OF TURNERIAN MYSTERY:--SECONDLY, WILFUL.
Sec. 1. In the preceding chapter we were concerned only with the mystery
necessary in all great art. We have yet to inquire into the nature of
that more special love of concealment in which Turner is the leading
representative of modern cloud-worship; causing Dr. Waagen sapiently to
remark that "he" had here succeeded in combining "a crude painted medley
with a general foggy appearance."[32]
As, for defence of his universal indistinctness, my appeal was in the
last chapter to universal fact, so, for defence of this special
indistinctness, my first appeal is in this chapter to special fact. An
English painter justifiably loves fog, because he is born in a foggy
country; as an Italian painter justifiably loves clearness, because he
is born in a comparatively clear country. I have heard a traveller
familiar with the East complain of the effect in a picture of Copley
Fielding's, that "it was such very bad weather." But it ought not to be
bad weather to the English. Our green country depends for its life on
those kindly rains and floating swirls of cloud; we ought, therefore, to
love them and to paint them.
Sec. 2. But there is no need to rest my defence on this narrow English
ground. The fact is, that though the climates of the South and East may
be _comparatively_ clear, they are no more absolutely clear than our own
northern air; and that wherever a landscape-painter is placed, if he
paints faithfully, he will have continually to paint effects of mist.
Intense clearness, whether in the North after or before rain, or in some
moments of twilight in the South, is always, as far as I am acquainted
with natural phenomena, a _notable_ thing. Mist of some sort, or
mirage, or confusion of light, or of cloud, are the general facts; the
distance may vary in different climates at which the effects of mist
begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in all probability it
is meant that we should enjoy them.
Sec. 3. Nor does it seem to me in any wise difficult to understand why they
should be thus appointed for enjoyment. In former parts of this work we
were able to trace a certain delightfulness in every visible feature of
natural things which was typical of any great spiritual truth; surely,
therefore, we need not wonder now, that mist and all its phenomena have
been made delightful to us, since our happiness as thinking beings must
depend on our being content to accept only partial knowledge, even in
those matters which chiefly concern us. If we insist upon perfect
intelligibility and complete declaration in every moral subject, we
shall instantly fall into misery of unbelief. Our whole happiness and
power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and live
in the cloud; content to see it opening here and closing there;
rejoicing to catch, through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of stable
and substantial things; but yet perceiving a nobleness even in the
concealment, and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread where the
untempered light might have scorched us, or the infinite clearness
wearied.
Sec. 4. And I believe that the resentment of this interference of the mist
is one of the forms of proud error which are too easily mistaken for
virtues. To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed
unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and seek knowledge
must always be right. Yet (as in all matters before observed,) wherever
_pride_ has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill
pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good, yet man perished in
seeking knowledge, and moths perished in seeking light; and if we, who
are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful
for us, we shall perish in like manner. But, accepted in humbleness, it
instantly becomes an element of pleasure; and I think that every rightly
constituted mind ought to rejoice, not so much in knowing anything
clearly, as in feeling that there is infinitely more which it cannot
know. None but proud or weak men would mourn over this, for we may
always know more if we choose, by working on; but the pleasure is, I
think, to humble people, in knowing that the journey is endless, the
treasure inexhaustible,--watching the cloud still march before them with
its summitless pillar, and being sure that, to the end of time and to
the length of eternity, the mysteries of its infinity will still open
farther and farther, their dimness being the sign and necessary adjunct
of their inexhaustibleness. I know there are an evil mystery and a
deathful dimness,--the mystery of the great Babylon--the dimness of the
sealed eye and soul; but do not let us confuse these with the glorious
mystery of the things which the angels "desire to look into," or with
the dimness which, even before the clear eye and open soul, still rests
on sealed pages of the eternal volume.
Sec. 5. And going down from this great truth to the lower truths which are
types of it in smaller matters, we shall find, that as soon as people
try honestly to see all they can of anything, they come to a point where
a noble dimness begins. They see more than others; but the consequence
of their seeing more is, that they feel they cannot see all; and the
more intense their perception, the more the crowd of things which they
_partly_ see will multiply upon them; and their delight may at last
principally consist in dwelling on this cloudy part of their prospect,
somewhat casting away or aside what to them has become comparatively
common, but is perhaps the sum and substance of all that other people
see in the thing, for the utmost subtleties and shadows and glancings of
it cannot be caught but by the most practised vision. And as a delicate
ear rejoices in the slighter and more modulated passages of sound which
to a blunt ear are utterly monotonous in their quietness, or
unintelligible in their complication, so, when the eye is exquisitely
keen and clear, it is fain to rest on grey films of shade, and wandering
rays of light, and intricacies of tender form, passing over hastily, as
unworthy or commonplace, what to a less educated sense appears the whole
of the subject.[33] In painting, this progress of the eye is marked
always by one consistent sign--its sensibility, namely, to effects of
_gradation_ in light and color, and habit of looking for them, rather
even than for the signs of the essence of the subject. It will, indeed,
see more of that essence than is seen by other eyes; and its choice of
the points to be seized upon will be always regulated by that special
sympathy which we have above examined as the motive of the Turnerian
picturesque; but yet, the more it is cultivated, the more of light and
color it will perceive, the less of substance.
[Illustration: J. Ruskin. 1 2 3 4
26. The Law of Evanescence.]
Sec. 6. Thus, when the eye is quite uncultivated, it sees that a man is a
man, and a face is a face, but has no idea what shadows or lights fall
upon the form or features. Cultivate it to some degree of artistic
power, and it will then see shadows distinctly, but only the more
vigorous of them. Cultivate it still farther, and it will see light
within light, and shadow within shadow, and will continually refuse to
rest in what it had already discovered, that it may pursue what is more
removed and more subtle, until at last it comes to give its chief
attention and display its chief power on gradations which to an
untrained faculty are partly matters of indifference, and partly
imperceptible. That these subtle gradations have indeed become matters
of primal importance to it, may be ascertained by observing that they
are the things it will last part with, as the object retires into
distance; and that, though this distance may become so great as to
render the real nature of the object quite undiscernible, the gradations
of light upon it will not be lost.
Sec. 7. For instance, Fig. 1, on the opposite page, Plate 26, is a
tolerably faithful rendering of the look of a wall tower of a Swiss town
as it would be seen within some hundred yards of it. Fig. 2 is (as
nearly as I can render it) a facsimile of Turner's actual drawing of
this tower, at a presumed distance of about half a mile. It has far less
of intelligible delineation, either of windows, cornices, or tiles; but
intense care has still been given to get the pearly roundness of the
side, and the exact relations of all the tones of shade. And now, if
Turner wants to remove the tower still farther back, he will gradually
let the windows and stones all disappear together, before he will quit
his shadows and delicately centralized rays. At Fig. 3 the tower is
nearly gone, but the pearly roundness of it and principal lights of it
are there still. At Fig. 4 (Turner's ultimate condition in distance)
the essence of the thing is quite unintelligible; we cannot answer for
its being a tower at all. But the gradations of light are still there,
and as much pains have been taken to get them as in any of the other
instances. A vulgar artist would have kept something of the form of the
tower, expressing it by a few touches; and people would call it a clever
drawing. Turner lets the tower melt into air, but still he works half an
hour or so over those delicate last gradations, which perhaps not many
people in England besides himself can fully see, as not many people can
understand the final work of a great mathematician. I assume, of course,
in this example, that the tower, as it grows less and less distinct,
becomes part of the subject of a _larger_ picture. Fig. 1 represents
nearly what Turner's treatment of it would be if it were the principal
subject of a vignette; and Fig. 4 his treatment of it as an object in
the extreme distance of a large oil picture. If at the same supposed
distance it entered into a smaller drawing, so as to be much smaller in
size, he might get the gradations with less trouble, sometimes even by a
single sweep of the brush; but _some_ gradation would assuredly be
retained, though the tower were diminished to the height of one of the
long letters of this type.
Sec. 8. "But is Turner right in doing this?"
Yes. The truth is indeed so. If you watch any object as it fades in
distance, it will lose gradually its force, its intelligibility, its
anatomy, its whole comprehensible being; but it will _never_ lose its
gradation of light. Up to the last moment, what light is seen on it,
feebly glimmering and narrowed almost to a point or a line, is still
full of change. One part is brighter than another, and brighter with as
lovely and tender increase as it was when nearest to us; and at last,
though a white house ten miles away will be seen only as a small square
spot of light, its windows, doors, or roof, being as utterly invisible
as if they were not in existence, the gradation of its light will not be
lost; one part of the spot will be seen to be brighter than another.
Sec. 9. Is there not a deep meaning in this? We, in our daily looking at
the thing, think that its own make is the most important part of it.
Windows and porticos, eaves and cornices, how interesting and how useful
are they! Surely, the chief importance of the thing is in these. No; not
in these; but in the play of the light of heaven upon it. There is a
place and time when all those windows and porticos will be lost sight
of; when the only question becomes, "what light had it?" How much of
heaven was looking upon it? What were the broad relations of it, in
light and darkness, to the sky and earth, and all things around it? It
might have strange humors and ways of its own--many a rent in its wall,
and many a roughness on its roof; or it might have many attractivenesses
and noblenesses of its own--fair mouldings and gay ornaments; but the
time comes when all these are vain, and when the slight, wandering
warmth of heaven's sunshine which the building itself felt not, and not
one eye in a thousand saw, becomes all in all. I leave the reader to
follow out the analogies of this.
Sec. 10. "Well, but," it is still objected, "if this be so, why is it
necessary to insist, as you do always, upon the most minute and careful
renderings of form?"
Because, though these gradations of light are indeed, as an object dies
in distance, the only things it can retain, yet as it lives its active
life near us, those very gradations can only be seen properly by the
effect they have on its character. You can only show how the light
affects the object, by knowing thoroughly what the object is; and noble
mystery differs from ignoble, in being a veil thrown between us and
something definite, known, and substantial; but the ignoble mystery is a
veil cast before chaos, the studious concealment of Nothing.
Sec. 11. There is even a way in which the very definiteness of Turner's
knowledge adds to the mystery of his pictures. In the course of the
first volume I had several times occasion to insist on the singular
importance of cast shadows, and the chances of their sometimes gaining
supremacy in visibility over even the things that cast them. Now a cast
shadow is a much more curious thing than we usually suppose. The strange
shapes it gets into--the manner in which it stumbles over everything
that comes in its way, and frets itself into all manner of fantastic
schism, taking neither the shape of the thing that casts it, nor of that
it is cast upon, but an extraordinary, stretched, flattened, fractured,
ill-jointed anatomy of its own--cannot be imagined until one is actually
engaged in shadow-hunting. If any of these wayward umbrae are faithfully
remembered and set down by the painter, they nearly always have an
unaccountable look, quite different from anything one would have
invented or philosophically conjectured for a shadow; and it constantly
happens, in Turner's distances, that such strange pieces of broken
shade, accurately remembered, or accurately invented, as the case may
be, cause a condition of unintelligibility, quaint and embarrassing
almost in exact proportion to the amount of truth it contains.
Sec. 12. I believe the reader must now sufficiently perceive that the right
of being obscure is not one to be lightly claimed; it can only be
founded on long effort to be intelligible, and on the present power of
_being_ intelligible to the exact degree which the nature of the thing
admits. Nor shall we, I hope, any more have difficulty in understanding
how the noble mystery and the ignoble, though direct opposites, are yet
continually mistaken for each other--the last aping the first; and the
most wretched artists taking pride in work which is simply slurred,
slovenly, ignorant, empty, and insolent, as if it were nobly mysterious
(just as a drunkard who cannot articulate supposes himself oracular);
whereas the noble art-mystery, as all noble language-mystery, is reached
only by intense labor. Striving to speak with uttermost truth of
expression, weighing word against word, and wasting none, the great
speaker, or writer, toils first into perfect intelligibleness, then, as
he reaches to higher subject, and still more concentrated and wonderful
utterance, he becomes ambiguous--as Dante is ambiguous,--half a dozen
different meanings lightening out in separate rays from every word, and,
here and there, giving rise to much contention of critics as to what the
intended meaning actually was. But it is no drunkard's babble for all
that, and the men who think it so, at the third hour of the day, do not
highly honor _themselves_ in the thought.
Sec. 13. And now observe how perfectly the conclusions arrived at here
consist with those of the third chapter, and how easily we may
understand the meaning of that vast weight of authority which we found
at first ranged against the clouds, and strong in arms on the side of
intelligibility. Nearly all great men must, for the reasons above given,
be intelligible. Even, if they are to be the greatest, still they must
struggle through intelligibility to obscurity; if of the second class,
then the best thing they can do, all their lives through, is to be
intelligible. Therefore the enormous majority of all good and true men
will be _clear_ men; and the drunkards, sophists, and sensualists will,
for the most part, sink back into the fog-bank, and remain wrapt in
darkness, unintelligibility, and futility. Yet, here and there, once in
a couple of centuries, one man will rise past clearness, and become dark
with excess of light.
Sec. 14. "Well, then, you mean to say that the tendency of this age to
general cloudiness, as opposed to the old religious clearness of
painting, is one of degradation; but that Turner is this one man who has
risen _past_ clearness?"
Yes. With some modifications of the saying, I mean that; but those
modifications will take us a little time to express accurately.
For, first, it will not do to condemn every minor painter utterly, the
moment we see he is foggy. Copley Fielding, for instance, was a minor
painter; but his love of obscurity in rain clouds, and dew-mist on
downs, was genuine love, full of sweetness and happy aspiration; and, in
this way, a little of the light of the higher mystery is often caught by
the simplest men when they keep their hearts open.
Sec. 15. Neither will it be right to set down every painter for a great
man, the moment we find he is clear; for there is a hard and vulgar
intelligibility of nothingness, just as there is an ambiguity of
nothingness. And as often, in conversation, a man who speaks but badly
and indistinctly has, nevertheless, got much to say; and a man who
speaks boldly and plainly may yet say what is little worth hearing; so,
in painting, there are men who can express themselves but blunderingly,
and yet have much in them to express; and there are others who talk with
great precision, whose works are yet very impertinent and untrustworthy
assertions. Sir Joshua Reynolds is full of fogginess and shortcomings as
compared with either of the Caraccis; but yet one Sir Joshua is worth
all the Caraccis in Europe; and so, in our modern water-color societies,
there are many men who define clearly enough, all whose works, put
together, are not worth a careless blot by Cox or Barrett.
Sec. 16. Let me give one illustration more, which will be also of some
historical usefulness in marking the relations of the clear and obscure
schools.
We have seen, in our investigation of Greek landscape, Homer's intense
love of the aspen poplar. For once, in honor of Homer and the Greeks, I
will take an aspen for the subject of comparison, and glance at the
different modes in which it would have been, or was, represented from
the earliest to the present stage of landscape art.
The earliest manner which comes within our field of examination is that
of the thirteenth century. Fig. 1. Plate 27 is an aspen out of the wood
in which Absalom is slain, from a Psalter in my own possession,
executed, certainly, after the year 1250, and before 1272; the other
trees in the wood being, first, of course, the oak in which Absalom is
caught, and a sycamore. All these trees are somewhat more conventional
than is even usual at the period; though, for this reason, the more
characteristic as examples of earliest work. There is no great botanical
accuracy until some forty years later (at least in painting); so that I
cannot be quite sure, the leaf not being flat enough at the base, that
this tree is meant for an aspen: but it is so in all probability; and,
whether it be or not, serves well enough to mark the definiteness and
symmetry of the old art,--a symmetry which, be it always observed, is
NEVER formal or unbroken. This tree, though it looks formal enough,
branches unequally at the top of the stem. But the lowest figure in
Plate 7, Vol. III. is a better example from the MS. Sloane, 1975, Brit.
Mus. Every plant in that herbarium is drawn with some approach to
accuracy, in leaf, root, and flower; while yet all are subjected to the
sternest conventional arrangement; colored in almost any way that
pleases the draughtsman, and set on quaint grounds of barred color, like
bearings on shields;[34] one side of the plant always balancing the
other, but never without some transgression or escape from the law of
likeness, as in the heads of the cyclamen flower, and several other
parts of this design. It might seem at first, that the root was more
carelessly drawn than the rest, and uglier in color; but this is in pure
conscientiousness. The workman knew that a root was ugly and
earthy; he would not make it ornamental and delicate. He would sacrifice
his pleasant colors and graceful lines at once for the radical fact; and
rather spoil his page than flatter a fibre.
[Illustration:
1. Ancient, or Giottesque. 4. Modern or Blottesque.
2. Purist. 5. Constablesque.
3. Turneresque. 6. Hardingesque.
27. The Aspen, under Idealization.]
[Illustration: 28. Aspen, Unidealized.]
Sec. 17. Here, then, we have the first mediaeval condition of art,
consisting in a fenced, but varied, symmetry; a perfect definiteness;
and a love of nature, more or less interfered with by conventionalism
and imperfect knowledge. Fig. 2 in Plate 27 represents the next
condition of mediaeval art, in which the effort at imitation is
contending with the conventional type. This aspen is from the MS.
Cotton, Augustus, A. 5, from which I have already taken an example of
rocks to compare with Leonardo's. There can be no doubt here about the
species of the tree intended, as throughout the MS. its illuminator has
carefully distinguished the oak, the willow, and the aspen; and this
example, though so small (it is engraved of the actual size), is very
characteristic of the aspen ramification; and in one point, of
ramification in general, namely, the division of the tree into two
masses, each branching outwards, not across each other. Whenever a tree
divides at first into two or three nearly equal main branches, the
secondary branches always spring from the outside of the divided ones,
just as, when a tree grows under a rock or wall, it shoots away from it,
never towards it. The beautiful results of this arrangement we shall
trace in the next volume; meantime, in the next Plate (28) I have drawn
the main[35] ramifications of a real aspen, growing freely, but in a
sheltered place, as far as may be necessary to illustrate the point in
question.
Sec. 18. This example, Fig. 2 in Plate 27 is sufficiently characteristic of
the purist mediaeval landscape, though there is somewhat more leaning to
naturalism than is usual at the period. The next example, Fig. 3, is
from Turner's vignette of St. Anne's Hill (Rogers's Poems, p. 214).
Turner almost always groups his trees, so that I have had difficulty in
finding one on a small scale and isolated, which would be characteristic
of him; nor is this one completely so, for I had no access to the
original vignette, it being, I believe, among the drawings that have
been kept from the public, now these four years, because the Chancery
lawyers do not choose to determine the meaning of Turner's perfectly
intelligible, though informal, will; and Mr. Goodall's engraving, which
I have copied, though right in many respects, is not representative of
the dotted touch by which Turner expressed the aspen foliage. I have
not, however, ventured to alter it, except only by adding the
extremities where they were hidden in the vignette by the trelliswork
above.
The principal difference between the Turnerian aspen and the purist
aspen is, it will be seen, in the expression of lightness and confusion
of foliage, and roundness of the tree as a mass; while the purist tree,
like the thirteenth century one, is still flat. All attempt at the
expression of individual leaves is now gone, the tree being too far off
to justify their delineation; but the direction of the light, and its
gradations, are carefully studied.
Sec. 19. Fig. 6 is a tolerable facsimile[36] of a little chalk sketch of
Harding's; quite inimitable in the quantity of life and truth obtained
by about a quarter of a minute's work; but beginning to show the faulty
vagueness and carelessness of modernism. The stems, though beautifully
free, are not thoroughly drawn or rounded; and in the mass of the tree,
though well formed, the tremulousness and transparency of leafage are
lost. Nor is it possible, by Harding's manner of drawing, to express
such ultimate truths; his execution, which, _in its way_, no one can at
all equal (the best chalk drawing of Calame and other foreign masters
being quite childish and feeble in comparison), is yet sternly limited
in its reach, being originally based on the assumption that nothing is
to be delicately drawn, and that the method is only good which insures
specious incompletion.
It will be observed, also, that there is a leaning first to one side,
then to the other, in Harding's aspen, which marks the wild
picturesqueness of modernism as opposed to the quiet but stiff dignity
of the purist (Fig. 2); Turner occupying exactly the intermediate place.
The next example (Fig. 5) is an aspen of Constable's, on the left in
the frontispiece to Mr. Leslie's life of him. Here we have arrived at
the point of total worthlessness, the tree being as flat as the old
purist one, but, besides, wholly false in ramification, idle, and
undefined in every respect; it being, however, just possible still to
discern what the tree is meant for, and therefore, the type of the worst
modernism not being completely established.
Sec. 20. Fig. 4 establishes this type, being the ordinary condition of tree
treatment in our blotted water-color drawings; the nature of the tree
being entirely lost sight of, and no accurate knowledge, of any kind,
possessed or communicated.
Thus, from the extreme of definiteness and light, in the thirteenth
century (the middle of the Dark Ages!), we pass to the extreme of
uncertainty and darkness, in the middle of the nineteenth century.
As, however, the definite mediaeval work has some faults, so the
indefinite modern work has some virtues, its very uncertainty enabling
it to appeal pleasantly to the imagination (though in an inky manner, as
described above, Vol. III. Chap. x. Sec. 10), and sometimes securing
qualities of color which could no otherwise be obtained. It ought,
however, if we would determine its true standing, to be compared, not
with the somewhat forced and narrow decision of the thirteenth century,
but with the perfect and well-informed decision of Albert Durer and his
fellow-workmen. For the proper representation of these there was no room
in this plate; so, in Plate 25, above, on each side of the
daguerreotyped towers of Fribourg, I have given, Fig. 1, a Dureresque,
and Fig. 3, a Blottesque, version of the intermediate wall. The latter
version may, perhaps, be felt to have some pleasantness in its apparent
ease; and it has a practical advantage, in its capability of being
executed in a quarter of a minute, while the Dureresque statement
_cannot_ be made in less than a quarter of an hour. But the latter
embraces not only as much as is worth the extra time, but even an
infinite of contents, beyond and above the other, for the other is in no
single place clear in its assertion of _any_thing; whereas the
Dureresque work, asserting clearly many most interesting facts about the
grass on the ledges, the bricks of the windows, and the growth of the
foliage, is forever a useful and trustworthy record; the other forever
an empty dream. If it is a beautiful dream, full of lovely color and
good composition, we will not quarrel with it; but it can never be so,
unless it is founded first on the Dureresque knowledge, and suggestive
of it, through all its own mystery or incompletion. So that by all
students the Dureresque is the manner to be first adopted, and calmly
continued as long as possible; and if their inventive instincts do not,
in after life, _force_ them to swifter or more cloudy execution,--if at
any time it becomes a matter of doubt with them how far to surrender
their gift of accuracy,--let them be assured that it is best always to
err on the side of clearness; to live in the illumination of the
thirteenth century rather than the mysticism of the nineteenth, and vow
themselves to the cloister rather than to lose themselves in the desert.
Sec. 21. I am afraid the reader must be tired of this matter; and yet there
is one question more which I must for a moment touch upon, in
conclusion, namely, the mystery of _clearness itself_. In an Italian
twilight, when, sixty or eighty miles away, the ridge of the Western
Alps rises in its dark and serrated blue against the crystalline
vermilion, there is still unsearchableness, but an unsearchableness
without cloud or concealment,--an infinite unknown, but no sense of any
veil or interference between us and it: we are separated from it not by
any anger or storm, not by any vain and fading vapor, but only by the
deep infinity of the thing itself. I find that the great religious
painters rejoiced in that kind of unknowableness, and in that only; and
I feel that even if they had had all the power to do so, still they
would not have put rosy mists and blue shadows behind their sacred
figures, but only the far-away sky and cloudless mountains. Probably the
right conclusion is that the clear and cloudy mysteries are alike noble;
but that the beauty of the wreaths of frost mist, folded over banks of
greensward deep in dew, and of the purple clouds of evening, and the
wreaths of fitful vapor gliding through groves of pine, and irised
around the pillars of waterfalls, is more or less typical of the kind of
joy which we should take in the imperfect knowledge granted to the
earthly life, while the serene and cloudless mysteries set forth that
belonging to the redeemed life. But of one thing I am well assured, that
so far as the clouds are regarded, not as concealing the truth of other
things, but as themselves true and separate creations, they are not
usually beheld by us with enough honor; we have too great veneration for
cloudlessness. My reasons for thinking this I will give in the next
chapter; here we have, I believe, examined as far as necessary, the
general principles on which Turner worked, and justified his adoption of
them so far as they contradicted preceding practice.
It remains for us to trace, with more observant patience, the ground
which was marked out in the first volume; and, whereas in that volume we
hastily compared the truth of Turner with that of preceding
landscapists, we shall now, as closely as possible, examine the range of
what he himself has done and felt, and the way in which it is likely to
influence the future acts and thoughts of men.
Sec. 22. And I shall attempt to do this, first, by examining what the real
effect of the things painted--clouds, or mountains, or whatever else
they may be--is, or ought to be, in general, on men's minds, showing the
grounds of their beauty or impressiveness as best I can; and then
examining how far Turner seems to have understood these reasons of
beauty, and how far his work interprets, or can take the place of
nature. But in doing this, I shall, for the sake of convenience, alter
the arrangement which I followed in the first volume; and instead of
examining the sky first, treat of it last; because, in many
illustrations which I must give of other things, I shall have to
introduce pieces of sky background which will all be useful for
reference when I can turn back to them from the end of the book, but
which I could not refer to in advance without anticipating all my other
illustrations. Nevertheless, some points which I have to note respecting
the meaning of the sky are so intimately connected with the subjects we
have just been examining, that I cannot properly defer their
consideration to another place; and I shall state them, therefore, in
the next chapter, afterwards proceeding, in the order I adopted in the
first volume, to examine the beauty of mountains, water, and vegetation.
FOOTNOTES
[32] Art and Artists in England, vol. ii., p. 151. The other
characteristics which Dr. Waagen discovers in Turner are, "such a
looseness of treatment, such a total want of truth, as I never
before met with."
[33] And yet, all these intricacies will produce for it another
whole; as simple and natural as the child's first conception of the
thing; only more comprehensive. See above, Chap. III., Sec. 21.
[34] Compare Vol. III. Chap. XIV. Sec. 13. Touching the exact degree in
which ignorance or incapacity is mingled with wilful conventionalism
in this drawing, we shall inquire in the chapters on Vegetation.
[35] Only the _main_ lines: the outer sprays have had no pains taken
with them, as I am going to put some leaves on them in next volume.
[36] It is quite impossible to facsimile good free work. Both Turner
and Harding suffer grievously in this plate.