2. Radiation, or tendency of force from some one given point, either in
the root or in some stated connection with it.
3. Liberty of each bough to seek its own livelihood and happiness
according to its needs, by irregularities of action both in its play and
its work, either stretching out to get its required nourishment from
light and rain, by finding some sufficient breathing-place among the
other branches, or knotting and gathering itself up to get strength for
any load which its fruitful blossoms may lay upon it, and for any stress
of its storm-tossed luxuriance of leaves; or playing hither and thither
as the fitful sunshine may tempt its young shoots, in their undecided
states of mind about their future life.
4. Imperative requirement of each bough to stop within certain limits,
expressive of its kindly fellowship and fraternity with the boughs in
its neighborhood; and to work with them according to its power,
magnitude, and state of health, to bring out the general perfectness of
the great curve, and circumferent stateliness of the whole tree.
216. I think I may leave you, unhelped, to work out the moral analogies
of these laws; you may, perhaps, however, be a little puzzled to see the
meaning of the second one. It typically expresses that healthy human
actions should spring radiantly (like rays) from some single heart
motive; the most beautiful systems of action taking place when this
motive lies at the root of the whole life, and the action is clearly
seen to proceed from it; while also many beautiful secondary systems of
action taking place from motives not so deep or central, but in some
beautiful subordinate connection with the central or life motive.
The other laws, if you think over them, you will find equally
significative; and as you draw trees more and more in their various
states of health and hardship, you will be every day more struck by the
beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for
mankind to know;[63] and you will see what this vegetation of the earth,
which is necessary to our life, first, as purifying the air for us and
then as food, and just as necessary to our joy in all places of the
earth,--what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as we
contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or
spoken for us, not in frightful black letters nor in dull sentences, but
in fair green and shadowy shapes of waving words, and blossomed
brightness of odoriferous wit, and sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom,
and playful morality.
217. Well, I am sorry myself to leave the wood, whatever my reader may
be; but leave it we must, or we shall compose no more pictures to-day.
This law of radiation, then, enforcing unison of action in arising from,
or proceeding to, some given point, is perhaps, of all principles of
composition, the most influential in producing the beauty of groups of
form. Other laws make them forcible or interesting, but this generally
is chief in rendering them beautiful. In the arrangement of masses in
pictures, it is constantly obeyed by the great composers; but, like the
law of principality, with careful concealment of its imperativeness, the
point to which the lines of main curvature are directed being very
often far away out of the picture. Sometimes, however, a system of
curves will be employed definitely to exalt, by their concurrence, the
value of some leading object, and then the law becomes traceable enough.
218. In the instance before us, the principal object being, as we have
seen, the tower on the bridge, Turner has determined that his system of
curvature should have its origin in the top of this tower. The diagram
Fig. 34, p. 145, compared with Fig. 32, p. 137, will show how this is
done. One curve joins the two towers, and is continued by the back of
the figure sitting on the bank into the piece of bent timber. This is a
limiting curve of great importance, and Turner has drawn a considerable
part of it with the edge of the timber very carefully, and then led the
eye up to the sitting girl by some white spots and indications of a
ledge in the bank; then the passage to the tops of the towers cannot be
missed.
219. The next curve is begun and drawn carefully for half an inch of its
course by the rudder; it is then taken up by the basket and the heads of
the figures, and leads accurately to the tower angle. The gunwales of
both the boats begin the next two curves, which meet in the same point;
and all are centralized by the long reflection which continues the
vertical lines.
220. Subordinated to this first system of curves there is another, begun
by the small crossing bar of wood inserted in the angle behind the
rudder; continued by the bottom of the bank on which the figure sits,
interrupted forcibly beyond it,[64] but taken up again by the water-line
leading to the bridge foot, and passing on in delicate shadows under the
arches, not easily shown in so rude a diagram, towards the other
extremity of the bridge. This is a most important curve, indicating
that the force and sweep of the river have indeed been in old times
under the large arches; while the antiquity of the bridge is told us by
a long tongue of land, either of carted rubbish, or washed down by some
minor stream, which has interrupted this curve, and is now used as a
landing-place for the boats, and for embarkation of merchandise, of
which some bales and bundles are laid in a heap, immediately beneath the
great tower. A common composer would have put these bales to one side or
the other, but Turner knows better; he uses them as a foundation for his
tower, adding to its importance precisely as the sculptured base adorns
a pillar; and he farther increases the aspect of its height by throwing
the reflection of it far down in the nearer water. All the great
composers have this same feeling about sustaining their vertical masses:
you will constantly find Prout using the artifice most dexterously (see,
for instance, the figure with the wheelbarrow under the great tower, in
the sketch of St. Nicholas, at Prague, and the white group of figures
under the tower in the sketch of Augsburg[65]); and Veronese, Titian,
and Tintoret continually put their principal figures at bases of
pillars. Turner found out their secret very early, the most prominent
instance of his composition on this principle being the drawing of Turin
from the Superga, in Hakewell's Italy. I chose Fig. 20, already given to
illustrate foliage drawing, chiefly because, being another instance of
precisely the same arrangement, it will serve to convince you of its
being intentional. There, the vertical, formed by the larger tree, is
continued by the figure of the farmer, and that of one of the smaller
trees by his stick. The lines of the interior mass of the bushes
radiate, under the law of radiation, from a point behind the farmer's
head; but their outline curves are carried on and repeated, under the
law of continuity, by the curves of the dog and boy--by the way, note
the remarkable instance in these of the use of darkest lines towards the
light--all more or less guiding the eye up to the right, in order to
bring it finally to the Keep of Windsor, which is the central object of
the picture, as the bridge tower is in the Coblentz. The wall on which
the boy climbs answers the purpose of contrasting, both in direction and
character, with these greater curves; thus corresponding as nearly as
possible to the minor tongue of land in the Coblentz. This, however,
introduces us to another law, which we must consider separately.