constancy with which, while the leaves are arranged on the spray with
exquisite regularity, that regularity is modified in their actual
effect. For as in every group of leaves some are seen sideways, forming
merely long lines, some foreshortened, some crossing each other, every
one differently turned and placed from all the others, the forms of the
leaves, though in themselves similar, give rise to a thousand strange
and differing forms in the group; and the shadows of some, passing over
the others, still farther disguise and confuse the mass until the eye
can distinguish nothing but a graceful and flexible disorder of
innumerable forms, with here and there a perfect leaf on the extremity,
or a symmetrical association of one or two, just enough to mark the
specific character and to give unity and grace, but never enough to
repeat in one group what was done in another, never enough to prevent
the eye from feeling that, however regular and mathematical may be the
structure of parts, what is composed out of them is as various and
infinite as any other part of nature. Nor does this take place in
general effect only. Break off an elm bough three feet long, in full
leaf, and lay it on the table before you, and try to draw it, leaf for
leaf. It is ten to one if in the whole bough (provided you do not twist
it about as you work) you find one form of leaf exactly like another;
perhaps you will not even have _one_ complete. Every leaf will be
oblique, or foreshortened, or curled, or crossed by another, or shaded
by another, or have something or other the matter with it; and though
the whole bough will look graceful, and symmetrical, you will scarcely
be able to tell how or why it does so, since there is not one line of it
like another....
But if Nature is so various when you have a bough on the table before
you, what must she be when she retires from you, and gives you her whole
mass and multitude? The leaves then at the extremities become as fine as
dust, a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky, a
confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by
particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf. This, as it comes down into the
body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque; it is always
transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky;
then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined
foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single
leaf on the extremities; then, under these, you get deep passages of
broken irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty
hollows; the twisted stems glancing through them in their pale and
entangled infinity, and the shafted sunbeams, rained from above, running
along the lustrous leaves for an instant; then lost, then caught again
on some emerald bank or knotted root, to be sent up again with a faint
reflex on the white under-sides of dim groups of drooping foliage, the
shadows of the upper boughs running in grey network down the glossy
stems, and resting in quiet chequers upon the glittering earth; but all
penetrable and transparent, and, in proportion, inextricable and
incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and the mystery of
the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some
solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless, large leaves,
the type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but
can never see.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 70: From "Modern Painters," Vol. I, 1843, Pt. II, Sec. VI
Chapter I.]
B. WATER[71]
Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature, and
without assistance or combination, water is the most wonderful. If we
think of it as the source of all the changefulness and beauty which we
have seen in clouds; then as the instrument by which the earth we have
contemplated was modelled into symmetry, and its crags chiselled into
grace; then as, in the form of snow, it robes the mountains it has made,
with that transcendent light which we could not have conceived if we had
not seen; then as it exists in the foam of the torrent, in the iris
which spans it, in the morning mist which rises from it, in the deep
crystalline pools which mirror its hanging shore, in the broad lake and
glancing river; finally, in that which is to all human minds the best
emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power, the wild, various, fantastic,
tameless unity of the sea; what shall we compare to this mighty, this
universal element, for glory and for beauty? or how shall we follow its
eternal changefulness of feeling? It is like trying to paint a soul.
To suggest the ordinary appearance of calm water, to lay on canvas as
much evidence of surface and reflection as may make us understand that
water is meant, is, perhaps, the easiest task of art; and even ordinary
running or falling water may be sufficiently rendered, by observing
careful curves of projection with a dark ground, and breaking a little
white over it, as we see done with judgment and truth by Ruysdael. But
to paint the actual play of hue on the reflective surface, or to give
the forms and fury of water when it begins to show itself; to give the
flashing and rocket-like velocity of a noble cataract, or the precision
and grace of the sea wave, so exquisitely modelled, though so mockingly
transient, so mountainous in its form, yet so cloudlike in its motion,
with its variety and delicacy of colour, when every ripple and wreath
has some peculiar passage of reflection upon itself alone, and the
radiating and scintillating sunbeams are mixed with the dim hues of
transparent depth and dark rock below--to do this perfectly is beyond
the power of man; to do it even partially has been granted to but one or
two, even of those few who have dared to attempt it....
The fact is that there is hardly a road-side pond or pool which has not
as much landscape _in_ it as above it. It is not the brown, muddy, dull
thing we suppose it to be; it has a heart like ourselves, and in the
bottom of that there are the boughs of the tall trees, and the blades of
the shaking grass, and all manner of hues of variable pleasant light out
of the sky. Nay, the ugly gutter, that stagnates over the drain-bars in
the heart of the foul city, is not altogether base; down in that, if you
will look deep enough, you may see the dark serious blue of far-off sky,
and the passing of pure clouds. It is at your own will that you see in
that despised stream either the refuse of the street, or the image of
the sky. So it is with almost all other things that we unkindly despise.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 71: From "Modern Painters," Vol. I, Pt. II, Sec. V, Chapter
I.]
C. THE MOUNTAIN GLORY[72]
The best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of
the meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great Alp, with
its purple rocks and eternal snows above; this excellence not being in
any wise a matter referable to feeling, or individual preferences, but
demonstrable by calm enumeration of the number of lovely colours on the
rocks, the varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of noble incidents
in stream, crag, or cloud, presented to the eye at any given moment.
For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape colour by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of grass, which I will
suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession to the lowlands) entirely
fresh and bright; the green of trees; and certain elements of purple,
far more rich and beautiful than we generally should think, in their
bark and shadows (bare hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued
afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, and of an exquisite
tone), as well as in ploughed fields, and dark ground in general. But
among mountains, in addition to all this, large unbroken spaces of pure
violet and purple are introduced in their distances; and even near, by
films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues
are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and purples
passing into rose-colour of otherwise wholly unattainable delicacy among
the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same time purer and
deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person who has never
seen the rose-colour of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve
or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what _tenderness_ in
colour means at all; _bright_ tenderness he may, indeed, see in the sky
or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the faraway hill-purples he
cannot conceive.
Together with this great source of pre-eminence in _mass_ of colour, we
have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and enamel-work
of the colour-jewellery on every stone; and that of the continual
variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers being,
besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood hyacinth
and the wild rose are, indeed, the only _supreme_ flowers that the
lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer,
and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, at its best,
cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue
star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the Alpine rose and
Highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet, lily of the
valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable partly by the
plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and narcissus I
have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite oxalis is
pre-eminently a mountaineer.
To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to add an
inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither
in its clearness, its colour, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of
space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by a
lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is far grander than any
torrent--but of the sea and its influences we are not now speaking; and
the sea itself, though it _can_ be clear, is never calm, among our
shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems
only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of
the ocean a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water at
all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden
flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the
ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the cloud
of the cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the cataract, the long
lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of the hills
reversed in the blue of morning,--all these things belong to those hills
as their undivided inheritance.
To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
pre-eminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains, in
the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of
Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as
I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any
of the wilder groupings of the hills; so, also, there are certain
conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and avenue,
rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the mountain
superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete as it is in
water: for exactly as there are some expressions in the broad reaches of
a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire or Thames, not, in their
way, to be matched among the rock rivers, and yet for all that a
lowlander cannot be said to have truly seen the element of water at all;
so even in the richest parks and avenues he cannot be said to have truly
seen trees. For the resources of trees are not developed until they have
difficulty to contend with; neither their tenderness of brotherly love
and harmony, till they are forced to choose their ways of various life
where there is contracted room for them, talking to each other with
their restrained branches. The various action of trees rooting
themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding
from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare
sunshine, crowding down together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing
hand in hand among the difficult slopes, opening in sudden dances round
the mossy knolls, gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant
fields, gliding in grave procession over the heavenward ridges--nothing
of this can be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried felicities of
the lowland forest: while to all these direct sources of greater beauty
are added, first the power of redundance,--the mere quantity of foliage
visible in the folds and on the promontories of a single Alp being
greater than that of an entire lowland landscape (unless a view from
some cathedral tower); and to this charm of redundance, that of clearer
_visibility_,--tree after tree being constantly shown in successive
height, one behind another, instead of the mere tops and flanks of
masses, as in the plains; and the forms of multitudes of them
continually defined against the clear sky, near and above, or against
white clouds entangled among their branches, instead of being confused
in dimness of distance.
Finally, to this supremacy in foliage we have to add the still less
questionable supremacy in clouds. There is no effect of sky possible in
the lowlands which may not in equal perfection be seen among the hills;
but there are effects by tens of thousands, for ever invisible and
inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the
hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the
clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear
our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for
the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud,
pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of
their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of
the plains from one horizon to the other. And of the nobler cloud
manifestations,--the breaking of their troublous seas against the crags,
their black spray sparkling with lightning; or the going forth of the
morning along their pavements of moving marble, level-laid between dome
and dome of snow;--of these things there can be as little imagination or
understanding in an inhabitant of the plains as of the scenery of
another planet than his own.
And, observe, all these superiorities are matters plainly measurable and
calculable, not in any wise to be referred to estimate of _sensation_.
Of the grandeur or expression of the hills I have not spoken; how far
they are great, or strong, or terrible, I do not for the moment
consider, because vastness, and strength, and terror, are not to all
minds subjects of desired contemplation. It may make no difference to
some men whether a natural object be large or small, whether it be
strong or feeble. But loveliness of colour, perfectness of form,
endlessness of change, wonderfulness of structure, are precious to all
undiseased human minds; and the superiority of the mountains in all
these things to the lowland is, I repeat, as measurable as the richness
of a painted window matched with a white one, or the wealth of a museum
compared with that of a simply furnished chamber. They seem to have been
built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full
of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple
lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious
in holiness for the worshipper.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 72: From "Modern Painters," Vol. IV, 1856, Chapter XX.]
D. SPLENDOURS OF SUNSET[73]
We have been speaking hitherto of what is constant and necessary in
nature, of the ordinary effects of daylight on ordinary colours, and we
repeat again that no gorgeousness of the pallet can reach even these.
But it is a widely different thing when Nature herself takes a colouring
fit, and does something extraordinary, something really to exhibit her
power. She has a thousand ways and means of rising above herself, but
incomparably the noblest manifestations of her capability of colour are
in these sunsets among the high clouds. I speak especially of the moment
before the sun sinks, when his light turns pure rose-colour, and when
this light falls upon a zenith covered with countless cloud-forms of
inconceivable delicacy, threads and flakes of vapour, which would in
common daylight be pure snow-white, and which give, therefore, fair
field to the tone of light. There is, then, no limit to the multitude,
and no check to the intensity, of the hues assumed. The whole sky from
the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten mantling sea of colour and
fire; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into
unsullied shadowless crimson, and purple, and scarlet, and colours for
which there are no words in language, and no ideas in the mind--things
which can only be conceived while they are visible; the intense hollow
blue of the upper sky melting through it all, showing here deep, and
pure, and lightless; there, modulated by the filmy formless body of the
transparent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and
gold. The concurrence of circumstances necessary to produce the sunsets
of which I speak does not take place above five or six times in a
summer, and then only for a space of from five to ten minutes, just as
the sun reaches the horizon. Considering how seldom people think of
looking for a sunset at all, and how seldom, if they do, they are in a
position from which it can be fully seen, the chances that their
attention should be awake, and their position favourable, during these
few flying instants of the year, are almost as nothing. What can the
citizen, who can see only the red light on the canvas of the wagon at
the end of the street, and the crimson colour of the bricks of his
neighbour's chimney, know of the flood of fire which deluges the sky
from the horizon to the zenith? What can even the quiet inhabitant of
the English lowlands, whose scene for the manifestation of the fire of
heaven is limited to the tops of hayricks, and the rooks' nests in the
old elm trees, know of the mighty passages of splendour which are tossed
from Alp to Alp over the azure of a thousand miles of champaign? Even
granting the constant vigour of observation, and supposing the
possession of such impossible knowledge, it needs but a moment's
reflection to prove how incapable the memory is of retaining for any
time the distinct image of the sources even of its most vivid
impressions. What recollection have we of the sunsets which delighted us
last year? We may know that they were magnificent, or glowing, but no
distinct image of colour or form is retained--nothing of whose _degree_
(for the great difficulty with the memory is to retain, not facts, but
_degrees_ of fact) we could be so certain as to say of anything now
presented to us, that it is like it. If we did say so, we should be
wrong; for we may be quite certain that the energy of an impression
fades from the memory, and becomes more and more indistinct every day;
and thus we compare a faded and indistinct image with the decision and
certainty of one present to the senses. How constantly do we affirm that
the thunderstorm of last week was the most terrible one we ever saw in
our lives, because we compare it, not with the thunderstorm of last
year, but with the faded and feeble recollection of it.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 73: From "Modern Painters," Vol. I, Pt. II, Sec. II, Chapter
II.]
THE STOICS[74]
WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY
The Stoics asserted two cardinal principles--that virtue was the sole
legitimate object to be aspired to, and that it involved so complete an
ascendancy of the reason as altogether to extinguish the affections. The
Peripatetics and many other philosophers, who derived their opinions
chiefly from Plato, endeavoured to soften down the exaggeration of these
principles. They admitted that virtue was an object wholly distinct from
interest, and that it should be the leading motive of life; but they
maintained that happiness was also a good, and a certain regard for it
legitimate. They admitted that virtue consisted in the supremacy of the
reason over the affections, but they allowed the exercise of the latter
within restricted limits. The main distinguishing features, however, of
stoicism, the unselfish ideal and the controlling reason, were
acquiesced in, and each represents an important side of the ancient
conception of excellence which we must now proceed to examine.
In the first we may easily trace the intellectual expression of the high
spirit of self-sacrifice which the patriotic enthusiasm had elicited.
The spirit of patriotism has this peculiar characteristic, that while it
has evoked acts of heroism which are both very numerous and very
sublime, it has done so without presenting any prospect of personal
immortality as a reward. Of all the forms of human heroism, it is
probably the most unselfish. The Spartan and the Roman died for his
country because he loved it. The martyr's ecstasy of hope had no place
in his dying hour. He gave up all he had, he closed his eyes, as he
believed, for ever, and he asked for no reward in this world or in the
next. Even the hope of posthumous fame--the most refined and
supersensual of all that can be called reward--could exist only for the
most conspicuous leaders. It was examples of this nature that formed the
culminations or ideals of ancient systems of virtue, and they naturally
led men to draw a very clear and deep distinction between the notions of
interest and of duty. It may indeed be truly said, that while the
conception of what constituted duty was often very imperfect in
antiquity, the conviction that duty, as distinguished from every
modification of selfishness, should be the supreme motive of life, was
more clearly enforced among the Stoics than in any later society.
The reader will probably have gathered from the last chapter that there
are four distinct motives which moral teachers may propose for the
purpose of leading men to virtue. They may argue that the disposition of
events is such that prosperity will attend a virtuous life, and
adversity a vicious one--a proposition they may prove by pointing to the
normal course of affairs, and by asserting the existence of a special
Providence in behalf of the good in the present world, and of rewards
and punishments in the future. As far as these latter arguments are
concerned, the efficacy of such teaching rests upon the firmness with
which certain theological tenets are held, while the force of the first
considerations will depend upon the degree and manner in which society
is organised, for there are undoubtedly some conditions of society in
which a perfectly upright life has not even a general tendency to
prosperity. The peculiar circumstances and dispositions of individuals
will also influence largely the way in which they receive such teaching,
and, as Cicero observed, "what one utility has created, another will
often destroy."
They may argue, again, that vice is to the mind what disease is to the
body, and that a state of virtue is in consequence a state of health.
Just as bodily health is desired for its own sake, as being the absence
of a painful or at least displeasing state, so a well-ordered and
virtuous mind may be valued for its own sake, and independently of all
the external good to which it may lead, as being a condition of
happiness; and a mind distracted by passion and vice may be avoided, not
so much because it is an obstacle in the pursuit of prosperity, as
because it is in itself essentially painful and disturbing. This
conception of virtue and vice as states of health or sickness, the one
being in itself a good, and the other in itself an evil, was a
fundamental proposition in the ethics of Plato. It was admitted, but
only to a subsidiary place, by the Stoics, and has passed more or less
into all the succeeding systems. It is especially favourable to large
and elevating conceptions of self-culture, for it leads men to dwell
much less upon isolated acts of virtue or vice than upon the habitual
condition of mind from which they spring.
It is possible, in the third place, to argue in favour of virtue by
offering as a motive that sense of pleasure which follows the deliberate
performance of a virtuous act. This emotion is a distinct and isolated
gratification following a distinct action, and may therefore be easily
separated from that habitual placidity of temper which results from the
extinction of vicious and perturbing impulses. It is this theory which
is implied in the common exhortations to enjoy "the luxury of doing
good," and though especially strong in acts of benevolence, in which
case sympathy with the happiness created intensifies the feeling, this
pleasure attends every kind of virtue.