself was obliged to apologise, and in which the
artist has committed nearly as many blunders in linear perspective as
there are lines
in the picture.
and
directly contradicted in succession.
that the
Pre-Raphaelites imitated the errors of early painters.
but in England,
few English people, comparatively, having ever seen a
picture of early Italian
Masters. If they had, they would have known
that the Pre-Raphaelite pictures are just
as superior to the early Italian
in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and
knowledge of effect, as
inferior to them in grace of design; and that in a word, there
is not a
shadow of resemblance between the two styles. The Pre-Raphaelites
imitate no
pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have op-
posed themselves as a body, to
that kind of teaching above described,
which only began after Raphael's time: and they
have opposed them-
selves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a
feel-
ing compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride.
Therefore
they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere
to their principles, and
paint nature as it is around them, with the help
of modern science, with the
earnestness of the men of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said,
found a new and noble
real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake, Mul-
ready, Edwin and
Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce
would each of them simply state their own private opinion
respecting their paintings, sign it, and publish it, I believe
the act would be of more
service to English art than any
thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But
as I
cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give
their pictures careful
examination, and look at them at
once with the indulgence and the respect which I have
endeavoured to show they deserve.
Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced
them only as examples of the kind
of study which I would
desire to see substituted for that of our modern schools,
and of
singular success in certain characters, finish of de-
tail, and brilliancy of colour. What
faculties, higher than
imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to
say; but I
do say, that if they exist, such faculties will
manifest themselves in due time all the
more forcibly be-
cause they have received training so severe.
For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists, lead The second falsehood was, that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draw The third falsehood was, that they had no system of light and shade.
like another, either in its
powers or perceptions; and
while the main principles of training must be the same
them into mediævalism
or Romanism, they will of course come to noth-
ing. But I believe there is no danger of
this, at least for the strongest
among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the
Tractarian
heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches
from a strong stem. I hope all things from the school.
well. This was
asserted, and could have been asserted only by persons
who had never looked at the
pictures.
To which it may
be simply replied that their system of light and shade
is exactly the same as the
Sun's; which is, I believe, likely to outlast
that of the Renaissance, however
brilliant.
of truth which
each will apprehend; therefore, also, the
modes of effort, even in men whose inner
principles and
final aims are exactly the same. Suppose, for instance,
two men, equally
honest, equally industrious, equally im-
pressed with a humble desire to render some part of
what
they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise, trained in
convictions such as I have
above endeavoured to induce.
But one of them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble
memory,
no invention, and excessively keen sight. The
other is impatient in temperament, has a
memory which
nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
comparatively
near-sighted.
Set them both free in the same field in a mountain
valley. One sees everything,
small and large, with al-
most the same clearness; mountains and grasshoppers
alike; the
leaves on the branches, the veins in the peb-
bles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can
remember
nothing, and invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to
his mighty task;
abandoning at once all thoughts of
seizing transient effects, or giving general
impressions of
that which his eyes present to him in microscopical dis-
section, he chooses
some small portion out of the infinite
scene, and calculates with courage the number of
weeks
which must elapse before he can do justice to the inten-
sity of his perceptions, or
the fulness of matter in his
subject.
Meantime, the other has been watching the change of
the clouds, and the march of
the light along the mountain
sides; he beholds the entire scene in broad, soft masses of
true gradation, and the very feebleness of his sight is in
some sort an advantage to him,
in making him more sen-
sible of the ærial mystery of distance, and hiding from
him the multitudes of circumstances which it would have
been impossible for him to
represent. But there is not
hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever;
not a flake
of spray has broken from the sea of cloud
about their bases, but he has watched it as it
melts away,
and could recall it to its lost place in heaven by the
slightest effort of his
thoughts. Not only so, but thou-
sands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, re-
main
congregated in his mind, each mingling in new asso-
ciations with those now visibly passing
before him, and
these again confused with other images of his own cease-
less, sleepless
imagination, flashing by in sudden troops.
Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray
symbols
and blots, and undecipherable short-hand:—as for his sit-
ting down to
“draw from Nature,” there was not one of
the things which he wished
to represent, that staid for so
much as five seconds together: but none of them escaped,
for all that: they are sealed up in that strange storehouse
of his; he may take one of
them out perhaps, this day
twenty years, and paint it in his dark room, far away.
Now,
observe, you may tell 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 what
Raphael did. This
you may wholesomely impress on
them both. But fancy the exquisite absurdity of expect-
ing
either of them to possess any of the qualities of the other.
I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and
of invention in the first
painter, that the contrast between
them might be more striking; but, with very slight
mo-
dification, both the characters are real. Grant to the first
considerable inventive
power, with exquisite sense of co-
lour; and give to the second, in addition to all his
other
faculties, the eye 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 just-
ice to the gifts with which they were intrusted. They
stand at
opposite poles, marking culminating points of
art in both directions; between them, or in
various rela-
tions to them, 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 for naming them,
in order
that the reader may know how the strong innate genius
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 the works of
William Hunt; but it may be
so to suggest the high value they possess as records of
English rural life, and still life. Who is there who for a
moment could
contend with him in the unaffected, yet
humorous truth with which he has painted our
peasant
children? Who is there who does not sympathize with
him in the simple love with
which he dwells on the bright-
ness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And
yet there
is something to be regretted concerning him:
why should he be allowed continually to paint
the same
bunches of hot-house grapes, and supply to the Water
Colour Society a succession
of pineapples with the regu-
larity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late dis-
covered
that primrose banks are lovely, but there are
other things grow wild besides primroses:
what un-
dreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if he
would lose himself for a
summer in Highland fore-
grounds; if he would paint the heather as it grows, and
the
foxglove and the harebell as they nestle in the clefts
of the rocks, and the mosses and
bright lichens of the
rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and
bring back a
piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the
gentians in their earliest blue, and a
soldanelle beside the
of alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
wreath of rubies. That is
what he was meant to do in
this world; not to paint bouquets in China vases.
I have in various other places expressed my sincere re-
spect for the works of
Samuel Prout: his shortness of
sight has necessarily prevented their possessing delicacy
of finish or fulness of minor detail; but I think that those
of no other living artist
furnish an example so striking of
innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular
work at
the exact and only period when it was possible. At the
instant when peace had been
established all over Europe,
but when neither national character nor national architec-
ture
had as yet been seriously changed by promiscuous
intercourse or modern
“improvement;” when, however,
nearly every ancient and beautiful
building had been long
left in a state of comparative neglect, so that its aspect of
partial ruinousness, and of separation from recent active
life, gave to every edifice a
peculiar interest—half sorrow-
ful, half sublime;—at that moment Prout
was trained
among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall,
until his eye was
accustomed to follow with delight the
rents and breaks, and irregularities which, to
another
man, would have been offensive; and then, gifted with
infinite readiness in
composition, but also with infinite
affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray,
he
was sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of
drawings, every
one made on the spot, the aspect borne, at
the beginning of the nineteenth century,
by cities which,
in a few years more, re-kindled wars, or unexpected pros-
perities, were to
ravage, or renovate, into nothingness.
It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but
there is this fellowship
between them, that both seem to
have been intended to appreciate the characters of foreign
countries more than of their own, nay, to have been born
might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had
to represent. I
believe John Lewis to have done more
entire justice to all his powers, (and they are
magnificent
ones,) than any other man amongst us. His mission was
evidently to portray the
comparatively animal life of the
southern and eastern families of mankind. For this, he
was prepared in a somewhat singular way—by being led
to study, and endowed with
altogether peculiar apprehen-
sion of, the most sublime characters of animals them-
selves.
Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and
Titian, have all, in various ways, drawn wild
beasts mag-
nificently; but they have in some sort humanized or de-
monised them, making them
either ravenous fiends, or
educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had respect
for
hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature;
the dignity and quietness of the
mighty limbs; the shaggy
mountainous power, mingled with grace as of a flowing
stream; the
stealthy restraint of strength and wrath in
every soundless motion of the gigantic frame;
all this
seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until
Lewis drew and himself
engraved a series of animal sub-
jects, now many years ago. Since then, he has devoted
himself to the portraiture of those European and Asiatic
races, among whom the refinements
of civilisation exist
without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierce-
ness,
indolence, and subtlety of animal nature are associ-
ated with brilliant imagination and
strong affections. To
this task he has brought not only intense perception of the
kind of
character, but powers of artistical composition
like those of the great Venetians,
displaying, at the same
time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and ap-
preciable
only, as the minutiae of nature itself are appre-
ciable, by the help of the microscope. The
value, there-
fore, of his works, as records of the aspect of the scenery
the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above
all estimate.
I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy
and completion of drawing, and
splendour of colour, he
takes place beside John Lewis and the pre-Raphaelites;
but he has,
throughout his career, displayed no definite-
ness in choice of subject. He must be named
among the
painters who have studied with industry, and have made
themselves great by doing
so; but having obtained a con-
summate method of execution, he has thrown it away on
subjects either altogether uninteresting, or above his
powers, 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 William Thornhill
being utterly missed); the “
Seven Ages” of the third;
for this subject cannot be painted. In the written
pas-
sage, the thoughts are progressive and connected; in the
picture they must be
co-existent, and yet separate; nor
can all the characters of the ages be rendered in
painting
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 any thing which
can be of true or extensive use.
He has, indeed, understood how to discipline his genius,
but never how to direct it.
Edwin Landseer is the last painter but one whom I
shall name: I need not point out
to any one acquainted
with his earlier works, the labour, or watchfulness of
nature which
they involve, nor need I do more than
allude to the peculiar faculties of his mind. It
will at
once be granted that the highest merits of his pictures
are throughout found in
those parts of them which are
it was not by the study of Raphael that he attained his
eminent success, but by a
healthy love of Scotch terriers.
None of these painters, however, it will be answered,
afford examples of the rise
of the highest imaginative
power out of close study of matters of fact. Be it remem-
bered,
however, that the imaginative power, in its magni-
ficence, is not to be found every day.
Lewis has it in no
mean degree, but we cannot hope to find it at its highest
more than
once in an age. We have had it once, and
must be content.
Towards the close of the last century, among the various
drawings executed,
according to the quiet manner of the
time, in greyish blue, with brown foregrounds, some
began to be noticed as exhibiting rather more than ordi-
nary diligence and delicacy,
was nothing, however, in them at
all indicative of genius,
or even of more than ordinary talent, unless in some of
the
subjects a large perception of space, and excessive
clearness and decision in the
arrangement of masses.
Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled with
delicate
green, and then with gold; the browns in the
foreground became first more positive, and
then were
slightly mingled with other local colours; while the
touch, which had at first
been heavy and broken, like
that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew
more
and more refined and expressive, until it lost itself
in a method of execution often too
delicate for the eye to
follow, rendering, with a precision before unexampled,
both the
texture and the form of every object. The style
may be considered as perfectly formed
about the year
1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.
* He did not use his full signature, J. M. W., until about the year
1800.
During that period the painter had attempted, and with
more or less success had
rendered, every order of land-
scape subject, but always on the same principle, subduing
the
colours of nature into a harmony of which the key-
notes are greyish green and brown; pure
blues, and deli-
cate golden yellows being admitted in small quantity as
the lowest and
highest limits of shade and light: and
bright local colours in extremely small quantity in
figures
or other minor accessaries.
Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly
speaking, works in colour at all; they are studies of light
and shade, in which both the
shade and the distance are
rendered in the general hue which best expresses their
attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights
and the foreground are executed in
that which best ex-
presses their warmth and solidity. This advantage may
just as well be
taken as not, in studies of light and shadow
to be executed with the hand; but the use of
two, three,
or four colours, always in the same relations and places,
does not in the
least constitute the work a study of colour,
any more than the brown engravings of the
Liber Studio-
rum; nor would the idea of colour be in general more
present to the artist's
mind when he was at work on one
of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in
the mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth,
and freshness being not
successfully expressible in a single
tint, and perfectly expressible by the admission of
three
or four, he allows himself this advantage when it is pos-
sible, without in the least
embarrassing himself with the
actual colour of the objects to be represented. A stone in
the foreground might in nature have been cold grey, but
it will be drawn nevertheless of a
rich brown, because it
is in the foreground; a hill in the distance might in nature
be
purple with heath, or golden with furze; but it will be
distance.
This at least was the general theory,—carried out with
great
severity in many, both of the drawings and pictures
executed by him during the period: in
others more or
less modified by the cautious introduction of colour, as the
painter felt
his liberty increasing; for the system was
evidently never considered as final, or as
anything more
than a means of progress: the conventional, easily man-
ageable colour, was
visibly adopted, only that his mind
might be at perfect liberty to address itself to the
acquire-
ment of the first and most necessary knowledge in all art
—that of form.
But as form, in landscape, implies vast
bulk and space, the use of the tints which enabled
him
best to express them, was actually auxiliary to the mere
drawing; and, therefore, not
only permissible, but even
necessary, while more brilliant or varied tints were never
indulged in, except when they might be introduced with-
out the slightest danger of
diverting his mind for an in-
stant from his principal object. And, therefore, it will be
generally found in the works of this period, that exactly
in proportion to the importance
and general toil of the
composition, is the severity of the tint; and that the play
of
colour begins to show itself first in slight and small
drawings, where he felt that he
could easily secure all
that he wanted in form.
Thus the “
ate and large compositions, are actually painted in nothing
but grey,
brown, and blue, with a point or two of severe
local colour in the figures; but in the
minor drawings,
tender passages of complicated colour occur not unfre-
quently in easy
places; and even before the year 1800 he
begins to introduce it with evident joyfulness
and longing
in his rude and simple studies, just as a child, if it could
be supposed to
govern itself by a fully developed intellect,
then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the
simple order of its
daily fare. Thus, in the foregrounds
of his most severe drawings, we not unfrequently find
him indulging in the luxury of a peacock; and it is im-
possible to express the joyfulness
with which he seems to
design its graceful form, and deepen with soft pencilling
the bloom
of its blue, after he has worked through the
stern detail of his almost colourless
drawing. A rainbow
is another of his most frequently permitted indulgences;
and we find
him very early allowing the edges of his
evening clouds to be touched with soft
rose-colour or gold;
while, whenever the hues of nature in anywise fall into
his system,
and can be caught without a dangerous de-
parture from it, he instantly throws his whole
soul into
the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown
tones of his foreground
become warmed into sudden
vigour, and are varied and enhanced with indescribable
delight,
when he finds himself by the shore of a moorland
stream, where they truly express the
stain of its golden
rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools,
and the
usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the
softness and depth of the sapphire,
when it can deepen
the distant slumber of some Highland lake, or temper the
gloomy shadows
of the evening upon its hills.
The system of his colour being thus simplified, he
could address all the strength
of his mind to the accumu-
lation of facts of form; his choice of subject, and his
methods
of treatment, are therefore as various as his
colour is simple; and it is not a little
difficult to give the
reader who is unacquainted with his works, an idea
either of their
infinitude of aims, on the one hand, or of
the kind of feeling which pervades them all, on
the other.
No subject was too low or too high for him: we find him
one day hard at work on
a cock and hen, with their family
ment of his execution into play to express the texture of
the plumage; next day
he is drawing the Dragon of Col-
chis. One hour he is much interested in a gust of wind
blowing away an old woman's cap; the next he is paint-
ing the fifth plague of Egypt. Every
landscape painter
before him had acquired distinction by confining his ef-
forts to one
class of subject. Hobbima painted oaks;
Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or
meadow
scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such
kind of mountain scenery as
people could conceive, who
lived in towns in the seventeenth century. But I am well
persuaded that if all the works of Turner, up to the year
1820, were divided into classes
(as he has himself divided
them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be
assigned to one class over another.
ture, including a
large number of formal “ gentlemen's
seats,” I suppose drawings
commissioned by the owners;
then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind, including
nearly all farming operations,—ploughing harrowing,
hedging and ditching,
felling trees, sheep-washing, and
I know not what else; then all kinds of town
life—
court-yards of inns, starting of mail coaches, interiors of
shops,
house-buildings, fairs, elections, &c.; then all
kinds of inner domestic
life—interiors of rooms, studies
of costumes, of still life, and heraldry,
including multi-
tudes of symbolical vignettes; then marine scenery of
every kind, full of
local incident; every kind of boat and
method of fishing for particular fish, being
specifically
drawn, round the whole coast of England;—pilchard fish-
ing at St.
Ives, whiting fishing at Margate, herring at
Loch Fyne; and all kinds of shipping,
including studies
of every separate part of the vessels, and many marine
battle pieces,
two in particular of Trafalgar, both of high
importance,—one of the Victory
after the battle, now in
his own gallery; then all kinds of mountain scenery,
some idealised into
compositions, others of definite locali-
ties; together with classical compositions, Romes
and
Carthages and such others, by the myriad, with mytholo-
gical, historical, or
allegorical figures,—nymphs, mon-
sters, and spectres; heroes and
divinities.
What general feeling, it may be asked incredulously,
can possibly pervade all
this? This, the greatest of all
feelings—an utter forgetfulness of self.
Throughout the
whole period with which we are at present concerned,
Turner appears as a
man of sympathy absolutely infinite
—a sympathy so all-embracing, that I know
nothing but
that of Shakspeare comparable with it. A soldier's wife
resting by the
roadside is not beneath it; Rizpah the
daughter of Aiah, watching the dead bodies of her
sons,
not above it. Nothing can possibly be so mean as that it
will not interest his whole
mind, and carry away his whole
heart; nothing so great or solemn but that he can raise
himself into harmony 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 * I shall give a
as a matter of course that
this sympathy must give him a
subtle power of expression, even of the characters of mere
material things, such as no other painter ever possessed.
The man who can best feel the
difference between rude-
ness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more dif-
ference
between the branches of an oak and a willow than
any one else would; and, therefore,
necessarily the most
striking character of the drawings themselves is the spe-
ciality of
whatever they represent—the thorough stiffness catalogue raisonnée of all this in the third
volume of
“Modern Painters.”
ness of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the
condition of
the mind of the painter himself is easily
enough discoverable by comparison of a large
number of
the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful: in
itself quite passionless,
though entering with ease into the
external passion which it contemplates. By the effort
of
its will it sympathises with tumult or distress, even in
their extremes, but there is
no tumult, no sorrow in itself,
only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful cheerfulness,
deeply meditative; touched without loss of its own perfect
balance, by sadness on the one
side, and stooping to play-
fulness upon the other. I shall never cease to regret the
destruction, by fire, now several years ago, of a drawing
which always seemed to me to be
the perfect image of the
painter's mind at this period,—the drawing of Brignal
Church near Rokeby, of which a feeble idea may still be
gathered from the engraving (in
the Yorkshire series).
The spectator stands on the “Brignal banks,”
looking
down into the glen at twilight; the sky is still full of soft
rays, though the sun
is gone; and the Greta glances
brightly in the valley, singing its even-song; two white
clouds, following each other, move without wind through
the hollows of the ravine, and
others lie couched on the
far away moorlands; every leaf of the woods is still in the
delicate air; a boy's kite, incapable of rising, has become
entangled in their branches,
he is climbing to recover 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 the stream; and
around it the low churchyard
wall, and the few white stones which 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 character of mind,
though I think none so touch-
more numerous than those which express his sympathy
with sublimer or more
active scenes; but they are almost
always marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a
look of being beloved in every part of them, which shows
them to be the truest expression
of his own feelings.
One other characteristic of his mind at this period re-
mains to be
noticed—its reverence for talent in others.
Not the reverence which acts upon
the practices of men
as if they were the laws of nature, but that 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 consist-
ent with the
great text-book of nature itself. Turner thus
studied almost every preceding landscape
painter, chiefly
Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.
It was probably by
the Sir George Beaumonts and other
feeble conventionalists of the period, that he was
per-
suaded to devote his attention to the works of these men;
and his having done so will
be thought, a few scores of
years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest modesty
ever
shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once
admirable and unfortunate, for the study
of the works of
Vandevelde and Claude was productive of unmixed mis-
chief to him; he
spoiled many of his marine pictures, as for
instance Lord Ellesmere's, by imitation of the
former;
and from the latter learned a false ideal, which confirmed
by the notions of Greek
art prevalent in London in the
beginning of this century, has manifested itself in many
vulgarities in his composition pictures, vulgarities which
may perhaps be best expressed
by the general term
“Twickenham Classicism,” as consisting
principally in
conceptions of ancient or of rural life such as have influ-
enced the
erection of most of our suburban villas. From
Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to
have de-
in his subsequent travels from far higher men, especially
Tintoret and Paul
Veronese. I have myself heard him
speaking with singular delight of the putting in of the
beech leaves in the upper right-hand corner of Titian's
Peter Martyr. I cannot in any of
his works trace the
slightest influence of Salvator; and I am not surprised at
it, for
though Salvator was a man of far higher powers
than either Vandevelde or Claude, he was a
wilful and
gross caricaturist. Turner would condescend to be helped
by feeble men, but
could not be corrupted by false men.
Besides, he had never himself seen classical life,
and
Claude was represented to him as competent 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 bears a date,
1818, and brings us within two
years of another dated drawing, no less characteristic of
what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second period.
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 of the
foreground
—“Passage of Mont Cenis. J. M. W.
Turner, January
15th, 1820.”
The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hos-
pice, or what seems to have
been a hospice at that time,
—I do not remember such at present,—a
small square-
built house, built as if partly for a fortress, with a de-
tached flight of
stone steps in front of it, and a kind of
drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400
or 500
yards off, is seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light,
which by help of a
violent blast of mountain wind has
broken through the depth of clouds which hangs upon
the
crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing
weight of darkness—the high air is too thin for it,—all
savage, howling, and luminous with cold, the massy bases
of the granite hills jutting out
here and there grimly
through the snow wreaths. There is a desolate-looking
refuge on the
left, with its number 16, marked on it in
long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting
the snow off
the roof and through its window in a frantic whirl; the
near ground is all
wan with half-thawed, half-trampled
snow; a diligence in front, whose horses, unable to
face
the wind, have turned right round with fright, its passen-
gers struggling to escape,
jammed in the window; a lit-
tle farther on is another carriage off the road, some figures
pushing at its wheels, and its driver at the horses' heads,
pulling and lashing with all
his strength, his lifted arm
stretched out against the light of the distance, though too
far off for the whip to be seen.
Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly
accustomed to the earlier 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, totally different
from the contemplative philosophy
with which it would formerly have been regarded.
Every
incident of motion and of energy is seized upon
with indescribable delight, and every line
of the compo-
sition animated with a force and fury which are now no
longer the mere
expression of a contemplated external
truth, but have origin in some inherent feeling in
the
painter's mind.
The second, that although the subject is one in itself
almost incapable of colour,
and although, in order to in-
crease the wildness of the impression, all brilliant local
colour has been refused even where it might easily have
been introduced, as in the
figures; yet in the low minor
been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to be-
come a leading,
instead of a subordinate, element in the
composition; the subdued warm hues of the granite
pro-
montories, the dull stone colour of the walls of the build-
ings, clearly opposed, even
in shade, to the grey of the
snow wreaths heaped against them, and the faint greens
and
ghastly blues of the glacier ice, being all expressed
with delicacies of transition
utterly unexampled in any
previous drawings.
These, accordingly, are the chief characteristics of the
works of Turner's second
period, as distinguished from
the first,—a new energy inherent in the mind of
the
painter, diminishing the repose and exalting the force and
fire of his conceptions,
and the presence of Colour, as at
least an essential, and often a principal, element of
design.
Not that it is impossible, or even unusual, to find draw-
ings of serene subject,
and perfectly quiet feeling, among
the compositions of this period; but the repose is in
them, just as the energy and tumult were in the earlier
period, an external quality, which
the painter images by
an effort 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 most perfect peace: in the
“Cowes,” the silence is only
broken by the dash of the
boat's oars, and in the “Alnwick” by a
stag drinking;
but in at least nine drawings out of ten, either sky, water,
or figures are
in rapid motion, and the grandest drawings
are almost always those which have even violent
action in
one or other, or in all: e. g. high force of Tees, Coventry,
Llanthony,
Salisbury, Llanberis, and such others.
The colour is, however, a more absolute distinction; and
we must return to Mr.
Fawkes's collection in order to see
how the change in it was effected. That such a change
would take place at one time or other was of course to be
period being, as above stated, merely a means of study.
But the immediate
cause was the journey of the year
1820. As might be guessed from the legend on the draw-
ing
above described, “Passage of Mont Cenis, January
15th, 1820,” that
drawing represents what happened on
the day in question to the painter himself. He passed
the
Alps then in the winter of 1820; and either in the pre-
vious or subsequent summer, but
on the same journey, he
made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body colour,
now in Mr.
Fawkes's collection. Every one of those
sketches is the almost instantaneous record of an
effect of
colour or atmosphere, taken strictly from nature, the
drawing and the details of every subject being comparative-
ly subordinate, and the colour
nearly as principal as the
light and shade had been before,—certainly the leading
feature, though the light and shade are always exquisitely
harmonized with it. And
naturally, as the colour becomes
the leading object, those times of day are chosen in
which
it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five out of
six of Turner's drawings
represented ordinary daylight,
we now find his attention directed constantly to the
even-
ing: and, for the first time, we have those rosy lights
upon the hills, those gorgeous
falls of sun through flam-
ing heavens, those solemn twilights, with the blue moon
rising
as the western sky grows dim, which have ever
since been the themes of his mightiest
thoughts.
I have no doubt, that the immediate reason of this
change was
the impression made upon him by the colours
of the continental skies. When he first
travelled on the
Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young student;
not yet able to
draw form as he wanted, he was forced to
give all his thoughts and strength to this
primary object.
But now he was free to receive other impressions; the
time was come for
perfecting his art, and the first sunset
landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison
with natural colour, the
things that had been called paint-
ings were mere ink and charcoal, and that all precedent
and all authority must be cast away at once, and trodden
under foot. He cast them away:
the memories of Van-
develde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great
mind they had
encumbered; 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 rose over
the rocks of the Siebengebirge.
There was another motive at work, which rendered the
change still more complete.
His fellow artists were
already conscious enough of his superior power in draw-
ing, and
their best hope was, that he might not be able to
colour. They had begun to express this
hope loudly
enough for it to reach his ears. The engraver of one of
his most important
marine pictures told me, not long ago,
that one day about the period in question, Turner
came
into his room to examine the progress of the plate, not
having seen his own picture
for several months. It was
one of his dark early pictures, but in the foreground was
a
little piece of luxury, a pearly fish wrought into hues
like those of an opal. He stood
before the picture for
some moments; then laughed, and pointed joyously to
the
fish;—“They say that Turner can't colour!” and
turned
away.
Under the force of these various impulses the change
was total. Every
subject thenceforward was primarily conceived in colour; and no engraving ever gave
the
slightest idea of any drawing of this period.
The artists who had any perception of the truth were in
despair; the Beaumontites,
classicalists, and “owl spe-
cies” in general, in as much indignation
as their dulness
was capable of. They had deliberately closed their eyes
put your brown ‘tree.’” A vast
revelation was made to
them at once, enough to have dazzled any one; but to
them, light unendurable as incomprehensible. They
“did to the moon
complain,” in one vociferous, unani-
mous, continuous “Tu
whoo.” Shrieking rose from all
dark places at the same instant, just the same
kind of
shrieking that is now raised against the Pre-Raphaelites.
Those glorious old
Arabian Nights, how true they are!
Mocking and whispering, and abuse loud and low by
turns, from all the black stones beside the road, when one
living soul is toiling up the
hill to get the golden water.
Mocking and whispering, that he may look back, and be-
come a
black stone like themselves.
Turner looked not back, but he went on in such a tem-
per as a strong man must be
in, when he is forced to walk
with his fingers in his ears. He retired into himself; he
could look no longer for help, or counsel, or sympathy
from any one; and the spirit of
defiance in which he was
forced to labour led him sometimes into violences, from
which the
slightest expression of sympathy would have
saved him. The new energy that was upon him,
and the
utter isolation into which he was driven, were both alike
dangerous, and many
drawings of the time show the evil
effects of both; some of them being hasty, wild, or
expe-
rimental, and others little more than magnificent expres-
sions of defiance of public
opinion.
But all have this noble virtue—they are in everything
his own: there
are no more reminiscences of dead mas-
ters, no more trials of skill in the manner of Claude
or
Poussin; every faculty of his soul is fixed upon nature
only, as he saw her, or as he
remembered her.
I have spoken above of his gigantic memory: it is espe-
cially necessary to notice
this, in order that we may un-
derstand the kind of grasp which a man of real imagina-
reach—grasp thenceforth not to be relaxed for ever.
On looking over any catalogues of his works, or of par-
ticular series of them, we
shall notice the recurrence of the
same subject two, three, or even many times. In any
other artist this would be nothing remarkable. Probably
most modern landscape painters
multiply a favourite sub-
ject twenty, thirty, or sixty fold, putting the shadows and
the
clouds in different places, and “inventing,” as they
are pleased to
call it, a new “effect” every time. But if
we examine the
successions of Turner's subjects, we shall
find them either the records of a succession of
impressions
actually received by him at some favourite locality, or
else repetitions of
one impression received in early youth,
and again and again realised as his increasing
powers
enabled him to do better justice to it. In either case we
shall find them records
of seen facts; never compositions
in his room to fill up a favourite
outline.
For instance, every traveller, at least every traveller of * The plate was, however, never published.
thirty years' standing,
must love Calais, the place where
he first felt himself in a strange world. Turner
evidently
loved it excessively. I have never catalogued his studies
of Calais, but I
remember, at this moment, five: there is
first the
is what he saw in broad
daylight as he crossed over, when
he got near the French side. It is a careful study of
French fishing boats running for the shore before the
wind, with the picturesque old city
in the distance. Then
there is the
that is what he saw just as he was
going into the harbour,
—a heavy brig warping out, and very likely to get in his
way or run against the pier, and bad weather coming on.
Then there is the
some years ago by Mr. Lupton*
see what had become of the brig. The weather had got
still worse, the
fishwomen were being blown about in a
distressful manner on the pier head, and some more
fish-
ing boats were running in with all speed. Then there is
the
had
been home to Dessein's, and dined, and went out
again in the evening to walk on the sands,
the tide being
down. He had never seen such a waste of sands before,
and it made an
impression on him. The shrimp girls
were all scattered over them too, and moved about in
white spots on the wild shore; and the storm had lulled
a little, and there was a
sunset—such a sunset,—and
bars of Fortrouge seen against it,
skeleton-wise. He did
not paint that directly; thought over it,—painted it a
long
while afterwards.
Then there is the vignette in the illustrations to Scott.
That is what he saw as
he was going home, meditatively;
and the revolving lighthouse came blazing out upon him
suddenly, and disturbed him. He did not like that so
much; made a vignette of it, however,
when he was asked
to do a bit of Calais, twenty or thirty years afterwards,
having already
done all the rest.
Turner never told me all this, but any one may see it if
he will compare the
pictures. They might, possibly, not
be impressions of a single day, but of two days or
three;
have
stated them*are records of successive im-
pressions,
as plainly written as ever traveller's diary. All
of them pure veracities. Therefore
immortal.
I could multiply these series almost indefinitely from * And the more probably because Turner was never fond of staying
the rest of his works. What
is curious, some of them have
long at any place,
and was least of all likely to make a pause of two or
three days at the beginning of
his journey.
Thus I know three drawings of Scarborough, and all of
them have a starfish
in the foreground: I do not remem-
ber any others of his marine subjects which have a
star-fish.
The other kind of repetition—the recurrence to one early
impression—is however 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,
finished at home. It had been a
showery day; the hills
were partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sun-
shine
breaking out at intervals. A man was fishing in
the mountain stream. The young Turner
sought a place
of some shelter under the bushes; made his sketch, took
great pains when he
got home to imitate the rain, as he
best could; added his child's luxury of a rainbow; put
in the very bush under which he had taken shelter, and
the fisherman, a somewhat
ill-jointed and long-legged fish-
erman, in the courtly short breeches which were the
fashion of the time.
Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in
their strongest training, and
after the total change in his
feelings and principles which I have endeavoured to
de-
scribe, he undertook the series of “England and Wales,”
and in
that series introduced the subject of Llanthony
Abbey. 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 to the other side of the
river, and put him, in somewhat less courtly dress,
under
their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all his
gained strength and new
knowledge at work on the well-
remembered shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years
before, to do it better.
the
very noblest of his second period.
* Vide Modern Painters, Part II. Sect. III. Chap. IV. § 14.
Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulles-
water, is the repetition of
one in Mr. Fawkes's collection,
which, by the method of its execution, I should conjecture
to have been executed about the year 1808 or 1810: at
all events, it is a very quiet
drawing of the first period.
The lake is quite calm; the western hills in grey shadow,
the
eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist
between them, all being mirrored in
the calm water.
Some thin and slightly evanescent cows are standing in
the shallow water
in front; a boat floats motionless about
a hundred yards from the shore: the foreground is
of
broken rocks, with some lovely pieces of copse on the
right and left.
This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening
by the shore of Ulleswater,
but it was a feeble one. He
could not at that time render the sunset colours: he went
back
to it therefore in the England series, and painted it
again with his new power. The same
hills are there, the
same shadows, the same cows,—they had stood in his
mind,
on the same spot, for twenty years,—the same boat,
the same rocks, only the
copse is cut away—it interfered
with the masses of his colour: some figures are
introduced
bathing, and what was grey, and feeble gold in the first
drawing, becomes
purple, and burning rose-colour in the
last.
But perhaps one of the most curious examples is in the
series of subjects from
Winchelsea. That in the Liber
Studiorum, “Winchelsea, Sussex,” bears
date 1812, and
its figures consist of a soldier speaking to a woman, who
is resting on the
bank beside the road. There is another
small subject, with Winchelsea in the distance, of
which
the engraving bears date 1817. It has two women with
bundles and
two soldiers toiling along the embankment in
the plain, and a baggage
waggon in the distance. Neither
of these seems to have satisfied him, and at last he did
bears date 1830.
There is now a regiment on the march;
the baggage waggon is there, having got no farther
on in
the thirteen years, but one of the women is tired, and has
fainted on the bank;
another is supporting her against
her 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 inci-
dents that Turner's memory
is thus tenacious. The slight-
est passages of colour or arrangement that have pleased
him—the fork of a bough, the casting of a shadow, the
fracture of a
stone—will be taken up again and again, and
strangely worked into new relations
with other thoughts.
There is a single sketch from nature in one of the portfolios
at
Farnley, of a common wood-walk on the estate, which
has furnished passages to no fewer
than three of the most
elaborate compositions in the Liber Studiorum.
I am thus tedious in dwelling on Turner's powers of
memory, because I wish it to
be thoroughly seen how all
his greatness, all his infinite luxuriance of invention,
de-
pends on his taking possession of everything that he sees,
—on his grasping
all, and losing hold of nothing,—on his
forgetting himself, and forgetting
nothing else. I wish it
to be understood how every great man paints what he sees
or did
see, his greatness being indeed little else than his
intense sense of fact. And thus
Pre-Raphaelitism and
Raphaelitism, and Turnerism, are all one and the same, so
far as
education can influence them. They are different
in their choice, different in their
faculties, but all the
same in this, that Raphael himself, so far as he was great,
and all
who preceded or followed him who ever were
great, became so by painting the truths around
them as
they appeared to each man's own mind, not as he had
both him and them.
There is, however, one more characteristic of Turner's
second period, on which I
have still to dwell, especially
with reference to what has been above advanced respect-
ing
the fallacy of overtoil; namely, the magnificent ease
with which all is done when it is
successfully done. For
there are one or two drawings of this time which are not
done
easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine
thing to exhibit his powers; in the
common phrase, to
excel himself; so sure as he does this, the work is a failure.
The worst
drawings that have ever come from his hands
are some of this second period, on which he
has spent
much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with
incident from one side to
the other, with skies stippled
into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in
violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large water-
colour, may be named as an
example. But the truly
noble works are those in which, without effort, he has ex-
pressed
his thoughts as they came, and forgotten himself;
and in these the outpouring of invention
is not less miracu-
lous than the swiftness and obedience of the mighty hand
that expresses
it. Any one who examines the drawings
may see the evidence of this facility, in the
strange fresh-
ness and sharpness of every touch of colour; but when
the multitude of
delicate touches, with which all the aerial
tones are worked, is taken into
consideration, it would
still appear impossible that the drawing could have been
completed
with ease, unless we had direct evidence on the
matter: fortunately, it is not wanting.
There is a draw-
ing in Mr. Fawkes's collection of a man-of-war taking in
stores: it is of
the usual size of those of the England
series, about sixteen inches by eleven: it does not
appear
one of the most highly finished, but is still farther re-
moved from slightness. The
hull of a first-rate occupies
towards the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem
to stern, with all her
portholes, guns, anchors, and lower
rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other
ships of
the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal pre-
cision; a noble breezy sea
dancing against their broad
bows, full of delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship
beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several other
boats, and a complicated cloudy
sky. It might appear no
small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this ship-
ping
down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the
drawing-room of a mansion in the middle of
Yorkshire,
even if considerable time had been given for the effort.
But Mr. Fawkes sat
beside the painter from the first
stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper
one
morning after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the
drawing in three hours, and
went 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 great thing can be
done at all,
it can be done easily; and let them not torment them-
selves with twisting of
compositions this way and that,
and repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If
a
man can compose at all, he can compose at once, or
rather he must compose in spite of
himself. And this is
the reason of that silence which I have kept in most of
my works, on
the subject of Composition. Many critics,
especially the architects, have found fault with
me for not
“teaching people how to arrange masses;” for not
“at-
tributing sufficient importance to composition.” Alas! I
attribute far more importance to it than they do;—so
much importance, that I
should just as soon think of sit-
ting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Comme-
dia,
or King Lear, as how to “compose,” in the true
sense, a single
building or picture. The marvellous stu-
what they call, “principles of composition,” are
mere
principles of common sense in every thing, as well as in
pictures and
buildings;—A picture is to have a principal
light? Yes; and so a dinner 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 pic-
ture is to have harmony of relation among its
parts? Yes;
and so is a speech well uttered, and an action well order-
ed, and a company
well chosen, and a ragout well mixed.
Composition! As if a man were not composing every
moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it instinct-
ively in his picture as well
as elsewhere, if be could. Com-
position of this lower or common kind is of exactly the
same
importance in a picture that it is in any thing else,
—no more. It is well that
a man should say what he has
to say in good order and sequence, but the main thing is
to
say it truly. And yet we go on preaching to our pupils
as if to have a principal light was
every thing, and so
cover our academy walls with Shacabac feasts, wherein
the courses are
indeed well ordered, but the dishes empty.
It is not, however, only in invention that men overwork
themselves, but in
execution also; and here I have a word
to say to the Pre-Raphaelites specially. They are
work-
ing too hard. There is evidence in failing portions of
their pictures, showing that
they have wrought so long
upon them that their very sight has failed for weariness,
and
that the hand refused any more to obey the heart.
And, besides this, there are certain
qualities of drawing
which they miss from over-carefulness. For, let them be
assured,
there is a great truth lurking in that common de-
sire of men to see things done in what
they call a “mas-
terly,” or “bold,” or
“broad,” manner: a truth oppressed
and abused, like almost every
other in this world, but an
eternal one nevertheless; and whatever mischief may
facility of
execution, and supposing that a picture was as-
suredly all right if only it were done with
broad dashes of
the brush, still the truth remains the same:—that because
it is
not intended that men shall torment or weary them-
selves with any earthly labour, it is
appointed that the
noblest results should only be attainable by a certain ease
and
decision of manipulation. I only wish people under-
stood this much of sculpture, as well as
of painting, and
could see that the finely finished statue is, in ninety-nine
cases out of
a hundred, a far more vulgar work than that
which shows rough signs of the right hand laid
to the
workman's hammer: but at all events, in painting it is
felt by all men, and justly
felt. The freedom of the lines
of nature can only be represented by a similar freedom in
the hand that follows them; there are curves in the flow
of the hair, and in the form of
the features, and in the
muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be
caught but
by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the
pencil. I do not care what example is taken,
be it the
most subtle and careful work of Leonardo himself, 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 do not understand how this kind of power, in
its highest perfection, may
be united with the most severe
rendering of all other orders of truth, and especially of
those with which they themselves have most sympathy,
let them 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
labour. There is one more, however, to be received; and
that
is a warning; for towards the close of it, what with
doing small conventional vignettes
for publishers, making
showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of
places he had
never seen, and touching up the bad en-
day,—engravings utterly destitute of animation, and
which had to
be raised into a specious brilliancy by
scratching them over with white, spotty, lights,
he gra-
dually got inured to many conventionalities, and even falsi-
ties; and, having trusted
for ten or twelve years almost
entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe
mostly in London, and receiving a new sensation only
from the burning of the Houses of
Parliament, he painted
many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether un-
worthy of him.
But he was not thus to close his career.
In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook
another journey into
Switzerland. It was then at least
forty years since he had first seen the Alps; (the
source
of the Arveron, in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which could
not have been painted till
he had seen the thing itself,
bears date 1800,) and the direction of his journey in 1840
marks his fond memory of that earliest one; for, if we
look over the Swiss studies and
drawings executed in his
first period, we shall be struck with his fondness for the
pass
of the St. Gothard; the most elaborate drawing in
the Farnley collection is one of the
Lake of Lucerne from
Fluelen; and, counting the Liber Studiorum subjects,
there are, to my
knowledge, six compositions taken at the
same period from the pass of St. Gothard, and,
probably,
several others are in existence. The valleys of Sallenche
and Chamouni, and Lake
of Geneva, are the only other
Swiss scenes which seem to have made very profound
impressions on him.
He returned in 1841 to Lucerne; walked up Mont
Pilate on foot, crossed the St.
Gothard, and returned by
Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large number of
coloured sketches
on this journey, and realised several of
them on his return. The drawings thus produced
are dif-
ferent from all that had preceded them, and are the first
his Third period.
The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his
mind, while the faculties of
imagination and execution
appeared in renewed strength; all conventionality being
done
away with by the force of the impression which he
had received from the Alps, after his
long separation
from them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness
and simplicity
of thought: most of them by deep serenity,
passing into melancholy; all by a richness of
colour, such
as he had never before conceived. They, and the works
done in following
years, bear the same relation to those of
the rest of his life that the colours of sunset
do to those of
the day; and will be recognised, in a few years more, as
the noblest
landscapes ever yet conceived by human in-
tellect.
Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this * This state of mind appears to have been the only one which Words-
century. Many a century
may pass away before there
rises such another; but what greatness any among us may
be
capable of, will, at least, be best attained by following
in his path;—by
beginning in all quietness and hopeful-
ness to use whatever powers we may possess to
represent
the things around us as we see and feel them; trusting
to the close of life to
give the perfect crown to the course
of its labours, and knowing assuredly that the
determina-
tion of the degree in which watchfulness is to 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 sub-
servient to that of the antiquarian or the man of science,
there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not subservient,
but superior. Every
archæologist, every natural philoso-
pher, knows that there is a peculiar
rigidity of mind
brought on by long devotion to logical and analytical
are utterly hardened by them, and become incapable of
understanding any thing
nobler, or even of feeling the
value of the results to which they lead. But even the
best
men are in a sort injured by them, and pay a definite
price, as in most other matters, for
definite advantages.
They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in tenderness,
elasticity,
and impressibility. The man who has gone,
hammer in hand, over the surface of a romantic
country,
feels no longer, in the mountain ranges he has so labo-
riously explored, the
sublimity or mystery with which
they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with
which
they are adorned in the mind of the passing trav-
eller.
themselves like a dissected model: where another man
would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the precipice,
he sees nothing but the
emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
familiarised already to his imagination as extending
in a
shallow stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district;
where the unlearned
spectator would be touched with
strong emotion by the aspect of the snowy summits which
rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating points
of a metamorphic formation,
with an uncomfortable web of
tan-like fissures radiating, in his imagination, through
their centres.
worth had been able
to discern in men of science; and in disdain of
which, 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 his
works which his true friends would have desired to see blotted
out.
What else has been found fault with as feeble or superfluous, is not so
in the
intense distinctive relief which it gives to his character. But these
lines are
written in mere ignorance of the matter they treat; in mere
want of sympathy with the
men they describe; for, observe, though the
passage is put into the mouth of the
Solitary, it is fully confirmed, and
even rendered more scornful, by the speech which
follows.
man, that in the views which have been opened to him of
natural energies
such as no human mind would have ven-
tured to conceive, and of past states of being, each
in
some new way bearing witness to the unity of purpose
and everlastingly consistent
providence of the Maker of
all things, he has received reward well worthy the sacri-
fice, I
would not for an instant deny; but the sense of the
loss is not less painful to him if his
mind be rightly con-
stituted; and it would be with infinite gratitude that he
would regard
the man, who, retaining in his delineation of
natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of
science so rigid as
to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the
most sternly
critical intellect, should yet invest its fea-
tures again with the sweet veil of their
daily aspect;
should make them dazzling with the splendour of wander-
ing light, and involve
them in the unsearchableness of
stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided anatomy
its visible vitality of operation, clothe naked crags with
soft forests, enrich the
mountain ruins with bright pas-
tures, and lead the thoughts from the monotonous recur-
rence
of the phenomena of the physical world, to the sweet
interests and sorrows of human life
and death.
THE END.