brought out perfectly. You have the white of foaming water, of
buildings and clouds, brought out brilliantly from a white ground; and
though part of the subject is in deep shadow the eye at once catches
the one black point admitted in front.
74. Well, the first reason that I gave you these Loire drawings was
this of their infallible decision; the second was their extreme
modesty in color. They are, beyond all other works that I know
existing, dependent for their effect on low, subdued tones; their
favorite choice in time of day being either dawn or twilight, and even
their brightest sunsets produced chiefly out of gray paper. This last,
the loveliest of all, gives the warmth of a summer twilight with a
tinge of color on the gray paper so slight that it may be a question
with some of you whether any is there. And I must beg you to observe,
and receive as a rule without any exception, that whether color be gay
or sad the value of it depends never on violence, but always on
subtlety. It may be that a great colorist will use his utmost force of
color, as a singer his full power of voice; but, loud or low, the
virtue is in both cases always in refinement, never in loudness. The
west window of Chartres is bedropped with crimson deeper than blood;
but it is as soft as it is deep, and as quiet as the light of dawn.
75. I say, "whether color be gay or sad." It must, remember, be one or
the other. You know I told you that the pure Gothic school of color
was entirety cheerful; that, as applied to landscape, it assumes that
all nature is lovely, and may be clearly seen; that destruction and
decay are accidents of our present state, never to be thought of
seriously, and, above all things, never to be painted; but that
whatever is orderly, healthy, radiant, fruitful and beautiful, is to
be loved with all our hearts and painted with all our skill.
76. I told you also that no complete system of art for either natural
history or landscape could be formed on this system; that the wrath of
a wild beast, and the tossing of a mountain torrent are equally
impossible to a painter of the purist school; that in higher fields of
thought increasing knowledge means increasing sorrow, and every art
which has complete sympathy with humanity must be chastened by the
sight and oppressed by the memory of pain. But there is no reason why
your system of study should be a complete one, if it be right and
profitable though incomplete. If you can find it in your hearts to
follow out only the Gothic thoughts of landscape, I deeply wish you
would, and for many reasons.
77. First, it has never yet received due development; for at the
moment when artistic skill and knowledge of effect became sufficient
to complete its purposes, the Reformation destroyed the faith in which
they might have been accomplished; for to the whole body of powerful
draughtsmen the Reformation meant the Greek school and the shadow of
death. So that of exquisitely developed Gothic landscape you may count
the examples on the fingers of your hand: Van Eyck's "Adoration of the
Lamb" at Bruges; another little Van Eyck in the Louvre; the John
Bellini lately presented to the National Gallery;[12] another John
Bellini in Rome: and the "St. George" of Carpaccio at Venice, are all
that I can name myself of great works. But there exist some exquisite,
though feebler, designs in missal painting; of which, in England, the
landscape and flowers in the Psalter of Henry the Sixth will serve you
for a sufficient type; the landscape in the Grimani missal at Venice
being monumentally typical and perfect.
[Footnote 12: No. 812. "Landscape, with the Death of St. Peter
Martyr."]
78. Now for your own practice in this, having first acquired the skill
of exquisite delineation and laying of pure color, day by day you must
draw some lovely natural form or flower or animal without
obscurity--as in missal painting; choosing for study, in natural
scenes, only what is beautiful and strong in life.
79. I fully anticipated, at the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement, that they would have carried forward this method of work;
but they broke themselves to pieces by pursuing dramatic sensation
instead of beauty. So that to this day all the loveliest things in the
world remain unpainted; and although we have occasionally spasmodic
efforts and fits of enthusiasm, and green meadows and apple-blossom to
spare, it yet remains a fact that not in all this England, and still
less in France, have you a painter who has been able nobly to paint
so much as a hedge of wild roses or a forest glade full of anemones or
wood-sorrel.
80. One reason of this has been the idea that such work was easy, on
the part of the young men who attempted it, and the total vulgarity
and want of education in the great body of abler artists, rendering
them insensitive to qualities of fine delineation; the universal law
for them being that they can draw a pig, but not a Venus. For
instance, two landscape-painters of much reputation in England, and
one of them in France also--David Cox and John Constable, represent a
form of blunt and untrained faculty which in being very frank and
simple, apparently powerful, and needing no thought, intelligence or
trouble whatever to observe, and being wholly disorderly, slovenly and
licentious, and therein meeting with instant sympathy from the
disorderly public mind now resentful of every trammel and ignorant of
every law--these two men, I say, represent in their intensity the
qualities adverse to all accurate science or skill in landscape art;
their work being the mere blundering of clever peasants, and deserving
no name whatever in any school of true practice, but consummately
mischievous--first, in its easy satisfaction of the painter's own
self-complacencies, and then in the pretense of ability which blinds
the public to all the virtue of patience and to all the difficulty of
precision. There is more real relation to the great schools of art,
more fellowship with Bellini and Titian, in the humblest painter of
letters on village signboards than in men like these.
Do not, therefore, think that the Gothic school is an easy one. You
might more easily fill a house with pictures like Constable's from
garret to cellar, than imitate one cluster of leaves by Van Eyck or
Giotto; and among all the efforts that have been made to paint our
common wild-flowers, I have only once--and that in this very year,
just in time to show it to you--seen the thing done rightly.
81. But now observe: These flowers, beautiful as they are, are not of
the Gothic school. The law of that school is that everything shall be
seen clearly, or at least, only in such mist or faintness as shall be
delightful; and I have no doubt that the best introduction to it would
be the elementary practice of painting every study on a golden ground.
This at once compels you to understand that the work is to be
imaginative and decorative; that it represents beautiful things in the
clearest way, but not under existing conditions; and that, in fact,
you are producing jeweler's work, rather than pictures. Then the
qualities of grace in design become paramount to every other; and you
may afterwards substitute clear sky for the golden background without
danger of loss or sacrifice of system: clear sky of golden light, or
deep and full blue, for the full blue of Titian is just as much a
piece of conventional enameled background as if it were a plate of
gold; that depth of blue in relation to foreground objects being
wholly impossible.
82. There is another immense advantage in this Byzantine and Gothic
abstraction of decisive form, when it is joined with a faithful desire
of whatever truth can be expressed on narrow conditions. It makes us
observe the vital points in which character consists, and educates the
eye and mind in the habit of fastening and limiting themselves to
essentials. In complete drawing, one is continually liable to be led
aside from the main points by picturesque accidents of light and
shade; in Gothic drawing you must get the character, if at all, by a
keenness of analysis which must be in constant exercise.
83. And here I must beg of you very earnestly, once for all, to clear
your minds of any misapprehension of the nature of Gothic art, as if
it implied error and weakness, instead of severity. That a style is
restrained or severe does not mean that it is also erroneous. Much
mischief has been done--endless misapprehension induced in this
matter--by the blundering religious painters of Germany, who have
become examples of the opposite error from our English painters of the
Constable group. Our uneducated men work too bluntly to be ever in the
right; but the Germans draw finely and resolutely wrong. Here is a
"Riposo" of Overbeck's for instance, which the painter imagined to be
elevated in style because he had drawn it without light and shade, and
with absolute decision: and so far, indeed, it is Gothic enough; but
it is separated everlastingly from Gothic and from all other living
work, because the painter was too vain to look at anything he had to
paint, and drew every mass of his drapery in lines that were as
impossible as they were stiff, and stretched out the limbs of his
Madonna in actions as unlikely as they are uncomfortable.
In all early Gothic art, indeed, you will find failure of this kind,
especially distortion and rigidity, which are in many respects
painfully to be compared with the splendid repose of classic art. But
the distortion is not Gothic; the intensity, the abstraction, the
force of character are, and the beauty of color.
84. Here is a very imperfect, but illustrative border of flowers and
animals on a golden ground. The large letter contains, indeed,
entirely feeble and ill-drawn figures: that is merely childish and
failing work of an inferior hand; it is not characteristic of Gothic,
or any other school. But this peacock, being drawn with intense
delight in blue, on gold, and getting character of peacock in the
general sharp outline, instead of--as Rubens' peacocks--in black
shadow, is distinctively Gothic of fine style.
85. I wish you therefore to begin your study of natural history and
landscape by discerning the simple outlines and the pleasant colors of
things; and to rest in them as long as you can. But, observe, you can
only do this on one condition--that of striving also to create, in
reality, the beauty which you seek in imagination. It will be wholly
impossible for you to retain the tranquillity of temper and felicity
of faith necessary for noble purist painting, unless you are actively
engaged in promoting the felicity and peace of practical life. None of
this bright Gothic art was ever done but either by faith in the
attainableness of felicity in heaven, or under conditions of real
order and delicate loveliness on the earth.
86. As long as I can possibly keep you among them, there you shall
stay--among the almond and apple blossom. But if you go on into the
veracities of the school of Clay, you will find there is something at
the roots of almond and apple trees, which is--This. You must look at
him in the face--fight him--conquer him with what scathe you may: you
need not think to keep out of the way of him. There is Turner's
Dragon; there is Michael Angelo's; there, a very little one of
Carpaccio's. Every soul of them had to understand the creature, and
very earnestly.
87. Not that Michael Angelo understands his dragon as the others do.
He was not enough a colorist either to catch the points of the
creature's aspect, or to feel the same hatred of them; but I confess
myself always amazed in looking at Michael Angelo's work here or
elsewhere, at his total carelessness of anatomical character except
only in the human body. It is very easy to round a dragon's neck, if
the only idea you have of it is that it is virtually no more than a
coiled sausage; and, besides, anybody can round anything if you have
full scale from white high light to black shadow.
88. But look here at Carpaccio, even in my copy. The colorist says,
"First of all, as my delicious paroquet was ruby, so this nasty viper
shall be black"; and then is the question, "Can I round him off, even
though he is black, and make him slimy, and yet springy, and close
down--clotted like a pool of black blood on the earth--all the same?"
Look at him beside Michael Angelo's, and then tell me the Venetians
can't draw! And also, Carpaccio does it with a touch, with one sweep
of his brush; three minutes at the most allowed for all the beast;
while Michael Angelo has been haggling at this dragon's neck for an
hour.
89. Then note also in Turner's that clinging to the earth--the
specialty of him--_il gran nemico_, "the great enemy," Plutus. His
claws are like the Clefts of the Rock; his shoulders like its
pinnacles; his belly deep into its every fissure--glued down--loaded
down; his bat's wings cannot lift him, they are rudimentary wings
only.
90. Before I tell you what he means himself, you must know what all
this smoke about him means.
Nothing will be more precious to you, I think, in the practical study
of art, than the conviction, which will force itself on you more and
more every hour, of the way all things are bound together, little and
great, in spirit and in matter. So that if you get once the right clue
to any group of them, it will grasp the simplest, yet reach to the
highest truths. You know I have just been telling you how this school
of materialism and clay involved itself at last in cloud and fire.
Now, down to the least detail of method and subject, that will hold.
91. Here is a perfect type, though not a complex one, of Gothic
landscape; the background gold, the trees drawn leaf by leaf, and full
green in color--no effect of light. Here is an equally typical
Greek-school landscape, by Wilson--lost wholly in golden mist; the
trees so slightly drawn that you don't know if they are trees or
towers, and no care for color whatever; perfectly deceptive and
marvelous effect of sunshine through the mist--"Apollo and the
Python." Now here is Raphael, exactly between the two--trees still
drawn leaf by leaf, wholly formal; but beautiful mist coming gradually
into the distance. Well, then, last, here is Turner's; Greek-school of
the highest class; and you define his art, absolutely, as first the
displaying intensely, and with the sternest intellect, of natural form
as it is, and then the envelopment of it with cloud and fire. Only,
there are two sorts of cloud and fire. He knows them both. There's
one, and there's another--the "Dudley" and the "Flint." That's what
the cloud and flame of the dragon mean: now, let me show you what the
dragon means himself.
92. I go back to another perfect landscape of the living Gothic
school. It is only a pencil outline, by Edward Burne-Jones, in
illustration of the story of Psyche; it is the introduction of Psyche,
after all her troubles, into heaven.
Now in this of Burne-Jones, the landscape is clearly full of light
everywhere, color or glass light: that is, the outline is prepared
for modification of color only. Every plant in the grass is set
formally, grows perfectly, and may be realized completely. Exquisite
order, and universal, with eternal life and light, this is the faith
and effort of the schools of Crystal; and you may describe and
complete their work quite literally by taking any verses of Chaucer in
his tender mood, and observing how he insists on the clearness and
brightness first, and then on the order. Thus, in Chaucer's "Dream":
"Within an yle me thought I was,
Where wall and yate was all of glasse,
And so was closed round about
That leavelesse none come in ne out,
Uncouth and straunge to beholde,
For every yate of fine golde
A thousand fanes, aie turning,
Entuned had, and briddes singing
Divers, and on each fane a paire
With open mouth again here;
And of a sute were all the toures
Subtily corven after floures,
Of uncouth colors during aye
That never been none seene in May."
93. Next to this drawing of Psyche I place two of Turner's most
beautiful classical landscapes. At once you are out of the open
daylight, either in sunshine admitted partially through trembling
leaves, or in the last rays of its setting, scarcely any more warm on
the darkness of the ilex wood. In both, the vegetation, though
beautiful, is absolutely wild and uncared for, as it seems, either by
human or by higher powers, which, having appointed for it the laws of
its being, leave it to spring into such beauty as is consistent with
disease and alternate with decay.
[Illustration: ÆSACUS AND HESPERIE.
From the painting by Turner.]
In the purest landscape, the _human_ subject is the immortality of the
soul by the faithfulness of love: in both the Turner landscapes it is
the death of the body by the impatience and error of love. The one is
the first glimpse of Hesperia to Æsacus:[13]
"Aspicit Hesperien patria Cebrenida ripa,
Injectos humeris siccantem sole capillos:"
in a few moments to lose her forever. The other is a mythological
subject of deeper meaning, the death of Procris.
[Footnote 13: Ovid, "Metamorphoses," XI. 769.]
94. I just now referred to the landscape by John Bellini in the
National Gallery as one of the six best existing of the purist school,
being wholly felicitous and enjoyable. In the foreground of it indeed
is the martyrdom of Peter Martyr; but John Bellini looks upon that as
an entirely cheerful and pleasing incident; it does not disturb or
even surprise him, much less displease in the slightest degree.
Now, the next best landscape[14] to this, in the National Gallery, is
a Florentine one on the edge of transition to the Greek feeling; and
in that the distance is still beautiful, but misty, not clear; the
flowers are still beautiful, but--intentionally--of the color of
blood; and in the foreground lies the dead body of Procris, which
disturbs the poor painter greatly; and he has expressed his disturbed
mind about it in the figure of a poor little brown--nearly
black--Faun, or perhaps the god Faunus himself, who is much puzzled by
the death of Procris, and stoops over her, thinking it a woeful thing
to find her pretty body lying there breathless, and all spotted with
blood on the breast.
[Footnote 14: (Of the Purist school.)]
95. You remember I told you how the earthly power that is necessary in
art was shown by the flight of Dædalus to the [Greek: herpeton] Minos.
Look for yourselves at the story of Procris as related to Minos in the
fifteenth chapter of the third book of Apollodorus; and you will see
why it is a Faun who is put to wonder at her, she having escaped by
artifice from the Bestial power of Minos. Yet she is wholly an
earth-nymph, and the son of Aurora must not only leave her, but
himself slay her; the myth of Semele desiring to see Zeus, and of
Apollo and Coronis, and this having all the same main interest. Once
understand that, and you will see why Turner has put her death under
this deep shade of trees, the sun withdrawing his last ray; and why he
has put beside her the low type of an animal's pain, a dog licking its
wounded paw.
96. But now, I want you to understand Turner's depth of sympathy
farther still. In both these high mythical subjects the surrounding
nature, though suffering, is still dignified and beautiful. Every line
in which the master traces it, even where seemingly negligent, is
lovely, and set down with a meditative calmness which makes these two
etchings capable of being placed beside the most tranquil work of
Holbein or Dürer. In this "Cephalus" especially, note the extreme
equality and serenity of every outline. But now here is a subject of
which you will wonder at first why Turner drew it at all. It has no
beauty whatsoever, no specialty of picturesqueness; and all its lines
are cramped and poor.
The crampness and the poverty are all intended. This is no longer to
make us think of the death of happy souls, but of the labor of unhappy
ones; at least, of the more or less limited, dullest, and--I must not
say homely, but--unhomely life of the neglected agricultural poor.
It is a gleaner bringing down her one sheaf of corn to an old
watermill, itself mossy and rent, scarcely able to get its stones to
turn. An ill-bred dog stands, joyless, by the unfenced stream; two
country boys lean, joyless, against a wall that is half broken down;
and all about the steps down which the girl is bringing her sheaf, the
bank of earth, flowerless and rugged, testifies only of its malignity;
and in the black and sternly rugged etching--no longer graceful, but
hard, and broken in every touch--the master insists upon the ancient
curse of the earth--"Thorns also and Thistles shall it bring forth to
thee."
97. And now you will see at once with what feeling Turner completes,
in a more tender mood, this lovely subject of his Yorkshire stream, by
giving it the conditions of pastoral and agricultural life; the cattle
by the pool, the milkmaid crossing the bridge with her pail on her
head, the mill with the old millstones, and its gleaming weir as his
chief light led across behind the wild trees.
[Illustration: MILL NEAR GRANDE CHARTREUSE.
From the painting by Turner.]
98. And not among our soft-flowing rivers only; but here among the
torrents of the Great Chartreuse, where another man would assuredly
have drawn the monastery, Turner only draws their working mill. And
here I am able to show you, fortunately, one of his works painted at
this time of his most earnest thought; when his imagination was still
freshly filled with the Greek mythology, and he saw for the first time
with his own eyes the clouds come down upon the actual earth.
[Illustration: L'AIGUILLETTE, VALLEY OF CLUSES.
From the painting by Turner.]
99. The scene is one which, in old times of Swiss traveling, you would
all have known well; a little cascade which descends to the road from
Geneva to Chamouni, near the village of Maglans, from under a
subordinate ridge of the Aiguille de Varens, known as the Aiguillette.
You, none of you, probably, know the scene now; for your only object
is to get to Chamouni and up Mont Blanc and down again; but the Valley
of Cluse, if you knew it, is worth many Chamounis; and it impressed
Turner profoundly. The facts of the spot are here given in mere and
pure simplicity; a quite unpicturesque bridge, a few trees partly
stunted and blasted by the violence of the torrent in storm at their
roots, a cottage with its mill-wheel--this has lately been pulled down
to widen the road--and the brook shed from the rocks and finding its
way to join the Arve. The scene is absolutely Arcadian. All the
traditions of the Greek Hills, in their purity, were founded on such
rocks and shadows as these; and Turner has given you the birth of the
Shepherd Hermes on Cyllene, in its visible and solemn presence, the
white cloud, Hermes Eriophoros forming out of heaven upon the Hills;
the brook, distilled from it, as the type of human life, born of the
cloud and vanishing into the cloud, led down by the haunting Hermes
among the ravines; and then, like the reflection of the cloud itself,
the white sheep, with the dog of Argus guarding them, drinking from
the stream.
100. And now, do you see why I gave you, for the beginning of your
types of landscape thought, that "Junction of Tees and Greta" in their
misty ravines; and this glen of the Greta above, in which Turner has
indeed done his best to paint the trees that live again after their
autumn--the twilight that will rise again with twilight of dawn--the
stream that flows always, and the resting on the cliffs of the
clouds that return if they vanish; but of human life, he says, a boy
climbing among the trees for his entangled kite, and these white
stones in the mountain churchyard, show forth all the strength and all
the end.