MODERN PAINTERS.[16]

[16] Modern Painters--their Superiority in the Art of

Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters, &c. &c.

By a Graduate of Oxford.

We read this title with some pain, not doubting but that our modern

landscape painters were severely handled in an ironical satire; and we

determined to defend them. "Their superiority to _all_ the ancient

masters"--that was too hard a hit to come from any but an enemy! We

must measure our man--a graduate of Oxford! The "scholar armed,"

without doubt. He comes, too, vauntingly up to us, with his contempt

for us and all critics that ever were, or will be; we are all little

Davids in the eye of this Goliath. Nevertheless, we will put a pebble

in our sling. We saw this contempt of us, in dipping at hap-hazard

into the volume. But what was our astonishment to find, upon looking

further, that we had altogether mistaken the intent of the author, and

that we should probably have not one Goliath, but many, to encounter;

while our own particular friends, to whom we might look for help,

were, alas! all dead men. We found that there were not "giants" in

those days, but in these days--that the author, in his most

superlative praise, is not ironical at all, but a most serious

panegyrist, who never laughs, but does sometimes make his readers

laugh, when they see his very unbecoming, mocking grimaces against the

"old masters"--not that it can be fairly asserted that it is a

laughable book. It has much conceit, and but little merriment; there

is nothing really funny after you have got over, (vide page 6,) that

he "looks with contempt on Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin." This

contempt, however, being too limited for the "graduate of Oxford," in

the next page he enlarges the scope of his enmity; "speaking generally

of the old masters, I refer only to Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator

Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Teniers (in his

landscapes,) P. Potter, Canaletti, and the various Van Somethings and

Back Somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have

libelled the sea." Self-convicted of malice, he has not the slightest

suspicion of his ignorance; whereas he _knows_ nothing of these

masters whom he maligns. Still is he ready to be their general

accuser--has not the slightest respect for the accumulated opinions of

the best judges for these two or three hundred years--he puts them by

with the wave of his hand, very like the unfortunate gentleman in an

establishment of "unsound opinions," who gravely said--"The world and

I differed in opinion--I was right, the world wrong; but they were too

many for me, and put me here." We daresay that, in such establishments

may be found many similar opinions to those our author promulgates,

though, as yet, none of our respectable publishers have been convicted

of a congenial folly. We said, that he suspects not his ignorance of

the masters he maligns. Let it not hence be inferred that it is the

work of an ignorant man. He is only ignorant with a prejudice. We will

not say that it is not the work of a man who thinks, who has been

habituated to a sort of scholastic reasoning, which he brings to bear,

with no little parade and display, upon technicalities and

distinctions. He can tutor _secundum artem_, lacking only, in the

first point, that he has not tutored himself. With all his

arrangements and distinctions laid down, as the very grammar of art,

he confuses himself with his "truths," forgetting that, in matters of

art, truths of fact must be referable to truths of mind. It is not

what things in all respects really are, but what they appear, and how

they are convertible by the mind into what they are not in many ways,

respects, and degrees, that we have to consider, before we can venture

to draw rules from any truths whatever. For art is something besides

nature; and taste and feeling are first--precede practical art; and

though greatly enhanced by that practical cultivation, might exist

without it--nay, often do; and true taste always walks a step in

advance of what has been done, and ever desires to do, and from

itself, more than it sees. We discover, therefore, a fallacy in the

very proposal of his undertaking, when he says that he is prepared "to

advance nothing which does not, at least in his own conviction, _rest

on surer ground than mere feeling or taste_." Notwithstanding,

however, that our graduate of Oxford puts his "demonstrations" upon an

equality with "the demonstrations of Euclid," and "thinks it proper

for the public to know, that the writer is no mere theorist, but has

been devoted from his youth to the laborious study of practical art,"

and that he is "a graduate of Oxford;" we do not look upon him as a

bit the better judge for all that, seeing that many have practised it

too fondly and too ignorantly all their lives, and that Claude, and

Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin must, according to him, have been in this

predicament, and more especially do we decline from bowing down at his

dictation, when we find him advocating _any_ "_surer ground than

feeling or taste_." Now, considering that thus, _in initio_, he sets

aside feeling and taste, the reader will not be astonished to find a

very substantial reason given for his contempt of the afore-mentioned

old masters; it is, he says, "because I look with the most devoted

veneration upon Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, that I do not

distrust the principles which induce me to look with contempt," &c. We

do not exactly see how these great men, who were not landscape

painters, can very well be compared with those who were, but from some

general principles of art, in which the world have not as yet found

any very extraordinary difference. But we do humbly suggest, that

Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, are in their practice, and

principles, if you please, quite as unlike Messrs David Cox, Copley

Fielding, J. D. Harding, Clarkson Stanfield, and Turner--the very men

whom our author brings forward as the excellent of the earth, in

opposition _to all_ old masters whatever, excepting only Michael

Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, to whom nevertheless, by a perverse

pertinacity of their respective geniuses, they bear no resemblance

whatever--as they are to Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin. We do

not by any means intend to speak disrespectfully of these our English

artists, but we must either mistrust those principles which cause them

to stand in opposition to the great Italians, or to conceive that our

author has really discovered no such differing principles, and which

possibly may not exist at all. Nor will we think so meanly of the

taste, the good feeling, and the good sense of these men, as to

believe that they think themselves at all flattered by any admiration

founded on such an irrational contempt. They well know that Michael

Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, have been admired, together with

Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin, and they do not themselves

desire to be put upon a separate list. The author concludes his

introduction with a very bad reason for his partiality to modern

masters, and it is put in most ambitious language, very readily

learned in the "Fudge School,"--a style of language with which our

author is very apt to indulge himself; but the argument it so

ostentatiously clothes, and which we hesitate not to call a bad one,

is nothing more than this, (if we understand it,)--that the dead are

dead, and cannot hear our praise; that the living are living, and

therefore our love is not lost; in short, as a _non-sequitur_, "that

if honour be for the dead, gratitude can only be for the living." This

might have been simply said; but we are taken to the grave--with "He

who has once stood beside the grave," &c. &c.; we have "wild

love--keen sorrow--pleasure to pulseless hearts--debt to the heart--to

be discharged to the dust--the garland--the tombstone--the crowned

brow--the ashes and the spirit--heaven-toned voices and heaven-lighted

lamps--the learning--sweetness by silence--and light by decay;" all

which, we conceive, might have been very excusable in a young curate's

sermon during his first year of probation, and might have won for him

more nosegays and favours than golden opinions, but which we here feel

inclined to put our pen across, as so we remember many similarly

ambitious passages to have been served, before we were graduate of

Oxford, with the insignificant signification from the pen of our

informator of _nihil ad rem_. As the author threatens the public with

another, or more volumes, we venture to throw out a recommendation,

that at least one volume may serve the purpose and do the real work of

two, if he will check this propensity to unnecessary redundancy. His

numerous passages of this kind are for the most part extremely

unintelligible; and when we have unraveled the several coatings, we

too often find the ribs of the mummy are not human. We think it right

to object, in this place, to an affectation in phraseology offensive

to those who think seriously of breaking the third commandment--he

scarcely speaks of mountains without taking the sacred name in vain;

there is likewise a constant repetition of expressions of very

doubtful meaning in the first use, for the most part quite devoid of

meaning in their application. One of these is "palpitating." Light is

"palpitating," darkness is "palpitating"--every conceivable thing is

"palpitating." We must, however, in justice say, that by far the best

part of the book, the laying down rules and the elucidating

principles, is clearly and expressively written. In this part of the

work there is greater expansion than the student will generally find

in books on art. Not that we are aware of the advancement of any thing

new; but the admitted maxims of art are, as it were, grammatically

analysed, and in a manner to assist the beginner in thinking upon art.

To those who have already _thought_, this very studied analysis and

arrangement will be tedious enough.

In the "Definition of Greatness in Art," we find--"If I say that the

greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind of the spectator

the greatest number of the greatest ideas, I have a definition which

will include as subjects of comparison every pleasure which art is

capable of conveying." Now, there are great ideas which are so

conflicting as to annul the force of each other. This is not enough;

there must be a congruity of great ideas--nay, in some instances, we

can conceive one idea to be so great, as in a work of art not to admit

of the juxtaposition of others. This is the principle upon which the

sonnet is built, and the sonnet illustrates the picture not unaptly.

"Ideas of Power" are great ideas--not always are ideas of beauty

great; yet is there a tempering the one with the other, which it is

the special province of art to attain, and that for its highest and

most moral purposes. In his "Ideas of Power," he distinguishes the

term "excellent" from the terms "beautiful," "useful," "good," &c.;

thus--"And we shall always, in future, use the word excellent, as

signifying that the thing to which it is applied required a great

power for its production." Is not this doubtful? Does it not limit the

perception of excellence to artists who can alone from their practice,

and, as it were, measurement of powers with their difficulties, learn

and feel its existence in the sense to which it is limited. The

inference would be, that none but artists can be critics, as none but

artists can perceive excellence, and we think in more than one place

some such assertion is made. This is startling--"Power is never

wasted; whatever power has been employed, produces excellence in

proportion to its own dignity and exertion; and the faculty of

perceiving this exertion, and approaching this dignity, is the faculty

of perceiving excellence." "It is this faculty in which men, even of

the most cultivated taste, must always be wanting, unless they have

added practice to reflection; because none can estimate the power

manifested in victory, unless they have personally measured the

strength to be overcome." For the word strength use difficulty, and we

should say that, to the unpractised, the difficulties must always

appear greatest. He gives, as illustration, "Titian's flesh tint;" it

may be possible that, by some felicitous invention, some new

technicality of his art, Titian might have produced this excellence,

and to him there would have been no such great measurement of the

difficulty or strength to be overcome; while the admirer of the work,

ignorant of the happy means, fancies the exertion of powers which were

not exerted. In his chapter on "Ideas of Imitation," he imagines that

Fuseli and Coleridge falsely apply the term imitation, making "a

distinction between imitation and copying, representing the first as

the legitimate function of art--the latter as its corruption." Yet we

think he comes pretty much to the same conclusion. In like manner, he

seems to disagree with Burke in a passage which he quotes, but in

reality he agrees with him; for surely the "power of the imitation" is

but a power of the "jugglery," to be sensible of which, if we

understand him, is necessary to our sense of imitation. "When the

object," says Burke, "represented in poetry or painting is such as we

could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then we may be sure

that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of

_imitation_." "We may," says our author, "be sure of the contrary; for

if the object be undesirable in itself, the closer the imitation the

less will be the pleasure." Certainly not; for Burke of course

implied, and included in his sense of imitation, that it should be

consistent with a knowledge in the spectator, that a certain trick of

art was put upon him. And our author says the same--"Whenever the work

is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what

I call an idea of imitation." Again--"Now, two things are requisite to

our complete and most pleasurable perception of this: first, that the

resemblance be so perfect as to amount to deception; secondly, that

there be some means of proving at the same moment that it _is_ a

deception." He justly considers "the pleasures resulting from

imitation the most contemptible that can be received from art." He

thus happily illustrates his meaning--"We may consider tears as a

result of agony or of art, whichever we please, but not of both at the

same moment. If we are surprised by them as an attainment of the one,

it is impossible we can be moved by them as a sign of the other." This

will explain why we are pleased with the exact imitation of the

dewdrop on the peach, and why we are disgusted with the Magdalen's

tears by Vanderwerf; and we further draw this inevitable conclusion,

of very important consequence to artists, who have very erroneous

notions upon the subject, that this sort of imitation, which, by the

deception of its name, should be most like, is actually less like

nature, because it takes from nature its impression by substituting a

sense of the jugglery. This chapter on ideas of imitation is good and

useful. We think, in the after part of his work, wherein is much

criticism on pictures by the old masters and by moderns, our author

must have lost the remembrance of what he has so well said on his

ideas of imitation; and in the following chapter on "Ideas of Truth."

"The word truth, as applied to art, signifies the faithful statement,

either to the mind or senses, of any fact of nature." The reader will

readily see how "ideas of truth" differ from "ideas of imitation." The

latter relating only to material objects, the former taking in the

conceptions of the mind--may be conveyed by signs or symbols,

"themselves no image nor likeness of any thing." "An idea of truth

exists in the statement of _one_ attribute of any thing; but an idea

of imitation only in the resemblance of as many attributes as we are

usually cognizant of in its real presence." Hence it follows that

ideas of truth are inconsistent with ideas of imitation; for, as we

before said, ideas of imitation remove the impression by an

ever-present sense of the deception or falsehood. This is put very

conclusively--"so that the moment ideas of truth are grouped together,

so as to give rise to an idea of imitation, they change their very

nature--lose their essence as ideas of truth--and are corrupted and

degraded, so as to share in the treachery of what they have produced.

Hence, finally, ideas of truth are the foundation, and ideas of

imitation the distinction, of all art. We shall be better able to

appreciate their relative dignity after the investigation which we

propose of functions of the former; but we may as well now express the

conclusion to which we shall then be led--that no picture can be good

which deceives by its imitation; for the very reason that nothing can

be beautiful which is not true." This is perhaps rather too

indiscriminate. It has been shown that ideas of imitation do give

pleasure; by them, too, objects of beauty may be represented. We

should not say that a picture by Gerard Dow or Van Eyck; even with the

down on the peach and the dew on the leaf, were not good pictures.

They are good if they please. It is true, they ought to do more, and

even that in a higher degree; they cannot be works of greatness--and

greatness was probably meant in the word good. In his chapter on

"Ideas of Beauty," he considers that we derive, naturally and

instinctively, pleasure from the contemplation of certain material

objects; for which no other reason can be given than that it is our

instinct--the will of our Maker--we enjoy them "instinctively and

necessarily, as we derive sensual pleasure from the scent of a rose."

But we have instinctively aversion as well as desire; though he admits

this, he seems to lose sight of it in the following--"And it would

appear that we are intended by the Deity to be constantly under their

influence, (ideas of beauty;) because there is not one single object

in nature which is not capable of conveying them," &c. We are not

satisfied; if the instinctive desire be the index to what is

beautiful, so must the instinctive aversion be the index to its

opposite. We have an instinctive dislike to many reptiles, to many

beasts--as apes. These _may_ have in them some beauty; we only object

to the author's want of clearness. If there be no ugliness there is no

beauty, for every thing has its opposite; so that we think he has not

yet discovered and clearly put before us what beauty consists in. He

shows how it happens that we do admire it instinctively; but that does

not tell us what it is, and possibly, after all that has been said

about it, it yet remains to be told. Nor are we satisfied with his

definition of taste--"Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the

greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are

attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection." This

will not do; for taste will take material sources, unattractive in

themselves, and by combination, or for their contrast, receive

pleasure from them. All literature and all art show this. That taste,

like life itself, is instinctive in its origin and first motion, we

doubt not; but what it is by and in its cultivation, and in its

application to art, is a thing not to be altogether so cursorily

discussed and dismissed. The distinction is laid down between taste

and judgment--judgment being the action of the intellect; taste "the

instinctive and instant preferring of one material object to another

without any obvious reason," except that it is proper to human nature

in its perfection so to do. But leaving this discussion of this

original taste, taste in art is surely, as it is a thing cultivated,

that for which a reason can be given, and in some measure, therefore,

the result of judgment. For by the cultivation of taste we are

actually led to love, admire, and desire many things of which we have

no instinctive love at all; so that the taste for them arises from the

intellect and the moral sense--our judgment. He proceeds to "Ideas of

Relation," by which he means "to express all those sources of

pleasure, which involve and require at the instant of their

perception, active exertion of the intellectual powers." As this is to

be more easily comprehended by an illustration, we have one in an

incident of one of Turner's pictures, and, considering the object, it

is surprising the author did not find one more important; but he

herein shows that, in his eyes, every stroke of the brush by Mr Turner

is important--indeed, is a considerable addition to our national

wealth. In the picture of the "Building of Carthage," the foreground

is occupied by a group of children sailing toy-boats, which he thinks

to be an "exquisite choice of incident expressive of the ruling

passion." He, with a whimsical extravagance in praise of Turner,

which, commencing here, runs throughout all the rest of the volume,

says--"Such a thought as this is something far above all art; it is

epic poetry of the highest order." Epic poetry of the highest order!

Ungrateful will be our future epic poets if they do not learn from

this--if such is done by boys sailing toy-boats, surely boys flying a

kite will illustrate far better the great astronomical knowledge of

our days. But he is rather unfortunate in this bit of criticism; for

he compares this incident with one of Claude's, which we, however,

think a far better and more poetical incident. "Claude, in subjects of

_the same kind_," (not, by the by, a very fair statement,) "commonly

introduces people carrying red trunks with iron locks about, and

dwells, with infantine delight, on the lustre of the leather and the

ornaments of the iron. The intellect can have no occupation here, we

must look to the imitation or to nothing." As to the "_infantine

delight_," we presume it is rather with the boys and their toy-boats;

but let us look a little into these trunks--no, we may not--there is

something more in them than our graduate imagines--the very iron

locks and precious leather mean to tell you there is something still

more precious within, worth all the cost of freightage; and you see, a

little off, the great argosie that has brought the riches; and we

humbly think that the ruling passion of a people whose "princes were

merchants, and whose merchants princes," as happily expressed by the

said "red trunks" as the rise of Carthage by the boys and boats; and

in the fervour of this bit of "exquisite" epic choice, probably Claude

did look with delight on the locks and the leather; and, whenever we

look upon that picture again, we shall be ready to join in the

delight, and say, in spite of our graduate's "contempt," there is

nothing like leather. If the boys and boats express the beginning, the

red trunks express the thing done--merchandise "brought home to every

man's door;" so that the one serves for an "idea of relation," quite

as well as the other. And here ends section the first.

The study of ideas of imitation are thrown out of the consideration of

ideas of power, as unworthy the pursuit of an artist, whose purpose is

not to deceive, and because they are only the result of a particular

association of ideas of truth. "There are two modes in which we receive

the conception of power; one, the most just, when by a perfect

knowledge of the difficulty to be overcome, and the means employed, we

form a right estimate of the faculties exerted; the other, when without

possessing such intimate and accurate knowledge, we are impressed by a

sensation of power in visible action. If these two modes of receiving

the impression agree in the result, and if the sensation be equal to

the estimate, we receive the utmost possible idea of power. But this is

the case perhaps with the works of only one man out of the whole circle

of the fathers of art, of him to whom we have just referred--Michael

Angelo. In others the estimate and the sensation are constantly

unequal, and often contradictory." There is a distinction between the

sensation of power and the intellectual perception of it. A slight

sketch will give the sensation; the greater power is in the completion,

not so manifest, but of which there is a more intellectual cognizance.

He instances the drawings of Frederick Tayler for sensations of power,

considering the apparent means; and those of John Lewis for more

complete ideas of power, in reference to the greater difficulties

overcome, and the more complicated means employed. We think him

unfortunate in his selection, as the subjects of these artists are not

such as, of themselves, justly to receive ideas of power, therefore not

the best to illustrate them. He proceeds to "ideas of power, as they

are dependent on execution." There are six legitimate sources of

pleasure in execution--truth, simplicity, mystery, inadequacy,

decision, velocity. "Decision" we should think involved in "truth;" as

so involved, not necessarily different from velocity. Mystery and

inadequacy require explanation. "Nature is always mysterious and secret

in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most

inexplicable." Execution, therefore, should be "incomprehensible."

"Inadequacy" can hardly, we think, be said to be a quality of

execution, as it has only reference to means employed. Insufficient

means, according to him, give ideas of power. We otherwise

conclude--namely, that if the inadequacy of the means is shown, we

receive ideas of weakness. "Ars est celare artem"--so is it to conceal

the means. Strangeness in execution, not a legitimate source of

pleasure, is illustrated by the execution of a bull's head by Rubens,

and of the same by Berghem. Of the six qualities of execution, the

three first are the greatest, the three last the most attractive. He

considers Berghem and Salvator to have carried their fondness for these

lowest qualities to a vice. We can scarcely agree with him, as their

execution seems most appropriate to the character of their subjects--to

arise, in fact, out of their "ideas of truth." There is appended a good

note on the execution of the "drawing-master," that, under the title of

boldness, will admit of no touch less than the tenth of an inch broad,

and on the tricks of engravers' handling.

Our graduate dismisses the "sublime" in about two pages; in fact, he

considers sublimity not to be a specific term, nor "descriptive of the

effect of a particular class of ideas;" but as he immediately asserts

that it is "greatness of any kind," and "the effect of greatness upon

the feelings," we should have expected to have heard a little more

about what constitutes this "greatness," this "sublime," which

"elevates the mind," something more than that "Burke's theory of the

nature of the sublime is incorrect." The sublime not being "distinct

from what is beautiful," he confines his subject to "ideas of truth,

beauty, and relation," and by these he proposes to test all artists.

Truth of facts and truth of thoughts are here considered; the first

necessary, but the latter the highest: we should say that it is the

latter which alone constitutes art, and that here art begins where

nature ends. Facts are the foundation necessary to the superstructure;

the foundation of which must be there, though unseen, unnoticed in

contemplation of the noble edifice. Very great stress is laid upon

"the exceeding importance of truth;" which none will question,

reminding us of the commencement of Bacon's essay, "What is truth?

said laughing Pilate, and would not wait for an answer." "Nothing,"

says our author, "can atone for the want of truth, not the most

brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy, the most pure feeling

(supposing that feeling _could_ be pure and false at the same time,)

not the most exalted conception, nor the most comprehensive grasp of

intellect, can make amends for the want of truth." Now, there is much

parade in all this, surely truth, as such in reference to art, is _in_

the brilliancy of imagination, _in_ the playfulness, without which is

no fancy, _in_ the feeling, and _in_ the very exaltation of a

conception; and intellect has no _grasp_ that does not grasp a truth.

When he speaks of nature as "immeasurably superior to all that the

human mind can conceive," and professes to "pay no regard whatsoever

to what may be thought beautiful, or sublime, or imaginative," and to

"look only for truth, bare, clear downright statement of facts," he

seems to forget what nature is, as adopted by, as taken into art; it

is not only external nature, but external nature in conjunction with

the human mind. Nor does he, in fact, adhere in the subsequent part of

his work to this his declaration; for he loses it in his "fervour of

imagination," when he actually examines the works of "the great living

painter, who is, I believe, imagined by the majority of the public to

paint more falsehood and less fact than any other known master." Here

our author jumps at once into his monomania--his adoration of the

works of Turner, which he examines largely and microscopically, as it

suits his whim, and imagines all the while he is describing and

examining nature; and not unfrequently he tells you, that nature and

Turner are the same, and that he "invites the same ceaseless study as

the works of nature herself." This is "coming it pretty strong." We

confess we are with the majority--not that we wish to depreciate

Turner. He is, or has been, unquestionably, a man of genius, and that

is a great admission. He has, perhaps, done in art what never has been

done before. He has illuminated "Views," if not with local, with a

splendid truth. His views of towns are the finest; he led the way to

this walk of art, and is far superior to all in it. We speak of his

works collectively. Some of his earlier, more imaginative, were

unquestionably poetical, though not, perhaps, of a very high

character. We believe he has been better acquainted with many of the

truths of nature, particularly those which came within the compass of

his line of views, than any other artist, ancient or modern; but we

believe he has neglected others, and some important ones too, and to

which the old masters paid the greatest attention, and devoted the

utmost study. We have spoken frequently, unhesitatingly, of the late

extraordinary productions of his pencil, as altogether unworthy his

real genius; it is in these we see, with the majority of the public,

"more falsehood and less fact" than in any other known master--a

defiance of the "known truths" in drawing, colour, and composition,

for which we can only account upon the supposition, that his eye

misrepresents to him the work of his hands. We see, in the almost

adoration of his few admirers, that if it be difficult, and not always

dependent, on merit to attain to eminence in the world's estimation,

it is nearly as difficult altogether to fall from it; and that nothing

the artist can do, though they be the veriest "aegri somnia," will

separate from him habitual followers, who, with a zeal in proportion

to the extravagances he may perpetrate, will lose their relish for,

and depreciate the great masters, whose very principles he seems

capriciously in his age to set aside, and they will from followers

become his worshippers, and in pertinacity exact entire compliance,

and assent to every, the silliest, dictation of their monomania. We

subjoin a specimen of this kind of worship, which will be found fully

to justify our observations, and which, considering it speaks of

mortal man, is somewhat blaspheming Divine attributes; we know not

really whether we should pity the condition of the author, or

reprehend the passage. After speaking of other modern painters, who

are so superior to the old, he says: "and Turner--glorious in

conception--unfathomable in knowledge--solitary in power--with the

elements waiting upon his will, and the night and the morning obedient

to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries

of his universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse,

clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the

sun and stars given into his hand." Little as we are disposed to laugh

at any such aberrations, we must, to remove from our minds the

greater, the more serious offence, indulge in a small degree of

justifiable ridicule; and ask what will sculptor or painter make of

this description, should the reluctant public be convinced by the

"graduate," and in their penitential reverence order statue or

painting of Mr Turner for the Temple of Fame, which it is presumed

Parliament, in their artistic zeal, mean to erect? How will they

venture to represent Mr Turner looking like an angel--in that dress

which would make any man look like a fool--his cloud nightcap tied

with rainbow riband round his head, calling to night and morning, and

little caring which comes, making "ducks and drakes" of the sun and

the stars, put into his hand for that purpose? We will only suggest

one addition, as it completes the grand idea, and is in some degree

characteristic of Mr Turner's peculiar execution, that, with the sun

and stars, there should be delivered into his hand a comet, whose tail

should serve him for a brush, and supply itself with colour. We do not

see, however, why the moon should have been omitted; sun, moon, and

stars, generally go together. Is the author as jealous as the

"majority of the public" may be suspicious of her influence? And let

not the reader believe that Mr Turner is thus called a prophet in mere

joke, or a fashion of words--his prophetic power is advanced in

another passage, wherein it is asserted that Mr Turner not only tells

us in his works what nature has done in hers, but what she will do.

"In fact," says our author, "the great quality about Mr Turner's

drawings, which more especially proves their transcendant truth, is

the capability they afford us of reasoning on past and future

phenomena." The book teems with extravagant bombastic praise like

this. Mr Turner is more than the Magnus Apollo. Yet other English

artists are brought forward, immediately preceding the above

panegyric; we know not if we do them justice, by noticing what is said

of them. There is a curious description of David Cos lying on the

ground "to possess his spirit in humility and peace," of Copley

Fielding, as an aeronaut, "casting his whole soul into space." We

really cannot follow him, "exulting like the wild deer in the motion

of the swift mists," and "flying with the wild wind and sifted spray

along the white driving desolate sea, with the passion for nature's

freedom burning in his heart;" for such a chase and such a heart-burn

must have a frightful termination, unless it be mere nightmare. We see

"J. D. Harding, brilliant and vigorous," &c., "following with his

quick, keen dash the sunlight into the crannies of the rocks, and the

wind into the tangling of the grass, and the bright colour into the

fall of the sea-foam--various, universal in his aim;" after which very

fatiguing pursuit, we are happy to find him "under the shade of some

spreading elm;" yet his heart is oak--and he is "English, all English

at his heart." But Mr Clarkson Stanfield is a man of men--"firm, and

fearless, and unerring in his knowledge--stern and decisive in his

truth--perfect and certain in composition--shunning nothing,

concealing nothing, and falsifying nothing--never affected, never

morbid, never failing--conscious of his strength, but never

ostentatious of it--acquainted with every line and hue of the deep

sea--chiseling his waves with unhesitating knowledge of every curve of

their anatomy, and every moment of their motion--building his

mountains rock by rock, with wind in every fissure, and weight in

every stone--and modeling the masses of his sky with the strength of

tempest in their every fold." It is curious--yet a searcher after

nature's truths ought to know, as he is here told, that waves may be

anatomized, and must be _chiseled_, and that mountains are and ought

to be _built_ up rock by rock, as a wall brick by brick; no easy task

considering that there is a disagreeable "wind in every fissure, and

weight in every stone"--and that the aerial sky, incapable to touch,

must be "modeled in masses." All this is given after an equally

extravagant abuse of Claude, of Salvator Rosa, and Poussin. He finds

fault with Claude, because his sea does not "upset the flower-pots on

the wall," forgetting that they are put there because the sea could

not--with Salvator, for his "contemptible fragment of splintery crag,

which an Alpine snow-wreath" (which would have no business there)

"would smother in its first swell, with a stunted bush or two growing

out of it, and a Dudley or Halifax-like volume of smoke for a

sky"--with Poussin, for that he treats foliage (whereof "every bough

is a revelation!") as "a black round mass of impenetrable paint,

diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick

instead of a trunk." A page or two from this, our author sadly abuses

poor Canaletti, as far as we can see, for not painting a tumbled-down

wall, which perhaps, in his day, was not in a ruinous state at all; it

is a curious passage--and shows how much may be made out of a wall.

Pyramus's chink was nothing to this--behold a specimen of "fine

writing!" "Well: take the next house. We remember that too; it was

mouldering inch by inch into the canal, and the bricks had fallen away

from its shattered marble shafts, and left them white and

skeleton-like, yet with their fretwork of cold flowers wreathed about

them still, untouched by time; and through the rents of the wall

behind them there used to come long sunbeams gleamed by the weeds

through which they pierced, which flitted, and fell one by one round

those grey and quiet shafts, catching here a leaf and there a leaf,

and gliding over the illumined edges and delicate fissures until they

sank into the deep dark hollow between the marble blocks of the sunk

foundation, lighting every other moment one isolated emerald lamp on

the crest of the intermittent waves, when the wild sea-weeds and

crimson lichens drifted and crawled with their thousand colours and

fine branches over its decay, and the black, clogging, accumulated

limpets hung in ropy clusters from the dripping and tinkling stone.

What has Canaletti given us for this?" Alas, neither a _crawling_

lichen, nor _clogging_ limpets, nor a _tinkling_ stone, but "one

square, red mass, composed of--let me count--five-and-fifty--no,

six-and-fifty--no, I was right at first, five-and-fifty bricks," &c.

The picture, if it be painted by the graduate, must be a curiosity--we

can make neither head nor tail of his words. But let us find another

strange specimen--where he compares his own observations of nature

with Poussin and Turner. Every one must remember a very pretty little

picture of no great consequence by Gaspar Poussin--a view of some

buildings of a town said to be Aricia, the modern La Riccia--just take

it for what it is intended to be, a quiet, modest, agreeable

scene--very true and sweetly painted. How unfit to be compared with an

ambitious description of a combination of views from Rome to the Alban

Mount, for that is the range of the description, though, perhaps, the

description is taken from a poetical view of one of Turner's

incomprehensibles, which may account for the conclusion, "Tell me who

is likest this, Poussin or Turner?" Now, though Poussin never intended

to be like this, let us see the graduate's description of it. We know

the little town; it received us as well as our author, having left

Rome to visit it.

"Egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma."

Our author, however, doubts if it be the place, though he

unhesitatingly abuses Poussin, as if he had fully intended to have

painted nothing else than what was seen by the travelling graduate.

"At any rate, it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty

bushes, of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of

leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque

brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and

discover in one place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature

have been cool and grey beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and

which, therefore, being moreover completely in shade, is consistently

and scientifically painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick

red, the only thing like colour in the picture. The foreground is a

piece of road, which, in order to make allowance for its greater

nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed,

for the quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage roads, is

given in a very cool green-grey, and the truthful colouring of the

picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with

a stalk to them, of a sober and similar brown." We need not say how

unlike is this description of the picture. We pass on to--"Not long

ago, I was slowly _descending_ this very bit of carriage road, the

first turn after you leave Albano;--it had been wild weather when I

left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in

sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of

sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its

arches like the bridge of Chaos. But as I _climbed_ the long slope of

the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble

outline of the domes of Albano, and graceful darkness of its ilex

grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper

sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in

deep, palpitating azure, half aether half dew. The noonday sun came

slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of

entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the

wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with

rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and

crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the

rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every

separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it

turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then

an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas

arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with

the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and _silver_

flakes of _orange_ spray tossed into the air around them, breaking

over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and

kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every

glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in

sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet

lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark

rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen--casting their quiet

shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them

filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and over

all--the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the _sacred_ clouds

that have no _darkness_, and only exist to illumine, were seen in

fathomless intervals between the solemn and _orbed_ repose of the

stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding

lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the

blaze of the sea." In verity, this is no "Campana Supellex." It is a

riddle! Is he going up or down hill--or both at once? No human being

can tell. He did not like the "sulphur and treacle" of "our Scotch

connoisseurs;" but what colours has he not added here to his

sulphur--colours, too, that we fear for the "idea of truth" cannot

coexist! And how, in the name of optics, could it be possible for any

painter to take in all this, with the "_fathomless intervals_," into

an angle of vision of forty-five degrees? It is quite superfluous to

ask "who is likest this, Turner or Poussin?" There immediately follows

a remark upon another picture in the National Gallery, the "Mercury

and Woodman," by Salvator Rosa, than which nothing can be more untrue

to the original. He asserts that Salvator painted the distant

mountains, "throughout, without one instant of variation. But what is

its colour? _Pure_ sky-blue, without one grain of grey, or any

modifying hue whatsoever;--the same brush which had just given the

bluest parts of the sky, has been more loaded at the same part of the

pallette, and the whole mountain throw in with unmitigated

ultramarine." Now the fact is, that the picture has, in this part,

been so injured, that it is hard to say what colour is under the dirty

brown-asphaltum hue and texture that covers it. It is certainly not

blue now, not "pure blue"--unless pictures change like the cameleon.

We know the picture well, and have seen another of the same subject,

where the mountains have variety, and yet are blue. We believe a great

sum was given for this picture--far more than its condition justifies.

We must return--we left the graduate discussing ideas of truth. There

is a chapter to show that the truth of nature is not to be discerned

by the uneducated senses. As we do not perceive all sounds that enter

the ear, so do we not perceive all that is cognizable by the eye--we

have, that is, a power of nullifying an impression; that this habit is

so common, that from the abstraction of their minds to other subjects,

there are probably persons who never saw any thing beautiful.

Sensibility to the power of beauty is required--and to see rightly,

there should be a perfect state of moral feeling. Even when we think

we see with our eyes, our perception is often the result of memory, of

previous knowledge; and it is in this way he accounts for the mistake

painters and others make with respect to Italian skies. What will Mr

Uwin and his followers in blue say to this, alas--Italian skies are

not blue? "How many people are misled by what has been said and sung

of the serenity of Italian skies, to suppose they must be more blue

than the skies of the north, and think that they see them so; whereas

the sky of Italy is far more dull and grey in colour than the skies of

the north, and is distinguished only by its intense repose of light."

Benevenuto Cellini speaks of the mist of Italy. "Repose of light" is

rather a novelty--he is fond of it. But then Turner paints with pure

white--for ourselves we are with the generality of mankind who prefer

the "repose" of shade. "Ask a connoisseur, who has scampered over all

Europe, the shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to

one that he cannot tell you; and yet he will be voluble of criticism

on every painted landscape from Dresden to Madrid"--and why not? The

chances are ninety to one that the merits of not a single picture

shall depend upon this knowledge, and yet the pictures shall be good

and the connoisseur right. One man sees what another does not see in

portraits. Undoubtedly; but how any one is to find in a portrait the

following, we are at a loss to conceive. "The third has caught the

trace of all that was most hidden and most mighty, when all hypocrisy

and all habit, and all petty and passing emotion--the _ice, and the

bank, and the foam of the immortal river--were shivered and broken,

and swallowed up in the awakening of its inward strength_," _&c._ How

can a man with a pen in his hand let such stuff as this drop from his

fingers' ends?

In the chapter "on the relative importance of truths," there is a

little needless display of logic--needless, for we find, after all, he

does not dispute "the kind of truths proper to be represented by the

painter or sculptor," though he combats the maxim that general truths

are preferable to particular. His examples are quite out of art,

whether one be spoken of as a man or as Sir Isaac Newton. Even

logically speaking, Sir Isaac Newton may be the _whole_ of the

subject, and as such a whole might require a generality. There may be

many particulars that are best sunk. So, in a picture made up of many

parts, it should have a generality totally independent of the

particularities of the parts, which must be so represented as not to

interfere with that general idea, and which may be altogether in the

mind of the artist. This little discussion seems to arise from a sort

of quibble on the word important. Sir Joshua and others, who abet the

generality maxim, mean no more than that it is of importance to a

picture that it contain, fully expressed, one general idea, with which

no parts are to interfere, but that the parts will interfere if each

part be represented with its most particular truth--and that,

therefore, drapery should be drapery merely, not silk or satin, where

high truths of the subject are to be impressed.

"Colour is a secondary truth, therefore less important than form."

"He, therefore, who has neglected a truth of form for a truth of

colour, has neglected a greater truth for a less one." It is true

with regard to any individual object--but we doubt if it be always so

in picture. The character of the picture may not at all depend upon

form--nay, it is possible that the painter may wish to draw away the

mind altogether from the beauty, and even correctness of form, his

subject being effect and colour, that shall be predominant, and to

which form shall be quite subservient, and little more of it than

such as chiaro-scuro shall give; and in such a case colour is the

more important truth, because in it lies the sentiment of the

picture. The mystery of Rembrandt would vanish were beauty of form

introduced in many of his pictures. We remember a picture, the most

impressive picture perhaps ever painted, and that by a modern too,

Danby's "Opening of the Sixth Seal." Now, though there are fine parts

in this picture, the real power of the picture is in its colour--it

is awful. We are no enemy to modern painters; we think this a work of

the highest genius--and as such, should be most proud to see it

deposited in our National Gallery. We further say, that in some

respects it carries the art beyond the old practice. But, then, we

may say it is a new subject. "It is not certain whether any two

people see the same colours in things." Though that does not affect

the question of the importance of colour, for it must imply a defect

in the individuals, for undoubtedly there is such a thing as nature's

harmony of colour; yet it may be admitted, that things are not always

known by their colour; nay, that the actual local colour of objects

is mainly altered by effects of light, and we are accustomed to see

the same things, _quoad_ colour, variously presented to us--and the

inference that we think artists may draw from this fact is, that

there will be allowed them a great licence in all cases of colour,

and that naturalness may be preserved without exactness--and here

will lie the value of a true theory of the harmony of colours, and

the application of colouring to pictures, most suitable to the

intended impression, not the most appropriate to the objects. We have

often laid some stress upon this in the pages of _Maga_--and we think

it has been too much omitted in the consideration of artists. Every

one knows what is called a Claude glass. We see nature through a

coloured medium--yet we do not doubt that we are looking at

nature--at trees, at water, at skies--nay, we admire the colour--see

its harmony and many beauties--yet we know them to be, if we may use

the term, misrepresented. While speaking of the Claude glass, it will

not be amiss to notice a peculiarity. It shows a picture--when the

unaided eye will not; it heightens illumination--brings out the most

delicate lights, scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, and gives

greater power to the shades, yet preserves their delicacy. It seems

to annihilate all those rays of light, which, as it were, intercept

the picture--that come between the eye and the object. But to return

to colour--we say that it must, in the midst of its license, preserve

its naturalness--which it will do if it have a meaning in itself. But

when we are called upon to question what is the meaning of this or

that colour, how does its effect agree with the subject? why is it

outrageously yellow or white, or blue or red, or a jumble of all

these?--which are questions, we confess, that we and the public have

often asked, with regard to Turner's late pictures--we do not

acknowledge a naturalness--the license has been abused--not "sumpta

pudenter." It is not because the vividness of "a blade of grass or a

scarlet flower" shall be beyond the power of pigment, that a general

glare and obtrusion of such colours throughout a picture can be

justified. We are astonished that any man with eyes should see the

unnaturalness in colour of Salvator and Titian, and not see it in

Turner's recent pictures, where it is offensive because more glaring.

Those masters sacrificed, if it be a sacrifice, something to

repose--repose is _the_ thing to be sacrificed according to the

notions of too many of our modern schools. It is likewise singular,

after all the falsehoods which he asserts the old masters to have

painted, that he should speak of "imitation"--as their whole aim,

their sole intention to deceive; and yet he describes their pictures

as unlike nature in the detail and in the general as can be,

strangely missing their object--deception. We fear the truths,

particulars of which occupy the remainder of the volume--of earth,

water, skies, &c.--are very minute truths, which, whether true or

false, are of very little importance to art, unless it be to those

branches of art which may treat the whole of each particular truth

as the whole of a subject, a line of art that may produce a multitude

of works, like certain scenes of dramatic effect, surprising to see

once, but are soon powerless--can we hope to say of such, "decies

repetita placebunt?" They will be the fascinations of the view

schools, nay, may even delight the geologist and the herbalist, but

utterly disgust the imaginative. This kind of "knowledge" is not

"power" in art. We want not to see water anatomized; the Alps may be

tomahawked and scalped by geologists, yet may they be sorry painters.

And we can point to the general admiration of the world, learned and

unlearned, that a "contemptible fragment of a splintery crag" has

been found to answer all the purposes of an impression of the

greatness of nature, her free, great, and awful forms, and that

depth, shades, power of chiaro-scuro, are found in nature to be

strongest in objects of no very great magnitude; for our vision

requires nearness, and we want not the knowledge that a mountain is

20,000 feet high, to be convinced that it is quite large enough to

crush man and all his works; and that they, who, in their terror of a

greater pressure, would call upon the mountains to cover them, and

the holes of rocks to hide them, would think very little of the

measurement of the mountains, or how the caverns of the earth are

made. Greatness and sublimity are quite other things.

We shall not very systematically carry our views, therefore, into the

detail of these truths, but shall just pick here and there a passage

or so, that may strike us either for its utility or its absurdity.

With regard to truth of tone, he observes--that "the finely-toned

pictures of the old masters are some of the notes of nature played two

or three octaves below her key, the dark objects in the middle

distance having precisely the same relation to the light of the sky

which they have in nature, but the light being necessarily infinitely

lowered, and the mass of the shadow deepened in the same degree. I

have often been struck, when looking at a camera-obscura on a dark

day, with the exact resemblance the image bore to one of the finest

pictures of the old masters." We only ask if, when looking at the

picture in the camera, he did not still recognize nature--and then, if

it was beautiful, we might ask him if it was not _true_; and then when

he asserts our highest light being white paper, and that not white

enough for the light of nature--we would ask if, in the camera, he did

not see the picture on white paper--and if the whiteness of paper be

not the exact whiteness of nature, or white as ordinary nature? But

there is a quality in the light of nature that mere whiteness will not

give, and which, in fact, is scarcely ever seen in nature merely in

what is quite white; we mean brilliancy--that glaze, as it were,

between the object and the eye which makes it not so much light as

bright. Now this quality of light was thought by the old masters to be

the most important one of light, extending to the half tones and even

in the shadows, where there is still light; and this by art and

lowering the tone they were able to give, so that we see not the value

of the praise when he says--

"Turner starts from the beginning with a totally different principle.

He boldly takes pure white--and justly, for it is the sign of the most

intense sunbeams--for his highest light, and lamp-black for his

deepest shade," &c. Now, if white be the sign of the most intense

sunbeams, it is as we never wish to see them; what under a tropical

sun may be white is not quite white with us; and we always find it

disagreeable in proportion as it approaches to pure white. We never

saw yet in nature a sky or a cloud pure white; so that here certainly

is one of the "fallacies," we will not call them falsehoods. But as

far as we can judge of nature's ideas of light and colour, it is her

object to tone them down, and to give us very little, if any, of this

raw white, and we would not say that the old masters did not follow

her method of doing it. But we will say, that the object of art, at

any rate, is to make all things look agreeable; and that human eyes

cannot bear without pain those raw whites and too searching lights;

and that nature has given to them an ever present power of glazing

down and reducing them, when she added to the eye the sieve, our

eyelashes, through which we look, which we employ for this purpose,

and desire not to be dragged at any time--"Sub curru nimium propinqui

solis."

After this praise of white, one does not expect--"I think nature

mixes yellow with almost every one of her hues;" but this is said

merely in aversion to purple. "I think the first approach to

viciousness of colour in any master, is commonly indicated chiefly by

a prevalence of purple and an absence of yellow." "I am equally

certain that Turner is distinguished from all the vicious colourists

of the present day, by the foundation of all his tones being black,

yellow, and intermediate greys, while the tendency of our common

glare-seekers is invariably to pure, cold, impossible purples."

"Silent nymph, with curious eye,

Who the _purple_ evening lie,"

saith Dyer, in his landscape of "Grongar Hill." The "glare-seekers" is

curious enough, when we remember the graduate's description of

landscapes, (of course Turner's,) and his excursions; but we think we

have seen many purples in Turner, and that opposed to his flaming red

in sunsets. He prefers warmth where most people feel cold--this is not

surprising; but as to picture "is it true?" "My own feelings would

guide me rather to the warm greys of such pictures as the

'Snow-Storm,' or the glowing scarlet and gold of the 'Napoleon' and

the 'Slave Ship.'" The two latter must be well remembered by all

Exhibition visitors; they were the strangest things imaginable in

colour as in every particle that should be art or nature. There is a

whimsical quotation from Wordsworth, the "keenest-eyed," page 145. His

object is to show the strength of shadow--how "the shadows on the

trunk of the tree become darker and more conspicuous than any part of

the boughs or limbs;" so, for this strength and blackness, we have--

"At the root

Of that tall pine, the shadow of whose bare

And slender stem, while here I sit at eve,

Oft stretches tow'rds me, like a long straight path,

Traced _faintly_ in the greensward."

"Of the truth of space," he says that "in a real landscape, we can see

the whole of what would be called the middle distance and distance

together, with facility and clearness; but while we do so, we can see

nothing in the foreground beyond a vague and indistinct arrangement of

lines and colours; and that if, on the contrary, we look at any

foreground object, so as to receive a distinct impression of it, the

distance and middle distance become all disorder and mystery. And

therefore, if in a painting our foreground is any thing, our distance

must be nothing, and _vice versa_." "Now, to this fact and principle,

no landscape painter of the old school, as far as I remember, ever

paid the slightest attention. Finishing their foregrounds clearly and

sharply, and with vigorous impression on the eye, giving even the

leaves of their bushes and grass with perfect edge and shape, they

proceeded into the distance with equal attention to what they could

see of its details," &c. But he had blamed Claude for not having given

the exactness and distinct shape and colour of leaves in foreground.

The fact is, the picture should be as a piece of nature framed in.

Within that frame, we should not see distinctly the foreground and

distance at the same instant: but, as we have stated, the eye and mind

are rapid, the one to see, the other to combine; and as a horse let

loose into a field, runs to the extremity of it and around it, the

first thing he does--so do we range over every part of the picture,

but with wondrous rapidity, before our impression of the whole is

perfect. We must not, therefore, slur over any thing; the difficulty

in art is to give the necessary, and so made necessary, detail of

foreground unostentatiously--to paint nothing, that which is to tell

as nothing, but so as it shall satisfy upon examination; and we think

so the old masters did paint the foregrounds, particularly Gaspar

Poussin--so Titian, so Domenichino, and all of any merit. But this is

merely an introduction, not to a palliation of, but the approbation

and praise of a glaring defect in Turner. "Turner introduced a new era

in landscape art, by showing that the foreground might be sunk for the

distance, and that it was possible to express immediate proximity to

the spectator, without giving any thing like completeness to the forms

of the near objects." We are now, therefore, prepared for an absurd

"justification of the want of drawing in Turner's figures," thus

contemptuously, with regard to all but himself, accounted for. "And

now we see the reason for the singular, and, to the ignorant in art,

the offensive execution of Turner's figures. I do not mean to assert

that there is any reason whatsoever for _bad_ drawing, (though in

landscape it matters exceedingly little;) but there is both reason and

necessity for that want of drawing which gives even the nearest

figures round balls with four pink spots in them instead of faces, and

four dashes of the brush instead of hands and feet; for it is totally

impossible that if the eye be adapted to receive the rays proceeding

from the utmost distance, and some partial impression from all the

distances, it should be capable of perceiving more of the forms and

features of near figures than Turner gives." Yet what wonderful detail

has he required from Canaletti and others?--But is there any reason

why we should have "_pink_ spots?"--is there any reason why Turner's

foreground figures should resemble penny German dolls?--and for the

reason we have above given, there ought to be reason why the figures

should be made out, at least as they are in a camera-obscura. We here

speak of nature, of "truth," and with him ask, it may be all very

well--but "is it true?" But we have another fault to find with

Turner's figures; they are often bad in intention. What can be more

absurd and incongruous, for instance, than in a picture of "elemental

war"--a sea-coast--than to put a child and its nurse in foreground,

the child crying because it has lost its hoop, or some such thing? It

is according to his truth of space, that distances should have every

"hair's-breadth" filled up, all its "infinity," with infinities of

objects, but that whatever is near, if figures, may be "pink spots,"

and "four dashes of the brush." While with Poussin--"masses which

result from the eclipse of details are contemptible and painful;" and

he thinks Poussin has but "meaningless tricks of clever

execution"--forgetting that all art is but a trick--yet one of those

tricks worth knowing, and yet which how few have acquired! Surely our

author is not well acquainted with Hobbima's works; that painter had

not a niggling execution. "A single dusty roll of Turner's brush is

more truly expressive of the infinity of foliage, than the niggling of

Hobbima could have rendered his canvass, if he had worked on it till

doomsday." Our author seems to have studied skies, such as they are in

Turner or in nature. He talks of them with no inconsiderable swagger

of observation, while the old masters had no observation at

all;--"their blunt and feelingless eyes never perceived it in nature;

and their untaught imaginations were not likely to originate it in

study." What is the _it_, will be asked--we believe it to be a

"cirrus," and that a cirrus is the subject of a chapter to itself.

This beard of the sky, however, instead of growing below, is quite

above, "never formed below an elevation of at least 15,000 feet, are

motionless, multitudinous lines of delicate vapour, with which the

blue of the open sky is commonly streaked or speckled after several

days of fine weather. They are more commonly known as 'mare's tails.'"

Having found this "mare's nest," he delights in it. It is the glory of

modern masters. He becomes inflated, and lifts himself 15,000 feet

above the level of the understanding of all old masters, and, as we

think, of most modern readers, as thus:--"One alone has taken notice

of the neglected upper sky; it is his peculiar and favourite field; he

has watched its every modification, and given its every phase and

feature; at all hours, in all seasons, he has followed its passions

and its changes, and has brought down and laid open to the world

another apocalypse of heaven." Very well, considering that the cirrus

never touches even the highest mountains of Europe, to follow its

phase (query faces) and feature 15,000 feet high, and given pink dots,

four pink dots for the faces and features of human beings within

fifteen feet of his brush. We will not say whether the old masters

painted this cirrus or not. We believe they painted what they and we

see, at least so much as suited their pictures--but as they were not,

generally speaking, exclusively sky-painters, but painters of subjects

to which the skies were subordinate, they may be fairly held excused

for this their lack of ballooning after the "cirrus;" and we thank

them that they were not "glare-seekers," "threading" their way, with

it before them, "among the then transparent clouds, while all around

the sun is unshadowed fire." We lose him altogether in the "central

cloud region," where he helps nature pretty considerably as she "melts

even the unoccupied azure into palpitating shades," and hopelessly

turns the corner of common observation, and escapes among the "fifty

aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the shechinah of the

blue." We must expect him to descend a little vain of his exploit, and

so he does--and wonders not that the form and colour of Turner should

be misunderstood, for "they require for the full perception of their

meaning and truth, such knowledge and such time as not one in a

thousand possesses, or can bestow." The inference is, that the

graduate has graduated a successful phaeton, driving Mr Turner's

chariot through all the signs of the zodiac. So he sends all artists,

ancient and modern, to Mr Turner's country, as "a magnificent

statement, all truth"--that is, "impetuous clouds, twisted rain,

flickering sunshine, fleeting shadow, gushing water, and oppressed

cattle"--yes, more, it wants repose, and there it is--"High and far

above the dark volumes of the swift rain-cloud, are seen on the left,

through their opening, the quiet, horizontal, silent flakes of the

highest cirrus, resting in the repose of the deep sky;" and there they

are, "delicate, soft, passing vapours," and there is "the exquisite

depth and _palpitating_ tenderness of the blue with which they are

islanded." Thus _islanded in tenderness_, what wonder is it if Ixion

embraced a cloud? Let not the modern lover of nature entertain such a

thought; "Bright Ph[oe]bus" is no minor canon to smile complacently on

the matter; he has a jealousy in him, and won't let any be in a

melting mood with the clouds but himself; he tears aside your

curtains, and steam-like rags of capricious vapour--"the mouldering

sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball beside you,

and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing wind and

rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no more,

dyeing all the air about it with blood." This is no fanciful

description, but among the comparative views of nature's and of

Turner's skies, as seen, and verified upon his affidavit, by a

graduate of Oxford; who may have an indisposition to boast of his

exclusive privilege.

"+Aerobato kai periphrono ton helion.+"

Accordingly, in "the effects of light rendered by modern art," our

author is very particular indeed. His extraordinary knowledge of the

sun's position, to a hair's-breadth in Mr Turner's pictures, and

minute of the day, is quite surprising. He gives a table of two pages

and a-half, of position and moment, "morning, noon, and afternoon,"

"evening and night." In more than one instance, he is so close, as

"five minutes before sunset."

Having settled the matter of the sky, our author takes the earth in

hand, and tosses it about like a Titan. "The spirit of the hills is

action, that of the lowlands, repose; and between these there is to be

found every variety of motion and of rest, from the inactive plain,

sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks

which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with clouds drifting

like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to

heaven saying, 'I live for ever.'" We learn, too, a wonderful power in

the excited earth, far beyond that which other "naturalists" describe

of the lobster, who only, _ad libitum_, casts off a claw or so. "But

there is this difference between the action of the earth and that of a

living creature, that while the exerted limb marks its bones and

tendons through the flesh, the excited earth casts off the flesh

altogether, and its bones come out from beneath. Mountains are the

bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of

its anatomy, which in the plains lie buried under five-and-twenty

thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which

spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging

their garment of earth away from them on each side." If the gentle

sketcher should happily escape a cuff from these cast-off clothes

flung by excited earth from her extremities, he may be satisfied with

repose in the lap of mother earth, who must be considerably fat and

cushioned, though some may entertain a fear of being overlaid. What is

the artist to do with an earth like this, body and bones? When he sits

down to sketch some placid landscape, is he to think of poor nature

with her bones sticking out from twenty-five thousand feet of her

solid flesh! Mother of Gargantia--thou wert but a dwarf! Salvator Rosa

could not paint rock; Gaspar Poussin could not paint rock. A rock, in

short, is such a thing as nobody ought to paint, or can paint but

Turner; and all that, after his description of rock, we believe; but

were not prepared to learn that "the foreground of the 'Napoleon' in

last year's Academy," is "one of the most exquisite pieces of rock

truth ever put on canvass." In fact, we really, in ignorance to be

ashamed of, did not know there was any rock there at all. We only

remember Napoleon and his cocked-hat--now, this is extraordinary; for

as _we_ only or chiefly remember the cocked-hat, so he sees the said

cocked-hat in Salvator's rocks, where we never saw such a thing,

though "he has succeeded in covering his foregrounds with forms which

approximate to those of drapery, of ribands, of _crushed cocked-hats_,

of locks of hair, of waves, of leaves, or any thing, in short,

flexible or tough, but which, of course, are not only unlike, but

directly contrary to the forms which nature has impressed on rocks."

And the nature of rocks he must know, having the "Napoleon" before

him. "In the 'Napoleon' I can illustrate by no better example, for I

can reason as well from this as I could with my foot on the native

rock." What rocks of Salvator's, besides the No. 220 of the Dulwich

gallery, he has seen, we cannot pretend to say; we have, within these

few days, seen one, and could not discover the "commas," the "Chinese

for rocks," nor Sanscrit for rocks, but did read the language of

nature, without the necessity of any writing under--"This is a rock."

Poor Claude, he knew nothing of perspective, and his efforts

"invariably ended in reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and

making it look perpendicular;" but in one instance Claude luckily hits

upon "a little bit of accidental truth;" he is circumstantial in its

locality--"the little piece of ground above the cattle, between the

head of the brown cow and the tail of the white one, is well

articulated, just where it turns into shade."

After the entire failure of all artists that ever lived before Turner

in land and skies, we are prepared to find that they had not the least

idea of water. When they thought they painted water, in fact, they

were like "those happier children, sliding on dry ground," and had not

the chance of wetting a foot. Water, too, is a thing to be anatomized,

a sort of rib-fluidity. The moving, transparent water, in shallow and

in depth, of Vandervelde and Backhuysen, is not the least like water;

they are men who "libelled the sea." Many of our moderns--Stanfield in

particular--seem naturally web-footed; but the real Triton of the sea,

as he was Titan of the earth, is Turner. To our own eyes, in this

respect, he stands indebted to the engraver; for we do not remember a

single sea-piece by Turner, in water-colour or oil, in which the water

is _liquid_. What it is like, in the picture of the Slave-ship, which

is considered one of his very finest productions, we defy any one to

tell. We are led to guess it is meant for water, by the strange fish

that take their pastime. A year or two ago were exhibited two

sea-pieces, of nearly equal size, at the British Institution, by

Vandervelde and Turner. It was certainly one of Turner's best; but how

inferior was the water and the sky to the water and sky in

Vandervelde! In Turner they were both rocky. We say not this to the

disparagement of Turner's genius. He had not studied these elements as

did Vandervelde. The two painters ought not to be compared together;

and we humbly think that any man who should pronounce of Vandervelde

and Backhuysen, that they "libelled the sea," convicts himself of a

wondrous lack of taste and feeling. Of their works he thus speaks--"As

it is, I believe there is scarcely such another instance to be found

in the history of man, of the epidemic aberration of mind into which

multitudes fall by infection, as is furnished by the value set upon

the works of these men." Of water, he says--"Nothing can hinder water

from being a reflecting medium but dry dust or filth of some kind on

its surface. Dirty water, if the foul matter be dissolved or suspended

in the liquid, reflects just as clearly and sharply as pure water,

only the image is coloured by the hue of the mixed matter, and becomes

comparatively brown or dark." We entirely deny this, from constant

observation. Within this week we have been studying a stream, which

has alternated in its clearness and muddiness. We found the

reflection not only less clear in the latter case, but instead of

brown and dark, to have lost its brownness, and to have become

lighter. To understand the "curves" of water being beyond the reach of

most who are not graduates of Oxford; and painters and admirers of old

masters being people without sense, at least in comparison with the

graduate, he thus disposes of his learned difficulty:--"This is a

point, however, on which it is impossible to argue without going into

high mathematics, and even then the nature of particular curves, as

given by the brush, would be scarcely demonstrable; and I am the less

disposed to take much trouble about it, because I think that the

persons who are really fond of these works are almost beyond the reach

of argument." The celebrated Mrs Partington once endeavoured, at

Sidmouth, to dispose of these "curves," and failed; and we suspect a

stronger reason than the incapacity of his readers for our author's

thus disposing of the subject. We believe the world would not give a

pin's head for all the seas that ever might be painted upon these

mathematical curves; and that, in painting, even a graduate's "high

mathematics" are but a very low affair. But let us enliven the reader

with something really high--and here is, in very high-flown prose,

part of a description of a waterfall; and it will tell him a secret,

that in the midst of these fine falls, nature keeps a furnace and

steam-engine continually at work, and having the fire at hand, sends

up rockets--if you doubt--read:--"And how all the hollows of that foam

burn with green fire, like so much _shattering chrysoprase_; and how,

ever and anon, startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray

leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind,

and driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how, through

the curdling wreaths of the restless, crashing abyss below, the blue

of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky

through white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in

tremulous stillness over all, fading and flashing alternately through

the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among

the thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro in sympathy with the

wild water, their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of

loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again

upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away." "Satque superque

satis"--we cannot go on. There is nothing like calling things by their

contraries--it is truly startling. Whenever you speak of water, treat

it as fire--of fire, _vice versa_, as water; and be sure to send them

all shattering out of reach and discrimination of all sense; and look

into a dictionary for some such word as "chrysoprase," which we find

to come from +chrysos+ gold, and +prason+ a leek, and means a precious

stone; it is capable of being shattered, together with "sunshine"--the

reader will think the whole passage a "flash" of moonshine. But there

is a discovery--"I believe, when you have stood by this for half an

hour, you will have discovered that there is something more in nature

than has been given by Ruysdael." You will indeed--if this be nature!

But, alas, what have we not to undergo--to discover what water is, and

to become capable of judging of Turner! It is a comfort, however, that

he is likely to have but few judges. Graduate has courage to undergo

any thing. Ariel was nothing in his ubiquity to him, though he put a

span about the world in forty minutes; "but there was some apology for

the public's not understanding this, for few people have had the

opportunity of seeing the sea at such a time, and when they have,

cannot face it. To hold by a mast or rock, and watch it, is a

prolonged endurance of drowning, which few people have courage to go

through. To those who have, it is one of the noblest lessons in

nature." Very few people, indeed, and those few "involuntary

experimentalists."

We are glad to get on dry land again, "brown furze or any thing"--and

here we must question one of his truths of vegetation: he asserts,

that the stems of all trees, the "ordinary trees of Europe, do not

taper, but grow up or out, in undiminished thickness, till they throw

out branch and bud, and then go off again to the next of equal

thickness." We have carefully examined many trees this last week, and

find it is not the case; in almost all, the bulging at the bottom,

nearest the root, is manifest. There is an early association in our

minds, that the birch for instance is remarkably tapering in its

twigs. We would rather refer our "sworn measurer" to the factor than

the painter, and we very much question whether his "top and top" will

meet the market. We are satisfied the fact is not as he states it, and

surely nature works not by such measure rule. We suspect, for nature

we should here read Turner, for his trees, certainly, are strange

things; it is true, he generally shirks them. We do not remember one

picture that has a good, true, _bona fide_, conspicuous tree in it.

The reader will not be surprised to learn that the worst painter of

trees was Gaspar Poussin! and that the perfection of trees is to be

found in Turner's "Marley," where most people will think the trees

look more like brooms than trees. The chapter on "the Truth of Turner"

concludes with a quotation--we presume the extract from a letter from

Mr Turner to the author. If so, Mr Turner has somewhat caught the

author's style, and tells very simple truths in a very fine manner,

thus:--"I cannot gather the sunbeams out of the east, or I would make

_them_ tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this,

and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the

night-sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read

this, and interpret this, and let us feel together." We must pause.

Really we do not see the slightest necessity of an interpretation

here. It is a simple fact. He cannot extract "sunbeams" from

cucumbers--from the east, we should say. The only riddle seems to be,

that they should, in one instance, remember together, and in the

other, feel together; only we guess that, being night-gloom, people

naturally feel about them in the dark. But he proceeds--"And if you

have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not

the sun in your spirit, and the passion in your heart, which my words

may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me." We must

pause again; here _is_ a riddle: what can be the meaning of having the

sun in one's spirit?--is it any thing like having the moon in one's

head? We give it up. The passion in the heart we suppose to be dead

asleep, and the words and voice harsh and grating, and so it is

awakened. But what that if, or if not, has to do with "leave me," we

cannot conjecture; but this we do venture to conjecture, that to

expect our graduate ever to _leave_ Mr Turner is one of the most

hopeless of all Mr Turner's "Fallacies of Hope." But the writer

proceeds with a _for_--that appears, nevertheless, a pretty

considerable _non-sequitur_. "For I will give you no patient mockery,

no laborious insult of that glorious nature, whose I am and whom I

serve." Here the graduate is treated as a servant, and the writer of

the letter assumes the Pythian, the truly oracular vein. "Let other

servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master while they

forget his message. Hear that message from me, but remember that the

teaching of Divine Truth must still be a mystery." "Like master like

man." Both are in the "Cambyses' vein."

We do not think that landscape painters will either gain or lose much

by the publication of this volume, unless it be some mortification to

be so sillily lauded as some of our very respectable painters are. We

do not think that the pictorial world, either in taste or practice,

will be Turnerized by this palpably fulsome, nonsensical praise. In

this our graduate is _semper idem_, and to keep up his idolatry to the

sticking-point, terminates the volume with a prayer, and begs all the

people of England to join in it--a prayer to Mr Turner!